Jack London is remembered today mostly for writing inspiring novels about dogs and the Alaskan wilderness. In his own time, however, he was also known as a prominent advocate of socialism and a virulent racist. At Slate, Johann Hari has an interesting review of a new biography of London:
The United States has a startling ability to take its most angry, edgy radicals and turn them into cuddly eunuchs…..
But perhaps the greatest act of historical castration is of Jack London. This man was the most-read revolutionary Socialist in American history, agitating for violent overthrow of the government and the assassination of political leaders—and he is remembered now for writing a cute story about a dog…..
The richer London became, the more radical his politics were. He was soon praising the assassination of Russia’s political leaders and saying socialism would inevitably come to America. Even as he employed small battalions of servants, he insisted he was a Robin Hood figure: They would be made to wait on the tramps and trade unionists he invited to his mansion.
And yet there is an infected scar running across his politics that is hard to ignore. “I am first of all a white man, and only then a socialist,” he said, and he meant it. His socialism followed a strict apartheid: It was for his pigmentary group alone. Every other ethnic group, he said, should be subjugated—or exterminated. “The history of civilization is a history of wandering—a wandering, sword in hand, of strong breeds, clearing away and hewing down the weak and less fit,” he said coolly. “The dominant races are robbing and slaying in every corner of the globe.” This was a good thing, because “they were unable to stand the concentration and sustained effort which pre-eminently mark the races best fitted to live in this world.”
And for those who are not “best fitted to live in this world”? In his 1910 short story “The Unparalleled Invasion,” the United States—with the author’s plain approval—wages biological warfare on China to decimate its population. It then invades and takes it over. It is, the story says, “the only possible solution to the Chinese problem.”
London’s simultaneous advocacy of racism and socialism was no anomaly among early 20th century Progressives. As co-blogger David Bernstein and Princeton economist Tim Leonard document here, many Progressives had a similar combination of views (see also here). Indeed, large-scale government intervention in the economy was justified in part by the supposed need to protect white workers from competition by members of “inferior” races.
Even by the standards of the time, London was extreme in both his socialism and his racism. As Hari notes, London thought that the Socialist Party was far too moderate. Very few American Progressives shared his belief that the Chinese and at least some other non-white races should actually be exterminated, as opposed to merely subordinated to whites. But the basic combination of racism and economic leftism was all too common in the early 20th century.
The racist elements of Progressive ideology don’t prove that economic interventionism is racist by nature, or that the policies Progressives defended in large part on racist grounds can’t be justified in other ways. Still less do they prove that modern left-wingers are necessarily racist as well. But they do undercut claims that racism is primarily a product of the “right” and that economic leftism and racial progress necessarily go together. Indeed, many of the early advocates of racial equality were mostly libertarian on economic issues, including Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and civil rights lawyer Moorfield Storey, one of the founders of the NAACP.
Despite London’s reprehensible racism and socialism, I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to admire his novels on literary grounds. We can admire Dostoevsky’s work even though he was a rabid anti-Semite and apologist for czarist repression. Still, knowing London’s political and racial views make it a little hard to love White Fang quite as much as before.
Scott says:
Anyone who would use the word “cute” to describe White Fang has obviously not read it.
August 17, 2010, 10:36 pmIlya Somin says:
Anyone who would use the word “cute” to describe White Fang has obviously not read it.
True. This characterization is probably influenced by the Disney version.
August 17, 2010, 10:38 pmGuy says:
The racism sheds new (and somewhat explanatory) light on the slaughter of the Native Americans by Buck at the end of The Call of the Wild. Haven’t read the book since Junior High, but recall being struck by their subhuman representation.
August 17, 2010, 10:43 pmSyd Henderson says:
I was assuming Hari was writing about The Call of the Wild which isn’t cute either.
August 17, 2010, 10:47 pmBenjamin Davis says:
It is amazing that after the 400 year history of this country there would be people who would think that racism is a product of the left or right only in the United States. Racism is part of the warp and woof of this country. You can see the white supremacist origins in the 17th century as detailed at some length by Burns (name is escaping) work on American civic ideals. The tension between European powers visions of who was a subject and the white American willingness to incorporate all whites to the exclusion of Indians and Blacks was a fundamental part of forging the US vision of itself.
You can even go to that gem of the Alaska Packers case and look at the racism against the Native-American packers as opposed to the white packers. And even with that, the white packers were organized on “nationality” lines (Italians only at one packer, Swedes only at another) and these workers would beat on each other while the companies screwed them all. They did work to unionize but, again, did not include the Native-Americans in their purview. Old old history.
Best,
August 17, 2010, 10:50 pmBen
Stephen Lathrop says:
I would be interested to see an example of anyone claiming that, in historical context. People on the left noticed the Republican Southern Strategy a long time ago, and Republicans have been slow to give it up. That says nothing about whether historical figures on the left have also been racists, as of course many have been. Responsibility for racism is in no way mitigated if your political opponents are also racists.
August 17, 2010, 10:52 pmHoward says:
Racism was the norm back then. It’s easy to not be racist now: PC behavior is driven largely by cowardice. It is a very small mind that views historical characters through the lens of modern life.
What matters is the art, not the artist.
Those who let the venality and/or strangeness of a personality warp their view of art are pathetic yentas living the zero sum game delusion. The Brits are still allowed to use the word that sums it up: cunt.
August 17, 2010, 10:52 pmRyan says:
The lunatic rantings excerpted above brought to mind Ayn Rand more than any prominent figure of the left.
August 17, 2010, 10:56 pmCJColucci says:
Early 20th century white American was a racist. Film at 11:00.
August 17, 2010, 10:57 pmFishhead says:
When black boxer Jack Johnson won the heavyweight championship of the world, Jack London called for white former-champ Jim Jeffries to come out of retirement and “reclaim the title for the White Race”.
August 17, 2010, 11:00 pmOrin Kerr says:
Like some other commenters here, I’d be interested in knowing the relative question, not the absolute one: That is, instead of whether there were liberal racists back then, the question should be, “was there a relationship between degrees of racism and left-right politics back then, and if so, what was it?”
August 17, 2010, 11:22 pmRicardo says:
I do wonder about characterizing someone who thinks the Socialist Party was “too moderate” as a “Progressive.” Progressive Woodrow Wilson had many members of the Socialist Party jailed for disloyalty while he was President.
Radicals and extremists certainly do tend to come full circle, though. Following on Johann Hari’s theme of not blotting out inconvenient aspects of history, it is worth repeating just how well-represented socialists and even former Communists were among the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. Many of Jack London’s peers in the Socialist Party would have certainly disagreed with his racist views while the Southern Democrats would have celebrated them.
August 17, 2010, 11:26 pmJustin says:
My vote for the historical castration award goes to Helen Keller. Most people don’t even know she wrote books, let alone that she was a radical socialist, suffragist, and pacifist. Who has become cuter and more retroactively powerless: a man who is now famous only for writing books about wolves in the wilderness, or a woman who is now famous only for being a little blind and deaf girl?
I love finding out about these types of people, though. Does anyone know about any other good historical castrations?
August 17, 2010, 11:30 pmRoger the Shrubber says:
Probably not quite what you’re looking for, but the popular culture view of Thomas Jefferson seems to have forgotten his very, very clear thoughts on priests, organized religion, and Christianity.
August 17, 2010, 11:44 pmJay says:
I guess that explains why it wasn’t called Black Fang.
August 17, 2010, 11:45 pmEMB says:
London’s political views weren’t mentioned in my middle school English class when we The Call of the Wild, but they were certainly discussed when we read The Sea-Wolf in 11th grade. I think his racism was probably mentioned a bit as well (though only in the context of social darwinism).
August 17, 2010, 11:45 pmTatil says:
It’s been a long time, so my memory might be fuzzy. Still, I believe “Valley of The Moon” depicted many minority groups as insular, but hard working people and the main character was admiring the resourcefulness of these immigrant groups and thought “angry” whites were jealous and lazy. Do I remember the book completely incorrectly or does his “racist” period covers only part of his life?
August 17, 2010, 11:46 pmreader says:
Yeah, sure, London was an unsavory character. But he helped provide many of the critical supplies Commander Data needed to expose the aliens from Devidia II who were murdering humans in 19th-century San Francisco. So I figure we should cut him some slack.
August 17, 2010, 11:48 pmnorm says:
Yes, Dostoevsky was an anti-Semite, but I was unaware that he was also rabid.
August 17, 2010, 11:50 pmsubpatre says:
London was not ‘a racist’; he was a eugenicist. He did not ‘not like’ other races; he believed they were inferior and should be eliminated.
Whether ‘progressive’ is the correct term or not is (to my mind) debatable. But London and thousands of others in his circle and station made common cause in their beliefs about socialism, environmentalism, and faith in human progress through eugenics. All were the current standards of science in the day.
August 17, 2010, 11:52 pmCornellian says:
London’s simultaneous advocacy of racism and socialism was no anomaly among early 20th century Progressives.
Advocacy of racism was no anomaly among early 20th century anythings. Hardly anyone undertakes a rigorous inspection of all his views on every issue with a view to ensuring they’re internally consistent on some abstract philosophical level. In other words, people then, and people now, are perfectly capable of holding racist or non-racist views about race without any regard for their views on any other issue.
August 17, 2010, 11:52 pmCornellian says:
My vote for the historical castration award goes to Helen Keller. Most people don’t even know she wrote books, let alone that she was a radical socialist, suffragist, and pacifist.
How exactly can one be a “radical suffragist?”
August 17, 2010, 11:54 pmKevin R says:
Win.
August 18, 2010, 12:00 amyankee says:
1) Do you have examples of somebody making the claim about antiracism and economic leftism necessarily going together? I’ve seen people argue that support for racial equality logically requires you to support economic leftism. I’ve also seen people argue, in no-true-Scotsman fashion, that you aren’t a “real” opponent of racism if you aren’t an economic leftist. But I’ve never seen anyone make any form of the reverse claim that support for economic leftism necessarily entails opposition to racism, especially as a historical matter.
2) I guess any example of something that doesn’t fit a generalization “undercuts” that generalization, but individual examples seem like the wrong way to go about evaluating generalizations that cut across wide swathes of history.
August 18, 2010, 12:00 amRicardo says:
Definitely a good one.
Johann Hari touches on Orwell a bit who hasn’t so much been castrated as had his life outside of writing 1984 pretty much ignored with all its complexities and contradictions. People get that he had passionate political views and hated totalitarian Communism but don’t realize that he always considered himself a socialist and took a bullet while fighting as a foreign volunteer in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification.
People also know his famous quote about juice-drinkers, vegetarians, nudists, and nature-cure quacks showing up at socialist conventions. But they don’t know the wider context of the book it is contained in, “The Road to Wigan Pier.”
