Revolution and Evolution In Twenieth Century
Buy betnovate c cream without prescription, Ch. 7 REDISCOVERING THE AMERICAS PAST
Every revolution is a struggle to resolve the particular contradictions which have evolved out of a particular past. Every country's past is particular, but America's past is so particular that it almost seems to have evolved on another planet. Except for the Native Americans, whom Europeans named Indians, everyone in this country is a descendant of someone who came here from another continent and another culture less than four hundred years ago-in most cases, much less. The economic, social, and political institutions of this country have been shaped by the struggles of very real and very different people, mostly of humble origin and all seeking to make a new and prosperous life for themselves here, on this earth, as quickly as possible, regardless of the cost to other peoples, especially to those of different ethnic backgrounds, and to future generations. They have thus made it inevitable that at some future time the American People would be compelled to face with sober senses the real, i.e., historical, conditions of their lives and their relations with their kind.
As the Indians were meeting in the eleventh century, somewhere near Ticonderoga, to reconcile the territorial claims of different tribes, they had no idea that technical advances in navigation and
144 James and Grace Lee Boggs
aspirations for freedom by ordinary people on another continent would lead to their becoming one day the first people in history to be placed in a concentration camp called a reservation, buy betnovate c cream without prescription. Nor did the members of a religious sect, seeking, in the early seventeenth century, a place where they could exercise what they conceived as their God-given right to interpret the Bible in accordance with their own consciences, have any idea that they would set into motion a chain of events which would lead, a hundred and fifty years later, to the creation of a new nation founded on concepts of freedom and equality more advanced than any hitherto dreamed of, but a nation that would eventually exterminate and enslave people on a racial basis as they had never before been exterminated or enslaved in human history.
Thus, one group, seeking to escape the contradictions on one continent, began to create new contradictions for itself and for another set of people on another continent, contradictions which have remained to this day and have become more complex and challenging with the years.
It is only by reflecting on the political, social, buy betnovate in us, and economic climate of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that we can understand why so many thousands were ready to embark on a journey to the new continent, a journey as daring and as historic as Mao's Long March more than three centuries later. Most of them had no idea what life would be like in the new land, what were the customs of the people already living there, how they would grow food or what kind of food the soil would grow. The voyage itself was long and dangerous. If you were lucky, you made it from Plymouth,
England to Plymouth, New England, in ten weeks, as the Pilgrims did. Buy betnovate c cream without prescription, But it might well take twice that long. A ship had to be stout enough and carry a crew skillful enough to cope with the tropical hurricanes which led to watery graves for many. Enough water and provisions had to be carried for both passengers and crew on the long voyage. The tools and implements needed to grow food, hunt game, and build dwellings had to be brought along. And finally, it was crucial to begin the journey with a sufficient number of dedicated and capable persons so that, after the inevitable attrition from illness and death en route, there would be enough people left to establish and maintain a minimum settlement. Because the last consideration
Rediscovering the American Past 145
was so important, it was customary for ships to set out together in a fleet. Yet despite the known and unknown perils, many individuals contemplated the Long Voyage because a new spirit had begun to stir in the ordinary man and woman, the artisans and the clerks, the housewives and the vagabonds, of Western Europe, buy betnovate c cream without prescription. It was an era of what we today call "rising expectations." Instead of dreaming about happiness in heaven, as the masses of Europe had done for centuries under the tutelage of the Roman Catholic Church, they had begun to think about achieving it here on earth.
As the word spread of a new and bountiful land across the ocean that was not already owned by kings and queens and feudal lords, those imbued with these rising expectations began to wonder how they could get to it. Some joined groups sponsored by kings and queens anxious for the gold and silver and furs of the New World. Others acquired merchant sponsors who were on the lookout for groups reliable enough to back. Many were simply adventurers and scoundrels, Order betnovate, running away from their obligations. Others saw them- Buy betnovate c cream without prescription, selves as agents or servants of the Crown. Some only planned to grab as much gold and silver as they could and then make a fast getaway back to their homeland to enjoy their new wealth. A very few thought of America as a place where they could settle, raise their families, and build a new society. But adventurer or settler, most of those who came to this country, then and since, have been humble and unhappy folk because, as Tocqueville'* put it, "the happy and powerful do not go into exile."
Among those who came to settle and raise their families were the Pilgrims who made the Long Voyage on the Mayflower in the fall of 1619, and whom subsequent generations of Americans have rightly honored. This is not because the Pilgrims endured more hardships or had more physical courage than the others who had come or were still to come. It was because they had a body of ideas, the radical ideology of Puritanism, which they were trying to implement by creating a new society in a new land, buy betnovate c cream without prescription. Many other settlements were established--in Virginia by the British, in New York by the Dutch--but these were only company- or Crown-sponsored. Their
* ·Tooqueville"s two-volume Democracy in America remains the most penetrating
analysis of the contradictions of American society ever written.
148 James and Grace Lee Boggs
members were bound together only by ethnic or family (biological)
ties or material (self) interests.
The radical ideology of the Puritans was formulated in terms of
religion because, as we have seen, the aspirations of the masses have
been, until recently, expressed in relation to God. In feudal Europe
the Roman Catholic Church had arrogated to itself the right to
interpret the will of God to everyone, from peasant to monarch, and
had become the continent's most powerful institution, both politi-
cally and economically. Therefore it was only natural that the first
generalized revolt by the European masses against feudal rule had
taken a religious form in the Reformation, which repudiated the right
of the clergy to interpret God's word to the masses.
The Pilgrims were, to begin with, Puritans. The Puritans were
English men and women of enterprising spirit who came from the
Buy betnovate c cream without prescription, lower middle class of printers and postmasters, clerks and apothecar-
ies, tailors and saddlers. Usually able to read and write, and with
some members who had attended the university, betnovate online stores, they were in revolt
against the Church of England because it seemed to them as
hierarchical and as restrictive of the independent thinking and
activities of the ordinary man and woman as the Roman Catholic
Church from which Henry the Eighth had split. Separating one by
one from the Church of England, they organized their own
congregations and elected their own pastors to help them practice in
their daily lives the ideas they derived from their studies of the Bible.
