> -----Original Message-----
> From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
> On Behalf Of Jim Farmelant
> Sent: Thursday, November 18, 2004 1:25 PM
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Subject: [lbo-talk] Proyect on Nathan Newman and Reconstruction
>
>
>
> -
>
> Nathan Newman is a rather ubiquitous figure on the Internet with a
> highly visible and frequently accessed blog:
>
> http://www.nathannewman.org/
>
> 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.
>
>
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