. Triumphalism of racial supremacy is always a veneer, and beneath it one
can see a barely hidden psychology of the state under siege, threatened by
anarchic and uncivilized forces of the racial Other, the cultural Other, and
Woman as well as insubordinations of domestic malcontents and plotters of
the lower order.
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>Yoshie
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Sometimes "barely hidden" doesn't even come close. In the fall of 1900, Albert Beveridge gave a speech to the "young men of Indianapolis" about why they ought to become lifelong Republicans. (This is the same year he gave his famous speech in the Senate about what our racial duties and economic opportunities were in the Philippines.) In this speech he says that
1. concentration of ownership/production in US trusts is the engine of progress
2. this "industrial combination," unfortunately, creates an "idleness of labor" as well as a surplus of capital
3. the "idleness of labor" is the "rock" upon which the liberty of the Republic will be destroyed unless some outlet is found for this labor, since young "idle" men must become either "soldiers" against this Republic or against something else.
4. that something else is the racial crusade in Asia, which, by the way, is also a good place to invest surplus capital. (Significantly, he also discusses the up and coming retail shopping industry--Marshall Field in particular--as a place some of these guys could find work and fun, but he's too honest to believe that a consumerist culture will be strong enough to deal with the frustrated expectations of these men. Conquest and domination, it seems, are needed to satisfy whatever it is B thinks is at the heart of male motivation, not just shopping. The year before TRossevelt had given a speech entitled "The Strenuous Life.")
Here is a source that lays bare in a quite unmediated way the link between the modern Republican party, modern racism and sexism, and the problems of what to do with too much capital, on the one hand and too many poor white freemen who shall have no decent future under corporate progress, on the other. (Hitler, that idiot, was bad for business--he gave racism a bad name and he was so uncool about how to handle disgruntled, but otherwise decent, folks.)
Steve
********************** Steven R. Cohen lomco at pipeline.com