It Can Happen Here

 Plan for Fully Authoritarian Rule?

“Project 2025” by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and 100 other right-wing groups has become a well-known blueprint for an incoming Trump administration. It is a far more organized plan than the one in 2016 and far more reactionary. The general slant is the 'unitary executive theory' – meaning a dictatorial president has the most power. It is 'philosophically' aimed at 'woke' and 'cultural Marxism' - actually DEI, multi-culturalism & 'political correctness.'  It's a plan by a wing of capital for almost total control of state power based on politics. Gathered from various sources, its features include:

• The most worrisome is indications they will set up many camps to imprison immigrants without papers in the U.S., then initiate mass deportations. Police, DEA, BATF will all be deputized to help.

• Gutting the civil service and experts in various government departments and replacing them with 20,000 loyal MAGA zealots.

• Abolishing, 'dismantling' or chopping certain departments like FBI, DHS, USAID, Education, Commerce, Energy, BLM and Interior.

• Immediately using the 1807 'Insurrection Act' to quash any protests of any kind using the U.S. Army and a nationalized National Guard.

• Using a politicized DOJ to go after opponents in media, education, politics, corporations, the internet and the legal system.

• Environmental and climate change regulations and treaties will be unenforced or canceled. The EPA and NOAA will be gutted. Carbon sources will be promoted.  "Drill baby, drill!"

• Recruiting thousands of loyal MAGA Republicans to fill civil service positions by firing thousands of skilled workers and experts in AFGE, NFFE and APWU union positions.

• Inserting theocratic rationales into law, as they just did in Alabama, and supporting white Christian nationalism.

• Politicizing the military as a physical club against opponents and 'the deep state' - which is really just the administrative state.

• Making sure political appointees are loyal to the plan and Trump, not any law.

• 'Marxists' and dark-skinned people will be the first targets, especially inside the government.

• Outlaw Mifepristone, Misoprostol and institute a national anti-abortion law while tracking anyone who has an abortion. No birth control will be promoted except the rhythm method or abstinence.

• Change the census to apply to only U.S. citizens.

• Remove the fight against unemployment as a goal of the Federal Reserve.

• Reduce the corporate tax rate again.

• Eliminate the independence of the DOJ, FCC, FTC and other agencies, putting them under direct presidential control.

• Rescind prohibitions against discrimination of LGBT people in government and law.

• Outlaw pornography.

• It also recommends the gold standard as their 'solution' to the federal debt. No shit.

This Project reflects a split between two factions of the bourgeoisie. Carrying out some of these points could result in widespread violence and a hard battle between corporate factions - but especially against the proletariat. Project 2025 functions as a reactionary 'wish list' but it is also an 'action plan.' What is not mentioned is that a display of government force against the Left and some Democrats will encourage extra-legal fascist and ultra-nationalist militias to physically attack leftists and anyone else they can. 

Can this reactionary program be achieved? There are real roadblocks in the way, but as we've found before, Trump and the government do unexpected things and sometimes 'quantity leads to quality.'  Trump will put his own megalomaniacal, vicious stamp on this program and speed it up as fast as possible. According to trackers he's made 250 suggestions on how to limit or upend U.S. bourgeois democracy. Complacency is not a solution, nor is simplistic 'both sidesism.'

British anti-fascist painting against Mosely in 1930s

The answer is unity between unions, political, community and socialist organizations, along with all other anti-fascists, to form an Anti-Fascist Front in the worst case scenario. The AFF would defend the class against fascists first of all. It would recruit in the military and national guard and field its own political representatives to run in local elections. It would form armed defense units. It would recruit from the ranks of Democratic Party (DP) voters, and even some political reps of the DP - but not form a political block with the leadership of the DP. It would gather the majority of independents and recruit worker voters from the Republican Party who would soon feel the damage. It would become an uncompromising left pole of attraction for every force opposed to Project 2025.

From my information Project 2025 has nothing yet explicitly attacking unions except those in federal agencies. There is nothing about international policy - yet.  Not a word about Bannon's 'Chinese Bio-Weapons.'  There nothing yet about new rules for Wall Street or eliminating rules for Wall Street, as perhaps Wall Street already has everything it wants. There is no direct mention of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or other 'safety net' programs - as yet. But this is only a matter of time.  One of the authors, Stephen Moore, is a fervent supporter of privatizing social security for Wall Street.  The Heritage Foundation itself has advocated raising the retirement age to 70.  

The wish and fantasy is for the Far Right to thoroughly control the military, the legal system, the media, the educational system, the police, the financial system, welfare programs and every branch of government through 'semi-gradual' means – small, medium and large shocks short of a violent coup.  Victor Orban's rule in Hungary is a partial example, though he is heavily funded by the EU and usually sells his politics for a dime. Other authoritarians like Putin and Netanyahu do not. This plan actually reflects weakness of an astounding kind - a crisis of the capitalist form of bourgeois democracy and profit economics that is happening across the globe - and now in the heart of the world capitalist system.

In response, the most Left elements in the AFF can promote a transitional approach to socialism as the only way out in their bid to defend the great majority of workers, unemployed, self-employed, retired, students, minorities, small businessmen and farmers in the U.S. But any AFF will come under increased attack by the police and government entities.  Just look at the violent threats and actions already against anyone the hard right dislikes.  This will not be pretty if it comes to pass, especially in its worst form.  Be prepared!

P.S. - Trump just said he'd cut Social Security, the plan of his Wall Street backers.  He also promises 'a bloodbath' if not elected.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Fascism,” “Trump,” “Who Were the January 6^th Rioters?” “Capitol Riot,” “Anti-Fascism Series,” “In the Red Corner,” “Transitional Program,” “United Front,” “Anti-Fascist Front,” “It Can't Happen Here” (S. Lewis), "The Shock Doctrine" (Klein).

May Day Books has many books, newspapers and pamphlets on the fight against fascism and its variations. Buy one and educate yourself.

Red Frog

February 28, 2024

Shipboard Rebels

 “The Creole Rebellion – the Most Successful Slave Revolt in U.S. History” by Bruce Chadwick, 2022

...and, if that's true, it happened on a ship in 1841. The Creole was a slave ship heading from Virginia to New Orleans to deliver its 'cargo' to the large plantations of the deep South. It had to 'round Florida and that meant sailing close to the British Bahamas and Nassau. In 1833 the U.K. had outlawed slavery so any U.S. slaves were free from servitude if they got to British soil. The leader of the rebellion, Madison Washington, a formerly free man who had been captured trying to free his wife, knew that. He planned a slave uprising on the ship and an eastern voyage to Nassau Town on the former pirate island of New Providence that was now a multi-ethnic haven.

