Reading Black Reconstruction in America: Entry 2 – The White Worker

This was a satisfying read. After this chapter I gained, finally, the knowledge and perspective I needed to think clearly about the dilemma of white labor in the late antebellum period. The chapter helped me fully understand the problems of “free labor.” I needed a Marxian analysis of the period, inclusive of free blacks, new immigrants, and slave workers, to understand the pressures and potentials for manipulation of free labor as a political issue. This chapter also gives us one of the book’s big arguments.

Du Bois begins by impressing on us the immigrant’s American dream. That is, every new immigrant recoiled at the idea of identifying with any permanent labor movement because each believed they could emancipate themselves “from the necessity of continuous toil.” With energy and thrift, they believed they could become members of the “petty bourgeoisie” and, thereby, exploit other new immigrants.[1] The American dream was, then, an unvirtuous cycle of exploitation. Freedom from want meant freedom to oppress an new class of fresh-of-the-boat hired laborers. Everyman a capitalist.

From this vantage point the white worker, with native or immigrant, feared the slave and freedmen as labor competition. Freed blacks would undercut the market wage courtesy of their relatively lower standard of living. The Irish, in particular, “blamed blacks for the cheap price of labor.” The intensity was such that race-labor riots occurred regularly in Northern cities from the 1820s to the 1840s. English and German immigrants, arriving in the 1840s, had contradictory views. They arrived opposed to slavery as another form of wage slavery, but also saw the abundant lands of the West as solution to many labor problems. But they had to keep the slaves, freed blacks, and the slave system out of the West to maximize advantages for labor (while they pushed out natives). So then white workers opposed the expansion of slavery while supporting slave states. Du Bois describes the attitude of these settler colonials of the West as more stern toward blacks. [2]

This meant labor would be either opposed to abolition and abolitionists, or in favor of abolition so long as the freed blacks were resettled in Africa. Even fugitive slaves were seen as a threat to white laborers. Meanwhile, Du Bois reminds us, these threats blinded white laborers to the threat of slave labor itself. Competition came in many forms, all to the benefit of capitalists and planters. The tragedy, Du Bois posits, was that the interests of Labor-Free Soil and Abolition diverged. Meanwhile, as time progressed, in the 1850s this increased the division between white and free black labor in urban areas. Unions opposed having black members. [3]

Du Bois does not fail, despite his Marxian framework, to note the irony of positions by Hermann Kriege and Wilhelm Weitling, both of whom were German labor leaders who had been friends of Marx and Engels. Neither could, in the United States, find the will power and proper analysis to meld abolitionism with free labor positions. Kriege “openly repudiated abolitionism” and Weitling gave little attention to the complications of slave labor. Only the Chartists in England clearly advocated abolition.[4] But overall American Marxists gave up the dream of solidarity with an emancipated black labor cohort.

Here Du Bois foreshadows two chapters ahead (past “The Planter” and into “The General Strike”) when discussing the plight of labor just before the Civil War. The occasion is an 1859 strike by iron molders—in the context of a larger labor union scene that had grown to twenty-six trades with national organizations. Du Bois reproduces an address by the molders that rails against the power of wealth, and its concentration in the hands of a few and the consequent impoverishment of labor. The molders call for all laborers to “battle with the stern realities of labor”—to face the matter of their condition directly, dodging no questions or issues. Despite this flourish, they overlooked slaves as a fellow class of exploited laborer. The couldn’t conceive of black slaves as fellow people, even while those laborers were “on the verge of the greatest labor revolution” ever seen in the United States.[5] The irony.

Then Du Bois turns to the white workers of the South. They had been ignored by the labor movement, abolitionists, planters, and Northern capitalists, Du Bois argues. The social and cultural condition of this 5,000,000 strong mass of white people was deplorable. Relying on narratives Cairnes, Herman Schluter, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Hart, Du Bois relays conditions of extreme poverty, degradation, ignorance, filth, squalor, illiteracy, brutality, ruffianness, and “irregularities of their moral lives.”[6] One cannot help but wonder whether Du Bois’ mild sympathies with eugenic science are on display here. Otherwise, the intensity of selected observations definitely seems to satisfy his anthropological eye.

