Juneteenth

...and the Fifth of July

Mashing up two old holiday posts, from June 19, 2022, and July 5, 2023:

Juneteenth engraving by Thomas Nast. ca. 1865, via American Civil War Museum.

Just thinking about the degree to which the Juneteenth celebration might, now that it's a national holiday, be a commemoration of what historian Eric Foner called the Second Founding, following on the Civil War, in which the Republic of 1787 was constitutionally replaced: by the Democracy of Abraham Lincoln's promises as expressed in the Gettysburg Address (that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish) and as spelled out in the explicit constitutional changes of the 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, and 19th Amendments (respectively abolishing chattel slavery in 1865, defining citizenship and offering equal protection under the law to all citizens in 1866. guaranteeing voting rights regardless of race in 1870, establishing the income tax in 1913, establishing direct election of senators in 1913, and guaranteeing the right to vote regardless of sex in 1920).

This really is what we're arguing about when conservatives say that the United States was not founded as a democracy but as a "constitutional republic"—feel perfectly free to say that, guys, and fight over the finer details, but the point is that it's not that any more: it was that, and we fixed it, to some extent, in the course of eradicating slavery, with the war, and the Gettysburg Address, and the Emancipation Proclamation, down to its promulgation to the enslaved citizens of Galveston Texas in 1865. We fixed it by changing the Constitution, with those six amendments. Now, it's supposed to be something different than what those 18th-century gentlemen proposed, and in particular more democratic, as a consequence of each of those changes, though much work remains to be done.

Nathan Newman has made practically the same statement, with a slightly different terminology (to him the signing of the Articles of Confederation created the Second Republic and the 1787 Constitution the Third) and a reduced list of Amendments:

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Juneteenth, celebrating the final word of the end of the Slave Constitution reaching the last slaves in Texas, marks the foundation of the Fourth Republic of our Nation, the one where the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments fundamentally reshaped the nation into a new constitutional order. As the southern states were readmitted only under conditions set by the US Congress, the new Republic’s principle was one of firm subordination of state authority to national power. Enforcement Acts would send troops to the South to enforce new civil rights laws, creating voting rights for all (male) Americans, a Freedmen’s Bureau would establish federally-run schools in the South, and other laws would ban segregation and build public works throughout the nation, most notably an Intercontinental Railroad. This is the nation most liberals recognize as our modern nation's core source and model.

I like how he emphasizes the Whiggishness of the new country, its commitment to an enormously more powerful central government engaged in infrastructure and education and the promotion of equity. It’s not only about slavery, though the response to slavery is extremely important; it’s about a better polity, for everybody. The 20th-century amendments in my list further the same project—the income tax following up on an idea first implemented by the Lincoln administration in the Revenue Act of 1861 (which also levied a federal tax on land, an idea to which I and my friends Professors Piketty, Saez, Zucman, and Warren remain deeply attached) to allow the federal government to raise a lot of money for its plans on a progressive basis, the direct election of senators remedying a ridiculously old-fashioned method of nominating them, and women suffrage repairing a hole that was becoming a scandal.

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Meanwhile back in the Constitutional Republicanism, the State of the Stupid, 2023:

You can build this strawman out of any old resentments and prejudices you have lying around the house or in the garage, without an expensive and time-consuming trip to the Hobby Lobby. 

The genius of Rubio's tweet is in his focusing his hostility on those who see the US as "built on stolen land" as if it wasn't obviously true that Europeans and their descendants had appropriated virtually every bit of North America from its indigenous inhabitants between landfall in Mexico in 1519 and the closing of the frontier in 1890. A gasbag like Ted Cruz would have insisted on adding something minimizing the importance of African chattel slavery to the sentence, but there's not an ounce of fat on Marco's argument: he heads straight for the single most indefensible lie you can tell about the history of the continent and tells you you're "nuts" if you try to argue with it.

As well as possibly "influential" (unlike, say, Senator Rubio), rich (in contrast to Senator Rick Scott), famous (as opposed to infamous like Senator Lindsey Graham), or holding a "fancy degree" (instead of a no-frills plain one like Josh Hawley's Yale J.D., 2006). 