It's an extraordinary story that mostly devolves into a legal and political struggle between the U.S. and Britain. Unlike the prior story of the Amistad that was loaded with Africans who had never been formally put in bondage, the U.S. considered the 140 slaves on board the 'property' and 'cargo' of slave buyers in New Orleans. They were just like bananas or guns or barrels of oil. Earlier slave ships had foundered on the reefs of the Bahamas - the Hermosa, the Comet, the Enterprise and the Encomium - and all slaves aboard were freed by British Bahamian authorities. Nassau itself was now mostly a black town with black police and soldiers. The twist in this story is that the 19 mutineers, in the chaotic fight onboard, killed one passenger who was a slave trader and severely injured the captain. When the rebels arrived off Nassau in control of the ship it became a legal question of murder and violence.

In an amazing scene off the harbor of Nassau, dozens of boats manned by black Bahamians surrounded the anchored Creole hoping all would be freed. The U.S. tried to seize the vessel with a small group of soldiers from a nearby fleet ship. Their boat was blocked by the civilians around the Creole and Bahamian soldiers on board. 116 slaves who had not participated in the mutiny left the brig and later escaped to the rest of the Caribbean. The tough British Governor did not stop them, as he told them there were no charges against them. 5 women and children stayed onboard. The remaining 19 were locked up, including Washington, pending a decision on what to do by London.

Politics, Slavery and War

To abolitionists in the North and a few in the South they were heroes. Washington, a strong, careful and smart leader, was lionized. Frederick Douglass wrote a novella about him. Washington had protected the crew and captain's family, nursed all the injured and tamped down any further bloodshed – perhaps to his detriment. Some thought he should have run the ship aground and fled onto the island, avoiding any legal process at all.

However to president Tyler, a Whig Virginian who inherited the presidency after the death of Harrison, these men were pirates and murderers. Prior to this Tyler had vetoed a proposal for a National Bank of the United States that was passed by Congress in the face of a disastrous recession, showing his free-market 'Jacksonian' tendencies. This is something that would get Congress labeled communist nowadays, but then it was just a sensible solution the insolvency of so many private banks. This veto had brought the ire of Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams and nearly all of his Whig Party. The Creole changed that. Now Tyler could play the nationalist hero by thundering against Britain, even though he himself supposedly opposed unpaid forced and imprisoned labor. The Creole was part of a line of uprisings on ships – the Deux Soeurs, the Augusta, the Decatur – that had freed captive slaves. The British, with international support, had even boarded suspect U.S. slave ships in the Atlantic and released the captives. This had all pissed off U.S. nationalists and Southern slavers to no end.

Madison Washington - Knowledge, kindness & force

The Crown's barristers concluded that the murder happened in international waters, so the U.K. had no jurisdiction. There was no present extradition treaty with the U.S., so the men were not required to be sent back. The Governor had acted correctly in not blocking the remaining freedmen from leaving the Creole. The action of the slaves was not an act of piracy and the assertion that 'cargo' and human beings were equivalent was nonsense. They concluded that the only way for the 19 to be returned to the U.S. for trial would be by a voluntary act of 'international goodwill.' A U.S. Supreme Court justice and the head of the DOJ privately agreed that the U.S. had no legal jurisdiction over the matter.

It was up to the politicians to negotiate in the context of an outraged South gunning for war and many irritated nationalists of both parties. Daniel Webster, an ostensible U.S. opponent of slavery and Lord Ashburton, a prominent British lawyer and politician, conducted the talks in 1842.  Ashburton was part of the Baring family of prominent bankers.  At the same time J.Q. Adams was advocating the freeing of the 19 anti-slavery rebels. He thundered against Southern human bondage in an address to Congress over his being accused of criminal treason and breaking a gag order. The Creole issue had reinvigorated the abolitionists in the U.S. and this had intruded into the Congress. The ghosts of Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, the Stono rebels and various lessor insurrectionists haunted the South, and now Madison Washington had done the same.  Some white men were hung for helping the rebellions, such as in north Georgia and other southern areas.

What happened? Chadwick covers the micro-history of all the twists and turns of the Tyler presidency, the chief characters involved, the testimony of the crew, a look at the anti-slavery movement; the end of the gag rule in the House over talking about slavery and the inclusion of Texas in the U.S. as a slave state. Tyler wanted to absorb Texas as part of compensation for losing the Creole case. On April 16, 1842 a Nassau court released the remaining 17 freedmen prisoners, as 2 had died in gaol. No one knows what happened to Washington after that. In 1855 the blasted slavers got partial compensation from the U.K. for their losses from ship incidents like the Creole. They nevertheless hoped that Britain would eventually take their side in a war, given it needed cotton. But like the Bahamians surrounding the Creole, the British people would have no truck with bondage. All of this, partly spurred by the national sensation of the Creole mutiny, became a prelude to the Civil War 5 years later.

P.S. - Slaver ship wrecks found off Bahamas far north of Nassau - 2/25/24 Guardian story: Sunk Slave Ships Discovered

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “American Myth,” “Black Sails,” “The Civil War in the United States” (Marx-Engels); “Mr Turner” (Mike Leigh); “12 Years a Slave,” “Slavery By Another Name,” “Caste” (Wilkerson); “Fire on the Mountain” (Bisson); “Life Under the Jolly Roger,” “Spartacus” (Fast); “Class Struggle in the Roman Republic” (Woods).

And I got it at the Athens, GA library. Support your local library!

May Day has books on slavery, both fiction and non-fiction, where every month is 'black history month.'

Red Frog / 2/25/24

College Library Browsing #10: Sadness is it's Own Reward

 “Left-Wing Melancholia – Marxism, History and Memory” by Enzo Traverso, 2016

This book looks at the situation of the Left after what Traverso considers a world-historic defeat of communism. That consists of the fall of the bureaucratic 'socialist' USSR, the central-eastern European workers' states and the degeneration of the mass Socialist and Communist parties in various countries. Gramsci's 'war of position' was posed in the 1920s and Traverso considers it lost. Traverso seems to be unaware of present vital efforts to keep Marxism alive, but lets hear what he has to say. Traverso dates the change in socialist attitudes to the 1980s and 1990s. In the 1970s and before Left victories over colonialism, apartheid, various dictators, capitalism and the U.S. defeat in Vietnam gave the Left an optimistic, emancipatory boost. After this period he considers the Marxist goal of a human 'utopia' off the table. The future now no longer exists in his view, just an endless 'presentism' and the dead hand of the reactionary past.