Not only did they insist that no priests or representatives of the
Establishment had the right to interpret the Bible for them. They
were convinced that if they worked hard and lived very strict moral
lives in accordance with the Bible, God would see to it that they
prospered. Through their joint worship, they constantly reinforced
one another in the conviction of their human dignity and righteous-
ness, as contrasted with the sinful and luxurious living of those who
persecuted them for their efforts to build the Kingdom of God here
on earth. For their subversive ideas, which the Puritans were very
aggressive in propagandizing, they were harassed and persecuted.
Many were put into prison, and not a few leaders were executed.
One congregation, which later became our Pilgrims, fled to
Holland, where they found religious tolerance, buy betnovate c cream without prescription. But among people
speaking another language and with their own prosperous and tidy
culture, there was no opportunity for the Puritans to make converts
Rediscovering the American Past 147
or to implement their hopes for a "New Jerusalem." So after many
disappointments, they arranged with a joint stock company for a ship
and provisions, as well as additional recruits and a crew, so that they
could establish a settlement in the New World and send back the
furs and gold and the other resources of America which would justify
the money invested in them.
The Puritans were men and women with strong convictions about
the ideal relations between people. But they were soon to find that
there is a big difference between ideals and reality. They had
embarked on the Mayflower in order to establish a new and united
community of true believers. But the new recruits to their contingent
were "strangers" who did not share the ideas or the past experiences
of the Puritans." The "strangers" had no interest in ideology
whatsoever; they had only undertaken the journey for the economic
opportunities which the New World promised.
As the ship approached the shores of New England, it dawned on
these economic opportunists that the King of England no longer had
any authority over them and that they were in a position to extract a
price for their skills and labor. Buy betnovate c cream without prescription, So they suggested that, once ashore,
they go off on their own.
Thus threatened, the Puritans drew up the Mayflower Compact,
which pledged all the signers to "combine ourselves together into a
civil body politick, for our better ordering and preservation."
Through the Mayflower Compact, the Puritans gained assurance that
the economic opportunists would stick with the ideologists, while the
economic opportunists gained a voice in the decision-making. The
Compact is a historic document because it represents the first
bargaining by working people for political rights in exchange
for their contributions in labor. It is a forerunner of the present labor
contract, and an example of the kind of concessions which those with
official power can make to those without power when they are linked
by material considerations. The Puritans were able to come up with
For an engrossing account of the contradictions and developing relations between
the two groups, see Saints and Strangers by George F. Willison (New York, 1945),
which is based on the manuscripts of William Bradford, a member of the original
congregation and a leader in its inner councils until his death in 1657. Bradford's
manuscript, which he called his "scribled writings," was begun in 1630 and completed
in 1650, buy betnovate c cream without prescription. It was first discovered, by accident, Betnovate medication, in 1855, two hundred years after his
death.
148 James and Grace Lee Boggs
this new concept of compact because over many years they had been
practicing the idea of a body politic among those who shared their
ideology. Now, driven by practical necessities, they were ready to
enter into the same relations with those with whom they only shared
material interest.
On shore, economic exigencies became more important each year.
As the struggle to survive in the new land grew more desperate, as it
became increasingly necessary to trade with the Indians in order to
get the furs with which to pay their debts to the sponsoring
Londoners, as many members of the original company succumbed to
hardships and were replaced by new shiploads, those with fewer
convictions and more self-interest in economic opportunity began to
dominate the leadership. Thus, step by step, in order that the settlers
might endure and prosper in the new country, economics began to
take command over religion and principled politics.
The growing priority of economic self-interest was most critically
manifested in the settlers' relations with the Indians. On board the
Mayflower the Pilgrims created the advanced idea of the Mayflower
Compact to meet the challenge from the "strangers" because the
two groups had shared a common cultural background in Europe and
a common material interest in establishing a settlement in the New
World. But this unity was not present in their relations with the
Buy betnovate c cream without prescription, Indians. The desire of all those coming over on the Mayflower to
escape their state of subjection in Europe and to prosper in the new
land was very real. The Puritan search for a land where they could
practice their convictions was also very real. However, they had
come to a country where there were some very real people who were
living in accordance with a completely different set of beliefs, with
an entirely different culture. When the Indians met to decide which
tribe would have hunting and fighting rights over different sections of
North America, their decisions were based on the various cultures of
the different tribes. There were some who hunted small game in the
East, those who hunted large game in the West, those who fished in
the myriad lakes and rivers, others who planted corn, buy betnovate c cream without prescription. On a continent
where there was plenty of land and very few people, and where
kings and church and aristocracy had not seized huge domains for
themselves, no concept of private land ownership had been devel-
oped. Nor had the Indians created structured armies and clerical
institutions to Protect private ownership and aristocratic privileges.
Rediscovering the American Past 149
When the Indians told the settlers that nobody owned the land, they
meant that everybody owned it. But it was easy for the settlers to
misunderstand the Indians, not only because it was in their economic
interest to do so, but because their historical experience had been
limited to Europe, where practically every piece of land was
somebody's private property, order betnovate cheap online. Their bodies had left Europe but they
had brought their European past with them in their heads.
From their earliest search for a "New Jerusalem," the Puritans had
been imbued with a vision of a new society of the common man and
woman. Buy betnovate c cream without prescription, As they established themselves in New England, they began
to translate their vision into reality. They were ready to work hard
and to make sacrifices for their convictions. They were courageous
and daring in their determination to hew out an existence in their
new surroundings. But since the Indians had not gone through the
historic experiences which they had endured in Europe, and since
their own concept of the nature of man/woman was limited to
European man/woman, it was easy for them not to include the
Indians in their concept of humankind. Their ideas had been
advanced enough to take them across the ocean, but not universal
enough to include people from another cultural background. Up to
then, the only patterns that had been established for relations
between peoples of widely different cultures had been either that of
the more advanced dominating over the less advanced and forcing
them to assimilate the culture of the advanced; or those with a less
advanced culture conquering those of a more advanced culture and
then gradually assimilating the achievements of the more advanced
culture-as in the case of the conquest of Rome by the barbarians
from Northern Europe or of China by the Mongols.
