January 16, 2007
Racism and Wages II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:20 PM EST Regarding my feature article on Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Smoler asks whether Jim Crow necessarily drove down the wages of white workers as well as black workers, and, if so, why. Certainly Martin Luther King, Jr., believed that was the case, as did W. E. B. Du Bois, and as did most members of the loose Popular Front–era coalition of civil rights activists allied with organizations like the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. Fred asks, “wouldn’t white workers’ wages rise as a consequence of racial discrimination in the labor market? If the potential pool of applicants for a set of jobs is limited by racist exclusion of black workers, the law of supply and demand ought to drive up white wages. Did white workers really receive only psychic income from their racial privilege, but no real income?” Of course, white workers benefited from Jim Crow inasmuch as their wages almost always exceeded those of black workers. Moreover, as I’ve argued on this website, the white working class also received a host of generous public sector subsidies—particularly federally backed mortgages—which were largely closed to African-Americans and which facilitated the rise of hundreds of thousands of families to the ranks of the middle class. That said, if Jim Crow placed whites at an advantage vis-à-vis African-Americans, it did not necessarily place them at an absolute advantage. Take the following famous example: During the 1934 gubernatorial election in Georgia, Eugene Talmadge visited Rome, Georgia, the state’s center of textile manufacturing, where he delivered incendiary speeches that appealed to raw race prejudice. He sharply criticized FDR’s National Recovery Administration for issuing wage scales that placed black and white workers on parity. Talmadge won the election and carried Rome’s white working-class districts. Three days later he declared martial law in order to protect the “right to work” and sent 4,000 troops to bust the textile union. No union equaled stagnant wages. By the same token, most Southern congressman ardently opposed New Deal measures like the National Labor Relations Act, which provided legal mechanisms for workers to unionize, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which introduced maximum hours and minimum wages; they also joined Republicans to block FDR’s proposed wartime expansion of the New Deal. At the insistence of Southern congressmen, the Social Security Act initially excluded farm workers and domestic workers, as did the FLSA. These exclusions hit African-Americans, who were concentrated in both sectors, particularly hard, but they also affected hundreds of thousands of white families. On the local level, most Southern states in the Jim Crow era were marked by a low-tax, low-service, low-wage mentality that benefited large landowners and owners of the region’s limited industrial base but did nothing for the larger population of farmers. One must consider public provisions like education, health care, and infrastructure (e.g., roads, bridges, levies) as part of the “wages” that white Southerners forfeited when they repeatedly elected allies of the Black Belt barons and Big Mules to state and federal office. One needn’t concentrate just on the Jim Crow South to appreciate these dynamics. Look, for instance, at the famous 1919 steel strikes in Chicago. They failed, in large part because employers were able to import black strikebreakers to bust the union, which had never seen fit to include black workers. The prevailing wages, hours, and working conditions in steel remained appallingly low, high, and dangerous, in that order, until the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, later renamed the United Steel Workers of America, organized black and white workers in the mid-1930s. Until the rise of the great CIO industrial unions, white workers in industries like steel enjoyed a comparative advantage over black workers, but they fared much better—in terms of wages, hours, working conditions, insurance, and state benefits—when they joined hands with African-Americans, formed strong labor unions, and flexed their muscle inside the Democratic party.
