Racism 2.0: Now with Plausible Deniability!
by Unknown | 7/31/2009 12:55:00 PM
I was going to leave Lucia Whalen alone after her tearful press conference, but Aaron Bady's post has convinced me that there are people out there who still don't get it. So, let's try again.

Bady claims that Whalen, the woman who called police on Henry Louis Gates for attempting to break into his own house, is "pretty much the only person involved in the Gates imbroglio who didn't over-react, the only person whose actions don't seem to reflect a sense of personal grievance or entitlement. ... There seems to be little or no room in the narrative for a person who simply tried to do the right thing in a difficult situation, with full cognizance and awareness of the difficulties of that situation. No good deed goes unpunished." Obviously, Bady buys Whalen's defense that because she never told the arresting officer that Gates was black, she can't be a racist. In doing so, he falls prey to the most simplistic of stereotypes regarding racism, and he fails to recognize the full import of the racism that likely did motivate Whalen's phone call to police, despite all her denials.



When people think of the term "racist," they think of folks like Bull Connor and George Wallace and Theodore Bilbo -- big swaggering brutes who display their hatred of black people like a badge of honor. Because people rightly observe that the Connors and Wallaces of old have virtually disappeared from the public scene, and that behavior such as theirs is now unacceptable, they assume that racism no longer exists in any important fashion. So really, the image of Bull Connor as the archetypal racist is one of the most nefarious cultural ideas active today. It blinds people to what's right in front of their eyes, because they're so focused on what's NOT there.

No one is claiming that Lucia Whalen is a Bull Connor-style racist. But then, very few people of any importance are these days. Bull Connor is to modern racism as ENIAC is to modern computers. Sure, there are still some of the old dinosaurs still around today, and sure, they occasionally wield some power, but really they're museum pieces, pariahs, and jokes.

The new racism -- again like new computers -- is sleek and shiny and unobtrusive. It's a velvet-cloaked, dagger-in-the-night kind of racism -- a kind made extra dangerous by the fact that few of us even recognize we have it. It manifests itself not in white hoods and burning crosses, but in the little flicker of revulsion white Americans feel when a black man walks by us on the street; the flicker of doubt we feel when a black woman demonstrates superlative achievement in college or on the job; the flicker of relief we feel when our new co-workers or neighbors turn out to be white rather than black; the flicker of discomfort we feel when we come into contact with African-Americans in our neighborhoods or anywhere else.

How can a mere flicker create a societal malaise? When we act on it -- something that we do with frightening regularity. The numbers on this do not lie. The following statistics are taken from pages x-xi of How Race Survived U.S. History (2008) by David Roediger, who is one of America's greatest historians of race. Roediger in turn got them from various government sources. Keep in mind when you read these that there are no real, tangible reasons for African-Americans to have a dfferent standard of living from whites nearly half a century after the end of Jim Crow.

  • Black males born in 1991 have a 29% chance of imprisonment. White males have less than 1/7 of that.

  • In 2004, the black poverty rate was nearly three times the white poverty rate. Nearly a third of black children lived in poverty, versus a tenth of white children.

  • In 2008, two-thirds of African-American urban students were in schools where less than 10 percent of the students were white.

  • In 1998, the average net worth of black and Hispanic families was 17.28% that of white families

  • In 2008, black unemployment was at 25% -- the peak level of American unemployment during the Great Depression. White unemployment in 2008 was less than 10% (it's higher now).


This is the very real and serious problem that Gates' arrest points up: the fact that our subconscious and unconscious racism has tangible and devastating effects on the African-American population. But racism today is a moving target, both because so few people are aware they possess it and because we are so resistant to being labeled racists. No one wants to be Bull Connor, and in the process we run headlong to the opposite extreme without acknowledging the very real damage our prejudices and racist impulses cause.

Of course Lucia Whalen isn't a racist -- and neither are most other people. She's not special or evil or, really, different from anyone else. Instead, she's a representative of a white American culture that is sown through with racism. The idea that she had to explicitly mention Gates' race or consciously think about it in order to be acting from racist motives is ludicrous on its face. Would she have called the cops if Gates and his driver had been white? I don't know. Would she have been less likely to do so? I guarantee it. That right there is the problem -- a problem not unique to Lucia Whalen, but common to virtually all non-black Americans. It's not a problem that's easily solved, nor should we assume that a solution can be achieved with any real speed. But the frustrating thing is when people like Lucia Whalen and Aaron Bady spend more time denying that they're Bull Connor than searching their souls to find out what they really are.

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The Severed Head Open Thread
by AndrewMc | 7/29/2009 07:07:00 AM
I'm still mulling over this story:


The descendants of an African chief who was hanged and decapitated by a Dutch general 171 years ago reluctantly accepted the return of his severed head Thursday, still angry even as the Dutch tried to right a historic wrong.


HuffPo Story

The story has all the elements of colonialism and post-colonialism mixed in with a bit of the bizarre. But it's not clear why the writer thinks that the Ahanta were "reluctant" to take the head back. Sounds to me like they were just pissed.



Interestingly, other writers describe the mood as "angry" or "tense."
Finding Dulcinea

The BBC probably has the most complete story on the wire services:
BBC

Anyway, it's an interesting tale.

Use this as an open thread.




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Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds
by AndrewMc | 7/26/2009 01:29:00 PM
We are a week past the anniversary of the detonation of the first atomic bomb, and we are approaching the anniversary of the second and third detonations. Aside from Albert Einstein, the person most responsible for the success of the atomic program was J. Robert Oppenheimer. The anniversary of the tests always brings to my mind the snippet from following interview, which he did in 1965:





That's a powerful quote, as is one from a show that runs on the History Channel from time to time in which one person says something to the effect of "We went from having the ability to kill people to having the ability to kill all people."





But there was another side to Oppenheimer--one that many don't recall. It doesn't often make the history texts, but Robert Oppenheimer was the target of Joseph McCarthy's communist with hunts. It should be said that Oppenheimer had been a radical professor and had expressed support for a wide range of reform programs that would later be branded by McCarthyites as "communist." Many of his friends in the 1930s weer members of the Communist Party.

Those issues combined with Oppenheimer's personality. During his time with the Manhattan Project he made many enemies. He also claimed to have been approached by someone who wanted to give atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. When he gave contradictory versions of the story, his enemies had the opening they needed. In 1954, after a series of hearings, his security clearance was revoked.

Oppenheimer eventually found his way to Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. At the time it was a haven for physicists and mathematicians. Against strenuous opposition, Oppenheimer pushed to include scholars of the humanities. Although he did not secure them permanent spots during his lifetime, the IAS today includes scholars from many disciplines, including the humanities.

Among the lay public, however, Oppenheimer will probably best be recalled for his words in the clip:

"We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.'"




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Debating Progress in 1935 and 2009: Social Security and Health Care
by Geschichte Grad | 7/22/2009 07:26:00 PM
Progressives, I would think, would be well advised to engage in some fruitful comparisons between the social security debate of 1935 and the health care debate of 2009. I'm sure someone's written on this already--although I Googled "compare new deal social security debate and health care debate" and didn't get anything, so this must be original, right?--so clue me in in the comments. Until then, here are my own thoughts on the matter, both for the sheer fun of historical comparisons and the action I hope such a comparison inspires.



Ahh, the summer of 1935...we remember it so well. FDR was facing criticism from the right (the American Liberty League) and from the left (Huey Long, Father Coughlin, etc.). Democrats held the House and Senate. Meanwhile, the American people demanded the relief that private, local, and state institutions could not provide. After decades of abortive attempts, the time finally seemed right for some sort of old-age and unemployment insurance. FDR's administration and Democrats in Congress launched a massive push for a program of economic security. Republicans were outraged, claiming that Social Security would bankrupt the government, introduce socialism, assault liberty, and destroy America. Progressives clutched their pearls, as well, noting all the limits to the administration's plan: its regressive contributory model; its exclusion of farm workers and domestic servants; its relinquishing of power to undependable state governments; etc.. Social Security, it must have seemed at the time, was on the ropes.

In the summer of 2009, we see plenty of similarities. New president facing left/right criticism: check. Democrats holding legislative and executive branches: check. American people demanding relief (this time, from the cost of health care or the lack of it): check. And it seems like now, more than ever--more than Truman facing resurgent Republicans, more than LBJ racking up immense war deficits, and more than the Clinton machine thirsting for power instead of designing policy--health care reform might actually make it. The right hates the idea, of course: socialism, bankruptcy, un-American, etc. The left, too, has its issues, particularly with censorship of the words "single payer," and those misgivings have led some progressives to hold back their support.

But it seems to me that we (progressives, that is) have a choice. We can abandon this leaky health care reform ship and let it go down. The best case scenario is that there's such a wide-spread public reaction that we get a proper single-payer health care system. Worst case: people get sick without health care. This is happening already, and I don't think that's acceptable. Health care reform, much like social security, begins with an essentially moral proposition: it's wrong that millions of people don't have access to health care.

The second option is to throw our support behind the best bill we can get now and work on it later. This is precisely what happened in 1935. SSA passed and it was seriously limited, but revisions in 1939 and 1950 removed those limits, and the Social Security Act of 1965 went even farther with the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid. I'd suggest that the same thing can happen with health care reform: we can make it better later.

Because here's the crucial point: once it's in, it ain't going away. The first post-FDR Republican president, Eisenhower, wouldn't touch Social Security with a ten-foot pole, and his conservative successors have followed in his footsteps. Bush tried, but even with total Republican control of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, it didn't happen. And they're scared now for the same reasons: (a) it's going to make Democrats wildly popular and (b) once we get it, it's not going away.

