Peculiar Institution
The United States fought a Civil War in the middle of the 19th Century. Now, over 160 years later, there are still arguments about the causes of that war. So let’s make one thing clear, right now. The Civil War was about enslaving a race for economic purposes. There are a lot of moral failures in that “peculiar institution” of slavery, but the bottom line was this. The Southern economy was largely based on cotton farming. Cotton farming required huge amounts of hand labor.
While Eli Whitney’s 1793 invention of the “cotton engine” did the job of removing seeds from the cotton bolls, ending hours of tedious hand labor, it also pulled the “cork from the bottle”. If cotton could be cleaned quickly and efficiently, then more of it could be grown. Rather than hire folks to pick that cotton, the South used the enslaved to do so. And, since cotton ultimately wore out the land it was grown on, wealthy Southern cotton growers were constantly looking for more land. That required expansion, from the Atlantic states to the Deep South, and from the Deep South over the Mississippi into Texas, and beyond.
Don’t tell John Wayne, but the Texas War of Independence, including the battle at the Alamo, was fought by Americans who wanted to grow cotton in Texas, owned by Mexico. Mexico freed slaves in 1829. So those famous Americans who fought for Texas Independence in 1836 were actually fighting to maintain their “right” to enslavement.
Civil War
By the 1850’s the economic issue for the South was simple. Either they could use their “peculiar institution” on more and more lands of the United States, or they faced ultimately economic failure when the existing grounds no longer supported the cotton plants. All of the “compromises”, in the end, faced that ultimate limitation. For cotton, it was either expand or die. And for the South, cotton required enslavement. An entire economic model, and culture, depended on it.
The Civil War forced change. Over 600,000 Americans died in the fight that ultimately led to emancipation. And, after the War, the Union (the North) maintained an occupation of many of the former rebellious states. That was both to protect the freedmen, but also to keep their former owners from regaining political power. In the economic vacuum created, Northerners came in to fill the void and make a profit. They were named after their luggage, “carpetbaggers”. That lasted for almost a decade.
Corrupt Bargain
But ultimately the Nation grew tired of the effort and expense, and a political deal was cut between rival political factions: the Republicans who had supported the war, and the Southern Democrats. The Southern Democrats would allow a winning Northern Democrat to have the White House taken away, as long as the troops left the South. New York Governor Sam Tilden won the election but lost the Presidency in the 1876 electoral vote, replaced by Ohio’s Rutherford Hayes. Reconstruction was ended.
And that same Southern economic class, now joined by some of the carpetbaggers, found ways to put the cheap labor back in the fields. Meager wages, share cropping, and planned indebtedness trapped the freedmen back on the land. They may have switched cotton for soybeans, and they technically were “free”, but now they were economically enslaved to the land and the crops once again.
American Divide
Economic forces often drives history. And our current governmental crisis is an example. America is more divided than ever before, and it isn’t the “political divide”. The richest 1% of Americans control 30% of the nation’s wealth. The top 10% of Americans control almost 70% of the wealth. And, the bottom 50% of Americans control 2.5% of the Nation’s wealth. America is divided by income inequality more than ever before.
An even more telling statistic: more than 10% of Americans have a negative total wealth. They owe more than they have. And 30% have a “zero net-worth”, not so different from the share-croppers of the post-Reconstruction South.
The Billionaires and Millionaires are taking more than just economic power. The Supreme Court gave them “the right” to spend as much money as they want on political causes. If money is “free speech” as the Robert’s Court ruled, then the concept of voting equality, “one person, one vote” just doesn’t make much difference anymore. A billion dollar’s worth of “voices” can shout down a single dollar’s worth crying out.
For Sale
State legislatures seem “for sale”. Sure, here in Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder went to jail for taking a $61,000,000 bribe to get the legislature to pay First Energy’s bills. But here’s the real “tell” of our current climate. The leaders of First Energy, the actual “bribers” are still walking the streets. Their criminal charges resulted in a mis-trial. And the Ohio legislature is still under the thrall of private for-profit education, the power companies, and other high tech businesses. When it all comes down, it’s about money, not what’s good for Ohio.
Wealth is taking the side of the current national Administration as well. Trump’s supporters, like David Ellison and Jeff Bezos, are buying up national information providers, in order to suppress opposition to Trump. Ellison is in the process of purging CBS, and Bezos has already decimated the Washington Post.
In Control
There was an old, scary television show, called The Outer Limits. It started with the phrase, “We are controlling transmission. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical…”
We are in an economic era today where the wealthy class, like the 1960’s show, want to control all that we see, and hear, and do. Artificial intelligence is just one more sign that a new battle of economic control is near. And the wealthy class (as a whole) has already taken their side.
Sure, it’s MAGA versus Progressive, Republican versus Democrat. But it’s more the extremely wealthy versus the rest of America. It took over 100 years to even begin to right the wrongs created by the end of Reconstruction. I’m not sure what it will require to fix the growing inequities we have today. But we can start by regaining some political power. We need to “control the horizontal and the vertical”.
Then we can try to balance America’s wealth for the benefit of all Americans, not just the one percent.
