A Grand Story of Post-1877 America
In which I continue my "goth hopepunk" understanding of the world to my own embarassment
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Post-1877 America offered promises of an equitable and prosperous society for a negligible price. Countless individuals spent their entire lives working to make these promises come true. Yet, for the majority of those living in America these promises ended up being just words, continually held just out of reach in a Tantalusian torture. This is the story of America. Promises of freedom and equality held just out of reach of the people who need them most. From the movement to create an Arcadian America, to the attempts to change education for the better in Chicago and beyond, people across the United States have pushed and pulled and struggled to make a better life for themselves, only to have it taken from them at the last moment. Understanding the history of the U.S., as the never-ending struggle of its citizens pushing for what they believed they are owed, provides a way forward for future activists.
Telling stories in a linear fashion remains a time-honored tradition. However, I tell this particular story of the United States through a series of vignettes, loosely grouped by themes. Fights to save the environment, America’s colonial expansion, the Black Freedom Struggle, and the closely linked political movements of Progressivism and Populism make up this story of the United States. These four themes do not cover the entirety of post-1877 American history but they do interrogate the most important parts. As with any story however, we must first go back to the beginning.
Post-1877 America did not see the invention of promises of a bold and bright future. Pre-Civil War Americans may have had different political goals, but they too looked to make America a place that lived up to the promises of its beginning. For many, the words of so-called “Founders” of the United States – the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, the words of Thomas Paine, among others – described a system of government constructed for the people and by the people. This system, in the minds of many, constituted a radical call for a new system of government, as well as blueprint on how to bring it about. Even though this description of the Founders remains apt, “Political, social, and economic equality were not what the framers had in mind,” this did not prevent people from believing that they should have equality while living in America.[1] As some historians have written about early radicals, many “wanted to strike at the heart of existing inequalities and radicalize governmental structures. [They] wanted to extend the lofty principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence to areas of life that the traditional founders never intended.”[2] While the large goals of those fighting for radical change at the beginning of America failed, their spirit lived on in those fighting for radical change in the United States post-1877.
The environment has been one place in particular where people fought for a better United States. Until recently the environment had not been a popular area of study for historians. Even through this relatively new historical lens, the specter of stymied activism remains clear. The Arcadian Americans, just one group fighting for a utopian United States, did not realize their goals of an environmentally-friendly modernism. One of these Arcadian Americans, Henry George a writer and philosopher, argued that post-1877 America offered a watershed moment for the creation of a new American utopia. This utopia, outlined in works such as Progress and Poverty, and Social Problems, “envisioned a spatial pattern that balanced smaller, greener cities with larger, more social towns, a pattern that would offer everyone both ‘breathing space and neighborhood.’”[3] George, looking back to the founding of American also “insisted that, in the system of American republicanism, citizens were entitled not only to civil rights but to environmental rights.”[4] George, and others such as Hamlin Garland and H.W.S. Cleveland, all fought through their writing, advocacy, and political work for a vision of America that would protect both its people and its environment. For the Arcadians, careful monitoring and modulation of the modernizing United States, and a reverence for past ideals, would create an equitable, bountiful, and beautiful country. They did experience some success, as evidenced by the development of National Parks, city beautification movements, and cemetery design but these utopian reformers, failed to fully incorporate their utopian ideas in American society. As a result of this failure they have faded from public memory.
Similarly, the story of Plutonium development tells the story of pushback against activism. One group of people who believed in the government’s ability to provide a safe and prosperous life for them and their progeny were those who worked developing plutonium for the military during the heights of the Cold War. The story of plutonium development in America revolves around Richland, Washington, home to several of the primary plutonium processing plants in the United States. Richland, in a few ways, looks like what some people might imagine as an American utopia. Top notch schools, no homeless or starving residents thanks to government subsidies. By most accounts, the people residing in Richland lived a picture-perfect lifestyle. These accounts did not tell the full story however. For one, “the corporate police kept a close watch on Richland’s unions.”[5] In addition to the crackdown on labor, whenever the environmental implications of the work they were doing came out, anyone trying to fight against, or at least ameliorate the consequences immediately faced repercussions. Dr. Herbert Parker, for instance was criticized “for shutting down the plant and jeopardizing national security.”[6] Parker shut down the plant in order to stop the spread of harmful radioactive particles in the Pacific Northwest. He, and many others eventually lost their jobs, for daring to dream of a safer plutonium development. Plutonium development, a huge part of the Cold War, perhaps the most important event of the 20th-Century saw many people trying to make a better, safer world, but faced retribution for their efforts.