Orwell spends the first half documenting in graphic detail the appalling conditions the working class in Britain in order to show that no decent human being can support the status quo and that socialism is the most obvious answer. He then critiques the socialist movement in Britain and suggests ways that it could be more mainstream and less of an eccentric, fringe movement.
August 18, 2010, 12:02 amAndy McGill says:
Everything written today, including this blog, will be considered racist or sexist or somethingist in the future.
It makes no sense to judge a past work by today’s sensibilities. Read them and understand them at their time. If you want to make commentary on current times, then you can apply current standards, and you will always find that the past didn’t figure out the utter moral perfection of current times.
August 18, 2010, 12:12 amFub says:
Being a literary great doesn’t confer immunities to either racism or foolish thinking on many subjects. London was also a drunk, to put it bluntly. Neither his politics, his racisism, nor his drinking, is news.
Any survey of literary greats reveals gaping and obvious human flaws. This is true for other arts as well, not to mention the sciences.
Faulkner, Hemingway and Fitzgerald were also drunks, but not so much racist.
Eliot was anti-semitic. Pound was virulently so, and his inane beliefs about economics was a major component of his treasonous devotion to Mussolini in WWII.
If knowing an artist was racist, a drunk, a political whacko, or possessed of any other extreme human failing detracts from one’s enjoying or recognizing and understanding the greatness of his art, then one is only impoverishing oneself.
August 18, 2010, 12:14 amBarb's Monkey's Uncle says:
One of the precious few who walked the walk in order that the lives of his fellow man might improve in some small way. A true bodhisat.
August 18, 2010, 12:26 amRicardo says:
Jack London lived in the time of the Fourteenth Amendment and Frederick Douglass. It is excessively generous to say that someone born in 1876 could not have possibly realized that racism was wrong. Hitler was born in 1889. Was this a 13-year window when racism went from being acceptable to obviously wrong?
August 18, 2010, 12:27 amyankee says:
Why, are you some kind of hyper-moral-relativist who thinks we have no right to apply our own standards in judging other cultures?
There are multiple perspectives one can take in analyzing literature. You can look at them from the perspective of authorial intention, you can look at them as a window into the author’s hidden assumptions about society, you can examine their moral views to praise or condemn them, you can look at the artistic merit of individual phrases, and so forth and so on. These are all valid ways of examining literature.
August 18, 2010, 12:36 amClayton E. Cramer says:
Jack London’s The Iron Heel is very clearly the inspiration for The Turner Diaries. Where the bad guys in The Iron Heel are capitalists, in The Turner Diaries they are blacks, Jews, and Mexicans. I will say, aside from the racism, anti-Semitism, and Holocaust denial, The Turner Diaries is better written. At least the hero isn’t named “Ernest Everhard.”
And no, I put no money into the National Front’s pocket by reading The Turner Diaries. I borrowed it from friends of mine who are members of the world’s smallest intersection set: Native American/Jewish right-wing gun nut/conspiracy theorists who used to regularly attend Soldier of Fortune conventions.
August 18, 2010, 12:54 amrpt says:
For some reason, I was expecting Prof. Somin to post on the new conservative position that the land use decisions of property owners of abandoned Burlington Coat Factory buildings in lower Manhattan should be approved by Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich.
August 18, 2010, 12:56 amneurodoc says:
In your view, pray tell, who/what is “a racist” if not someone who does “not like” other races, believing “they (are) inferior and should be eliminated.”
So racist views are not unlike views on broccoli, which some people like and others detest, because whether a person likes or dislikes broccoli cannot possibly tell us anything about them as people, their values, their notions of social justice, etc.?
Perhaps Germans who very much agreed with the Nazis virulent anti-semitism shouldn’t be counted anti-semites, because those views were so commplance at the time, and those who would condemn them now for that deadly hatefulness are presentists applying contemporary norms to Germans of that day.
I count anti-semitism as a variant of “racism,” even though Jews may not constitute a racial grouping. (The Roma aren’t a distinct racial grouping either, are they, but would anyone argue that the Nazis efforts to extirminate them did not amount to “racism”?) And I have certainly heard Progressives maintain that there is no reason to believe that their ranks are tainted by antisemitism, let alone that any of what may be seen as a Progressive agenda, namely what masquerades as “anti-Zionism,” is antisemitic in nature. No, antisemitism it is argued comes primarily from the Right, and it is only that which comes from the Right which should be of any concern.
August 18, 2010, 1:06 amKen Arromdee says:
Many people don’t know that Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. Or that Thomas Edison took credit for other people’s work and basically bootlegged “A Trip to the Moon”.
And it’s true that Helen Keller and a lot of civil rights activists were socialists. Socialism preys on desperate people. What I don’t get, however, is the attitude that because these people were socialists we should think more highly of socialism rather than less highly of them. Nobody points to Edison’s dishonesty in order to promote dishonesty as being a great thing.
August 18, 2010, 1:11 amneurodoc says:
I’m having a heard time imagining that set. When you say “Native American,” you mean American Indian? So are those you are referring to American Indians who converted to Judaism, or Jews with had some American Indians ancestors on their father’s side? Or perhaps someone like the Indian chief in Blazing Saddles who spoke a bit of Yiddish.
August 18, 2010, 1:13 amDuffy Pratt says:
William Shockley was a racist too. That doesn’t stop me from using semiconductors.
August 18, 2010, 1:14 amTimothy Sandefur says:
Call of The Wild totally sucks.
August 18, 2010, 1:25 amRicardo says:
You laugh, but Larry David is both Jewish and Native American by descent.
August 18, 2010, 1:38 amneurodoc says:
Larry David sometimes causes me to laugh, though I have very ambivalent feelings toward him. Would like to know more about that Native American ancestory, which the Wikipedia piece you linked to does not elaborate on. Could be an attempt at a joke, a la Whoppi Goldberg’s adopted name, or a fraud like that perpretrated by Ward Churchill. In any event, I very, very much doubt that Larry David is among those Native American/Jewish right-wing gun nut/conspiracy theorists who used to regularly attend Soldier of Fortune conventions, the one who loaned Clayton E. Cramer a copy of The Turner Diaries, which was such an inspiration to that mass murderer Timothy McVeigh.
August 18, 2010, 1:52 amneurodoc says:
Would you extend that to Lili Riefenstahl, the exceptionally talented and pioneering cinematographer who enthusiastically lent her talents to the Nazi cause?
August 18, 2010, 1:57 amMalvolio says:
My dad used to say, “Just because someone’s a genius doesn’t mean he’s not an asshole.” He called it “the Norman Mailer Rule”.
“‘Once the rockets go up /
August 18, 2010, 2:10 amWho cares where they come down!
That’s not my department,’
Says Werner Von Braun.”
– Tom Lehrer
Fishhead says:
The movie THE SEA WOLF with Edward G. Robinson is faaaantastic. With music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold worthy of any concert hall.
August 18, 2010, 2:22 amRicardo says:
I don’t think anyone here has said that. The point is that people like Helen Keller, George Orwell, MLK Jr. and his many associates and others have had their stories subject to a degree of Cold War-era historical revisionism where anything that potentially complicates their legacies is excised. Regardless of one’s political philosophy, these efforts should be countered in the interest of truth-seeking.
That aside, this history raises an interesting point about how there were seemingly morally serious people who supported socialist movements. One possible answer is to recall how unattractive the other options were at that time. People with what we today would consider modern views on race and women’s rights were often welcomed by socialists when neither political party in the U.S. wanted much to do with these issues. The eugenics-supporting leftists like H.G. Wells and Jack London were certainly another contingent, though.
August 18, 2010, 2:51 amDavid Welker says:
“But they do undercut claims that racism is primarily a product of the “right” and that economic leftism and racial progress necessarily go together.”
Really Somin? Do you always play so loose with words? For example, do you understand the basic but critical difference between the words “was” (past tense) and “is” (present tense)? Of course you do. May I suggest you put that basic knowledge to use?
How do beliefs that you questionably assert are of the “left” from the past prove that racism is not primarily a product of the “right” today? Answer: they don’t. At most this would tend to show is that racism was not primarily a product of the “right” at this particular time in history. (And even here, I am being too kind. Jack London is an anecdote, not a statistic.)
I could go even further and question how you define left and right. There is more than one dimension to political thought in the real world. Why isn’t Jack London properly classified as socially conservative but economically liberal? Is he truly fully a creature of the “left” (whatever that means)? I would think about having that conversation, but question the value while you are having more basic difficulties distinguishing “is” and “was.”
Finally, the claim that you refute that economic liberalism always implies racial progress is so obviously wrong as to not be worth refuting. As if anyone thought it was somehow metaphysically impossible to be economically liberal and socially conservative. The question of whose ideas you are trying to refute would be worth asking, but your mixing up “is” and “was” in such a sloppy manner makes one think that you are not actually refuting anyone, but rather are just being sloppy in general.
Here is what I think happened with this post. You have taken an inherently interesting topic (the racist views of a famous and talented writer) and made an interesting blog post out of it. But then you didn’t feel as though the post was complete unless you used it to make a “point.” The problem is that the “point” you make is a combination of so obvious when it is right — So you say economic liberalism does not always imply racial progress? Duh! You aren’t going to win a Nobel Prize for that one, Einstein — and so blatantly wrong when it is wrong — unaccountably mixing “was” and “is” — as to be of no value whatsoever.
This is unnecessary. The racism of Jack London is an interesting and worthy topic by itself. If you are going to insist on making additional points, you should do it right rather than doing a half-assed job like you have done here. Otherwise, just leave the extra “points” out of it. Seriously. You messed up a perfectly good post.
August 18, 2010, 3:12 amdearieme says:
@Barb’s Monkey’s Uncle: I’m a huge fan of Orwell too. But I’m not inclined to take everything he said as factually accurate.
@Duffy Pratt: Don’t you worry about using semiconductors. According to Wikipedia
August 18, 2010, 4:10 amShockley didn’t invent them, he cribbed the invention of a Canadian to whom he deliberately denied credit.
J.T. Wenting says:
“Even by the standards of the time, London was extreme in both his socialism and his racism”
He would fit right in with Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Tojo, the entire eugenics movement, and much of the rest of 1930s and early ’40s society both in the US and elsewhere.
August 18, 2010, 4:26 amDennis Nicholls says:
Oh dear. Does this mean that Oakland, California, with probably the highest percentage of black people of any California city, will have to rename its landmark “Jack London Square”?
August 18, 2010, 4:40 amCornellian says:
So racist views are not unlike views on broccoli, which some people like and others detest, because whether a person likes or dislikes broccoli cannot possibly tell us anything about them as people, their values, their notions of social justice, etc.?
Racist views, or the absence of them, do indeed tell us something about the person who holds them. But they are no guarantee that the person will hold any particular view about economic, social or foreign policy. I suspect today there is some loose correlation, but not much else.
