The Fourteenth Amendment

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Eric Foner opens the chapter on the 14th Amendment in The Second Foundation by providing context for its adoption. The 39th Session of Congress began in December 1865. President Andrew Johnson had set up governments in those states under rules that enabled them to elect a large number of former high-ranking Confederate political and military leaders. The rebel states had enacted the Black Codes, and allowed horrifying attacks on Freedmen to go unpunished. The Republicans and the people who elected them were outraged, and refused to seat their senators and representatives. That gave the Republicans a 2/3 majority, enough to override vetos.

The Republicans were divided into two groups, the Radicals and the moderates. The Radicals wanted full political and civil rights for the Freedmen and for all men. The moderates initially thought they could work with Johnson, but that failed because of Johnson’s deep racism which he put into practice throughout his Presidency. The moderates were worried about giving suffrage to the freedmen, in part because voters in the North were opposed; in part because they thought the freedmen were not prepared to participate in politics; and perhaps because at least some of them beld racist views about the mental capacity of the Freedmen. They were also concerned about granting rights that suggested social equality.

The two groups were united in trying to increase their presence in the slave states, and in insuring full political rights short of suffrage. They all agreed further amendments to the Constitution were needed. This fragile unity was the basis for the adoption of the 14th Amendment.

Congress established the Joint Committee on Reconstruction to consider some 70 amendments. The 15 members of the Committee and the entire Congress debated the amendments for several months. These debates not only covered the precise wording of the amendment but also the nature of freedom, what it means to be a citizen of the United States, which powers should be exercised by the federal snd state governments, and the nature of proper governance.

The first bill that emerged from the debates was an effort to deal with the electoral problem created by the 13th Amendment. The end of slavery meant that the ⅗ compromise in the Constitution was no longer effective, so that all Black people in the South were counted towards representatives and electoral college votes. That gave the White Supremacists too much power. The obvious solution was to require the states to enfranchise Black voters. An alternative solution determined representation by the number of voters. If the slave states disenfranchised Black voters they would lose the edge the ⅗ clause gave them, reducing the number of their Representatives by as much as ⅓.

The compromise was to count inhabitants but exclude people disqualified from voting by race or color. This proposal got the necessary ⅔ vote in the House, but stalled in the Senate in large part because of fear that the slave states would disqualify Black voters with non-racial rules, like literacy tests and property ownership requirements.

Gradually things slowed to a halt as the Republicans found it difficult to bridge the gaps between the moderates and the Radicals. Congress began tp focus on the Civil Rights Act of 1866.

This law established birthright citizenship and provided that all citizens of the US would enjoy basic economic rights and natural rights to the same extent as white citizens. That would mean an end to the Black Codes. The law was not intended to deal with political rights, which include suffrage, the right to sue and be sued, to serve on juries, and to attend public schools, among others. It was also unclear whether the law applied to private conspiracies to deprive Black citizens of their rights by violence or intimidation, or by conspiring to reduce employment opportunities or otherwise. This law allowed private citizens to enforce it in federal court. Andrew Johnson vetoed the bill, but Congress overrode that veto.

It was the Supreme Court that ultimately protected the racists in the Civil Rights Cases (1883).

During and after passage of the Civil Rights law, debate continued over amendments. The breakthrough was the decision to compile the proposed amendments into a single amendment containing those most likely to garner enough support to pass. There was a lot of wrangling over language but eventually the text was ratified. The text of the amendment is set out below.

Foner discusses the contents of the 14th Amendment at length, pointing out what they did and didn’t do, and focusing on the intent of the framers. It was enacted in June 1866 and sent to the states for ratification. Tennessee was the only rebel state to ratify the amendment. The others, under governments appointed by Johnson and encouraged by him, refused. The Radical Republicans were infuriated, and so were many moderate Republicans. Foner explains the stated reasons:

If Radical Republicans saw the amendment as disappointingly weak, white southerners deemed it an unwarranted, indeed outrageous, interference in their states’ internal affairs. Southern objections focused both on practical political matters—loss of representation because of denying blacks the right to vote, the bar to officeholding by “the best portion of our citizens”—and on broader fears for the future of white supremacy. Opponents charged that Congress might well feel authorized to use the amendment to give “Negroes political and social equality with the whites.” To accept such a fate by agreeing to ratify, a southern newspaper wrote, would be a form of “self-degradation.”P. 88-9, fn omitted.

In the election of 1866 Johnson campaigned for opponents of the 14th Amendment. This breach of norms, coupled with the intransigence of the rebel states and their appalling treatment of the Freedmen changed the minds of the moderate Republicans. In the new session Congress threw out Johnson’s plan for reconstruction and enacted their own form of reconstruction, now called Radical Reconstruction.

The Reconstruction Act of 1867 placed the ex-Confederate states, other than Tennessee, under temporary military rule. It required that new governments be elected by black and white male voters (with the exception of Confederate leaders barred from officeholding by the Fourteenth Amendment). The southern states were obligated to adopt new constitutions incorporating the right to vote regardless of race. And they were required to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. P 90, fn omitted.

The new governments rapidly complied, and the Amendment was ratified in July 1868.

Discussion

1. In the simplified histories we get in school, it all seems so neat: after the Union crushed the slaver rebellion, Congress passed the Reconstruction Amendments which gave the Freedmen the same rights as other citizens. It’s never that simple. This post is a tiny slice of that history, but it’s way more than I learned in school.

2. The debates over the 14th Amendment included complaints about federal interference in the internal affairs of states, an issue I raised here. It’s obvious that what they meant was the right of states to oppress people state legislators despised, as with Black Codes, exclusion from legal rights, exclusion from suffrage, and worse.

This kind of federalism, dual sovereignty, continues today. Florida passes laws blocking the teaching of the history of Black people and the existence of LGBT people. States deny women medical treatment and medicines they need. Alabama claims the right to gerrymander congressional districts to reduce the voices of Black voters.

Are there any non-oppressive hallowed state principles that today’s federal government could conceivably trample?

====================
Fourteenth Amendment

Section 1

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

Section 3

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Section 4

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Section 5

The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

The Thirteenth Amendment

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I’m moving on to Eric Foner’s book The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution. It’s a detailed description of the history of the adoption of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and their aftermath.

The Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery. A large number of enslaved people lived in areas not controlled by the Union and thus unprotected. Many more lived in the Border States and Tennessee which were exempt. Abraham Lincoln and his Republican Party were concerned that the Supreme Court, led by the odious Roger Taney, would declare it unconstitutional, or rule that it terminated when the Civil War ended. By this time there was a strong belief that slavery sullied the nation’s principle of equality of all people before the law. Foner doesn’t say it, but by this point it must have been obvious that, as Lincoln puts it in his Second Inaugural Address:

These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.

