One thing should be said for Abraham Lincoln. He had neither the smell for empire nor for monopoly capitalism. As a young Congressman, he opposed the Mexican-American War and thereby threw away his chances for re-election. As a mature man, just before his assassination, he looked askance at the beginnings of corporate capitalism: "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow. The money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at the moment more anxiety for my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."
In this centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation, we must therefore take a look at "the smell of empire" that combined with the economic remains of slavery to establish racism as a "permanent" feature of American life, even as European capital's carving up of Africa in the 1880's established "the white man's burden," or racism, as the new feature for all of capitalist imperialism.
The United States' plunge into imperialism in 1898 came so suddenly that Populism hardly noticed it. Although for a decade and more Populism had fought monopoly capital which gave birth to imperialism, it was not weighted down by an awareness of any connection between the two. This was not the result only of the deflection of the struggle of the people vs. monopoly into the narrower channel of free silver vs. banker. Behind the apparent suddenness of the rise of imperialism stands the spectacular industrial development after the Civil War. The unprecedented rate of industrialization telescoped its victory over agriculture and its transformation from competitive to monopoly capital.
Because monopoly capital had appeared first in transportation, the Mid-Western wheat belt as well as the post-Reconstruction South resented their veritable bondage to the railroads that controlled the outlet of, and thus set the prices for, their products. The agricultural population had been the first to revolt, the first to organize into a new political party, and the ones mainly responsible for getting the first anti-trust Acts of 1887 and 1890.
It was this precisely which so shook up the Southern oligarchy that it quickly gave up its resentment of Northern capital's victory over agrarianism in order to unite with its former war enemy to destroy their mutual class enemy, Populism. Together, North and South pulled out all stops - the violence of Northern capital against labor was more than matched by the Southern oligarchy's encouragement of the revival of the rule of rope and faggot against a mythical "Negro domination" inherent in Populism.
That additive of color, moreover, now had a promissory note attached to it: a veritable heaven on earth was promised the poor whites in the new white-only enterprise - textiles. So began "the great slaughter of the innocents"21 that will first in the late 1920's explode into the unwritten civil war of unarmed, starving textile workers against armed, well-fed Southern monopolists - the great Gastonia, North Carolina strike. But for the late 1890's the Southern monopolists - in agriculture as in industry - became so frightened over the explosive force contained in Populism, the threat to their rule, that they happily embraced the North, Northern capital.
Monopoly capital first appeared in transportation before it appeared in industry, but from the first it was built on Andrew Carnegie's principle: "Pioneering doesn't pay." Empire building through consolidations did. Swallowing up of smaller capital, destruction of cut-throat competition alongside of monopolization, not to mention cheating on top of exploitation - that was the way of all great American fortunes built by means more foul than fair during those two decisive decades. Four times as much acreage as had been taken up by homesteaders was given to railroad companies. Bourgeois historians must record what even bourgeois politicians had to admit - after the fact, of course. In Rise of American Civilization, Charles A. Beard states: "The public land office of the United States was little more than a centre of the distribution of plunder; according to President Roosevelt's land commission, hardly a single great western estate had a title untainted by fraud."
Monopoly was on its way in all fields and with just as unclean hands22 - Rockefeller started the oil trust; Carnegie, steel; Morgan, banking; while Jay Gould, Leland Stanford, James J. Hill, Cornelius Vanderbilt first kept to railroads and then spread tentacles outward until all together they impelled the Federal Government to its imperialist path.
Long before American capital's discovery of the easy road to wealth, Marx had described European capital's birth: "The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On the heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theater . . . Great fortunes sprung up like mushrooms in a day; primitive accumulation went on without the advance of a shilling."
The capitalist leopard couldn't change its spots in the United States even though its primitive accumulation had to be achieved within the confines of its own land. Direct slavery was still the method of developing Southern agriculture, wage labor that of developing industry. Despite the famous free farmer in the West and its seemingly endless frontier, free land was still more, fantastically more, at the disposal of railroad magnates than available to homesteaders, and that fact held though the "magnates" were first to become such. Here too "great fortunes sprung up like mushrooms in a day" not for every man but for those who knew how to get government to help new industrialism, hot-house fashion, to blossom forth into monopoly form.