August 18, 2010, 6:18 amKirk Lazarus says:
I doubt many people are that stupid, even leftists. The fact that economic leftism was associated with racism for much of the 20th century is pretty much general knowledge, and anyone politically active on the left quickly learns to avoid this territory. In my country, Australia, the union movement was the prime mover of the ban on, first Chinese, then all non-white immigration known as the White Australia Policy. In 1947 the leader of Australia’s main leftist party, the Australian Labour Party, supported the ban with the observation “Two Wongs don’t make a white”.
What counts as progressive changes over time, and 180° turns are not uncommon. In 19th century England the progressive position regards India was that the British government should pursue a comprehensive program to Anglicize the country culturally, to turn them into “brown Englishmen”. The conservative position was to leave them to manage their own internal affairs.
August 18, 2010, 7:06 amMike Lorrey says:
The real distinction in the early 20th century on the racism and socialism axes was actually nationalism vs internationalism. Bellamy, who wrote the pledge of allegiance, was a socialist, but also a nationalist. His relative wrote the socialist/nationalist science fiction novel “Looking Backwards”, which was translated into dozens of languages and inspired the formation of National Socialist clubs in many nations, including Germany, Scandinavia, Britain, and of course the US. These groups, originating in the progressive protestant movement of the late 19th century, was heavily racist no matter what nation the organization was in, part and parcel of the nationalism component of their socialism. These are the “right wing” elements that the radical left disparages today. Conversely, the International Socialists: communists, wobblies, etc were generally not very racist, they tended to have a high percentage of jewish membership, and sought for their movement as a means of organizing international peace by overthrowing their governments with violent communist revolution or Fabianist incremental insurgency.
August 18, 2010, 8:01 amNotice that nobody on the right today would consider a progressive socialist/nationalist to be a right winger, but that label has more to do with long ago disputes within the socialist movement itself over nationalism (the protestant progressive side) vs internationalism (the communist and jewish influenced side).
Ricardo says:
One could equally point to black American union organizers like A. Philip Randolph, who organized the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where Martin Luther King gave the famous “I Have a Dream Speech” or Edgar Nixon who organized the Montgomery bus boycott. Complicating matters yet more, Randolph was in favor of strict immigration controls as he thought immigrant labor would drive down the wages of working class blacks. I do think he felt immigration controls should be race-neutral, though. Samuel Gompers, on the other hand, was anti-immigrant and racist. Generalizations are difficult.
Then there is the infamous campaign slogan of Tory Peter Griffiths who unexpectedly won a seat in the House of Commons in 1964: “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour.”
Niall Ferguson identified a phenomenon he calls “Toryentalism” — where some conservatives in 19th century England were rather thrilled at the prospect of re-creating a feudal kingdom in India they felt they had lost in their homeland. They disrupted the traditional land tenure system and instead gave huge tracts of land to local political allies in exchange for a promise of loyalty and tax revenue. Edmund Burke would hear none of this (and, of course, he was not a Tory) but then Burke was not just any conservative but rather one with liberal inclinations. Some of the liberals of the 19th century were somewhat like neo-conservatives today with visions of promoting progress through nation building in the non-Western world.
August 18, 2010, 8:29 amShelbyC says:
How about progressivism itself? “Historical Castration” ain’t just a colorful figurative term when it comes to progressivism.
August 18, 2010, 8:37 amrpt says:
As Mr. Davis noted, racism of the past extended across party and ideological lines. However, the current “fear black/brown people and Muslims” approach is and has been exclusively an explicit GOP/conservative campaign tenet since the Nixon southern strategy.
August 18, 2010, 8:58 amB.D. says:
Statism plus racism is a terrible combination. Sure, there were a lot of racists in the early 20th century, but only some of them advocated things like forced sterilization, segregation, and official discrimination. When government can solve all problems, and other races are a problem, one shouldn’t be surprised at the dark history of progressives and socialists in the early 20th century.
August 18, 2010, 9:01 amFrank Drackman says:
OK, I’m Jewish, so I can say this…
(usin my Larry King voice)
“Is it just me, or doesn’t a Hot Dog at Yankee Stadium taste better than the ones you eat at home?”
I mean…
“For My 2 Cents you won’t find a better Summer Read than “The Turner Diaries”
and the Last Paragraph’s the best part.
Frank
August 18, 2010, 9:05 amGLAdetariba says:
Would you extend that to Lili Riefenstahl, the exceptionally talented and pioneering cinematographer who enthusiastically lent her talents to the Nazi cause?
August 18, 2010, 9:09 amWell, George Lucas does. He copied her in the final scene of Star Wars
Jurgen was a nazi sympathizer. His Storm of Steel is among the 5 best novel of the XX century.
Scmitt was a nazi , and is among the top jurist of the xx century. it s widely quoted in Europe in Courts and doctrine.
Koestler have been accused of rape
The fellow travelers that covered stalinist crimes were no better person but nobody deny their literary or intellectual merits: Neruda( he said in one of his book that he raped a pariah because he could) is in the western canon according to Bloom even if he wrote an Ode to Stalin. Sartre. Malraux. And almost every writer in Europe in the xx century. Those who were not useful idiot were far right nuts like Pound
Hemigway covered the murder of Jose Robles only because he want to go to bed with a communist
Sleepy hollow is not published unabridged in the USA because of the racist remarks
Bertold Brecht collected money in New York for the support of Hitler.
The publisher of the main books in Medicine, a jewish ,supported the nazis before running to the USA when he discovered the true.His wife remained in Germany as a loyal supporter
Heiddeger
Ricardo says:
“Exclusive” is too much. Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign was full of dog-whistle tactics and insinuations. Birthers and Obama-is-a-secret-Muslim types were hardly absent from Clinton rallies. Harry Reid and a couple of other Democrats have stepped forward to criticize the “Ground Zero Mosque.” And to excuse this by saying they were forced to do so by the Republicans would prove rather too much: it would be an admission that Democrats in some places depend on xenophobic and nativist votes to get elected and that any so-called principles are for sale.
August 18, 2010, 9:15 amKen Arromdee says:
Perhaps by / he means “or”, not “and”.
August 18, 2010, 9:44 amBuckland says:
Another interesting point about London:
He was a heavy drinker in the early 20′s. However he was also a big supporter of Prohibition on the theory that if alcohol was no longer available he would be able to stop drinking.
In Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition he tells how London went to town to vote for a statewide Prohibition referendum and then spends the rest of the day getting plastered.
I think this may fit with the portrait that Ilya paints. A public idealist that has no qualms penalizing others if it benefits him privately. Need more jobs — get rid of the Chinese and Jews. Need to stop drinking — ban it for everybody.
August 18, 2010, 9:54 amneurodoc says:
I have never read, nor heard any of David Duke’s views on particular economic, social or foreign policy issues. Nonetheless, given my knowledge of the man as a rabid racist and antisemite (if those are not one and the same), I am very confident that I know where he does or would come out on a great many of those issues. Is there any social measure targeted at the amelioration of African American conditions in this country that Duke would support, other than something like plans to limit the number of children they have, return them all to Africa, etc? And does he favor any foreign policy choice which somehow might work to Israel’s advantage or oppose any that would work to the disadvantage of the Jewish state? I would expect others with equally rabid racist and antisemitic views, e.g., clusters like those Timothy McVeigh was drawn to, members of the Identity Church movement, KKKers, etc., to come out like Duke most of the time on those issues too. (I’m less certain about what to expect of them on economic issues, but I would put my money on the less rather than more sophisticate economic thinking, with a generally populist theme, that is so long as the beneficiaries would not be any of certain groups.)
August 18, 2010, 9:58 amSueSimp says:
Jack London also wrote communist science fiction, including the uber-creepy Marxist Utopia story “Goliah.”
And he was pretty sexist, in addition to his other aforementioned prejudiced. He didn’t like the idea of women being able to vote, but he was finally okay with it because he thought at least they would vote prohibition in.
August 18, 2010, 10:05 amneurodoc says:
If you would avoid the frontal, very personalized attacks and were less earnestly abrasive and generally off-putting, you might do a better job of persuading others to your view of things.
August 18, 2010, 10:11 amSeaDrive says:
London really was a good writer in the “ripping good story” genre that was popular in his time. Rudyard Kipling was another.
Given the harshness of his views, I find it interesting that he could laugh at himself in print, as he did in “The Cruise Of The Snark.”
August 18, 2010, 10:19 amCJColucci says:
Like some other commenters here, I’d be interested in knowing the relative question, not the absolute one: That is, instead of whether there were liberal racists back then, the question should be, “was there a relationship between degrees of racism and left-right politics back then, and if so, what was it?”
That would be a very interesting question, and there may even be reputable historians who have looked into it. What I’m afraid we’ll get instead, however, is variations on the theme that big-government racists were worse than small-government racists because you can’t have racist government programs unless you have government programs.
August 18, 2010, 10:22 amPaul Moreno says:
You can read similar views in Upton Sinclair’s classic, The Jungle. This is from my book, Black Americans and Organized Labor, pp. 111-12:
Black workers steadily migrated into northern industries continued before World War One. Here blacks found a wider range of jobs open to them, but still faced occupational discrimination. Most companies sought no unnecessary antagonism with their white workers, who wanted to keep the better jobs to themselves. Chicago attracted blacks as it did European immigrants. The meatpacking industry became the largest industrial employer of Chicago blacks. When the Knights of Labor butcher union went out on strike in sympathy with Debs’ white-only American Railway Union in 1894, blacks made their first significant inroads into the packinghouses. Ten years later, when a reformed union of skilled butcher workers struck to establish a minimum wage for unskilled labor, to protect their own jobs, the unskilled—new immigrants and blacks—did not join them and took their jobs. There was “very little system” in the recruitment of the strikebreakers, R. R. Wright reported. Though strikebreakers were as often Italian or Greek as black, resentment focused on the blacks and the press provided lurid reports of the new workers as a gang of depraved desperadoes. Upton Sinclair broadcast the image in his best-selling Socialist Realist novel, The Jungle.
Any night, in the big open space in front of Brown’s, one might see brawny Negroes stripped to the waist and pounding each other for money, while a howling throng of three or four thousand surged about, men and women, young white girls from the country rubbing elbows with big buck Negroes with daggers in their boots, while rows of wooly heads peered down from every window in the surrounding factories. The ancestors of these black people had been savages in Africa; and since then they had been chattel slaves, or had been held down by a community ruled by the traditions of slavery. Now for the first time they were free—free to gratify every passion, free to wreck themselves. . . . They lodged the men and women on the same floor; and with the night there began a saturnalia of debauchery—scenes such as never before had been witnessed in America. And as the women were the dregs from the brothels of Chicago, and the men were for the most part ignorant country Negroes, the nameless diseases of vice were soon rife; and this where food was being handled which was sent out to every corner of the civilized world.
An effective propagandist, Sinclair knew that “No issue would arouse the public to urge the companies to bargain with the unions more effectively than that of young African-American men taking the factory jobs of whites, sleeping with white women, and learning the pleasures of debauchery.” Yet Sinclair tried to blame the packers for manipulating racial feelings, claiming that they brought in arch-segregationist Ben Tillman in the aftermath to confound the Socialists.
