Posts Tagged ‘slavery’
“Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection”*…
Every week, Sam Circle reads the New Yorker— closely– and publishes a wonderful review of the contents of each issue in two parts: the primary editorial and the poetry and cartoons. In their most recent missive, the “Random Pick” (an article from the archive) was “This Year’s Model” by Michael Kelly. (June 17, 1996)…
Who’d have guessed that the most blistering take I’ve read on the Democrats’ current travails would be something a centrist wrote in the ‘90s? I have a general sense of Clinton’s deal, but given that I was four when he left office (I know, I know) the details aren’t visceral for me, and it’s hard to know how literally to take leftists when they call him a social conservative. But [while] I wouldn’t exactly call [Kelly] trustworthy in general (here’s Tom Scocca with a blistering and definitive posthumous takedown), I at least grant the trust of contemporaneousness when he says Clinton is, “on social issues,” running “to the left of Pat Buchanan but to the right of, say, George Bush”. It’s sick that Kelly’s issue with Clinton claiming he’s going to gut welfare and put far more cops on the streets is that he maybe can’t be trusted to actually do so; it doesn’t matter, though, because Kelly’s analysis is still sharp, and in many ways Clinton can be seen as a predecessor of Trump: “You vote for Clinton, and who knows what you’ll get? Maybe he’ll turn again – back your way.” There are no principles, there are only deals; it’s a politics of nihilism loosely cloaked in a politics of populism. And centrists still push this “we’re just following the polls” message. This is an uneasy glimpse of the past, clarified by the horrors of the present…
The legacy of the “centrist urge” and faux populism in the 90s…
See also: Rebecca Solnit’s “Stop glorifying ‘centrism’. It is an insidious bias favoring an unjust status quo” (source of the image above)
* “I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.” – Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail“
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As we take stock, we might recall that it was on this date in 1862 that Congress passed the the Act Prohibiting the Return of Slaves, effectively nullifying the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and setting the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation.
“John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”*…
Brian Klaas on the state of the American Dream…
Intergenerational poverty—in which those who are born poor stay poor throughout their lives—is an obvious blight on society. Its persistence also flies in the face of many meritocratic myths about poverty being purely a reflection of limited talents and poor choices rather than structural and social factors.
But how persistent is intergenerational poverty? And which countries are best—and worst—at tackling it?
Recently published research in Nature set out to answer that exact question, with a comparison between the United States, the UK, Australia, Germany, and Denmark. This design allowed the researchers to examine differential rates of intergenerational poverty among five rich democracies that are ostensibly peer nations.
The findings are brutal reading for the United States. As the researchers explain:
We found that the United States has a much stronger intergenerational poverty than the four other high-income countries examined. Spending all of one’s childhood in poverty in the United States is associated with a 42 percentage point increase in the mean poverty rate during early adulthood. This is more than four times stronger than in Denmark and more than twice as strong as in Australia or the United Kingdom.
Crucially, though, through a series of clever research methods, they were able to identify the key drivers of the variation between these countries. And, as they point out, the biggest factor that makes the United States an outlier is tied to government policy around taxes and the social safety net. Using sophisticated modelling, they were able to demonstrate that “if the United States were to adopt the tax and transfer insurance effects of its peer countries, its intergenerational poverty persistence could decrease by more than one-third.”
This is the kind of social research that deserves more attention; it’s solid evidence that the persistence of intergenerational poverty is, to a large extent, a policy choice. That’s depressing, of course, but it’s also a call to action: these are the stakes of politics.
The governance choices we make have enormous impacts on the life chances of millions of people, and it’s why the pushback against bad policy is essential—and why depressed complacency about the currently dystopian state of the world, while understandable, is self-defeating and counterproductive.
There are solutions—and the ripple effects of our actions taken now can get us closer to implementing them, even (or especially) when it seems most hopeless…
Bracing– but painfully timely– reading: “The American Outlier of Intergenerational Poverty,” from @brianklaas.bsky.social.
(Image above: source)
* Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress
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As we take the necessary steps, we might recall that it was on this date in 1775 that Thomas Paine published African Slavery in America – the first article in the American colonies calling for the emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery.
The full text is here.
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines who you will be when you can’t help it”*…
Indeed. And not just what one reads, but how one reads it. The estimable Henry Farrell reviews the “tech canon” that seems to underlie so much of what Silicon Valley and the tech world at large is advocating. That canon’s celebration of great men and the acomplishments of small teams helps explain everything from Mark Andreessen’s accelerationist manifesto through the machinations of DOGE to Jeff Bezos’ resteering of The Washington Post…
… Tech luminaries seem to opine endlessly about books and ideas, debating the merits and defects of different flavors of rationalism, of basic economic principles and of the strengths and weaknesses of democracy and corporate rule.