These defeats take the form of a Leftist melancholia, which in Traverso's survey is part nostalgia, part tragedy, part defeat, part memory, part history, part sorrow, part martyrs, part tradition, part inspiration. Victims became the special focus in this vein, especially the memory of the Holocaust, slavery or Jim Crow, the Red Scare, Shirtwaist or the hanging of Joe Hill in the U.S. Agency and Left victories are forgotten in the general warp and weave - except in the small circles of the hard left. My main issue with this book is 'why'? Is the book only an elegiac and academic description of the present or does it posit some move forward beyond melancholia?

Traverso tracks how defeat has always been a part of the Marxist revolutionary myth. Supposedly you 'lose until you win.' Defeats and heroism are remembered in order to give historic impetus to further class struggle and victories. The 1848 Paris revolt and the later 1870 Paris Commune especially played that role; the defeat of 1905 as a 'dress rehearsal' for the Russian revolution of 1917; the crushing of the various 1919 revolutions in Europe inspired the revolts of the '30s and '40s, including the Chinese Revolution. In our time the death of Che Guevara, the assassination of Malcolm X, the crushing of the Panthers, the overthrow of Allende all 'infuse' this myth. Prior to the 1990s a certain teleological, optimistic certainty about 'the future is ours' was more common among many leftists. Earlier, in the face of fascism, both Luxemburg and Trotsky had spoken of 'socialism or barbarism.' That seems to be our present 'melancholic' situation. The environmental situation does not encourage optimism either, though it destroys 'free market' logic in spades.

Traverso hints that actual socialists must embrace both the past, present and future. However it is obvious that many far leftists dwell in the past in various ways, and have no conception of how the future will actually arrive. Traverso ignores China, but some find their 'optimism' in the CCP and state-led development of China. It's a thin reed that does not translate in a mass way even in China. Nor does China make any effort to export 'revolution' and actually never has. Others cling to anyone who opposes the U.S., no matter from what position – authoritarian, leftist, theocratic, conservative, Republican or fascist. This kind of reflexive 'anti-imperialism' abandons a socialist future or any actual plan to get there. It is another 'melancholy' symptom.

Cultural Arty Facts

To make his points other than through voluminous and erudite quotes, Traverso looks at various Italian communist neo-realist films, along with political ones from Latin America. As he puts it “Defeat had turned communism into a realm of memory.” Pontecorvo's 'Battle of Algiers' and the anti-colonial film 'Burn' come in for special attention. Others are the post-Soviet film about central Europe, “Ulysses Gaze;” the French film, “A Grin Without a Cat;” Ken Loach's “Land and Freedom” about the Spanish Civil War and films about post-Allende Chile – in particular “Santa Fe Street” and “Nostalgia for the Light.” He brings up C.L.R. James' analysis of Moby Dick as Melville's 1851 parable about capitalism leading to totalitarianism. Quite prescient!

Courbet self-portrait:  Desperate Man

Traverso looks at 1800s 'Bohemia' in Paris – at the time the marginal realm of anti-government plotters, anarchists, dissident artists and intellectuals, petty criminals, drinkers and layabouts who were neither part of the intelligentsia nor full-on lumpens. Marx was mostly hostile to this strata, considering them basically lumpen-proletarians, but Traverso sees this sub-cultural strata splitting or shifting based on the times and political situation. Bohemia went on to be called the Lost Generation, the Flappers and Jazzmen, the Surrealists, the Existentialists, the Beats, the Hippies, the Punks, then the Rappers, Hip-Hoppers and the Hipsters. But these counter-cultural strata changed or were crushed, to the point that a real Bohemia is invisible now. The real Bohemia has become a semi-proletarian underground of marginalized persons with no public face. It's public U.S. face – hipster and hip-hop - has been commodified and captured, another melancholic development.

Traverso chooses to highlight Courbet, a Bohemian utopian-socialist painter who put 'le peuple' and symbols of the people at the center of his art, an art that mourned the failed revolutions of 1848 and 1871. Baudelaire, Heine, Flaubert and Herzen all reflected these bloody defeats as well. Baudelaire, the author of “La Fleurs de Mal,' took part in the 1848 revolt, manned a barricade and escaped the slaughter. But Baudelaire was also an anti-Semite, reflecting the Janus-faced nature of this unstable 'declasse' artistic strata. This strata eventually produced revolutionaries like Breton and outright fascists like Celine and Marinetti. As Traverso points out Marx, Benjamin, Lenin and Trotsky, along with Greenwich Village's John Reed, all lived unstable 'bohemian' lives for a long time.

Colonialism and Imperialism

Traverso places an emphasis on how Marx's situation in Europe in the 1800s conditioned his world-view. While Marx understood capitalism and traced the roots of colonialism, he was not the theorist of imperialism and the revolutionary role of national-democratic struggles as was Lenin. Marx was critical of Toussaint l'Overture, the Mexican Revolution's Zapata and Villa and Latin America's Simon Bolivar. These had to wait for later Marxists to trace their emancipatory role or to lead national-liberation and anti-dictatorial struggles. He makes the point that Marx's concept of an unchanging 'Asiatic mode of production' was an approximation regarding relatively unknown economies to Europeans, mostly based on Morgan's work. Later Marxists have refined that analysis of early production economies. Traverso, a French academic, does not believe that capital played a revolutionary role in developing the forces of production. What role did it play then? A continuation of feudalism? Marx excoriated colonialism over its violent and exploitative 'primitive accumulation of capital' in Ireland, in India, in Peru and the slave economy of the U.S. Yet why this discussion is in a book on 'left-wing melancholia' I do not know.

The connection seems to be the development of 'Western Marxism” (a misnomer) and post-colonial theory. The Frankfurt School, in the face of the triumph of bureaucracy in the USSR, advent of fascism in Germany and Italy and the decay of the European Left reflected a retreat from 'classical' Marxism into a cultural refuge. Their product is what the Republicans call 'cultural Marxism.' Similarly “post-colonial theory' grew out of opposition to classical Marxism based on the collapse of the Soviet bureaucracies.  Absent any class and economic analysis, post-colonialism diverted the struggle against capitalism into an ethnic conflict, even when using the term 'intersectional.' The two – post-colonial theory and 'Western' Marxism - finally united in the university academy, a fusion we live with to this day. I guess this is melancholy as theory. It also has the smell of revolutionary defeat.

Traverso looks at the sadness of Benjamin and Adorno in the face of the twin defeats of the 1940s, fascism and the brutal bureaucracy in the USSR. They argued over jazz, over Surrealism, over culture, over how to defeat fascism, over capitalism. Benjamin thought Marxism had to become 'messianic' – a Red version of liberation, a religio-secular movement. Traverso then moves on to Daniel Bensaid, a younger French Trotskyist involved in May-June 1968, who later played a role as a bridge between different Marxist currents. Bensaid embraced both a utopian vision and Benjamin's messianic method - or something like that according to Traverso. This is the kind of vague direction that makes you yearn for 'classic' Marxism.

