The Clare Spark Blog

December 24, 2014

“blood on their hands”?

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 10:31 pm
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Anti-Iraq war image depicting Tony Blair

Anti-Iraq war image depicting Tony Blair

What is incitement or “fighting words” and who does it? Some statutes state that it is illegal to incite others to commit crimes. Voices from both sides of the increasingly polarized political spectrum are accusing personalities or groups of having “blood on their hands”—yet the punditry continues to classify “peaceful protest” promoting hate as an exercise of free speech. I was stunned to discover that there are actual laws in the UK, Canada, and the US warning that such acts as spouting “fighting words” are tantamount to encouraging crime (though less so in the US). (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incitement (on British law), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_words, comparing Canada and the US, with case law examples.)

Tell that to Hollywood writers, journalists, or to academics of any political stripe. It is not widely known that wealthy liberals, through their foundations, had resorted to better communication as the favored strategy in solving “the Negro problem” as it was called in Gunnar Myrdal’s famous book, An American Dilemma (1944), a study said to be a landmark in “race relations.” One of Myrdal’s less publicized warnings to readers was a direct threat to hidebound Southern conservatives. Myrdal was neither a revolutionary socialist nor, pace one biographer, an optimistic moralist appealing to Christian consciences. Rather, in one rarely quoted passage, the Swedish social democrat and economist was explicitly cautioning “Southern conservative(s)” who had better heed the lessons of history and to

“…begin allowing the higher strata of the Negro population to participate in the political process as soon as possible, and to push the movement down to the lowest groups gradually…also to speed up the civic education of these masses who are bound to have votes in the future.…political conservatives, who have been successful for any length of time, have always foreseen impending changes and have put through the needed reforms themselves in time. By following this tactic they have been able to guard fundamental conservative interests even in the framing of the reforms. They have thereby also succeeded in slowing them up; changes have not overwhelmed them as avalanches. They have kept the control and preserved a basis for the retention of their political power. Southern conservatives should further learn from history that, over a period of time, the conservative forces in society cannot afford to abstain from the tremendous strategic advantage of forming the party of “law and order.” This is such an immense interest for conservatism that if–for constitutional and other reasons–the law does not come to the conservatives even when they are in power, the conservatives had better come to the law.

“But the great majority of Southern conservative white people do not see the handwriting on the wall. They do not study the impending changes; they live again in the pathetic illusion that the matter is settled. They do not care to have any constructive policies to meet the trends. They think no new adjustments are called for. The chances that the future development will be planned and led intelligently–and that, consequently, it will take the form of cautious, foresighted reforms instead of unexpected, tumultuous, haphazard breaks, with mounting discords and anxieties in its wake–are indeed small. But we want to keep this last question open. Man is a free agent, and there are no inevitabilities. All will depend upon the thinking done and the action taken in the region during the next decade or so. History can be made. It is not necessary to receive it as mere destiny.” [End, Myrdal quote, his emphasis]

Myrdal, like his patrons, the Carnegie Corporation, wanted to forestall incitement by red agitators who, preying upon real grievances, would incite race riots and other forms of disruptive protest.

But these words were written in the early 1940s (probably by Myrdal, not Bunche, his chief assistant, then a radical), and we face a more subtle brand of incitement today. Its form is the cynical belief, shared by academics, movie and television writers, hip journalists, and perhaps many politicians (all catering to minorities and women, certainly not the white working class), that not only is everybody corrupt, motivated solely by the will to power, but that the American future is hopeless, for we are led by criminals masquerading as businessmen and the politicians who protect them. It is they, these bold [populist] speakers of truth to power, who give each other cushy professorships and other trophies indicating excellence in the arts, while inciting hatred of the American past and present, with no analysis of effective or ineffective social policies.

As published in Rolling Stone

As published in Rolling Stone

Recall the worshipful popularity of The Sopranos, or that James Spader (“Red Reddington”) in the popular series The Blacklist, informs the female FBI agent he is protecting that the world is run by criminals. I have just seen American Hustle which ends with the lines “The art of survival is a story that never ends.” I assume that the writers view themselves as surviving in a specifically American business environment that rewards con artists like themselves. The same could be said of the hit Netflix drama House of Cards that weaves an intricate tale of secret deals between power-seekers who have zero interest in social policy, except for the obligatory nod to feminism through a failed effort to get anti-sexual assault in the military through Congress. In the fashionable bleak mood even Democrats are phonies. Holden Caulfield has won hearts and minds.

While stopping for a moment to eat lunch, I heard Neil Cavuto on Fox lamenting the cynicism of the young, who have lost faith and trust in [earthly] “leaders.” I am suggesting something different: that cynicism is a form of incitement. Rightists correctly blame POTUS, Eric Holder, Al Sharpton, and Bill de Blasio of playing the race card while (at times) calling for national unity. But there is nothing peaceful in the protests of black supremacists and their self-righteous, indoctrinated young white allies, masked as crusaders for social justice.

girlwithradiomind

More than “faith” or “trust” in “leaders” we need to teach the young to distinguish between cynicism and healthy skepticism. Cynicism may produce well-made, clever and lucrative “art” and entertainment, but it is rational skepticism that leads to healthy, rational citizen participation in democratic processes.

August 17, 2014

Improving “race relations”: Left, Right, and Middle

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 6:36 pm
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

racerelationsThe race riot in Ferguson, Missouri (August 10, 2014 onward), is a reminder that we have made little progress in resolving the vexed question of “race relations” in America. This blog suggests that neither Leftists, Rightists, nor Moderates have a clue as to how to proceed in ameliorating what are called “race relations.”

I became interested in this subject while researching my book on the so-called “revival” of Herman Melville, universally lauded for his allegedly advanced position on prejudice and “race.” So I read a book published during WW2, by Gunnar Myrdal, assisted by Ralph Bunche: An  American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy (Harper, 1944), a massive research project funded by the Carnegie Corporation in order to fend off the depression-instigated race riots that were anticipated at the end of the looming conflict with Nazism and other fascisms.  Immersion in the Bunche Papers at UCLA and related materials alerted me to this volatile, incendiary, and unresolved subject.

First, an outline of the positions as put forth by American political factions and organizations:

The New Left: Unlike old Lefties (who viewed the bourgeoisie as developing the productive forces, but doomed) American history is essentially racist and destructive; propertied white males have abused indigenous peoples, blacks, Nature, immigrants, and women. There is no solution to the race problem short of revolutionary transformation achieved through [inter-racial] class struggle directed against finance capital (the master puppeteers). After the revolution, all particularisms (e.g. “identity politics”) will disappear in an internationalist commitment to communism and true individuality.

Liberals and other anticommunist social democrats: It must be noted that Bunche and Myrdal were at odds over prior strategies to solve “the Negro problem.” Bunche was infuriated by the liberal solution of “better communication” between whites and blacks. At that time, Bunche was writing from the left of Myrdal (a Swedish social democrat), and urging that blacks join unions to overthrow autocratic union bosses and all other bureaucrats toward the objective of worker’s control. At times, he (or more likely Myrdal) called for a more effective welfare state. Myrdal’s responses to Bunche’s militant memoranda resulted in mischaracterizing Bunche as an “economic determinist,” while leaning on him to separate troublemaking black “betterment organizations” from the harmless ones. (See https://clarespark.com/2011/08/04/carnegie-corp-and-the-negro-problem/.) Bunche correctly identified the Marcus Garvey movement and its offshoots as fascist and escapist, while criticizing such venerable organizations as the NAACP and Urban League as indifferent to the cause of Labor.

[But during and after WW2, Bunche was successfully co-opted by the liberal establishment and became an ally of the State Department and its British counterparts in his mediation of the “insoluble” Jewish problem (see https://clarespark.com/2014/06/18/how-ralph-bunche-sold-out-and-failed-in-palestine/.)]