These and other considerations led to the introduction of several versions of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1863.

The opposition party, the Democrats, offered a number of objections. One was the slippery slope argument. Give freedom to enslaved people and they’ll demand the vote, the right to own property, the right to testify in court, and and even “racial amalgamation” P. 33. This sometimes took the form of outright racism bellowed on the floor of the House and Senate.

Fernando Wood, the former mayor of New York City now a member of the House of Representatives, painted a lurid picture of the amendment’s consequences: “It involves the extermination of the white men of the southern States, and the forfeiture of all the land and other property belonging to them.” P. 33.

Others took a states rights position, that each state should make its own decision. Still others warned against the intrusion of the federal government into property rights. If the government could free slaves without compensation, what prevented it from taking the factories of the north? Some opposition Democrats even thought slavery should be permitted after the war.

The debates went on throughout 1864. The bill received fewer than the required ⅔ in the House. It was brought back in the lame duck session after the election of 1864, and passed January 12 with Lincoln in full support. The story of his change of mind is fascinating: here’s a review of a book Foner wrote about it.

The 13th Amendment does more than abolish slavery. Section 2 gives Congress unprecedented power to enforce it. Foner says this provision changed the relationship between the federal and state governments in our dual sovereignty system. For the first time, Congress was specifically empowered to legislate in the area of the rights of citizens of the states.

Ratification required the votes of ¾ of the states. That took the rest of the year, and the 13th Amendment became part of the Constitution on December 19, 1865. Foner points out that Mississippi abolished slavery in in its post-war constitution, but refused to ratify the 13th Amendment until 1995.

… [I]ts legislative Committee on Federal and State Relations explained why: the second section might in the future be interpreted to authorize Congress “to legislate in respect to freedmen in this state. [We] can hardly conceive of a more dangerous grant of power.” P. 39.

The 13th Amendment didn’t answer a basic question: what does it mean to be free. As one Democratic congressman put it, “mere exemption from servitude is a miserable idea of freedom”. P. 41. The matter was debated extensively throughout the Reconstruction Era, and the debate continues today. There was general agreement that freedom included a man’s right to control his own person, to earn his living by his labor, and to keep the proceeds of his labor to support himself and his family. But the entire agricultural system of the slave states was based on unfree labor, on slavery, and to change to a system of free labor was an enormous undertaking.

Slavers and White Supremacists seized on the punishment clause of the 13th Amendment: slavery was abolished “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”. Foner notes that this clause was added without much attention, simply because it was part of a similar provision in the Northwest Ordnance.

Starting with Mississippi the slave states enacted Black Codes. These made it a crime for Black men not to have jobs, and the punishment was to be leased out by the State to plantation owners where they would be forced to work for free. They also grabbed Black children and forced them into unpaid apprenticeships on the ground that their parents couldn’t afford to take care of them.

Foner points out that very few people thought the 13th Amendment changed the common law of coverture: men were entitled to their wives’ unpaid home services and sexual relations. Black women probably didn’t think coverture was much af an improvement for themselves, but at least they could marry and keep their children.

It was apparent that much more would be necessary if Black people were to be truly free.

Discussion

1. This material is infuriating. It’s horrifying that I didn’t know much of this history. Surely somewhere I heard about the Black Codes? But I’m sure it wasn’t in any history class I took in my 19 years of schooling. And in the slave states (sorry, I mean Red States), politicians are trying to stamp out this history altogether, supported by slabs of money from people afraid to put their names on the checks.

2. The historical links between the Black Codes and the carceral state, are, I trust, obvious.

3. Dual sovereignty has proven itself to be a disaster for many of us. US citizenship confers few meaningful political rights. Your political rights depend almost entirely on the state you live in. Your right to vote, your right to medical treatment, your right to a decent education, your right to walk the streets without being terrorized by gun freaks, and most other rights we think of as basic to our liberty, all come from state law. If you live in a Red State you have the right to shorter life, poorer working conditions, lower wages, an indifferent education, restricted voting rights, and whatever health care you can buy. If you live in a Blue State, you live better.

That’s not true in other countries. Germany doesn’t let Bavaria decide to provide a different health care system than Saxony. Japan doesn’t let the kids in Osaka use vastly different textbooks than kids in Hiroshima. India doesn’t let Uttar Pradesh decide who can vote; in fact there are no countries that let political subdivisions create voting restrictions. That’s because being German or Indian or Japanese means you are a citizen of a nation, not of a province.

What does it mean to be a citizen of the US? We’re still arguing about that after 250 years. And SCOTUS says you are not an American, you’re a Georgian or a Californian when it comes to the important parts of your daily life. SCOTUS, of course, stands firmly on the side the the successors to the slavers.

Democracy Is Our Hope For A Better Future

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In The Nation That Never Was, after telling us his version of a better story of America, Kermit Rosevelt writes:

We Americans are not perfect, either. Some of us are bad. Some are indifferent and unwilling to sacrifice for others. Some are easily distracted, misled, manipulated. We go forward and we go back. We elect Reagan, we elect Obama, we elect Trump. But what makes us American—our deepest ideal—is that we keep trying. America is born in an attempt to find a new and better way, to escape the stale and oppressive monarchies of Europe. We don’t get it right immediately. Yet we keep going. We’re looking for America, and we know that the America we’re looking for isn’t something that’s given to us by Founding Fathers. It’s something we make, something we find inside ourselves. The true America is not handed down from the past but created anew by each generation, created a little better, and what we can give the future is the opportunity to get just a little closer than we did ourselves. That’s the promise that makes us American. That’s the promise we have to keep. P. 205.

It’s not exactly a reason his better story is better, but Roosevelt thinks the better story supports his theory of democracy. Compare that passage with this from one of my favorite books, Philosophy and Social Hope, by Richard Rorty:

Pragmatists … do not believe that there is a way things really are. So they want to replace the appearance–reality distinction by that between descriptions of the world and of ourselves which are less useful and those which are more useful. When the question ‘useful for what?’ is pressed, they have nothing to say except ‘useful to create a better future’. When they are asked, ‘Better by what criterion?’, they have no detailed answer, any more than the first mammals could specify in what respects they were better than the dying dinosaurs. Pragmatists can only say something as vague as: Better in the sense of containing more of what we consider good and less of what we consider bad. When asked, ‘And what exactly do you consider good?’, pragmatists can only say, with Whitman, ‘variety and freedom’, or, with Dewey, ‘growth’. ‘Growth itself,’ Dewey said, ‘is the only moral end.’

They are limited to such fuzzy and unhelpful answers because what they hope is not that the future will conform to a plan, will fulfil an immanent teleology, but rather that the future will astonish and exhilarate.… Pp. 27-8, fn omitted.