At the end Traverso has no answer to Left melancholia, so this is purely an analysis of the present and near past and nothing else. In its own way it is an academic product of that tendency. Not that there is nothing to mourn about. But as Joe Hill pointed out: “Mourn but Organize!”

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “One Way Street” (Benjamin); “Did Someone Say Totalitarianism?”(Zizek); “The Melancholia of the Working Class,” “How to Read a History Book,” “How Will Capitalism End?” “A Walk Through Paris,” “Marxist Criticism of the Bible,” “Transatlantic,” “Marxist Theory of Art.”

May Day Books has many volumes on Left cultural and theoretical writing. Educate yourself!  I got this from the UGA Library.

Red Frog / February 22, 2024

The Carceral State of Florida

 “The Nickel Boys” by Colson Whitehead, 2019

This is a true fiction story based on a state boys 'reform' school in Marianna, Florida in the Florida panhandle. The place was called the Arthur Dozier School for Boys at the time, but here it is named the Nickel School. It was established in 1900 and closed in 2011 due to overwhelming problems. Like the Christian/Canadian Govt. indigenous boarding schools in Canada and the U.S., or the Catholic/Irish Govt. Madeleine Laundries / Asylums in Ireland, bodies and bones were found in unmarked graves on the school grounds. You can still look at the remains of the school on Google Maps, see it's most notorious building and locate its official cemetery off in the woods. 

The key character is Elwood, a 17 year old high school student. He's a bright, dark-skinned boy from Tallahassee who gets caught in a stolen car while he's hitch-hiking to attend a college course. He's sent to Nickel as a car thief even though the driver was the thief. It's 1963 or so and the U.S. legal system, especially in Florida, is racist and ridiculous. So what does Elwood learn in his time at Nickel?

He meets a street-smart friend, Turner. He learns that the education there is a joke. After he tries to break up a fight, he learns that vicious corporal punishment is administered in a small storage shed called the 'White House.' The White House is where torture and beatings are administered under the loud whir of an industrial fan. He is beaten bloody. He learns that medical care consists of aspirin and aspirin only. He finds out that state goods for the school are sold to local businesses by the managers of the school and that kid's labor is loaned out to various local big-wig business people for free. He understands that several are killed for standing up to the top boss or escaping and later, secretly buried after being taken 'out back.' He learns that some boys are raped in closets by staff or other boys; some stuck in sweat-boxes as punishment – one dying. Tiny rooms at the top of the dorms become isolation cells. He finds out that the schools' products – bricks, harvested food and a print shop – are profitable for the state, while the boys are paid nothing. He learns how to hide his feelings and curb any visible instinct to rebel or help.

The 'white house' at Dozier / Nickel

At the time Elwood attends, the school is segregated by skin color, as its still Jim Crow time. 600 boys are incarcerated there, of all skin colors - but the darker got it worst. After his ordeal, Whitehead tells the supposed story of Elwood in New York where he meets and hears about some other former boys from Nickel or places like it. They are dead in Vietnam or former army, alcoholic and drugged, unable to hold a job, violent or troubled in many ways. Elwood seems to be doing the best.

How does Elwood try to get out? He rejects 'loving thy enemy' preached by Dr. King. Instead he writes to the Chicago Defender and takes notes of all the goings on – especially the embezzling of food. He believes the white Florida state inspectors will take heed and he won't get caught. After all, it's the civil rights movement and he's inspired by letters like the one from King's Birmingham jail cell. But inspiration isn't enough. Hey muthafucka, it's the Jim Crow South, as (Nat) Turner might have told him.

Whitehead ignored the white boys in the school, betraying a bit of Black nationalism in his writing.  The only good white person is one of the staff who hauls Elwood and Turner around town to deliver stolen goods to local businessmen.  While the dark-skinned kids get it far worse, the light-skinned kids were abused too, given the testimony. This is the method of racism in a class society, as both are the real targets.  White rednecks, wiggers, crackers, hillbillies - all were also looked down and made poor by Jim Crow and the present South.

Eventually, after reporting by the Tampa Bay Times, the school becomes a national scandal full of gruesome discoveries. It is perhaps worse than a Dickensian orphanage and work house, but also a commentary on the incarceration state in the U.S. that is still going on. It is important that this story is not just located in the distant past, but was uncovered somewhat recently. So many current historical anti-racist novels only center slavery or Jim Crow without touching the present. After all, the 'present' is the thing that we deal with now and ignoring it is a form of safely historicizing social reality, of shoving it into the past, of distancing. This is a riveting personal story of two boys, based on historical truth. It will keep you glued to your reading chair.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “The South – Jim Crow & It's Afterlives” (A. Reed); “The New Jim Crow” (Alexander); “Caste” (Wilkerson); “Rustin,” “No Name in the Street” (Baldwin); “Are Prisons Obsolete?” (A. Davis); “Selma” (Duvernay); “Prison Strike Against Modern Slavery,” “Just Mercy,” Slavery by Another Name.”

May Day Books has many leftish fiction books and books on Jim Crow.  I got this from the Athens GA public library.

Red Frog / February 19, 2024

Who Do You Owe?

 Debt, Prices & Credit:

The U.S. Blue Collar Recession

1. Auto loan debt: $1.607 Trillion - Q4/2023

2. Avg. auto loan outstanding: $23,809 - Q3/2023

3. Avg. New Pickup Truck price: $60,000 - Q3/2023

4. Avg. New Car price: $49,388 - Q2/2023

5. Median U.S. House price: $387,600 - Q4/2023

6. Mortgage debt: $12.252 Trillion - Q4/2023

7. Derivatives held on Wall Street & elsewhere: $268 Trillion - Q3/2023

8. Student debt: $1.601 Trillion - Q4/2023

9. Credit Card debt: $1.129 Trillion - Q4/2023

10. Total household debt: $17.3 Trillion - Q3/2023

11. U.S. Government debt: $34.233 Trillion - February 14, 2024

12. U.S. Corporate debt: $3.1 Trillion - Q3/2022

13. Medical Debt: $220 Billion, Q4/2021 - 22% over $5,000 2023

14. Avg. insurance price for houses: $1,678 yr. - Feb, 2024

15. Avg. insurance price for cars: $1,982 yr. - Feb. 2024

16. Avg. Rent: $1,372 mth. - Q2/2023

17. Median House Price: $417,700 - Q4/2023

18. Home Foreclosures: Up 9% from 2022, up 193% from 2021

19. Commercial property foreclosures: Data? A 'bad outlook.'

20. Car Debt Delinquent: 7.7% - Q4 /2023

21. Car repossessions: Up 20.4% - Q4/2023

22. Credit Card Debt Delinquent: 8.5% - Q4/2023

23. Commercial Chap. 11 Bankruptcies: 6,569 - Q4/2023

24. Personal Bankruptcies: 419,550 – Q4/2023

The Debt Bomb

Note the number of derivative debts and bets – 10 times larger than the whole world GDP economy. This is also part of the 'Snowball' crash in the Chinese stock markets, the shadow banking shortfalls, as well as the severe real estate recession in China.  This is a crisis for the large capitalist sector in the Chinese economy.  The Snowball crash is explained by Ellen Brown in Scheerpost: Chinese Market Crash  5 large investment banks hold most of these derivative bets here in the U.S. according to Wall Street on Parade.