Since the acceleration of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the repertoire of non-solutions has been added to by liberals: affirmative action, separatist curricula in academe, multiculturalism, whiteness studies (the latter adopted by the far left since it damns Amerikkka and the West). Through dwelling on the errors of the  past, while ignoring present-day education and other practical solutions, black rage has probably accelerated, though prominent black writers were angry enough (e.g., James Baldwin, Chester Himes). Since writing this blog, I have reviewed the Johnson administration recommendations now known as The Moynihan Report. See https://clarespark.com/2015/08/08/the-moynihan-report-march-1965-and-instability-in-the-black-family/. This might upset those conservatives who see the reconstituted nuclear family as the solution to black poverty and illegitimacy.

The Right: There is no cohesive conservative movement on this subject, but the most persistent call for relief from race riots, a threatening black underclass, incomplete transition to middle class status by American blacks, and female headed households (with excessive illegitimacy in “the black community”) has been a call for the rehabilitation of the patriarchal black family along with a religious revival, presumably headed by strong father figures willing to discipline and inspire children to study, to renounce gang membership, and to adhere to traditional religious principles. (The latter is expressed in support of school vouchers that would include sectarian religious schools, hence this strategy implicitly rejects “secular” solutions to group antagonisms.)

Given the sharp disagreements over strategy within the fighting factions of American politics, it is not surprising that Masters of Sex delivered a muddled episode on August 10, 2014 (see https://clarespark.com/2014/08/16/ferguson-mi-masters-of-sex-and-the-dilemma-of-the-white-liberal/).

Clare’s advice: Had the phrase “move on” not been sullied by the ultra-liberal George Soros forces, I would advise concerned Americans to stop dwelling on past failures and errors, but to focus on a quality education for all children, neither idealizing nor demonizing those aspects of the Western past that are irrefutably “racist” and demeaning to non-whites. There is a heated debate right now regarding whether or not “race” even exists as it is currently imagined; a revival of Lamarckianism may be in the works, thanks to epigenetics. As for the father-led family, that mostly conservative strategy seems utopian to me, and would take to long to demonstrate results, unlike potential changes in school curricula and in the media. [Update 8-29-14: it has been objected on Facebook that women may be inadequate parents too. This is true, but it is one feature of conservative ideology to drastically separate male and female roles in the family: men are the disciplinarians, while women offer unconditional love. Why should parenting be taught in the schools to prepare youngsters for the likely road ahead? Both parents should be setting boundaries and educating their kids for real life which is always a struggle, whatever the period in which kids must function.]

One thing is for certain: Eva Moskowitz’s charter schools in Harlem have established that black and brown children can “succeed” beyond our wildest dreams if there is strong cooperation between school staff and parents, and a challenging curriculum.

Hope looms on the horizon, but we are all responsible, white and non-white alike, for pushing Eva Moskowitz’s agenda forward, notwithstanding opposition from entrenched interests such as teachers unions (see comments below).

racerelations2

June 18, 2014

“Feminized” and “jewified” modernity

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 8:43 pm
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
palestinetugofwar

I recently went through my notes from the Ralph Bunche papers at UCLA, some of which had been already posted: https://clarespark.com/2014/05/17/miracle-man-ralph-bunche-saves-the-un/. You may remember that he became Acting Mediator for the Arab-Israeli conflict after the Stern Gang assassinated Count Folke Bernadotte, September 17, 1948; the [pseudo] settlement of this conflict was a test case for the efficacy of the new United Nations after WW2. Indeed, Bunche won the Nobel Peace Prize for his ‘successful’ mediation that resulted in the 1949 armistice lines between Israel and her neighbors.

Earlier, in the 1930s, Bunche was a leftist, possibly a member of the CPUSA, though that is hard to pin down, as he was all over the various left factions that fought with each other during the Great Depression. Some will see him as solely as a follower of Norman Thomas or A. Philip Randolph. But he wrote to Alger Hiss in support of his struggle with the anticommunists, and he was also on the editorial board of the communist publication Science and Society (though he later resigned). I made a photocopy of a strongly anti-imperialist, anti-racist declaration of W. E. B. Dubois from the mid-1930s, and find little in Bunche that deviated from the DuBois anti-capitalist positions. Indeed, Bunche’s pamphlet A World View of Race, autographed by DuBois, is an anti-racist, anti-imperialist classic of the genre.

Bunche was effectively co-opted during and after his stint as Gunnar Myrdal’s chief research associate while the latter was writing about An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy ) published 1944. By then, Bunche had proven his usefulness to the liberal elite by identifying those “Negro betterment organizations” that were likely to get out of hand and effectively upset the status quo. His next job was with the OSS, where he downplayed US influence in Africa, then he was hired by the State Department, to which he remained loyal during his time with the UN. During the summer of 1948, he addressed the top dogs in that department to warn them that Israel was inevitably “expansionist” [and trouble owing to increased immigration], a warning he later repeated to upper-class Americans in private meetings. [Added 6-24-14: this “expansionist” line would come to duplicate radical jihadist propaganda that Israel and its Western allies were seeking to destroy Palestinians and other Muslims through “expansion” into territories once held by Islam, including Muslim penetration into the Europe that the Arab world had ostensibly civilized.]

By that, I mean that he aligned with those State Department figures who wished to cooperate with Arabs (whose oil was crucial), and who were also eager to maintain an increasingly shaky alliance with Great Britain against the Soviet threat. But perhaps the most important point to take away from this brief summary of Bunche’s politics is this: RB entirely accepted the UN and State Department line that the question of a Jewish state must be framed as two victimized peoples fighting over a small strip of land, strategically located for the failing British Empire. Nearly all the scholarship that followed takes this identical, incorrect line.

What is modernity? To its reactionary enemies, modernity signifies economic development along with the rise of banks and financiers, political democracy, the emancipation of the inquiring mind, a free quality education for all children, urbanization, secularism and pluralism, but above all, equality under the law for rich and poor alike. But for the Muslim world, the emancipation of women was probably one of the most painful developments as it was a symptom of reduced paternal authority in the family. I remember reading a book from the late 1940s that registered the indignation that Israel’s enemies expressed at the sight of sabra women going about, unaccompanied, wearing shorts and sandals.

1922 antimodern image
1922 antimodern image

Even my most erudite friends fail to see this distinction between fighting over land and borders and the “Pan-Arab” resistance to modernity. An incorrect analysis leads to bad strategy, destructive school curricula, and worse journalism that more often than not, concludes in some form of moral equivalence between Jewish and Palestinian atrocities: an ideological analysis based on irrational antagonism toward “the Other.” (see https://clarespark.com/2012/10/11/the-other/).

What neither Bunche nor pundits in our own time saw with respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict was as follows: It was never about land and borders or “Otherness.” The “question of Palestine” was always about Muslim resistance to modernity. And Jews along with emancipated women signified a rupture in human history that was intolerable. Modern machines, modernist skyscrapers, and technology, along with other common antimodern tropes, had nothing to do with their animus against a Jewish state. Most disturbingly, Bunche made it his mission to preserve the legend of Count Bernadotte’s greatness; agreeing with him that the displaced “Palestinians” should enjoy the “right of return”, and carefully editing out of Bernadotte’s memoir all evidence of hostility to the Jewish leaders they encountered during their “peace” efforts in 1948.

Modernity

It is astonishing that Bunche, a very astute person, did not see that at the time; perhaps it was a leftover from his days on the anti-imperialist Left. Moreover, his lack of understanding (the Palestine problem is insoluble), suggests that though he was a highly educated person and very liberal and systematic in his notes on Africa, he was morally compromised by his alliance with more powerful men. Bunche’s disgust with antisemitism, the main subject of my article on his relations with Myrdal, probably reflected 1. The communist line at the time, and 2. The Jews he praised were probably communists supportive of the labor movement; his anti-antisemitism probably did not reflect his deeply held beliefs. I find it painful to acknowledge this. His diaries are not free from disdain at Jews who fawned over him.

