The Struggle for Universal and Equal Rights in the United States
From the Civil War and Reconstruction to the New Left
We host a discussion group every Sunday at 6 PM EST on “Equal Human and Political Rights and Democratic Republicanism,” a reader created by blog contributors. Below are the introductions to Sections Twelve, Thirteen, and Fourteen, which outline the struggle for universal and equal rights during the Civil War and Reconstruction, the American Socialist Party and Communist Party, and the Civil Rights/Black Liberation Movement and the New Left.
Sections Twelve
We return to U.S. history. The Socialist Party Platform in Section Seven was similar to the pre-WWI European Social-Democratic Programs in demanding a fully democratic political system and is an extraordinarily useful reminder that socialists in this country used to take it for granted that winning the battle for political democracy was necessary “in order that they may thereby lay hold of the whole system of socialized industry and thus come to their rightful inheritance.” In Section Fifteen, Daniel Lazare and Ben Grove will revive criticism of the Constitution and call for establishing a democratic republic.
However, in between Paine’s criticism of the oligarchic Constitution, the Radical Republicanism of the Abolitionist/Civil War/Reconstruction period, the Debsian Socialist Party’s democratic republicanism, and the recent revival of constitutional critique initiated by Lazare in 1996, there have been many decades during which criticism of the Constitution receded as an essential concern of the left. There were even long periods when it was widely assumed that the U.S. was a democracy. Most foreign observers, including Marx and Engels at times, also fell into this misperception. Only African Americans have been continuously at war with the Constitution and the myth of American democracy from the start. We must begin to study this long history and what it means for political strategy today.
Section Six touched on the anti-slavery movement as a reminder that the US was never a democracy. Our current section discusses the Civil War and Reconstruction. The main point to emphasize is that for a time, out of very different motivations, white Northern farmers/workers/capitalists formed a temporary military/political alliance with Southern enslaved people against Southern enslavers, which produced a radical democratic movement that overturned some but not all of the racist and oligarchic provisions of the original Constitution. Keeping with the dual track of a white working-class movement and a separate(?)/parallel(?) African American tenant farmer/working class/national minority (nation?) movement, we note how Marx and his fellow German ‘48er (and then Communist League representative) Joseph Wedemeyer switched from trying to form a working-class party in New York in 1852 to supporting the new Republican Party in 1854 to fight slavery. The main story, however, is how the black/white political alliance of Reconstruction failed to hold, and African Americans were reconsigned to a new form of semi-slavery for almost 100 years.
Picking a few representative readings for such an enormous subject is difficult, but David Levering Lewis’ Introduction to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction is an excellent place to start. Lewis places Du Bois’s work in the complex web of U.S. political, intellectual, and academic history in less than twenty pages. In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois demonstrates his distaste for constitutional reverence in a memorable description of the 39th Congress. Du Bois was one of only a handful who maintained a constitutional critique during the nationalistic explosion of WWII.
Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was an outspoken critic of the Constitution before the Civil War. As the war raged and bold and decisive action became paramount, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens lambasted the Constitution's checks and balances and demanded unimpeded lawmaking power in a sovereign legislature. Eric Foner and Manisha Sinha provide concise overviews of the Reconstruction period. Sinha’s work is especially interesting for expanding the temporal boundaries of Reconstruction to include the post-war struggles of Indigenous peoples, northern workers, and women. Reconstruction provided tantalizing glimpses of democratic alternatives. However, while the slaveholders’ rebellion was defeated in 1865, the undemocratic structure of the Senate, the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court survived. Today, we remain trapped under the weight of a constitution that guarantees the political and social domination of a numerical minority.
Sections Thirteen
Socialist Party of America (SPA) leader Eugene Debs was influenced by Marxist theoretical works suggested by Victor Berger, including Capital, but especially Kautsy’s commentary on the Erfurt Program. This was the roundabout return to the U.S. of a socialist theory that originated partly with the Workies. Why theory and history moved in this roundabout way is an interesting question. The best answer is that slavery and the Civil War put the U.S. on a different political track from European countries, a track we are still on. The anti-Constitution political section of the 1912 SPA Platform and the relation of the Socialist Party to Jim Crow and African Americans should be emphasized — not to try to resolve the problem but only to acknowledge it existed. The fourth essential subject is the impact of WWI and the Bolshevik Revolution on U.S. socialists and the split into separate communist and socialist parties.