And if you agree that the land is stolen, you agree that the US is an "evil nation" and are offended by "patriotic songs". That's even more irritating, because I love patriotic songs—well, maybe not "The Star-Spangled Banner", if you know me you know I love the period of Haydn and Mozart but "Anacreon in Heaven" is not a good tune, and the lyrics, with their endless three-stanza riddling question (“Can you see?”)

On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?

make no sense at all in the necessarily abbreviated standard version, where the answer never shows up (Oh, I know! It must be a flag!); and not the worst schlock of Irving Berlin, a great composer and lyricist who was not always innocent of intention to pander—what I love are the patriotic songs of the Union in the Civil War, "Rally Round the Flag" and "Battle Cry of Freedom", and the military marches of J.P. Sousa, and "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" and "We Shall Overcome"...

You see where I'm going here, right? Because I'm always going there, lately. If our country has an evil origin, begotten in wickedness and raised up in iniquity, that doesn't mean we can't be patriotic about what we, the people, have done and may yet do to overcome it! So my patriotic focus now goes to the Juneteenth holiday. But we can see the Fourth of July as prefiguring it, as Lincoln did in his reference to the Declaration at the outset of the Gettysburg Address, the "proposition" that all men are created equal, to be realized in a world where we, the people, meaning all of the people, govern ourselves, for ourselves.

So talk about the Founders all you want. But remember this message posted by historian Timothy Burke to Substack:

More than anything else, I wish that every single American today poised to debate, discuss, characterize, reject, claim, venerate or condemn the ‘founders’ would at least give them this much: they did not agree on a great many issues. They did not speak with one voice. They were not one mind on anything despite being all men and all white. Anybody who invokes ‘them’ should have the courtesy not to invoke ‘them’ but to invoke the specific founders and the specific sentiments they have in mind, with an acknowledgement of the dissenting (plural!) views. And go beyond the men gathered in various halls and drafting rooms: consider the entire generation of people living in the continental states at the time of the Revolution.

Another deliberately stupid senator came to particular grief on that score with his tweet for the Fourth:

As should be obvious, the quote is bogus. But it does in fact represent Henry's views to some extent, in the earliest independence period, when he and George Mason worked to retain the Anglican communion as Virginia's tax-supported state church (they agreed that other religions should be "tolerated", but they were antidisestablishmentarians—that word does have a meaning!). The faction of Jefferson and Madison, though, worked energetically to get it disestablished, and succeeded, after a monumental ten-year struggle that lasted longer than the Revolution, in the course of which Madison got himself elected governor, in passing a law at the beginning of 1786,

Dissenters would no longer suffer civil penalties for their religious beliefs. Freedom of conscience, as a matter of natural right, gained ground as something no government should violate. As the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom read:

“No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief. . . . We are free to declare, and do declare, that the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind.”

in what was to be a model for the religious freedom clauses of the First Amendment to the Federal Constitution.

I don't know whether Hawley is aware that Patrick Henry was a ferocious opponent of the 1787 Constitution as well, but he was, as I've told you folks before, and continued to oppose it even after he'd gotten Madison to offer the first ten amendments ratified in 1791. Henry and Mason were the founders of that “states' rights” conservatism that never has reconciled itself with the idea of a strong federal government, probably not only out of a prophetic fear that it might try to abolish slavery, and continues as a minoritarian ideology defending the privileges of the rich, not necessarily famous (it can be easier to exercise a certain kind of power outside of public view, which is how Leonard Leo can do so much more damage than Trump can), and holders of whatever degrees help them get there.

Rubio and Hawley, favoring a government dominated by one religion (the one that moves to outlaw abortion), indeed a national religion, with a devotional-pageant version of history with all the difficult content laundered out of it, are the heirs of Mason and Henry, and would no doubt oppose that Constitution just as they did if we were living under it, in favor of a return to something more like the Articles of Confederation. With the advent of the Trumpery, they’re ready to swing all the way back to a monarchy, that looks to government only to police the lower orders while the gentry does whatever it wants (including in the state capitols) and the sovereign is a performance artist like Louis XIV or Nero (though always keeping an eye on his personal business interests).

Let’s think, this Juneteenth, about the practice of a democracy in which every voice is lifted, as the song says, in “harmonies of liberty”.