Bunche Nobel

May 17, 2014

Miracle Man Ralph Bunche saves the UN

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 6:01 pm
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Bunche and Count Bernadotte, 1949

Bunche and Count Bernadotte, 1948

My Bunche notes from UCLA Special Collections, suggest revisions of Sir Brian Urquhart’s Bunche biography and my own previous work on Bunche and his politics. Though a leftist in the 1930s, as he climbed the ladder, Bunche became a perfect social democrat and supporter of an FDR-type welfare state. The far Right Bunche critics are probably wrong to have labeled Bunche as a lifelong subversive. They underestimate his careerism, ambition, and opportunism. If he had a hidden agenda (made more overt in the Congo-Katanga episode), we have no proof as long as his letters to his wife remain sealed. Why are these letters off limits? (Could it be that he told his spouse that he was a member of a communist group?) (Further examination of his diaries and memoranda could buttress his identity as materialist: in his 1938-39 memoranda to Gunnar Myrdal, both men mocked the notion that better communication would solve group antagonisms: OTOH while at the UN Bunche preached that “discussions” led by mediators such as himself could bring about peace; even the Cold War could be ended.) (For a later blog with a slightly different emphasis see https://clarespark.com/2014/06/18/how-ralph-bunche-sold-out-and-failed-in-palestine/.)

Recent scholars who have emphasized the split between US and UK interests and ideologies, do not acknowledge that both countries wanted to prevent the Soviet Union from making inroads in the Middle East. Both countries viewed the Jews as materialistic and hence real or potential communists. Both countries wanted to protect their oil and strategic interests in the region.

The point of the UN negotiations (ostensibly to stop the fighting that erupted after the November 29, 1947 UN vote that created a partition in Palestine), was to protect Arab elites from spectral and real mass uprisings. Moreover, the “Palestine problem” was not about two peoples fighting irrationally over a small piece of land. But rather, the quarrel was about the clash of civilizations: Israel was to be a modern country, while the Arab states were economically, politically, and culturally backward. This was widely recognized at the time by modernizing visitors, but ignored in the subsequent academic literature. Rather, such groups as the Anti-Defamation League have framed “the Jewish problem” as a form of “prejudice”–a flaw that can be corrected with a change of heart. Such experts in social relations do not acknowledge that the 19th century witnessed the growing emancipation of women, Jews, labor, and ordinary people calling forth objections from displaced elites. That is why I have emphasized the transition from pre-capitalist to capitalist society as predictably violent and filled with turmoil, no matter how astutely “managed” by “mediators.”

Before the armistice talks in 1949, Freda Kirchwey and Lillie Shultz of The Nation Institute accused Count Bernadotte and Bunche of being agents for the UK, and they were probably correct—at least both men catered to UK interests. Some historians (e.g., Sidney Bailey How Wars End: bizarre title implies that wars do end with proper mediation) have covered up the visit of McClintock (US State Department) and Troutbeck (UK) to Bunche and Bernadotte three days before the assassination. The result: most of the Negev was to be awarded to Egypt (? and indirectly to UK?), and taken away from the area established in the partition resolution of the UN Nov.29, 1937. But then, CB and Bunche viewed that resolution (hated by Bevin) as a dead letter anyway. It has long been my view that the UK never intended to give up the Mandate, for the Negev was to be an air base and storage space for the weapons previously parked in Egypt.

These pages also verify my memory that Bunche and his supporters blamed all Jews for the Bernadotte assassination, directly or indirectly. All Jews are terrorists, he implied: Even the Israeli moderates in the Jewish Agency and then the Provisional Government of Israel should not have blamed the UN for partiality toward Arab interests. Hence they are terrorists too and are responsible for the “extremists” who shot Bernadotte.

There is also disagreement over security for Bernadotte. Dov Joseph, Mayor of Jerusalem, claimed that CB refused Jewish security because he didn’t want to be spied upon, but UN flaks deny this, and claim (without evidence) that Jews refused to protect the truly neutral CB; in this fable, the Jews were alleging that CB favored Arabs. My notes do indicate that Bunche wrote the Bernadotte plans, and suggest the reason that he did not accompany CB on his fatal Jerusalem survey: Bunche was completing the revised CB plan that took away most of the Negev from Jews, following the instructions he received from McClintock and Troutbeck in their secret September 14 meeting. (Bernadotte was assassinated on Sept. 17.)

Of all the elements of anti-Semitism through the ages, the most relevant for Israel’s founding are Jews as liars and haters (as opposed to “neutral” peace-loving UN, Bernadotte, and Bunche). If there is such thing as forbidden knowledge, these papers are it.

[Anti-Zionists] argued that the Bernadotte assassination proved that Israel was not ready to be a sovereign state.

Christian antisemitism was deployed by Bunche in wake of Bernadotte assassination. CB presented as a self-sacrificing friend to all humanity (a Christ- type, like the UN itself), while crucified by the Jews (all of whom turn out to be terrorists, ignoring the sharp differences between moderate PGI and militant Irgun and anti-imperialist Stern Gang, the latter a breakaway movement and small.) This trope is repeated over and over in post-assassination media coverage.(compare to Wiki entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folke_Bernadotte) This mentions British and US influence on content of Bernadotte plan, but claims no one knows details. Wiki does mention Negev to be given to “Arab territory” but does not specify which Arab State would benefit. It appeared to have been Egypt.)

The UCLA National Center for History in the Schools produced a [blatantly pro-Palestinian, pro-UN] 180 page “lesson plan” for grades 9-12 that implies Bunche was a superb and impartial negotiator, but the record shows that US and UK were determined to impose a settlement based on their (divergent) interests, not Jewish interests. NEVER. But the idea of conflict resolution must be defended by moderates at all costs, so these materials go generally unanalyzed. They follow the Arab elite narrative: Palestinian Arab farmers were uprooted and expelled by heartless, displaced-persons-obsessed, deracinated Jews.

Jews in PGI understand that Bunche’s main objective is to vindicate himself as successful Peace mediator. Many letters in Bunche papers criticize him for antisemitism (but from outsiders, not from PGI). Bunche insists that Bernadotte plans meant as negotiating positions, not imposed settlement.
Above all, Bunche (and his staff, who knew almost nothing about Jews, the Middle East, and the Holocaust before they arrived with Bernadotte on the UN mission) wanted to vindicate the UN (then a new organization) as a successful actor on the world stage. His aim was to show that conflict resolution in the hands of a skillful mediator could serve the cause of world peace.

Bunchemiracle

May 2, 2014

Promises made by liberal elites to the Greatest Generation

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 7:26 pm
Tags: , , , , ,

sailorwarning This short blog is part of an ongoing effort to explain the differences between communist ideology and its rival, social democracy, also known as “socially responsible capitalism.”

[From my article on Ralph Bunche and Gunnar Myrdal: see this important excerpt: https://clarespark.com/2011/08/04/carnegie-corp-and-the-negro-problem/.%5D

Louis Wirth’s insistence on wise progressive planning and foresight, including the sighting of threats to order, was reiterated in a Q. and A. booklet from the Office of War Information, “What Do Students Do In The War and After” (numbered M-3227, slipped into the Ideologies volume in the Bunche Papers at UCLA, though not bound).
On page 8 the Committee for Economic Development [business leaders adopting Keynesian economic policies, created in 1942, C.S.] is mentioned as promising “maximum employment and high productivity” after the war. Page 9 quotes Ambassador [John Gilbert} Winant (a suicide in 1947) in a speech to English miners:

“Anti-Fascism is not a short term military job. It was bred in poverty and unemployment. To crush Fascism at its roots we must crush depression. We must solemnly resolve that in the future we will not tolerate the economic evils which breed poverty and war. This is not something that we solve for the duration. It is part of the war.” Page 10 announces “There is a growing sense of social responsibility among business leaders and a wide-spread acceptance of the inescapable duty of business to maintain full production and continuous employment to maintain the purchasing power upon which prosperity depends.” Page 11 ff., states that the curricula for history, the social sciences and the liberal arts will be revised and adjusted accordingly: Education must stress science, interpersonal human relations, and international affairs, the “larger world of other peoples and other cultures with whom we must collaborate in establishing world order.” [end excerpt from my article on Bunche and Myrdal]

In other words, multiculturalism and internationalism were not an imposition by the Left but an upper-class “progressive” response to heightened expectations among soldiers for more equality, peace, meaningful work and education after discharge from the armed services.
sailorkiss

January 3, 2012

The Race Card

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 9:41 pm
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sumner bio paperback cover art

This blog responds to the playing of “the race card” by such politicians as Eric Holder, Barack Obama, Al Sharpton, and Jesse Jackson, plus a cast of thousands of militant black nationalists, along with academic allies who favor ethnic studies. Their separatism and taxonomy of “African-Americans” suggests not only an underlying loyalty to (racist) Pan-Africanism, but a fashionable version of US history as unmarked by moral and political outrage at the institution of slavery or horror at the failed struggle for Reconstruction after the supposed ending of the Civil War. At bottom, this blog suggests that the President’s continued popularity may be partly attributed to white liberal guilt (as suggested early on by Shelby Steele and others), and certainly not to powerful “liberal” blows against the racism that permeates our society, with some exceptions.