The Indians had neither the will nor the power to conquer the
Pilgrims, buy betnovate c cream without prescription. The Pilgrims made no attempt either to incorporate the
values of the Indian culture into their own or to assimilate
the Indians into their culture. Nor did they set an outer limit beyond
which no Pilgrim could settle, so that on the other side of that limit
the Indians could continue their own way of life or develop at their
own pace and by their own efforts toward a technically more
advanced civilization under their own leadership. Instead economic
expediency was allowed to govern. The Pilgrims first took from the
Indians such skills in hunting, fishing, and the growing of corn as
served their interests, and then entered into an increasingly unequal
150 James and Grace Lee Boggs
trade relation with the Indians. They traded trinkets and alcohol and
resold corn to the Indians in exchange for beaver and fox furs with
which they bought supplies and paid the debt they owed their
Buy betnovate c cream without prescription, sponsors back in England. To meet ever increasing demands from
Europe, they stepped up their profit in the exchange with the
Indians. For less corn they demanded more fur and more land,
leaving less land and less game for the Indians and therefore greater
Indian need to buy corn and cloth from the settlers. Each year more
and more settlers poured in from the tyranny of Europe, and more
and more land was taken from the Indians. That which was not taken
outright became worthless to the Indians because the wild animals
on which they depended for food and skins fled before the tide of
advancing settlements. As the antagonisms between desperate
Indians and avaricious colonists became more bitter, some of the
most avaricious even began selling guns to the Indians, guns which
they knew would be used against other colonists, buy betnovate c cream without prescription. Thus, in the course
of their determination to advance their own humanity, which was
progressive in relation to their persecution in England, the settlers
became increasingly backward in relation to another section of
humanity and even among them selves. Betnovate no rx, The same domination and
restrictions from which they had fled in Europe, they imposed on the
Indians.
Today many Americans think that the rapid development of this
country is the result of the Pilgrims having been a "chosen people," a
people blessed by Providence because they were brave enough to
turn their backs on Europe, leaving behind its persecution and
tyranny, risking the dangers of the ocean voyage to come to the new
continent where there were such unlimited opportunities. Such an
explanation introduces an element of predestination and inevitability
into the decisions made by the Pilgrims. More important, it evades
the contradiction within which the settlers were trapped in their
relations with the Indians because their concept of man/woman was,
not surprisingly, limited by their historical experiences. We must rid
Buy betnovate c cream without prescription, ourselves once and for all of this concept of "chosen people," not to
berate the Pilgrims for their historical limitations but in order not to
get trapped ourselves in the limitations of this concept. Once you
begin to use divine providence or a supernatural power to justify
self-interest, you impose limits on your own human capacity and
responsibility to reflect on and develop an enlarged concept of
Rediscovering the American Past 151
humanity in relation to those different from yourself and thus in
relation to your own humanity.
How much the American mind has crippled itself by using divine
Providence to sanction the country's rapid economic development
can be seen by the assertion of Benjamin Franklin a century later
regarding the Indians, "If it be the design of Providence," Franklin
said, "to extirpate these savages in order to make room for the
cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the
appointed means. It has already annihilated all the tribes who
formerly inhabited the seacoasts." This from the man who served
with Thomas Jefferson on the committee to draft the Declaration of
Independence!
Thus the philosophical basis was laid to bring in and enslave a
whole people from another continent to achieve the rapid agricul-
tural development which is a prerequisite to rapid industrial
development. This philosophy led, in the Mexican War, to the
seizure of millions of acres of land from "greasers" and the
destruction of the culture of the indigenous people of the Southwest;
in the Spanish-American War, to the subjugation of the Cubans and
the Filipinos; and, finally, in our day, to the genocidal war against
"gooks" in Indochina. All in the name of "Manifest Destiny."
In 1763 the war between the British and the French for the
domination of the American continent ended in victory for the
British. The war is known as the French and Indian War, since
the Indians fought with the French on the basis that the latter, being
less interested in settling, constituted less of a threat to their way of
life than the British, buy betnovate c cream without prescription. The British came out of the war with a Powerful
empire, but also with a huge post-war debt and the increased costs of
policing their empire. To pay these costs, the British Parliament
decided to impose heavy taxes on the colonies, since, betnovate overnight delivery, after all, it
could be claimed that the war had been fought in their interests as
much as in the interests of those remaining at home.
In resisting the British effort to tax them, the colonists were
undoubtedly motivated by economic self-interest. But as the struggle
over the tax issue intensified, these heirs to the Puritan tradition of
ideological controversy and propaganda began to develop political
ideas of a scope previously unheard of. At first, the argument took
the form chiefly of legal reasons why the British Parliament had no
152 James and Grace Lee Boggs
right to tax the colonists who were not represented in Parliament.
But before very long the intellectual leaders of the rebellion,
reflecting on the historical experience of the colonies over the
previous hundred and fifty years, began to realize how far they had
advanced beyond those who were still trying to govern them, in their
concepts and realization of the nature and potential of man/we-
man. *
Buy betnovate c cream without prescription, When most Americans think of the American Revolution, what
comes to mind is the 1770 Boston Massacre in which Crispus Attucks
lost his life, the dumping of tea in Boston Harbor, the ride of Paul
Revere, or the shot fired at Lexington and Concord and heard round
the world. They see the American Revolution as a series of
spontaneous and rebellious actions, which in turn led to other
militant actions and finally to a war for freedom from colonialism.
Such a scenario of the American Revolution is very similar to that
which most radicals have of the revolutions in Russia, China, Cuba,
Africa, Vietnam.