It is no historic secret that the later the bourgeois revolution against feudalism or slavery takes place, the less complete it is, due to the height of class opposition between capital and labor. The lateness in the abolition of slavery in the United States accounts for the tenacious economic survivals of slavery which still exist in the country.
Nevertheless, as the strength of Populism and the solidarity of black and white that it forged showed, the economic survival of slavery couldn't have persisted, much less dominated the life of the Negroes North as well as South, IF they hadn't been re-inforced by the "new" Northern capital. It was not the "psychology of Jim Crowism" that did the reinforcing. The "psychology of Jim Crowism" is itself the result, not the cause, of monopoly capital extending its tentacles into the Caribbean and the Pacific as it became transformed into imperialism, with the Spanish-American War.
So great, however, was the corruption of capitalism that the muckrakers were blinded by it; that is to say, diverted by it from grasping capitalism's organic exploitative nature that would naturally transform itself into quasi-totalitarian imperialism. The result was that when the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, it had the appearance of a sudden manifestation out of nowhere. In truth it was long building up. Latin America had known, ever since 1820, that while the Monroe Doctrine could protect it from European invasion, there was no such protection from American aggression for which the Doctrine was designed. Were we even to exclude the imperialistic adventure of the Mexican-American War of 1846 on the excuse that it had been instigated, not by Northern capital but by the Southern wish to expand the territory for slavery, these facts that are incontrovertible preceded the Spanish-American War:
(1) three full decades of phenomenal industrial expansion followed the end of the Civil War; (2) three full decades of undeclared civil war were waged against labor in the North; and (3) the combined might of Northern capital and the Southern aristocracy was used against the challenge from agriculture - Populism. The removal of the Federal troops was only the first of the steps in this unholy alliance which two decades later jointly ventured into imperialism.
It could not be otherwise. The capitalistic mentality and the slavemaster mentality are not very far apart when the domination of the exploiters is challenged by the working people. Indeed, monopoly capital needed Southern racism for its plunge into empire. North and South, the thirst for empire was brilliantly white.
As America shouldered the "White Man's Burden" she took up at the same time many Southern attitudes on the subject of race. "If the stronger and cleverer race," said the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, "is free to impose its will upon 'new caught, sullen peoples' on the other side of the globe, why not in South Carolina and Mississippi?"23 Professor C. Vann Woodward notes that "These adventures in the Pacific and the Caribbean suddenly brought under the jurisdiction of the United States some eight million people of the colored races, 'a varied assortment of inferior races,' as the Nation described them, 'which, of course, could not be allowed to vote.' "
The Atlantic Monthly was no exception, Professor Woodward reminds us once again, this time in his article in the Progressive (Deel, 1962): "In the pages of Harper's, Scribner's, Century, the North American Review can be found all the shibboleths of white supremacy." The daily press, of course, was no different.
"The Boston Evening Transcript of 14 January, 1899, admitted that Southern race policy was 'now the policy of the Administration of the very party which carried the country into and through a civil war to free the slave.' And The New York Times of 10 May, 1900, reported editorially that 'Northern men . . . no longer denounce the suppression of the Negro vote (in the South) as it used to be denounced in the reconstruction days. The necessity of it under the supreme law of self-preservation is candidly recognized.' "
Nor does that mean that the academic world that "should" know better. was any different in New York than in Mississippi: "The doctrines of Anglo-Saxon superiority by which Professor John W. Burgess of Columbia University, Captain Alfred T. Mahan of the United States Navy, and Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana justified and rationalized American imperialism in the Philippines, Hawaii, and Cuba differed in no essentials from the race theories by which Senator Benjamin R. Tillman of South Carolina and Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi justified white supremacy in the South."