The connection is obvious. Roosevelt says democracy is about the future. He says the better story fits with his view of democracy. Rorty says that Pragmatism is about the future. Later on he says that Pragmatism is well-suited to democracy, because the growth of freedom leads naturally to a democratic form of government. Both think we can have a better future.

The relation between philosophy and forms of government

Rorty calls himself a Pragmatist, after the only truly American philosophy, founded by the Americans C.S. Peirce, John Dewey, and William James. Here’s a short series discussing some of the basic elements of Pragmatism: Method, Truth, and Applications.

In Rorty’s first sentence, “a way things really are” is a reference to the traditional philosophical problem called the appearance-reality dualism. It’s based on the fact that we only have the evidence of our senses. Therefore we cannot know the reality of the thing we perceive as it truly is. Pragmatism teaches that all we know is what our senses tell us, and there’s nothing beyond that, no Platonic forms, no hidden reality. For a fuller discussion, see the post on Truth linked above.

The older forms of philosophy searched for universal truths, unchanging verities, the way things really are. The results of that search establish a static universe based on the theory of everything created by one or more human beings. There is one answer to any problem, and it can be found by consulting the fixed principles — or the ruler’s command. As Roosevelt puts it, universal verities lead to “… the stale and oppressive monarchies of Europe.”

Pragmatism and democracy are not necessarily connected. As Rorty points out, a Nazi could agree with and apply Pragmatic thinking. But there is a decisive difference between a society living with eternal verities, and one open to change.

A Problem

After reading Roosevelt’s book, I’ve begun to think the the real contest is between Americans dedicated to democracy in the Rorty/Dewey sense, and those committed to the unchanging verities they find in history or their sacred books or handed to them by authoritarian demagogues. The futurists want to make the future better for everyone. The traditionalists think everything is just fine as it is, or as it was at some date in the past, or as it would be in a new society built to effectuate their theory of everything. The futurists, as Rorty says, want the future to be amazing. The traditionalists can’t even handle the latest scientific achievements, like mRNA vaccines. The futurists think the economic status quo must be improved to benefit everyone. The traditionalists think the status quo is the best we can do.

And, not to put too fine a point on this, the people who really want things to remain as they are are the filthy rich; and the people who really want to return to the past are the religious fundamentalists. Both groups are apparently willing to sacrifice democracy to get what they want.

Left Theory

Perhaps you have noted that posts at Emptywheel are categorized. Most of mine are in the category Left Theory. I think the left needs a set of ideas about society and government that can be persuasively explained to non-lefties, and that link all our policy positions into a reasonably coherent whole. I offered a tentative economic theory here. In that post I say that a useful economic theory should be based on observation and experience, not on some grand theory of humanity, or, for that matter any other grand theory. It would serve as a tool for reaching our goals. It would change as we learned more new things. In this sense it would be Pragmatic.

Democracy is a broad theory about how governments should work. It’s a system that works for all people of good faith, giving everyone the opportunity to participate in the process of building the future. In that sense it is Pragmatic.

In the absence of eternal verities, we have to justify all of our beliefs. Why then do I believe democracy is the way forward? First, I believe that the Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would have others do unto you”, is the best guiding principle humans have ever developed. I firmly believe that application of this principle would massively reduce the amount of pain and misery in the world, and that that would be a good thing. To do that, we need to get as many different ideas as we can about our future, both for deciding what we should be as a nation, and for solving problems. Democracy does that.

Also, I want to be part of the decision-making, so I should insure that others can and do participate if they want to.

Second, I agree with Jefferson that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. That desire, that insistence, that we give consent to the government is effectuated by majority rule in a democracy.

And that’s where the conflict lies. In the US the minority party holds power despite the will of the majority. The current system of government makes that easy, especially with the rogue majority on SCOTUS.

Our current challenge is to make our democracy work.

The Better Story

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In the first chapters of The Nation That Never Was, Kermit Roosevelt explains the many problems with the standard story of the US. In the last chapter he offers us a better story. What follows is mostly Roosevelt’s version, but I’ve added more history. Roosevelt’s is at pp. 202-4.

A Version Of The Better Story

During the Revolutionary War, the colonists established a federation of the 13 original colonies. They wanted to keep their existing governments, and feared a strong central government. Their first try, the Articles of Confederation, failed because the central government was too weak and the states frequently ignored it. Then they tore up the Articles and replaced them with the Founders Constitution. In order to gain support for a stronger central government, they put in provisions supporting the continuation of slavery and gave states with smaller white populations greater power in the national government.

From the very beginning Black people resisted slavery by escaping and rebelling in the face of murder and torture. That continued under the Founders Constitution. They and the Abolitionists set up escape routes, and tried every legal route to saving escapees. They rallied, protested, spoke, wrote, appealed to Congress, and demanded freedom and equality. Gradually the movement for freedom became an powerful political force, driven by the principle that all men are created equal. They meant equality in a actual society, not in a hypothetical natural law sense as in the Declaration of Independence, Leaders included Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison.

Urged on by the Black people and the Abolitionists, the United States government resisted the expansion of slavery into the territories, which the Supreme Court supported in Dred Scott. That led to a war with the Slave States which was won by the United States. A major factor in the victory was the 200,000 Black soldiers who fought and died to end slavery. The victorious United States threw out the governments of the seceding states, forced the enactment of the Reconstruction Amendments, and passed laws to enforce them. This is called the Second Founding.

The Second Founding recreated the United States under the principles laid out by its Leader, Abraham Lincoln. His most famous statement of these principles is in his Gettysburg Address: the United States is “… conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal….”

This became our guiding principle. Lincoln told us that we must dedicate ourselves to the principle of equality that the brave men of the United States had died for. He told us we were starting anew with this principle foremost in our minds:

… that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

But not everybody agreed that we were starting over. The secessionists never quit. Their first step was to murder Abraham Lincoln. Then they took power in the former slave states. The Supreme Court gutted the Reconstruction Amendments. That enabled the secessionists and White Supremacists to establish legalized segregation, blessed by the Supreme Court in cases like Plessy v. Ferguson.

Black people never quit either. Despite participating in more wars on behalf of a segregated nation and being treated like dirt on their return, through decades of lynching and white race riots, they continued to fight for equality. After the Second World War, they began to achieve success and for once the Supreme Court didn’t block them.

The, beginning in the 1980s, the White Supremacists pushed back against equality, and achieved partial victories, especially in the revanchist Supreme Court. But Black people persevere, and with them all people of conscience, and this time other marginalized groups join the march towards equality, Black, Brown, Asian, LGBT, young people, all of us together.

That’s our nation: always striving for equality, always striving for fairness and equality, always fighting the darkness.