January 15, 2007
Etymology and History Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:40 PM EST I have always been fascinated by etymology, the history of words, perhaps because it so often reveals other kinds of history. The date when a word entered the language often indicates when a concept or an issue entered the consciousness of the people. Take anti-Semitism, for instance. The word is a remarkably recent addition to the English lexicon, arriving only in 1881 (from the German—where else?). Heaven knows anti-Jewish sentiment is ancient enough, as members of the small Jewish minority in medieval Europe served all too well as convenient scapegoats for kings trying to evade responsibility for misfortunes (and, very often, their debts). But the basis of that sentiment was religious. Jews were not Christians and, indeed, were often portrayed as “Christ killers.” But the late nineteenth century saw the emergence of a different kind of anti-Jewish sentiment, one that was racial, not religious, in nature: The trouble with Jews was not their religion; it was the fact that they were, well, Jews. Western European countries had emancipated the Jews in the nineteenth century, removing numerous disabilities. Jews could sit in the British Parliament, for instance, beginning in 1862, and by 1885 there was a Jewish peer, Lord Rothschild. Other countries did likewise. Bismarck’s personal banker, Gershon Bleichroeder, was ennobled in 1872, the year after the constitution of the German Empire removed most Jewish disabilities. But as Jews entered the mainstream of European life, there was an inevitable backlash, a backlash that in Europe would turn into the horrors of such things as the Dreyfus affair and, eventually, the Holocaust. But anti-Semitism also quickly spread to this country in attenuated form, becoming what can only be called a fashion. While the New York men’s clubs that were founded in the mid-nineteenth century had often had Jewish members, they stopped admitting Jews after about 1880. It wasn’t until after the Second World War that this “fashionable” anti-Semitism began to wane. The novel by Laura Hobson, Gentlemen’s Agreement, made into a movie directed by Elia Kazan that won the Oscar for best picture in 1947, marks, perhaps, the beginning of the end of this form of anti-Semitism. Or, on a far lighter note, take the word impecunious. It is, of course, just an upscale word for being without money, and it entered the English language in 1596. It is a great example of an “inkhorn term,” words with usually Latin or Greek roots coined by pedants and writers showing off that flooded into English in the age of Shakespeare, supplementing and sometimes replacing perfectly good words that had been in use for centuries, such as penniless. But lurking within impecunious is a much older history, dating back to the dawn of money. The Latin word for cattle or livestock is pecus, and before the invention of coins, in the seventh century B.C., cattle often served as a unit of account, one of the functions of money. So to be impecunious means, literally, to be without cattle. (The word fee, as well, has bovine origins, coming indirectly from the Old English feoh, meaning cattle.)
The other day I ran into a neat example of the power of etymology to explain or exemplify history, this time by a word that isn’t there. English is notorious among major languages for the sheer size of its vocabulary. The average speaker of English uses half again as many different words in ordinary speech as the average speaker of, say, French or German. All languages have “missing words”—words that are found in most other languages but not that one. French, for instance, lacks a word meaning “shallow”; they say “peu profond”—“little deep”—instead. But English probably has fewer missing words than most. Like the dog that doesn’t bark in the night, however, missing words are very hard to notice. I learned a new one the other day. I was listening on CD to a lecture by Professor Thomas Childers of the University of Pennsylvania called “The History of Hitler’s Empire” that I highly recommend, and he noted just in passing that English lacks a word for a sudden, unconstitutional change in government. Instead we either use the French term, coup d’état, or the German, Putsch. This says much about the politics of those countries that derive their political institutions from England. While French and German history are liberally sprinkled with these types of political events, the history of the English-speaking peoples is not. The last successful coup d’état in the English-speaking world, after all, was the Glorious Revolution of 1688, three hundred and nineteen years ago. That remarkable record leaves its trace—or in this case its lack of one—in the language.
January 15, 2007
Racism and Wages Posted by Fredric Smoler at 07:55 AM EST In his lead essay on this website (“What Did Martin Luther King Really Believe?”), Josh Zeitz writes that Martin Luther King “leaned on the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, who famously observed that poor and working-class whites gained nothing from Jim Crow but the psychological ‘wages of whiteness.’ In return for the psychological boost that ‘whiteness’ gave them, poor whites—millions of them, from slavery times through the modern age—surrendered political and economic power to their elite counterparts. . . . Jim Crow divided white and black labor against each other, stunting the growth of unions, labor parties, and liberal political coalitions. Jim Crow thus drove down wages across the board and secured a political system (chiefly in the American South) where taxes were regressive, public services were minimal, and political participation was sharply limited. Remember that on the eve of World War II, poll taxes in eight Southern states disenfranchised as many as 64 percent of white citizens and virtually all eligible black voters. It’s hard to say what most working-class whites got from Jim Crow other than the satisfaction that they weren’t black.” I am pretty confident that Josh knows more about this than I do, but given that caveat, I have some questions. First, all things being equal, wouldn’t white workers’ wages rise as a consequence of racial discrimination in the labor market? If the potential pool of applicants for a set of jobs is limited by racist exclusion of black workers, the law of supply and demand ought to drive up white wages. Did white workers really receive only psychic income from their racial privilege, but no real income? Even in the absence of unions, a tighter labor market usually benefits workers. So if racial discrimination didn’t have this effect in the Jim Crow South, why didn’t it? I can imagine many factors depressing white wages—legal impediments to labor unions, etc.—but I don’t understand why racial privileges for white workers didn’t push a bit in the opposite direction. My possibly unreliable memory of the early economic literature on racial discrimination makes me think that racism did drive up labor costs for some employers. In theory, as I understand it, some but not all employers would benefit from restricting black workers’ access to higher-paid sectors of the labor market; if so, depressing black wages by limiting the possibility of wage competition benefited employers who used that cheaper black labor, but what was in it for a mill or mine owner, rather than for someone hiring people to chop cotton? Suppose the opposite was true, that rather than keeping all wages low, white wages were to some degree driven up by racist exclusion of black competitors, in absolute as well as in relative terms. If that happened, to any degree, we’d want to understand why white employers pursued a policy contrary to their own economic interests. One possible explanation would be fear of white working-class retaliation; another might be employers’ sincere racist solidarity with white workers. A comparison would be with Australia until the 1970s, when the exclusion of immigrants on racial grounds was a demand of the unionized working class, which feared wage competition, whereas more immigration was favored by many employers, because it would lower wage costs. The white Australia policy was nevertheless supported, if weakly, by other employers, on the grounds of racial solidarity. Another comparison would be the effect of the American Medical Association on physicians’ incomes. When the AMA attained the power to license medical schools, it restricted the output of physicians, and drove up incomes, a process that was reversed only when the Federal government began increasing the number of physicians by expanding output. The first medical schools to be closed down after the AMA gained control of the licensing of medical schools were the ones training black physicians, and women. In the long run, racial and sexual prejudice are very bad economic practice, but I am not sure that in every case they are bad economic strategy in the near term for the direct beneficiaries. One other point: When Josh writes that “it is hard to say what most working-class whites got from Jim Crow other than the satisfaction that they weren’t black,” he seems to be implying that white workers made a foolish as well as a vicious bargain, and were in some sense deceived about the economic consequences of the old racial hierarchy. On that theory, people naturally prefer higher absolute incomes and equality of racial status to higher relative incomes and higher relative status. I think that most Americans nowadays do feel that way, at least about the wages of whiteness, but there is a lot of historical and contemporary evidence suggesting that people can value relative status very highly indeed and commit appalling cruelties to maintain those status differences. In the days of Jim Crow, America looked peculiar (in comparison to other industrialized societies) because of the aberrant feature of de jure racism, which underpinned one such status hierarchy. Nowadays America looks peculiar because of the breadth and depth of our social egalitarianism, i.e., the relative decline of status hierarchies privileging men, whites, the former patricians, the educated, or anybody. While there is a rise in income inequality in America, I do not think we are yet seeing any corresponding and proportionate rise in status inequality. We are rather seeing its accelerating disappearance. Martin Luther King’s is the most famous name associated with the successful political struggle to destroy one very toxic form of American status hierarchy, the hierarchy of race. He used to be famous for being martyred. Increasingly he is famous for having won. Editor’s note: This blog item was submitted at 4 p.m., Sunday, January 14, and its posting was delayed because of technical difficulties at the site. Those difficulties have now been resolved.
January 13, 2007
Technical Snafus II Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 12:15 PM EST I see that the correction to today’s feature has now been made, and I thank our tech support people. However, technical issues continue to prevent us from posting blog entries from any of our other blog contributors, so I apologize to them and to you, the reader, until everything is straightened out and we can be going full speed again, which I hope will be very shortly. Thanks for your patience.
