[Peace-discuss] Letter to Editor

[David Green]

A comment by labor historian David Montgomery, perhaps
apropos:

The global perspective can be extremely useful to
researchers and teachers of US labor history. It might
be most useful, in introducing this question, to
break the subject down into some of its constituent
parts.

1. Slavery and racism. Industrialization and the
formation of a working class and a workers movement in
the US took place in a country dominated by chattel
slavery. As late as the 1850s there were more
African-American slaves over the age of 10 in the US
than there were free wage earners. In fact it was
during
that decade that the balance tipped in favor of wage
earners. Slavery left its mark on all working-class
life and movements (just reread the classic Sidney
Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in
Modern History (New York, 1985) for starters) , but
for Europeans the slaves were overseas. North
American slavery evolved through a variety of forms in
ways that directly shaped the activities,
possibilities, and thinking of free workers in the US.
See Alexander Saxton, Rise and Fall of the White
Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in
Nineteenth-Century America (1990) and David Roediger,
Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the
American Working Class (1991).

To provide students with some historical perspective
on the "global economy" and working people's struggles
(slave, waged, and indigenous) they should be directed
to a study of the Atlantic world in the 17th and 18th
centuries, which is bound to hold the attention of any
reader: Peter Linebaugh and Marcus
Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves,
Comoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary
Atlantic (Boston, 2000). Before I leave that subject,
let me add that I have long directed my students
also toward the splendid comparison of two
contemporaneous systems of bondage that had much in
common, as well as crucial differences, and both of
which left legacies that shaped national labor
movements,  Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American
Slavery and Russian Serfdom (1985)


--- "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:

> Although Seiter thinks he's presenting a reductio ad
> absurdum,
> I think he might be right.  
> 
> It may be as much a mistake to make Lincoln a hero,
> just
> because slavery was wrong, as it is to make Bush Jr.
> a hero
> because Saddam was a tyrant.  It's certainly a
> mistake to see
> both (Lincoln v. slavery, Bush v. Saddam) as
> either-ors that
> exhaust the possibilities.  
> 
> The radical Republicans ca. 1860 would have said
> (probably
> did) "You're either with us or with the slavers" --
> that's
> what Lincoln's rhetorical genius allowed him to say
> in the
> Gettysburg speech -- and there's no more reason to
> believe
> that than there is to believe its modern analogue.
> 
> See the anti-establishment portrait of Lincoln in
> Gore
> Vidal's novel of the same name, perhaps more
> accurate than
> the historical consensus.  A recent scholarly study,
> Ethan S.
> Rafuse's "McClellan's War: The Failure of Moderation
> in the
> Struggle for the Union," presents the politics of
> those who
> were opposed to the slave-holding aristocracy as
> well as to
> the radical Republicans.  William Appleman Williams,
> the major
> revisionist (and anti-Vietnam war) historian of a
> generation
> ago, pointed out that those Republicans represented
> the
> interests of, e.g, wealthy Midwestern landowners.  
> 
> In fact the Civil War called upon poor people to die
> in a
> contest between two elites who disagreed on how to
> exploit
> labor -- slavery or the wage contract.  In some ways
> wage-laborers in the North were treated worse than
> slaves. 
> (E.g., to drain the pestilential swamps around New
> Orleans,
> Louisiana slave-owners imported Irish laborers from
> the North:
> a dead slave was a major loss, but you could always
> rent
> another Irishman.)  Marx wrote to Lincoln to
> congratulate him
> on the defeat of slavery, but only because he
> believed it
> clarified the class struggle. 
> 
> I can imagine being a member of an anti-war movement
> in the US
> a century and a half ago.  It's not too much of a
> stretch to
> see those who arranged Lincoln's nomination as the
> neocons of
> the time, mutatis mutandis.  Like the neocons, they
> represented one end of the elite policy spectrum;
> one might
> even argue that they divided the Whigs as the
> neocons have
> divided the Republicans.
> 
> As Mark Twain said, history doesn't repeat itself --
> but it
> does rhyme. --CGE
> 
> 
> ---- Original message ----
> 
> On 30 May 2006 Brian Dolinar
> <briandolinar at gmail.com> wrote:  
> 
> >Don't miss this...
> >
> >Anti-war critics could take aim at Lincoln
> >Tuesday May 30, 2006
> >
> >Carl Estabrook (May 8 letter) predictably
> demagogued my
> letter. My
> >comment directed toward Estabrook referenced his
> hypocrisy in not
> >generating a ballot referendum calling for the
> impeachment of
> >President Clinton.
> >
> >I am not impressed by whatever lip service
> Estabrook may have
> paid to
> >purported Clinton war crimes either on his radio
> show or
> through his
> >letters to the editor. It is action, not words,
> that counts.
> >
> >If anti-war ideologues were consistent in their
> moral views,
> there was
> >no greater warmonger worthy of impeachment than
> Illinois' own
> Abraham
> >Lincoln.
> >
> >President Lincoln "illegally and immorally" invaded
> other
> sovereign
> >states of the South using South Carolina's
> bloodless bombing
> of Fort
> >Sumter as a pretense for war. No war for cotton,
> Mr. Lincoln!
> >
> >President Lincoln spied on Americans, he lied about
> not going
> to war
> >over slavery, and he suspended the Writ of Habeas
> Corpus. If
> he had
> >simply trusted in the Anaconda plan, war could have
> been averted.
> >
> >These so-called facts prove Lincoln was the worst
> president
> of all
> >time who sent 618,000 American soldiers and untold
> tens of
> thousands
> >of civilians to their ignoble deaths. And for what?
> For the
> good of
> >America? To free the slaves? Bah, humbug.
> >
> >No slave that ever lived was worth the life of one
> American
> soldier.
> >Not in our name.
> >
> >I'll be accused by some of comparing apples to
> oranges, and
> maybe they
> >are right. Given the anti-war left's own purported
> concern
> for the
> >safety of American soldiers fighting "a bunch of
> radical
> Arabs," how
> >much more grievous was Lincoln's "evil" when it was
> Americans
> fighting
> >Americans? Lincoln lied, and Americans died!
> >
> >HENRY SEITER Jr.
> >
> >Urbana
> _______________________________________________
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>
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> 


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