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The Face of a Criminal
by Unknown | 7/22/2009 12:42:00 AM
Chances are you've never been arrested. That's for two reasons: because you've never committed a serious crime, and because you don't look like a criminal. That is to say, you're probably well-dressed, clean, tidy -- and you're not a member of a race, whether African-American, Arab-American, or otherwise, that's associated with criminal activity in the American mind.

Unlike you and me, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was born looking like a criminal to most Americans, becaue he was born black. Throughout his life, Gates has done just about everything humanly possible to dispel the notion that he is a criminal. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale, earned MA and PhD degrees from Cambridge, holds an endowed chair at Harvard, and has established himself as the world's preeminent African-American Studies professor. As an author, a teacher, and a public intellectual, Gates occupies a more dominant position in his field than any single historian can claim in ours. He is so well-known, and so respected, in his hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts, that a local burger joint sells a hamburger named after him.

None of that mattered last Thursday, when Gates' own (presumably) white neighbors called the police on him for attempting to break into his own house.



A lot of criticism, both on- and offline, has centered on the policeman who arrested Gates for disorderly conduct on his own doorstep. Gates himself aimed most of his ire at the policeman, at one point calling him "a racist cop." I'm not entirely certain that's true. The police have to show up when someone calls in a break-in, and assuming the cop hadn't heard of Gates (entirely possible), he may honestly have needed the identification before he could be sure Gates did own the house. What's more, no amount of sensitivity training in the world is going to keep a cop's nerves from being on edge when someone starts yelling at him. I don't think the policeman acted entirely appropriately, but neither am I sure he's a foul racist.

What I want to talk about, instead, is the neighbor who called the police on Gates in the first place.

First of all, you don't call the cops on your neighbor if you know it's your neighbor. What kind of person doesn't know they live next door to Henry Louis Gates? The answer: someone who never bothered to find out. There are many reasons someone would choose not to know who their neighbor is, yet I think most people would know if their neighbor was famous. Go back and draw a street map around Marilyn Monroe's house. How many of her neighbors didn't know she lived there? Or pick any other famous person and do the same test.

Henry Louis Gates is a famous man. He's been on television more times than I can count. He's a household name for many people, even non-academics. But his own neighbors didn't know who he was?

Or let's look at it another way. The nosy neighbor can't claim that he or she never looked at the house or its occupants. since they were certainly watching while Gates and his driver jimmied the door. So even if they didn't know who Gates was, they had to know what he looked like. Couldn't they tell that the guy who owned the house and the guy who was jimmying the door were the same guy? Do you think they would have had that same problem with a white neighbor? Or is it just that Gates looked like any other black man, a criminal first, a resident after?

I live in an apartment complex, and I've never met most of my neighbors. But I sure as heck know what they look like. I couldn't imagine calling the cops on them for trying to get into their own front doors. Can you? What kind of person would do such a thing? Or is it simply a gut reaction to seeing a black man in one's neighborhood?

The upshot of all this is that Henry Louis Gates found himself inside his own house having to prove to the police that he was Henry Louis Gates, because if he wasn't he was obviously a criminal. You know, because he looked like one. The arrest a week ago proves that Gates' lifelong quest to define himself as one of America's leading scholars was absolutely necessary for his safety. The most shocking fact of the whole situation is this: the only reason anyone cares that Gates was harrassed by the police and arrested in his own home is that he's Henry Louis Gates. People expect African-Americans to be treated with indignity even on their own property, because they look like criminals; the only reason the cop erred is that he couldn't tell Henry Louis Gates apart from those other criminal blacks. "This is what happens to a black man in America," Gates said during the altercation. He's absolutely right.

Two and a half years ago, it happened to my friend, Weeping for Brunnhilde, a graduate student in medieval history who once wrote for this very blog. On January 12, 2007, Weeping was stopped by a policeman who asked him why he was smoking a cigarette on his own porch. As with Gates, a neighbor had reported Weeping to the police for having the audacity to occupy his own home while black.

Here's what Weeping wrote at the time:

Someone called in that there was a "young black male" on my stoop who didn't live there, and did I have ID.

The next maybe seven minutes (the entire duration of the encounter) is more or less a blur.

Although black, the officer seemed not to understand my rage and indignation at being rendered a suspect on my own stoop. I did make an effort to direct the rage away from him, lest he feel threatened, but I couldn't just stand there calmly.

At one point a raged out, from a place of despair, about how this has been happening to me my whole life and I'm sick of it. ...

I've had such encounters with the police I don't know, five, six, seven times?

Every couple of years something like this happens.

When the cop gestured at an apology towards the end, just doing my job blahblahblah I shot back, "I know, I fit the description, believe me, I know, this is NOT the first time this has happened to me." ...

Harrass me, fine, but don't insult me.

Don't ask me to pretend that I'm not being victimized.

The first time, fine.

The second time, fine.

The third time, fine.

But eventually a pattern emerges, you know? Even if each and every time I've been stopped is "procedurally legitimate," I feel no less victimized for it.

Especially if each and every time is "procedurally legitimate."

"Young black male."

I'm thirty-four.

I have a four-year old child and another on the way.

I'm young, but I'm not that young. Technically speaking, I'm middle aged.

I'm writing a dissertation about something that few people in the world could even begin to understand.

I could get ten Ph.D.s and win a Noble Peace Prize and at the End of the Day, I'm a "Young black male."

See my point?


Indeed. And I wish to say one more thing about the neighbors who called the police on Gates and Weeping.

The person who called the cops on the most accomplished African-American Studies scholar in the world lived in liberal Cambridge, Massachusetts, so statistically speaking he probably voted for Obama. Ditto the neighbor who called the cops on Weeping, since he lives in a college town. And so they probably believe they have moved beyond racism. Us racist? they say with incredulity. We voted for a black man to occupy the highest office in the land!

Wrong. The election of Obama accomplished only one thing when it comes to race. Before November 4, 2008, there was only one kind of black person: those who looked like criminals. Now there are two: those who look like criminals, and those who are Barack Obama. No one would ever, ever mistake Obama for a criminal -- but our race-blindness ends at the Oval Office door. Any other black man or woman, anywhere else, in our heart of hearts we know they look like a criminal. Post-racial society my ass -- the only person who benefits from post-racialism is Obama himself. If Henry Louis Gates can be arrested in his own home, any black man can.

As an American patriot, that makes me mad as hell.

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The Death of Why?: An Interview With Author Andrea Batista Schlesinger
by Robert Ellman | 7/19/2009 05:32:00 PM
The topic below was originally posted on my blog, the Intrepid Liberal Journal.

The phrase “knowledge is power” is a cliché in our culture. Yet as often as we hear it from others or speak it ourselves, how often have we contemplated the process of acquiring knowledge? Is there a blueprint for obtaining knowledge and wisdom? Are we encouraging children to be intellectually curious or merely teaching them that every question has an instant and obvious answer?

In her book, The Death of Why?: The Decline of Questioning and the Future of Democracy (Berrett-Kohler Publishers), New York City policy expert Andrea Batista Schlesinger writes that,
“Why is the first question most children ask. With this question we express, to the delight and chagrin of our parents, our power.

In my life, questions have always been power. Asking them enabled me to overcome the challenges I faced as a young woman sitting at tables where I didn’t automatically belong.”




Although only thirty-two, Schlesinger has operated in the arena of policy debates locally in New York City and nationally for over a decade. Since 2002, Schlesinger has applied her background in public policy, politics, and communications to transform the Drum Major Institute (“DMI”) into a progressive policy think tank with national impact. During her tenure as Executive Director, DMI created its Marketplace of Ideas series which highlights successful progressive policies from across the country and launched two public policy blogs that reach several thousand readers a day; and embarked on a national program to nurture careers in public policy for college students from underrepresented communities.

Recently, Schlesinger took a leave of absence from DMI to serve as a senior policy adviser to the re-election campaign of New York City mayor Michael R. Bloomberg – a decision that is controversial among New York City liberals like myself. Prior to joining DMI, Schlesinger directed a national Pew Charitable Trusts campaign to engage college students in discussion about the future of Social Security and served as the education adviser to Bronx borough president and mayoral candidate Fernando Ferrer.

The one life lesson Schlesinger has learned above all others in her career and promotes passionately her book is that questions equals power. It is Schlesinger’s contention that our culture promotes instant answers at the expense of inquiring.

With this book, Schlesinger has four primary objectives:

1) Convince readers of the importance of inquiry in our democracy

2) Illustrate how the very institutions that should be encouraging inquiry such as schools, the media, and government, the Internet are instead undermining intellectual curiosity in our society;

3) Inspire readers with hopeful examples of people working to restore inquiry to its rightful place of importance;

4) Convey a sense of urgency among citizens to develop effective “habits of the mind” and not be easily seduced by instant easy sound bite answers to complex challenges such as global warming.

Death of Why, is a well researched and scrupulously sourced eleven chapters and 215 pages of text. Where Schlesinger’s book is especially provocative is when she takes bloggers like me to task for engaging in robotic group-think and avoiding engagement with people possessing different viewpoints.

Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo said that,
"The road to wisdom is asking 'why'? Andrea Batista Schlesinger has been asking 'why?" and supplying her own bright and thoughtful answers for long enough so that some of us suggested she write a book. It's foruntate for all of us that her answer was 'why not!'"
The publisher of The Nation, Kathleen vanden Heuvel added that,
"From her start in politics as a teenager Andrea Batista Schlesinger has asked the important questions. Now she asks her most important: are we teaching young people to value inquiry, and if not, what hope can we have for the future of democracy?"
Schlesinger graciously agreed to a telephone podcast interview with me this afternoon about her book. She was engaging and assertive in a conversation that was just over forty-six minutes. Among the topics discussed and debated is her contention that we’re ideologically segregated, her argument that the Internet has reinforced a destructive group think mentality in our society, her advocacy for civics education and objection to teaching “financial literacy” in public schools and we closed by discussing her decision to join Mayor Bloomberg’s re-election campaign as a senior policy adviser.