August 18, 2010, 10:56 amSmooth, like a Rhapsody says:
1. “Historical Castration” nominee: Margaret Mead
2. Was Justice Holmes “racist”?; what about Woodrow Wilson?
August 18, 2010, 10:58 amyankee says:
Also lots of no-true-Scotsmanesque claims that people who have long been considered to be on the right/left were really creatures of the left/right.
August 18, 2010, 10:59 amneurodoc says:
Who first brought Willie Horton to national attention? (Hint: it wasn’t Lee Atwater, though after Horton was introduced to the public, and Michael Dukakis faded away, Atwater did a great deal to get Horton as much attention as possible, something Atwater said his death approached.)
August 18, 2010, 11:13 amJoseph Slater says:
When looking at history, it’s very important not to make sweeping generalizations about certain terms that meant very different things at a specific point in the past and meant different things across the decades. Also, as others have suggested, the past is indeed a different country, and they do things differently there. Also, as others have suggested, that the great bulk of folks in power or influential in literary or other circles — left, right, and center –were quite racist in the 1920s.
For example, “socialism” already meant various things in the 1920s, from fairly mild Fabian types to explicitly pro-Russian communist types and various stripes in between. And even the pro-Russian communism types should be cut some slack in the 1920s, before folks in the U.S. generally knew of the atrocities there (and before the worst of the atrocities had happened).
The idea that socialism, or “progressivism,” or “leftist economics” is particularly tainted by racism is not supported by the facts. This is where where the post gets slippery as to time. Again, in the 1920s, pretty much everyone was racist. As an aside, it’s tiring to see libertarians crow about the racism of some on the political left, and when told of the racism of those on the political right, respond that they weren’t libertarians. Because there weren’t any libertarians, certainly not any with a record of using power, back then.
Anyway, the post conflates the London of the first decade of the 20th century with the right-wing revisionism of the New Deal, in which the NLRA, the FLSA, etc. are somehow an intentional plot to disempower blacks. While I don’t have the time to rebut all of that here, it’s clear that those laws were passed primarily for other reasons. And to the extent, e.g., that they excluded from coverage jobs that were disproportionately black (e.g., agriculture), that was mostly a matter of pressure from southern states — not exactly a bastion of “progressivism.”
Sure, some black leaders were — understandably — worried about unions that excluded blacks. Fortunately, beginning in the mid-late 1930s, the CIO began organizing and had — for its time — a very inclusive racial policy. This came from liberal and leftist influences in the CIO. And, not to make the story too simplistic, it’s worth noting that for the last several decades, the percentage of black membership in unions is actually higher than the overall percentage of blacks in the workforce. Unions also were a key backer of Title VII.
So, was Jack London a racist? Yep. Were some “progressives” racists in the 1920s? Yep. Were they more so than, say, their conservative opponents? Nope. As time went on, did the liberal/left — progressives, New Dealers, Democrats of the mid-later 1960s — have much better positions on racial equality than leading conservatives. Yep.
August 18, 2010, 11:17 amMike P. says:
This is just a reminder about searching for skeletons in the closet…the political right (especially conservatives and even libertarians) are usually taken to task for the “wrong” views of prior generations of conservatives. It fits into the lefty myth of progress, a narrative that essentially implies all lefties were “right” and all conservatives were “wrong.” Nobody would embrace the views of many conservatives on civil rights, although, as Mr. Slater points out, it is difficult to speak in broad generalizations on this point. The Catholic Church, for example, supported civil rights, although it resisted the sexual revolution. As you point out, William Lloyd Garrison supported abolition, but he also supported the prohibition of alcohol. Sometimes people held positions we now would regard as unusual (e.g. prohibition of alcohol) but not actually malicious (such as segregation).
In general, it’s probably better for everyone to be humble when looking at history, especially since our period will one day be judged by future generations too.
August 18, 2010, 11:46 amSmooth, like a Rhapsody says:
neurodoc:
without looking it up, wasn’t it Al (“a little lower….a little lower”) Gore?
also, why do we care if a second rate adventure writer was (what we now call) racist; or that Socrates molested collies (if he did)?
August 18, 2010, 12:02 pmepluribus says:
I find this effort to tie socialism to the progressive movement particularly lame. Trotsky and Lenin were socialists. Theodore Roosevelt and Robert La Follete and Hiram Johnson were progressives. Even worse is the effort to tie progressives to racism. Woodrow Wilson was a racist, not because he was a progressive but because he was born and raised in Virginia. Roosevelt was virulently anti-German but made some openings to black people. He was the first to invite a black man (Booker T. Washington) to have dinner at the White House. This all smells of guilt by association, and the associations are pretty damn weak.
August 18, 2010, 12:14 pmepluribus says:
He was a drunk, a womanizer, a loving father, a scientific farmer, a self-professed socialist, a prodigiously hard worker, a sailor, and a personally charming man. But he was far more than a second rate adventure writer. I don’t much care about his personal characteristics. I do care about his writing, which was good.
August 18, 2010, 12:20 pmMark Field says:
Apparently I missed the memo which instructed modern liberals and progressives to pledge their undying devotion to Jack London. No doubt modern libertarians feel the same way about Mr. Justice McReynolds.
August 18, 2010, 12:24 pmathEIst says:
“‘Once the rockets go up /
Who cares where they come down!
That’s not my department,’
Says Werner Von Braun.”
– Tom Lehrer
I think Tom Lehrer used “Werner von Werner” so we wouldn’t know who he was referring to.
August 18, 2010, 12:52 pmbailey says:
Margaret Sanger held the same views but she’s a celebrated progressive, even today.
August 18, 2010, 12:53 pmDavid Welker says:
My goal was not to persuade, but to point out obvious logical flaws in a direct manner. If you allow emotion to interfere with your processing of that logic, that is your choice.
As far as tone, that Somin makes such basic and obvious errors is disappointing, because I strongly suspect he is smarter than that. Indeed, I believe the problem is laziness rather than intelligence. My point is, if you are going to bother making an extraneous point, do it right, or don’t do it at all.
August 18, 2010, 12:56 pmshades of gray says:
Some here seem to impute racism to just teh Whites and Republicans, conceding only that it may have been a cross-spectrum phenomenon way back when. For example, today’s border issue gets cast by the majority media and WH as a racist, conservative impulse and not as a serious economic and security concern. Today’s Democrats aren’t racist by self-definition, and they certainly have nothing to gain by their hyper race-conscious, “pro” color (in both senses) party platform. Political profiteering in surging brown demographics are completely beside the point.
And, yet, for decades, Democrat bloc-voting American blacks have discriminated against the Asians, then the Jews and whites, the gays, women as hos, and recent times (see last week black on brown violence in NYC) the Latinos.
Asians who aren’t in the pocket of either party can be notoriously racist or racially condescending toward blacks and western whites.
Then, there’s La Raza sympathies and the race-based leftist-nationalist demonization of white Gringo and morenos.
How’s about light-skinned and articulate Negro supporter Harry Reid’s 1993 introduction of a bill to eliminate the problem of (Mexican) anchor babies, an issue on which he’s done an abrupt about-face? Was he merely racialist then and some conservatives racist now?
Wonder how Obama’s preacher and Nation of Islam members to whom Progressivism means far left redistribution and retribution against the Whiteman vote?
Distasteful tribal, race-based thinking and policy linger despite, and mutate to suit, all politics, to include Progressivism. No halos for the left or right, up or down.
Most young readers enjoy Jack London for the pitting of man against unrelenting elements, and, as such, he’s a good antidote to the Disneyfication of nature, both out there and within us. As a kid, I took away from his adventure books the point of view that man should unapologetically trump other animals whenever necessary. (As a girl, I cried about that, though.)
London was a card-carrying specieist.
August 18, 2010, 12:56 pmbailey says:
Doesn’t sound a lot different from the fair Justice G’s recent pronouncements on abortion, either.
August 18, 2010, 12:59 pmMnZ says:
Shouldn’t you include Republicans in that list? Congressional Republicans voted for key civil rights legislation in greater numbers than Democrats.
August 18, 2010, 1:11 pmFub says:
The chronological adult version of the longstanding children’s epithet, “I’m rubber and you’re glue…”
Yes.
In fact, Pound’s acts were arguably even more contemptible. Riefestahl “enthusiastically lent her talents” to her own country’s execrable cause. Pound enthusiastically donated his to the execrable cause of a country with whom his own was at war.
Both their moral deficiencies are more horrifying because of their unequivocal artistic achievements. Neither of their artistic achievements are lessened as artistic achievements because of their moral deficiencies.
Looking to art for marching orders is a terribly easy moral folly to engage, both by consummately skilled artists, and by the rest of us.
August 18, 2010, 1:17 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
He’s part-Cherokee; she’s Jewish.
August 18, 2010, 1:20 pmunMichael Moore says:
Looking to art for marching orders is a terribly easy moral folly to engage, both by consummately skilled artists, and by the rest of us.
The Obama administration was (is?) doing just that- awarding funds and grants coupled with
August 18, 2010, 1:27 pmmarching ordersrequests to the Arts community to get this President’s Progressive message out.RW says:
does “reprehensible” modify socialism? its not remotely fair to describe socialism as the same kind of assault on human decency as racism, even if think its a terrible idea, many or most socialists are well-meaning.
August 18, 2010, 1:57 pmJoseph Slater says:
I meant “Democrats of the mid-later 60s” to signal post-CRA politics, but if you prefer, I will rephrase it as “liberals” of the 1960s having better politics on race than conservatives.
August 18, 2010, 1:59 pmDave N. says:
It depends on whether you include Communists in the Socialist mix (or Nazis, for that matter, since there was more than a hint of Socialism in National Socialism). I am sure 100 million Chinese, 20 million Russians, and 6 million Cambodians would disagree about the beneficence of Socialism if you could somehow speak to the dead.
August 18, 2010, 2:23 pmyankee says:
Depends on who you ask. Today’s campus feminists spend a huge amount of time denouncing previous generations of feminist activists and “mainstream” feminist organizations like NOW for being overly concerned with the interests of middle-class white women.
August 18, 2010, 2:26 pmChris Green says:
In one of the first couple posts, someone said this:
“But they do undercut claims that racism is primarily a product of the “right” and that economic leftism and racial progress necessarily go together.”
Thank you soooo much for turning this discussion into another right versus left thing. Anyway, another famous (at least among some circles) writer during the same time period who seems to have had a strong racist streak was HP Lovecraft. I’m not sure how he felt about Blacks, Asians or Latinos, but he sure seemed to dislike Esquimaux for some reason. Kind of weird for someone who lived in New England.
