These notes are part of the Black Reconstruction Reading Group‘s study material.
Author: John DV
Chapter 2 The White Worker
[jdv said he reads the chapter first by skimming, and then looking at the notes, then reading the text -jk]
Hermann Schluter (1851 – 1919) wrote a book, Lincoln, Labor and Slavery that DuBois cites a lot in this chapter. Who was Hermann Schluter? According to the Free Dictionary, he is a “figure in the working-class movement in Germany and the USA.” He was part of the German Social Democracy. His works “criticize the attempts of bourgeois and social-reformist historiography to reduce the history of the working-class movement in the USA to the trade-unionist struggle.”
Marxist-History.org says “In the first place, he was a proletarian by birth, by experience, and by steadfast choice.” His book “deals with a chapter in American history that our academic historians had completely ignored.”
19 million immigrants entered the U.S. by the end of the 19th century as it became more and more the “land of opportunity” with less dependent on property holdings and birth. This was partly due to the proliferation of schools for even the poor laborer.
The white labor or new labor as DuBois calls it, was used to being poor, oppressed, with low standard of living, but it didn’t regard itself as permanent laboring class. They wanted to move up. The successful, well-paid laboring class formed a petit bourgeoisie. DuBois says this petit bourgeoisie was ready and willing to always exploit common labor – white and black, foreign and native. Widespread idea that the son could raise to a higher level than the father. Put working class in conflict/competition with itself. Opposed slavery because they didn’t want to be reduced by competition to the level of slaves. Wanted a chance to become capitalists and that might never happen with a permanent class of slaves. Competition with emancipated blacks for lower unskilled labor. Foreigners blamed blacks for cheap price of labor.
Race riots ensued: Cincinnati 1829, Philadelphia 1828-40,
The English and German immigrants began to arrive in the 1840s who “to some degree envisaged the Marxian reorganization of industry through trade unions and class struggle.”
Land out west seen as opportunity they didn’t have in Europe. Rather than joining in solidarity with black workers, they became rivals.
Union and labor leaders joined the Democratic Party for their trade policy and welcoming more immigrants, but they were also the party of the planter class in the South.
The white laborers saw the land out west as more significant than other Americans because they were used to land monopoly in Europe. They saw the black labor competition as significant so that black laborers must be kept out of the west at all costs and they opposed expansion of slavery.
We hear a lot about judging folks by their times, but it’s important as DuBois points out to remember that “the demand for the abolition of slavery had been continuous since the revolution.” Esp by the 1830s.
In all this talk about free land out west, very little is mentioned that it was somebody else’s land already. Native Americans are barely addressed in this so far.
Two labor movements: to give the black worker a minimum legal status to earn wages, and to give the working class (mostly immigrants) better wages and slice of the pie.
White Slavery:
White laborers seeing black slavery and wanting it abolished then start comparing it to “white slavery” (presumably wage slavery and in England) and are no longer generous toward the black worker.
The strikes in 1849 to 1852 and Horace Greeley. More competition between skilled and unskilled, black and white. AFL form d and to this day excluded blacks. He popularized the slogan “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.”[a] He endlessly promoted utopian reforms such as socialism, vegetarianism, agrarianism, feminism, and temperance. He hired Karl Marx because of his interest in coverage of working-class society and politics (Wikipedia).
Some labor leaders emphasized race over class such as John Campbell in 1851. Kriege openly repudiated abolition. Sided with the planters. William Weitling ignored the question of slavery. Even organizations that advocated Marxian socialism “never got a clear attitude towards slavery.” The Chartist movement in England became very anti-slavery.
“The abolitionist did not sense the new subordination into which the worker was being forced by organized capital, while the laborers did not realize that the exclusion of 4 million workers from the labor program was a fatal omission.” Abolitionists are compared to women and sympathy for the “southern slave.”
Just before the outbreak of the civil War there were in the US 26 trades with national organizations. The iron molder started a national strike in 1859 and while talking about the working class being a pressed by the capital class made no mention about slavery. “We are weary of this question of slavery it is matter which does not concern us.”
Up to this point DuBois has ignored the white worker of the South “because the labor movement ignored them and the abolitionist ignored them and above all they were ignored by Northern capitalists and Southern planters.’ 5 million white people lived in the South and held no slaves. Two classes of poor whites: the mountains and lowlands. He is describing today’s poor MAGA whites. A middle class of poor whites formed. The poor whites of the South didn’t see the solidarity opportunities with the black laborer to overthrow the plantar glass because of “deep rooted antagonism to the negro.”
Poor whites of the South began to migrate to the Midwest and west. “They had a very vivid fear of the negro as a competitor in labor whether slave or free.” This migration complicated the Free soil movement in the West. In Kansas a civil war began.
The period of the civil War: poor whites in the north and poor whites in the South fighting each other for the capitalist class of both regions. The civil War began in Kansas in 1854 and ended in the presidential election of 1876.
Famous quote: “the slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again towards slavery. The whole weight of America was thrown to color caste…a new slavery a rose. The upward moving of white labor was betrayed into Wars for profit based on color caste. Democracy died save in the hearts of Black folk.”
The white worker is complicit in this new slavery.
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