White Party, White Government

Race, Class, and U.S. Politics

Joe R. Feagin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136332623
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

White Party, White Government examines the centuries-old impact of systemic racism on the U.S. political system. The text assesses the development by elite and other whites of a racialized capitalistic system, grounded early in slavery and land theft, and its intertwining with a distinctive political system whose fundamentals were laid down in the founding decades. From these years through the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the 1920s, the 1930s Roosevelt era, the 1960s Johnson era, through to the Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Barack Obama presidencies, Feagin exploring the effects of ongoing demographic changes on the present and future of the U.S. political system.

1

Framing a Racist America

Puritan Inheritances and Political Framing

Over the centuries of North American slavery and legal segregation, and now decades of continuing racial discrimination, the dominant political framing of this society has contained very positive big-picture narratives of early English Puritan and other Protestant “settlers.” These Europeans are said to have come to North America with strong ideals of liberty and equality, and by means of their religious faith and hard work they prospered against the Native Americans and difficult environmental conditions. These early white Protestant colonists and their descendants in the founding era are said to have generated and emphasized the grand ideals of liberty, freedom, and equality long central to the U.S. political-economic tradition. Among the questions for us to answer in this chapter are how accurate is this portrait, and what are the implications of answers to that inquiry?

In particular, we will examine how these early colonial Americans, together with their views and institutions, shaped both the political and economic institutions and the patterns of racial oppression that were emerging in North America.

Early Protestants: Dogmatic, Undemocratic, and Hierarchical

The 1830s French visitor and observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, argued that the “American” heritage was of “strictly Puritanical origin.”¹ Early on, Calvinistic Protestants developed numerous communities in many areas of North America. The Puritans colonized New England areas, while yet other Protestant groups, such as Scots-Irish Presbyterians and Dutch Calvinists, established communities in other colonies. These groups generally shared the accents on relatively dogmatic religious beliefs, strict morality, and hierarchical and patriarchal institutions.

In England, groups of Puritans had sought to purify the established Anglican Church, which they saw as corrupt. One group, called the “Pilgrims,” moved to North America in 1620, developing the pioneering Plymouth colony. Mostly working-class people, they came with a commitment to a Puritan covenant that tended to view all men, including elected officials, as practically equal. Over the next decade, much larger Puritan groups came and set up the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1630, the ship, Arbella, together with ten others, brought some 700 Puritans to expand the Massachusetts Bay Colony. John Winthrop, an English lawyer, was their leader and became governor. These Puritan colonists were generally from better-off groups, had more education, and had a more educated clergy than Plymouth.²

What are some possible social inheritances stemming, at least in part, from these famous Puritans, the Calvinist Protestants in other colonies, and their immediate descendants? One inheritance appears to be a certain dogmatism and unreflective intolerance in regard to dissenting beliefs and practices. A second inheritance seems to be a commitment to a substantially oligarchical government and political structure, yet one with a strong veneer of democratic ideals. A third inheritance has contributed to a strong commitment to social hierarchy, one accenting class, racial, and gender inequality and stratification. A fourth inheritance is clearly an emphasis on this new nation as an exceptional light to all, a Eurocentric model of virtue and democracy for others, and a guardian of democratic political values for the world. While the views and practices of these early Protestant communities were not the only sources shaping these age-old societal inheritances, they did provide an early and extraordinarily influential impact on the social and political contours of the new European American society created in North America.

Consider the first likely inheritance. The Puritans had a substantially dogmatic and authoritarian perspective that accented obedience to authority and allowed little dissent over numerous religious issues and little freedom in regard to such things as male dominance, artistic creativity, and human amusements. According to psychologist Bob Altemeyer, authoritarianism “happens when the followers submit too much to the leaders, trust them too much, and give them too much leeway to do whatever they want.”³ Many of the Puritans’ community norms and laws were authoritarian and confining, as one sees in their infamous trials of “witches” (mostly women) in the Salem area. Puritan assertions of liberty and freedom typically meant some liberty for themselves (as the “saints”) versus outside control, but not in regard to outsiders and dissidents they sought to control. Where they had power, they often denied liberty to others.⁴ Later on, Thomas Jefferson also underscored the religious intolerance of the English Puritans and other early Anglo-Protestant immigrants.⁵