Addendum on Abraham Lincoln

When the Civil War started, Lincoln was willing to accept slavery as the price of unifying the states. That changed during the war. Roosevelt says the Fort Pillow Massacre played a big role in that change. Lincoln had established units of Black Soldiers. They were among the defenders of Fort Pillow, near Memphis in April, 1864. The secessionist troops under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest, later the first head of the KKK, captured a group of US troops trying to surrender, including approximately 300 Black soldiers and their White officers. The Southerners murdered the Black soldiers in cold blood. A few days later Abraham Lincoln gave a speech called the Address At The Sanitary Fair. Here’s a short section.

A painful rumor, true I fear, has reached us of the massacre, by the rebel forces, at Fort Pillow, … of some three hundred colored soldiers and white officers, who had just been overpowered by their assailants. There seems to be some anxiety in the public mind whether the government is doing its duty to the colored soldier, and to the service, at this point. At the beginning of the war, and for some time, the use of colored troops was not contemplated; and how the change of purpose was wrought, I will not now take time to explain. Upon a clear conviction of duty I resolved to turn that element of strength to account; and I am responsible for it to the American people, to the christian world, to history, and on my final account to God. Having determined to use the negro as a soldier, there is no way but to give him all the protection given to any other soldier.

Why This Is A Better Story

Roosevelt offers several reasons why this is a better story. It has the advantage of being accurate, of course. The standard story ignores the role of Black People in our history. The better story includes Black people and tells us of their valor and perseverance, and the contributions they made to the story of America. In doing so it makes room for the contributions of other groups ignored by the standard story. The better story opens the way to real unity of all of us regardless of all the many ways in which we are different.

The better story gives us a new set of heroes. It valorizes the soldiers who personified the words of Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn Of The Republic: “… As He died to make men holy let us die to make men free ….” These regular people, Black and White, are worthy of emulation. That’s not entirely true of the Founders, who fought for their own freedom, and were morally compromised by the denial of freedom to their slaves, their enslaved concubines, and enslaved children.

We can respect the leaders of the Second Founding, Lincoln and the Senators and Representatives who enacted the Reconstruction Amendments and related legislation. We do not have to consider their personal lives, because the better story is about contributions to the future, not an unhealthy fixation on the always problematic past.

Similarly, the better story tells us about the wrong way to be an American. People who oppose these heroes and the values they lived out, and their contributions to our democracy, are not good citizens.

The better story shows us how we can be better citizens: by trying to make America a better place.

States Rights

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One of the recurrent themes in The Nation That Never Was by Kermit Roosevelt is states rights, the right of the state to make many critical decisions about the rights and privileges of their residents. It seems like a strange way to run a country. How can we think of ourselves as a single nation when there are enormous variations in our rights? It seems contradictory to another recurrent theme of Roosevelt: the desire for unity.

The original English settlements in the US were organized under Charters from the Kings of England. They seem to have been drawn for various political reasons, that is reasons of English politics and money, and without regard to the interests of Indigenous Americans, or of the Colonists. There was no plan. Our original 13 colonies arrived on the scene just like the nations of the Middle East after the Sykes-Picot lines: as an exercise of British colonialism.

The Colonists were subjects of the English Crown, but each colony eventually established its own government. They created courts, legislatures, and administrative bodies usually under a written constitution. One of the big complaints in the Declaration of Independence is that the King is ignoring these institutions. As an example:

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

By 1776, these governments were entrenched. After the Revolutionary War their big fear was that any central government would act the tyrant as had the English Kings. That led to the Articles of Confederation, which created a central government so weak it could not be a tyrant. The Articles were a total failure.

But the dominant vision remained. Colonial leaders wanted a federation of independent states, each with a strong government, and a national government barred from interfering with state governments. The Constitution preserves most of the powers of the individual states, and gave the rest to the central government. They got a central government strong enough to insure peace among these independent units, to ward off external attack, and to establish a suitable business environment. People’s rights as citizens of the United States were limited. Substantially all individual rights sprang from state citizenship.

Even within this context slavery was a paramount issue. The northern states were moving away from it, as was Europe. This was obviously a concern to the Southern states, and the Constitution contains provisions they demanded by the to alleviate those concerns.

Roosevelt says that supporting the demands of the slave states is just the first of many occasions in which unity takes priority over equality in our history. It’s one of the many times the interests and rights of Black people were sacrificed to the demands of unity.

The Constitution was an agreement among the Thirteen Colonies, not an agreement of “We the people of the United States” as the Preamble states. Theoretically the people agreed through their representatives in the state governments, but that seems just as unlikely as the assumptions underlying of social contract theory.

The Founders Constitution preserves the powers of the States except for specific matters, and that is confirmed by the Tenth Amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The powers reserved to the states include determining citizenship in the state, the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, almost all other political rights, and the right to establish and regulate slavery. This is the origin of the notion of states rights: that the state has the right to determine your rights.

Theoretically the Reconstruction Amendments changed the relations between the states and the Federal government. Citizenship in a state was conferred on all residents, and the states didn’t get to decide that question. The rights in the Constitution became enforceable against the states, although that took decades and has a twisted legal history. Voting was a right guaranteed by the federal government. States were prohibited from treating people differently on account of race. Congress was explicitly empowered to legislate these changes. But the Supreme Court refused to allow this to happen. In the Slaughter-House Cases and later cases, the Supreme Court narrowed and nearly neutered the Reconstructions Amendments and restored state power, enabling states to neutralize the supposed gains of Black citizens.

The pre-Civil War arrangement of power continues to the present. In a 2010 case, McDonald v. City Of Chicago, the revanchist Alito said that SCOTUS wouldn’t reexamine the Slaughter-House Cases.

Discussion

Reading these cases makes me wonder what it means to be a US citizen, a point I have raised before, as here. If it’s true that your rights mostly come from the state where you live, the differences among the rights available to citizens can be enormous.

Two of the obvious examples currently are abortion and trans rights. Right-wing state legislators are passing laws to police these bodies directly and by terrifying medical professionals. Another obvious example is the right-wing assaults on education, including the ridiculous Florida laws against teaching subjects the right wing can’t face, like Black history and racism, LGBTQ rights, and critical thinking. This includes books like the two in this series and probably my posts on them.

I think the problem is much wider. The plain fact is that some states take better care of their citizens than others. The clearest example of this is life expectancy. Here’s a list of the states by life expectancy at birth using data from the years 2018-20. The top 5 states, all Blue (New Hampshire at 4 is purple), have a life expectancy of 79.4 years while the bottom 5, all bright Red, are at 72.9. If, as the Declaration claims, you have a right to life, you get nearly 9 more years of it in Hawaii than in Mississippi.

The same is true for education, public safety, and all other aspects of government that are primarily the responsibility of states. That inequality is the direct result of the notion of dual sovereignty that underlies cases like McDonald.

