Fear is the engine that drives Latin Americans north. Little wonder, too, that the majority of Latin Americans see their democracies as foundering. Economies may thrive. Foreign investment may prosper. They long for a firmer hand. Perhaps these are symptoms of the growing global suspicion that democracy is rigged against the ordinary citizen, that it has less to offer than an authoritarian government with a buoyant free market.
The wounds left unattended—inequality, injustice, corruption, violence—are powerful catalysts for discontent. Contact us at letters time. A citizen casts his vote in the Mexican presidential election July 2, , in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. By Marie Arana. Related Stories. It Takes Black Women in the U. America Needs to Get Back to Facts. Had I better take my umbrella? Here are some of the sorts of people who went out and stopped the rain in the nineteen-thirties: schoolteachers, city councillors, librarians, poets, union organizers, artists, precinct workers, soldiers, civil-rights activists, and investigative reporters.
They knew what they were prepared to defend and they defended it, even though they also knew that they risked attack from both the left and the right. That did not exactly happen here, but in the nineteen-thirties four of five American superintendents of schools recommended assigning only those U.
Nor did W. Instead, Beard took pains to point out that Americans liked to think of themselves as good talkers and good arguers, people with a particular kind of smarts. Not necessarily book learning, but street smarts—reasonableness, open-mindedness, level-headedness.
Possibly, he allowed, you could call this a stubborn independence of mind, or even mulishness. The more argument the better is what the North Carolina-born George V.
Denny, Jr. Denny, who helped run something called the League for Political Education, thought that was nuts. Town meeting tonight! Should schools teach politics? The debates were conducted at a lecture hall, usually in New York, and broadcast to listeners gathered in public libraries all over the country, so that they could hold their own debates once the show ended.
His panel included a Communist, an exile from the Spanish Civil War, a conservative American political economist, and a Russian columnist. No one expected anyone to come up with an undisputable definition of democracy, since the point was disputation. Asking people about the meaning and the future of democracy and listening to them argue it out was really only a way to get people to stretch their civic muscles.
The most ambitious plan to get Americans to show up in the same room and argue with one another in the nineteen-thirties came out of Des Moines, Iowa, from a one-eyed former bricklayer named John W. Studebaker, who after the Second World War helped create the G. Bill, had the idea of opening those schools up at night, so that citizens could hold debates.
In , with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation and support from the American Association for Adult Education, he started a five-year experiment in civic education. The meetings began at a quarter to eight, with a fifteen-minute news update, followed by a forty-five-minute lecture, and thirty minutes of debate.
They attacked capitalism. They attacked Fascism. They defended capitalism. The program got so popular that in F. Commissioner of Education and, with the eventual help of Eleanor Roosevelt, the program became a part of the New Deal, and received federal funding. It came to include almost five hundred forums in forty-three states and involved two and a half million Americans. Even people who had steadfastly predicted the demise of democracy participated.
The federal government paid for it, but everything else fell under local control, and ordinary people made it work, by showing up and participating. It was heritable and permanent, not temporary, meaning generations of black people were born into it and passed their enslaved status onto their children.
Enslaved people were not recognized as human beings but as property that could be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and disposed of violently. Enslaved people could not legally marry. They were barred from learning to read and restricted from meeting privately in groups. In most courts, they had no legal standing. Enslavers could rape or murder their property without legal consequence. Enslaved people could own nothing, will nothing and inherit nothing.
They were legally tortured, including by those working for Jefferson himself. They could be worked to death, and often were, in order to produce the highest profits for the white people who owned them.
For this duplicity, they faced burning criticism both at home and abroad. Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.
By , Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South. The wealth and prominence that allowed Jefferson, at just 33, and the other founding fathers to believe they could successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires in the world came from the dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery.
In other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if some of the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue. Jefferson and the other founders were keenly aware of this hypocrisy. Instead, he blamed the king of England for forcing the institution of slavery on the unwilling colonists and called the trafficking in human beings a crime.
Yet neither Jefferson nor most of the founders intended to abolish slavery, and in the end, they struck the passage. There is no mention of slavery in the final Declaration of Independence. Similarly, 11 years later, when it came time to draft the Constitution, the framers carefully constructed a document that preserved and protected slavery without ever using the word.
In the texts in which they were making the case for freedom to the world, they did not want to explicitly enshrine their hypocrisy, so they sought to hide it. The Constitution contains 84 clauses.
Six deal directly with the enslaved and their enslavement, as the historian David Waldstreicher has written, and five more hold implications for slavery. With independence, the founding fathers could no longer blame slavery on Britain. The shameful paradox of continuing chattel slavery in a nation founded on individual freedom, scholars today assert, led to a hardening of the racial caste system.
This ideology, reinforced not just by laws but by racist science and literature, maintained that black people were subhuman, a belief that allowed white Americans to live with their betrayal. By the early s, according to the legal historians Leland B. Ware, Robert J. Cottrol and Raymond T. This made them inferior to white people and, therefore, incompatible with American democracy. On Aug. It was one of the few times that black people had ever been invited to the White House as guests. The Civil War had been raging for more than a year, and black abolitionists, who had been increasingly pressuring Lincoln to end slavery, must have felt a sense of great anticipation and pride.
The war was not going well for Lincoln. The president was weighing a proclamation that threatened to emancipate all enslaved people in the states that had seceded from the Union if the states did not end the rebellion.
