Political Philosophy: Part Four

 The fourth in my continuing series of posts explaining my worldview. This post focuses on the progressive content of the American republican tradition.

Part Four: Locofocos and log cabins: the egalitarian tradition in the United States

The idea that the American Revolution made little change to the social structure of the Thirteen Colonies is a common one, and an incorrect one. While the top layers of political power may have been monopolised by a merchant and land-owning elite which was prominent before the Revolution, the 1780s and 1790s witnessed a flourishing of social capital among ordinary Americans. Despite lacking the right to vote, working class people (which in those days meant skilled artisans) organised mechanics’ societies and Democratic-Republican clubs to further their interests, make their voices heard, and disseminate political writings. When members of the elite such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were elected to the White House, they did so thanks to the campaigning and propaganda of groups such as these.

The Democratic-Republican clubs supported the party of Jefferson, but went further than him in their advocacy of egalitarian principles, their views often being closer to those of Thomas Paine. They served a similar social and educative function to Britain’s radical schools and to Catalonia’s ateneus, but as with every form of popular self-organisation, the elites felt threatened and set about destroying them. The Washington Administration blamed the clubs for inciting the Whiskey Rebellion, just as the British government was trying a number of radical leaders in the treason trials of 1794.

Although the American Revolution (unfortunately) didn’t cross the Atlantic, the Industrial Revolution crossed it from the other direction. Between 1815 and 1850, the United States experienced what historians term the ‘Market Revolution’, in which a previously agrarian economy was industrialised, marketised, and made more unequal with the help of transport and infrastructure. Not all Americans were pleased with these developments – partisans of the Democratic-Republican tradition believed wage labour and the factory system to be contrary to egalitarian principles and profit-making to be a breach of republican ideas about civic virtue. They also made much of the pork-barrelling of certain Whig politicians and the concentration of wealth in institutions such as President Andrew Jackson’s bête noire, the Second Bank of the United States.

The Locofocos must surely be one of the most unfairly overlooked political formations in American history. They were a group of hardcore Jacksonians in New York who broke from the regular (Tammany Hall-controlled) Democratic Party in 1835, and who served for the next few years as the radical wing of the egalitarian, anti-bank tendency, both inside and outside the party. The issues on which they agitated are largely forgotten now, and modern observers would doubtless view them as libertarians due to their free-market rhetoric. They were, however, advocates of measures such as public education, but opposed state regulation of commerce (particularly the issuance of paper currency) as they saw it as always favouring the capitalists. Their support came from the city’s working class, and their leadership partially overlapped with the activists of the city’s early union movement. Like most Americans of their time, they viewed plutocracy as a product of state intervention in the economy, not the natural outcome of market forces.

Historian Sean Wilentz has written of an egalitarian thread in American republicanism, traceable back to Jefferson (who wrote that inequality caused “much misery to the bulk of mankind”), and which was grounded in the labour theory of value and in a belief in the impossibility of equal political relations between people who held vastly different levels of wealth. While observing the usual caveats about that thread not being extended to women and racial minorities, we can see its influence in radical and reformist movements throughout pre-Civil War America. Its ideas formed part of the rhetoric of the Jackson-era Democratic Party, working class movements, and abolitionists. (The latter often denounced slave-owners as aristocratic and parasitic on the producers of wealth.) This tradition continued to find its expression in progressive movements until the First World War. The Greenback and Populist parties, the Knights of Labor, and the Wobblies all used Jacksonian anti-wage labour rhetoric to attack the robber-baron capitalism of their own times. The Wobblies even harked back to 1776, calling their movement the ‘Continental Congress of the working class’.

To fully understand the egalitarian tradition described by Wilentz, we must compare it with modern American political rhetoric. The positions of both major parties on economic questions align with those of the Federalists and Whigs. Against the egalitarian, populist, and anti-monopoly rhetoric of the Jacksonians and unionists, Whig spokesmen argued that capital and enterprise were as worthy of respect as labour, that anyone could rise from poverty to start a business and live the American Dream™, and that egalitarian rhetoric was demagogic and divided Americans against each other. The Democratic and Republican parties of today make no attempt to challenge the prevailing Whiggish consensus, differing only in the extent to which the state should intervene; the shrill ‘class warfare’ slur which greets anything resembling egalitarian rhetoric, and the valorisation of ‘job creators’, would be very familiar to Jacksonians.

The other key difference between then and now is the link that was made between government intervention in the economy and inequality, the opposite of what is believed today. Wilentz dates the reversal to the first few decades after the Civil War, when the owners of the newly-emerging ‘trusts’ began to justify their monopoly control of entire industries as being the product of market forces, and the labour theory of value fell out of fashion. Since the rise of the Progressives and New Dealers, the energies of progressives has been spent trying to capture state power, in order to create what historian Arthur Schlesinger called ‘countervailing power’ against the corporate elite. The purpose of this series of posts, it should be clear by now, is to explain why those energies have been wasted. Perhaps what we need is a modern-day Locofoco movement.