Can’t have that, can we?
From the moment the first African captives arrived on these shores 400 years ago, this land offered white people of every station one ironclad guarantee. Enslaved people were not just property, nor just unpaid agricultural workers and house servants. They’d been assigned a permanent place on the lowest rung of the social ladder. No matter what misfortunes might befall whites, at least they weren’t Black. The New World offered Europeans not only economic opportunity but a guaranteed social floor below which they could not fall.
(Four hundred years later, women still struggle to break through a glass ceiling.)
For some reason, that was on my mind while making coffee. It was on Heather Cox Richardson’s last night in the context of Donald Trump’s comments Thursday night about immigrants taking “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs.” It’s a textbook case of the ruling-class, divide-and-dominate ploy from the cartoon above.
Richardson writes:
In U.S. history it has been commonplace for political leaders to try to garner power by warning their voters that some minority group is coming for their jobs. In the 1840s, Know-Nothings in Boston warned native-born voters about Irish immigrants; in 1862 and 1864, Democrats tried to whip up support by warning Irish immigrants that after Republicans fought to end enslavement, Black Americans would move north and take their jobs. In the 1870s, Californian Denis Kearney of the Workingman’s Party drew voters to his standard by warning that Chinese immigrants were taking their jobs and insisted: “The Chinese Must Go!”
As Tevye the milkman instructed, it’s a tradition, and not a new idea here:
“In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond told his colleagues in 1858. “That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill.”
Capital produced by the labor of mudsills would concentrate in the hands of the upper class, who would use it efficiently and intelligently to develop society. Their guidance elevated those weak-minded but strong-muscled people in the mudsill class, who were “happy, content, unaspiring, and utterly incapable, from intellectual weakness, ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations.”
Aspirations to sharing power, that is. Allow mudsills to vote and society would “be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided,” Hammond warned.
The only true way to look at the world was to understand that some people were better than others and had the right and maybe the duty, to rule. “I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are born equal’” Hammond wrote, and it was on this theory that some people are better than others that southern enslavers based their proposed new nation.
“Our new government is founded…upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth,” Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, told supporters.
That this vision for the country ran contrary to the one advanced in the Declaration (nominally, at least) was of no concern. Treating everyone as born equal would violate the implicit contract with whites guaranteed by Black enslavement. The ruling class always places property and contractual rights ahead of human rights.
But not Abraham Lincoln, Richardson reminds:
Arguments that some races are “inferior,” he said, would “rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and…transform this Government into a government of some other form.” The idea that it is beneficial for some people to be dominated by others, he said, is the argument “that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.”
[…]
He went on to tie the mudsill theory to the larger principles of the United States. “I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it, where will it stop,” he said. “If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out!” To cries of “No, no,” he concluded to cheers: “Let us stick to it then. Let us stand firmly by it.”
Ironically, ten years after Hammond’s speech, the defeated South was undergoing the sort of economic and social reconstruction he feared. The resistance led by the Ku Klux Klan ensured that Reconstruction would fail. It wasn’t race-hatred that drove them, I’d argue, as much as hatred of the idea that freed Blacks would share power as whites’ equals. That was a violation of the contract that guaranteed a social floor below which no white man, no matter how poor, could fall. Race is a part of that sentiment, but skin color has always been a handy shorthand for telling in any crowd just who’s who in the pecking order. The South had just fought and lost a devastating war to preserve that order. Even whites with no human property fought to preserve it.
If you can convince the lowest white man that he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll even empty his pockets for you. — Sen. Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas to Bill Moyers (1960)
The promise behind Trump’s pledge to make America “great again” is revealed once again in Trump’s warning that immigrants will take “Black” and “Hispanic” jobs. “Careful, that foreigner wants your cookie,” is his message to nonwhites. The coded message to his nearly all-white MAGA faithful is that, yes, there are still castes of people in this country that represent a social floor below which they can never fall. And Trump promises to guarantee that the mudsills stay there lest society “be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided.”
“Anyone who sees the world through such a lens is on the wrong side of history,” Richardson insists. More than that, they stand against the very idea behind the flag in which they drape themselves.
Remind them every chance you get.
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