Even buying a new car now is prohibitive, and that has always been a key 'American right.' Nearly all of these numbers are at all time highs except house prices, which have fallen in some areas due to high interest and insurance rates. Government CoVid and recession funding slowed debts like medical and student for awhile. Some figures are delayed or hidden. Yet now trying to buy a new or used car, rent, buy a house or get sick is going up again. The debt levels on some items will never be re-paid – like derivatives, federal, corporate debt or even mortgage, credit card, medical and student debt. I suspect the 'corporate debt' figure is a great undercount.  It all adds up to a very shaky capitalist economic structure, but also a vast burden on the working class in all its aspects – the low-skilled, youth, minorities, women, old people. This can't be fixed by some patchwork legislation or tweaks. Debt is how workers have afforded to buy things in the U.S. - but this kind of spending has limits beyond which capital has no plan except immiseration.  

Michael Roberts has pointed out that 'debt,' speculation and recession are signs that the ordinary profit rate based on exploiting labor is not enough to float the capitalists.  In other words profits are falling right now.

So ... open the books, social control of the Federal Reserve, cancel debts, nationalize the banks, outlaw derivatives, social ownership of land, introduce a real 'sharing' economy, limit and control interest rates, free education, public ownership of housing, bring back Glass-Steagall, revoke Taft-Hartley and CFMA 2000, fight climate change through transitional steps towards full social control of production.

Sources: Investopedia, Federal Reserve, Wall Street on Parade, Cars.com, Kelly Blue Book, BLS, Federal Debt Clock, Bankrate, Moodys, Reuters, Guardian, Statistica, Car Price.com, Petersen Study on Health Care.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “The Debt System,” “Debt & Capital,” “Debt – the First 5,000 Years” (Graeber); “The Debt Trap,” “J is for Junk Economics” (Hudson); “Modern De Facto Slavery,” “The Deficit Myth”(Kelton); “Liar's Poker” (M. Lewis); “Bad Money” (K. Phillips).

Red Frog

February 16, 2024

The Substitution of Individual Justice for Social Justice

 “True Detective,”Season 1” by Nic Pizzolatto, 2014

Much ink has been spilled this year on True Detective, Night Country, Season 4 because Jodi Foster and other women star in a cold, dark Alaska town haunted by the murders of indigenous women and a bunch of ostensible scientists. The Tuttle Corporation and the spiral symbol carry over from Season 1 in this season. So far it's weaker than Season 1 and a chunk too full of shamanic, magical bullshit. It's just not enough to stick woman cops into the mix, put some black lines on chins and sprinkle it with Inuit mysticism. The series Alaska Daily and the film Wind River actually made a better case about the frequent murders of indigenous females.  The last episode is a disaster of disconnected horrors, topped by a wishful bucket of revenge.  Pizzolatto himself called it 'sloppy.'  At least Alaska natives get in on Season 4.  That's its only plus. Anyway ...

Rust drinkin' Lone Star

True Detective, Season 1 featured Woody Harrelson as Marty, a violent, lazy good 'ol boy cop that cheats on his wife but is at bottom a decent guy. The standout is Mathew McConaughey, hard as that is to say given the scene chewing he's done in so many films. This time he plays Rust, a depressed philosophic loner who's an expert at solving murders and getting real confessions. His switch to being a long-haired alcoholic part way through is riveting.

There are the usual amount of cop/detective tropes in this series, designed to get us to identify with or feel for the cops: 1. A troubled marriage for Marty and too much alcohol for Rust – i.e. flawed cops. 2. Dead, mutilated or kidnapped women & children. 3. In the key chase scene Rust goes it alone – of course. 4. Obstructive cop bosses trying to derail the investigation. 5. Rust is the typical TV genius cop, like no real ones. 6. Murders staged in lonely, rural places – in this case Louisiana swamps, bayous, fields or woods. 7. Fraught buddy cop relationship that gets better between Rust and Marty. 8. Overly lengthy, too complicated case that wears on itself.

This one introduces another familiar cliché – the creepy, barefoot swamp peon with mental problems.  It also highlights the most common cliché – a rich family, in this case the Tuttles - one of whom is the governor, another running the top fundamentalist sect and schools in the state, and behind it all their large capitalist Tuttle conglomerate. The Tuttle clan have massive pull among politicians, press and police, and are also evidently ritualistic abusers and perhaps killers of children. It is as if their exploitative and corrupt authoritarianism gets translated into secret murderous pedophilia - their picture of Dorian Grey. They get off scot free behind their symbolic animal masks like the rich nearly always do, while the peons pay. The masks might remind one of Squid Game where the rich killers also wear animal masks.

Of most interest is Rust's atheism and the connection between religion and child abuse. Given the Southern Baptist, Catholic Church and Boy Scout child sex abuse waves, this is not fiction. But I do not recall a chief character making atheism such a central part of his point of view. “Sentient meat” is Rust's term for humans – i.e. we're just conscious animals. Characters in other series briefly mention they don't believe in God, or don't go to church, or something like that. Then this comment competes with scenes of conservative, overdone religious marriages, funerals and churches like everyone in TV U.S.A. is in the Sicilian Mafia living in 1950. Rust pounds his atheism to the point where Marty cautions him over and over not to offend the Bible Belt sensibilities of the rubes. Rust is a 'pure' atheist who does not link religion to class or oppression, as most of the believers we see are poor, working-class folks. He treats them kindly nevertheless, but not the preacher head of the fundamentalist schools. This considerate treatment of hated atheism is rare in the conventional zone of cop shows. This season ranks above other 'detective' stories if only for the characterizations, Rust's weird circular philosophy, his atheism and the embedded anti-rich politics that allow it to rise above the Louisiana tropic of tropes.