This fervor has yielded a recognizable “Silicon Valley canon.” And as Elon Musk and his shock troops descend on Washington with intentions of reengineering the government, it’s worth paying attention to the books the tech world reads — as well as the ones they don’t. Viewed through the canon, DOGE’s grand effort to cut government down to size is the latest manifestation of a longstanding Silicon Valley dream: to remake politics in its image.
Last August, Tanner Greer, a conservative writer with a large Silicon Valley readership, asked on X what the contents of the “vague tech canon” might be. He’d been provoked when the writer and technologist Jasmine Sun asked why James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, an anarchist denunciation of grand structures of government, had become a “Silicon Valley bookshelf fixture.” The promptled Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe and a leading thinker within Silicon Valley, to suggest a list of 43 sources, which he stressed were not those he thought “one ought to read” but those that “roughly cover[ed] the major ideas that are influential here.”
In a later response, Greer argued that the canon tied together a cohesive community, providing Silicon Valley leaders with a shared understanding of power and a definition of greatness. Greer, like Graham, spoke of the differences between cities. He described Washington, DC as an intellectually stultified warren of specialists without soul, arid technocrats who knew their own narrow area of policy but did not read outside of it. In contrast, Silicon Valley was a place of doers, who looked to books not for technical information, but for inspiration and advice. The Silicon Valley canon provided guideposts for how to change the world.
Said canon is not directly political. It includes websites, like LessWrong, the home of the rationalist movement, and Slate Star Codex/Astral Codex Ten, for members of the “grey tribe” who see themselves as neither conservative nor properly liberal. [Paul] Graham’s many essays are included, as are science fiction novels like Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. Much of the canon is business advice on topics such as how to build a startup.
But such advice can have a political edge. Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, co-authored with his former student and failed Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters, not only tells startups that they need to aspire to monopoly power or be crushed, but describes Thiel’s early ambitions (along with other members of the so-called PayPal mafia) to create a global private currency that would crush the US dollar.
Then there are the Carlylian histories of “great men” (most of the subjects and authors were male) who sought to change the world. Older biographies described men like Robert Moses and Theodore Roosevelt, with grand flaws and grander ambitions, who broke with convention and overcame opposition to remake society.
Such stories, in Greer’s description, provided Silicon Valley’s leaders and aspiring leaders with “models of honor,” and examples of “the sort of deeds that brought glory or shame to the doer simply by being done.” The newer histories both explained Silicon Valley to itself, and tacitly wove its founders and small teams into this epic history of great deeds, suggesting that modern entrepreneurs like Elon Musk — whose biography was on the list — were the latest in a grand lineage that had remade America’s role in the world.
Putting Musk alongside Teddy Roosevelt didn’t simply reinforce Silicon Valley’s own mythologized self-image as the modern center of creative destruction. It implicitly welded it to politics, contrasting the politically creative energies of the technology industry, set on remaking the world for the better, to the Washington regulators who frustrated and thwarted entrepreneurial change. Mightn’t everything be better if visionary engineers had their way, replacing all the messy, squalid compromises of politics with radical innovation and purpose-engineered efficient systems?…
[Farrel discusses James Davidson and William Rees-Mogg’s The Sovereign Individual and the enhusiastic reactions of SV avatars Balaji Srinivasan and Curtis Yarvin…]
… We don’t know which parts of the canon Musk has read, or which ones influenced the young techies he’s hired into DOGE. But it’s not hard to imagine how his current gambit looks filtered through these ideas. From this vantage, DOGE’s grand effort to cut government down to size is the newest iteration of an epic narrative of change.
Musk, a heroic entrepreneur, will surely make history as his tiny team of engineers cuts the government Leviathan down to size. One DOGE recruiter framed the challenge as “a historic opportunity to build an efficient government, and to cut the federal budget by 1/3.” When a small team remakes government wholesale, the outcome will surely be simpler, cheaper and more effective. That, after all, fits with the story that Silicon Valley disruptors tell themselves.