This problem was created by the Supreme Court. SCOTUS decisions about our rights as US citizens start with the Slaughter-House Cases and related cases that tightly narrow the Reconstruction Amendments. At about the same time SCOTUS decided to give rights to corporations just like people. SCOTUS dismantled the Voting Rights Act in direct violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments which give Congress the power to legislate. SCOTUS allows gerrymandering on the flimsiest pretexts and on the shadow docket.

Because whatever rights we have as citizens of the US are in the Constitution and federal laws, SCOTUS has the final say. SCOTUS has proven itself to be a screaming disaster for democracy, and for the supposed principles of the Founders of equality of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The Intent Of The Declaration Of Independence

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In his book The Nation That Never Was, Kermit Roosevelt lays out the standard story we are all taught about our history. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are our founding documents. They lay out our principles of freedom and equality. The Declaration teaches us that All Men Are Created Equal and entitled to certain inalienable rights. P. 8 et seq. The Constitution puts that theory into practice. It’s so engrained in our minds that it’s hard to imagine contesting it.

But people have. Roosevelt gives examples from the 19th Century. White supremacists across the nation argued that these documents justified slavery, the eradication of Native Americans, and second-class citizenship for women, among other inequalities. Black people and Abolitionists said that equality and freedom were meant for everyone in the country, not just White men of property.

This dispute continued into the Civil Rights Era in the 20th Century. In his I Have A Dream speech, Martin Luther King said that the Declaration was a guarantee of freedom and equality for all.

“I have a dream,” he said, “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’” P. 23.

Malcom X saw the Declaration as a call to action for Black people, who he said were a nation within a nation. The US had abused Black people for hundreds of years, and refused to treat them as human beings. Therefore, just as the colonists were justified in rebelling against an abusive King, Black people were justified in rebelling against White rule. For him, the Declaration was not about equality, but about the right to throw out the oppressors.

Roosevelt offers four arguments that we shouldn’t interpret the statement “all men are created equal” as a political foundation for the US government.

First, if we interpret that statement as Lincoln did in the Gettysburg Address, or King did in his I Have A Dream speech, Jefferson would have to be condemning slavery and granting the freedmen the same rights as White people. Jefferson obviously wasn’t saying that. He himself was a slaver: he enslaved his own children by Sally Hemings. This was perfectly legal in Virginia, which passed a statute in 1662 saying that citizenship of a person depends on the citizenship of the mother. This was necessary because “questions have arisen” after a Virginia court decided that the daughter of a White man with nn enslaved woman was a free woman. P. 45.

Second, the ideal of equality is irrelevant to Jefferson’s argument. There is no other mention of equality in the Declaration. There’s a long list of abuses and offenses committed by the King of England, and it’s those abuses that justify throwing off the King’s rule by force, not the equality of anyone with anyone. It wouldn’t affect Jefferson’s argument if the King were treating Englishmen equally with the Colonists by oppressing both, .

Third, Jefferson’s first draft complained that the King introduced slavery into the Colonies and then overruled the Colonist’s attempts to terminate the slave trade. That was taken out by the Signers, leaving only the complaint that the King was stirring up rebellion among the slaves. That’s the equivalent of a demand to have the king stay out of Colonial slavery.

Fourth, you wouldn’t make equality a principle and then exclude people from the definition of “all men”. That makes you look bad, especially because England had already outlawed slavery. [Adding on edit: This is an overstatement of the facts. See the comments of Michael Conforti below. I may also have overstated Roosevelt’s point. I quoted his text in a comment below.] Continuing slavery makes you look like hypocrites in the eyes of potential allies. Relatedly, freedom and equality of all citizens was not the dominant view, and calling that self-evident would look foolish.

So, what did Jefferson mean? He claims that it is self-evidently true that all men are created equal and endowed with equal rights. Then he says

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,

This is the actual principle that motivates the Declaration: government power comes from the consent of the governed, and the governed have a natural right to withdraw that consent if the government misuses its power.

Jefferson explains that the Colonists aspire “to the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them”. He’s basing his entire argument on Natural Law, not laws created by humans. He’s saying that there is no Divine Right of Kings, that the King is just a man, not a person born to rule, or ordained by the Almighty with the right to rule. This was mostly accepted by this point even in England. But it moves the argument onto solid ground, the grounds of consent. Roosevelt says that the Declaration is a document of political philosophy, not of human rights.

And how does slavery, the antithesis of freedom and equality, fit in?. Roosevelt says that Jefferson is referring to the generally accepted idea of government at that time. It comes from the likes of Jean-jacques Rousseau, as we saw in The Dawn Of Everything. It begins by imagining a society in a state of nature. Everyone is free and equal, and has certain natural rights. But they have no way to protect those rights other than their own strength, leading to a war of all against all in which life is brutish, nasty, etc., following Hobbes.

So men formed governments to protect those rights. The men who formed the government agree to defend each other against the outsiders, who have no protection from that government. The Declaration doesn’t say anything about the rights of outsiders like slaves and Indigenous Americans. It only addresses the rights of insiders, the White English colonists, as against their rulers.

Slavery is perfectly consistent with this view of nationhood. The slaves, Native Americans, and others are outsiders, beyond the protection of government and not entitled to equality or freedom, except as the government is willing to provide.

Discussion

1. Many of the books I”ve discussed here have changed my understanding of something I was taught in school. I think one reason I don’t have trouble changing my mind is that so few things seem critical to my self-understanding. For example, I was taught that there was a fixed external truth, and that our human truths are mere approximations of that truth. Now I think differently about truth. But that doesn’t change anything about my self-perception or my day-to-day interactions with other people. On the other hand, when I am accused of bad behavior towards others I feel an assault on my self-perception, and I try to change my behavior.

The standard story seems critically important to lots of right-wing partisans, as we saw in the right-wing reaction to the 1619 Project, and the hissy-fit about Critical Race Theory. It’s one thing to say: my principles include the belief that all men are crated equal and have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s another to say one of my principles is that Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders believed that and said so in the Declaration and the Constitution. The latter strikes me as akin to a religious belief, analoguous to the early Egyptians believing that the dead require leavened bread and wheat beer and changing their entire agriculture to fit that belief.

2. The Declaration may not have originally stood for the proposition that all men are created equal, but now it absolutely does. The history of that change of perception is important, because it tells us that we as a nation can change. Slavery was once widely accepted. Now it’s not. Our ancestors reversed that consensus, and we can and should be proud of that. It is as inspiration to work for a better country.

