Essay of the Day

This is not to say American historical development during the three centuries from John Winthrop to the advent of FDR was sweet innocence incarnate. America was always capitalistic, a fragment of Europe absent its premodern institutional base of feudalism (even American slavery was business-oriented first and foremost, the dripping magnolia hiding the dark secret, except to master and slave alike, of profit in the international market). The decks were cleared for expansion: for honing a capitalistic entity which demanded ideological absolutism; a compliant, degraded labor force, agricultural and then industrial; a polity riddled with division, both racial and class, to prevent common awareness of exploitation and the solidarity needed to oppose it. Yet the indivisibility or interchangeability of capitalism and America was bound to be shaken up, less by reform (always within acceptable ideological bounds) than by the social protest of working people and their, along with depressed minorities, whether native blacks or recent immigrants, wider yearnings for a decent life beyond sharecropping and the factory whistle.

The always cheery and luminescent Norman Pollack with another gentle reminder.


TS