Actually, the protracted process of creating a vigorous, independ-
ent, self-confident, self-reliant people capable of making decisions for
themselves had been taking place for over a hundred and fifty years,
beginning with the Mayflower Compact and continuing through
township meetings and the creation of representative institutions. It
was to take more than ten years of ideological struggle and
propaganda, from the passage of the Sugar Act by the British
Parliament in 1764 to the outbreak of hostilities at Lexington and
Concord in 1775, before a political base had been laid in the hearts
and minds of the American people deep enough to wage military
struggle against the most powerful military force of their day.
writing letters, publishing pamphlets, holding meetings, men and
women from every strata of the population, in the North and South
Atlantic colonies, Betnovate side effects, began a vigorous ideological struggle around their
right and duty to resist taxation by the British and what this meant in
terms of their own past, their present and future relations with the
motherland, and their own future in America. Young radical
Northern intellectuals like Sam Adams and Mercy Otis Warren, and
John Adams and Abigail, his wife; Southern aristocratic intellectuals
*A Dissertntia a Feudal ond Conon Law, written by the youthful John Adams in
1765, reveals the philosophical and historical scope of these reflections.
Rediscovering the American Past 153
like Thomas Jefferson; Pennsylvania conservatives like James Wilson;
or farmers like John Dickinson; the British-born Tom Paine; all
struggled for ten years to convince each other and to win the people
to their views. Not until the ideological struggles to discover the right
road for the Chinese revolution inside the Chinese Communist Party
during the Yenan years, would democracy again be practiced on such
a broad scale.
The intellectual leaders of the American Revolution did not only
speak and write. Between 1763 and 1775 they organized Committees
of Correspondence in every colony, and in nearly every town,
county, and city, to maintain contact with one another and to
organize a common resistance, buy betnovate c cream without prescription. Then, as the framework of the
colonial administration began to disintegrate in the sharpening
conflict between the American colonists and Great Britain, these
Committees of Correspondence were turned into Committees of
Inspection and Committees of Safety, which exercised executive
power in their jurisdictions, becoming, in effect, what we would
today call a "dual power structure."
As with any other people who have shared the same general
historical experience, there were many differences or tendencies
within the unified conviction that they should not pay the tax to the
British. These reflected actual differences within the population.
Some colonists were content with the prevailing relations with
England ("don't rock the boat"). Often they were motivated by their
desire for profits in trade with England and the incipient Triangular
Trade-Africa (slaves), West Indies (sugar), New England (rum)--
with which it was linked. Many were afraid of losing their positions
as administrators for the Colonial Office. Some had accumulated
Buy betnovate c cream without prescription, warehouses of tea, and relished the idea of British tea being tossed
overboard so that they could sell their own stock. Many were afraid
of being isolated from Europe, which was in their eyes the only
civilized continent in the world, and the home of relatives and
friends.
As the ideological struggle became more heated, those who had
intended only to reform the relations between empire and colony
became aware that debate and protest and reform had already
unleashed the hopes of the masses to the degree that there was no
longer any room for compromise between the expanded concept
154 James and Grace Lee Boggs
which the people now had of themselves and the concept of them as
subjects which the British government held.
As the confrontation drew near, many of those who had put
forward ideas to rid the colony of the British began to retreat. Like
liberals, they wanted to be on both sides, order betnovate in us. Some vacillated for the
entire period of the struggle. Some even moved as far inland as
possible to evade the issue. Some fled to Canada and are now part of
that country's history.
Essentially the American colonists were able to make and win the
revolution for independence against Britain because they had
experienced a degree of freedom from feudalism that no other
people had known, buy betnovate c cream without prescription. They had experienced both the opportunity and
the necessity not only to struggle for survival, but to make decisions
for themselves. They had learned that freedom is not just an abstract
concept but a way of life involving both opportunity and responsibil-
ities. They began to appreciate that on this continent they had been
creating in reality what such European philosophers as Locke and
Hume and Rousseau had only been discussing from an ideal
viewpoint. They began to see themselves as creating a new way of
life, a new way to achieve happiness, which made them the vanguard
of man/womankind, the social force of a new humanity.
It was within this milieu of intense theoretical and practical
activity that Thomas Jefferson, then only thirty-three years old, was
able to write the Declaration of Independence in 1776, evoking a
new vision of humanity. To this day people all over the world are still
moved to struggle by the words:
Buy betnovate c cream without prescription, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That
to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving
their just powers from the consent of the governed,-That whenever
any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the
Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new
Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its
powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their
Safety and Happiness.
A few years later, inspired by this Declaration, the French
Revolution would explode in Europe and a similar movement in
Santo Domingo.
Rediscovering the American Past 155
Many years later, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, John
Adams would write: "The revolution was effected before the war
commenced. The revolution was in the minds and hearts of the
people." As a result of the revolutionary propaganda, especially of
the Adamses, the Paines, and the Jeffersons, the colonists had
discovered that there was a noble purpose in their struggle against
the British Crown, namely, to establish the dignity of the common
person· Armed with this new political concept of their human
identity, the colonists were able to defeat the more experienced
British forces. The American forces won the war for independence
with small contingents of local forces, mostly fighting on their own
terrain and with the support of the people. What they lacked in
technology and military experience, they made up for in ingenuity
and energy, and most of all by the conviction that their cause was
just.
When the war ended in 1783, the contradictions and differences
which had been submerged in the struggle against the common
enemy came to the surface. In his original draft of the Declaration of
Independence, Betnovate free sample, Jefferson had accused the King of England of many
crimes. These included bringing "on the inhabitants of our frontiers
the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an
undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions of
existence" and the waging of "cruel war against human nature itself,
violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a
distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying
them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death
in their transportation thither."
In the final draft of the Declaration of Independence, which was
adopted by the Congress on July 4, 1776, after heated debate and
threats of withdrawal by the slave-trading and slave owner represen-
tatives, the passage concerning the Indians remained but that on the
slaves was completely deleted, buy betnovate c cream without prescription. Jefferson agonized over the deletion,
but, in the interests of unity, he capitulated.
