#judith stein

[zwischenstadt]

“Just a few weeks after [Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta speech] there was to be a run-off election between populist Tom Watson and his Democratic opponent.  A run-off became necessary because Democratic fraud and intimidation, especially against black voters, had been so blatant that the Democratic winner was forced to agree to Populist demands to repeat the election.  In the run-off the black vote was crucial. Watson was the nation’s best known Populist.  Most other Populists had little national visibility because few of them were elected to national office.  One historian recently estimated that between 1892 and 1894 at least twenty Populist Congressmen had been denied election through ballot-stuffing alone.  Watson had been elected in 1890 as a Democrat and subsequently became a Populist, provoking particular rage among his former colleagues.  When he ran in 1892, Northern capitalists raised $40,000 to help defeat him.  President Cleveland announce that he was as interested in the Congressman’s defeat as he was in his own election.  Watson’s popularity in a district which included Black Belt and industrial areas directly challenged the ruling coalition.  While New South leaders were alarmed by Populist victories in white hill counties, successful penetration of the Black Belt and industrial areas would create majorities capable of challenging their state power. Washington offered Southern leaders a way to combat black insurgency.  Meier and Harlan’s explanation that the Bourbons needed a black leader to ‘express Negro accommodation to the social conditions implicit’ in the 1877 compromise does not violate the facts so much as the dynamics of history.  In 1895, while Southern rulers were combating other blacks and whites whose politics challenged the compromise and the social system it embodied, some men reached out for a symbol that would deny that reality and preserve their ideology and self-conception.  Then as now, however, the encouragement of moderate men was not the principal weapon used against radical movements.  The history of Populism demonstrates that violence and intimidation were the primary weapons used to combat its challenge to the prevailing order.

Judith Stein, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others: The Political Economy of Racism in the United States” published in Science and Society 1975.  

I strongly recommend seeking this one out, amazing piece of history

[weil-weil-lautre]

As politics changed, the organic model that had dominated black thought since the 1890s lost its power to persuade. Blyden, Du Bois, and Garvey had invented a view of the race to support a politics…

[weil-weil-lautre]

Stein’s work shows the depth, breadth and intellectual richness that a grounded historical-materialist perspective can bring to scholarship and understanding. She assumed from the outset that…

[weil-weil-lautre]

Liberalism and Its Critics

[zwischenstadt]

Populists rarely sought specific legislation in race relations, probably because they were suspicious of the administration of the laws in a state they did not control.  Since most of the purely racist practices were in fact against the law and occurred because the Democrats controlled the process of government, Populist political power was deemed the means to end those practices.  Where Populists controlled local governments (they never controlled a state), blacks had political representation, their lives were protected, they held government jobs, they served on juries, and they were part of the life of the community.  Populist newspapers recognized and reported black achievements.  That is why politics and political rights were considered so important by black communities. While Democrats tried to devise a system of race relations consistent with white supremacy, Populists measured race relations by the standard of equality.  Results followed from this assumption, even when initially white Populists were insensitive to racial discrimination.  For instance, at the first Populist convention in Texas, there were no blacks on the state executive committee.  When reminded of that fact by a black delegate, the convention applauded him an unanimously voted to place blacks on all committees from the state to local levels.  When two whites suggested some form of separation, they were quickly rebuked by the convention.  This is not to say that no white Populist held racist ideas, any more than no Populist held other ideas of the dominant culture.  But the collective practices flowing from the party countered prejudice.  There were, of course, differences among blacks, among whites, and between blacks and whites, about the means of addressing and resolving problems.  But that was not unique to the Populists. Populists did not conduct campaigns against the idea of racism, a word not used at that time.  In part, this stemmed from the fact that the full institutionalization of racism in law and practice occurred in the first decade of the twentieth century, after the defeat of Populism.  Also, the elaborate rationalizations and theories of race differences written by intellectuals were unknown to the average white Populist.  Populist treatment of race came principally from their own analysis of their past actions.  In their view, former white Democrats had opposed black Republicans because they had not understood the world, not because of racism.  The corollary of racism, black powerlessness, was a view white Populists did not hold.  Populism was not the politics of guilt.  Blacks and whites needed political education, not moral uplift.

Judith Stein: “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others: The Political Economy of Racism in the United States”

[zwischenstadt]

Though not related to the military action, a recession arrived the same time that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990.  Reagan’s 1982 recession was mainly a blue-collar affair, but this one included supervisors as well as workers.  Layoffs hit white-collar suburbia, as large corporations fired middle managers.  In June 1991 unemployment reached 7.8 percent.  Nevertheless Bush, reflecting the Reagan ideology on labor, vetoed more benefits for the unemployed, claiming that the budget deficit precluded the expenditures.  He tried to keep the recession on the back burner.  Not until December 1991 did the White House officially acknowledge the economic woes.  Even when Bush faced challenger Patrick Buchanan in the 1992 New Hampshire presidential primary, he imagined that he was assaulted by the moralists of the GOP- those opposed to abortion, gun control, gay rights, etc.  But Buchanan, who moved easily between social and economic issues, was onto something.  The president won only those voters who felt they were better off in 1992 than they were four years ago; those who believed they were about the same split between the two, but those whose problems were greater than in 1988 chose Buchanan by a margin of 57 to 39 percent.  Buchanan ended up with 38 percent of the votes.  Even after New Hampshire, Bush continued to overestimate the social issues and appeased the cultural right wing of his party.  At the Republican convention Bush allowed Buchanan, who switched from his economic critique of Bush to a social attack on the Democrats, to declare that American confronted ‘a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself. Democrats, too, were slow to pick up on the economic issues.  After Mondale’s defeat in 1984, southern and moderate Democrats created the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) to distance the party from the constituency groups- civil rights, labor, feminist, peace, etc.- that they blamed for Democratic debacles.  Founder Al From, who had worked on Capitol Hill and in the Carter administration, believed that these groups preferred their own causes to the cause of Democratic victory.  There was a small truth to this critique, but From and the New Democrats aimed for more substantive changes.  After Dukakis’s loss they created a think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), to promote their ideas.  PPI embraced ‘free markets, free trade, and fiscal discipline.’  It was closer to business than to labor.  It supported cuts in spending, not tax increases to reduce the deficit.  Government policy would aim for economic opportunity, not security.  Markets, not the state, would solve problems.  Economic incentives, not mandates, would clean the environment and provide health care.  Vouchers would improve the schools, law and order would reform the criminals, and two-parent households would elevate children.  PPI believed that Democrats would not win until Americans no longer viewed the party as anti-family, anti-American, and anti-religion.

Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies. 

How both the Republicans and Democratic elite organized to keep ‘bread and butter’ issues off of the Federal agenda after Reagan

[romanceoftheworld]

Judith Stein watercolor

[weil-weil-lautre]

Too often, commentators have been content to characterize Donald Trump’s cabinet as a collection of billionaires. The president does show a fondness for rich businessmen but to stop there is to erase important divisions among American corporate elites and ignore Trump’s critique of the global tr...