After describing this Southern peasant class, Du Bois turns toward the much smaller “middle class of poor whites.” They were small farmers, overseers, and merchants. Some became varieties of professionals. All were bound to the planters, and mediated with the peasant class, Du Bois argues, in two ways. First all came together to form “police patrols,” taking vengeance on “recalcitrant or runaway slaves.” Second, the dream of becoming a planter (by savings, investment, and good luck) made them accomplices of aspiration. Meanwhile, the planters fought against the unionization and solidarity of one group that could set an example for poor southern whites: the mechanics. Indeed, slaves were allowed to learn mechanics trades (printers, shipwrights, iron molders) so undermine white mechanics’ solidarity with competition.[7]

The situation was such for poor whites that they sought relief through migration. This was encouraged by the planters. But Southern whites that migrated West reinforced the trend toward hostility toward slavery and free blacks there. In this they joined Northern workers. But Southern planters also desired new lands for plantations and new vistas for slave labor. They needed new places to protect and expand what Du Bois called their “agrarian feudalism.” These opposing forces met first in Kansas.[8] Hence, “Bleeding Kansas”—with “Redlegs” and Jayhawkers on one side (i.e., pro-abolitionists of Kansas), and on the other bushwackers, border ruffians, and Quantrill’s Raiders (pro-slavery irregulars based in Missouri).

Du Bois, however, sums it up in pointed Marxian terms:

It was a war to determine how far industry in the United States should be carried on under a system where the capitalist owns not only the nation’s raw material, not only the land, but also the laborer himself; or whether the laborer was going to maintain his personal freedom, and enforce it by growing political and economic independence based on widespread ownership of land. …During the war, labor was resentful. Workers were forced to fight in a strife between capitalists in which they had no interest and they showed their resentment in the peculiarly human way of beating and murdering the innocent victims of it all, the black free Negroes of New York and other Northern cities.[9]

Du Bois ends with a beautiful, tragic flourish about modernity–its gifts of beauty, freedom of belief, democratic self-governance, and individual freedom. And then he posits a laughing God who “dropped a black man in the midst.” This black man, and the inability of U.S. citizens to deal with him, “transformed the world,” turning “democracy back to Roman Imperialism and Fascism,” restoring “caste and oligarchy,” and replacing “freedom with slavery”—the last withdrawing “humanity from the vast majority of human beings.”[10]

The Civil War resulted, briefly, in freedom for the slave, before the institution of a second “new slavery.” The new regime embraced a “color caste.” Du Bois then makes his big move. The story becomes directly relevant to white workers in 1935, in the United States and well beyond. This is his hook for white readers:

The plight of the white working class throughout the world today is directly traceable to Negro slavery in America, on which modern commerce and industry was founded, and which persisted to threaten free labor until it was partially overthrown in 1863. The resulting color caste founded and retained by capitalism was adopted, forwarded and approved by white labor, and resulted in subordination of colored labor to white profits the world over. Thus the majority of the world’s laborers, by the insistence of white labor, became the basis of a system of industry which ruined democracy and showed its perfect fruit in World War and Depression. And this book seeks to tell that story.[11]

We’re here then, with Du Bois, to find out how imperialism, fascism, oligarchy, and oppression reigned after the end of Reconstruction. And it was all for the sake of the white worker’s false sense of superiority—a position that maintained the leadership of white Northern capitalists and their profits.

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Notes

[1] W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, Introduction by David Levering Lewis (1935; reprint, New York: The Free Press, 1992), p. 17-18.
[2] Ibid., p. 18-19.
[3] Ibid., p. 20-22.
[4] Ibid., p. 22-24.
[5] Ibid., p. 25.
[6] Ibid., p. 26-27. I couldn’t find any more bibliographic information in the book on Cairnes. On Hart, however, Du Bois names the pertinent book, titled The Southern South).
[7] Ibid., p. 27-28.
[8] Ibid., p. 28-29
[9] Ibid., p. 29.
[10] Ibid., p. 30.
[11] Ibid., p. 30.