A second likely inheritance of the early Calvinistic groups is a socially schizophrenic view of, and practice of, political democracy that is still with us today. Contrary to commonplace contemporary notions that early English colonists emphasized a broad doctrine of “democracy,” the Massachusetts Puritans were diverse and inconsistent in their support of political democracy and even of the values of political and social freedom. The Puritans did develop some more representative institutions in colonial towns than in England, with their legislatures being elected by male voters. Puritan communities did move away from the firm aristocratic controls experienced in England, and in their churches they replaced English clerical hierarchy with elected ministers.⁶ Puritan officials were often elected but, once elected, they typically viewed themselves as responsible mainly to God, and not to ordinary colonists. These men expected and got obedience to their authority. When in 1630 several ships brought many new Puritans to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, their major leader, spoke onboard ship in a famous sermon for his community: “If we should change from a mixed aristocracy to mere democracy, first we should have no warrant in scripture for it: for there was no such government in Israel … A democracy is, amongst civil nations, accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government.”⁷

A third likely inheritance from the Puritans and other early Protestants is a strong accent on social stratification and justified inequality. The Massachusetts Bay Puritans generally exuded more status arrogance and superiority than the smaller group of Plymouth Puritans, especially in regard to nearby Native American societies and other English colonies. For them, rank and status were very important. Indeed, most early English Protestant colonists accepted and enforced a strong class, gender, and, quite soon, racial hierarchy. In his onboard sermon, John Winthrop summarized this commitment to social hierarchy and inequality: “God Almighty in his most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in submission.” Rationalizing hierarchy for the Puritans, Winthrop further accented these reasons: “First to hold conformity with the rest of his world, being delighted to show forth the glory of [God’s] wisdom in the variety and difference of the creatures, and the glory of his power in ordering all these differences for the preservation and good of the whole.” That is, God ordained the inegalitarian societal hierarchy. A second reason for socioeconomic hierarchy was that it enabled rich and poor to demonstrate Christian virtues—“in the great ones, their love, mercy, gentleness, temperance etc., and in the poor and inferior sort, their faith, patience, obedience.”⁸ Obedience to authority was central to the essentially authoritarian views of these Puritan leaders and followers.

A fourth probable inheritance from the early Calvinistic tradition is the strong accent on American exceptionalism we observe over centuries of U.S. history. A typical encyclopedia definition defines American exceptionalism as the view that the United States is qualitatively different from other countries because of its religiously fostered values of liberty, its egalitarian morality, and its democratic political institutions.⁹ In a famous part of his Arbella speech, Winthrop made the first recorded statement about such exceptionalism. He concluded his sermon with a metaphorical assertion anticipating well the contemporary concept of America as the dominant societal model for the world: “The Lord will … make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, ‘the Lord make it like that of New England.’ For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”¹⁰ Winthrop and his fellow Puritans saw themselves as setting a spiritual and social example for “all people.” Massachusetts Bay colonists and other English colonists gradually built a nationalistic exceptionalism with a distinctive “American” identity. Like many of their descendants to the present day, they saw themselves as very distinctive and “God’s chosen people.”¹¹ From the beginning, this view of America as very exceptional in comparison with other countries—part of what is sometimes called America’s “civil religion”—has often been ethnocentric, Eurocentric, and, as we will see, periodically white nationalist.

Capitalism, Slavery, and the Colonists

A dramatic departure from the purported love of liberty and freedom of the early European colonists can be seen in the early development of a political-economic system that soon was centered in the coordinated operation of capitalism, genocide, and slavery. Western capitalism somewhat predated European imperialism, yet escalated and matured dramatically as numerous European countries like England aggressively engaged in overseas colonialism and imperialism. In his famous book, Capital, the political economist Karl Marx accented the harsh realities of the earliest capitalistic production:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation … [They all] depend in part on brute force, e.g.,the colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the State, the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode … [C]apital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.¹²

Western capitalistic wealth and production thus began with the violent looting of resources and the forcible enslavement of numerous populations. This capitalism expanded, not just from the industry and hard work of a European group, but rather by that group often stealing the labor of other groups. In this process there is no market equality or equal exchange, concepts central to arguments for capitalism by early economic analysts like Adam Smith. While there were markets, the fundamental reality was one of the “violent dispossessions of a whole class of people from control over the means of production.”¹³ Note, too, that all these chief moments of early capitalistic wealth accumulation involve non-Europeans—indigenous peoples, Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans—those soon to be racialized as “not white” in the dominant racial framing of Europeans and European Americans. A key feature of European colonialism and capitalism was the turning of the actual producers—many people of color—into slave or low-wage laborers to generate much wealth for the capitalistic investors and other exploiters.

