John Buell

Race, Slavery, and the Politics of Welfare

No wedge issue in US politics has been more effective or persistent than welfare. This is in large measure because popular concepts of welfare, crime, and race interact with and intercept each other at least on a subconscious level. Combatting this destructive dynamic is a difficult task and requires more than just theoretical arguments. Nonetheless, more attention to the historical background can contribute to a process of personal and social reform.

The end of slavery placed the relationship between freedom and equality on the national agenda In addition all the agitation for blacks voting helped raise the issue of women’s suffrage. But although some abolitionist saw women’s suffrage as a part of a natural expansion of the suffrage, others insisted on a laser -like focus on voting rights for blacks. This split became a source of enduring hostility. As for the economic issues law, historic racism, and ideology stood in the way of more egalitarian democratic initiatives.

Early in the first phase of Reconstruction President Andrew Johnson ordered that all land seized from confederates except that already sold be returned to original owners. The issue of labor then became urgent. The former plantation owners had land but no one to work it. Some former slaves argued that if you work for someone else you are not truly free. This was also Lincoln’s belief. Planters argued that being free does not give you other rights, like economic autonomy. The universal complaint of planters was that the Negro will not work unless forced to work. Eventually without support from Washington, former slaves were left with sharecropping and other subordinate arrangements that left them dependent on merchant credit and a one-crop economy with a gradually declining world price.

Opposition to a homestead for former slaves, 40 acres and a mule, came from men who did not work, who lived off the profits of their slaves. And it was made in the face of promises of land to former slaves once the war was over. In addition, this interpretation of former slaves' refusal to work was reinforced by and reinforced racist stereotypes developed to square the notion that all men are created equal with the fact of slavery. African Americans are portrayed as inherently lazy and not deserving of the economic opportunities afforded whites. Columbia University historian Eric Foner points out that every colonial power has said the same thing about its formerly servile population.

Virtually all historians today recognize that the Birth of a Nation stereotypes of Radical Reconstruction as corruption and exploitation by an ill-prepared minority were wrong and destructive. But Northern Republicans for a variety of reasons lost interest in the cause of enfranchisement of former slaves. Gradually, those rights were abrogated. Slavery was not restored but economic and cultural exploitation continued unabated. Some examples from Foner struck me as especially persuasive. For two generations white Democrats dominated Southern politics, and their long tenures enabled them to hold the chairmanship of key congressional committees. The initial Social Security system excluded domestic and agricultural workers in order not to disturb the cheap labor system from which Southern planters benefited after the Civil War. These were concessions even as powerful and politically astute a president as FDR had to make to enact this legislation.

The GI Bill, enacted at a time when African Americans were dying for their country, continued such compromises. In the legislation, home and education loans were color blind, but banks and colleges were free to discriminate and did so. Historian Thomas Sugrue points out one of the subtle effects of this discrimination. When minorities did acquire homes they had trouble finding loans for improvement and maintenance, feeding a widespread slur that blacks don’t maintain homes and like to live that way.

Finally the role of terror cannot be discounted.

Violence, which really should be seen as domestic terrorism, has played a key role in repressing progressive or anti-racist movements in US history. Klan violence at the end of Reconstruction led to the first overthrow of a sitting government since the Revolution. This violence took the form of murdering many local elected officials, murdering or beating teachers in public schools, intimidation of those in interracial relationships. Far from being deeds limited to a small rogue element, these were acts of hideous torture presented as spectacle for the entire community, including young children

Violence also played a major role in repressing the labor movement. Often the violence took the form of mass shootings by private armies acting with the tacit acceptance of state governments. Such paramilitary operations have not reached the breadth and depth achieved in some Latin American countries, but their actions have been a major force in our politics. Perhaps if we called them what they are, terrorists aiming to change politics and policy through violence against opponents and even innocent citizens, they would receive the scrutiny they merit. The sad fact is, as Foner suggests, that egalitarian movements have had a higher regard for democracy than some of their opponents. Theologian Cornel West has argued that whites owe a debt of gratitude to African Americans as the latter have never responded with a terrorism of their own to the widespread atrocities inflicted on them.

Domestic white terrorism historically has also played a largely unacknowledged role in sustaining racism. Blacks, unlike other immigrant groups, had to live with the daily fear of assassination. Those blacks who displayed the “work ethic” whites professed to admire often faced the threat of assassination. This is one of several reasons why they did not move up the social ladder with the speed other immigrants achieved. Thereby fueling stereotypes about black initiative.

Positive hope lies in the fact that many of the exclusionary techniques affected poor whites. There was at least the possibility of coalitions, some of which were attempted, albeit crushed in part by stoking fears of an Afro-American dictatorship. This history constitutes no reason not to try again, to follow the example of the slaves, who kept on fighting against overwhelming odds, perhaps with more attentiveness to the multilevel exclusionary strategies and more sensitivity to new rights claims that may emerge in any period of broad social transformation.

John Buell lives in Southwest Harbor, Maine, and writes regularly on labor and environmental issues. Email jbuell@acadia.net.

From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2018

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