Please refer to the flash media player below.



This interview can also be accessed at no cost via the Itunes Store by either searching for the “Intrepid Liberal Journal” or “Robert Ellman.”

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Confirming Judges and Open Thread
by AndrewMc | 7/17/2009 12:57:00 PM
I can't possibly be the only person watching/listening to the Sotomayor testimony and thinking two things:

1. Is there really nothing more important that exploring, exploring, exploring again, whipping like a rented mule, and then probing one more time except the "wise Latina" comment?

and . . .




2. I understand that the Senate is supposed to be an august body, full of deliberation and respect, and polite looking-the-other-way behavior when a colleague does something dumb. But the Democrats have the votes to confirm her. There's no question. Why didn't someone pull Judge Sotomayor aside and say "Look, if they bother you too much about the "Wise Latina" thing, reap 'em a new one. Just go to town. Don't worry, we've got your back."

At least then the hearing would be more interesting and less predictable.

What were confirmations like back in the 19th century? Were they this political? I'm betting that nobody asked Taney what his views were on slavery before he was confirmed.


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Indian Boarding Schools: Cultural Assimilation and Destruction
by Winter Rabbit | 7/14/2009 07:48:00 AM
What happened inside the walls of theIndian Boarding School that used to be to the right here?

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

Let’s look to history for some feasible answers.

(This video is over at Pretty Bird Woman House)



Updates (watch video “Older Than America”):



Updates Continued (two stories from NPR):



American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many

The late performer and Indian activist Floyd Red Crow Westerman was haunted by his memories of boarding school. As a child, he left his reservation in South Dakota for the Wahpeton Indian Boarding School in North Dakota. Sixty years later, he still remembers watching his mother through the window as he left.



American Indian School a Far Cry from the Past

These days, most American Indian children go to public schools. But remnants still exist of the boarding-school system the federal government set up for Indian children in the late 1800s.

Some people, such as U.S. officials at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, question whether the government should continue to be in the boarding-school business. Many students at these schools say they are a necessary escape from the poverty and addiction that plague many reservations.





(All bold mine)

Source

RICHARD PRATT -- "KILL THE INDIAN, SAVE THE MAN"


As we have taken into our national family seven millions of Negroes, and as we receive foreigners at the rate of more than five hundred thousand a year, and assimilate them, it would seem that the time may have arrived when we can very properly make at least the attempt to assimilate our two hundred and fifty thousand Indians, using this proven potent line, and see if that will not end this vexed question and remove them from public attention, where they occupy so much more space than they are entitled to either by numbers or worth.




Children are educated to become responsible and free thinking adults in the future; however, those were not Elazor Wheelock’s goals when he began Dartmouth College in 1769.
To the contrary of genuine education’s goals, Wheelock’s Indian College in Hanover, New Hampshire and the Indian Boarding Schools that followed had these things


Source

…cultural destruction, forced assimilation, and military regimen were popularized by Richard Henry Pratt, who started the Carlisle Indian School in 1879, and became cornerstones of most Indian boarding schools in the United States.


as the goals. So, just how did they come into reality?

Christian denominations were given power to build them on reservations as a result of Ulysses S. Grant’s “peace policy.”


Source

The policy pursued toward the Indians has resulted favorably, so far as can be judged from the limited time during which it has been in operation. Through the exertions of the various societies of Christians to whom has been entrusted the execution of the policy, and the board of commissioners authorized by the law of April 10, 1869, many tribes of Indians have been induced to settle upon reservations, to cultivate the soil, to perform productive labor of various kinds, and to partially accept civilization.They are being cared for in such a way, it is hoped, as to induce those still pursuing their old habits of life to embrace the only opportunity which is left them to avoid extermination.


I recommend liberal appropriations to carry out the Indian peace policy,
not only because it is humane, Christian like, and economical, but because it is right.


Those Christian denominations also had some measure of control with the B.I.A., yet only in terms of carrying out the “peace policy” on reservations. Now that the general historical context has been set with a few specifics; consequently, what were the means to the “cultural destruction and forced assimilation?” Clearly put, it’s at least categorized into the following: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, sexual, and neglectful abuse with at least illness and poor sanitation which sometimes even resulted in death. Ironically, Friends of the American Indian and Thomas Morgan believed those were merely the lesser evils.


Source

The choices seemed simple and stark to the reformer movement — either kill all the Indians or assimilate them into white civilization through education.



Source

"We must either fight Indians, feed them, or else educate them. To fight them is cruel, to feed them is wasteful, while to educate them is humane, economic, and Christian."


Some examples of the extraordinary abuse and death in moreover extremely poor sanitation conditions of the Indian Boarding Schools are as follows:


Source


When they got to Carlisle, the students were extremely homesick. Their long hair was cut. One boarding school student, Lone Wolf of the Blackfoot tribe, remembered:

"[Long hair] was the pride of all Indians. The boys, one by one, would break down and cry when they saw their braids thrown on the floor. All of the buckskin clothes had to go and we had to put on the clothes of the White Man. If we thought the days were bad, the nights were much worse. This is when the loneliness set in, for it was when we knew that we were all alone. Many boys ran away from the school because the treatment was so bad, but most of them were caught and brought back by the police."




Source

They were forbidden to practice their religion and were forced to memorize Bible verses and the Lord’s Prayer.



Source

Rose was strapped for speaking her language. This is a common practice in schools all over the place at the time. Her open hands were hit with a large thick leather strap, many times.
I received the strap on several occasions, although not as harshly as Rose did in my story. I did see many native children whose hands were strapped so long and hard that they were blistered for days, as though they had been burned with fire.





Source

Indian Boarding School Abuse – Including Child Molestation
In the late 19th century, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (in conjunction with various churches) placed thousands of Native American children into Indian Boarding Schools. At the boarding schools, the children were forced to give up their Indian heritage and were forbidden from speaking their native languages. They were routinely beaten and sexually abused, and some even died.



Here is a letter that author and professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Brenda J. Child posted,

Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 (North American Indian Prose Award Series) (Paperback)
by Brenda J. Child,that informs a parent of the death of its child from an Indian Boarding School.


(from photobucket)

(Italics mine)

Source
(letter is no longer up, this is the old address)

Dear Sir,

It is with a feeling of sorrow that I write you telling of the death of your daughter Lizzie. She was sick but a short time and we did not think her so near her end. Last Wednesday I was called away to Minneapolis and I was very much surprised upon my return Saturday evening to find she was dead, as they had given us no information except she might live for a number of months. Those that were with her say she did not suffer, but passed away as one asleep. I am very sorry that you could not have seen your daughter alive, for she had grown quite a little and improved very much since you let her come here with me. If we had known she was going to live but so short a time, we would have made a great effort to have gotten you here before she died.

So wrote the superintendent of Flandreau Indian School to the father of a student who died of tuberculosis in a government boarding school in 1907. …Hundreds of children like Lizzie died at boarding school, never to return to their families and communities.




Source

Meriam Report: GENERAL SUMMARY OF FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS


The survey staff finds itself obliged to say frankly and unequivocally that the provisions for the care of the Indian children in boarding schools are grossly inadequate.

The outstanding deficiency is in the diet furnished the Indian children, many of whom are below normal health.
The diet is deficient in quantity, quality, and variety. The effort has been made to feed the children on a per capita of eleven cents a day, plus what can be produced on the school farm, including the dairy. At a few, very few, schools, the farm and the dairy are sufficiently productive to be a highly important factor in raising the standard of the diet, but even at the best schools these sources do not fully meet the requirements for the health and development of the children. At the worst schools, the situation is serious in the extreme…
Next to dietary deficiencies comes overcrowding in dormitories. The boarding schools are crowded materially beyond their capacities. A device frequently resorted to in an effort to increase dormitory capacity without great expense is the addition of large sleeping porches. They are in themselves reasonably satisfactory, but they shut off light and air from the inside rooms, which are still filled with beds beyond their capacity.
The toilet facilities have in many cases not been increased proportionately to the increase in pupils, and they are fairly frequently not properly maintained or conveniently located. The supply of soap and towels has been inadequate…


What is a modern consequence of all this? Boarding School intergenerational trauma, which has been being addressed by those indigenous people who still suffer from its devastating effects.


Source

Working to heal the wounds of boarding school
United Nations panel hopes to undo the damage caused by U.S. government's Indian boarding school policies
By Karen Lynch


“People in Indian country are still becoming aware of the effects of boarding school trauma,” said Dr. Eulynda Toledo-Benalli, Dine’, currently performing boarding school healing project research with the Navajo people. “This is something about our history that is not being talked about in a way that encourages healing from its intergenerational trauma…”


As a panelist, Dr. Toledo-Benalli said the pain she suffered as a second-generation survivor affected not only herself but her children, as well. “Many times I have said to my children that I’m sorry for the way I treat them. This is so, because parents learn parenting skills from their parents. It is said that the oppressed become the oppressors.


As Dr. Toledo-Benalli talked about the painful memories as a survivor, the memory of her father who was “snatched and taken to Colorado, to a place that he did not know even existed. My mother who was herding sheep was also snatched.


The Wellbriety Movement helps with boarding school intergenerational trauma as well.