I will try to contrast two important books on race and class in the 19th century; one by the late David Montgomery, writing from the Left, and another by the late David Herbert Donald, writing from the moderate middle.  As I have shown in other blogs on the website, such success as the ex-slaves and their descendants have achieved in America is explained by the overt or subtextual racism of primitivism and  multiculturalism. (See https://clarespark.com/2010/04/08/racism-modernity-modernism/, and https://clarespark.com/2011/05/12/the-great-common-goes-to-the-white-house/.

I.    After having faulted upper-class antebellum and post-bellum Radical reformers (through 1868) for their obliviousness to structural class conflict, the late labor historian David Montgomery concluded that “the Radicals” (including Charles Sumner), nevertheless exerted a positive influence on American politics. In Beyond Equality, (1967) the book that established him as a leading historian, Montgomery ended with this paragraph:  “…though their moment in power was brief and their response to the dilemmas of that moment confused, the Radicals left America a legacy that was both rich and various. To Negroes they bequeathed the promise of equality, enshrined in the organic law of the land. To Liberals they imparted faith that an educated and propertied elite might shepherd the nation through the morass of democratic ignorance toward an increasingly prosperous, harmonious, and rational life. Upon the Sentimental Reformers, and through them, on the working classes, they bestowed the ideal of popular use of governmental machinery to promote the common good, and a conception of that good as something nobler than a larger gross national product. Henry Carey’s sense of revulsion toward the consecration of “selfishness and individualism as the prime feature of society,” and Thaddeus Stevens’s aspiration for a community ‘freed from every vestige of human oppression,’ jettisoned by a nation in frantic pursuit of wealth, were left in trust to its labor movement.”

(For David Montgomery’s views on his membership in the Communist Party see http://rhr.dukejournals.org/content/1980/23/37.full.pdf+html.)

II.   I have quoted from Montgomery’s first book, not because I sympathize with his Marxist analysis of the future of the labor movement, but because Montgomery’s positive view of the abolitionists and antislavery men (including Senator Charles Sumner, 1811-1874) stands in such sharp contrast with that of his Ivy League colleague David Herbert Donald, author of a much lauded two-volume biography of Sumner, that leaves out the labor question altogether, focusing rather on Sumner (a catalyst for Civil War) as a pain in the neck (perhaps with Jewish, Negro, or Indian blood), deserving of endless psychological analysis. But even more importantly, Donald sees the race problem as one of “prejudice,” without consideration of labor competition, in Ralph Bunche’s view, the lingering cause of white racism (see https://clarespark.com/2009/10/10/ralph-bunche-and-the-jewish-problem/) .

Here are some passages that illustrate my point:

David Herbert Donald

[From Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (1960), footnote: pp.4-5:] “…Barry [1853] asserted that Sumner’s mother was ‘probably of Jewish descent’; this allegation led…Stearns [1905]…to identify ‘the Hebrew element in Sumner’s nature; the inflexibility of purpose, the absolute self-devotion, and even the prophetic forecast.’ Such a theory of inherited racial traits is, of course, highly unscientific. But, in any case, the Jewish strain in Sumner’s ancestry is dubious. At no point in his career, when virtually every other possible weapon was used against him, were anti-Semitic charges raised.” In the text on p. 5, Donald reports that “Boston maiden aunts speculated—without any evidence whatever—that the mysterious [Esther Holmes, Sumner’s paternal grandmother, never married to Major Sumner] had been ‘partly of Negro or Indian blood.’” But then, Donald hints that there may be something to these speculations seeking to account for Sumner’s passion for Negro human rights: “Prudently the new senator preferred to draw the veil over the whole subject of his genealogy (referring to CS’s autobiography): “It seems to me better to leave it all unsaid.”

In Charles  Sumner and the Rights of Man (1970), Donald takes a slightly more positive view of his subject, but no sooner does he declare Sumner’s belief in the brotherhood of humanity, than he finds a quote that attributes distinct racial qualities to Negroes (though this typical 19th century view of national or racial character never affects Sumner’s view of such crucial matters as freeing the slaves immediately after the attack on Fort Sumter, or endowing the freedmen with some of the land that they had worked, plus a full panoply of civil rights, including desegregated quality education, male suffrage, the right to testify in trials, desegregated public space, etc.

[Donald, V.2, p. 422, referring to Sumner’s anti-segregation speech “The Question of Caste”:]  “Invoking the new prestige of evolutionary science, he declared that ethnology and anthropology proved the ‘overruling Unity’ among the races of man, ‘by which they are constituted one and the same cosmopolitan species, endowed with speech, reason, conscience, and the hope of immortality, knitting all together in a common Humanity.’… [The Switch:] When the bars of caste were lifted, the Negroes would exhibit their basic racial traits of ‘simplicity, amenity, good-nature, generousity, fidelity,’ and these, when added to the ‘more precocious and harder’ characteristics of white Americans, would result in a civilization where ‘men will not only know and do, but they will feel also.”….

Near the end of Vol. 2, Donald reveals his affinity with Gunnar Myrdal, the white liberal foundations who funded and controlled the production of An American Dilemma (1944), and other cultural historians who hoped that reduction of “prejudice” and interracial understanding (or the constant reiteration of “white guilt”) will alleviate every kind of racism, through a change of heart:

[Donald, p. 533, referring to Sumner’s proposed civil rights bill:] “The subordination of the Negroes was less a matter of economics than of prejudice, deep-seated and ineradicable so long as black men legally were marked as belonging to an inferior caste. Only by securing equal rights to all citizens could the United States live up to its promise and become a land where even-handed justice ruled.”

This rejection of economic considerations (e.g. labor competition) is precisely what Myrdal’s associate Ralph Bunche or his mentor Abram L. Harris, were repudiating in the late 1930s.

What to take away from this dip into the conflicted mind of the late David Herbert Donald, a Mississippian with a Vermont ancestor who fought for the Union? How did he climb the academic ladder to become one of the most honored historians in the field? Why should we pay attention to his Sumner obsession?

I have two primary reasons for writing this blog:

  1. Having reread the two-volume Donald  bio of Sumner, I am more convinced than ever that Melville modeled his character Captain Ahab after Sumner. Just as “Ahab” was a “fighting Quaker”,  Sumner’s first scandalous public oration– on the Fourth of July 1845, in Faneuil Hall, Boston, to an elite assemblage that included military brass sitting in the first row—denounced all wars and pledged his life to peace.  The “fighting Quaker” moniker, plus the compassion that Ahab feels for the black boy Pip, going so far as to take “crazy” Pip into his cabin and promising never to abandon him, clinches the deal for me. For Sumner’s writing completed as Melville was writing Moby-Dick see https://clarespark.com/2009/10/05/charles-sumner-moderate-conservative-on-lifelong-learning/. Or see https://clarespark.com/2008/05/03/margoth-vs-robert-e-lee/.