What is not rare is the repetition of the 'evil corporation' theme in so many movies and streaming series. It seems to have almost no impact on the actual political situation either because only a select class, 'liberal' or educated group watches this stuff or the divide between culture and actual politics is canyon-like, with viewers segmenting the two in their experience. It becomes more like an 'in group' wink of shared knowledge. It clearly implies that 'cultural struggle' is nearly always inadequate to actually changing anything. Will Season 4 change anything about male chauvinism, racism, murdered tribal members or toxic mining? No, not in the real world.

Trope Bingo for your next detective screenplay or viewing:

1. A conflicted lead cop or detective, preferably divorced, with alcohol, drug or emotional problems.

2. Or perhaps he/she is near retirement, but needs to make 'one last case.'

3. The lead cop is always a kind of genius, no matter what.

4. If with children, a problematic teenage daughter who never listens.

5. If married, a bad relationship, partly due to the job.

6. If female, a hard-bitten but kind feminist.

7. Dead, kidnapped, imprisoned or mutilated women or girls or children are the victims.

8. Murders preferably located in lonely areas or rural communities - 'exotic' locations preferred.

9. Nearly all witnesses lie or omit key information repeatedly.

10. Witnesses that are always too busy to answer questions.

11. Many red herrings and suspects.

12. A boss who obstructs the investigation for either political or CYA reasons.

13. A forced police partner relationship that is fraught but gradually gets better.

14. There will be autopsies with victims lying on tables with a 'V' cut.

15. Always send the lead detective out alone on perilous assignments.

16. There can never be too many complications.

17. The crime is many times connected to money or a sociopath of some kind.

18. The actual killer is revealed in the last minute

19. A round at the bar is required.

20. The substitution of solving an individual murder for broader social justice.

P.S. - This season was probably based on more than 3 dozen female bodies found south of Houston, north of Galveston along I45.  Locally one of the areas where bodies were found became known as the killing fields.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “detective,” “Squid Game,” “Trapped and Detective Series in General,” “This Rancid Mill,” “Streaming Run-Down,” “Redbreast,” “Gorky Park” (Smith); “Comrade Detective,” “Blood Lake,” “Karl Marx, Private Eye,” “Red Harvest” (Hammett).

Some of the books listed above are available at May Day.

The Cultural Marxist / February 13, 2024

The Ride to the Sea

 “Silent Cavalry – How Union Soldiers From Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta and Then Got Written Out of History” by Howell Raines, 2023 - (Part 2 of 2)

Confederate and neo-Confederate sources repeatedly claimed the U.S.A. First Alabama Cavalry was undistinguished. Raines shows otherwise. He tries to liken their role to the 20^th Maine on Little Round Top in the battle of Gettysburg but they're different situations. The Alabama Federal unit was quickly created by Union General Buell, and some soldiers were loaned to the budding spy system of General Dodge. They helped as spies in the siege of Vicksburg, the seizure of Chattanooga and the siege of Atlanta, as well as providing cavalry screens for the armies. Their local knowledge and accents helped immensely, as well as their courage. Dodge had spies inside southern cities and roaming the roads looking for Confed units and northern Alabama men were key. 1,000s of black freedmen went north and were used and recruited by the Union too – 13 were even on the roster of the 1^st Alabama.

Nearly every Union general had good things to say about the regiment and for a few who didn't, they were said out of temporary ignorance or CYA. The regiment was eventually split into 3 parts. They became outriders for garrisons in major cities combating sabotage; patrolling all along the Tennessee River valley in places like Florence against units of Secesh cavalry under Morgan, Wheeler and Forrest; and with Sherman's march through Atlanta to Savannah, then to Virginia. Constant brushfire guerrilla battles between Union and Confed units went on for most of the war in northern Alabama too, so you might say that area never really seceded. Like eastern Tennessee and the rest of mountainous Appalachia, Confederate control was nominal to non-existent. This extended to the swamps of western Florida and southeast Georgia and the farms of eastern Texas, which became no-go areas for Confederate parties trying to round-up recruits and hogs to butcher.

The loyal Alabamians participated in the key battles of Stones River, Brice's Crossroads, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, Resaca, Kennesaw Mountain, Atlanta and on Sherman's march. Upon leaving Chattanooga Sherman made a group of 1^st Alabama his personal bodyguard for the headquarters group! Above Resaca near Dalton, Georgia they were running point. They had a chance to help destroy the Confederate army when they and others penetrated Snake Creek Gap on the Confederate western flank, but were erroneously ordered to stop by McPherson. According to Raines, at the battle of Allatoona Pass above Atlanta they, along with a Kansas cavalry unit, rescued a Union garrison force besieged by Hood. This battle is where the phrase 'hold the fort' comes from, though there is disputation about this.

While Raines mentions the burning of Atlanta in his title, he has no evidence cavalry soldiers were burning rail roundhouses and the like in the city. That's just 'click-bait.' However one of his themes is how aggressive these southern Unionists were against the slave forces. They could have burned Atlanta and would have enjoyed it!

Marchin' & Ridin' to the Sea

For their skills, the First Alabama were chosen by Sherman to ride point in the right, southern column of Sherman's 'march to the sea' – Blair's XXVII Corps. They swept away Confederates, secured bridges, towns and ferries, did recon, appropriated or destroyed military hardware and enjoyed decimating some plantation properties. They were part of a rowdy group that occupied the former Georgia state capitol in Milledgeville. Prim and proper Blair tried to tell them to back off in a letter to Sherman, but Sherman did nothing. After all, gleeful foraging was part of the drill. Confederate raiders back home were abusing the people of north Alabama, their kin, at the same time and they knew this. Southern-fried historian Shelby Foote noted that not one instance of rape was reported on the whole march, so there's that.

Sherman on the road to Savannah

Their behavior reminds me of a character from the modern South, Madalyn Murray O'Hair. The way to raise the most prominent atheist in the U.S. is to stick them in some Bible-thumping state like Texas. So in this war. An anti-slavery Georgia Unionist, George Snelling, born near Milledgeville and Sherman's liaison with the First Alabama, directed Sherman to the plantation of a general in the Confederate Army, Howell Cobb. Cobb was a pompous politician in the U.S. House, a main speaker for secession in Montgomery and an advocate of Andersonville. His plantation was completely looted by Union soldiers and slaves. If you find no justice in this, you're not paying attention. Maybe Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Greg Abbott will someday suffer this fate if they secede.