Source

The Healing Forest Model


The unhealed forest (community, left) transforms itself into a healed forest (right) by participating in and utilizing Wellbriety Movement activities, programs, and learning resources. The destructive roots of anger, guilt, shame and fear of the unhealed forest become the four gifts of the Sacred Hoop: Forgiving the Unforgivable, Healing, Unity and Hope. The wounded trees become healthy trees and the community participates in wellness involvements, such as, sober powwows, tradition, culture and spirituality. These are some of the gifts of the Wellbriety Movement.


(Medicine Bluffs)
Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket
Having looked to history for some feasible answers as to what happened inside the walls of that Boarding School, as well as the definition of historical trauma and one helpful solution, I also suggest reading:

Tim Giago’s book “Children Left Behind: The Dark Legacy of Indian Mission Boarding Schools,”

and jenniestarrish’s diary Kill the Indian, save the man at Native American Netroots.


In my family's case, my dad was sent to a boarding school about 800 miles from home. This was in the early 1930's and that was an incredible distance to cover in those years.













I hope with all my heart that those relatives, known and unknown who still suffer from
boarding school intergenerational trauma are able to the find peace and resolution that they need for themselves and for their loved ones.

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The Ultimate Organizer: An Interview With ACORN's Founder Wade Rathke
by Robert Ellman | 7/12/2009 03:35:00 PM
The topic below was originally posted on my blog, the Intrepid Liberal Journal.

It seems no matter which political party in America holds the majority, a Washington/Wall Street corporate centric axis dominates policy making. Indeed, Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin recently observed that banks, “Frankly Own the Place.” Among liberal-progressive activists like myself, this condition has facilitated a confrontational mindset.

Our experience suggests that the power and wealth concentrated in the hands of a few will not be voluntarily relinquished. Hence, everything from healthcare reform to bankruptcy protection for aggrieved homeowners is perceived by many of us as a high stakes pitched battle between struggling families and feculent corporate behemoths. Although activism has certainly facilitated important victories on behalf of working people, fighting for economic justice often seems analogous to climbing an endless wall.

Veteran activist Wade Rathke has been steadily climbing that wall on behalf of working people for forty-years. As the founder of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform (“ACORN”), Rathke has a unique perspective about what community organizing strategies work best to empower working people that are struggling to save and accumulate wealth. Rathke is also an assertive advocate for welfare benefits on behalf of people out of work. He’s both won and lost more than his share of battles. Both he and ACORN have the battle scars of scrutiny liberals typically receive from standing up for America’s poor and disenfranchised.



In Citizen Wealth: Winning the Campaign To Save Working Families, (Berrett-Koehler), Rathke writes,
“We need to create a national economic and political consensus that increasing family income, wealth and assets is not `welfare’ or an entitlement ‘give-away’ program but an investment in the public good and well-being.”
His book is an accessible thirteen chapters and 171 pages of text presenting his blueprint to organize regular folks to win economic and political power. Rathke’s book also contains revealing anecdotes about ACORN’s negotiations with corporate entities such as H&R Block and their bank, HSBC, to end the predatory practice of Refund Anticipation Loans. Perhaps the most compelling topic in his book is covered in chapter nine when Rathke laments how millions of citizens eligible for Food Stamps, Medicaid and the State Children Health Insurance Program (“SCHIP”) are disenfranchised from participating in the very programs designed to help them.

Rathke has remained involved with organizing activities after leaving ACORN in 2008. He is the founding board member of the Tides Foundation as well as the chief organizer of SEIU Local 100 in New Orleans and publisher of Social Policy magazine. He posts regularly at the Chief Organizer blog.

Rathke agreed to a telephone podcast interview with me about his book and among the topics covered is the meaning of citizen wealth, why economic justice has lagged behind expanded civil liberties for minorities and women, the methodology of ACORN’s approach to fight H&R Block’s predatory practices of Refund Anticipation Loans, the criticisms ACORN and the Community Reinvestment Act have received about the housing crisis and his belief that worker/labor organization is imperative for all segments of society. Our conversation was twenty-eight and a half minutes.

Please refer to the flash media player below.



This interview can also be accessed at no cost the Itunes Store by searching for either the “Intrepid Liberal Journal” or “Robert Ellman.”

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What The Fourth of July Means
by AndrewMc | 7/04/2009 04:10:00 PM
As people celebrate the Fourth of July with some quintessentially American activities--blowing stuff up and drinking gallons of beer--let's try to remember those who sacrificed to make this possible.

You may be thinking, right about now, "Yes, Andrew. So many soldiers laid down their lives to enable this country to survive."

But that's not who's on my mind.



Instead I'm thinking of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, Roger Sherman, especially Thomas Jefferson, and a host of other intellectuals who came together and crafted the Declaration of Independence. I'm also thinking of John Locke and George Mason, whose writings had a great deal of influence over the final Declaration.

Coming to the precipice of declaring independence was no easy thing. And yet a whole host of intellectuals contributed to that process. And even after that we have a number of intellectual luminaries to thank for helping to make the nation what it is today. Reinhold Niebuhr comes to mind. As does Abraham Lincoln. Even though I disagreed with most things he said, William F. Buckley was a towering intellect. There are others.

All of these people, and many other intellectuals, contributed to what this nation is today. Yet somehow the Fourth of July has joined Memorial Day and Veteran's Day as celebrations of the military, of military accomplishments, and of military sacrifice. Look around at what happens today. At most any gathering we'll be asked to take a moment to think of the sacrifices made by our veterans. Will anyone mention Roger Sherman? John Locke? The English Bill of Rights as a precursor to the Declaration? The intellectual influences of the Glorious Revolution on the development of the colonial American mindset?

Why is this? I suspect that it stems from a few things. One is that we are a country at war, and we still suffer a hangover from the perception of our treatment of veterans after the Vietnam War. So, we want to ensure that that doesn't happen again.

The other reason, I think, is because it takes a much more broadly educated citizenry to think about and celebrate intellectuall achievements. It also requires a citizenry that is better educated about its history in order to celebrate the non-military sacrifices made by various Americans over the past several centuries. In many ways its easier to think about the very real sacrifices made by our soldiers.

But the Fourth isn't supposed to be a military celebration. After all, the Revolutionary War was already well under way. The Fourth is about celebrating the beginnings of our independence. Certainly there is a military component to that. But independence wasn't initiated on the battlefield. It was a process that occurred over the course of several centuries.

And, while it was certainly maintained, at various times, on the battlefield, one could make the argument that Brown v. Board and Wounded Knee had as much a hand in shaping who we are as Americans as did Vietnam.

So, as you celebrate the Fourth today, tip your hat to our soldiers. But take the time to help others remember the intellectual achievements that gave us--and helped us maintain--our independence.

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Unemployed Councils and Eviction Riots
by midtowng | 7/02/2009 10:17:00 PM
It was the morning of January 22, 1932, in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood of the Bronx. A crowd was gathering in front of 2302 Olinville Avenue, near the Bronx Park.
City Marshals and Police had moved in to evict 17 tenants who were on a "rent strike". A crowd of 4,000 had gathered nearby.
When the marshals moved into the building and the first stick of furniture appeared on the street, the crowd charged the police and began pummeling them with fists, stones, and sticks, while the "non-combatants urged the belligerents to greater fury with anathemas for capitalism, the police and landlords." The outnumbered police barely held their lines until reinforcements arrived.
Every single reserve police officer in the Bronx had to be called in to prevent being routed by the rioters.



The situation at Olinville Avenue was only calmed down when a compromise was reached.
the strikers agreed to a compromise offer that called for two- to three-dollar reductions for each apartment and the return of evicted families to their apartments. "When news of the settlement reached the crowd," the Bronx Home News reported, "they promptly began chanting the Internationale and waving copies of the Daily Worker as though they were banners of triumph."
In other words, the rent strikers won a complete, if temporary victory.
At nearby 665 Allerton Avenue the same scenario was repeated when the police attempted to evict three tenants.
"The women were the most militant," noted the New York Times they constituted the majority of the crowds, the arrestees, and those engaged in physical conflict with the police. This time, the evictions did occur, but only with the help of over fifty foot and mounted police and a large and expensive crew of marshals and moving men.
After the Battle of the Bronx, as it was later called, the landlords at Bronx Park East asked a blue ribbon committee of Bronx Jewish leaders to arbitrate the dispute. But the strike leaders rejected arbitration. "When times were good," strike leader Max Kaimowitz declared "the landlords didn't offer to share their profits with us. The landlords made enough money off us when we had it. Now that we haven't got it, the landlords must be satisfied with less."
The landlords retaliated by forming rent strike committees. They used their resources to push through quick evictions. Many of the renter strikes were broken. Mass evictions took place at 665 Allerton Avenue and 1890 Unionport Road.

"This is a peculiar neighborhood. It is the hot bed of Communism and radicalism. The people in this neighborhood are mostly Communists and Soviet sympathizers. They do not believe in our form of government."
- state senator Benjamin Antin

The landlords continued their offensive and the judges rarely considered the neediness of the families. By December 1932 is appeared that the Bronx rent strikes had largely been crushed.
But then something happened.
in December of 1932 and January of 1933, the Unemployed Councils began a new wave of strikes that rapidly assumed far greater proportions than the last one. Beginning in Crotona Park East, the strikes spread into Brownsville, Williamsburg, Boro Park, the Lower East Side, and much of the East Bronx. In February of 1933, a panicked Real Estate News writer warned that "there are more than 200 buildings in the Borough of the Bronx in which rent strikes are in progress, and a considerably greater number in which such disturbances are brewing or in contemplation."
So who were the Unemployed Councils and what have they to do with rent strikers in the Bronx? To answer that question we must go back a few years in time.