2. The notion that a career such as Sumner’s, passionately averse to slavery, that then fights for reconstruction of an American post-Civil War Union, could be the sign of a mental disorder or even tainted blood, is so bizarre as to be a sign of mental  incompetence and perhaps outright hostility in Sumner’s biographer. It was noted in one obituary (the New York Times) that Volumes one and two of  Donald’s major work were different in tone, owing to the growing civil rights movement. Clearly, that writer did not read the new, improved model with sufficient care.  Donald never relinquishes his characterization of a foppish, somewhat gay, anti-social, supremely arrogant and Negro-fixated Charles Sumner. His complexion may have been olive-tinted in Volume 1, but he goes out in Vol. 2 with “So White a Soul” (referring to Emerson’s characterization of Sumner’s moral  purity, but with a suggestion of underlying racism).

TO BE CONTINUED.

August 4, 2011

Carnegie Corp. and “the Negro problem”

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 7:55 pm
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Gunnar Myrdal and family, 1938

Diane Ravitch and other education historians frequently cite Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma as a landmark publication in the history of American reform, but they do not describe the fundor Carnegie Corporation’s explicitly anti-communist project. As with other social democratic initiatives, social cohesion, not structural reform and/or the search for truth, was the explicit aim of the massive Carnegie project.  In this blog, I excerpt a key passage in my published article on the subject, with some revisions. See Clare L. Spark, “Race, Caste, or Class? The Bunche-Myrdal Dispute Over An American Dilemma,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol.14, No.2  (March 2001): 465-511. The reason for this post is not to support Bunche’s 1930s leftist strategies as my own today, but to emphasize that social democrats are and were anticommunists, and should never be conflated with revolutionary socialists. True, they are and were protofascist statists with an aristocratic mind-set, but there are degrees of statism, and we still have more than one political party.

[From my article:] The record suggests that Bunche was hired for the Carnegie study because as a leading black intellectual in command of the existing literature and research, he criticized anti-white black nationalist tendencies that would undermine the coming war effort; moreover Bunche’s participation at a high level made the project look inclusive and objective. These points are obvious, but more, as an experienced scholar-activist, he could draw clear boundaries between safe (co-optable) and potentially disruptive protest movements, a feat perhaps not within the competence of establishment social scientists, themselves removed from 1930s radical organizations with their shifting modes and memberships. This latter objective is explicitly spelled out in a letter from Louis Wirth to Samuel Stouffer, 31 August 1940, that illuminates the objectives of the Carnegie-Myrdal Study.[i]

Samuel Stouffer

Louis Wirth was very favorable to Bunche’s Ideologies memorandum, but his suggestions for revision were politically motivated, and are worth further quoting:

[Wirth:]”…4. I think the classification of ideologies needs more intensive work. The two major lines of thought explicitly recognized are (1) accommodation, (2) escapism. But actually the materials fall into at least three categories (1) accommodation (2) escapism (3) militancy. Surely, although some of the revolutionary ideologies are in part escapist, utopian and futile, still, they are activist and radically and militantly so. This needs stressing and is the major shortcoming of the organization of the materials as it now stands. Also, I think it might be well to distinguish between the ideologies that accept the fundamental premises upon which the present order rests and those that reject or transcend these premises. This amounts virtually to saying that a distinction should be made between caste-bound ideologies and those that repudiate caste. Likewise, a distinction should be made between those ideologies that accept the general socio-economic order and those that reject it (liberal democratic, capitalist, Christian, nationalism vs. a fascist or communist, or socialist internationalism). 5. In the concluding chapter the dominant trends might be emphasized: Whither are we going? This is a question that is fairly studiously avoided. 6. Finally the  compatibility or incompatibility of the different ideologies should be brought out. Which ones are in conflict with one another and which mutually reinforce one another? For any formulation of General Policy with reference to the Negro in America, which I assume is one of the ultimate objectives of the Carnegie-Myrdal Study, this demand is crucial.”

Wirth’s juxtaposition of “Christian” with (U.S.) “nationalism” as a counterpoint to the various “internationalist” ideologies he lists requires some examination: perhaps it reflected the German-Jewish immigrant’s obeisance to assimilation. I wonder if Wirth, a prominent urban sociologist, associated Jews with the Left. He might have been surprised by Bunche’s sharp attack on antisemitism in black nationalist organizations, recognizing that Bunche was writing from the Left.  Bunche had synopsized his article from the Journal of Negro Education, July 1939, in his memorandum “The Programs, Ideologies, Tactics And Achievements of Negro Betterment and Interracial Organizations,” Book #4 (765-770). In his “General Critique of Negro Organizations” Bunche criticized race consciousness and inwardness of the sort preached by Marcus Garvey and Carter Woodson.[ii]  Race pride was the black man’s burden: for the nationalists, white allies must think of the problem as Negroes think of them, or be rejected. Bunche objected,and then brought up the folly of “Negro anti-Semitism.”

Ralph Bunche, radical

[Bunche:] As long as the Negro is black and the white man harbors prejudice, what has the Negro to do with class or caste, with capitalism, imperialism, fascism, communism, or any other “ism?” (767) [The organizations, black, white, or mixed, share these characteristics:] “(1) adherence to policies of escape, based upon racialism and nationalism; (2) lack of mass support among Negroes, and mass appeal; (3) dependence upon white benefactors for finance; (4) reluctance to encourage the development of working class psychology among Negroes and avoidance of class interpretations; (5) tendency directly or indirectly, to take the main ideological cues from white sympathizers; (6) lack of a coherent, constructive program; (7) lack of broad social perspective and the ability to relate the problems of the Negro to the main social currents and forces of the American society; and (8) pursuit of policies of immediate relief and petty opportunism (767-68).

[Bunche, cont.] It is not surprising that the narrowly racial conceptions of the Negro have caused him to be seduced by anti-Semitism. He thinks only in terms of jobs for Negroes, business for Negroes, Negro landlords, bankers and employers, and vents his emotional spleen on the Jewish shopkeeper in the Negro neighborhood, who exploits the black trade quite as enthusiastically as would the black shopkeeper. The Negro anti-Semite does not reason, nor does it matter, that all Jews are neither shopkeepers nor prejudiced. It is sufficient that the Jew makes profit from a store in a Negro section that Negroes ought to work in, or that a Jewish professor holds a position at a Negro university that a Negro, if even a less competent one, should occupy. Such bigoted attitudes are deliberately nurtured by the self-seeking, sensitive Negro middle-class–the business and professional groups, who seek an economic base for their middle-class aspirations.

In view of the obvious implications for the Negro of this sort of blind, suicidal emotionalism, the certain truth that racial generalizations and prejudices are luxuries which the Negro can ill-afford, it is a bitter indictment of Negro organizations that none has been rational or bold enough to wage a vigorous campaign against Negro anti-Semitism. [No Negro organization is fighting fascism, comparing] fundamental racial and totalitarian dogmas, versus democracy, imperfect as it has been for minority groups (769).

Bunche then quoted Mein Kampf: “all that is not race in this world is trash.” (770) Writing with maximum urgency, he argued that nationalist politics must be abandoned; blacks should forge alliances with  progressive groups…developing the American society with a lush economic and political democracy in which there will be real opportunity and real life for all citizens (772).…facing facts and facts alone (773).” Without the broad view and social analysis he advocated, Bunche predicted that Negroes would be herded into ghettoes and concentration camps (770). In another publication, he recommended that Negroes and Jews should cooperate through their organizations to solve their common problems. [iii]

i. See inserted feedback on Ideologies volume (Bound volume, Bunche Papers, Box 80). Compare Charles Henry, RB, 104.

11. See Ideologies memo, p.11. Compare RJB to Mrs. A. L. Spaulding, n.d. ca 1935, Bunche Papers, Box 1, commenting on her plan for an Exposition: “Primarily I presume it would be your desire not to portray the
Negro as a separate and distinct group in the American society which has made some progress under adversity but rather to exhibit the fact that the American Negro has been an integral and contributing factor in the development of the peculiarly American civilization. That would free the plan from the stigma of furthering separatism, for which it might properly be criticized from some sources.”

