Revolution or Reform

Abstract

Revolution or Reform Anthony Gronowicz (bio) Timothy Messer-Kruse. The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 1848–1876. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 319 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $55.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). According to conventional wisdom the producing classes in the United States embraced democracy, if not during the glorious American Revolution, then during the rough and tumble Jacksonian period when common men tracked mud into the reception room of the White House at Andrew Jackson’s inauguration. Whether you read Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s Age of Jackson (1945), still the most widely assigned text for that period, or Sean Wilentz’s Chants Democratic (1984), you will encounter the American worker, staunchly republican in principle, struggling against vested interests. Thanks to reform, America became a huge success story. On the eve of the Korean War, Schlesinger’s historian father published a paean (The American As Reformer [1950]) to the American reform tradition on behalf of a foundation organized “‘for the purpose of promoting the well-being of mankind.’” 1 Yet, one reason for the existence of so many nineteenth-century American reformers was that the United States had much reforming to do; no other modern society tolerated slavery within its midst. Schlesinger, Jr. and Wilentz steer clear of slavery’s fatal importance to the concept of American democracy, while Schlesinger, Sr. treated slavery as the exception to the moral superiority of the American experience. However, it must be recognized that reformers were upstaged by the Grand Army of the Republic. It was military necessity, not moral imperative, that prompted emancipation. The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 1848–1876 sets out to tell “the story of the collision of the American radical tradition with the vehicle of international socialism that was driven by Karl Marx himself” (p. 3). Messer-Kruse aims to rescue American reformers from attacks levied by a wide-ranging field of scholars and activists like Samuel Bernstein, Daniel de Leon, David Herreshoff and David Montgomery (pp. 75–76). According to Messer-Kruse, “labels such as Marxist, anarchist, and utopian are of dubious analytical utility in a historical context where they had not yet [End Page 218] come into use as terms of self-description.” Therefore, “the first key to understanding the Yankees who either joined or tacitly supported the IWA is understanding the radical intellectual milieu from which they came” (p. 4). Yet, Messer-Kruse repeats conventional wisdom’s mistakes by making unsubstantiated claims about the nature and history of American republicanism. In 1797, seventeen years before British troops occupied Washington D.C. and burned the White House to the ground, the Encyclopaedia Britannica reported, “It may in truth be said, that in no part of the world are the people happier . . . or more independent than the farmers of New England.” In New York City most adult white male citizen mechanics could vote. The task bedeviling American antebellum reformers was how best to preserve the economic independence of New England farmers and expand the political rights of New York City mechanics to include others. Yet it was these white male producers who embraced the political limitations of democratic republicanism with respect to granting social and political equality to women and blacks. Therefore most reformers from the War of 1812 through the Mexican-American War focused their energies on opposing the rise of the factory and its corporate form of organization. The reform tradition evolved as American society was transformed during the nineteenth century from a nation of agricultural producers into one dominated by large corporations—from a society that claimed to protect the farmer laborer’s property in land to one which treated those laborers as commodities while elevating the corporation to a position of legal supremacy. Even before the Constitution was written, antislavery expansion or outright abolition became the issue behind which advocates of “free” labor and the new industrial order could moralize their intentions. In 1786 Aaron Burr sponsored a losing bill in the New York State legislature to abolish slavery, while Alexander Hamilton helped establish the African Free School, the antecedent to New York City’s public school system. Thirteen years later...