-
Nathan Newman is a rather ubiquitous figure on the Internet with a highly visible and frequently accessed blog:
He is also an active participant on Doug Henwood's LBO-Talk mailing list, which has become quite the pole of attraction for the anticommunist left.
Newman has evolved over the past 10 years or so. He started out as a student activist with the Committees of Correspondence, a self-described Marxist formation that came into existence as a split from the CPUSA. (I was a member myself for about a month or two until I discovered that its commitment to the Democratic Party was as great as the CP's.) In more recent years as his career ambitions as a lawyer and DP operative have deepened, his politics have begun to look more like James Carville's than Lenin's.
That being said, I found his recent article titled "A New Birth of Freedom: The Forgotten History of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments" (co-written with J.J. Gass) for the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU's law school to be of some interest as a supreme expression of liberal folly. The article can be read at:
http://www.brennancenter.org/resources/ji/ji5.pdf
You can also follow the exchange between Yoshie Furuhashi and Nathan over the article at:
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20041115/date. html
(Look for the thread titled "End of Black Reconstruction".)
Basically, Newman blames the Supreme Court for the end of Reconstruction:
"What had turned federal prosecutors’ optimism of 1872 into their surrender of 1876? The severe depression beginning in 1873 bears some blame for shifting federal attention away from racial violence. However, continuing indictments by the Justice Department and passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 show that many national Republicans were still committed to civil rights. Their commitment was finally destroyed by the Supreme Court’s determined opposition to equality. When the Court overturned Reconstruction statutes and allowed terrorists to go free, it not only hamstrung the federal government but also signaled that anyone fighting for civil rights in the South would die. Denied any realistic hope of contesting elections in the South, the Republican Party gave up on Reconstruction."
Newman makes no effort to conceal his real goals in writing such a blinkered version of American history. Basically he is arguing that progressives should spare no effort in keeping the Supreme Court out of the hands of reactionaries. Implicitly, the election of John F. Kerry would have had as momentous an impact on American society as a different composition of the Supreme Court would have had in the 1870s.
"We need to recover the accurate history of Reconstruction, to honor those who fought in the Civil War and sacrificed their lives afterwards in the struggle for civil rights. And we need to debunk the idea that contemporary “federalist” jurisprudence has a claim, or even a monopoly, on historical accuracy. One need not believe in a living constitution to oppose the Rehnquist Court’s assault on federal civil rights legislation; the 14th Amendment as it was passed in 1866 and ratified in 1868 will do just fine."
For Marxists, however, the explanation for the end of Reconstruction and the radical shift to the right over the past 30 years or so must be found in class relationships. The bourgeoisie, both north and south, found it necessary to beat back a challenge of newly emancipated slaves, poor white farmers and northern workers in the 1870s. Today, it needs to attack the standard of living of workers in the same fashion. Then, as now, the two parties worked together to defend the class interests of the big bourgeoisie that supported it. Now, as then, the main need is to create independent and radical challenges to the ruling class and the two parties that they use against us.
I did a fair amount of research on the civil war and Reconstruction in the course of answering Charles Post, a sociology professor who had tried to examine this period from the standpoint of the Brenner thesis--quite wrongly, in my estimation. Nearly everything I read persuaded me that the Northern and Southern bourgeoisie saw eye to eye when it came to putting an end to Reconstruction. Basically, the retreat was part of an overall shift to the right under the impact of a rising tide in the class struggle internationally.
Despite the liberal interpretations of the end of Reconstruction, we can see close class affinities between the Northern bourgeoisie and its purported deadly enemy, the plantocracy, revealed in a number of places. At its best, the Northern elite had *no interest* in creating a class of yeoman farmers in the south from the emancipated African population. While swearing allegiance to free labor, free soil was another matter altogether.
One of the most revealing aspects of this was the editorial footprints of the Nation Magazine, founded in 1865 by abolitionist E. L. Godkin. As I pointed out in an article I posted a while back on the Nation Magazine, Godkin was a *liberal* in the late 19th century sense. He was for free trade, competition and all the sorts of economic measures associated with people like Alan Greenspan today. He opposed slavery because it was inimical to his own economic philosophy.
That being said, Godkin and his associates were not at all predisposed to an all-out assault on the plantation system, as long as it was based on *free labor*. In 1867, President Johnson had run into a conflict with the Radical Republicans in the Congress, who passed legislation to break the back of Southern reaction. When Johnson kept cutting deals to maintain white power in the South, he was impeached. In a December 5th 1867 editorial on the impeachment, the Nation spelled out its opposition to the impeachment:
"It must now be confessed those who were of this way of thinking [namely that the Radical Republicans were going too far], and they were many, have proved to be not very far wrong. It is not yet too late for the majority in Congress to retrace its steps and turn to serious things. The work before it is to bring the South back to the Union on the basis-of equal rights, and not to punish the President or provide farms for negroes or remodel the American Government."
If the abolitionist Nation Magazine was opposed to providing farms for negroes [sic] and remodeling the US government, then which class was it speaking for? And what was its political and economic agenda? Not much has changed in 125 years evidently.
________________________________________________________________ Juno Platinum $9.95. Juno SpeedBand $14.95. Sign up for Juno Today at http://www.juno.com! Look for special offers at Best Buy stores.