111. Brian Urquhart Papers, UCLA, Box 1, mimeo of Bunche’s Forward to Wedlock’s “Anti-Semitism in the Negro Press,” dated 12/11/41.

February 27, 2011

Remembering Ralph Bunche, American

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 4:15 am
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Ralph Bunche at UCLA, 1926

Dr. Ralph Bunche, political scientist and Acting Mediator in the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1948-49, did not want to remembered as an African-American or an African American. Bunche wrote that his ancestors had helped build this country, and wanted no insinuation that he should be racially identified, though there was no doubt that he was a tireless defender of “my people.”

In the last few blogs, I have been complaining about a powerful group of white cultural historians who believe they are accurate in describing American descendants of slaves as African-Americans or African Americans without the hyphen. These include such luminaries as David Brion Davis, David Blight, Seymour Drescher, Steven Mintz, and John Stauffer. They are all hard working and productive scholars, good men all, who have done much to remind Americans that the sectional reconciliation that followed the Civil War did not fulfill the emancipatory promise of that momentous conflict. I do not depart from their general view that white supremacy still lingers; see https://clarespark.com/2012/01/21/the-persistence-of-white-racism/.

But I do not understand why they persist in a racialist discourse. Africa, a huge continent, was the site of numerous, distinct societies that were too various to be gathered under the umbrella of pan-Africanism. As cultural historians, they would argue that African survivals created a cohesive community of blacks in America that share a common culture. But such a category, however fluid it may be imagined, covers over class differences and other conflicting interests. These scholars follow W. E. B. Dubois, not Ralph Bunche. They also frequently cite Gunnar Myrdal, who knew nothing about race relations in America, and was chosen by the Carnegie Corporation for precisely that reason, lest their mammoth study of “the Negro problem” be seen as one-sided. So Ralph Bunche, who had been outlining a big study on this very subject, but could not proceed for lack of powerful fundors, was hired as Myrdal’s lead collaborator, and Bunche was not to be intimidated by Myrdal or his sponsors. His voluminous memoranda and correspondence, housed at UCLA Special Collections, were a revelation to me, for the internal debates in the making of An American Dilemma (1944) that were never published told me a lot about “liberal” sponsorship of American history projects with their emphasis on intercultural communication and understanding. For examples, see https://clarespark.com/2011/06/16/the-antiquated-melting-pot/.

Bunche and his close friend and mentor at Howard University, Abram L. Harris, had great hopes for integrated industrial unions, but recognized that union bosses (the bureaucratic layer) were a menace to the interests of the rank-and-file, white as well as the black workers who were to unite with their working brethren to lift all workers out of the mire of the Great Depression. Bunche was a radical during the 1930s, hence he was no acolyte to those I have called elsewhere “socially responsible capitalists” or “corporatist liberals.” All this is worth remembering as the nation argues about public sector unions and unions in general.

Though Myrdal attacked Bunche and his colleagues as “economic determinists” Bunche never neglected culture and ideology. But what may have made him unacceptable to high society was his plain spoken condemnation of all black nationalist tendencies, seen by him as escapist and often antisemitic. Bunche’s constant reminders to Myrdal that Jews were the only pro-labor members of Negro Betterment Organizations (such as the Urban League) could not have sat well with those who read his memoranda. But it is worth remembering that Bunche spoke out against antisemitism when it was not fashionable to do so.

Although Sir Brian Urquhart has written a commendable biography of Bunche, no one can write a complete biography as long as his voluminous  letters to his wife are sealed until the death of his children, Ralph Jr. and Joan. I would like to have been the one to have written that biography, but it cannot be. Still, the many months I have spent in his papers are a highlight of my years in research, and did much to dispel the lingering racism that was my unfortunate inheritance as a student in the 1940s and 1950s. One more memory before Black History Month disappears: the professors I mentioned above are disturbed by the lingering effects of racism into the present, though they are vague about precisely what that entails beyond “race inequality.” Bunche had no doubt on that score: 19th century job competition between black and white workers bred bitterness, he thought, and it would take work to overcome that cultural inheritance. But that kind of talk is forgotten in the age of liberal guilt and “reparations” that do not, and cannot, repair. See https://clarespark.com/2013/06/23/the-origins-of-political-correctness/.

February 10, 2011

“Multiculturalism”: cui bono?

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 4:17 am
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

David Cameron

I have seen numerous cable news reports of British P. M. David Cameron’s recent speech in Munich, where he spoke about “multiculturalism” as failed social policy, thus joining Angela Merkel as a critic of MC.  No one in the major media, to my knowledge, understands the origin and application of this doctrine, although it is the chief sales point of many a progressive private school, and indeed, it is the ruling ideology in the U.S., though both Marxists and conservatives grumble.  I wrote about its origins at length here: http://hnn.us/articles/4533.html. But to answer the question I posed above, who benefits, I can enumerate those who have triumphed in imposing MC:

1. Social democrats who smashed the red specter of proletarian internationalism that haunted Europe after the French Revolution and the various smaller revolutions that followed. The social democratic claim was that ethnicity trumped class solidarity in the hearts of the people. In countries such as the U.S. where a flood of immigrants threatened WASP hegemony, the melting pot ideal of the new amalgamated, innovative, culturally syncretic American was smothered by “cultural pluralism” and hyphenated Americanism as advanced by such as Randolph Bourne and Horace Kallen. Ethnicity or “race” displaced “class” as an analytic category, though the Depression years saw a resurgence of class analysis, making late 1930s progressives very nervous about another depression that would surely follow demobilization after the looming  second world war. Et voila, the Carnegie Corporation fretted about the “American Dilemma,” with Gunnar Myrdal attacking Ralph Bunche’s  “economic determinism” in the pages of that landmark book, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy (1944).

2. Upwardly mobile non-white petit-bourgeois intellectuals. In the move toward separate ethnic studies programs after the urban riots of the mid to late 1960s, college administrators leapt at the opportunity to pacify the restless natives. MC asserted that “cultural diversity” was a great thing for everyone, enriching even, and that if you were a person of color, only other persons of color in your particular group understood your unique and untranslatable “experience”. Under these conditions, ancient and recent wrongs would be righted, and “deracinated” blacks, browns, and reds (Native Americans), and sometimes even yellows, would set down roots and arm themselves to resist the depredations of the white male oppressor. Job opportunities burgeoned for would-be academics from the correctly hyphenated community of color. (I.e., only an African-American can teach African-American Studies.)

3. Terrorists (home-grown).  The constant reiteration of Amerika as a tainted, evil country, with no boundaries between past and present,  provides the moral justification for destroying the entire entity.

     So when P.M. David Cameron and various journalists deplore ghettoes that prevent assimilation to a presumably more coherent [British] “national identity” they are not misdescribing reality (though jihadists are the issue, not westernized Muslims, though there is disagreement even on this issue: see http://www.meforum.org/3053/radical-islamist-muslims). Where the pundits fail is in ignoring distinctions between liberal nationalism (Gesellschaft) and conservative, integral nationalism (Gemeinschaft). I.e., they do not sufficiently define their terms.  Charles Sumner prescribed liberal nationalism during the mid-19th century as follows: the overarching federal government, as a republic, protects its citizens from invasion and protects their civil rights, including property rights (See https://clarespark.com/2008/05/03/margoth-vs-robert-e-lee/). But there was a competing notion of “identity” derived first from German Romanticism and then carried forth in the organic conservatism beloved in the American South before and after the Civil War, and by the advocates of MC today as they deploy magical notions of “community” or the utterly invented and absurd idea of Zeitgeist (the spirit of the age or Volk, a spirit, indeed).

What is lost is the notion of the free-standing individual, possessed of an education that prepared her to criticize proposed social policies and their advocates. (See https://clarespark.com/2011/10/09/vox-populi-vox-big-brother/.) What is also lost is the ongoing debate about markets: their wealth-creating potential, or conversely, their regulation, limitation, or abolition. (I am of the belief that markets are wealth-creators and that every anti-modern, anti-science initiative is a descent into possibly irreparable poverty and strife. Multiculturalism is anti-science and anti-modern.)