The Communist Party (CP) replaced the Socialist Party’s goal of a democratic republic with the goal of a Soviet America under Communist Party leadership before flipping to an anti-fascist popular front alliance with the New Deal Democratic Party. The democratic republic’s absence and the gradual reduction in discussion about the Constitution can be seen by comparing the CP’s 1928, 1932, and 1936 party platforms. On a theoretical level, the CP also introduced the idea of national independence for the Negro majority in the Southern Black Belt. But on a practical level, it largely ignored the Negro Nation idea and fought for civil and political equality for African-Americans alongside its primary activity of organizing industrial unions. Those heroic battles changed millions of lives, but Marxist political theory was stagnant; it could not cope with the profound changes in global and domestic politics post-WWII. Stunted by its subservience to Stalin and the Soviet Union’s national interests, the CP withered in the 1950s.
Sections Fourteen
What legal scholar Aziz Rana calls America’s “constitutional creed” solidified during the Cold War. The Left remained committed to democracy but had only a tenuous connection to their predecessors’ democratic republican values. Tom Hayden made an ambiguous statement about the Constitution's denial of democracy in the first draft of Students for a Democratic Society’s (SDS) Port Huron Statement. A decade earlier, Hayden’s political mentor, C. Wright Mills, described the ubiquity and domination of the “military event.” Americans, Mills explained, “[H]ear that the Congress has again abdicated to a handful of men's decisions clearly related to the issue of war or peace. They know that the bomb was dropped over Japan in the name of the United States of America, although they were at no time consulted about the matter. They feel that they live in a time of big decisions; they know they are not making any.”
During the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King Jr. noted the limits of the American legal system. He concluded that the Civil Rights Movement struggle had “left the realm of constitutional rights” and entered “the area of human rights.” Soon after, the Black Panthers Party’s Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention marked what Rana calls “the country’s last culturally resonant moment of mass constitutional rejectionism.” However, the convention made the shift from a structural critique to a rights-based critique apparent. While the convention’s draft constitution took up new and innovative demands, including ones centered around the family, children's rights, and control of the police, it lacked the pre-Cold War analysis of the bicameral legislature, the Senate, and the Electoral College.
Instead of the labor and anti-fascist battles of the 1930s and ‘40s, the Civil Rights/Black Liberation and New Left/anti-Vietnam War movements were the main political struggles of the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. These movements condemned imperialism and economic inequality and struggled to advance democracy in the U.S. However, very few people connected democratic values and the constitutional structure of the government. Today, we can reflect on this period and recognize a constitutional blindspot. For different reasons, those actors, going about the chaos of their lives, didn’t see something that we now see: Democracy cannot be realized through an undemocratic political system.
Section Twelve primary readings: David Levering Lewis’ Introduction to DuBois’s Black Reconstruction; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, pp. 265-68; William Lloyd Garrison comments on the Constitution; Fawn McKay Brodie, Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South, pp. 290-4; Eric Foner, The Second Founding, Introduction; Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, Introduction
Section Thirteen primary readings: Aziz Rana, The Constitutional Bind, Chapter 4; Eugene Debs, Why We Have Outgrown the United States Constitution; Victor Berger denounces the Senate; Donald Bruce Johnson, National Party Platforms, pp. 309-12, 325-31, 356-60.
Secondary readings: Interview with Aziz Rana. Historical survey of WWI, Great Depression, Fascism, and WWII: Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 3
Section Fourteen primary readings: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail; King, Where Do We Go From Here, Chapter 2, pp. 23-69, Chapter 4, pp. 138-9; The Black Panther Party Ten-Point Program; The first five pages of The Port Huron Statement; Carl Oglesby, Democracy is Nothing if it is Not Dangerous; Oglesby, Let Us Shape the Future/Trapped in a System; Oglesby, An Open Letter: Dear McCarthy Supporters.
Secondary readings: Aziz Rana, The Constitutional Bind, Chapter 14; Luke Pickrell, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Democratic Constitution Ideology; C. Wright Mills, Letter to the New Left; Gil Schaeffer, You Can’t Use Weatherman to Show Which Way the Wind Blew, pp. 3-42; Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb; Franz Schurmann, The Logic of World Power; Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 4: Globalizations, 1945-2011