Introduction And Index To Series On The Second Founding

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Posts in this series
The Intent Of The Declaration Of Independence
Problems With The Standard Story Of The Revolutionary War And The Constitution
States Rights
The Better Story
Democracy Is Our Hope For A Better Future
The Thirteenth Amendmeent
The fourteenth Amendment
The Fifteenth Amendment
The Slaughterhouse Cases
Cruikshank, Gun Control, And Bad Rulings
The Major Questions Metadoctrine and The Slaughterhouse Cases
The Supreme Court Has Always Been Terrible

The term “second founding” refers to the fundamental changes made to the US Constitution and in our society by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. I had not heard this term before did some reading for this this post praising Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s questions at oral argument on the recent Alabama redistricting case. Justice Jackson actually knows her history, unlike the Fox News members of SCOTUS, and, well, me.

Shortly after writing that post I heard a podcast featuring Kermit Roosevelt discussing his book, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story. I read it and was discussing it with a friend who recommended I look into the work of Eric Foner. That led me to his recent book, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution.

In this series I’ll take up these two books. They’re short and very readable, and they complement each other. Foner focuses on the events of the period, while Roosevelt focuses on the legal/theoretical side.

The Nation That Never Was

Roosevelt teaches law at Penn, and yes, he’s the great-grandson of Teddy Roosevelt. The premise of his book is that we are telling the wrong story about our constitutional history. The conventional story starts by describing the Declaration Of Independence and the Constitution as our founding documents, incorporating our national values of freedom and equality for all, but hmmm, slavery was bad so we had a Civil War and Reconstruction and cured that problem, but then we found out about racism, and then Martin Luther King solved that problem and now things are great. It’s a story that the right-wing fetishizes.

The rest of us have a more adult view of our history. It doesn’t question starting point of the standard story, the part about the Declaration and the Constitution. But it adds all the horrors of the Jim Crow Era, the abuses of a perverted capitalism against workers of every description, and the horrifying treatment of Native Americans. It’s grim and unsatisfying, but at least it’s more accurate.

Roosevelt thinks we need a story that gives us real heroes, people who give us hope and inspiration for the future. He also thinks we need to look very closely at the founding documents, and the decisions of the First Founders as well as their omissions.

Roosevelt suggests a new story. First we had a system that was OK with the most brutal forms of slavery. Then we fought a war to wipe it out. We won that war at huge cost in blood and treasure. We changed the very nature of our society and we can take pride in that effort and the people who did it. We aren’t perfect. But the Civil Rights Amendments gave us the tools we need to reach for freedom and equality for all, and it’s a task for which we as citizens are all responsible.

Roosevelt discusses reparations, but I’m not going to address that, except to say this. I urge readers to take the time to read this article by Ta’Nehisi Coates. It’s a tough read. I certainly know I have benefited from the current structure of society, almost certainly at the expense of others who have suffered unfairly. I don’t know what to do about that, but it is unjust.

The Second Founding

Foner teaches history at Columbia. I haven’t finished the book yet, but so far there’s a lot of detail about our history I didn’t know or ever think about. Much of that has to do with the sausage-making behind the Civil Rights Amendments, and the arguments made by opponents of those Amendments. I read Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters From An American substack every day, in large part because she is attuned to the parallels between the politics of the Civil War Era and those of today. Here’s an example. In the same way, Ibram X. Kendi shows that arguments by racists never die, and Hannah Arendt shows that anti-Semitism is an endemic hate virus. White supremacy and Christian Nationalism seem to be ineradicable.

Plan

My current plan is to do a fairly short series. I’ll start with the Roosevelt book. There is a conventional view of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, but that story is utterly inadequate. Then I’ll turn to Foner’s book to look at the politics of the Reconstruction Amendments, and the way they were weakened by centrists and subverted by White Supremacists and the Supreme Court.

We’ll see what else pops up.

Taken together, I think these two books give us a good introduction to a different way of thinking about our history, one in which we can take pride, one that gives us heroes we can respect, one that sets our aspirations and hopes for our future and our descendants. The history is suitable for grown-ups, and therefore is probably illegal in Florida and Texas.

We can’t fix the past, but we can do better for the future, just as the Second Founders did. That’s what it means to be a citizen.

Conclusion To Series On The Dawn Of Everything

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The Dawn Of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow has 525 pages of text. I’ve discussed 10 of the 12 chapters in the last 14 months, and it’s time to move on. I’ll conclude this series with a few ideas triggered by the book.

1. The authors show that human societies didn’t follow any particular pattern of change. We didn’t move from foraging to agriculture to industrialization along a single track. We didn’t grow from bands to tribes to clans to small hamlets to towns to cities to nation-states. We didn’t move from one form of social organization to another in any particular order. Instead, the crucial factor is human agency. Agency is the antithesis of the mindlessness of Darwin-style evolution. People make choices. Genes don’t.

2. Greaber and Wengrow are clear about their biases. Among other things they think the current state of society is based on social inequality, and that this is bad. One of the principle themes of the book is laid out as a section heading at p. 111: Why The Real Question Is Not “What Are The Origins Of Social Inequality’ But ‘How Did We Get Stuck?’ They don’t answer the question directly, but it’s likely they think one of the central problems is domination.

In Chapter 10 they say that societies are held together by domination, which can take three forms, sovereignty (control of violence), control of knowledge, and charisma, which operates through virtues approved by the group, such as strength or rhetoric. Each of these can be used to achieve and perpetuate social inequality.

3. The authors think that societies have a shared mental component that links members and separates them from other groups. In ancient societies people shared creation myths or other cosmogonies, rituals, cultic practices, totems, and social practices. We moderns do too. In this post I suggested that

… we Americans share a sort of secular religion based on the founding myths of our country and a weak allegiance to what Jefferson called “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence. The latter is a formulation that originally meant Natural Law but I think now includes a science-based mental stance and values based on a vaguely Christian moral sense. The founding myths include our commitment to freedom, as “all men are created equal”; a government of laws, not of men; a form of capitalism; and representative democracy.

By “vaguely Christian moral sense”, I meant something like the Golden Rule, and that this Rule was given to us from something greater than our mortal selves. Each of us has many more beliefs, some fully supported by fact and reason, many less so, and some perfectly arbitrary, such as a preference between forks and chopsticks, or certainty that the end times are upon us.

One important mental component that holds citizens of the US together is a shared commitment to the idea that this is a nation of laws, not of men. We had a general agreement that we would select our leaders, and adhere to the laws and rules they enacted. There’s still some truth there even in these days of Republican treachery.

4. Control of knowledge is a powerful tool. In Chapter 10 the authors describe an ongoing problem in pre-dynastic Egypt, around 3500 BCE: whether the dead require food and drink, and if so, what. The answer turns out to be they need leavened bread and wheat beer. There is no known explanation for this. Skeptics might suggest the priests who gave this answer really liked leavened bread and wheat beer. In any event, this answer required a vast increase in the amount of wheat to satisfy the needs of all of the dead people. That led to vast increases in agriculture, away from the fertile floodplains of the Nile, increased need for irrigation, additional labor, accounting bureaucracies, and debt peonage. The baseless idea of feeding the dead changed the course of human history.

