Recent “woke” campaigns have raised a legitimate question: How could the founders of our country espouse the ideals of freedom, especially in the Declaration of Independence, and still support slavery?
A related question (not so often asked by critical theorists) is: How did the country ultimately conduct a deadly war (with 600,000 combatants killed) to end slavery?
The argument reflected in these essays is that ideological, emotional, and political support for slavery changed over time. Southern founders such as Washington and Jefferson believed that slavery was a “necessary evil,” but a temporary one. Beginning around 1830 (after most if not all the founders were dead) Southern elites argued instead that slavery was a “positive good.” The development of what Grynaviski and Munger call institutional racism was a “conscious project of ideological reconstruction.”[2]
Thomas Campbell (right) with the vice minister of agriculture of the Kazakhstan Soviet Republic. For credit see below.
Thomas D. Campbell was a farmer and mechanical engineer. In 1918, when he was 36 years old and World War I was spurring demand for wheat, he started a 95,000-acre wheat farm in southeastern Montana. It was the largest farm in the United States and possibly the world. Located primarily on land leased from the Crow Indian reservation, the farm obtained a $2 million investment from New York financier J. P. Morgan.
As time went on, Soviet agricultural experts visited Campbell’s farm to learn how to use so many machines efficiently, and Campbell went to the Soviet Union as a technical adviser, where he met Josef Stalin. Campbell was famous, influential, and popular. His farm continued well beyond his death in 1966.
Perhaps history can teach us, after all. Here are some fascinating stories that surfaced in the past few weeks. My paragraphs will give you highlights and I encourage you to read the originals.
‘Follow the Consensus’
Looking back, most of us see the American prohibition era (1920–1933) as a giant, foolhardy mistake. It destroyed businesses, turned average citizens into criminals, built a mafia of corruption, and more. How could it have happened?
Even though I’m not adding original posts right now, lively articles about history are all around us. Here are summaries of three, with links.
Charles Curtis: Republican, Native-American, and Vice President
Herbert Hoover’s vice president, Charles Curtis, was part-Native American, a member of the Kaw Tribe of Kansas. With Kamala Harris in the news, the Washington Posttells his interesting story (making the point that Harris will not be the first “person of color” to be an American vice president).
Curtis, whose mother was a Kaw member and whose father was white, grew up on the Kaw reservation in the late nineteenth century. As a teenager he moved sixty miles away to live with his paternal grandparents in Topeka, where he became something of a star horse jockey. When the tribe was forced to move to Oklahoma, Charles wanted to go, too, but his Kaw grandmother urged him to stay in Topeka and get an education. He did, and he was always grateful for her advice. He became an attorney and with his “winning personality,” a Kansas congressman, senator, and eventually vice president.
The Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C., which depicts Abraham Lincoln standing over a kneeling freed slave, is being scrutinized and reconsidered these days. But the dispute over the statue (also called the Freedmen’s statue) has had a remarkable result for historians: An 1876 letter by Frederick Douglass has been found in which he expressed disappointment in the statue.
For me, what is so intriguing is how it was discovered and how that illustrates the wonderful world that digital technology has brought to historians—a world in which artifacts of the past are readily available.