Even Samuel Gompers and the A.F. of L., which began by opposing this imperialistic venture, ended by capitulating to it. Only the independent Negro movement maintained a consistent and principled opposition to this plunge into imperialism:
" . . . in 1899 the Afro-American Council , . . demanded an end to lynching and the enforcement of the 14th and 15th Amendments. This was the year of the Spanish-American War which gave the United States the Philippines; and DuBois and other Negro intellectuals, together with a large section of the Negro press, actively supported the recently formed Anti-Imperialist League, castigated the war as unjust, and linked it to their own struggle with the demand that America should put itself in order at home before expanding overseas. This Negro campaign against American imperialism did not stop with the acquisition of the Philippines; and, in 1900 many voices - including that of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Bishop, Henry M. Turner - were raised against the use of Negro troops in the United States' effort against the Boxer Rebellion in China."24
This poison in the air from the smell of empire pervaded North as well as South even as it had already pervaded Europe when it set about carving up Africa in the previous decade. It is true that despite dollar diplomacy's "lapses" in not sticking only to the dollar profits but participating both in marine landings and the actual occupation, American imperialism was not on the level of the spoliation and barbarism of Europe's conquest of Africa.
The greater truth, however, is that Theodore Roosevelt's "manifest destiny" does not fundamentally differ from Britain's jingoistic "white man's burden" or from the French "mission civilisatrice" or the German "kultur." All white civilization showed its barbarism in the conquest of the whole Afro-Asian, Latin American and Middle Eastern worlds. 25
The debate over whether imperialism means a search for exports and investments or imports and "consumer choice" sheds no illumination on the roots of racism and its persistence over the decades so that by now the hollowness of American democracy reverberates around the globe and makes the newly awakened giants of freedom in the economically underdeveloped world look sympathetically to the totalitarian Sino-Soviet orbit which had not directly oppressed it. Whether imperialism's exploitation was due to the need for cotton or copper, coffee or copra, cocoa or diamonds, super-profits for finance capital or "prestige" for national governments, its inhumanity to man is what assured its return home to roost on native racist as well as exploitative grounds.
The Spanish-American War was no sooner over than the United States began forcing the door open to trade in China. The 1900 election campaign was built around this imperialistic note. It was not merely out of the lips of a young senator from Indiana that we heard jubilation26: "The Philippines are ours forever . . . And just beyond the Philippines are China's illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either . . . We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race . . ." When McKinley was assassinated there came to rule over this new empire from Latin America to the Philippines, and from Hawaii to some open doors in China and Japan, Theodore Roosevelt - that alleged trust buster and very real empire builder.
Racism, in the United States and/or abroad, helped pave the way for totalitarianism with its cult of "Aryanism" and its bestial destruction of an entire white race in the very heart of Europe.27 Those who wish to forget that at the root of present-day apartheid South Africa was the "civilizing mission" of the white race which meant, in fact, such horrors as the extermination of the Khoisan peoples by the Boers, of Leopold II's reduction of 20 to 40 million peaceful Congolese to 8 million-are the ones who took the extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany "in stride" - until the Nazi search for "lebensraum" meant a challenge to their own area of exploitation.
Surely, on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation when the holocaust of World War II is still fresh within the memory of living men, it is high time to stop playing psychological games with racism. It is precisely such playing with the question as to whether the Civil War was to be limited only to the question of Union, and not extended to the abolition of slavery, which both prolonged the war and left the revolution in human relations in so unfinished a state that to this day we suffer from its state of incompletion. In 1905 labor made one more try for a fundamental change.
The imperialist mark of the 20th century did not for long go unchallenged.
First, the South: while light industry by-passed the Negro, heavy industry did not. Being at the very bottom of the social structure, capitalist society pushed the Negro into the worst paid industries. Since, however, as capitalist industrialization developed, those very industries - coal, steel, iron - became pivotal to the whole movement, the Negro was very stategically placed in industry. There was no mass migration North until World War I, but in the South the Negro did become an integral part of labor from the earliest days of heavy industrialization - and a militant member of whatever unions took root there.
Between the two extremes - textiles which employed no Negroes in the direct process of production, and mines and steel mills in which Negroes were more or less equal in number to whites - there were the so-called strictly "Negro jobs"-saw mills, fertilizer plants, etc. These employed mainly Negroes. They remained unorganized. They were located rurally so that the Negro was as much isolated as a factory worker as if he were a peasant still. Nevertheless the break from share-cropping and personal dependence on planter-merchant had been made.
By 1900 the United Mine Workers claimed one third of the total organized Negro labor force. By no accident, the discontent with the craft unionism of the A.F. of L. came first of all from the Western Federation of Miners, which merged into the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) in 1905. It was built on militant class struggle lines, industrial unionism 30 years ahead of the C.I.O. It also had, first, a socialist, and then a syndicalist philosophy of "one big union" which would not merely fight to better conditions of labor and raise wages, but to control production.
