Honesty, Slavery and the Supreme Court

I’ve been reading Douglas A. Blackmon’s astonishing (and Pulitzer Prize winning) book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. Although I haven’t finished it, I feel no reservations about recommending it. I recently came across the following passage, which I found to be both succinct and thought-provoking:

From the lowliest frontier outposts to the busiest commercial centers, Americans had shared a consensus that the highest definition of a citizen was his veracity, that truth telling and fulfillment of a man’s commitments were the highest measures of virtue. The near cult of honesty that pervaded public discussions was quaint by the sensibilities of more than a century later. But in a still new nation born of the eighteenth-century Age of Reason, it was an utterly sincere expression of a fundamental national creed.

That allegiance to logical purity, combined with the basic tenets of equality embodied in the philosophies of the Revolution, had impelled the nation toward civil war during the antebellum decades, as the inherent contradiction between the new republic’s noblest ideals and slavery grew more apparent. In spite of the prevailing view among all white Americans that blacks were in some manner lesser to them, the nation nonetheless made war upon itself at devastating cost, in a conflict ultimately justified as a struggle to end the bondage of slaves. Northern soldiers who had doubted whether emancipation was worth the blood it required were transformed by scenes of new freedom they encountered in the South. The morally bewildering sacrifice of the war became a concrete demonstration that a nation could steadily mold itself toward the “more perfect union” of the Declaration of Independence. The surrender of the South, the emancipation of the slaves, and passage of the civil rights amendments of the 1870s were the zenith of that vision. 

The Supreme Court’s endorsement in 1896 of the flagrantly duplicitous doublespeak of Jim Crow segregation represented a resignation of America’s white institutions to the conclusion that the emancipation of black slaves had been folly. Most agreed that the elimination of slavery per se was an adequate remedy to the past abuses of blacks. In the eyes of the vast majority of white Americans, the refusal of the southern states to fully free or enfranchise former slaves and their descendants was not an issue worthy of any further disruption to the civil stability of the United States. Black Americans were exchanged for a sense of white security.

There had always been lies and misrepresentations in U.S. politics, but the new consensus represented by Plessy v. Ferguson marked an extraordinary turning point in the political evolution of the nation. Thousands of northern whites had fought not because of their fondness or empathy for African Americans but because the principles of the Declaration of Independence coupled with the American compulsion for honesty demanded it. The abandonment of that principle, and embrace of an obviously false mythology of citizenship for black Americans, brought an end to the concept that abstract notions of governance by law and morality could always be reconciled to reality. It marked a new level of unvarnished modern cynicism in American political dialogue. And it established a pattern over the ensuing twenty years in which almost any rationalization was sufficient to excuse the most severe abuses of African Americans.

It occurred to me that contemporary American society is still grappling with the vestigial tensions of this seminal betrayal. Honesty is still regarded as a signifier of national character, of course, but mostly as a comforting myth; a handshake in lieu of a contract is tantamount to gross negligence and subject to liability (not to mention mocking scorn).

Plessy v. Ferguson was a kind of cultural capstone for the nascent petroleum and steel industries of America’s Second Industrial Revolution. The national character, such as it was, had been set on a new path – a path dedicated to the proposition that all industries be at unfettered liberty to acquire wealth. As Blackmon masterfully explains, after Plessy v. Ferguson a black American without money had zero protections against a post-reconstruction society bent upon consigning him or her to a life of unremitting slave labor as a criminal convict.

The new slave labor provided an ideal captive workforce: cheap, usually docile, unable to organize, and always available when free laborers refused to work. 

This description could apply to labor forces coming under the yoke of Gilded Age industrialists of all stripes throughout the country; child labor, the urban poor, anyone who couldn’t buy their way out of the emerging labor economy of the twentieth century. Power that had been seen as divinely ordained in antebellum America coroneted itself thereafter. Honesty became as “quaint” to the titans of capitalism as the Geneva Convention became to Alberto Gonzales. This is the cynicism that still defines our political life.