Plutonium development certainly marked an era of environmental change in the United States. It also played a huge role in America’s push to become an empire and expand its territory. These expansion narratives require a place in any story of the United States. Telling this story without reference to the peoples who fought for a world where colonizers lived up to their own promises would do the story a disservice. Indeed, the colonizing mission of the United States, both in the “continental” United States, as well as its territories abroad, brought out groups who fought for a piece of American prosperity and equality. Two of these groups, Native Ghost Dancers and Puerto Rican nationalists, faced the full wrath of the United States Armed Forces for their attempts to make a better world for themselves. Pedro Campos Albizu, leader of a large force of Puerto Ricans attempting to overthrow their colonial leaders, fought for independence, to not only gain self-governance for Puerto Ricans, but also to stop the forced sterilization of women, which he saw as an “assault on Puerto Rican woman.”[7] While Albizu’s revolution failed as did his to assassinate Harry Truman, his story, and the stories of the many Puerto Ricans fighting for a better world while living in America remains hugely important.
Jack Wilson, also known as Wovoka, founder of the Ghost Dance Religion also fought to create an America that would allow his people the space, freedom, and peace necessary to prosper. As historian Louis Warren writes, the Ghost Dance started “a movement that promised believers a means to persist as Indians while surviving conquest and the reservation era.”[8] Like the Arcadian Americans, or the Puerto Rican revolutionaries, the Ghost Dancers did make some headway toward their goal by “subverting the narrative of progress and calling assimilation into question.”[9] This progress did not come close to reaching the original goals of the Dance however. Native groups participating in the Ghost Dance did not experience the growth in prosperity and community, or the disappearance of the white man that the Dance called for. Puerto Rican nationalists similarly did not win sovereignty over their own land, and for some the battle still continues today.
No other story weaves itself so tightly through American history than the Black Freedom Struggle. Post-Civil War, many African-Americans in the United States hoped that the time had finally come for the equity and prosperity of all those living in the U.S. A time for the promises of the Civil War to finally come true. The end of Reconstruction, in the traditional narrative, ended this brief period of hope. A similar type of hope that would not remerge again in full until the Civil Rights movement decades later. However, in the years up to and during the Civil Rights Movement, people, many of them women, fought to make the world into something closer to the ideals of equality and freedom. Even if they never met their goals, the attempts provide current activists with models to improve and act upon.
In the early 1900’s people like Mary Church Terrell worked to stop the high incarceration rates of African-American females. To quote Terrell’s famous phrase, “against the convict lease system of Georgia, of which Negroes, and especially female prisoners, are the principal victims, we are waging a ceaseless war.”[10] Terrell’s activism led her to publish a widely popularized critique of the convict lease system in the United States, where “She exposed the fetters of freedom by analyzing instances in which planters paid the criminal fines for poor whites and blacks in order to ensure a constant, enslaved labor force on their farms.”[11] Despite all of her work, and the work of others, black male and female incarceration rates remain among the highest in the world.
While Terrell did not fully stop the prison-industrial complex from developing – something no one should ask of one person – others took up the charge as well. Dr. H. Claude Hudson, a dentist and president of the LA chapter of the NAACP helped continue the movement. Arguing that the murder of a poor black man by the LAPD “was the consequence of an increasingly violent and aggressive pattern to policing in Black L.A.” Hudson helped make the connection between racist policing and increased jail populations in the public mind.[12] Despite the work of Hudson and other activists that goes on up to and through the present, the amount of jail and policing reform has not reached the heights that people like Hudson and Terrell fought for. The history of imprisonment, intertwined with the Black Freedom struggle, acts as a building block of the history of the United States. A building block that activists have tried to refurbish, despite being pushed aside at almost every turn by the state.
The fights of the 50s and 60s Civil Rights Movement, and the attempts to stifle the white power movement of Post-Vietnam War offer another view on how often activists for equality and freedom faced opprobrium for their work. The Civil Rights Movement in particular acts as a moment in history where true equality and freedom seemed within grasp. However, the state snatched away those promises in the final moments. Historian Danielle McGuire describes how this lack of unencumbered reform has affected people succinctly. When describing Abbeville, an incredibly segregated southern town torn apart by the abduction and rape of Recy Taylor McGuire, penning this in 2016 writes, “the physical layout and population of the tiny rural outpost remain nearly the same as they were in 1944.”[13] While painting this era of the Long Civil Rights Movement as a failure remains incorrect, many activists, including people like Stokely Carmichael and Fred Hampton, Mildred Loving, Joan Little, and Karen Galloway did not stop fighting for the “’bold intention’ [of] ‘social equality’”[14] Indeed, as authors such as Michelle Alexander have argued, we should describe modern-day America as a “New Jim Crow.” This marks the ability of capital to push back against the victories of the Black Liberation Movement.[15]
The post-Vietnam War rise of white power groups in the United States inscribes another place in the story of America where people have attempted to fight against the injustice they see in America and yet have run up against often insurmountable roadblocks. In particular, the 1988 case against various leaders of the White Power movement, including Louis Beam, Richard Butler, and Robert Miles failed. As historian Kathleen Belew writes, “The men walked free and, with the government consenting, the judge ordered ‘the firearms in question returned to the person who turned them over to the government.’”[16] The jury unanimously decided to let these white power leaders, who had committed years’ worth of terror go free. These groups actively worked to hinder the equality and prosperity of minority groups in the United States. Government agents, unlike in the other parts in this story, led the fight for greater equality. While activist groups led by people of color had worked on exposing these groups for years, and certainly played a part, in this particular case the government, long a bulwark against true equity, attempted to create a better world. And yet even this, limited to be true, attempt by the state could not defeat a group of 12 white people.
