The Low Road to Capitalism

by William H. Benson

August 29, 2019

     “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation,” writes Matthew Desmond, in his article “Capitalism,” that appeared in the August 18, 2019 issue of The New York Times Magazine, part of “The 1619 Project.”

     Desmond argues that America’s “low-road to capitalism” of today descends from the techniques that landowners perfected on the cotton plantation in the South prior to the Civil War. To support his argument, he points to two statistics that laborers across the United States understand.

     First, today “only 10 percent of American wage and salaried workers carry union cards,” and call themselves members of a labor union, “authorized to fight for a living wage and for fair working conditions.” This 10 percent ranking places the U.S. second to last among the worlds’ nations.

     “How easy is it to fire workers in the U.S.?” Unlike other countries that have strong rules about severance pay, reasons for dismissal, and safeguards to prevent arbitrary terminations, “they virtually disappear in the U.S., now ranked dead last out of 71 nations.”

     Desmond says, “American slavery is necessarily imprinted on the DNA of American capitalism.” If he is correct, one wonders, “What happened on the plantation?”

     First, President Andrew Jackson stole the land across the Southern states from the people who lived there. Desmond says, “The U.S. solved its land shortage by expropriating millions of acres from Native Americans, often with military force, acquiring Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Florida.”

     Second, landowners exploited the land. “Enslaved workers felled trees by ax, burned the underbrush and leveled the earth for planting. Whole forests were dragged out by the roots.” They planted cotton.

     Third, landowners exploited the laborers. “Planters understood that their profits climbed when they extracted maximum effort out of each worker.” Overseers set a quota for cotton picked per individual, and if a slave failed to meet his or her quota, the overseer would bring out a whip.

     Food, clothing, books, education, recreation, and free time for a slave were negligible.

     Third, landowners played the credit markets. They learned that it was easier to mortgage their laborers than their real estate. For example, Thomas Jefferson mortgaged his slaves to build his mansion at Monticello. To access the credit markets, a series of state banks expanded across the South.

     Fourth, landowners kept meticulous records, an early form of spreadsheets. They used Thomas Affleck’s “Plantation Record and Account Book,” “a one-stop-shop accounting manual, complete with rows and columns that tracked per-worker productivity,” that even allowed for a slave’s depreciation.

     “People reduced to data points,” writes Desmond. 

     Desmond relies on research that Caitlin Rosenthal, a history professor at Berkeley, conducted for her first book, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management, published a year ago. Her research into numerous plantations’ business records led her to a surprising conclusion.

     “Slavery in the United States was a business. A morally reprehensible, and very profitable business. Slaveholders in the South were using advanced management and accounting techniques long before their northern counterparts, techniques that are still used by business today.”

     In an interview with the Harvard Business Review, Caitlin Rosenthal said, “all of this should make you cringe. This is not an easy topic to read. The plantation was the brutal extraction of labor from an oppressed people.”

     Desmond adds, “Slavery was a font of phenomenal wealth. By the eve of the Civil War, the Mississippi Valley was home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the U.S. Cotton was the nation’s most valuable export.”

     One can understand why the Southern landowners were aghast when certain Northerners called for the abolition of slavery, because, “The combined value of four million enslaved people exceeded that of all the railroads and factories in the nation.”

     Desmond writes, “We can still feel the looming presence of this institution of slavery, which helped turn a poor, fledgling nation into a financial colossus. Slavery can still be felt in our economic life.”

     Desmond makes a strong argument that a low-road form of capitalism developed on the Southern plantation, but capitalism since then has improved. The 13^th amendment abolished slavery, and if management terminates an employee today, he or she is free to find a better-paying job elsewhere.

     Although not perfect, the nation’s workforce of today faces a far more equitable and just business environment, than did the eighteenth-century slaves. Today, you and I reside well above the low road.

Frederick Douglass, 1852 Speech

by William H. Benson

June 30, 2019

     The Rochester, New York Ladies Anti-Slavery Sewing Society asked the abolitionist Frederick Douglass to deliver the address at the Fourth of July celebration on Monday, July 5, 1852.

     This was nine years before voters elected Lincoln president, before the Southern states departed Congress to form the Confederacy, before shots rang out at Fort Sumter, and ten years before Lincoln drafted the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the 3.5 million slaves in the former Southern states.

     No one in 1852 knew that a bloody civil war was imminent, that it would rip the nation apart, and that its winner would toss slavery into the dustbin of history, where it belonged. 

     Partway into his speech, Douglass stops and asks, “why am I called upon to speak here to-day?”

     He notes the “sad sense of the disparity between” himself, a black man and a former slave, and his audience, white free ladies, and dares to point out the obvious. “I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common.

     “The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. The Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.

     “I will, in the name of humanity, dare to call in question and to denounce everything that serves to perpetuate slavery—the great sin and shame of America!”

      He then submits five questions. First, “Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man?” He answers, “It is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race.”

     He asks, “Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty?” He answers, “There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.”