Unemployment and Civil Unrest in America

"There is no poverty in America."
- Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur, Secretary of the Interior, 1931

Unlike today, the unemployed haven't always suffered in silence.
On November 5, 1857, 15,000 unemployed men convened at Tompkins Square Park in New York City. They did not ask for charity, but for work. However, some of the hungry stormed baker's wagons and the police responded with force.
Tompkins Square Park was again the site of another mass protest of the unemployed and hungry on January 13, 1874. Once again the demonstrators demanded public works projects, not charity. Once again the police responded in kind.

"mounted police charged the crowd on Eighth Street, riding them down and attacking men, women, and children without discrimination. It was an orgy of brutality. I was caught in the crowd on the street and barely saved my head from being cracked by jumping down a cellarway."
- Samuel Gompers, 1874

Most of these demonstrations achieved nothing. But decade after decade of efforts convinced local governments to set up soup kitchens and, in some places, public works projects.

It's difficult to find accurate information about the unemployment situation of the early Great Depression and the civil unrest it caused because the newspapers and politicians simply refused to acknowledge it until 1932. The AFL, the sole remaining national labor union after all other national labor unions had been brutally crushed, was completely unable to deal with the changing environment.

There was only one organization in America prepared to capitalize on the suffering and strife caused by the economic meltdown - the communists. While all other organizations in America either denied the social and economic problems, or ran away from them, the communists embraced them.

The Origin of Unemployed Councils



"If a modern state is to rest upon a firm foundation its citizens must not be allowed to starve. Some of them do. They do not die quickly. You can starve for a long time without dying."
- leader of Children's Bureau of Philadelphia, 1931

On August 31, 1929, in Cleveland, Ohio, the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) was born. The idea behind it was "dual unionism".
As part of the 13-point plan that included unemployment insurance, a seven-hour workday, and recognition of the Soviet Union, they called for each local to set up Unemployed Councils.
Into these Councils shall be drawn representatives of the revolutionary unions, shop committees and reformist unions, as well as unorganized workers. The councils shall be definitely affiliated to the respective TUUL.
Early on Cleveland was the center of agitation by the unemployed of the Great Depression. On February 11, 1930, some 2,000 unemployed workers stormed Cleveland City Hall. They were dispersed when police threatened to turn fire hoses on them.
“Marching columns of unemployed became a familiar sight. Public Square saw demonstrations running into tens of thousands. The street-scene is etched in memory. It was in the heart of working- class Cleveland, during a communist-led demonstration. Police had attacked an earlier demonstration. In the Street battle, several unemployed had been injured, and one had since died. In the same neighborhood, the Unemployed Councils had called a mass protest, a solemn occasion that brought out thousands. The authorities, under criticism and on the defensive, withdrew every cop from the area, many blocks wide. . . (163-164)”
- Len de Caux, labor journalist living in Cleveland
Before February was over there were skirmishes between police and the unemployed in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles.

Proving once again that they were way out in front of events, the Communists declared March 6, 1930, International Unemployment Day. The demonstrations in places like Chicago and San Francisco were peaceful, but other places weren't so lucky. In Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Boston, battles broke out between police and demonstrators. The worst clash took place, as usual, in New York.
The unemployment demonstration staged by the Communist Party in Union Square broke up in the worst riot New York has seen in recent years when 35,000 people attending the demonstration were transformed in a few moments from an orderly, and at times a bored, crowd into a fighting mob. The outbreak came after communist leaders, defying warnings and orders of the police, exhorted their followers to march on City Hall and demand a hearing from Mayor Walker. Hundreds of policemen and detectives, swinging night sticks, blackjacks and bare fists, rushed into the crowd, hitting out at all with whom they came into contact, chasing many across the street and into adjacent thoroughfares and rushing hundreds off their feet. . . . From all parts of the scene of battle came the screams of women and cries of men, with bloody heads and faces. A score of men were sprawled over the square with policemen pummeling them. The pounding continued as the men, and some women, sought refuge in flight.
- NY Times
The demonstration succeeded in prodding city officials to collecting fund to be distributed to the unemployed. On October 1930, the unemployed demonstrators rallied at City Hall Plaza to demand the Board of Estimate to distribute the funds. The police again attacked the demonstrators, but the Board finally agreed to distribute the funds.

I'm spending my nights at the flophouse
I'm spending my days on the street
I'm looking for work and I find none
I wish I had something to eat

- the popular 'Soup Song' sung to the tune of 'My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean'

At this very same time unemployment was causing a massive wave of evictions for poor families. More than 200,000 evictions occurred in New York City in 1930 alone. There would be millions more to come.
Proving yet again that they were out in front of events, the Unemployed Councils called for a nationwide moratorium on evictions and direct aid to the dispossessed. The politicians of both political parties responded by calls for donations to charities.

The Councils would mobilize neighbors to stop the evictions and even move the furniture back into the apartments after the police had left. Thousands of organized incidents of eviction resistance occurred throughout the Great Depression.

By early 1931 millions of Americans were dependent on Relief aid. Unemployed Councils helped families apply for aid, demonstrated at relief offices, and sent delegations to lobby for more aid for local offices.



The first real food riots in the Great Depression broke out in February 1931.
In Minneapolis, several hundred men and women smashed the windows of a grocery market and made off with fruit, canned goods, bacon, and ham. One of the store's owners pulled out a gun to stop the looters, but was leapt upon and had his arm broken. The "riot" was brought under control by 100 policemen. Seven people were arrested.
"Who has the most children here?"
- Minneapolis food rioter asked before handing out stolen bacon

Food riots broke out in San Francisco, Oklahoma City, St. Paul, Van Dyke, and many other cities. But I dare you to find any mention of them in the New York Times.
As the Depression deepened and starvation spread across the country, the media reported it less and less.
Thousands of unemployed workers looted food stores (afraid of their contagious effect, the press usually did not report food riots); indeed, Irving Bernstein reports, "By 1932 organized looting of food stores was a nationwide phenomenon."
As far as the media was concerned, the poor in America were starving to death in silence.
But this was still America, and some people were determined to bring attention to the plight of the homeless and hungry no matter what the cost. Those people worked in the Unemployed Councils.

Hunger Marches

"We march on starvation, we march against death,
we're ragged, we've nothing but body and breath;
From north and from south, from east and from west
the army of hunger is marching."
- Hunger Marcher's song, 1932

Local hunger marches started on April 1, 1931, when a large group of unemployed forced their way into the Maryland state legislature to demand relief.
Later that month 3,000 turned out in Columbus, Ohio. In May 15,000 unemployed marched on Lansing, Michigan. By the end of summer there had been 40 hunger marches in states all over the country.

"One vivid, gruesome moment of those dark days we shall never forget. We saw a crowd of some fifty men fighting over a barrel of garbage which had been set outside the back door of a restaurant. American citizens fighting for scraps of food like animals!"
-- Louise Armstrong, an incident in Chicago, spring 1932

Despite this growing movement, it was business as usual in Washington. A few of the more bold Democrats proposed modest relief packages which Hoover immediately vetoed. It required someone outside of the two parties to take this movement to the next level, and that someone was Herbert Benjamin.

Herbert Benjamin was an unapologetic communist until his dying day. A few months before he had returned from Moscow where he had received training on organizing the unemployed.
Unlike Coxey's Army in 1894, this hunger strike would have 1,670 "delegates" rather than being a ragtag group. Columns of unemployed represented by all races would leave from Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, and St. Louis, and all arrive on December 6. Marches from the west coast would leave earlier and meet up in either Chicago or St. Louis.
Each delegate wore an armband that said "National Hunger March, December 7, 1931", which was the day that Congress would open for a new session. There were ten marchers to a truck as well as a smaller car that would run ahead looking for hostile crowds and/or police. While the media and local governments were extremely hostile to the marchers (Mayor Mackey of Philadelphia advised them to "pass by" his city. Hartford closed its streets to them), the public often turned out in large numbers to cheer them on and protect them from the local police. The marches were given $40 for all expenses, but frequently local communities would furnish them food and medical care free of charge, or at cost.

All of the columns reached Washington D.C. on December 6, as scheduled. Both the Hoover Administration and the media was in an uproar.
Three days later, however, 14 persons appeared outside the White House as "hunger marchers." In a cold drizzle they unfurled their banners ("Mr. Hoover, We Demand Food & Lodging," "Mr. Hoover You Have Money for the Entertainment of the Fascist Assassin Grandi."). Promptly the police pounced on them, arrested all 14 for parading without a permit.
[...]
Next day the U. S. Secret Service paid Leader Benjamin the compliment of taking his "hunger march" seriously and thus helping to publicize it throughout the land. Chief Moran declared that his sleuths had learned the march was really a Communist demonstration on a large scale. "Marchers" from all parts of the country would be brought to Washington in 1,144 trucks, 92 automobiles. They would be lodged and fed along the way. They would have medical attention. They would defend themselves with stones. They would be organized in military fashion. They would petition the President and Congress for relief for the jobless. They would make trouble. Only one thing in their plans did Chief Moran fail to ascertain and that was where the money was coming from to finance such a large undertaking. As usual, Moscow was publicly suspected.
"The marchers were of several races, mostly whites and negroes, but among them were several scores of yellow men from various climes. Many women appeared in the column."
- Daily Mirror

1,000 police showed up for the march, as well as 1,000 Marines, and an unknown number of secret service. Another 500 police were in the Capitol. Police were armed with shotguns and machine guns.
Vice-President Curtis sent out word that no marchers could enter the Capitol grounds carrying placards that were critical of the president.