Education and the Black Freedom struggle fed into each other on a deep level, especially in Chicago. Black teachers, mostly women, led educational activism movements, fighting for higher wages, better funding for non-white schools, and more community-level decision making. Many of these activists tied themselves to the Black Power movements of the 1960s and beyond. And yet, despite making gains, especially in recent years, the city still pushes back against these gains. “Black teachers are more likely to work in predominantly Black schools, the same schools that are disproportionately being closed or ‘turned around.’”[17] Despite the continued efforts of activists, and some forward movement, especially on the part of the CTU to promote better schooling, the Chicago government and business leaders continue to create new charter schools, and shut down public ones.
The Black Freedom Struggle may hold the crown as the most important period of post-1877 America, but both the Populist and Progressive movements can lay a claim to that particular piece of headgear as well. Similar to the Black Freedom Struggle, both the Populist movements and Progressive movements contain stories of people attempting to make the world a better place, with those actions failing in the face of co-optation and government pushback.
Populism, in particular, had a far-ranging goal of equity and prosperity, similar to the ideas of the Arcadian Americans in many ways. However, these goals of equality and prosperity did not often extend to non-white peoples, especially African-Americans. Many Black Populists, like John Rayner fought for black equality, if not full desegregation, and yet faced constant opposition. In one example, “The Democrats pushed for a constitutional amendment to disenfranchise North Carolina’s black voters by way of a poll tax and a literacy test….Democratic fraud and Populist ambivalence combined to strop African Americans of their voting rights.”[18] The largest populist movement of turn of the century America, worked against many of its own members. People fighting for progress had their rights taken away, by the very groups who confessed to fight for them.
To many, the Prohibition marks the beginning of the modern U.S. state. A movement highly rooted in Progressive ideology, it brought tremendous amounts of power at the federal level and grew federal budget and employment by leaps and bounds. The result of a group of reformers who wished to make the United States a more moral nation, like many of the other groups mentioned here, the ideals of the Prohibitionists were lofty. They wished to create a new moral nation, a nation in the image of an upper White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.[19] This marks a point of divergence from a large number of the groups mentioned elsewhere in this paper. Due to this divergence, the Prohibitionists, for a while experience success. They got a constitutional amendment passed banning alcohol. A huge win with long-lasting impacts. But to do this they committed violence upon other people. Particularly minority groups. “Vigilante enforcement raids were the radical edge of a broader dry mission that included political reform strategies…The Klan’s war against alcohol provided it with powerful allies among the large and well-organized antiliquor crusade bodies.”[20] So, in one of the few instances in the United States where radical change came into effect, the change only happened through the work of a white supremacist organization working explicitly to commit violence against non-WASP groups. The lofty rhetoric of the founders corrupted for the benefit of the ruling class.
If this seems a sad story of the United States, it should. However, as with any well-told story, it does not end without at least a glimmer of hope. Activists still live to fight another day. Even with the election of Trump, a person uniquely suited to stymie the efforts of those fighting for equality and prosperity, people still fight. In Chicago, young people across all races and genders fight for equity in education, fight to end poverty, fight to end police terror, fight for justice. This does not remain limited to Chicago. On a national level a groundswell of activism grows daily. Politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Ilhan Omar, got elected on radical platforms, and work to bring them into reality. They have a long fight ahead of them. But it is not the time for pessimism. As long as the possibility of radical equality exists, people will fight for it, building off the people that came before them. A United States that welcomes and provides for all is possible.
[1] Alfred F. Young, Ray Raphael, Gary B. Nash, eds, Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of a Nation (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 3 [2] Young, Raphael, Nash, 4. [3] Aaron Sachs, Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 227 [4] Sachs, 235. [5] Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 142. [6] Brown, 168. [7] Daniel Immerwahr, How To Hide An Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 252 [8] Louis S. Warren, God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 10. [9] Warren, 269. [10] Terrell quote found in Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 134. [11] Haley, 135. [12] Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965 [13] Danielle L. McGuire, At The Dark End of The Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance – A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 280. [14] McGuire, 26. [15] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010) [16] Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2018), 183. [17] Elizabeth Todd-Breland, A Political Education: Black Politics And Education Reform In Chicago Since The 1960s (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018),225 [18] Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 200. [19] Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016), 12. [20] McGirr, 139.