     He asks, “Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong?” He answers, “No! I will not. I have better employments for my time and strength.”

     He asks, “What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken?” He answers, “That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot.”

     Finally, he asks a crucial question, “What, to the American slave, is your 4^th of July?”

     He answers, “a day that reveals to him the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless.

     “Your denunciations of tyrants brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy.

     “There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour. For revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”

     Douglass then denounces the internal slave trade. “Here,” he says, “you will see men and women reared like swine for the market. You know what is a swine-drover? I will show you a man-drover. They inhabit all our Southern States. I was born amid such sights and scenes.”

     He picks up again his attack upon the church. “But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines!

     “They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny, and barbarous cruelty. It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs.”

     As were most abolitionists, Frederick Douglass was bare-knuckled, unrelenting, hostile, in-your- face, and merciless, when he spoke, when he condemned the “peculiar institution” of slavery, as he did on July 5, 1852. The Ladies Anti-Slavery Society received an earful that day, more than they expected.

     Today, in certain cities, mainly in New England, groups gather to celebrate the Fourth of July with a “Reading Frederick Douglass” event. Participants take turns reading portions of Douglass’s speech.

     For example, participants will gather on Friday, July 5, at 6:00 p.m. in Boston’s Egleston Square to hear a complete reading.

     In 2018, the Yale historian David Blight won the Pulitzer Prize for history for writing his biography, Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom. In it, he called Douglass’s 1852 speech “abolition’s rhetorical masterpiece.” Indeed, it is.

ACHIEVEMENT

by William H. Benson

January 10, 2008

     I watched the presidential candidates debate the issues on television last Saturday evening, prior to New Hampshire’s primary vote on Tuesday, and I was impressed. Each of the Republicans first and then the Democrats next seemed intelligent, articulate, and determined to redirect our country’s future with definite plans.

     Of the four Democrats—Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and Bill Richardson—I thought that Hillary dominated the debate. As the campaign gears up, and even though I may not agree with her political views, I suspect that she will be difficult to beat. All four of the Democrats vowed that if elected they would bring the troops home from Iraq, a promise I was glad to hear. One of them, perhaps it was John Edwards, said, “To end the war, we must end the occupation.” How true.

     A clear winner did not appear among the Republicans, and yet, I would say that Mitt Romney appeared on the defensive. Mike Huckabee, the Arkansas Baptist minister who won in Iowa’s caucus vote, seemed intense, even wound up, whereas Fred Thompson and John McCain came across relaxed and confident. But, it would be a mistake to count Giuliani out, for the race among the Republicans is wide open; any of them could win the next handful of primaries, even though McCain and Thompson have the most experience.

     By the time you read this, we will know the two winners in New Hampshire, and I predict Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

     Any American who wants to run for the highest office in the land belongs to a select group of very driven and focused people, who must endure a lot of criticism and verbal abuse. Originating from ordinary backgrounds, they are now extraordinary people, and plenty has gone into making these people so driven that they strive for the Oval Office.

     Recently I re-read the book Profiles of Power & Success in which its author Gene N. Landrum identified the traits of the overachiever: intuitive-thinking, an exceptional amount of self-esteem and optimism, a talent for risk-taking, an obsessive will power, manic energy, a dedicated work ethic, plus tenacity and perseverance. In addition, there is usually at least one crisis in such a person’s background, possibly a whole series of them.

     The crisis is not a desirable episode in anyone’s life, and yet, “it appears from the research that such events are the catalysts for transforming average people into overachieving visionaries. The crisis becomes their inspiration.” People who have suffered a great trauma are imprinted by their experience; they are either destroyed by it or pushed into a higher gear and armed with a manic need to succeed.

     The crisis can appear in several forms: a disabling injury, the loss of a parent or sibling when a child, a bankruptcy, imprisonment, a divorce, or abandonment by family members. ”Psychological suffering, anxiety, and collapse can lead to new emotional, intellectual, and spiritual strengths—confusion and doubt can lead to new ideas.” And to new thoughts about who they are and what they will achieve.

     Their lives have become “a Horatio Alger story.” Upon this very theme—of rags-to-riches—did Horatio Alger, Jr. write over 100 books, selling 20 million copies, and once you have read one, you have read them all, even though the titles may change. There was Luck or Pluck, Sink or Swim, Ragged Dick, and Tattered Tom, fictional stories in which a street urchin who, through his own industry, honesty, and perseverance, rises to the top.

     Unfortunately, Alger failed to apply those same qualities to his own life. He wasted his book royalties living the fast life in New York, San Francisco, and Paris, and dying in 1899 in his sister’s home in rural Massachusetts, drained of any semblance of success.

     To throw your name in the ring, to declare yourself a candidate for president, to ask voters for their vote in a primary is to take a gigantic personal risk: it is not for the faint of heart. Few have the gumption to do it, and among those few, only one wins. It is more by pluck than luck and by swim than sink that anyone wins. In 2008 may the voters elect the best person—man or woman—for the job.