Like many white Americans, he opposed slavery as a cruel system at odds with American ideals, but he also opposed black equality. That August day, as the men arrived at the White House, they were greeted by the towering Lincoln and a man named James Mitchell, who eight days before had been given the title of a newly created position called the commissioner of emigration.
This was to be his first assignment. After exchanging a few niceties, Lincoln got right to it. He informed his guests that he had gotten Congress to appropriate funds to ship black people, once freed, to another country.
Your race suffer very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side. You can imagine the heavy silence in that room, as the weight of what the president said momentarily stole the breath of these five black men.
The Union had not entered the war to end slavery but to keep the South from splitting off, yet black men had signed up to fight. Enslaved people were fleeing their forced-labor camps, which we like to call plantations, trying to join the effort, serving as spies, sabotaging confederates, taking up arms for his cause as well as their own.
And now Lincoln was blaming them for the war. Nearly three years after that White House meeting, Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. By summer, the Civil War was over, and four million black Americans were suddenly free. Beneath its sod lie the bones of our fathers. Here we were born, and here we will die. They did the opposite. The South, for the first time in the history of this country, began to resemble a democracy, with black Americans elected to local, state and federal offices.
Some 16 black men served in Congress — including Hiram Revels of Mississippi, who became the first black man elected to the Senate. Demonstrating just how brief this period would be, Revels, along with Blanche Bruce, would go from being the first black man elected to the last for nearly a hundred years, until Edward Brooke of Massachusetts took office in More than black men served in Southern state legislatures and hundreds more in local positions.
These black officials joined with white Republicans, some of whom came down from the North, to write the most egalitarian state constitutions the South had ever seen. They helped pass more equitable tax legislation and laws that prohibited discrimination in public transportation, accommodation and housing.
Perhaps their biggest achievement was the establishment of that most democratic of American institutions: the public school. The political rights of our grandfathers were scarcely changed by Saratoga and Yorktown; their industrial rights were in part secured by that war. The civil war was a process of industrial adjustment.
A democracy must consist wholly of free men; the old idea of states-man and states-men must be realized. America was not a democracy until slavery was abolished. If it exists to-day in any form in this United States, then democracy does not obtain among us.
There is a record of the evolution of democracy in America which seems to escape common attention. It is a record written by hard experience. They record the national adjustment towards the close of the nineteenth century.
Though recorded in political form, they mean an industrial and anterior fact. They are beyond repeal, just as the steam engine and the printing press are beyond repeal.
Politics writes after them that their sanction is in Congress, which has power to enforce them by appropriate legislation. This provision is of vast legal import, but the necessities of industrial life are the fundamental indication of them.
The necessary blending of industry and politics in a democracy is more frequently illustrated in the fundamental laws of the local governments, — the constitutions of the States.
These are the most reliable history extant of democracy in America. There have been more than two hundred of these constitutions in this country since June, In the only one of the eighteenth century which continues in force, that of Massachusetts of , the state is declared to be a contract. The evolution of these two ideas is the history of American politics. Democracy in America records the contest between laws—a conventional system of politics—and men struggling for industrial freedom.
This is shown in the history of the franchise: from a franchise limited to white males, possessing a prescribed amount of real estate, confessing to belief in a prescribed creed, to a manhood and womanhood suffrage untethered by such limitations.
In these state constitutions the experience in administration has passed over into formal statements in the bills of rights. These brief clauses of have grown into a treatise on civil principles in the present state constitutions.
Industrial life wrought this change. The provisions in these bills are the generalizations on industrial data which record the evolution of democracy in America.
Whatever discord may at present rage in the state, it is but the continuation of the old discord between desire and performance, between conditions in the evolution of government and the selfishness of men. But as liberty may run into license in politics, so it may in the industrial world.
That world has its order and its chaos, its desire and its performance, its theory and its administration. Perhaps it is unfortunate for the fate of democracy in America that we have always attempted to interpret it politically.
Our books represent it as a political device. It has become almost axiomatic with us to seek the solution of the questions in the state by a political agreement rather than by a better industrial organization.
Politics and labor are the democratic team, but politics leads. The state, if corrupt, is regarded as politically corrupt. Industry has been the shuttlecock of politics, and those who labor have been viewed as the beneficiaries of the state, and not truly as the statesmen. They exist independent of the form of government. It was long thought that political equality would secure industrial equality, but the effort to read industrial equality into life has not yet been an unqualified success.
At present, the theory is winning popular support that the government, the public business of the state, should be made an industrial, as long ago it was made a political copartner.
Democracy is now construed towards communism, towards a labor copartnership. The political copartnership, on the basis of equality, having failed to make each of the statesmen rich, those who have not suspect those who have as robbers, and look upon the state as the chief robber of all. In other words, democracy, in America, is showing its material side. Men are not content with the mere blessings of political liberty; they demand wealth wherewith to enjoy the blessings.
In a democracy Nemesis is active. The privileges of democracy breed discontent. Whatever the form or the idea of the state, man cannot get rid of himself. His philosophy, his vagaries, his stomach, are always with him. Democracy is not an insurance against the consequences of being born into the world. It is no panacea. The state is no better than the men and women in it; it can do no more than they. A sound statesmanship starts with a sound man. If no such man exists, then he must develop before the healthy state can come.
And the people know this; whence their lack of reverence for the state. It is a thing which they made, and they know its imperfections. Did the farmer make the apple, or the gardener the flower?
It is not only political, but industrial honesty that we need.
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