October 10, 2009

Ralph Bunche and the Jewish Problem

Filed under: 1 — clarelspark @ 7:59 pm
Tags: , , , , ,

Image (49)RALPH BUNCHE AND THE JEWISH PROBLEM

Clare L. Spark, Ph.D.,

Prepared for the conference “Ralph Bunche: Scholar, Activist, Bureaucrat” UCLA, 2-21-04 at the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies. I was invited because of my article “Race, Caste, or Class? The Bunche-Myrdal Dispute Over An American Dilemma,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol.14, No.2 (March 2001): 465-511.

Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish economist and politician who had been imported to solve “the Negro problem” by the Carnegie Corporation, shamelessly used and abused his chief collaborator, Ralph Bunche. Numerous scholars who have written about the making of AN AMERICAN DILEMMA: THE NEGRO PROBLEM AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY (1944) report Bunche’s fear of lynching or imprisonment during his research trip to the South with the flamboyant Myrdal in 1939, but no recent scholar, to my knowledge, has seen how the figure of Bunche, as red specter or black crypto-Jew functioned in the text. Briefly, Myrdal hinted to Southern conservatives that if they did not “adjust” race relations by allowing political rights to their Negro populations, the young revolutionaries associated with Bunche, a.k.a. “the Howard boys,” would be tumultuously overturning the entire institutional “set-up” [AD, 519-20]; just as earlier, Southern Bourbons had warned of black domination if the abolitionists prevailed.

As if this deployment of the Bunche Threat were not enough, Myrdal and other Carnegie personnel urged Bunche, who certainly knew his way around the 1930s Left, to identify those Negro betterment organizations that were Communist fronts or otherwise disruptively militant. Oddly, Red Bunche was asked to function as Red Hunter for his patrons. (For details, see https://clarespark.com/2011/08/04/carnegie-corp-and-the-negro-problem/.) This paper will attempt to flesh out Myrdal’s chief gripe with Bunche: his imputed overemphasis on economic factors in the perpetuation of racism, exhibited in the accusation that the Bunche cadre (like all the Negro and most of the white writers on the Carnegie project) were economic determinists, for this term has only rarely been understood to be a cover for antisemitism/antimodernism/counter-Enlightenment.  My previous research had put me on guard to spot Myrdal’s strategies.

I did not set out to become a Bunche scholar; rather my encounter with him was the outcome of research on the pseudo-democratic propaganda churned out by social democratic elites in the 1930s and 1940s; I wanted to see how changing attitudes toward the big state during the later New Deal affected the scholarly and popular reception of Herman Melville’s character Captain Ahab, a character often taken to be the mouthpiece of the romantically wandering author himself. Since Melville had been considered to be an anti-racist, way ahead of his time, it was important to study the state of race relations during the period of his promotion in the twentieth century; i.e., how Melville’s rootless cosmopolitanism might have either fit in with or diverged from those of other progressives. For some social psychologists were advising, in the interests of civilian morale, that a few members of minorities should be taken into the Big Barn of the planning state, and valued for their entertainingly acrid and sulphuric contributions. [see chapter two of HUNTING CAPTAIN AHAB: PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE AND THE MELVILLE REVIVAL, partly excerpted in prior blogs; see https://clarespark.com/2011/03/27/progressive-mind-managers-ca-1941-42/.]

So I ploughed through AMERICAN DILEMMA, and was amazed to see Ralph Bunche stigmatized as an “economic determinist.” I was shocked, for while I was growing up in the 1950s, Bunche was a prominent and revered public figure. Since that derogatory term “economic determinism” had been associated with Hebraic puritanism, and was frequently derided by 1930s humanities scholars seeking to reform the overly “Marxist” and “Freudian” American literature curriculum, my curiosity was aroused, and I began my reading of Bunche’s voluminous memoranda for the Carnegie project, also his correspondence with other scholars before and during the years of his labors for Myrdal.

A few years later, during a UCLA conference on the history of the social sciences, I mentioned that Myrdal had treated Bunche rather badly to one of the participants, who then urged me to pursue this problem, for he had read some of the Carnegie materials at Columbia University, and thought there was a scandal that needed to be aired. Shortly after that, I was invited to contribute a journal article to a special issue on Gunnar Myrdal, little dreaming that this new research would so clearly dovetail with my work on the Melville Revival and the construction of the postwar humanities curriculum, influenced as it was by Southern Agrarians, some of whom were pro-fascist. [See Clare Spark, “Race, Caste, or Class? The Bunche-Myrdal Dispute Over An American Dilemma,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 14, No.3 (March 2001): 465:511]

Most significantly, I saw that there were sharp methodological differences between the two collaborators: Myrdal advocated his theory of cumulative causation to solve the Negro problem, while Bunche insisted upon class politics, rejecting those strategies of existing interracial organizations then advocating attitude change through better communication and understanding: these latter were moral reformers who would purge the bigoted heart of hate and fill it with Christian love.

This divergence of method and strategy between  Myrdal and Bunche reflected a long-standing antagonism in Western culture regarding the political and economic institutions that would best carry forward the democratizing promises of the radical Reformation, increasing mass literacy, the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. Personalities associated with the radical enlightenment, namely the so-called mechanical materialists of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century progressive bourgeoisie, were challenged by romantic conservatives (the corporatists) who, as conservative enlighteners, co-opted “science” and “liberalism” to protect the property and prerogatives of threatened aristocrats, finally developing the welfare state and its concomitant theory of ethnopluralism, today called multiculturalism.

The corporatists aimed to mitigate group conflict and integrate malcontents into the body politic. In his important essay “Sombart and (German) National Socialism,” Bunche’s mentor and Howard U. colleague Abram L. Harris referred to such reactive persons as liberal interventionists deriving their social theory from German Romanticism and Bismarck. I call them corporatist liberals; they call themselves the moderate men, charting their socially responsible and spiritually inflected middle course between the “extremes” of laissez-faire capitalism on the Right and totalitarian statism on the Left.  Moreover, since the rigorously empirical Herman Melville had been read as Prometheus, or the Romantic Wandering Jew, by numerous corporatist critics, I came to understand that the scandal of “economic determinism” was at bottom, a comment upon the supposed havoc wreaked by “the Jewish spirit” that had, in its typically defiant and deicidal Jewish way, toppled the unquestionable authority of Christian religion, hence had infected the masses with an excessive desire for material improvement, political power, and self-direction: in other words, emancipation from illegitimate, arbitrary authority.

For elites threatened by dispossession, it was a brave new modern world, dominated as it seemed by usurpers fortified by science, secularism, and mobbish majorities. Empiricism or positivism, as wielded, say, by Ralph Bunche, that relentlessly thorough investigator of institutional power and all manner of economic, political, and social conflicts–this field research or “objectivist” disinterested fact-finding was the deadly enemy to social cohesion as previously managed by Kings and Churches.

Under that benign and selfless corporatist management, peace and harmony had ruled, thanks to the unselfish, disciplined, and self-sacrificing monarchs and clergy who were now, owing to the intrusion of free markets, hunted, incinerated, and decapitated by the dastardly dark mustachioed and beetle-browed homo economicus, Adam Smith’s “narcissistic” monopoly-busting economic man who could care less, it was alleged, for the public interest. Whereas the good king integrated his subjects into the organic society, the bomb-makers of modernity decimated the natural bonds between master and servant, introducing, for the first time in history, class warfare. And for some Christian conservatives homo economicus was, what else, a typically money-grubbing and domineering Jew, the archetypal confidence-man promising false utopias to credulous masses; moreover, the new industrial working class and its allies were clamoring for rights when they should have been mindful of their duties. Alas, the modern world was jewified, and hence, afflicted with the disease of decadence. But social engineering, radical subjectivism, and the related concept of the rooted cosmopolitan would repair all that.