From another perspective, hubris is about to get clobbered by nemesis. Jasmine Sun’s question about why so many people in tech read Seeing Like a State hints at the misunderstandings that trouble the Silicon Valley canon. Many tech elites read the book as a denunciation of government overreach. But Scott was an excoriating critic of the drive to efficiency that they themselves embody…
… Seeing Like a State, properly understood, is a warning not just to bureaucrats but to social engineers writ large. From Scott’s broader perspective, AI is not a solution, but a swift way to make the problem worse. It will replace the gross simplifications of bureaucracy with incomprehensible abstractions that have been filtered through the “hidden layers” of artificial neurons that allow it to work. DOGE’s artificial-intelligence-fueled vision of government is a vision from Franz Kafka, not Friedrich Hayek…
… Some of this revised canon might draw on Patrick Collison’s own bookshelves, which contain a far wider range of ideas than the canon itself. Collison’s reading interests tend toward classical liberalism, but writers who rub shoulders on his shelves, like Karl Popper and Elinor Ostrom, could be brought into debate with less well-known liberals like Ernest Gellner and contemporary left-liberals like Danielle Allen. All of these thinkers are deeply concerned with building and maintaining a genuinely plural society in which groups can get along despite their differences…
We are what we read: “Silicon Valley’s Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions” (gift article) from @himself.bsky.social in @bloomberglp.bsky.social. Eminently worth reading in full…
… as is Farrell’s addendum (in his wonderful newsletter): “Silicon Valley’s thing about Great Men“– “There is an alternative.”
And listen to Farrell discuss these issues (with Max Read and John Ganz) in the podcast episode “The Silicon Valley canon and malformed publics“
And for a reminder that this phenomenon has long, deep roots, see “Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of the Neoreactionaries,” from TechCrunch in 2013.
* Oscar Wilde
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As we anguish over antecedents, we might recall that it was on this date in 1854 that the Republican Party was “organized” (In Ripon, Wisconsin). It held its first public meeting on March 20th and its first convention on July 6 of that same year.
The party grew out of opposition to the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and opened the Kansas and Nebraska Territories to slavery and future admission as slave states, and was largely animated by anti-slavery advocates (including some ex-Whigs, and ex-Free Soilers).
The Kansas–Nebraska Act was authored by Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas and passed in 1854… the same Stephen Douglas that debated Abraham Lincoln in the 1858 Illinois Senate race. Douglas was re-elected by the Illinois General Assembly, 54–46. (Until 1913, when the 17th Amendment to the United States Constitution— which provides that senators shall be elected by the people of their states– was ratified, senators were elected by their respective state legislatures.) But the publicity made Lincoln a national figure and laid the groundwork for his 1860 presidential campaign.
How times change…
“Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts”*…
In (what seems to your correspondent) a techno/progress-studies “update” of the Annales school of historiography) historian Stephen Davies argues that technology and ideas change our lives much more than politics do– and that history should reflect that…
Most of us recognize the following dates and years: 4th July 1776, 14th July 1789, 1914, 1933, 1917, 1215, 1815, and 1066.
But I imagine most readers will fail to identify what’s special about this second list of dates: 5th July 1687, 9th March 1776, and 24th November 1859. Or indeed this third list of dates and years: 22nd January 1970, 26th April 1956, 1st October 1908, and 1960.
Why are these first dates so recognizable and memorable? It is because the events in question (the adopting of the US Declaration of Independence, the fall of the Bastille, the start of World War I, Hitler’s coming to power, the Russian Revolution, the drafting of the Magna Carta, the Battle of Waterloo, and the Battle of Hastings) are seen as critical events or markers in a particular story. They are supposedly events that had a profound subsequent impact on the shape and destiny of society and so shaped the way that later generations lived.
Undoubtedly there is truth in this but what was the nature of the impact that these events had? What, if anything, did they have in common? The clear answer is that these are all political events. As such they are also thought of as being connected, as being key points or landmarks in a particular story that structures the past into a meaningful pattern and makes sense of it. It thus tells us what was important in bringing about both past worlds and the contemporary world and so, by extension, what we should see as important here and now.
This story is of the growth and development of government, the forms it has taken, and in particular the historical evolution of particular states or political entities, such as France, England/Britain, and the USA. Making these dates important and central to our understanding of the past implies that the driving force in history, the thing that shapes and determines the world we are in and that is crucial for our future, is politics and political power. The dates given are all about political power: Who has it, who contests it, and who wins it.
In this political story the important, memorable events are wars, revolutions, elections, the rise of certain kinds of governance and political institutions, and the doings of rulers – kings, emperors, popes, prime ministers, and revolutionaries. The fact that these kinds of dates are memorable and widely known shows us that this is the dominant way of thinking about history and of understanding the past…
… This predominant understanding of history is incorrect for three reasons:
- It places emphasis on the wrong events.