Congress refused to let them speak in the Capitol. Neither Democrat nor Republican heard their demands. In response the demonstrators sang the "Internationale". President Hoover also refused to see them. According to the Washington Herald, the marches who were arrested were beaten.
The march then went to the AFL Headquarters to meet with President William Green, who promptly berated the marchers.

The first hunger march was over and the marchers left Washington. However, it had forced the media to actually report on the hunger problem in America, something it was loath to do. It also pushed Congress to propose relief legislation, which the Hoover Administration promptly defeated.

“The communists brought misery out of hiding in the workers’ neighborhoods. They paraded it with angry demands.... In hundreds of jobless meetings, I heard no objections to the points the communists made, and much applause for them. Sometimes, I’d hear a communist speaker say something so bitter and extreme, I’d feel embarrassed. Then I’d look around at the unemployed audience; shabby clothes, expressions worried and sour. Faces would start to glow, heads to nod, and hands to clap (162—163).”
- Len de Caux

A grassroots movement grows

Father James R. Cox was known as Mayor of Shantytown in Pittsburgh because he was so active in helping the homeless.
The first hunger marchers had scarcely left Washington before Father Cox started his own Hunger March. Dubbed "Cox's Army", it started on January 6, 1932 at 12,000 in size, but grew to 25,000 by the time it reached Washington.
Father Cox hated communists and felt the need to reclaim the pressing issue of homelessness and hunger in America from the communists. In fact, Cox's march was funded by store owners in the Pittsburgh area.
President Hoover personally met with Father Cox and heard his proposals, which were then ignored after the photo-op was over.

In March 7, 1932, about 4,000 unemployed factory workers marched on the Ford Motor Company in Detroit. They were looking either to get their old jobs back, or unemployment insurance.
They marched from Detroit to the River Rouge plant. Their signs read, "We Want Bread Not Crumbs," "Tax the Rich, Feed the Poor," "Free the Scottsboro Boys," and "Stop Jim Crow." At the Dearborn line, the crowd was told to disperse. None of the marchers was armed, but teargas and fire hoses were used on the crowd. Finally, the order to shoot was given - scores were wounded. Killed outright were Joe York, Joe DeBlasio, Coleman Leny, and Joe Bussell.
The order to shoot was given by private thugs hired by Ford, who was violently anti-union at the time. Firemen hosed them with icy water in the sub-freezing temperatures.
About 60 men were wounded, mostly in the back as they ran. One later died. The police blamed communists for the violence and sought to arrest Communist leader William Z. Foster, as well as starting a crackdown on leftist organizations.



The Unemployed Council decided to hold a public funeral, and between 30,000 and 70,000 people turned out for what was later called the Ford Hunger March. The Detroit police wisely decided not to make a show of force that day.
A massive crowd, tens of thousands strong, took over the broad main street. Detroit police decided it was better to disappear. For several miles, through the downtown area, stopping all traffic and all business, the crowd escorted the victims to their graves. Nothing like this had ever been seen in Detroit.
[note: there was a Ford Hunger March reunion in Detroit during the deep recession of 1982, which also got little media coverage]

Moderate Resistance

During the summer of 1931 the socialists finally took the hint and set up their own Unemployed organizations.

In Chicago socialist Karl Borders formed the Workers Committee on Unemployment, and by the end of 1932 he had twice as many members as the local UC.
Independent socialist A. J. Muste organized the Leagues of the Unemployed in small towns throughout Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.

In Seattle it was the Unemployed Citizens League, formed by socialists Hulet Wells and Carl Branin, who directed the Seattle Labor College and published The Vanguard, a weekly newspaper. It was set up as a self-help organization and distributed food, firewood, and clothing.
By 1932 it overshadowed the local Unemployed Council, which called the organization a “social fascist” effort. However, the Councils couldn't compete with the immediate aid that the UCL offered the unemployed.
The communists changed tactics, joined the UCL, and agitated for more direct political action. By 1933 this tactic began to bear fruit as the self-help organization began to demand public assistance.

The Great Rent Strike War of 1932



Which brings us back to the spreading rent strike of New York City. These were the poor, the hopeless, the unemployed. Most of the people effected, and sympathetic, were about to be evicted anyway. So why not put up a fight?
Using the networks they possessed in fraternal organizations, women's clubs, and left wing trade unions, aided by younger comrades from the high schools and colleges, Communists were able to mobilize formidable support for buildings that were on strike and to force police to empty out the station houses to carry out evictions. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the strike of five buildings on Longfellow Avenue between 174th and 175th streets, which the Greater New York Taxpayers Association made a test case of its efforts to suppress the movement. Three separate waves of eviction provoked confrontations between police and neighborhood residents, the largest of which involved three thousand people "hurling stones, bottles and other missiles." On another occasion, a mob of fifteen hundred fought the police for an hour and then took off after the landlord when they saw him moving through the crowd. The strike finally was broken, but only after more than forty evictions, an injunction against picketing, and numerous arrests and injuries. The police needed full-scale mobilization to suppress such strikes. "The police have set up a temporary police station outside one of the buildings," read the Daily Worker description of a Brownsville rent strike. "Cops patrol the street all day. The entire territory is under semi-martial law. People are driven around the streets, off the corners, and away from the houses."
The Unemployed Councils had no coherent legal strategy, or a way to argue the legitimacy of the rent strike before judges. They mostly used the strife for party organizing efforts.
However, they were the only organization that actually cared about the families about to be dispossessed. Despite all official efforts to crush the movement, it continued to grow.

"Rent strikes can be compared to epidemics, for when a strike breaks out in one apartment house, strikes start in nearby houses or landlords are forced to capitulate to threats of tenants. Some landlords have been forced to reduce their rent a number of times."
- secretary of the Bronx Landlords Protective Association

Although evictions did take place, some tenants won rent reductions through striking, while others won reductions merely by the threat to strike. Most of the strikers were Jewish, and often they were communists as well.
As many as 77,000 evicted families were restored to their homes using these tactics.

"The entire East Bronx is full of fire."
- a Bronx landlord

By January of 1933, the landlords were starting to use the charge of "criminal conspiracy" against rent strike leaders. By March the City issued a ruling against picketing of apartment buildings. This last law had dubious legal standing, but it was temporarily effective at shutting down the epidemic of rent strikes.
The Unemployed Councils then shifted tactics by taking large numbers of tenants to the newly created Home Relief Bureaus, where they would conduct sit-ins and hunger strikes until given relief. The government was more sensitive to pressure, and had more resources, than the landlords. Eventually the government simply took over paying rent for the tenants, while the Unemployed Councils became their de facto bargaining agents.
“I stood in the rain for three days and the Home Relief Bureau paid no attention to me,” a woman declared at a neighborhood meeting in New York City. “Then I found Out about the Unemployed Council...We went in there as a body and they came across right quick.” “The woman at the desk said I was rejected,” another woman added. “I was crying when Comrade Minns told me to come to the meeting of the Unemployed Council. One week later I got my rent check.”
New York wasn't the only place for rent strikes. In Chicago, particularly in the black neighborhoods, evictions and protests were an epidemic.
In early August, 1931, an eviction riot led to three people being shot dead, and three injured cops. The fear of further unrest prompted the mayor to declare a moratorium on evictions. Some of the rioters got work relief.

In Detroit it took 100 police to evict a single resisting family.

The outcome of the rent strike movement was to force the government to enact serious housing reforms, the twin pillars of which were rent control and public housing.

Of course it wasn't just renters who faced evictions. On July 13, 1933, at 11413 Lardet in Cleveland, Ohio, the Cuyahoga County sheriff's deputies arrived and evicted John and Sophie Sparenga and their four children.



As their furniture was carried to the street, a local "home defense" organization went up and down the street raising the alarm. Before long 4,000 to 6,000 protesters surrounded the 150 cops.
As police arrived, they were greeted by taunts, jeers and volleys of rocks, bricks, sticks and even kitchen utensils. The officers responded with nightsticks, tear gas and fire hoses. Four times during that day and night, the protesters were dispersed, only to re-form and battle again into the darkness.

"This is a crowd that won't scatter, a crowd that is strangely grim and determined," wrote James Steele in an account of the incident for The Nation magazine.

Some 14 people, including two policemen, were injured in the fracas, most suffering minor bruises, scrapes and tear-gas burns. Four people were arrested but later released.




Today the home at 11413 Lardet is bracketed by foreclosed homes.

Many might be under the false impression that the New Deal was completely implemented after FDR took office. In fact, most parts of the New Deal weren't passed until years afterward. Social Security didn't get passed until 1935. The United States Housing Act didn't get passed until 1937.
The Emergency Price Control Act, which limited rent hikes on apartments didn't get passed until 1942. When the law expired in 1947, many state and municipal governments stepped in.

All during this time the unemployed kept up the pressure.
In Colorado, when the federal relief funds were discontinued in the winter of 1934 because the state had repeatedly failed to appropriate its share of costs, mobs of the unemployed rioted in relief centers, looted food stores, and stormed the state legislature, driving the frightened senators from the chamber. Two weeks later, the General Assembly sent a relief bill to the governor, and federal funding was resumed (Cross). An attempt in Chicago to cut food allowances by 10 percent in November 1934 led to a large demonstration by the unemployed, and the city council restored that cut.
In early 1935 the various Socialist and Communist councils united to create the Workers Alliance of America. Most of the Unemployed Councils were absorbed by the Alliance.
The reason was that the communists were preparing to face the deadly threat of fascism rising around the world, and they wanted a united front to do so.

