_Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn_, Alan Dawley, 2000.
>From page 70:
"The economic experience of the journeymen in the central shop era engendered the awareness of an inescapable conflict of interest between labor and capital. Despite the attempts of business spokesmen to kill this idea, it would not die. But such is only the stuff of which an awareness of class conflict is made; it is *not* the full awareness of parallel conflicts in politics. society, culture, and economy. The development of such a belief was checked by the political experience of laboring people in the context of capitalist democracy. The ballot box was the coffin of class conciousness."
he then goes on to say some stuff about how 19th century radicals saw the American "Revolution" (my quotes) as an "inspiration" (his term), and that abolitionists and feminists often evoked it and the Declaration of Independence in their own appeals. "Whereas the first American Revolution remained fresh in their minds, they did not see the need for another... the artisans of Lynn called for a spirit of '76 to infuse the labor movement... some journeymen compared their bosses to King George..." (p 70-71).
_Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man From His Native Land_, Randall Robinson, 2004.
<http://www.randallrobinson.com/quitexc.html> "Why then have America and Americans behaved so callously toward governments and peoples who present them with no threat but only proffers of friendship? Perhaps Americans, or more specifically, white Americans, have behaved such because they only really value or respect what they either crave or fear: money or might, all else to be belittled, disdained, dismissed, even desecrated. Could it be that in America, the unexcelled bigness of all things material has resulted in the concomitant relative smallness of all values nonmaterial? Moribund ethics. The death of the spirit. An unexamined and withering national soul. The commercialization of everything from school to pew."
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