- It judges the relative importance of events incorrectly.
- It ultimately misunderstands which events had the most transformative effects on human life.
The political understanding of history leads us to view our situation in a distorted and inaccurate way. It implies that if you want to address social problems or challenges, then politics (whether electoral or revolutionary) is the only way to do it. It implies that the news and events we should pay attention to are political ones, because those are what will have the greatest impact.
But there may be other, better ways of looking at the past.
Let us return to our second list of dates: 5th July 1687, 9th March 1776, and 24th November 1859. These dates are associated with the publication of major works of intellectual inquiry that changed the human understanding of how the natural world works.
The first of these, 5th July 1687, has been rated as the second most significant date of the last millennium, as it saw the publication of the first edition of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. The text brought about a revolution in the understanding of the nature and mechanics of the physical world…
[Davies explains the other key dates…]
… These are all landmarks in a quite different kind of story, one in which the driving force is not politics but intellectual inquiry and discovery. This story’s main figures are scientists and philosophers and thinkers, not politicians and generals. The story is about the gradual growth and deepening of human knowledge, and with it understanding and mastery over the physical world…
… However, there are other, even more important dates, if we think of the impact the events associated with them have had on everyday life and the nature of society, that are even less known and considered. Here we have yet another story or way of thinking about history, one that is almost completely ignored.
Consider our third list of dates and years: 22nd January 1970, 26th April 1956, 1st October 1908, and 1960. Even fewer people would recognize these. However, if you want to understand our world, these are more important than those on the first or second list.
What were they, and why so important? They are when the way we lived changed.
The first, 22nd January 1970, was the first commercial flight of the Boeing 747, the first jumbo jet. This was the outcome of an amazing project, led by figures such as the inspirational head of Pan American Airways, Juan Trippe, and Boeing’s coordinating engineer, Joe Sutter. The project involved the creation of several new technologies and came close to bankrupting Boeing. The jumbo jet transformed air travel from a luxury good to a mass-consumer one. In doing so, tourism, migration, trade, and the exchange of ideas have all been transformed. The world we live in is now far more interconnected and integrated because of this breakthrough. The modern global city is a product of the 747 and the aircraft that followed it. Trippe called the 747 ‘a great weapon for peace, competing with ballistic missiles for the future of humanity.’…
[Davies explicates the other dates]
… Why should we count these events as more important and significant than the iconic events in the political understanding? One reason is that politics is, in a sense, downstream of these technological breakthroughs, as politics is determined and driven by the changes in material circumstances and lived experiences that those events brought.
The forms that events such as wars and revolutions or peaceful politics took were both made possible by the kinds of events we are looking at here but were also limited by them. Certain possibilities were not possible or no longer possible because of the changes brought by these events and the way that they also created systems with limits or unavoidable requirements. For example, after the jumbo jet, containing pandemics with quarantines, as was common in the nineteenth century, has become difficult or impossible.
In this materialist way of thinking, it is material lived experience that determines consciousness and shapes things like culture and politics, and so things that influence or shape that material lived experience are what we should give more weight and attention to…
[Davies offers other examples– the telegraph, the telephone, and radio broadcasting, observing that “almost every aspect of our lives today is shaped in some way by these three events and what followed from them.”]
… If the shared element of the first set of dates was the part played by power in human affairs, what unites the latter ones? These are the dates when technological shifts changed our lives. Human beings, through cooperation, exchange, exploration, experiment, and inquiry, can create novel solutions to challenges and problems, with enormous effects. These are cases when those solutions worked, with predominantly good, but also bad, effects.
Certainly, on an initial comparison the fruits of technology seem to have created more good than the battles of history. This would be even clearer if we thought about other events that could be added to this kind of list, such as the discovery of anesthesia and antisepsis, the synthesizing of antibiotics by Ernst Chain and Howard Florey, the fundamental breakthroughs in our understanding of the biology of infectious disease that were brought by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, or the discovery of the Haber-Bosch process for taking nitrogen from the air to create artificial fertilizer, which reduced the threat of famine and starvation to a historical low.
An understanding of the past in which not just our intellectual successes but our technological breakthroughs occupy pride of place would be very different from the political one that dominates now. Instead of politics and war, and the growth, rise, and decline of states and empires being the focus, the central story would rather be one of human cooperation and inventiveness, innovation and scientific and technological progress and discovery, and the improvement in human well-being than the deeds (often diabolical) of those with power…
If it is the case that human ingenuity solving problems is the most potent force in history, why do so many still fixate upon politics, wars, and revolutions?