January 10, 2007
National Histories Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:25 PM EST A disturbing piece in today’s New York Times describes Lebanon’s inability to produce a common vision of Lebanese history for that country’s students. Lebanon’s 15-year civil war, from 1975 to 1990, is apparently entirely avoided by all history texts, so that Lebanese history seems to end in the early 1970s, but there are also sectarian disputes about when Lebanese history begins. Christian schools seem to date it to ancient Phoenicians, Muslim schools to the Arab conquest, and the Ottomans are variously described as conquerors, occupiers, or administrators, ditto the French, in both cases the sect of the school profoundly influencing the interpretation of very elemental questions. Under Syrian pressure, which includes assassination, some government officials deprecate any view of history stressing any Lebanese national identity, since Syria’s view is that Lebanon, which it occupied for some decades, is part of Greater Syria. On that theory the simple notion that Lebanon has its own history is at best error (and at worst heresy). This made me think a bit about the teaching of American history. The varieties of Lebanese history have echoes here, although the case is of course different. Americans do not have a single national textbook of history, the way some countries do, so there is no standard official version of our past. Most school districts make their own choices about texts, and local political biases matter. Around the time of the Lebanese civil war, two central purchasing authorities, the state of Texas and the city of New York, ordered texts for the two largest American markets, which means savvy publishers tried to produce texts that annoyed neither. A very interesting book on the subject, Frances FitzGerald’s America Revised, appeared in the late 1970s. FitzGerald argued that the attempt to appease two very different political constituencies produced oddly bland accounts of our history; she thought that some of the older frankly patriotic texts were more effective at exciting the young about our history, and the extracts she printed made a pretty strong case. So at that point a lot of Americans may still have been taught a common history, although a dispiritingly unmemorable one. A few years before America Revised appeared, I met a modestly famous American historian, of distant British descent, who proudly informed me that he swiftly disabused most of his undergraduates of the misconception that the Puritans or the American Revolutionaries were their ancestors and the patriotic account of our history they had previously encountered was their history. They were the children or grandchildren of immigrants, he told them, or they were from some other marginalized group, and their history was one of indignity and humiliation; their history was not the grand and sonorous narrative of traditional political history, which none of their ancestors had made, although it was perhaps labor history, or social history, maybe women’s history. I remember being astonished that he thought he was doing those kids a favor. I myself had three immigrant grandparents, and I was not persuaded that I was being flattered to be told that those bloody footprints in the Pennsylvania snow were no history of mine. The insult was not less insulting for being wholly unintended. He was in fact a very nice man, but I thought he was in this respect a fool, and I did not think his folly would prosper. I was, of course, wrong. I have the impression that since the mid-1970s, a fair number of Americans have been taught that high political history is not their history, that their history is more partial and restricted than that, being instead the morally privileged history of oppression. The history of oppression is real, although as often taught it necessarily involves the partitioning of the population into the descendents of the wicked and powerful, and the blameless because powerless, which means there is less of a common history. It would be a mistake to worry too much about this. The Lebanese civil war did not happen because the Lebanese had no common narrative of the past; it is rather the case that the Lebanese publish no common narrative of the past because they fought a civil war, and no group among them won it. On the other hand, if the Lebanese have another civil war, which seems quite possible, that war may be the likelier, and the bloodier, because there is no notion of common identity, and the Lebanese have constructed a myriad of histories in which each group is a victim, menaced by neighboring oppressors. A recent experience reminded me that the choice does not have to be between jingo accounts of collective triumph and dystopian narratives of cruelty and injustice. During a visit to a friend’s family, for Christmas, I listened to my friend’s father’s historical anecdotes about his steel town in western Pennsylvania. That history included the fact that Pennsylvania had more Medal of Honor winners in World War II than did the rest of the country combined, but it also included a history of the state legislature’s shabby record in disputes over the sale of mineral rights to the coal companies, and the death of a grandfather of black lung, and men crippled in the mills, but also what those men, and their managers, had built to smash Hitler and Tojo, and the fates, some glorious, some awful, of the local men who had gone overseas to do that. It included racial murders, but also the Catholics of the town seeing off the Klan when it tried to come in from Indiana, and a lot more. So the history had dark passages, along with some brilliant ones, and all of it seemed to belong to all of us. It was not jingo hagiography, but it still seemed an old-fashioned view. If the Lebanese counter-example is kept in view, it is also a very sane one.
January 10, 2007
Skeeter Eaters of San Antone Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:50 PM EST I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted, but as my many dedicated fans will recall from this classic, I just can’t resist an item about bat guano. In this case, I was prompted by an article in the January 6 issue of The Economist (the issue date is listed as January 4 on the website, for some reason) about a professor who is studying the bat population in Texas. Bats are a great help to Texas farmers, eating large numbers of moths whose larvae infest cotton bolls. The article gives other examples of helpful bats eating agricultural pests in a wide-ranging group of states. Some farmers put up specially designed bat houses to attract more of the creatures (as do bridge builders, the article says, though it doesn’t say why).
