[lbo-talk] Political Cartography: Kansas

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Sun Nov 21 13:33:59 PST 2004



>Jon Johanning wrote:
>
>>On Nov 21, 2004, at 1:26 AM, Shane Mage wrote:
>>
>>>Sounds like good oldfashioned American populism to me.
>>
>>Right now, good old-fashioned populism sounds like about the best we
>>can do, or even somewhat better than we can do -- our fondest
>>aspiration is to work our way back to the 1890s.
>
>I suspect that "good oldfashioned American populism" has a lot to do
>with the right turn in Tom Frank's Kansas. It had a substantial
>anti-urban, anti-cosmoplitan strain mixed in with the better stuff.
>
>Doug

Has Doug taken a look at W. E. B. DuBois' _John Brown_ (NY: International Publishers, 1962 [first published in 1909])? Free state settlers in Kansas "found themselves in three parties: a few who hated slavery, more who hated Negroes, and many who hated slaves. Easily the political _finesse_ . . . might . . . have pitted the parties against one another in such irreconcilable differences as would slip even slavery through" (137). And yet, through a civil war known as "Bleeding Kansas" (from the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 to the Wyandotte constitution of 1858 which rejected slavery and suffrage for Blacks and women), free state settlers not only withstood the attacks of pro-slavery men but fiercely fought fire with fire -- "So Kansas was free. . . . Free because strong men had suffered and fought not against slavery but against slaves in Kansas" (143). Kansas wouldn't have become free -- and precipitated the Civil War that forced Abraham Lincoln to emancipate slaves in order to vanquish the Rebels -- if the "few who hated slavery" alone had fought against the pro-slavery party. -- Yoshie

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