The First Alabama's role in Kilpatrick's U.S.A. cavalry was to block Joe Wheeler's rebel cavalry along the route to Savannah. They succeeded in keeping him at bay in constant skirmishing. They forded the major Oconee River at Ball's Ferry in southeastern Georgia and attacked Confed forces, then were forced back across the river. But the Union took the crossing that day, constructing bridges and the army moved on. After the easy reduction of Fort McAllister south of the city, they led the victory parade down Savannah's main street due to their service, contradicting the Lost Cause myth that they had no role in the fighting. Heading north, they routed Wheeler at Barnwell, South Carolina, sending his cavalrymen into a desperate scatter. At Monroe's Crossing, South Carolina their small command repulsed a night attack by Johnston massive forces, turning it into a victory with the help of a well-placed cannon. Reaching Raleigh and the surrender of Johnston's army, Sherman ordered them home because of the constant fighting still going on in north Alabama.

1900 Reunion of 1st AL Cavalry USA

The Lost Causation

Raines goes into the Lost Cause bastion of Tuscaloosa, AL, home to the University of Alabama, its 'crimson tide' and its 'Bama Rush,' a college now full of rich frat and sorority brats from Atlanta and Dallas-Fort Worth. The local post-war Tuscaloosa paper was run by a sociopathic aristocrat, Ryland Randolph, who did more to promote Klan Klaverns than Forrest. Later the University was a hotbed of Lost Cause historiography, which Raines defines as not asking obvious questions and ignoring information that opposed their thesis - and sometimes outright lying or destruction of documents. He analyzes various Lost Cause journalists, politicians and academics across the South - men like Richmond's Edward Pollard and General Jubal Early and places like Vanderbilt in Nashville and Polk's University of the South in Sewanee, TN.

Pollard, a vicious aristocratic imbecile, wrote the book “The Lost Cause” in 1866 and set the tone for 100 years of historical fiction. For Raines it consists of 3 theses: 1. The “culturally superior, racially homogeneous white” South lost because of northern industrial might and the crude 'mongrels' of the North. 2. The need to win the continuing war by maintaining white dominance through “recalcitrance, legal trickery and political deals.” 3. The South didn't lose so much as was misled by the incompetent Jeff Davis. Attach the Robert E. Lee cult and you've got yourself a real shit-story.

Early, an incompetent Confederate general on the first day of Gettysburg, a hesitator of the first order in his raid on D.C. and the loser of the 1865 Shenandoah Valley campaign, continued pushing the myth. His blame was on Longstreet, the most competent of Lee's generals. According to Raines Early was actually the central, drunken figure in solidifying this racist, nationalist Southern story. Raines has found evidence that Dunning worked with the disorganized Alabama archives to make it “a Rebel Shrine.” Raines makes hilarious fun of a broad array of rich and powerful locals here, so its an enjoyable romp – but still perhaps a too-deep dip into Alabama politics for most. Raines describes the refutation of William Dunning's Lost Cause mythology by recent historians Vann Woodward, John Hope Franklin and Eric Foner, and the rediscovery of W.E.B. Du Bois.

In 1909 at the Waldorf Astoria the 'American' Historical Association met and both Dunning and Du Bois were there. Du Bois wrote a paper about the benefits of Reconstruction; the Dunning side presented their racist, Jim Crow angle about the terror it inflicted on rich white people, a period of “Negro misrule.” Du Bois spoke of the vast increases in education, advances in public transportation, fairer taxation and economic development, not to mention the spread of democracy in ethnically diverse southern legislatures. Dunning chose to ignore Du Bois, as did the idiot NY press, while printing the vilifications of “an unreconstructed crank” from Alabama named Chisholm. Birmingham's steel money and the Walker Percys paid for the Lost Cause for another 60 years and this included a long family friendship with Shelby Foote. As a 30-year old Foote wanted to blow up the first Union memorial he saw, in Arizona. And there we have it – later delivered right to your TV screen by Ken Burns. While still disdaining blacks, Foote finally rejected segregation around 1963. But these are reasons why Foote didn't tell Burns about the First Alabama, a fact Raines uncovers after years of research.

The Afterlives of the First

Coming back to a vicious, racist state government full of Confederate sympathizers for many years, the men of the First Alabama USA were re-tormented after the fall of Reconstruction in the 1870s.  They were not just read out of history or forgotten.  Raines spends no time on this part of the story however. He's more interested in his family story, the bastardization of history by shabby academics, the violent clowns of Alabama, a detailed semi-history of Birmingham, the reactionary literary aristocracy of the Nashville Agrarians and the Fellowship of Southern Writers and lastly the Lost Causeite Dixie Brahmins who looked down on Negroes and white 'red necks' alike. All in all a book that takes many colorful and chatty detours in its story of a legendary Union regiment from the South.  

The basic impact of this book is the manifest number of characters in the South - through history - who promote idiotic, violent, untruthful and corrupt ideas on a regular basis, up to and including present Trump supporters. The South will rise again all right - under proletarian, progressive and socialist groups who remember the First Alabama's resistance to racism and planter capital.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use the blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these words: “Silent Cavalry – Part 1,” “The South vs. South” (Parts 1&2); “The Civil War in the United States” (Marx-Engels); "Why the South Lost the Civil War," "Lincoln" (Spielberg); "Struggle & Progress" (Jacobin); "The Neo-Confederate States," "Blockaders, Refugees and Contrabands," "The Bloody Shirt," "Guerrillas, Unionists and Violence on the Confederate Home Front," "The Free State of Jones," "Andersonville Prison," "James-Younger Gang," "Southern Cultural Nationalism," "The Civil War in Florida," "A Blaze of Glory," "The State of Jones," “Monument,” "Drivin' Dixie Down," “A Confederacy of Dunces,” “U.S. Army Bases Named After Confederates” or the words “Civil War,” "John Brown" or “slavery."

For May Day Books - where every month is black history month

And I got it at the Athens, GA library.

The Cranky Yankee  / Feb. 10, 2024

Alabama Unionist 'Hillbillies'

 “Silent Cavalry – How Union Soldiers From Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta and Then Got Written Out of History” by Howell Raines, 2023 - (Part 1 of 2)

This book is one of a large number of 'revisionist' histories that overturn the “Lost Cause” mythology that was prevalent in Alabama and the U.S. until the '60s and '70s. Evidence of the mostly white Unionist First Alabama Cavalry was hidden by local Alabama state historians and William A. Dunning, the leading Lost Cause historian in the 1920s. He taught and wrote at that bastion of 'Yankee' egg-headedness - Columbia University in New York City. Dunning's American Historical Society's version blocked W.E.B. Du Bois' accurate take on civil war history for many years. Columbia finally apologized for their 'white supremacist historiography' (their words) in 2019. They might have been talking, in part, about Dunning.

The Jim Crow Alabama State Department of Archives & History expunged Unionist Civil War, along with Reconstructionist 'scalawag' and populist Alabama history too. Even in 2018 Raines couldn't find anything useful there. Ken Burns and Shelby Foote never mentioned the 1^st Alabama Cavalry U.S.A. in their conservative, 'nostalgic' 1990 documentary series on the Civil War.  Foote, a "semi-closeted Lost Causer," as Raines calls him, had time to call former slave dealer, future leader of the KKK and butcher Nathan Bedford Forrest a 'genius' equal to Lincoln.