August 18, 2010, 2:31 pmJustin says:
The “radical” modifier was only intended to act on the word socialism in this case, but I assume one could qualify as a radical suffragist by advocating for extreme positions about extending the political franchise to minors, felons, resident aliens, corporations, or the deceased. Then again, maybe someone who wants DC to be represented in the Senate would qualify. The way the label is thrown around, I can’t keep track of what counts as radical these days.
August 18, 2010, 2:38 pmyankee says:
Well, if you want to play this game scores of black slaves, dead American Indians, the subjegated native peoples of pretty much the entire world other than Europe in the 19th century, the victims of various American-supported Latin American dictators, etc. would have nasty things to say about the capitalist system too. Unless, in no-true-Scotsman fashion, you want to say that the European colonialists and their descendants weren’t “real” capitalists, in which case you have to let the socialists play the no-true-Scotsman game too.
The socalists are still way “ahead” of the capitalists in this particular competition though.
August 18, 2010, 2:50 pmmidfielder says:
As usual, everyone, even Orin Kerr, whose opponents are always arguing in bad faith, misses the point. The real question is whether a historical person everyone agrees WASN’T a racist, e.g. Louis Brandeis, would agree with today’s definition of “racist.” For example, would Brandeis agree that a person is “racist” if he opposes admission of unqualified blacks to elite universities? No, he’d laugh at the notion. But over the last 20 years or so, the mere expression of that position has triggered the vast majority of “racism” accusations.
August 18, 2010, 2:51 pmChris Green says:
Most socialists do seem to have good intentions.
I think a kind of wistful longing for the good old days when humans lived and died as families and clans, when cooperation with everyone you knew (about 50 people) was necessary for survival and when your leader knew the intimate details of you and your family and work life (because he was probably your uncle) and could thus manage the whole group with some efficiency, I think those longings our built into our genes.
I had a roommate who called himself a communist. He was the nicest guy in the world. More then anything, he wanted to be surrounded by family doing meaningful work. He could car less about money or ambition and couldn’t understand why other people did. Of course his failure was that he couldn’t understand that why other people did. He believed all CEO’s were evil. He simply couldn’t relate to a person driven to create, than build up a business and didn’t seem to understand that it was important to try. Therefore, he ascribed the only motivation he could think of for why a person would want to control a business and make a lot more money then your average person, they must be part, or wholly selfish and greedy. Forget the challenge and satisfaction that can come from building and running a business. Those were things he couldn’t relate to.
August 18, 2010, 2:54 pmCommentus Anonymus says:
Classic projection, so typical from the left.
August 18, 2010, 2:55 pmyankee says:
CEO’s take their jobs for “challenge and satisfaction” rather than to make gobs of money? This has got to be the most naive thing I’ve ever heard.
August 18, 2010, 3:09 pmJ-ism (journalism) says:
On what grounds does Pelosi justify her call to investigate the opponents of the Ground Zero Mosque? Christian- Judeo religionism? Urban culturocentrism? American nativism? White on ethnic Muslim racism? Republicanism? Tea Party extremism?
It’s just gotta be an Ism.
August 18, 2010, 3:11 pmMike Schilling says:
My vote for the historical castration award goes to Helen Keller
Robert E. Lee, surely, who’s now known as a reluctant defender of slavery, based on no evidence whatsoever.
August 18, 2010, 3:13 pmgreg s. says:
J-ism,
No ism. The answer is homophobia.
August 18, 2010, 3:16 pmChris Green says:
It is obviously a combination of both. The company I work for was started by a bunch of people who wanted to make money, but they were also very excited about their product and the new technology they were implementing. A lot of businessmen owners are very excited about their business, not just the money they are making, particularly for companies that are still small. Of course, every company started out small.
August 18, 2010, 3:25 pmShelbyC says:
You may be thinking of Lawyers :-).
August 18, 2010, 3:35 pmMark Field says:
Nope, he used “von Braun”. Rhymes with “down”.
August 18, 2010, 3:52 pmsbron says:
Seems to me that today’s eugenicists are on the political left and the libertarian right. They both believe whites are inherently lazy, culturally retarded and inferior, and should be replaced as rapidly as possible by the elimination of borders and the nation-state.
August 18, 2010, 3:54 pmShelbyC says:
Yeah. Cuz immigration is a threat to white people just as sure as gay marriage is a threat to straight marriage. Stupid libertarians.
August 18, 2010, 4:01 pmyankee says:
And America was destroyed many times over back when there were no restrictions on immigration in the 19th century. Or are only brown immigrants destroyers of the nation-state?
August 18, 2010, 4:07 pmChris Green says:
You may be joking, but I think you have something there. When my Dad worked at a big law firm, it seemed to him that all the partners cared about was money. He said there was actually a palpable hostility toward family life interfering with long hours at work. Now that he is legal council for a small shoe company, things are much better. He doesn’t make as much, but the CEO and other company leaders are likeable fellows and he can take a longer lunch of he wants to play, or come home early every once in a while to play with his grandchildren.
August 18, 2010, 4:15 pmDirtCrashr says:
Jack London a macho-Socialist ahead of his time and the proto-Che Guevara, both were racists.
August 18, 2010, 4:15 pmbgates says:
This man was the most-read revolutionary Socialist in American history, agitating for violent overthrow of the government and the assassination of political leaders….
And yet there is an infected scar running across his politics that is hard to ignore.
Sure, he wanted to murder people over political disagreements and overthrow the government.
But he also had a dark side.
August 18, 2010, 4:22 pmSmooth, like a Rhapsody says:
I thought I was being kind in calling him “second rate”–by which I meant he is in the second rank of American writers. I am not even sure he merits that designation; but he is certainly not in the first rank of Poe, Whitman, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, James, Crane, Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner….etc…
August 18, 2010, 4:24 pmRPT says:
Good clarification. Thanks.
August 18, 2010, 4:26 pmSarcastro says:
Yes, everyone’s a racist, as can be seen by your masterful stereotyping generalizations! Some blacks say women are hoes, therefore blacks’ hands are unclean as well! And there are some Asian racists. And La Raza has a racist slogan!
And Germans were Nazis and the Irish bought the 1960 election and white people are all victims like those Duke Lacrosse boys!
No one is clean.
August 18, 2010, 4:35 pmyet another cynic says:
If you advocate colorblindness all around, in employment, college admissions, and more . . .
you’d have been called a radical in the 1920s . . .
a liberal in the 1960s . . .
and a racist today.
August 18, 2010, 4:38 pmLazarus Long says:
” People on the left noticed the Republican Southern Strategy a long time ago”
The so-called “southern strategy” was for one campaign.
Compare and contrast that to the Democrats 250 year history of slavery, secession and segregation.
Democrats opposed:
August 18, 2010, 4:42 pm1. The Emancipation Proclamation
2. The 13th Amendment
3. The 14th Amendment
4. The 15th Amendment
5. The Reconstruction Act of 1867
6. The Civil Rights of 1866
7. The Enforcement Act of 1870
8. The Forced Act of 1871
9. The Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871
10. The Civil Rights Act of 1875
11. The Freeman Bureau
12. The Civil Rights Act of 1957
13. The Civil Rights Act of 1960
14. The United State Civil Rights Commission
Steven says:
I agree; but it is useful to bring up to counter the progressive’s attempts to link any deviation from their ideology as racist. Support federalism? Well, you are a state’s rights type and state’s rights types are racists. Against government healthcare? Well, many black people are poor* so your probably against it because your a racist… et cetera.
It is also a good jumping off point to remind everyone that while big government helped with racial integration in the 60s, it can just as easily be used against minorities. It was just luck of draw that it worked in favor of them last time around.. big government people can be racists and if they happen to control a very powerful modern centralized state… While their ideology says it is ok to use state power to change society and culture… with a lack of respect for individualism (just sees in terms of collective groups)… Well, it might not go at all well for minorities on outs with the powerful.
* Most are middle class; but it’s more useful for the progressive’s narrative to not bring that up.
August 18, 2010, 4:44 pmGuy says:
I don’t think it’s for the money, more likely it’s most often for authority, control, and respect.
August 18, 2010, 4:45 pmepluribus says:
You like classifications, I guess. Whatever floats your boat. That, and you probably haven’t read much London. But then you don’t have to read an author to know he is “second rate,” do you? Read “To Build a Fire” some time.
August 18, 2010, 4:46 pmNumber Six says:
If you want to talk about historical revisionism and whitewashing, let me add two cents worth.
Andy Jackson, much admired, led the party which is the parent of the Democrat party. Andy Jackson hated Indians and much of his popularity came from all the Indian tribes and villages he wiped out. You’ll have a hard time finding that mentioned in American public schools. Trail of Tears, Mr. Jackson.
The men who led the Confederacy, who Seceeded from the Union and fought to preserve slavery. Most history books fail to mention that after the Civil War all those men became Democrats. From 1865 to the 1950s, when men passed laws such as the Poll Tax and Literacy Tests, they were Democrats. The Klansmen were Democrats. Bull Conner was a Democrat. His police dogs probably voted for Democrats too!
The Conscience of the Senate, Robert C. Byrd, (D., W.V.). I’ve seen him use the N…. word on national television. And it was within the last ten years. Not in the 1950′s, after 2001.
August 18, 2010, 4:47 pmSteven says:
Lazarus Long says:
“The so-called “southern strategy” was for one campaign.”
It’s also worth defining what it was (and was not). So the republicans decided to join the democrats and actually campaign in the south.
Sort of reminds me of the meme about Elder Bush’s dad. “Gave loans to the Nazis” (translation: Worked for a bank that gave loans to Germany… and the USSR…)….
August 18, 2010, 4:50 pmOscar says:
I shouldn’t be surprised, but it never ceases to amaze me how people completely miss the influence of Darwinism in the beliefs of racists like London, Margaret Sanger and Adolph Hitler.
London’s quote drips with the language of Darwinism. And this quote…
Sounds remarkably like Hitler’s words concerning Jews.
And why shouldn’t Darwinism lead to such thinking? If man is nothing but an animal, and “nature red in tooth and claw” is the cause of man’s existence, and man’s existence is a good thing (and every narcisistic racist believe his/her own existence is a good thing), then it stands to reason that man red in tooth and claw is a good thing as man conciously pursues the same ends that nature pursues unconciously.
August 18, 2010, 4:56 pmHenry Bowman says:
What do you mean “were represented”. They’re still there, as well as in Congress.
August 18, 2010, 4:56 pmyankee says:
Evidence? I was taught all that stuff in my public school.
But yes, the Democrats were the bad guys on race until President Johnson pushed the ’64 and ’65 Acts through and the Republicans grabbed the opportunity to snag the Southern racist vote.
August 18, 2010, 4:58 pmrichard40 says:
I actually agree with you. However I would note that many leftists judge our founding fathers very harshly for their racism, and dont seem to apply your standard of “understanding their time”. Do you agree with me that leftists are equally wrong to judge our founders without understanding the standards of their time?