Part of the reason is obvious: Those events are dramatic, as unpleasant things often are. A more cynical explanation is that this flatters the self-importance of the most immediately powerful people in society, and also causes the rest of society to see them as more important than they are. It also legitimizes and justifies the actually existing systems and institutions of political power by making it seem that these are the keys to human well-being and advancement.
If our alternative, technology-focused way of thinking about history became the default mode of understanding the past and how our world came to be, rather than the first, many things may change. We might pay less attention to politics and more to technology, science, and business. We would think more about trade and innovation. We might think of technological solutions to social and environmental problems…
… John F Kennedy memorably captured this sentiment in the peroration to his ‘Moon Speech’ delivered at Rice University in Texas in 1961. As he said:
If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space.
The vision of history and the optimism for the future that he expressed that day is something we should recover…
Do we misperceive politics to be at the center of history? “History is in the making,” from @SteveDavies365 in @WorksInProgMag.
(Image above: source)
* “Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts — between individuals in economic life, between groups in politics, between creeds in religion, between states in war. This is the more dramatic side of history; it captures the eye of the historian and the interest of the reader… History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks.” – Will Durant
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As we parse the past, we might recall that it was on this date in 1865 that the 27th (and conclusive) state (Georgia) ratified the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude (except as punishment for a crime). Proclaimed on December 18, it was the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments adopted following the American Civil War.
The Emancipation Proclamation (made in September 1862; effective January 1, 1863) had freed all current slaves in the U.S. (though as a practical matter freedom took years longer). The Thirteenth Amendment assured that it would never be reinstated.
“I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon”*…
In the most recent issue of his “No Mercy/No Malice” newsletter, “The Podcast Election,” Scott Galloway makes the case that “in each election the victor is likely to be whoever best weaponizes an emerging medium.” John Grinspan (curator of political history at the Smithsonian Institution) offers a timely historical example: Long before anyone was accused of being “woke,” the Wide Awakes used new news technology to rapidly construct a national movement…
… when I discuss the deep history of political division in our country, someone in the audience always asserts that we can’t possibly compare past divisions to the present, because our media landscape is doing unprecedented harm, unlike anything seen in the past.
I’m always struck by people’s belief in a placid media landscape in the past, a time of calm before the internet blew everything up. In fact, the most divided period in the history of U.S. democracy — the mid-1800s — coincided with a sudden boom in new communications technologies, confrontational political influencers, widespread disinformation, and nasty fights over free speech. This media landscape helped bring about the Civil War.
The point is not that 21st century media is like the 19th century’s, but that the past was hardly full of the upstanding, rational, nonpartisan journalists many like to believe it was. And at this era’s center, in the campaign that actually led to the war, was a huge, strange, forgotten movement — the Wide Awakes — born from this media landscape and fought out in the newspapers, polling places and, ultimately, battlefields of the nation.
Newspapers had been around for centuries by the 1800s, but as American rates of literacy rose, millions of ordinary citizens became daily news junkies. The number of papers jumped from a few publications in 1800 to 4,000 brawling rags by 1860, collectively printing hundreds of millions of pages each year. They ranged from the snarky, immensely popular New York Herald and the blood-drenched true crime reports in the National Police Gazette to the high-minded abolitionism of The Liberator.
Nearly everyone literate devoured them — from wealthy elites to schoolgirls to enslaved people technically banned from reading. Newspapers published scandals and rumors, riling mobs and sparking frequent attacks on editors — often by other editors. Well into the 20th century, communities were still pulling newspaper presses out of local rivers, having been hurled there by angry mobs.
Ninety-five percent of American newspapers had explicit political affiliations. Many were directly bankrolled by political parties. There was no concept of journalistic independence and nonpartisanship until the turn of the 20th century.
These partisan presses, not the government, even printed the election ballots. Readers voted by cutting ballots from their pages and bringing them to the polls. (Imagine if TikTok influencers or podcasters were responsible for administering elections.)
The telegraph may seem old-timey today, but with its introduction in the 1840s, Americans could suddenly disseminate breaking news across huge territories along electrical wires. It allowed people to argue the issues nationwide, long before the internet, television, or even radio.
Americans became a people by arguing politics in the press. When politics was local, the major parties had avoided discussing slavery, taking what Abraham Lincoln mocked as a “don’t care” attitude. But now that Maine could debate with Texas, the topic shot to the forefront. By the 1850s, Northerners were digesting its evils daily.