At the height of its power, the I.W.W. claimed one million members, 100,000 of whom were Negroes. The most important of the I.W.W. unions among Negroes were precisely in the the prejudice-ridden South, in the lumber industries in Louisiana and Texas and among the longshoremen and dockworkers in Baltimore, Norfolk and Philadelphia. The Brotherhood of Timber Workers in the lumber camps of Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas had 35,000 members in 1910, 50 per cent of whom were Negroes.
1905 is a year that opens a new page in the role of labor not only in America. It is the year of the first Russian Revolution. It is the year of the first victory of a colored race over a white one - with Japan's victory over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War. However, neither Japanese labor nor Russian followed their own governments. Instead the Social Democratic leaders in both countries - Plekhanov and Sen Katayama - shook hands against capitalism and chauvinism in each country.
In the United States, too, we see the vanguard role of the I.W.W. not only as labor in general, but specifically in relationship to Negro labor who thereby not only as "mass" but as reason refashioned American unionism. The most prominent of the Negro I.W.W. organizers was Ben Fletcher who was jailed with the founders of the I.W.W., Haywood, Chaplin and others for their opposition to World War I.28
Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of the Negroes - no less than 86.7 per cent in 1900 - had remained in agriculture and were thus unaffected by the rise of the I.W.W. The Negro was to experience no serious proletarianization and urbanization until the First World War, when the flow of immigrant labor was shut off and Northern capital was compelled to comb the South for labor needed in war industries. By then the war hysteria, persecution by the government and imprisonment of its leaders brought about the decline of the I.W.W. The only thing that awaited the Negro in the North was isolation and extreme frustration.
21 Capital, by Karl Marx. Marx had been referring to the factory system in England, but it holds as well for America. The full quotation reads: "Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, etc.-these children of the true manufacturing period, increase gigantically during the infancy of Modern industry. The birth of the latter is heralded by a great slaughter of the innocents."
22 See History of Great American Fortunes, by Gustavus Myers.
23 The Strange Career of Jim Crow, by C. Vann Woodward, 1961 Galaxy book edition. It is a sad commentary on the state of Northern scholarship that this expose of the academic world and press in the North, as well as of the Supreme Court's bending to those racist trends, comes from the pen of a Southern historian who is doing it, at least in part, only in order to excuse the slowness of desegregation in the South. Since no one can possibly consider a century old struggle a race with time, much less "majestic instance, the Professor tries to whittle down the concept of 100 years by showing that Jim Crowism didn't get fully established until the beginning of the 20th century, as if the stench of white supremacy by any other name, like slavery, black codes, lynchings, does not smell as bad.
24 This quotation is from an article by George P. Marks, "Opposition of Negro Newspapers to American Philippine Policy, 1899-1900," in The Midwest Journal (Jefferson City, Mo.), Winter 1951-1952. It is cited in Independent African, by George Shepperson and Thomas Price; University Press, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1958, p. 101.
25 Because we are limiting ourselves to U.S. imperialism's effects on racism, we cannot here go into the details of its conquests. There are many good books on the subject. One of the latest details how "The U.S. reduced 5 of the Latin-American nations to the status of quasi-protectorates within less than 2 decades . . . The Cuban protectorate was set up in 1902 with a naval base and the security of foreign investments as the main goal . . . " Even, when with the New Deal, the Good Neighbor policy was established and direct rule given up, we at no time, even to this day, did anything to free the countries from being one-crop or one-mineral economies subordinated to America. See Imperialism and World Politics, by Parker Thomas Moon, 1926, as the old standard; and for a later and moderate view, A History of the Modern World, by Joel Colton, revised 1962 edition, Alfred A. Knopf, N Y.
26 The reference is to Senator Albert J. Beveridge, quoted in Foster Rhea Dulles' "The U.S. Since 1865," University of Michigan Press, 1959, p. 173.
27The Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt.
28 See The Black Workers, by Sterling D. Spero and Abraham L. Harris; and Negro Labor in the U.S., by Charles H. Wesley.