August 18, 2010, 5:03 pmyankee says:
I can’t speak for Andy, but the question isn’t really whether we should “understand the standards of their time,” but whether we should adopt the moral relativist position that those standards are exculpatory rather than damning.
August 18, 2010, 5:09 pmAmerican Psikhushka says:
That’s pretty disturbing, because I like some of Jack London’s work. Although anyone that would assume I am racist because of that would be pretty paranoid and shallow. I like Kipling too, and I haven’t become a raving British Imperialist and vague racist yet.(Both London’s and Kipling’s short stories are a good choice when you need some escapist fiction in small, easy-reading, succinct chunks – like in grad school.)
August 18, 2010, 5:15 pm.
But as a non-racist, non-sexist libertarian I am somewhat more disturbed by the “historical castration” terminology. It seems pretty sexist and androphobic, equating men with “beasts” that must be “castrated” to be “tamed”. (Somewhat sarcastic here, though not entirely.) This is sort of like certain parties claiming that libertarians need to be “tamed”. Which is pretty amusing considering the sources of these thoughts, who tend to espouse rather primitive, barbaric, ignorant, and/or totalitarian beliefs. For example true socialism and communism results in poverty, stagnation, and often starvation, whereas true free market capitalism results in rising standards of living and greater societal wealth. And of course castration itself is a barbaric practice. (And illegal/tortious to perform on non-consenting non-felons. The Constitutional right to refuse medical treatment, etc. and all)
.
And while we are on the subject of racism and art – the film “The Outlaw Josie Wales” is not “racist”. There are a number of points supporting this. The book it was based on was called “The Rebel Outlaw Josie Wales”. So the title change shows from the start that there was an effort to excise any racist overtones from a good story. This continues in the film itself. The title character refuses to join either side of the Civil War until his wife and children are slaughtered and his farm is burned by Yankee “Red Legs”. So the choice of the character to join the Confederacy was likely personal and geographic, not ideological. Later in the movie these same Yankee “Red Legs” commit a war crime by murdering unarmed Confederate soldiers (the title character’s unit) who had already surrendered.(Note this is the second set of war crimes.) Also, later in the film the title character goes out of his way to free a Native American woman held in virtual slavery by white men at a trading post and white women taken as slaves and about to be slavetraded by Native Americans. So there is no overt racism on the part of the title character and quite a bit of pro-freedom, pro-independence, and pro-egalitarian overtones and behavior.(And even possibly some anti-war overtones.) Just wanted to set that straight, it came up in a similar past thread. It’s annoying when people claim that the movie is “racist” – it isn’t.
.
Also, one other thing: The death of Native Americans during the colonization period was mainly due to disease from simply coming into contact with European colonists. There was some intentional infection – smallpox blankets, etc. – but by and large it was unintentional. In fact if it hadn’t been for the disease deaths the Europeans would likely have had a much harder time during and after colonization. I’m not trying to be an apologist for the Europeans – they were an imperialistic bunch – I’m just being accurate. The Native Americans also took land from, killed, and enslaved each other pretty regularly. Just stating the facts.
Joseph Slater says:
It’s really amazing how often some folks on the political right want to change the topic from “liberals vs. conservatives, historically, on race” to “Democrats vs. Republicans, historically on race” despite the completely point made above. Which, despite being obvious to anyone paying attention, apparently does need to be made repeatedly.
Although it wasn’t really that the Dems as a whole were bad on race pre-1964 CRA; it’s that the southern Dems were really, really bad. And then most of those folks gravitated toward the Republican party.
August 18, 2010, 5:24 pmAmerican Psikhushka says:
Guy-
I don’t think it’s for the money, more likely it’s most often for authority, control, and respect.
It’s likely very subjective and depends on the individual and what they value. Some value freedom and independence more than authority, control, and respect. A lot of people just like working for themselves rather than other people. (Some CEOs are also owners, some work for a board of directors.)
August 18, 2010, 5:51 pmMeiczyslaw says:
Strangely enough, I was reading a commentary on Adam Smith recently, and Smith made just that argument in the 1770s. He spent some time berating “mercantilists” who were into all sorts of evil things: protective tariffs, corporate welfare, etc. Obviously, this was before socialism existed — but it’s still recognizable as statism when viewed through Smith’s eyes.
August 18, 2010, 5:54 pmwhit says:
whereas the white people are evil a la white people are the cancer of history is almost exclusively a stance of the left.
iow, i think one is more likely to find an anti-brown racist amongst the right, and anti-white racist amongst the left. currently, that is.
it seems that every post here referencing racism is either explicitly or implicitly referencing anti “brown” racism.
also, let’s remember that racist policies in recent history are nearly exclusively of the left a la the anti-asian and to a lesser extent anti-white racial preferences policies.
August 18, 2010, 5:56 pmSarcastro says:
Jack London clearly stands for all liberals today, making them all racists now and letting the substantially non-racist GOP off the hook.
Also Robert Byrd does the same thing. Also Darwin. In fact, I have never seen the three of them in the same room at the same time…!
Also Soros.
August 18, 2010, 5:58 pmneurodoc says:
Yes, the brilliant and amusing Tom Lehrer, who retired much too young, depriving us of more unrivaled enjoyment, didn’t pull his punches. He called out by name Werner von Braun, the Nazi rocket scientist, member of the Nazi party and commissioned SS officer, who didn’t deserve to land on his feet as he did because we wanted the expertise he had.
http://www.guntheranderson.com/v/data/wernherv.htm
August 18, 2010, 6:02 pmyankee says:
It’s not remotely amazing. “Historically, the Democrats were much worse than the Republicans on race” is much easier to prove than “historically, liberals were much worse than conservatives on race,” because the former is true and the latter is not. So if you’re a conservative changing the subject to Democrats vs. Republicans is a completely rational rhetorical strategy.
August 18, 2010, 6:11 pmJoseph Slater says:
Yankee: Fair enough, although I will still quibble a bit re “Democrats” as a whole. By the New Deal and later, I would say Democrats outside the south were as good or better than Republicans on racial equality issues. It was the Dixiecrats that were the problem.
Neurodoc: My parents played me Tom Lehr growing up, and I have always loved him. “Base 8 is just like Base 10 . . . if you’re missing two fingers.” And, even more relevant to this blog, his song “Smut”: “As the judge remarked the day that he acquitted my Aunt Hortense / To be smut it must be utterly without redeeming social importance. . . .”
August 18, 2010, 6:17 pmMichaelT says:
I agree with most of what Kirk says, but use his comment as an illustration of
1) “Conservative” in Europe means a different thing than in the U.S., as does “Liberal”. The “Liberals” in Europe typically and historically have been much closer to the semi-libertarian “Conservatism” (economically, politically) of current U.S. Conservatives.
2)The rigidity of this debate and thought process staying confined to the French-Revolution definitions of Right/Left, meaning in effect Reactionary/Revolutionary. There are many different axes that politics lives on, in fact entire N-dimensional Hilbert-Spaces of political thought. Impose axes like Libertarian-Statist, Democratic-Autocratic, Cosmopolitan-Monocultural, Mercantilist-Communist, Egalitarian-Elite, etc. You can come up with lots more. For instance, most of those we call “The Left” see themselves as Libertarian, Democratic, Cosmopolitan, Socialist, Egalitarian. Most of those on “The Right” see themselves as Libertarian, Democratic, Cosmopolitan, Capitalist, Egalitarian. How each sees the other side is something else.
And what actual effects their policies are having, I would argue, are indications of how wrong good intentions can go, as we move ever closer to Statist, Autocratic, PC-Monocultural, Socialist Elitism. These are all things the “Progressives” of the early 20th century were working towards, explicitly stated, and today’s left are direct descendants of that Progressivism. Which is why whether Jack London was a racist should be relevant to the Left today. Carry on, blindly, folks!
August 18, 2010, 6:23 pmRPT says:
Sorry, I’m not on the “left” except when playing fretted instruments.
August 18, 2010, 6:32 pmAdrian says:
I prefer to read comments not make them but, for heaven’s sake, it’s LENI Riefenstahl!
August 18, 2010, 6:38 pmRPT says:
What is with this “left” business?
August 18, 2010, 6:38 pmSarcastro says:
This is the key: the liberal racism of the past is important because the past leads to the future!
If you like that, I hear tautologies can also be used to prove anything you like!
August 18, 2010, 6:43 pmneurodoc says:
Well, you know it is possible for some artists to believe that their work transcends all, including anything like loyalty to a country, even that of their birth. But Pound could claim to be crazy, therefore not criminally responsible for his clearly treasonous conduct. And of course, that is what he did, successfully with the collusion of powerful admirers. Judged so, he went off to St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital, where he had a long but not unpleasant stay, rather than prison, where he deserved to be.
Pound’s talents were as a poet, and those talents did nothing to advance the fascist cause. On the other hand, Riefenstahl’s talents as a cinematographer were employed on behalf of the Nazis, and to great effect. So her art was much more entwined with an evil enterprise than Pound’s, however much Pound may have wished to be of help to the fascist cause.
I’m not sure about this, especially if you think artistic achievements more significant in this regard than other ones, e.g., scientific accomplishments. If artists’ “moral deficiencies” should have no bearing on how their artistic ouevre is viewed, why should their artistic achievements influence how we judge their “moral deficiencies,” serving as either a mitigating or aggravating factor?
I have never read any of Jack London’s work. If I do so, should I try to put aside any knowledge of his racism lest it diminish appreciation of his work as art? Or should I read his works fully informed of his racism, and thus sensitized to embedded messages I might otherwise overlook, understanding his work differently than I might were I uninformed of it?
August 18, 2010, 6:43 pmRPT says:
True, as did many Republicans, as the parties’ platforms and demographics changed. That is, of course, why I said it was a problem for BOTH parties. But today the “fear of black and brown” is a fundamental GOP strategy. And no, I do not believe the Democrats are “anti-white”, even if Philadelphia. Re Asians, the only person I know who celebrates internment is Michelle Malkin, and I did read a story this morning about how the GOP is about to jettison its two Asian congressmen in Louisiana Hawaii.
August 18, 2010, 6:48 pm1040 says:
why so circumspect, whit?
August 18, 2010, 6:58 pmneurodoc says:
I’m not sure that helps. Is Larry David hermaproditic, chimeric, or something else that permits at one and the same time “he’s” and “she’s” when speaking of him/her/it? Or is it my confusion as to the referrant. Is/was it that his father is/was part Cherokee, while his mother is/was Jewish? (To which should I ascribe the parts I like – his brilliant wit, and the parts I don’t like – the obnoxiousness, which I take to be real rather than just an affected persona?
(This is a little far afield, since I don’t imagine for a minute that Larry David is a member of that very small set of “Native American/Jewish right-wing gun nut/conspiracy theorists who used to regularly attend Soldier of Fortune conventions,” one of whom lent you that copy of The Turner Diaries to read. By the way, care to say if any one or more of those labels pertain to you, e.g., “used to regularly attend Soldier of Fortune conventions”?)