The National Era — an abolitionist paper in Washington — first printed Harriet Beecher Stowe’s hair-raising Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by far the most influential antislavery novel in history. Meanwhile, the radical pro-slavery magazine De Bow’s Review, based in New Orleans, spread a maximalist vision of expanding slavery far and wide. Americans living thousands of miles from each other could argue about the issue, and the only gatekeepers were editors who profited from spreading often legitimate outrage.
It’s fitting, then, that the Northern pushback to slavery’s expansion came from the 19th-century equivalent of “very online” young newspaper readers. Early in the 1860 election, a core of young clerks in Connecticut formed a club to help campaign for the antislavery Republican Party. They happened to live in the state with the highest literacy rates and huge newspaper circulations. So when a local editor wrote that the Republicans seemed “wide awake” in the campaign, the boys named their club the Wide Awakes.
Adding militaristic uniforms, torch-lit midnight rallies, and an open eye as their all-seeing symbol, a new movement was born, which I chronicle in my recent book, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force that Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War. Often, their chief issue was not the knotty specifics of what to do about slavery, but the fight for a “Free Press” — unsuppressed by supporters of slavery, South or North.
The Wide Awakes exploded across the national newspaper network. Within months of their founding, young Republicans were forming clubs from Connecticut to California. Most learned how to organize their companies through the papers. They built a reciprocal relationship with America’s press: cheering friendly newspaper offices and harassing pro-slavery Democratic papers’ headquarters. Friendly editors returned the favor, marching with the Wide Awakes and pushing their readers to form more clubs, like the Indiana newspaperman who nudged: “Cannot such an organization be gotten up in this town?”
None of this could be described as independent journalism, but it sure spread a movement. It only took a few months to turn the Wide Awakes into one of the largest partisan movements America had ever seen, believed to have 500,000 members — the equivalent of 5 million today, proportionally speaking.
The same network of newspapers spread fear as well. Readers in much of the South saw the clubs as a partisan paramilitary organization. Wild accounts shared accidental misinformation and deliberate disinformation, pushing the false notion that the Wide Awakes were preparing for a war, not an election. The presence of a few hundred African American Wide Awakes in Boston morphed into claims in Mississippi that “the Wide Awakes are composed mainly of Negroes” who were plotting a race war. A dispersed, partisan media exaggerated such falsehoods like a national game of telephone.
By the time Lincoln won election in November 1860, hysterical editors predicted a Wide Awake attack on the South. Secessionist newspapers used fears of Wide Awakes to help push states out of the Union…
… What began in ink was spiraling into lead and steel. It took 16 years to develop from the introduction of the telegraph to the Civil War. Undoubtedly, the fight over slavery caused that conflict, but the newspapers fed it, amplified it, exaggerated it.
Mid-19th-century Americans lived with an odd combination: an unprecedented ability to spread information, but also a siloed and partisan system of interpreting it. It helped the nation finally reckon with the crimes of slavery, but also spread bad faith, irrational panic, and outright lies. This history can add a needed perspective to today’s political conflicts, so often magnified by social media. In both eras, new technologies supercharged existing political tensions. Yet we can also see from this heated history that political media is less like an unstoppable, unreformable force that will consume democracy, and more like another in a succession of breathtaking, catastrophic, wild new landscapes that must be tamed…
Perspective from our past: “How a 19th-century news revolution sparked activists, influencers, disinformation, and the Civil War,” from @NiemanLab.
Apposite: the Galloway piece referenced above and “The TikTok Electorate” from Max Read… and more fundamentally, “Are Americans too ignorant and gullible to self-govern?” a consideration of a century-old debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey, from the estimable Howard Rheingold.
* Tom Stoppard
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As we muse on media, we might recall that it was on this date in 1969 that journalist Seymour Hersh submitted the story that (the following day) filed the story that broke the news of the My Lai massacre to the American public. At least 347 (up to 504) Vietnamese civilians, almost all women, children, and elderly men, were murdered by U.S. soldiers, the largest massacre of civilians by U.S. forces in the 20th century.
Hersh had tried the day before to place a cautious and conservative piece but was initially rejected by Life and Look magazines. He turned to his friend David Obst, who ran the anti-war Dispatch News Service and who placed a more candid version in 35 papers (including the Washington Post and the Boston Globe); it ran in those papers the following day. Initial reaction was muted, as the press was focused on a massive anti-war demonstration in Washington scheduled for November 15. But the story spread, prompting global outrage and fueling domestic opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Hersh’s coverage of the atrocity earned him the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
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