The fifty-five delegates who came together in 1787 to frame a
Constitution for the new nation were almost all men of distinction--
patriots, scholars, merchants, and landowners. The most distin-
guished among them--whether from the North like John Adams,
Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton, or from the South, like
156 James and Grace Lee Boggs
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison--had all
expressed their abhorrence of the institution of slavery in the
strongest terms. But none of them believed in the equality of blacks
and none of them was ready for a principled political struggle over
the question of slavery.
The immediate question which had brought the delegates together
was the urgent need to create a central government strong enough to
defend the nation against foreign encroachments, to negotiate trade
treaties with foreign powers, to keep the thirteen states from clashing
with one another, and to establish the sound currency necessary for
trade and economic development. But the delegates also represented
different states, based on different and potentially conflicting social
and economic relations, and fearful of domination by a government
in which other interests were represented.
In order to increase their representation in the central govern-
ment, the slaveowning states demanded that slaves be counted in the
census as whole numbers, while the Northern states, where slavery
was virtually non-existent, did not want slaves counted at all. They
compromised on the provision to count the slave as three-fifths of a
Buy betnovate c cream without prescription, man. Neither Northern nor Southern delegates were talking about
slaves voting. They were only concerned with the interests of their
respective states.
Thus the United States became the only nation in history whose
best and brightest minds first led a revolution from colonialism in the
name of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all men, find betnovate online, and
then built a contradiction into their society by explicitly denying
human dignity to a quarter of the population they aspired to govern.
The Constitutional Convention had exposed and polarized real
contradictions in the country. But in the interests of unity, the
Founding Fathers covered up the contradictions. They evaded their
political responsibility to carry out ideological struggle and create a
principled political leadership for the country. They thereby laid the
groundwork for the Civil War.
At the time it appeared that the cover-up compromise would
work, buy betnovate c cream without prescription. Many blacks had fought in the War of Independence (some on
the British side). There was also a general sentiment, particularly in
the Northern and border states, that slavery would gradually
Rediscovering the American Past 157
disappear. In fact, during and after the revolution, many slaves had
actually become free men and women--some by simply running
away, others through legislative action, court decision, or individual
manumission in the Northern states.
However, almost before the ink was dry on the compromise
document, free blacks began to sharpen the contradictions by
agitating for the freedom of those still enslaved. In the afterglow of
victory in a just cause, many whites sympathized and supported the
black freedom movement. Buy betnovate c cream without prescription, Then, in 1793, only six years after the
Constitution was adopted, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin,
which made it possible to utilize many more slaves in the production
of cotton than had hitherto been required on the tobacco plantations.
Cotton was a most precious commodity for the textile mills which
would provide jobs for workers and profits for capitalists in New
England. Cotton was also shipped to England, assuring a more
favorable trade balance for the infant nation, as well as the capital it
needed for new factories. So once again the economic thrust took
over, white support for the black freedom movement subsided, and
the country was flooded by racist propaganda, using the Bible,
pseudo-science, greed, and fear to justify the enslavement of blacks.
But slaves continued to rebel and to run away. Betnovate information, Freed blacks, like
David Walker in Boston, issued appeals to their brothers and sisters
to rise up and throw off the yoke of slavery. Periodically, spectacular
rebellions--among them those of Denmark Vesey in 1820 and Nat
Turner in 1831--struck terror into the hearts of the slavemasters and
aroused hope and anger in the blacks.
In the 1830s a number of radical intellectuals in the North began
the Abolitionist Movement, a comprehensive attack upon slavery and
all the political, economic, and social institutions which had made it
possible and continued to enforce it. The Abolitionists, men and
women like William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Theodore
Parker, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, John Brown, were part of a
cultural renaissance which developed in the coastal cities of New
England, and which found expression not only in the anti-slavery
movement, but in the creative writings of men like Emerson,
Thoreau, and Melville, buy betnovate c cream without prescription. These New England intellectuals were very
different from the Southern intellectuals of an earlier period like
Thomas Jefferson, whose opportunities to reflect and create new
158 James and Grace Lee Boggs
ideas had been made possible by slave labor and who worried about,
but were still able to live with, the contradiction between their lofty
ideas and the ownership of slaves.
In the first place, these men and women were very conscious of
their continuity with the distinctively American intellectual tradition
which had begun with the Puritans and assumed such an advanced
political form in the ideological struggles, propaganda, and organiza-
tion leading to the American Revolution. Without such a historical
consciousness of a continuing tradition, real creativity is impossible.
But they were also very conscious of going beyond this tradition.
Their horizons had been immeasurably broadened by the whaling
industry and the China trade, which took Young people like Herman
Melville, as well as ordinary seamen and merchants, to the far
corners of the earth. Enriching their historical tradition with these
new experiences, they had developed an enlarged concept of
humanity, which included, and even idealized, South Sea islanders,
Indians, and African blacks, because they had not yet been caught
up in the nexus of commercialism. Their concept of equality was not
individualistic but universalistic. Buy betnovate c cream without prescription, As Melville put it, in Moby Dick, a
"just Spirit of Equality" had spread "one royal mantle of humanity
over all my kind."
In response to the black rebellions and black agitation and
propaganda, these New England intellectuals now began a ferocious
attack on the culture of the marketplace, which justified the
degradation of some human beings in order to further the economic
well-being of others. Americans, buy no rx betnovate, they said, had thrown off the yoke
of theocracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, only to set in its place the
yoke of money. The Constitution, they said, was a bastard document,
a compromise between the high ideals of the Declaration of
Independence and the selfish economic interests of slave traders and
slave owners. They challenged other Americans to base their
decisions on putting human beings first rather than the Almighty
Dollar. They were ready to put their lives on the line, to hide
runaway slaves, to wrest them from sheriffs trying to return them to
the South, to defend their meetings against attack, and, even as in
the case of John Brown, to organize a massacre of white settlers in
the Kansas-Nebraska armed conflict, and, five years later, an
insurrection at Harper's Ferry.