August 18, 2010, 6:58 pmwhit says:
nobody said the democrats are anti-white any more than the repubs are anti-brown
what *i* said is that one is more likely to find an anti-white racist amongst the left and an anti-brown racists amongst the right
imo and ime the vast majority of those on the left and those on the right are not racists at all
but at least when it comes to racist POLICIES iow policies that discriminate on account of race, in recent history those are almost always the result of overwhelmingly democratic/leftwing support
August 18, 2010, 7:05 pmJohn says:
“fear of black and brown” is a fundamental GOP strategy
Really? Does this strategy exist anywhere except in your mind?
August 18, 2010, 7:12 pmrepublicanmother says:
Upon further study, you will find that most progressives of that period were heavily influenced by Darwin’s “Descent of Man”, which claimed that only 5% of the human race was evolving. These progressives went on to redefine our country into a well-ordered stratified society, primarily through compulsory education, in light of what they believed to be a scientific fact.
I would encourage everyone to check out the documentary Maafa 21 to see how these progressives have targeted, and continue to target, the black community in America.
August 18, 2010, 7:21 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
I’ll second epluribus. Neurodoc, here.
“To Build a Fire” is a great story. There’s a good thought in there about the importance of imagination. But mainly, the lesson is that when somebody who is in a position to know more than you do tries to tell you something, you should probably listen. This is probably why the story finds its way into high school lit books.
August 18, 2010, 7:25 pmneurodoc says:
My mistake. I imagined that you were here to persuade others of your conclusions, but you weren’t. Instead, you were here to lay out ineluctable logic that only emotional fools could fail to process. Kinda like Andrew Wiles going to the blackboard to outlining his proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, writing QED at the end with a great flourish, and then turning to those present and telling them that if they don’t follow, they’re pitiable. (BTW, I think we can safely conclude that Orin Kerr did not mean to be taken seriously in either http://volokh.com/2010/08/04/brilliant-people-agree-with-me/ or http://volokh.com/2010/08/16/people-who-disagre-with-me-are-just-arguing-in-bad-faith/#comments.)
Your profile says that you spend 1/3 of your time doing criminal defense work, another 1/3 litigation. Do you adopt the same approach when representing clients in court as you have in this thread, that is not worrying about persuading, figuring that your logic will carry the day provided that no juror let’s an abreaction to you avoid the conclusion you think they must reach if they remain “unemotional”? I very much doubt it. (And if you do, woe unto your clients.) I think you just feel free to indulge yourself in obnoxiousness here.
Now, long ago I heard it said that you could always tell a Harvard man, you just couldn’t tell him much. I know that is not always the case, since it is not true of several Harvard alumni and faculty in my family, including our daughter, and among our friends. But we can’t adduce you as counter-evidence, can we.
August 18, 2010, 7:39 pmricky says:
Wow, this thread is the perfect example of how as soon as someone says “racist” the conversation becomes incredibly dumb. Some interesting historical nuggets, though.
August 18, 2010, 7:43 pmneurodoc says:
Al Gore?! A Democrat with his heart set upon being POTUS would play that card in an effort to embarrass an opponent and pick up some votes?
August 18, 2010, 7:46 pmSarcastro says:
[Back in the day, you got
Lester Maddox's plan to get the 'negrophobe' whites to the polls by yelling about how blacks are voting Dem proves the GOP are the real racists. Or Reagan's use of "Sates Rights" rhetoric only in places that were really into segregation.
Though others might prefer to look at more modern times, if only to avoid the crazy argument that things can change in 50 years.
Limbaugh and Beck saying Obama and Holder hate whitey, FOX talking up the Sherrod and NBPP stories, the sudden use of thug in the GOP lexicon, ACORN as reparations, that Tea Party Express guy's rant.
And that's just black people. I'm not going to bother with a discussion of the Mexican invasion/reconquista/North American Union. Nor shall I go into detail about how Muslims have infiltrated and will one day take us down if we don't get a lot more angry at them.]
August 18, 2010, 7:48 pmSarcastro says:
[And preemptively, I acknowledge that many luminaries on the left are using the race card vastly more than they should, not that it's relevant to the point I was making.]
August 18, 2010, 7:59 pmRich Rostrom says:
As a conservative, I have to acknowledge that racism was primarily a conservative vice, and that leftists did most of the heavy lifting in defeating it.
However, the sort of messianic rebuild-the-world racialism expressed by London was left-wing. It was the “Progressives” of that era who believed that from science they had the knowledge to construct a perfected human society. Misinterpreted Darwinism led many of them to propose wholesale destruction of “inferior” races.
Even Communists, normally anti-racists, have been ready to destroy entire ethnic groups that were not with the program.
Conservatives have often supported racial subjugation and exploitation, but within limits: Keep them in their place, sure, but kill them all – no. The racial extremism of Nazi Germany was an aspect of messianic totalitarianism that was much more like revolutionary leftism than any conservative creed.
August 18, 2010, 8:22 pmSarcastro says:
Because it’s an albatross we’d better hang around one neck or the other, or else Nazis will just be gathering dust in the back of the rhetorical shed.
August 18, 2010, 8:34 pmDavid Welker says:
neurodoc,
Look, I don’t blame you for assuming my goal was persuasion. That is a common goal. But it is not a universal goal and was not my goal in this particular instance. Plenty of conversations are actually more interesting when the goal is not to persuade. In fact, when someone is determined to persuade, they often start by being dishonest (over-emphasizing benefits and under-emphasizing costs or the opposite, depending on what they want you to think, among other rhetorical moves, for example) and then they quickly get even more annoying as they are not satisfied unless you agree with them.
A better appeal on your part would be simply that you thought that my response to Somin was unpleasant to you, a third party. That would actually run counter to my preferences. At least slightly. But your assumption that persuasion is among my goals in this particular instance happens to be wrong. That does not mean that persuasion is NEVER among my goals. But honestly, I think persuasion is often over-rated, especially as much of what many people believe is not based on a particularly strong foundation.
August 18, 2010, 9:05 pmDavid Welker says:
Oh really? So, how often should one use the “race card” exactly?
While I am at it, I should preemptively acknowledge that many serial killers in the criminal community are using the murder card vastly more than they should. I mean, you would think that 5 of 6 murders would be enough for them.
August 18, 2010, 9:10 pmM. Simon says:
How about if I love Black Tooth?
August 18, 2010, 9:12 pmM. Simon says:
As a conservative, I have to acknowledge that racism was primarily a conservative vice, and that leftists did most of the heavy lifting in defeating it.
Democrat conservatives like the KKK and Woodrow Wilson. The president who introduced Jim Crow to the Federal Government.
August 18, 2010, 9:16 pmMalcolm Kirkpatrick says:
(athEIst): “I think Tom Lehrer used ‘Werner von Werner’ so we wouldn’t know who he was referring to.”
The Tom Lehrer lyric is correct. My memory may be playing tricks but I think “Werner Von Werner” comes from some Bob Newhart monologue.
Historical whitewash? There’s a website devoted to plagarism which pretty well establishes that T.S. Eliot stole “The Waste Land” and H.G. Wells stole __A Study of History__.
London’s not Dostoevsky or Melville, but he could plot an entertaining tale. That’s enough. London allowed his opposition a sympathetic presentation. The captain in __The Sea Wolf__ personifies the opposition, and London gives him the better argument.
To the main topic, the relation between socialism and racism: Political control of resource flows creates an incentive for people to organize a coalition around any arbitrary principle (like race). As people devote more resources to rent-seeking, the total pool shrinks. When times get lean, people get together in groups, choose sides, pick up sticks and rocks, and kill until there’s enough to go around. Race is one way they choose sides.
Related: Jack Hirschliefer
August 18, 2010, 9:18 pm“Anarchy and Its Breakdown”
__Journal of Political Economy__
Sarcastro says:
[In my understanding, the race card is accusing other people of being racist. As there are still some racists in the world, there are times when it is appropriate, i.e. when said racists say something racist.
Indeed, when someone who is not racist says something racist (e.g. 'clean and articulate,') that would also be a time when 'playing the race card' is acceptable.]
August 18, 2010, 9:27 pmwhit says:
Well, you know it is possible for some artists to believe that their work transcends all, including anything like loyalty to a country, even that of their birth. But Pound could claim to be crazy, therefore not criminally responsible for his clearly treasonous conduct. And of course, that is what he did, successfully with the collusion of powerful admirers. Judged so, he went off to St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital, where he had a long but not unpleasant stay, rather than prison, where he deserved to be. Pound’s talents were as a poet, and those talents did nothing to advance the fascist cause. On the other hand, Riefenstahl’s talents as a cinematographer were employed on behalf of the Nazis, and to great effect. So her art was much more entwined with an evil enterprise than Pound’s, however much Pound may have wished to be of help to the fascist cause. I’m not sure about this, especially if you think artistic achievements more significant in this regard than other ones, e.g., scientific accomplishments. If artists’ “moral deficiencies” should have no bearing on how their artistic ouevre is viewed, why should their artistic achievements influence how we judge their “moral deficiencies,” serving as either a mitigating or aggravating factor?I have never read any of Jack London’s work. If I do so, should I try to put aside any knowledge of his racism lest it diminish appreciation of his work as art? Or should I read his works fully informed of his racism, and thus sensitized to embedded messages I might otherwise overlook, understanding his work differently than I might were I uninformed of it?
well, then there is a roman polanski.
——————————————–
i actually read several people on democraticunderground (a progressive website) who claimed that he shouldn’t be prosecuted because he’s such a brilliant director
seriously.
August 18, 2010, 9:32 pmCalvin Dodge says:
He was epileptic (I learned this from “The Twelve Chairs”). Perhaps the two maladies are easily confused?
August 18, 2010, 9:35 pmwhit says:
assuming arguendo that biden isn’t a racist of course.
and of course if a repub had made that comment, you know he would have been accused of being a racist and/or that would have been offered as “proof” that he was.
August 18, 2010, 9:36 pmDavid Welker says:
Interesting. But I think the phrase “race card” has more baggage than that. Calling it a “card” indicates that one is playing a game. And the game that is being played is either politics or “playing the victim.”
As soon as you say that someone is playing the race card, I think you are saying that their accusations of racism are probably false and brought up for insincere reasons in order to gain an advantage in some sort of “game” that they are playing.
But that is just my impression of the phrase. It is interesting that you have a different impression.
August 18, 2010, 9:37 pmCalvin Dodge says:
It also rhymes like this:
Call him Nazi, he won’t even frown
“Nazi, Schmazi”, says Werner von Braun
and
Like the widows and orphans in old London town
August 18, 2010, 9:40 pmWho owe their large pensions to Werner von Braun
Calvin Dodge says:
Oooh … that should have been “call him A Nazi”.
