A few months ago, Stanek messaged me with an interesting observation: it's curious to see all the nostalgia these days for a supposed "time before corporations" in American history when we consider that we are a country that was literally founded by one (that's not his argument verbatim, just my summation of it). I know almost nothing about economics so I won't comment on American corporate history here. However, I've always been one to keep an eye out for tidbits that fly in the face of the generic, vague, or flat-out false "facts" about U.S. history that get thrown around, especially those used for political arguments (what I call "twisted history"). It's not that I'm a buff for alternate history or that I go out of the way to find any facts I can that support my own opinion, but I do keep the door open while reading for when those facts do happen to show up. And at the very least if it turns out that I'm wrong then my own views on history will have been challenged for the better.
Thus, with all the generalized comments these days about returning to a time in American history when the government never told us what to do and that the states should be calling the shots, it made me laugh when I caught this brief mention in Ira Berlin's Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America of South Carolina telling its citizens what to do:
Anyway, I don't really have an overall argument here. It is generally true that government was less intrusive in 18th and 19th centuries. The examples I pointed out were also from the colonial era, although to me it's a hard argument to say colonial governments were any more intrusive than early American state governments. Additionally, these laws are hundreds of years old and have little to do with the governments they are associated with today; if conservatives in South Carolina or Pennsylvania want little or no government interference today then that's their political ideology. I just like pointing out that governments at all times and in all places have had a tendency to try and tell people what to do, for better or for worse. In many instances in addition to the two that I listed, things weren't as hands off and "free to do as you please" in the previous centuries as certain people like to believe. Ironically, you would think that having a system of slavery would make that self-evident...
Thus, with all the generalized comments these days about returning to a time in American history when the government never told us what to do and that the states should be calling the shots, it made me laugh when I caught this brief mention in Ira Berlin's Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America of South Carolina telling its citizens what to do:
"...other strictures were added, including limitations on movement of slaves and penalties against white persons who traded with slaves. A recapitulation of these laws in the 1691 slave code forbade slaveowners from giving slaves Saturday mornings free, 'as hath been accustomed formerly.'" (page 68)To me, there is something incredibly ironic about the government of South Carolina, of all places, not only attempting to force its citizens to do something (that is, be more cruel to their slaves) but also trying to control the free market. But to be fair, Berlin shows throughout the book that the north had its share of reprehensible laws regarding slavery and individual rights too. This passage in particular caught my eye:
"Often the punishment meted out to free blacks drove them back into bondage, as the Pennsylvania law enslaved free blacks found to be without regular employment, and who "loiter[ed] and misspen[t]" their time." (page 187)Freed blacks being enslaved for not spending their time the way the state thinks they should... I understand the different mindset whites had back then towards African Americans but regardless, that is a pretty significant showing of just how intrusive state governments could be back then. Of course libertarians might argue that government at any level should stay out of our lives, whereas I would counter that that's likely one of the ways slavery got started in the first place.
Anyway, I don't really have an overall argument here. It is generally true that government was less intrusive in 18th and 19th centuries. The examples I pointed out were also from the colonial era, although to me it's a hard argument to say colonial governments were any more intrusive than early American state governments. Additionally, these laws are hundreds of years old and have little to do with the governments they are associated with today; if conservatives in South Carolina or Pennsylvania want little or no government interference today then that's their political ideology. I just like pointing out that governments at all times and in all places have had a tendency to try and tell people what to do, for better or for worse. In many instances in addition to the two that I listed, things weren't as hands off and "free to do as you please" in the previous centuries as certain people like to believe. Ironically, you would think that having a system of slavery would make that self-evident...
Good and interesting, but it left me wondering:
ReplyDeleteWas the issue beyond the whole states rights aspect of the civil war (and more or less since) regarding limiting any and all government interaction with its citizens, or was it just the state government being pissed that the federal government was trying to tell it what to do?
Thanks Trunk. That’s a good question, and like most things in history the answer would vary from person to person based on their own reading or research as well as their personal political leaning. I’ll give it a shot though.
ReplyDeleteFrom what I have seen, the issue depends on who you ask and at what time in history you ask them. For instance, a lot of people in the Confederacy (Robert E. Lee, for one) personally believed that secession was wrong but followed their state anyway as they felt a stronger allegiance to it than to the federal government. There was a lot more reasoning involved than just that, but to put it simply in the 1800s it seems that for most of the Confederates who viewed the Civil War in ideological terms (and many historians argue that they were actually a minority of those who fought), the issue was largely about the states not wanting the far-off government in D.C. telling them what to do. Of course some people probably did fight for that “don’t tell me what to do” ideology and associated the south with that crusade, but the Confederacy had an ironic way of being pro-centralized government as well on occasion (they actually instituted a centralized draft before the Union did).