Raines is here to set the record straight as he eviscerates the self-pity of the “Alabama inferiority complex.” He names the names of the various twisted characters, thugs and intellectual frauds in Alabama who protect the state from outside influences. As he puts it: “...intellectual dishonesty of a particularly flagrant sort is a thematic feature across the decades of public life in Alabama...” Much of the book is his deep search through documents, books and interviews trying to piece the story together - in the process combating Dunning, Wallacite and Trumpist neo-Confederates. He zig-zags between the home front and the war, which is at times irritating. Raines spends time on the many characters involved, along with the illicit cotton trade between northern and southern military units. The book is littered with colorful insults from both sides. The Confederates denigrated the Alabama mountain folk as disloyal low caste anti-war 'hillbillies.' You see, 'white trash' is not just a classist northern insult.

Raines instead seeks his own anti-racist, anti-slavery roots, sometimes to excess. Some of his extended 'hillbilly' family lived in northern Alabama. One ancestor worked with the First Alabama U.S.A. and walked all the way back from South Carolina after a Johnston's army surrendered in Raleigh. One more distant relative died in Andersonville while others were killed in battle fighting for the Union. Raines tells stories of his youth, his father, mother, grandfathers and grandmothers in the northern hill country and steel town of Birmingham. His family and area were influenced by “Jeffersonian Democracy” and the Church of God, which operated integrated churches and revivals in Birmingham and northern Alabama even during Jim Crow. They had been in north Alabama during the Civil War too, which shows how religious ideology influences communities, not just economics. The non-segregationist Primitive Baptists played the same role for “The Free State of Jones” in southeast Mississippi.

In the 1890s this northern Alabama area between Florence on the Tennessee and Birmingham supported Populist Party politicians who appealed to all skin colors and were for 'sharing the wealth' and ending convict leasing. Their candidate was defeated statewide by a famous example of vote fraud – stuffed ballot boxes in mostly black southern counties where some African-Americans could still vote. In 1902 all black voting was basically made illegal in Alabama. Raines as a child experienced the area's rural poverty. The TVA finally got electric power to Winston County in 1937. But it continued with mule-driven plows and the lacks of electric light, telephone service, sewage systems and paved roads even into the 1960s.

First AL Cav.USA led by Genl. Spencer

The 1^st Alabama Cavalry U.S.A

79 of 100 delegates to the Alabama secession vote were slave-owners, as a popular vote for secession would have lost. The vote 'for' was just 61 to 39. After these delegates voted to secede in 1861, many men in northern Alabama were 'lying out' to avoid conscription, or heading north to find Union soldiers. Some found the beginnings of the 1st Alabama Cavalry like Raines' ancestors.

Across north Alabama an organizer named Chris Sheats roused Unionist and anti-war feeling, with big meetings held at Jim Looney's tavern in Winston County. The first rally drew 2,500 people, one of the largest in the South. 2,066-2,678 men were recruited into the 1st Alabama and other units from these mountainous and wooded counties unsuited to slave plantation agriculture. His family's Winston County wanted to secede from Alabama when Alabama left the Union, so some called it 'The Free State of Winston.' The unit recruited from 18 Appalachian counties, a thing Raines says was hidden by local Lost Cause historians. The cavalry gathered at Huntsville and Corinth after these cities were taken by the Union in April and May 1862. There are still graveyards in several counties where the dead are listed, not as 'C.S.A.' but as 'U.S.A.' This movement spread so at one point Unionists in northern Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee suggested a 'Nickajack' Republic, named after a lake in the Tennessee River valley just west of Chattanooga. The First Alabama fought alongside units from Missouri, Kansas, Tennessee and Kentucky, not just from farther North.

In 1862 the local secessionist authorities in Montgomery, basing themselves on Richmond's Partisan Ranger and Conscription laws, instituted a reign of terror against north Alabamians to either impress draft resistors, arrest refusers or kill them. A first local sweep of the Home Guard was repulsed by armed Unionists. The second, larger military sweep drove locals north into the arms of the Union Army or draft dodgers farther into the hills and caves. Known Unionists were pointed out by a prominent local informer and assassinated, arrested or forced into the C.S.A. Horses, cattle, pigs and chickens were seized from known Unionists and their families left destitute and starving.

Murders even happened long after the war as part of political feuds engendered by the UnCivil War when neighbor killed or informed on neighbor. This campaign of murder and intimidation of Unionist draft dodgers, deserters and resistors occurred throughout the South, as documented by the Southern Claims Commission, an arm of Reconstruction. Mountain people later responded to the Confederate violence in kind. Raines suggests that Northern units under General Grenville Dodge developed the tactic of attacking civilian infrastructure useful to the Confederacy – factories, bridges, rail, secessionist plantations and crops. He thinks this strategy was later adopted by Sherman in Georgia and secessionist South Carolina to make the Confederacy 'howl.' 

End of Part 1 of the review.

P.S. - If you think Civil War history is irrelevant to today's political situation, 'bless your heart.' States Rights Constitutional nonsense is still one of the key motivators of anti-labor reaction and racism in the U.S. It was also the legal claim made by the Confederacy. “States' Rights” are embedded in parts of the archaic U.S. Constitution, the Senate, the electoral system and the court system. It has created a ridiculous patchwork of states, counties, cities and towns, laws and powers benefiting reactionary and depopulated areas.

P.P.S. - A book recommended is 'Hammer & Hoe” about Communist organizing among black and white workers in the steel industry and farms around Birmingham during the 1930s – a newer subject Raines doesn't bring up in his discussion of censorship in Alabama.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use the blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these words: “The South vs. South” (Parts 1&2); “The Civil War in the United States” (Marx-Engels); "Why the South Lost the Civil War," "Lincoln" (Spielberg); "Struggle & Progress" (Jacobin); "The Neo-Confederate States," "Blockaders, Refugees and Contrabands," "The Bloody Shirt," "Guerrillas, Unionists and Violence on the Confederate Home Front," "The Free State of Jones," "Andersonville Prison," "James-Younger Gang," "Southern Cultural Nationalism," "The Civil War in Florida," "A Blaze of Glory," "The State of Jones," “Monument,” "Drivin' Dixie Down," “A Confederacy of Dunces,” “U.S. Army Bases Named After Confederates” or the words “Civil War,” "John Brown" or “slavery."

For May Day Books - where every month is black history month

And I got it at the Athens, GA library.

The Cranky Yankee / February 7, 2024