Ah, well …
August 18, 2010, 9:41 pmDavid Welker says:
Most progressives think if you are brilliant enough, you should be able to get away with raping children. After all, success should have its privileges! And we know that this is a core progressive belief because some anonymous commenters who said they were progressives said that on the democratic underground website.
There are f*cked up people out there who claim to belong to every ideology. Is this really news? I think it is obvious enough as to not really be that interesting.
August 18, 2010, 9:42 pmSarcastro says:
Yes, I judge all liberals by DU, just like I judge all conservatives by Free Republic. I had no idea Conservatives were such supporters of Mel Gibson in his recent troubles!
[And David Welker, I'm not sure I buy your speculative victimization narrative. For one thing, Republicans have said racist stuff in the past and it doesn't exactly stick to them for more than a news cycle either (that was about how long the Biden flap lasted, IIRC.)
And Republicans use the card when they can (which I conceide is a lot less than Dems can and do). See upthread, calling Dems/progressives/blacks the real racists. They still call Byrd a racist, despite his contemporary track record and apologies.]
August 18, 2010, 10:06 pmMark Field says:
I always thought Wilson was a Progressive. Now I find that he was a conservative. It’s so hard to keep up with revisionism.
August 18, 2010, 10:08 pmRicardo says:
Margaret Sanger is a candidate for historical figure with the greatest number of fabricated quotes circulating on the internet.
She certainly held some of the racial stereotypes of the day and probably believed that some races were inherently more intelligent than others. However, nowhere did she advocate mass sterilization or elimination of certain races the way Jack London did. She advocated sterilization of the mentally ill and mentally retarded and should certainly be criticized for that but never advocated race-based sterilization. She was quite clear in saying that people of all races have the right to have as many or as few children as they want — her goal was to make the number of children a conscious decision (e.g. “family planning”) rather than a matter of pure chance.
She repeatedly and forcefully spoke out against the Nazis. Much gets made out of her move to open a birth control clinic in Harlem to serve the black community — conservatives make this out to be some dark conspiracy against black people. In reality, the clinic had the blessing of W.E.B. DuBois and followed her philosophy that birth control should not be limited to upper-class white women like herself living in Greenwich Village.
August 18, 2010, 10:21 pmDavid Welker says:
Sarcastro,
I actually wasn’t trying to make a substantive point for you to buy or not. I was just saying my impression of the meaning of the phrase race card in comparison to yours.
I agree with you, of course, that the “race card” (using my more pejorative meaning of the phrase rather than your neutral meaning) is sometimes played by people on all sides of the ideological spectrum.
August 18, 2010, 10:25 pmSarcastro says:
[And I agree with you on that point, David Welker, and found the semantic difference interesting. I suspect you have the right of it in the end. i.e. that the playing the race card is universally pejorative and as such assumes an inappropriate allegation of racism.
Yeah, the point I was refering to was from
one post above you. Apologies for the mixup.]
August 18, 2010, 10:35 pmYoungblood says:
Keller was always primarily famous for being a little blind, deaf, and mute girl who learned to speak and the first deaf person to graduate from college. She was never really famous for her socialism. Once she became a socialist, people basically stopped paying attention to her. Today, few people care that she became a Socialist just like few people care that she eventually became a committed Swedenborgian.
August 18, 2010, 10:37 pmwhit says:
we’ve discussed this before. DU and FR are funhouse mirror versions of each other
August 18, 2010, 10:44 pmSarcastro says:
[Well put. And have you noticed they each cannot stop talking about the other?]
August 18, 2010, 10:54 pmReed the Viking says:
Fads, Fartleks, and Chicks with Guns…
Fads come and go. When my older siblings were in middle school, pacifiers were apparently a cool accessory to have. I remember pogs, lanyards, beanie babies, pokemanz, yo-yos (especially brains and fireballs), and other stupid crap. After reading this …
August 18, 2010, 10:56 pmYoungblood says:
The same is true of Jack London, by the way. (In reference to my comment about Helen Keller, above.) Although Johann Hari plays up London’s socialism in his review, London is hardly remembered as a socialist even by other socialists. However, people who care about good writing acknowledge that he’s one of the masters of the American short story and that he penned several brilliant novels.
A hundred years from now Tom Cruise may or may not be remembered as one of the premiere actors of the late 20th century. If he is, nobody is going to remember that he was a Scientologist and an anti-psychiatry advocate.
August 18, 2010, 11:00 pmwhit says:
they are obsessed like codependant exes are
August 18, 2010, 11:04 pmM-K says:
In my NSHO, Jack London was a far better short story writer than novelist. “To Build a Fire” is a well known classic, but my personal favorites include “A Piece of Steak” and “Lost Face.” If you’ve never read London, or only read his most famous novels, try those. Both should be available through Project Gutenberg or Google Books.
London died circa 1916 or 1918. For what it’s worth, the word “racism” would not be coined for a couple more decades. (“Racialism” existed, apparently meaning the viewing of things through a racial prism–something that pretty well describes our society today.)
August 19, 2010, 12:14 amKirk Lazarus says:
This thread seems to have degenerated into the usual US partisan political nonsense. My examples of the association of leftism/progressivism with racism weren’t the product of the view that racism is the exclusive domain of the left. It was intended to counter the myth that the left is always opposed to racism and the right usually behind it. The local extreme left group on campus were recently advertising a talk on how capitalism is responsible for racism! In reality market forces generally counter racism. Racism is generally the product of “communal” thinking, the sort of thinking that the left endorses.
But surely women are the real victims here, as always. The language of historical castration poses women as impotent, weak and harmless and therefore not to be taken seriously.
August 19, 2010, 1:49 amRicardo says:
William Jennings Bryan — who supported the Progressive movement and served in the Wilson Administration — was not so impressed, on the other hand.
Upon yet more study, one would find that social darwinism was an idea started by Herbert Spencer — not Charles Darwin — and was embraced by many who did not at all consider themselves Progressives. The Supreme Court famously noted in its Lochner ruling, “The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics.”
Darwinism is a scientific theory with no immediate political ramifications. Social darwinism and eugenics are political ideologies and while the latter certainly had its share of Progressive supporters, the evangelical Protestants in the Progressive movement were anti-Darwin.
August 19, 2010, 1:57 amRicardo says:
Both the modern left and right endorse communal thinking. The left traditionally thought in terms of social class and now thinks more in terms of ethnic identity while the right thought (and still thinks) in terms of nation, culture and religion.
I would say classical liberals and libertarians have been the only consistent opponents of communal thinking.
August 19, 2010, 3:34 ambandit, Boston MA says:
he is remembered now for writing a cute story about a dog.
Maybe you’re referring to To Build a Fire where the guy can’t get the fire lit and freezes to death while the dog trots off and leaves him?
August 19, 2010, 8:40 amEcoDude says:
Read the first sentence:
“Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.”
http://freedomkeys.com/ar-racism.htm
August 19, 2010, 9:47 amSmooth, like a Rhapsody says:
bandit:
Is that schadenfreude I detect in that comment?
….good dog.
August 19, 2010, 10:27 amJoseph Slater says:
bandit, Boston, MA wins the inaugural “most appropriate profile pic for a thread” award.
August 19, 2010, 10:35 amHarryEagar says:
Yet more than a few of his writings portray colored people more favorably than white people. ‘Koolau the Leper,’ for example.
I have been reading this new biography but have not finished, partly because I was mystified by the author’s opening statement that London’s socialism has been submerged.
Perhaps you could imagine that if all you did was read ‘Call of the Wild’ when you were 11, but if you read any more than that of London — ‘The Iron Heel’ was the one that revealed to me that there was more to London than dog stories — you couldn’t miss the socialism.
I doubt I will bother to finish this so-far trivial biography.
August 19, 2010, 2:32 pmL says:
Minor (in this context) quibble: that quote comes from Holmes’ Lochner dissent.
August 19, 2010, 4:21 pmRich Rostrom says:
American Psikhushka says: The death of Native Americans during the colonization period was mainly due to disease from simply coming into contact with European colonists.
True.
There was some intentional infection — smallpox blankets, etc…
False. The only known case of “smallpox blankets” even being discussed was in one letter from Colonel Henry Bouquet to Lord Jeffrey Amherst in 1763, during Pontiac’s Rebellion.
This a notorious myth, repeatedly endlessly by white-guilt-mongers. For example, Ward Churchill claimed that the U.S. Army induced a smallpox epidemic among the northern Plains Indians – at a time when the U.S. government was providing free vaccinations to Indians.
August 19, 2010, 4:31 pmrepublicanmother says:
I guess it depends on what how you define progressive. The group I was referring to is the one that gave us the Federal Reserve system, of which William Jennings Bryan was definitely not. One only need to read their writings to see that they were convinced of the truth of social Darwinism. By evangelical Protestants, I assume you mean New Era Presbyterians and Methodists, which have morphed into all out liberals today. I would argue that while they did not believe they were descended from monkeys, they did buy into the rhetoric of a better society through government, which is not what the Bible teaches.
August 19, 2010, 6:48 pmRyan says:
The comparison I suggested is not about racism per se; it is about a common language of dehumanization of others. Replace London’s “white man” and “strong breeds” with Rand’s John Galt. There’s little difference beneath the razor-thin rationalizations of their shared sociopathy.
August 19, 2010, 7:27 pmBama 1L says:
The result of Keller’s later political activism and its unacceptability to most Americans is basically that her adulthood gets left out of the story entirely. You are left with endless retellings of “The Miracle Worker” only, which is really the story of Annie Sullivan. Sullivan gets Keller to understand the sign for water and the lights come up. You never find out what Keller had to say once she got a voice.
August 19, 2010, 9:56 pmBama 1L says:
Ironically, Holmes actually was a social Darwinist and would probably have enacted Mr. Spencer’s Social Statics, but didn’t think the Constitution gave him the authority to overrule a legislature’s contrary opinion.
August 19, 2010, 10:00 pmerp says:
I don’t know if anyone else has mentioned this, but Margaret Sanger advocated abortion for colored babies to solve that problem. The right’s alleged racism is a product of the left’s projection.
August 20, 2010, 2:20 pmOwen H. says:
If his views and politics are good reasons to denounce London’s work and London himself, does that mean those that say we shouldn’t hold Washington and Jefferson in high regard are correct?
August 22, 2010, 12:25 pmBB says:
Pity you let an author’ politics disturb your enjoyment of their writings. Do you have the same problems with the ancient Greeks, Romans, or Rav Kook, for example?
Finally, your comment that London PREscribed extermination was supported by a London quote that DEscribed natural selection: the smarter, stronger, more intelligent have historically genocided, supplanted, replaced, the dumber, weaker, less intelligent. Was this a mistake? Could you provide us with a quote that supports your thesis? The way I see it, London is just describing the natural meritocracy of power and intelligence that has existed in the world for thousands of years.
August 26, 2010, 11:22 am