Many of the societies described in the book believed that their gods demand sacrifices of animals, food, or even human beings. We see this among the Aztecs, and in Gen. 4:3 and Gen. 22:2, for example. These ideas don’t ever really disappear. For example, the idea of helping one’s dead ancestors shows up in Chinese use of joss paper.

These ideas seem strange to me, even for the ancients. That’s because they are perfectly abstract. There is no way to verify them, or to justify them other than stories. And yet human beings have always acted on stories, and those actions shape whole societies.

5. At present, it seems to me that our mutual commitment to the rule of law is threatened by a drive to dominate and control knowledge. In most advanced societies knowledge was largely generated and vetted in and through an academic culture. Because of this commitment, no one cared that I read existentialist and surreal texts in college in the 60s, and no one cared that my history class was heavy on criticism of Gilded Age capitalism. Everyone assumed that it was important that as we got older we replace our child’s version of philosophy and of our history with a more adult ideas. Universities were thought to be the training grounds for leadership. Why would you want ignorant leaders, trained on a bunch of Young Adult stories?

But now intellectual pursuits, such fields of study as Critical Race Theory, deconstruction, the history of Reconstruction in the US, and gender studies are the subject of political hostility. For at least the last 50 years private interests have been trying to take control of information. Think of tobacco companies and their scientists lying about their cancer-causing products. Exxon and its scientists concealed the dangers of climate breakdown while fighting changes in energy policy. Someone found a bunch of doctors to attack vaccines. The right-wing media dumps lies into the minds of its audience. Now politicians are reaching directly into the intellectual formation of college students, hoping to hide people and histories they don’t like and that don’t fit the Potemkin World they’ve created.

That Potemkin World is the endpoint sought by the reactionaries who have dumped billions into the project of knowledge control. They’re motivated by their desire to protect and extend their wealth, and defuse any opposition to their control. I see an obvious analogy to the priests of Egypt who divined that the dead needed wheat beer.

Graeber and Wengrow say “As soon as we were human we started doing human things.” P. 82. And apparently we keep doing them even when they make as little sense as feeding the dead with expensive wheat products or risking the future of the earth to make a few bucks.

The Search For The Origins Of The State

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Posts on The Dawn Of Everything: Link
Posts on Pierre Bourdieu and Symbolic Violence: link
Posts trying to cope with the absurd state of political discourse: link
Posts on Freedom and Equality. link

In Chapter 10 of The Dawn Of Everything the authors, David Graeber and David Wengrow, take up the search for the origins of the state. They discuss current theories of the nature of the state. They provide a different framework for understanding the term in ancient times, and even suggest that the earliest versions of these organizational structures were part-time, just as agriculture was part-time. Then they give examples of how their theory works.

Theories of the State

Today almost everyone lives under the governance of a nation-state. The generally accepted definition was suggested by Rudolph von Ihering in the late 1800s and is now associated with Max Weber: “… any institution that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within a given territory….” P. 359. But that’s not the way things worked in the earliest large groups.

Marxists suggested that states emerged to protect the power of an emerging ruling class, but the authors reject this theory.

A third theory is quite common: as the population in any area increases, you need top-down authority to coordinate and plan. But, as we’ve seen, this isn’t right, because a large number of ancient polities operated quite well without an autocratic leader endowed with the power of violence.

The authors suggest that at least for ancient societies we should consider three factors:

  • Sovereignty, meaning the control of violence directed at members of the group and the right to authorize other to inflict violence;
  • Administration, meaning control over information. This can be of two kinds. Frequently it means factual information necessary to keep things operating, for example taxes due and collected, or corvée obligations. Particularly in early societies it means esoteric or cultic knowledge, for example, explanations of the cosmos and the roles of people in it.
  • Charisma, meaning a personal power of persuasion that enables one to dominate others.

Each of these factors is a form of dominance, which the authors see as the basis of the state. The authors rephrase the search for the origins of the state from their perspective:

How did large-scale forms of domination first emerge, and what did they actually look like? What, if anything, do they have to do with arrangements that endure to this day? P. 370.

Dominance in early societies

This material takes up most of the chapter. The authors give examples of societies organized under one form of dominance, which they call First-Order Societies, then societies with two of the forms of dominance, Second-Order Societies. The material is fascinating, and the examples support the use of their categories. I’m only going to discuss one illustration, the Chavin Culture, a pre-Inca group located on the western slopes of the Andes down to the sea near what is now Lima Peru.

This culture seems to have arisen around 3000 BCE, and flowered around 1200 BCE. It lasted another 800 years before disappearing. The authors say there is little evidence of the use of violence, no evidence of a formal bureaucracy, and no evidence of a monarch with sovereign or political power.

The archaeological record is dominated by imagery, primarily carved stone. Here’s a description.

Crested eagles curl in on themselves, vanishing into a maze of ornament; human faces grow snake-like fangs, or contort into a feline grimace. No doubt other figures escape our attention altogether. Only after some study do even the most elementary forms reveal themselves to the untrained eye. With due attention, we can eventually begin to tease out recurrent images of tropical forest animals – jaguars, snakes, caimans – but just as the eye attunes to them they slip back from our field of vision, winding in and out of each other’s bodies or merging into complex patterns. P. 388.

The authors characterize these as “shamanic journeys to the world of chthonic spirits and animal familiars.” The society was held together by rituals and cultic knowledge. The people seem to have enjoyed rituals oriented to hallucinogenic substances made from local plants.

This is an example of a First-Order Society.

Discussion

1. I do like the idea of a stoner kingdom.

2. The authors possibly think that societies are held together through domination. Like power, this is a term they don’t discuss. I did a digression on power, link above. I’ve discussed Pierre Bourdieu’s work on domination, link above. And I’ve discussed some current ideas about freedom, which is the complement to the idea of both, link above.

But they give plenty of examples where that isn’t so. In fact, they seem to think we’d be better off if we lived without domination, or at least in a society where decisions are made in a more democratic system. That contradiction is confusing.

3.

Very large social units are always, in a sense, imaginary. Or, to put it in a slightly different way: there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighbourhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, or at least most of the time, in our heads. P. 276.

Large social units may exist in the imagination, but they have roots in reality. I live in the Gold Coast neighborhood of Chicago. I only know a few of my neighbors, but we are bound together by a number of links. We care about local schools, local traffic, local businesses and our parks in a particular way. If these are threatened, say by a local developer trying to replace a park or increase the traffic burden, we cooperate to deal with it.