There were many differences among the Abolitionists over strategy
Rediscovering the American Past 159
and tactics. They debated and split over whether it might be best
just to let the South go, rather than allow its Poison to spread into the
rest of the nation; or whether there was any point in using the
electoral process, buy betnovate c cream without prescription. But none of them had any use for the proposal to
ship the slaves back to Africa in order to rid the country of the
"Negro question," the new compromise (favored by Lincoln) which
was gaining popularity and leading to the formation of Colonization
Societies. Instead they were absolutely convinced that Americans,
for the sake of their own humanity and development, must struggle
to resolve this contradiction which they had created for themselves.
They were very much aware of the fact that blacks had lived in this
country for as long as any whites--and longer than most.
The Abolitionists concentrated on the slavery question, but they
were also active and vocal on other issues: women's rights, peace,
debtors' reform, Buy betnovate canada, abolition of capital punishment, prison reform. No
issue which involved oppressed humanity was alien to them.
However, they had very little idea of the power that would be
necessary to realize their advanced ideas or of the systematic mass
struggles which blacks would have to carry on if they were going to
be able not only to free but to develop themselves to become a
powerful part of a developing nation. Hence their propaganda and
agitation tended to appear abstract and idealistic, despite the
militancy of their actions. Buy betnovate c cream without prescription, Objectively, they were too remote
geographically and socially from the blacks who were their chief
social force. They therefore were unable to develop what we now
call the "from the masses, to the masses" relationship out of which
could have developed the revolutionary politics and programs for
land reform around which the black masses might have organized
themselves; There were black Abolitionists who had come out of the
masses, men and women like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth,
Haniet Tubman, Samuel Ward, Henry Highland Garnet, Charles
Remond. But these were individuals, distinguished for their courage,
their eloquence, their organizational ability, rather than a political
body developing its ideas and programs through a collective and
continuing process of theory and practice.
It is not just hindsight which leads us to raise the land issue. The
struggle over who would settle the land from which the Indians were
being driven had been a burning issue ever since the Louisiana
Purchase and the first decade of the nineteenth century. At first the
160 James and Grace Lee Boggs
slaveowning interests of the South fought to have new states
admitted as slave states in order to increase their power in Congress.
But as the soil in the slave states was threatened with exhaustion by
the wasteful methods of cultivating cotton, they began to regard
their own westward expansion as a matter of economic life and
death. On the other hand, the growing industrial capitalist class in
the Northeast saw the West chiefly as the breadbasket indispensable
to the feeding of workers in the cities, while many of these same
workers were insisting that the West remain free soil so that they
could eventually pull up stakes and go homesteading and farming.
For both the Northern worker and industrialist, economic ties to the
West were becoming more important than their economic ties to the
South.
Compromise after compromise had been attempted by Congress
and the politicians on the continuing conflict between North and
South over western lands, buy betnovate c cream without prescription. The first was the Missouri Compromise of
1820, which provided for Maine to be admitted as a free state,
Missouri as a slave state, with slavery prohibited elsewhere in the
Louisiana Purchase north of 36"30'. That compromise failed, and
Congress tried the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska
Act of 1854. Both of these provided for "squatter sovereignty," i.e., find cheap betnovate online,
Congress evaded the responsibility for deciding whether new states
should be free or slave, and left the decision to whomever got there
first. The 1850 and 1854 Compromises were open invitations to
armed struggles between the contending forces. These struggles led
directly to the Civil War.
Thus the issue which led the majority of the American people into
the Civil War was not the abolition of slavery as a fundamental
Buy betnovate c cream without prescription, contradiction in the American concept of man/woman, which could
have been resolved only by mass struggles to realize an enlarged
concept of humanity. Rather it was the question of how the western
lands would be used for production, i.e., whose economic interests,
those of the cotton-growing South or the industrial Northeast, would
prevail.
In failing to give principled political leadership at the Constitu-
tional Convention, the Founding Fathers had given the go-ahead
signal for politics to become the handmaiden of economics. Every
individual and every interest group was given official sanction for the
pursuit of individual or sectional advancement through economic
Rediscovering the American Past 161
development under the benevolent auspices of a fatherly govern-
ment. This meant, for many city workers, settlement and expansion
toward the West, exterminating and driving the Indians before them,
while for new immigrants, fleeing the poverty and tyranny of
Europe, it meant jobs in the mushrooming factories. Although many
people believe that the immigrants rushed from their ships to the
frontier, the historical fact is that most of them stayed in or near their
friends in the Eastern cities. Usually those who had lived in the new
nation for some time moved West, while the new immigrants
replaced them in industry, becoming the first labor force rooted to
the mines, the mills, the tanneries, and the foundries.
In this ideology economic development was both goal and method,
end and means, buy betnovate c cream without prescription. Every political decision made by government and
people was governed by how much it would further or retard the
rapid economic development of the country.
This left to the Abolitionists, and their few supporters in the
North, and the blacks in the South, the social and political
responsibility for putting principled politics in command of econom-
ics. The Abolitionists and the blacks were governed by social thought
because they believed that what was good for the most oppressed
was good for the country as a whole. But they were geographically
separated from each other and neither had reached the stage of
consciously struggling for power in order to put their politics in
command of the entire country. On the other hand, Southern whites,
Northern industrialists, Low cost betnovate, the old workers leaving the city to become
farmers, and the new immigrants swarming off the ships to become
workers, were all expressing bourgeois values. Buy betnovate c cream without prescription, That is, they believed
that what was good for their own special, material interests was best
for the country.
Ironically, and not surprisingly, forces with conflicting interests--
Northern industrialists, workers become farmers, Abolitionists and
blacks-would all line up on the same side in the Civil War, It was
an unholy alliance, and could not last.