I think a key piece of evidence into the political mindset of the mid-1800s is Bleeding Kansas: obviously the federal government at the time felt it could not tell Kansas it had to allow or prohibit slavery since it left it up to the state to decide (popular sovereignty); and at the other end of things, the citizens themselves rushed to the state in order to try and influence the outcome instead of protesting outside of Washington or otherwise trying to influence things at the national level. To me, this indicates that most people believed that permitting or prohibiting slavery was acceptable so long as it was a state decision, not federal. Of course, some people in Kansas at the time also thought it was acceptable to murder people on the opposing side of the debate, so who knows if I’m right about this.
As for people today, again it probably depends on who you ask. Stanek might have a better feel for how the issue is discussed today. I just know that I hear a lot of people saying things today like how the government should only fix the roads and nothing else. It usually seems to me that they are implying all levels of government: I can’t imagine someone like Sarah Palin would tolerate it if Alaska’s legislature decided to allow public health care. So to me, the issue today seems to be more about personal defiance to any type of government rather than debate framed in terms of state vs. federal authority.
Again, I wasn’t really trying to make any grand arguments with my post and looking back on it I think I just wanted to point out some interesting (and depressing) moments in history. As an aside I suppose I should have cited current examples of people looking back on the past for historic support for their politics, but I was only trying to point out an ironic counter-argument to that view, not try and debunk their entire political ideology piece by piece. I guess I would just point out Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz (the book I’m currently reading) if you want a lot of examples of people using Confederate nostalgia for all sorts of political arguments today.
Anyway, that was probably more info than you wanted Trunkely and I hope I ended up answering your question somewhere in there. Most of this was on the fly, and I had to retype it since blogger froze when I previewed my first response and I lost it all.
I tend to think the federal-state-individual connections are extremely muddled at this point. I'm overgeneralizing here (but just a bit) when I say that nobody seems to know what they want. Or, rather, people aren't particularly self-consistent in what they want.
ReplyDeleteWe know that the Bill of Rights was originally written as a protection of individual liberties from federal overreaching. It didn't apply to state or local governments. But starting around the 1920s, the Supreme Court started using the 14th amendment to incorporate pieces of the Bill of Rights--essentially using federal power to put limits on state governments where they hadn't previously existed. In this way, expanding federal power actually preserved individual liberty. And this isn't some wild-eyed liberal concept: last year, in a victory for conservatives, one of the holdouts--one of the very few amendments in the Bill of Rights that hadn't yet been incorporated--was ruled by the Supreme Court to bind state and local governments. I'm speaking here of the 2nd amendment which was judged last year to render Chicago's long-standing local gun ban unconstitutional.
So by that line of thinking, flexing the federal muscle against states is a valid way to protect the individual. Conservatives tend to embrace this in other circumstances, as well. To use some examples from the health care arena (where else): conservatives tend to favor federalizing tort law to institute limits that states won't and they favor using federal power to essentially deregulate consumer protections that states have placed on their health insurance markets.
Those are examples of a sort of "individual > any and all government" point of view--a view that will play the different levels of government off each other in any way that they judge maximizes individual liberty. The flip side of that is that the "federal power is inherently bad" view, a notion Rand Paulites might use to argue against something like the Civil Rights Act, is invalidated.
Except I suspect there's quite a bit of overlap there with states righters, the kind of folks who would in many contexts argue that the state--and not the federal--government is the most legitimate level of government. Although "states rights" became something of a euphemism for legalized racial discrimination in the latter half of the 20th century, with bigots invoking it to tell the federal government to mind its own business while the personal liberties of minorities were infringed with tacit state approval, I do think it can conceivably be viewed as part of a conservative philosophy. For example, Virginia's conservative governor suggested the problem with the individual mandate to carry health insurance was that it's federal; he refused to rule out the acceptability of state-level mandates (like the one currently functioning in Massachusetts). But, like I said, it's muddled. The Tea Party Senate candidate in Alaska last time around, Joe Miller, seemed to be a dyed-in-the-wool "state > federal" guy to the point that he was actually calling for the federal government to turn its federally-owned land in Alaska over to the state government. And yet when Miller lost his race to a write-in candidate, took it the courts, and was resoundingly shot down by the Alaskan state courts, did he give up gracefully? No, he then took it to the federal courts.
Muddled.
I think that's the heart of the matter there, Stanek. More often than not, people use political rhetoric or historic references when it suits their own needs while ignoring the facets that don't. The hardcore conservatives who called President Obama a Nazi while supporting a somewhat difficult-to-justify war in Iraq are a fine example.
ReplyDelete"Muddled" is a perfect word to describe the reasons behind the Civil War, too. A lot of people today as well as in the 1860s avidly denied that the war was about slavery and instead claim it was fought over states rights (we can get into whether or not it all boils down to the issue of slavery some other time, but in my opinion it does). Yet as I already mentioned, the Confederacy was the first to institute a centralized draft during the Civil War. And in the antebellum period the southern states seemed just fine with things like federal enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act - against an often unwilling northern populace - or sending U.S. marines to put down the raid on Harpers Ferry. On the flip side of things, I recently learned that some northern states attempted to nullify the Fugitive Slave Act, causing another minor "Nullification Crisis" like the one South Carolina caused in the 1830s. Interesting. As with many things, political philosophy often goes on the back burner when it doesn't suit one's immediate argument.