I’m bound to other Chicagoans by crucial ties: they staff my doctor’s office, my dry cleaner, and my grocery store, and everything else I need. My life is smooth and pleasant because of them. I care that they are safe and healthy. I care that they have paved streets so they can get to work, and so I care about the people who pave those streets, clear off the snow, fill the potholes, and replace the bulbs in the stoplights. I want everybody’s kids to have good schools, just like I want good schools for my grandkids.

We have other ties. We like brats and argue about pizza. We ride public transport and we talk about the best way to get around in our miserable traffic. We go to movies, theater, concerts, and restaurants together. We can always talk about something here that affects us all, the latest corruption story, property taxes, who the Bears should draft, and the weather.

As I read it, the authors think those ties are strong enough to pull us together as a group without a dominating force.

4. Each of the societies described in the book has a mental component that goes deeper than just being neighbors. They share rituals, cosmologies, stories about themselves as a people, cultic practices, and there’s a shared understanding of themselves as a group. These are taught to children and reinforced by ritual and practice throughout the lives of members. They are at least as important to the maintenance of the group as any of the forms of dominance.

The Founders rejected the idea of a state religion, and we’ve mostly abandoned cultic practices. I think we Americans share a sort of secular religion based on the founding myths of our country and a weak allegiance to what Jefferson called “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence. The latter is a formulation that originally meant Natural Law but I think now includes a science-based mental stance and values based on a vaguely Christian moral sense. The founding myths include our commitment to freedom, as “all men are created equal”; a government of laws, not of men; a form of capitalism; and representative democracy.

This, roughly, is the mental component that up til now has bound us into a nation. I think the authors miss this point.
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Photo credit: Cbrescia.

Egalitarian Cities In Early Central America

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Befor I read Chapter 9 of The Dawn Of Everything I thought all the Pre-Columbian Central American societies were monarchies, and that they all practiced violent rituals, including lethal ball games and ritual human sacrifices. David Graeber and David Wengrow describe a city, Teotihuacan, and a city-state,Tlaxcala, that were not.

Teotihuacan

Teotihuacan was founded around 100 BCE in the Valley of Mexico, where Mexico City is today. It grew into a city aided by an influx of people fleeing an earthquake and a volcanic eruption. It seems to have started with a traditional top-down authoritarian regime. There were huge constructions including the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon and the Temple of the Feathered Serpent and other public buidings. Around 250-350 CE there was a dramatic change in the organization of the city.

A key piece of evidence is the desecration of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent and the construction of a new center of organization along the Avenue of the Dead. At the same time, they built stone apartment complexes to house the population, which is estimated at 125,000. The authors cite the work of an early excavator who thought these apartments were a form of social housing, designed to bring order to the growing population. The authors paint an idyllic picture of a communal commercial life.

We don’t know exactly how the city was organized or governed in the later period, but the authors say we an probably rule out a top-down form of government. The city lasted for about 250 years in this form, and then it collapsed, perhaps under the strain of rising class inequalities, perhaps exacerbated by a long period of drought.

By around AD 550, the social fabric of the city had begun to come apart at the seams. There is no compelling evidence of foreign invasion. Things seems to have disintegrated from within. Almost as suddenly as it had once coalesced some five centuries previously, the city’s population dispersed again.… P. 345.

This history is broadly similar to that in Wikipedia.

Tlaxcala

Tlaxcala was an independent group of four small kingdoms formed in the 14th Century to stand against their Aztec neighbors, the Triple Alliance. The authors say it was a democratic entity that governed itself by consensus. The primary evidence for this is records of their decision to ally with the army of Hernan Cortés in 1519. The description of the decision-making process given by the authors sounds a lot like that of the Native Americans of the Great Lakes region discussed in earlier chapters. Of course, once the Spanish destroyed the Aztecs, they subjugated and evangelized the peoples of Tlaxcala.

Here’s the relevant part of a brief Wiki entry, which gives a somewhat different history, and ignores the organization issue. Both accounts discus the Flower Wars. The Wiki entry says the Flower Wars were ritual combat intended to demonstrate the machismo of the participants, and were less lethal than the wars of conquest. The authors say these were real wars, and that the Aztecs made up this story about the Flower Wars to cover up their inability to conquer the Tlaxcall people; “But this was braggadocio.” P. 348.

Discussion

1. Mesoamerican art of this era is remarkable, as the authors note. Here’s an article describing some of it. There’s a Nova episode on the archaeology of the Maya people. This and other material got me to thinking about the role of religious beliefs in the ancient cultures described by the authors. One of the central factors is the role of religion in the power structure of cultures like the Aztecs and Maya, and many others, including our own.

2. The book does not discuss of the origins of religion in ancient societies. Instead of religion, we are told that our ancestors participated in rituals, in the case of Teotihuacan, “calendrical rituals”. All of the cultures discussed in The Dawn of Everything had rituals, fertility rituals for humans and agriculture, rituals for the beginning of the new year, rituals for rain, and so on. We might think of them as precursors of organized religion.

Decades ago I read Mircea Eliade’s book, The Myth Of The Eternal Return, which I stole from my mother’s bookshelves. Eliade offers a framework for understanding the mindset that adheres to ritual. It starts with the differentiation of the sacred and the profane. This is from Wikipedia:

According to Eliade, traditional man distinguishes two levels of existence: (1) the Sacred, and (2) the profane world. (Here “the Sacred” can be God, gods, mythical ancestors, or any other beings who established the world’s structure.) To traditional man, things “acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality”. Something in our world is only “real” to the extent that it conforms to the Sacred or the patterns established by the Sacred. Fn. omitted.

The entire Wiki entry is worth reading, and for those interested the book is full of valuable material and fascinating speculation. Fun fact: I first heard of the Epic Of Gilgamesh from this book, and I recall spending a long afternoon at the library of the University of North Carolina reading it in 1970.

I can’t find my copy of the book so I don’t know if Eliade discusses Mesoamerican beliefs. But we can find hints that these people believed that they were participating in the divine through human and animal sacrifice and human bloodletting. See this and this.

3. In many ancient societies the monarch, ostensibly an earthly power, became a deity. In Eliade’s terms, this is a melding the Sacred and profane. We see this in some of the Mesoamerican societies, and in Egypt, for example. A weak version of the idea continues into the 17th Century under the concept of the Divine Right of Kings, one of the ideas rejected by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence (“All men are created equal”.) We can see echoes of it today in the legal doctrine of sovereign immunity, which arises from the idea that the king holds power under the aegis of the Almighty. Therefore the king can do no wrong and cannot be sued. This bizarre notion was imported from English Common Law into US law without much thought, and despite Jefferson’s principle. Now there’s a zombie idea.

4. The effort to link religion and political power exists today in the US and other nations. You might get the impression that some religious leaders see their religion as a stepping-stone to earthly power.