We need to make one more side trip into the 19th Century. The Civil War.
No other event so defines us. I would argue that not even the Revolution is as important to who we are today as the Civil War is. This event, along with World War II, established the national identity in ways with which we still struggle to accommodate today.
Shelby Foote, in his majestic narrative about the Civil War, pointed out the central change of the aftermath. “Before the war, we said ‘the United States are.’ After, we said ‘the United States is.’” A simple enough thing to say, but to comprehend the meaning is to understand that the country underwent a fundamental realignment of perspective. It was a shock, a stunning blow to what had been an assumed association of separate nations in a voluntary coalition. The most prominent of the Virginia Founders spoke often of their country, by which they meant Virginia. When Jefferson Davis asked Robert E. Lee to assume overall command of all the Confederate armies, Lee refused, saying that he was willing only to defend his country—Virginia.
This separateness went without saying until the Civil War. When South Carolina seceded and fired upon Fort Sumter, they assumed the position of a separate country at war with another one. All the states that seceded took it as given that they could leave the Union any time they chose. Lincoln decided that ratification of the Constitution and all that went with the establishment of a federal government that represented all the states as one nation argued against that presumption.
The opinions over the issues of the War continue to be debated. Was it over slavery? Was it over the presumed right to be free of federal interference? Certainly for most of the foot soldiers of the South, slavery was hardly and issue, but the idea that federal troops could march into their states and tell them what to do was. These men were ill-served by the people who instigated secession, who knew very well what the issue was about, and often cloaked their defense of an economic system in the rhetoric of liberty and revolutionary politics.
We need not rehash the Civil War here except to point out that the issue was slavery, though in most ways it was not about the slaves. This is perhaps a slippery point to grasp. The institution of slavery was crippling the ability of congress to function across national lines. The five-eighths rule gave southern plantation owners an unwarranted electoral advantage even while they denied the rights they were exercising to the people they used. But it was the increasing rancor over the admission of states to the union, whether they would be free or slave, that drove the South finally to break with the United States. The way of life of the major propertied citizens of the southern states was directly threatened by northern industrialization and the westward expansion of free state settlers. Eventually, their ability to maintain a useful majority in congress would be eroded to nothing and domination by free state politics would start undoing them financially and socially. The sticking point was slavery. It had to go. The north was beginning to “carry” the south. Things had to change.
The moral issues coincided this time.
But what concerns us here is what happened afterward. Functionally, the United States of America assumed prominence across all state and territorially borders and, at least implicitly, federal law trumped state law. Reconstruction was intended to rebuild the South, both materially and politically. The program, however, involved military governorships in charge of vast areas of the South—the so-called Satraps—and much that occurred was arbitrary, experimental, and occasionally capricious, fueling the resentments left over from defeat. It is within this time frame that we first see the sentiments of “taking our country back” expressed by embittered southerners who hated the federal government and the north for essentially destroying their way of life.
The Ku Klux Klan and other clandestine groups notoriously struck back locally to nullify many of the emancipation measures, but what concerns us here is the political action taken by southern politicians who carried out a propaganda campaign over several years that tied federal programs to corruption.
This was certainly nothing new. There had always been a degree of mistrust over Washington’s handling of money and public programs. But the southern Democrats did such a thorough job of connecting the two things in the public mind that “government project” automatically meant “corruption!” There was, by the time they finished, no way for there to be a federal program that wasn’t corrupt—the idea became an oxymoron in the public mind, especially in the south and subsequently in the west. It was one of the most successful campaigns of its sort ever and it has lingered with us to this day. In the wake of that, the issue of State’s Rights became bigger and bigger.
This was almost wiped away during the Great Depression. FDR became a savior to many people and “government aid” lost much of its former opprobrium during a decade of extreme need and effective federal aid. World War II cashed in on some of that new-made good will and, along with the other patriotic sentiments of the war years, brought this country together in ways it never was before and has drifted from since.
In the wake of both the Great Depression and World War II, federal activism increased as never before. The ability of the central government to address problems of national concern achieved an almost unquestioned dominance. The failure of traditional approaches to economic downturns, periods of recession and depression that had plagued our economy throughout in boom and bust cycles, was finally demonstrated sufficiently and laws passed that it became a given that some control over what had been regarded as “natural” cycles could be exerted to the benefit of the entire country. With the economic boom and world dominance that came in the wake of World War II, America entered a long period of federal triumphalism which finally broke with the high inflation and interest rates in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the effective challenges to American global hegemony demonstrated by the OPEC oil embargo.
But the pool of resentment left over from the Civil War never disappeared. It found purchase in the Cold War and expressed itself as skepticism of government in general, using the example of Soviet-style dictatorship as the gold standard for the inevitable result of excess federal control. The mania of the McCarthy Era was only one, very prominent example of the push back against the federal government, with its continued accusations of deep infiltration by the politically suspect in the Washington bureaucracy. With each new wave of federal override of local prerogative—in education, in voting, in civil rights, in race equality, in First Amendment issues over free speech and religion—the assertion that these actions were part and parcel of a worldwide communist conspiracy informed the frantic reaction on the part of people who had inherited the cultural resentment of government in general.
It came to a head under President Johnson when he pushed through the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act and the southern Democrats as a block deserted him and became the core of a revitalized Republican Party. From that point on, their strategy has been simple—to seize on any issue that can be made to look like federal usurpation of local or even individual rights. What this amounted to was a culture war, because the resentments all were directed at social legislation and court decisions that seemed to run counter to common values. But as the movement continued, it was clear that much more was at stake than simply drawing a line against a changing culture that no longer approved racism, gender discrimination, or arbitrary censorship. As the Seventies became the Eighties, the Right included in their list of “corrections” any economic measures that could be seen as “leveling” measures—anti-unionism increased, attacks against federal financial rules increased, news organizations that did not appear to support a conservative, business-friendly program were attacked or purchased. The role of money became dominant.
What had happened clearly was that the financial sector had found a useful foil in the social reactionaries who were attacking the dominant federalism on cultural grounds. Corporate strategists found they could easily usurp social anger and make it one with a desire to roll back fiscal controls in place since the Great Depression, by aligning the rights of the wealthy with the rage of social conservatives.
All of which goes back to the post-Civil War resentment of disempowered elites who felt they had been stripped of their natural rights to dictate community norms. It was not until the massive union movements that sprang up during and after the Gilded Age, coupled with Theodore Roosevelts activist trust busting, that the wealthy of the north and east found common cause with this reservoir of anti-federal resentments. They were derailed by the Great Depression and it took a couple of generations and the mischaracterization and fear brought about by the Cold War before an effective momentum could be achieved to regain traditional patrician privileges and strip the middle class and the poor of any ability to redress social and economic inequities. The success of the movement can be seen in the numbers of disenfranchised blue collar, middle, and lower middle class people who vote the programs of this group in complete rejection of their own best interests. Somehow The Enemy has become anyone who advocates higher education for all people, economic controls, and great personal liberties, including a free press not dominated by corporate interests.
I’ll see if I can’t wrap this up next time.