Some people may be under the impression that FDR's election and the New Deal was simply a logical reaction to extreme hardships. That democracy naturally corrected itself.
That wasn't the case. It took a grassroots movement, working against all odds, to push the government into action. It's a lesson we should remember.

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Bankrupt, How the 2005 Bankruptcy Law Fuels the Current Economic Crisis
by Ralph Brauer | 7/01/2009 11:03:00 PM



Not long ago I found a disconcerting message on my answering machine. It said simply, "Don't send me any more emails. We went bankrupt." It is a message that has been reverberating through towns in America mostly below the radar screen of the mainstream media.

The businesses filing for bankruptcy range from manufacturers to auto dealers. Some of them are national, many of them are regional, and quite a few are local, the anchors of many small towns. A lot of them are niche businesses. By that I mean they operate in specialized markets often as suppliers to larger firms.



How Bad Is It?

The increase in bankruptcies has skyrocketed in the past year. Despite all the optimistic reports about this economic crisis having turned the corner, that is not the case when it comes to bankruptcy. Last year recorded the highest number ever since the law was changed in 2005 and this year will probably exceed that. Currently we are experiencing a daily filing rate of over 5,000!

As usual a graph tells the story:


Note the precipitous climb of the graph from a little over a thousand a day in 2006 to over five times that many per day in less than two years!


But it is not just the number of bankruptcies that is disconcerting but the size of them. A chart of the largest bankruptcies from 1980 until the present reveals that most of them have occurred in the last few years--the latest and most notorious being General Motors.




To put this in a soundbite, notice that of the top ten, five have occurred in the last year.

While it is difficult to compare total bankruptcies in the current crisis with those during the Great Depression because of changes in the bankruptcy laws along with monumental social changes (in the 1930s significantly more people lived in rural America making a living as farmers), the size issue does point towards an important and unsettling difference between our own times and the 1930s.

This crisis is notable in that not even during the Great Depression were such large and important corporations forced into bankruptcy proceedings. A glance at this list shows today's crisis has hit multiple sections of our economy including auto manufacturing (two of the so-called Big Three), finance, telecommunications, energy, and transportation. Only two of these failures--Enron and World Com--are directly attributable to criminal corporate malfeasance.

In a paper on bankruptcy during the Great Depression authors Bradley and Nary Hansen point out:
As a proxy for unemployment among wage earners, we use the bankruptcy rate among manufacturers. We expect a positive correlation between manufacturing bankruptcies and wage earner bankruptcies.

The Hansens found that positive correlation in their examination of data from the Great Depression which suggests that the other shoe has yet to drop in terms of the impact of thus depression.

The Statistics

The definitive bankruptcy statistics come from the place where bankruptcies end up--the U.S. Courts. Their June 28 report contained a chart that tells the story:



Note the dramatic increase in business bankruptcies over the last year--61%.Think about this statistic for a minute. It tells us that in the last year almost 50,000 businesses went under, which means an average of 1,000 per state. If you use the Census Bureau statistic of an average of 16 employees per business that would mean 16,000 people per state and 800,000 nationally no longer have a place to work.

The problem with these data is that according to an influential paper by Robert Lawless and Elizabeth Warren, they dramatically undercount the percentage and number of business bankruptcies. The two point out:
Based on new research from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, if historical measures were used, we estimate as many as 17.4% of all current bankruptcy filings involve the failure of a business. Extrapolating to all filings, we estimate that rather than the 37,000 business filings reported by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AO) for 2003, there were between 260,000 and 315,000 bankruptcies that historically would have been counted as business filings but that in 2003 were not

If we extrapolate these findings to this past year that means the number of business bankruptcies would have been in the hundreds of thousands, rather than a "mere" 50,000. Lawless and Warren point out the implications of this for public policy which:
Has set the stage for legislators and policymakers to recast bankrupt debtors from unfortunates caught up in the caprices of unforgiving market changes to overspenders responsible for their own misfortunes.

If you are a systems thinker you realize that this unemployment and bankruptcy will reverberate through the economy. The companies that went under will no longer pay taxes in their communities, lowering the tax base. The companies that they purchased supplies and materials from will have to find other customers. The communities in which these businesses once were important institutions now must somehow find other businesses to replace those they lost. In this economic climate that is a daunting task, which will inevitably lead communities to bend over backwards to attract these replacements, further increasing the property tax burden on those very same homeowners caught in the subprime crisis.

Meanwhile those who are unemployed will have to find other work or collect unemployment. It is doubtful many of them will find work at the same salary that they enjoyed before, so their purchasing power will decline and some of them will default on mortgage, car or credit card payments.

For corporations bankruptcy is essentially a credit crunch. Corporations file for Chapter 11 or Chapter 7 because their debt has increased to the point where their creditors call in their loans. It is the corporate equivalent of the mortgage crisis and like the mortgage crisis sorting out who is at fault becomes a critical policy issue. Is there an equivalent to the subprime scandal in the rash of corporate bankruptcies? Is there a legislative action parallel to the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Banking Act that played a role in the crisis?

There seems little question, if any, from a business point of view, that in response to the current crisis creditors have tightened their lending practices. As financial institutions have faced their own potential demise, they have called in their loans to stay afloat. Bankruptcies, like mortgage foreclosures, are a manifestation of an economic collapse.

Bankruptcy Law


Bankruptcy law is a formidable thicket of definitions and procedures that requires a special personality who not only knows all the nuances of the law but who also is part psychologist. Chapter 11 aims to restructure a company so it can continue to function. If all goes according to the plan filed with the bankruptcy judge, when the bankrupt company's obligations are discharged it can emerge from the process as a survivor who has lived through some tough times.

Chapter 11 requires attorneys to apply some tough love to clients who sometimes land in court because of profligate spending, questionable decision-making and incompetent management. Like someone working with an addict or alcoholic you have to get a client to see the error of their ways while convincing them to undergo and stick to a treatment program that is emotionally, physically and psychologically daunting.

On the other hand for Chapter 7, which is essentially the complete liquidation of a company, the task is more for akin to that of a funeral director who must oversee the burial of companies that suffered the equivalent of a fatal accident or terminal illness. Unlike Chapter 11, Chapter 7 is The End with all the suffering and grief that entails.

Sharp legal minds will recognize that for businesses bankruptcy is exactly the opposite as it is for consumers. For individuals Chapter 7 once was a good way to escape from under burdensome debt. People could declare bankruptcy and walk away from whatever debts they had. College students, for example, could use bankruptcy as a way of liquidating all their student loans. Credit card addicts use it as a way of wiping clean sometimes profligate spending. On the other hand, for businesses Chapter 11 was preferable to Chapter 7 because it at least allowed them to restructure and continue operating.

All that changed with the 2005 revision to the bankruptcy code, which received a great deal of attention for making it more difficult for individuals to file for Chapter 7. It is important to note the changes enacted in 2005 were driven by creditors, which is why the debate over its passage was sometimes bitter and controversial.

Less well known are the changes the 2005 law made in business bankruptcies. In a paper on the 2005 law in the Southern Illinois University Law Journal, Robert Lawless stated its impact on small business in no uncertain terms, arguing that changes in small business bankruptcy in the 2005 law:
Are unprecedented developments in American law. Never before has Congress singled out small businesses for harsher treatment than large corporations.

Lawless' paper is an excellent discussion of the major changes in the law, changes that slipped under the radar screen of most Americans. First, the law defined a small business as any firm with more than $2,000,000 in noncontingent liquidated secured and unsecured debt. As Lawless points out:
Empirical studies of business bankruptcies suggest this definition will cover most business filers.

What the law did to small businesses is one of the best-kept secrets of this entire economic crisis, with virtually no one in the press even calling attention to it. Because it is written for lawyers and scholars, Lawless' article can be daunting, but it certainly should be required reading for anyone researching the current crisis. Among its key findings:


  • A small business debtor loses the protection of the automatic stay (1) if it is a debtor in a pending small business case, (2) if it was a debtor in a small business case that was dismissed in the previous two years, or (3) if it was a debtor in a small business case that was confirmed in the previous two years.

  • By denying the automatic stay only to small businesses filing a second chapter 11, Congress expressed hostility to small businesses reorganization alone.

  • The expanded reporting requirements are onerous and many are unnecessary.

  • What makes the expanded disclosure requirements perhaps most worrisome is that each becomes grounds to seek possible dismissal of a chapter 11 case.

  • Together, the new disclosure provisions and the tighter dismissal rules make chapter 11 much more hostile to reorganizing small businesses than the pre-2005 law.

  • We can expect entrepreneurial activity in the United States to decline.



In essence Lawless tells us that in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, a majority of American businesses are frantically trying to keep from drowning with the weighty anchor of the 2005 bankruptcy law changes tied to their waists. It has also pushed more businesses into Chapter 7.

Curiously this was predicted back in 2002 when Baird and Rasmussen wrote about the impending demise of Chapter 11:
To the extent we understand the law of corporate reorganizations as providing a collective forum in which creditors and their common debtor fashion a future for a firm that would otherwise be torn apart by financial distress, we may safely conclude that its era has come to an end.

The Real Estate Shell Game and the Demise of Circuit City


After allowing financial institutions to engage in all sorts of shenanigans that helped to bring about the mortgage crisis and today's economic woes by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, Congress and the Bush Administration proceeded to bestow another gift on financial institutions with a little-known addition to the 2005 bankruptcy law rewrite. Among those pushing for the changes was Citi, the same firm that played a huge role in the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

In the new economic world created by the repeal of Glass-Steagall, Citi, the company that began as a loan-sharking business, was now heavily involved in the credit card business, so it had two reasons to push for the 2005 changes. Most of us know about the changes in credit card debt, but few know that the law essentially limits the ability of businesses to restructure real estate debt. Of course, this hits retailers especially hard because most of them rent space or are paying off the costs of building new stores.