The only thing that’s new here is that the attempts to lure bats may finally be working. A century ago, a Texas physician tried to do the same thing—not to protect agriculture, but to reduce malaria in humans. As explained in a 1982 article in our magazine, in 1902 Dr. Charles A. R. Campbell came up with the idea of luring insect-eating bats to places with large numbers of mosquitoes. The role of mosquitoes as vectors of malaria had recently been established, and Campbell hoped his scheme would reduce the disease’s prevalence. As a sideline, he planned to harvest the bats’ droppings for use as fertilizer.
When simple boxes scented with bat guano failed to attract any business, Campbell began building ever larger and more elaborate towers designed to accommodate hundreds of thousands of bats. He tramped through filthy, vermin-infested caves to see what sorts of architectural features bats liked most. Finally, in 1911, he opened “Dr. Campbell’s Malaria-Eradicating Guano-Producing Bat Roost” near a San Antonio sewage dump. Sure enough, malaria cases in the area dropped steeply.
Inquries streamed in from mosquito fighters around the world—“Russia, Greece, Japan, Australia, India, South Africa, and British Guyana,” according to the article. In 1914 Campbell received U.S. patent 1,083,318 on his bat-house design; by the early 1920s bat houses had been built across the South and in Mexico and Europe; and in 1925 Campbell published a book called Bats, Mosquitoes, and Dollars. (Contemporary photographs of Campbell’s bat houses can be seen here and here along with 1920s towers in Italy; a tower from the Florida Keys can be seen here, and a present-day restored bat tower can be viewed here, in case your copy of Bats magazine for Summer 1989 is not in a convenient place.)
The only problem was that Campbell’s bat towers didn’t actually work. Whether they succeeded in attracting bats is unclear, but even if they did, it didn’t help, because the ones that live in the San Antonio area are free-tailed bats. They eat moths, which makes them valuable to cotton farmers today, but they turn up their noses at mosquitoes. The decline in malaria cases was just a coincidence, caused by public-health education and the increased availability of cheap screening. By the time Campbell published his book, the value of the towers was coming into serious question, and at his death in 1931 he was close to forgotten, though his gravestone does have a copper plaque depicting a bat on it.
What does all this mean? Nothing, really. I just like to use the phrase “bat guano.”
January 9, 2007
Hypocrisy Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:45 AM EST Joshua Zeitz writes, “Mr. Gordon accuses me of hypocrisy for arguing that states should restore the voting rights of ex-felons while also mocking Colson. On the contrary. Colson should absolutely be permitted to vote. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t recall the criminal operation he built and ran inside the Nixon White House . . .”
Mr. Zeitz argues that felons, once they have paid their debt to society, should be rehabilitated and welcomed back into the fold of the law-abiding. But he mocks one who has rehabilitated not only himself but thousands of others as well. Charles Colson did some very bad things a third of a century ago, as he is the first to acknowledge. But he has done many, many good things since, far more good things, selfless things, than I or, I’m sure, Mr. Zeitz have done. Mr. Zeitz was not recalling Watergate—a subject totally irrelevant to his point—he was simply mocking a man who has redeemed himself. Why? I can only guess that it is because Mr. Colson is guilty of the irredeemable crime of not being of the left and therefore deserving of no respect from Mr. Zeitz, whatever good works he may have done. It was a cheap shot, reflecting more on Mr. Zeitz’s character than on Mr. Colson’s.
Mr. Zeitz writes, “(Note to Mr. Gordon: Have I defended Webster Hubbell in these pages, or in any other forum? I don’t recall having done so. Unless he can refresh my memory, he should not intimate what is not true.)” As far as I know he has never mentioned Webster Hubbell, and I never said he had. Note to Mr. Zeitz: I do not intimate; I state. If I haven’t said something in so many words, then do not assume I have said it. Webster Hubbell and Charles Colson were both lawyers, both political intimates of Presidents, both crooks. Both went to jail. Since then, Mr. Colson has dedicated his life to helping others and redeeming his sins. Mr. Hubbell has done squat. Mr. Zeitz mocks Mr. Colson.
|