Though Myrdal is often represented as basing his optimism on the spellbinding American Creed, the enlightened ideology of democracy, rationalism, and equality he sees undermined (but not fully vanquished) by the persistence of “caste conflict” and the general backwardness of the South, his progressivism, in contrast to that of Harris and Bunche, was located in a powerfully paternalistic state.  America’s weak state fomented only corruption and chaos; a neutral bureaucratic layer would enforce the laws and suggest new ones where indicated.  Although answerable to the people (in America, the passive masses who should learn the skills of participatory democracy), the process of bureaucratic accountability was not spelled out; perhaps Myrdal longed for a modern version of the even-handed contractual monarch of the High Middle Ages who ostensibly protected the commonweal from factions of selfish interest groups.  In a complex industrial “set-up,” the [king’s] regulatory functions would necessarily be distributed among specialist bureaucrats, the social engineers led by social scientists.

While aligning himself with the social goals of radical liberals (materialists), Myrdal’s organic conservative discourse and objectives locate him in the opposing idealist camp. Myrdal’s organic society would reduce the distance between classes, not eliminate them [the communist ideal], nor would it focus on wealth creation [the free-market capitalist ideal]. [This needs revision and additions to allow for Bunche’s emphasis on the reduction of toil and a rising standard of living, plus Harris’s probably changing views on labor unions as monopolistic and ultimately bad for workers. C.S. 2/27]

“A vitalized democracy,” Myrdal wrote, “would result, not only in a decrease in the immense class differences in America, but more fundamentally, it would effect a higher degree of integration in society of the many millions of anonymous and atomized individuals: a strengthening of the ties of loyalty running through the entire social fabric; a more efficient and uncorrupted performance of all public functions; and a more intense and secure feeling on the part of the common citizen of his belongingness to, responsibility for, and participation in the commonwealth as a great cooperative human endeavor–a realization of a fuller life” (AD, 716).

Like the prominent sociologist Robert S. Lynd, attacking do-nothing and defeatist social scientists in the present “revolutionary situation,” Myrdal states, “We are entering an era where fact-finding and scientific theories of causal relations will be seen as instrumental in planning controlled social change. The peace will bring nothing but problems, one mounting upon another, and consequently, new urgent tasks for social engineering. The American social scientist, because of the New Deal and the War, is already acquiring familiarity with planning and practical action. He will never again be given the opportunity to build up so ‘disinterested’ a social science”(1022-23).

Turn now to the problem of race as imagined by Bunche versus Myrdal. For the rationalist Bunche, writing in the 1930s, race was a debilitating myth that masked the primacy of class power and economic competition; “race” was false consciousness that defeated a potentially unified labor/tenant farmer movement, whether in the cities or in the rural South; the concept of “race” difference, reinforced by the twisted conditions of ghetto life, was the chief obstacle to group betterment and individual emancipation, not only for “[his] own people,” but for all of suffering humanity.

Bunche was obviously not a vulgar Marxist, ignoring the autonomous power of ideology, but it does not follow that attitude change of the sort advocated by the Carnegie Corporation, interracial organizations, and Myrdal, “by the actual spread of an ideology of class solidarity,” can force positive structural institutional change without independent organization by participants in the labor market, educated through the experience of unified class action how best to defend their individual and group interests. And, for Bunche, integration signified equal rights; i.e., equal opportunity to pursue the American dream, a goal that was unlikely to be realized without the elimination of ghettoes.

By contrast, for the irrationalist Myrdal and other social democrats, “race” was an obstacle to fellow-feeling, not only in the mob that must be pacified and made to feel compassion for each other and for their overburdened superiors, but in the hidebound conservatives whose stubborn and callous adherence to white supremacy would lead to catastrophe: Mutual empathy and a willingness to compromise and share the wealth would restore the lost paradise of community, peace and harmony envisaged by advocates of the social democratic planning state, and after the war, by the upper-class peace movement that put its hopes for earthly “salvation” in a Christianized United Nations populated by rooted cosmopolitans in “the international community,” again, redistributing the goods of this world.

For Bunche, writing before the war, antisemitism was a problem that had to be confronted by black activists, for it not only divested blacks of dedicated allies to the labor movement (he referred to pro-union Jews already present in some Negro betterment organizations), but antisemitism unfairly attributed to Jewish shopkeepers– exploitative characteristics that were actually a problem of all small businesses; whereas the populist/progressive Myrdal, in defiance of Bunche’s memoranda, suggested in his endnotes to AD that Jews were the most sinister exploiters of blacks and controlled the black press through their power as advertisers, hence masking rational anti-Jewish protest from ripped-off ghetto consumers. What is at stake are contrasting views on what constitutes fascism and nazism, and how these ideologies are taught today throughout our educational system and the mass media, as I shall attempt to restate now in my final remarks.

The ideological commitments of the moderate men were longstanding, and did not originate in wartime state planning or propaganda to counter accusations of American hypocrisy from Germany and the Soviet Union; rather the failure of weak statist reforms in response to the Depression, fears of renewed economic collapse likely to follow postwar demobilization, and the ongoing resolve by prescient moderates to co-opt minorities and labor were the proximate causes that shaped the writing of Myrdal’s book. An American Dilemma incorporated some of Bunche’s ideas, while attacking or ignoring others. It is well-known that Myrdal refuted Bunche’s central thesis, namely that however noble the civil libertarian goals of the established interracial and Negro betterment organizations might be, only pressure from the politically conscious rank and file-controlled labor movement, unified across racial lines and organized in industrial unions, could solve “the Negro problem.”

Scholars have entirely ignored (to my knowledge), however, Myrdal’s response to Bunche’s fervent plea that Negro intellectuals combat the antisemitism rife in the Negro press and cultural nationalist movements. For Bunche, antisemitism was a distorted perception fostered by fascists and protofascists that stunted the development of class consciousness among the working class, Southern sharecroppers and tenants, and the unemployed; Negro organizations should be demanding job creation, not the displacement of white workers or the elimination of rival Jewish small businessmen. The Urban League emphasis on jobs for Negroes, Bunche wrote, had “lent encouragement to the development of a racial caste within the American working class and it certainly lacks the independence and the courage to give honest and intelligent direction to the Negro working population.”[NBO, book 2, p. 272]

Bunche’s emphasis on the development of an effective and independent internationalist labor movement as the best defense against either white supremacy or fascism in America clashed with Myrdal’s definition of fascism as an extreme form of racial persecution and oppression imposed by a “centrally controlled, ruthless, and scientifically contrived apparatus of propaganda and violence.” [AD, 6]. Such an emphasis implied that counter-propaganda (attitude change) would be efficacious in combating racism. Myrdal did not specify the destruction of independent working class organizations in Italy and Germany by business interests in many countries; such an evasive diagnosis of fascism by Myrdal (in AD) tended to obscure the similarities between bureaucratic collectivist strategies in “the West,” similarly coping with economic crisis and fearful of the spread of “[Jewish]Bolshevism.” [Peter Alexis Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic Crises (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986)].

As I have shown elsewhere, by the end of the war, the socially responsible moderates had triumphed. The classical liberals of the eighteenth century were now misdescribed as forerunners of the welfare state, while the disintegrating and dissembling “Jewish spirit” had been pinned on Hitler, the wily outsider who had misguided the German masses and whose support of free markets was echoed in America among “fascist Republicans.” Sadly, the alliance between Harris and Bunche was ended, as Harris, convinced that socialism could never protect individual autonomy, fled to the Chicago school of free market economics, while Bunche, in his ascension to middle-management, adopted the “genuinely liberal” formulations of deceptive organic conservatives: Bunche had switched to Myrdal, the author of “a great book.” [see illustration: Bunche holding Myrdal’s AMERICAN DILEMMA] For a related more recent blog on the transformation of the civil rights movement, see https://clarespark.com/2009/10/31/the-offing-of-martin-luther-king-jr-and-ralph-bunche/.

Blog at WordPress.com.