If you wonder why so many stores in suburban malls now lie empty and why big box retailers such as Circuit City have gone under you need only read the following paragraph from testimony delivered last October to the House Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law by Professor Jay Westbrook of the University of Texas Law School, Professor Barry Adler of the New York University School of Law and Lawrence Gottlieb, the Chair of the Bankruptcy & Restructuring Group at Cooley Godward Kronish LLP.
[The 2005 Law] has left retailers without adequate time and money to effectuate operational initiatives and cost cutting measures needed to resuscitate their businesses. Retailers now enter the Chapter 11 arena with little choice but to narrowly tailor their strategy to ensure that their lenders are not deprived of the substantial benefits and protections conferred by section 363(b) of the Bankruptcy Code, which authorizes the use, sale or lease of estate property outside the ordinary course of business upon court approval.

BAPCPA’s constrictive liquidity provisions and the enormous leverage handed to secured lenders as a result thereof have eliminated the ability of retailers to control the Chapter 11 process as a “debtor-in-possession.” Rather, the process is now controlled almost exclusively by prepetition lenders, who have essentially assumed the role of "creditor-in-possession."

What this means is that real estate debt now is one of the "first in line" when a company gets in financial trouble. This helps to explain why the demise of companies like Circuit City came on the heels of the mortgage crisis, for their financial difficulties constituted a kind of retail business mortgage crisis.

Bankruptcy attorney Lawrence Gottlieb testified:
Today, retailers almost invariably begin the Chapter 11 process with little hope of emergence. Numerous economic factors – the credit crunch, the subprime lending crisis, the slowdown of the housing market and eroding value of retail commercial leases – have clearly contributed to this downward spiral.

Data confirm his fears:
Since the enactment of BAPCPA in late 2005, no more than two retailers have successfully emerged from Chapter 11 as reorganized entities.

With this in mind it puts the May retail statistics in some perspective. The press widely reported that May was the first time in three months that retail sales rose--this time by a paltry .5%. Reports attributed this to auto dealers steeply discounting prices for new cars to try to deal with the bankruptcy of General Motors, the lower price of gasoline and the impact of federal stimulus funds.

Yet behind these seemingly optimistic reports lay some grim realities:
The International Council of Shopping Centers last week said May same-store sales dropped 4.6 percent from the same month last year, more than double its forecast of a 2 percent decline. Macy’s Inc., Dillard’s Inc. and Saks Inc. were among merchants that reported steeper declines than analysts estimated as Americans focused on buying essentials rather than discretionary items.

Note that the names of some of these retailers routinely pop up in discussions of who will be the next big retail firm to go under.

The Opposition


While he was still alive, the last politician who proudly wore the label liberal--Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone-- almost single-handedly fought off these changes, according to the PIRG Bankruptcy Campaign. In much the same way John Quincy Adams used the rules of the House to argue against slavery, Wellstone used the rules of the Senate to throw roadblocks in front of attempts to rewrite American's bankruptcy laws. Wellstone's objections have a certain prophetic quality about them, for he seemed to sense the economic storm that was brewing on the horizon.

In his book, The Conscience of a Liberal, (which is probably the last book in which a politician openly claimed that title), Wellstone wrote about why he opposed attempts to change the bankruptcy laws.
The vast majority of bankruptcies were caused by major medical bills, loss of job, or divorce. Current bankruptcy law was a major safety net for the middle class in America.

In a letter to then Majority Leader Trent Lott detailing his opposition he stated:
I continue to be puzzled by the false urgency for this bill. As bankruptcy rates fell steadily in the past two years, the rhetoric about the "crisis" in filings became even more shrill. But even more perversely, projected increases in bankruptcy filings for the coming year – as a result of layoffs and falling income due to a cooling economy – is now being used to justify rolling back the bankruptcy safety net. In other words, now that more working Americans will be forced to file for bankruptcy because of circumstances beyond their control, we should make it harder for them to do so. I for one will have difficulty making that argument to the newly unemployed steelworkers in my state.

Unfortunately for businesses and consumers, Paul Wellstone died before the passage of the 2005 law. It is one of history's great ifs whether that bill would have emerged from the Hill in its present form.

Instead in the Senate eighteen Democrats and one Independent voted with 55 Republicans to change the law. Only 25 Democrats voted no. Among them were Barack Obama, Charles Schumer, and Chris Dodd. Hilary Clinton was not present for the vote because her husband was undergoing open heart surgery. Joe Biden voted in favor if it as did John McCain and current majority leader Harry Reid.

The Big Picture


The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act allowed banks and other financial institutions to engage in the shenanigans that helped to cause this crisis. The 2005 bankruptcy law changes, which were also a gift to those financial institutions, now make it more difficult for financially strapped businesses to reorganize.

It doesn't take a Harvard economist to envision the scenario. Banks get out of control after the repeal of Glass-Steagall. To stave off financial collapse they start calling in loans. The 2005 law makes it more difficult for businesses to restructure that debt. The result: a thousand bankruptcies per state in the last year. But because of the law these are not your usual bankruptcies. The new law pushes more firms into Chapter 7.

I know just such a business. It had been in the same family for three generations, having survived the Great Depression in part because one generation essentially defied New Deal regulations. The company did not manufacture anything that would have benefited from World War II, yet it found a way to land a few key contracts. After the war it prospered along with the rest of the country. The company continued to survive because of the high quality of its products and the loyalty of its customers, but it found itself trying to compete in a market that had become dominated by a few giant corporations.

The town where this business was located could be any rural Midwestern city with plowed fields extending right to the city limits. In the summer you can see the corn stalks waving in the breeze and hear the cries of pheasants from between the rows. In this flat landscape the horizon seems to extend forever, promising endless possibility and a limitless future. The heart of Main Street still consists of brick buildings with ornate stone façades sporting dates that hearken back to the 19th century carved into imposing gray granite blocks

Many of the businesses located behind the glass display windows that look out onto the wide streets are as old as the buildings themselves, having been in the same family for over a century. These people are survivors, for they weathered the dust clouds and stark realities of the Great Depression without ever closing their doors. For people living in these towns, these old family business provide a solid foundation as massive as the stones that were used to build those stores.

These businesses are literally the heart and soul of these towns so when one of them fails it is not only the death of a business but a loss felt keenly by everyone living in those towns as keenly as if someone in their families had died. In these towns an empty storefront on Main Street stares back like a grim tombstone reminding all of their community's mortality.

Clearly this business and the others that have failed testify that we do not yet truly understand the full dimensions of what this country faces. However there is a cultural and historical parallel that most analysts have overlooked.

A Parallel
In terms of large-scale corporate bankruptcies the closer parallel to our time is the so-called Long Depression that covered the last three decades of the nineteenth century, encompassing the famous 1893 Depression. An article from the New York Times during those years sounds eerily familiar:
The year 1893 began in doubt and ended in disaster…Its opening found the financial community in a state of serious concern about the currency issue…Banks began to be rapidly drawn upon; contraction of loans followed; and then came the panic…The whole country seemed to be calling on New York for money…How far the decline will go, or how long it will continue, it is no use to try to guess. [December 31, 1893]

The article named the firms that had already gone down like a bell tolling the dead: National Cordage, the Reading Railroad, the Union Pacific and Great Northern. For the nineteenth century the railroads meant as much to the economy as automakers meant to the twentieth, so the parallels extend even deeper.

A second parallel is the degree of corporate concentration. In Democracy in Desperation, a history of the 1890s Depression, Douglas Steeples and David Whitten observed:
Nowhere was consolidation more rampant than in the railroad industry…By the early 1890s, the Pennsylvania, Reading, Santa Fe, Great Northern and New York Central; the Union, the Southern, and the Northern Pacific; and a few others controlled thousands of miles of track and millions in capital each. [p. 19]

A Cultural Implosion

The Long Depression of the last half of the 19th century was above all a cultural phenomenon in which America's economic, social, and political arenas simultaneously underwent a fundamental shift in values. The nation experienced a change in its collective mindset as profound as the one which led their ancestors to sever their ties with Great Britain. Historians have labeled this shift as a transition from a rural to an industrial society.

But it involved far more than merely changing the way the nation did business. No institution, no community, no individual was immune to the change. It altered everything that they did from the way they built their houses and raised their crops to the ways they schooled their children. In a famous 1855 painting The Lackawanna Valley, artist George Inness captured that shift in a single image. It shows a massive smoke- belching locomotive traveling across the pristine rural landscape of the Hudson River Valley.



Note still standing amidst the stumps remains scraggly tree visually blocking the path of the train that has emerged from the smoking roundhouse dominating the desert-like background.

Were I to be forced to select a single contemporary cultural document that forms the equivalent of that painting I would choose the Matrix movies with their stark vision of a future in which the differences between humans and robots have evaporated and all is under the control of a single massive computer.

Today the changes of the late 19th century are seen as historically inevitable. But to the people of those times, they were far from that. In fact opposition to the most dramatic of these changes in the form of the Progressive and Populist movements helped to lessen their more dramatic impacts and laid the groundwork for what I term the Second American Revolution in which this nation found a way to maintain its democratic commitment to the level playing field in the face of industrialization.

Today this economic crisis and asks whether we can maintain that principle as we confront the massive changes our society is undergoing. Whether we can create the equivalents of the Progressive and Populist movements of a century ago may well determine whether our society survives. Paul Wellstone believed that America had in its soul the ability to weather this crisis. Let us hope that he was correct.

 
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