In order to lend a semblance of legitimacy to their cause, the
Southerners used the legal or Constitutional issue of States' Rights.
The colonists had originally fought a war for independence on the
principled basis of human rights, and on this basis, it was conceivable
that, until the adoption of the Constitution, any individual could
have appealed to a national government over and above the states.
162 James and Grace Lee Boggs
But when the slaveowners won States' Rights at the 1787 Conven-
tion, they effectively blocked off any legal or constitutional way for
dissidents in the South to transcend the control of the Southern
states.
Lincoln did not try to discover or propagate a deeper philosophical
basis or human vision for carrying out the struggle against the
slaveholding states. Instead he reacted to the secessionist challenge
within the framework which they had created, making "Save the
Union" the only objective of the Northern cause. In the bloodiest
internal struggle that any nation has ever undergone, the question of
unity rather than principled politics was the central issue. For whom,
by whom the nation was to be saved was obviously a matter of
conflicting interpretations on the part of the different forces on the
Northern side. Yet Lincoln's goal, like that of the Founding Fathers,
was unity at whatever cost. He made no effort to appeal to an
enlarged sense of human identity among those on both sides, to urge
them to recognize the role which whites had played in bringing
blacks to this country by force and hence their responsibility for
developing a new society in which everyone could play an equal role.
Not until it looked as if the North might lose the military struggle did
he even issue the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, which freed
only the slaves in Southern territory, buy betnovate c cream without prescription. The result of this narrow and
opportunistic approach to a long and bitter struggle was that the
more hardships the Northern workers endured in the war, the more
they tended to blame the blacks. This was especially true of the Irish
immigrants who had poured into the country in the decade
preceding the 1849 Irish famine. In the New York Draft Riots of
1863 they were foremost among those who burned and raped blacks
with more ferocity than any Southern lynch mob.
Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865, just as the war had come to
an end. There was no one around like George Washington, who had
commanded the respect of the entire country after the War of
Independence because he had been a masterful and successful
general, determined to rid the country of foreign domination. The
contradictions among the victors had advanced beyond the point
where they could be covered up by an individual figure symbolizing
Buy betnovate c cream without prescription, unity. Vice-President Andrew Johnson, who took over the Presi-
dency, tried to carry out Lincoln's program for binding up the
Rediscovering the American Past 163
wounds of the nation, i.e., reconciling the interests of the victors with
those of the defeated. But what was needed after such a costly
conflict was not reconciliation but a revolutionary policy, backed by
force, which would have enabled the blacks to take over the land of
their defeated masters, and thus set the nation on a new road. So
Johnson ended up trapped by the various factions in the administra-
tion and in Congress, overnight betnovate, each of which had different views on how to
end the chaos.
Some wanted to Punish the Southern planters by denying them the
vote and taking over their property; others wanted to treat them like
prodigal sons. Meanwhile, Confederate veterans were roving the
country in the South and West, raiding, looting, killing blacks and
Indians. The newly emancipated blacks in the South were like
stateless people without land to till, homes to live in, or food to eat.
But all the capitalists were interested in was expanding production;
all the workers wanted were jobs and land; and all the newly arrived
immigrants wanted were jobs.
In this brief period of chaos, with the South under military control
by federal troops, black people in the South for the first time in this
country came to exercise some aspect of political decision-making, buy betnovate c cream without prescription. In
the process, several were elected to Congress. But far more
important was their contribution to education. The freed blacks
owned nothing, had nothing. The only chance they could see for
developing themselves was through education. And if they were to
Buy betnovate c cream without prescription, get some education, it would have to take a social form because only
rich whites could afford private schools. So they established public
schools which not only enhanced their own opportunities but those
of the many poor whites who could not afford private schools. A few
of them were able to establish plantations, and fewer still opened up
small stores. They forced the opening up of public places, like
restaurants and hotels, and rode in the same cars on trains with
whites. For a brief period the socially conscious black forces, aware
of their destitute existence, put forward such humanitarian ideas that
even poor whites who had small landholdings as well as those who
had formerly acted as slavedrivers for the master plantation owners,
were in sympathy with their cause.
At this point the blacks were still the largest ethnic group within
the working class. Although westward expansion was still going on,
164 James and Grace Lee Boggs
the bulk of production of agricultural goods and industrial commodi-
ties was still east of the Mississippi River, in the Northeast and
Southeast.
But the efforts of the blacks to develop new social institutions
depended at this stage upon military support from a federal
government which was under pressure from profit-hungry indus-
trialists, land-hungry workers, and job-hungry immigrants, to get
back to business as usual, i.e., to the pursuit of private happiness
through economic expansion, buy betnovate c cream without prescription. The result was that in 1877, still
another compromise was reached between the North and South. In
exchange for "home rule" (i.e., States' Rights under another name) or
the withdrawal of federal troops, the South agreed to support
Rutherford Hayes, the Northern businessman's candidate, Buying generic betnovate, for Presi-
dent in a disputed election. Thus once again the best and brightest
minds of this country capitulated to blackmail. After fighting a
bloody civil war allegedly to free the slaves, then declaring them
legally free, the North allowed them to be put back into a state of
servitude equal to or worse than that of slavery. In exchange for the
Buy betnovate c cream without prescription, opportunity to develop the West and North as they saw fit, the
Northern industrialists gave back to the Southern slaveholders the
right to exploit the blacks as they saw fit. Once again, the nation had
put economic development, economic expansion and the material
self-interests of the individual ahead of all human considerations.
Economics was put in command over politics, degrading politics to a
tool of economics--to "dirty politics." Once again, it was confirmed
to those already in the country and to the millions of immigrants still
to come, that the pursuit of economic development and economic
expansion was the ideology of this nation whatever the cost in terms
of human development.
Following the 1877 Compromise a flurry of restrictive laws, Jim
Crow laws, were passed in Southern towns, counties, and states, all
designed to keep blacks in their place--their place being what any
white person, even a small white child, said was their place. Thus the
United States became two nations, a nation with two sets of laws,
one for blacks and one for whites, with more laws than all the rest of
the world combined. State laws duplicate and conflict with national
ones, local laws conflict with and duplicate state and national laws.