Historian James Horton has noted that the Europeans “came to what they called the New World as part of a capitalistic venture … From the very beginning, European colonization was very much a commercial, capitalistic enterprise.”¹⁴ Several North American colonies were set up by royal joint-stock companies to create wealth for European stockholders. The English kings gave joint-stock, individual, and group charters to exploit North American lands to various white entrepreneurs. One key royal-chartered corporation was London’s Virginia Company, with its branches including the Plymouth Company and the London Company. Jamestown, Virginia, was established in 1607 by the London Company. Because there was no gold, the company turned to “tobacco farming, producing tobacco that was sold in Europe, turned out to be very valuable, very profitable. But very labor intensive.”¹⁵ There were not enough white indentured servants to meet this labor need—and Indians resisted as groups or died off from European diseases—so white planters and other whites in the North American colonies turned to enslaving Africans on an ever larger scale. As pioneering historian W. E. B. Du Bois put it, slavery was not “a plague sent from God.” Instead, North American slavery arose “principally from the cupidity … of our ancestors.”¹⁶

Most slavery-related enterprises in North America were very much about profit-making in this early era of world capitalism. For example, by the 1770s, slavery-centered agricultural production in the Virginia colony had made it the “most wealthy and populous of the thirteen colonies.”¹⁷ The North American colonies had developed by the mid-1700s into a slavery-centered society in which much of the economy, especially that part beyond subsistence farming, was controlled by white slaveholders and large numbers of white merchants, shipbuilders, insurance and banking firms, and non-slaveholding farmers often linked in some way to slave farms and plantations or the trade in slaves. The North American slavery system generated commodities for an ever-expanding global market, and thus created much capital that was constantly recirculated into the ever-growing Atlantic capitalistic system. In the early period of North American capitalism, important economic and social institutions became very racially encoded—thereby creating a materialistic and foundational system of racial oppression in what would soon become the United States.¹⁸

The White Racial Frame and the Elite

For several centuries now, a highly oppressive system of slavery, legal segregation, and contemporary racial oppression has been aggressively rationalized and legitimated by a strong white racial framing, which has been most powerfully perpetuated by the white elite. This dominant racial framing is central to our systemic racism, and it has long provided the vantage point from which most whites and a great many others have routinely viewed and interpreted this society. This white racial frame is much broader and deeper than just racial stereotypes and prejudices, for it includes at least the following important dimensions:

1. racial stereotypes and prejudices;

2. racial narratives and interpretations;

3. racialized imagery;

4. racialized emotions; and

5. common inclinations to discriminate along racial lines.

Early on, this dominant white frame incorporated many racial stereotypes, images, and emotions that were widely accepted among whites and essential to rationalizing and maintaining the subordination of Native Americans, African Americans, and soon other Americans of color. Also very central to this white racial frame were aggressively positive views of whites and their interests, folkways, and self-conceptions.¹⁹

From the 17th century onwards, in North America’s new society, the early capitalist was typically a European American male. By the late 17th or early 18th century he and other powerful men were self-imaged specifically as “white” within this strong and developing white frame, and also as dominant within the often associated capitalistic and patriarchal frames central to the new society. Not surprisingly, the growing numbers of significant slaveholders and allied entrepreneurs frequently portrayed themselves as noble capitalists and patriarchs.

These capitalistic patriarchs accurately viewed themselves as powerful white “fathers” controlling not only their families but also often their communities and society more generally. For instance, in the early 1700s the powerful Virginia slaveholder, Willi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Framing a Racist America: Puritan Inheritances and Political Framing
• 2. Faking Democracy: Race, Class, and Our Undemocratic Political System
• 3. Race, Class, and Early U.S. Politics—to the 1930s
• 4. Race,Class, and U.S. Politics: 1930s–1970s
• 5. Race, Class, and U.S. Politics: 1970s–1990s
• 6. The George W. Bush Era: Racial and Class Dimensions
• 7. The Barack Obama Presidential Campaign
• 8. Barack Obama’s Presidency: Racial and Class Dimensions
• 9. Demographic Change and Political Futures
• Notes
• Index