Passing a law has become the passing-the-buck method for attacking
all social problems, because the nation, beginning with the Constitu-
Rediscovering the American Past 165
tional Convention, had put behind it any concept of the transforma-
tion of people through ideological and political struggle over
principles and practice. Thus "that's the law" has become the excuse
to evade contradictions, just as economics has become the excuse to
evade social and political issues. Courts, lawyers, prisons, guards, and
probation officers proliferate to service the proliferating prisoners
produced by the proliferating laws.
For a brief period in the 1880s and 1890s, black and white farmers
in the South attempted to come together in what has been called the
Populist Movement, buy betnovate c cream without prescription. But the Populist Movement was no less a
self-interest movement just because it united two self-interested
groups, betnovate medicine. Poor blacks and poor whites, mainly farmers, combined their
forces to fight for their economic interest in credit, cheap money and
lower shipping rates against Northeastern railroad and banking
interests. The movement developed primarily in the border states
and did not include the white workers in the North nor the new
immigrants who were taking over so many of the jobs in the
expanding heavy industry. In the North these white workers were
already beating up blacks who attempted to get jobs in the mills and
mines. Buy betnovate c cream without prescription, Motivated only by self-interest, they regarded their jobs as
Private property to be protected against other workers from other
ethnic groups, much as the farmer regards his/her piece of land.
Although the Populist Movement had as one of its objectives to
bring poor whites and poor blacks together, the narrow concept of
economic self-interest on which it was based made it easy for
the landowners and aristocrats of the South to combine with the
Northern industrialists to whip up racist prejudice and split the
movement. Recognizing the economic threat in any united action by
blacks and whites, the landowners and industrialists stirred up white
fears that if the blacks became equal economically to the whites,
blacks would easily take away white women from white men and
mongrelize their race. Inflaming the poor whites against the blacks
on the basis of their color was not difficult in a country where the
extermination of Indians and the enslavement of blacks had been for
so long justified on the basis of their racial inferiority.
The effect of this racist Propaganda was to increase lynching to a
level which it had never reached even under slavery. With blacks
thus terrorized and kept forcibly on the cotton plantations as
Sharecroppers, the country was free to drive forward towards
166 James and Grace Lee Boggs
economic expansion. Henceforth, all but a small minority would be
blind to any human or social responsibilities which might interfere
with economic self-interest. From top to bottom, depoliticization
would become the rule, reversing the process towards politicization
which had begun with the Puritans and had reached such a high
level in the period preceding the American Revolution.
Henceforth the separation between the best and brightest minds
and the mass social forces, which had not existed in the American
Revolution but which had prevented the Abolitionist Movement
from developing into a revolutionary movement, would become
polarized into a division crippling to both sides, buy betnovate c cream without prescription. In the pursuit of
their own careers, American intellectuals would put their talents at
the service of the Establishment, while those who refused to do so
would be condemned to lives of isolation and frustration. At the
other pole the masses would become even more exclusively preoccu-
pied with material interests, using the excuse of "dirty politics," i.e.,
politics under the command of economics, to justify their own
evasion of social and political responsibility. Politics would become
increasingly degraded to the struggle to get "a piece of the action" or
a piece of the power for your own individual, ethnic or sectional
interest--and eventually to the attempt to get total control of a
swelling state apparatus for yourself and your machine of dehuman-
ized supporters. Only occasionally, as in the first decade of the
twentieth century, and again in the 1930s and the 1960s, would the
opportunity arise to bridge the gap between the intellectuals and the
masses. Buy betnovate c cream without prescription, But each time, because there had not been the necessary
philosophic, ideological and political preparation, the opportunity
would be wasted.
At the turn of the century, Theodore Roosevelt took this
depoliticalization of the American people and their obsession with the
pursuit of economic interests to the international level. Buy betnovate without prescription, Realizing that
the United States was beginning to approach the economic strength
of Britain, and that the two were now the world's most powerful
nations, he became convinced that it was America's "Manifest
Destiny" to rule the world. With Theodore Roosevelt, the govern-
ment took upon itself the role of encouraging rapid economic
development of the productive forces at home and the imperialist
role of this country abroad. Production for the sake of more
production and for expanding mass consumption at home, and
Rediscovering the American Past 167
economic and military expansion for the sake of American pro-
duction and world power abroad, were consciously accepted as the
responsibility of the central government.
The effect of this new concept of the role of government has been
the accelerating growth over the last seventy years of big govern-
ment and executive power completely alien to the concept of feeble
central government, inhibited by regional loyalties, provided for in
the Constitution. Constantly intervening at home, to meet the
recurring economic crises of recession and inflation, and abroad, to
meet the competition of rival powers and crush the socialist and
nationalist aspirations of other peoples, the United States is now
ruled by a Warfare-Welfare State, a state which aims both to satisfy
the expanding economic appetites of an increasingly self-interested
population and to achieve domination over other powers and other
peoples. Instead of the powerless central government conceived by
the Founding Fathers, we are now confronted with a powerful
monster dedicated only to the increase of its own power.
Once again, the people of this country are faced with the kind of
arbitrary power which John and Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson,
and Tom Paine faced in the 1760s, and which they could effectively
resist only after the most sober historical reflection on their previous
development, passionate ideological struggle, and revolutionary
propaganda and organization, in the course of which they arrived at
a new vision of human identity for "all men." In our hindsight we
have the advantage of almost twice as many, much more concen-
trated years of rapid economic development and social crisis. We can
draw not only on our own historical experiences but those of the
whole world. And, most important, the oppressed peoples in this
country and the world whose attitudes and aspirations could only
have been inferred two hundred years ago, have over the intervening
period, and particularly since World War II, stood up and made
known to everybody the infinite variety of their grievances, their
aspirations, and their contradictions.
.
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