Most Americans are not reconciled with the reality that the Republic set up by the Founding Fathers was created in the image of a massive plantation. The highest priority to the rulers of the republic was that their money-making operations continue with the least amount of interruption to their profit-making enterprises. When the Founders used rhetoric of freedom, it was only intended to benefit the white, property-owning class. The prospect of ordinary people having liberty haunted the powerful elite of the early republic, who felt entitled to exploit the ordinary people as slaves, and serfs - what we call indentured servants. In the same way that modern employers feel entitled to employ underlings, and benefit from their work financially, so too ancient slaveowners really only saw themselves as a kind of employer; and their ability to control their slaves through terrorism can still be found in the labor practices of our modern age, although refined almost to an art form of manipulation, with enticements and artifices taking the place of what was once merely naked coercion. The Federal plantation system of government inherited the primordial fear of the plantation slavemasters, who were constantly paranoid and on edge over the possibility of slave revolts. The whole Federal Government was really nothing more than a massive paramilitary organization, dedicated to the function of policing the slave society, in the best interests of the slavemasters. This gave the US Government a bias which automatically made its agents suspicious of the masses, the object of control of this institution. Any sign that the people of America might somehow combine, to overthrow the plantation junta, is instinctively guarded against by the many agencies of the republic, which constantly seed the public with suggestions and innuendoes that cause rivalries and conflict between ethnic groups. Racism is a carryover into modern times of the earliest efforts by absentee European landlords, to exploit poor white people as managers over native and non-white work-forces, who otherwise would have been property-less and low-status members of European society, if they had remained in the Old World. Average Americans today are so confused about their history, they often attribute positive advances to the wrong parties, and this is why so many people believe that the Civil Rights Movement was only possible under the auspices of the republic. The truth is that the Civil Rights Movement was only made necessary because of the impact of the racist, atheistic, and untraditional republic imposed by the arbitrary will of the Founding Fathers, for it was the usurpation of the prerogatives of genuine constitutional institutions by the republic that created the imbalances the Civil Rights Movement sought to remedy. Had the Founders preserved the ancient constitution in its entirety, instead of picking and choosing those laws that served them at the expense of the nation, America would not have been behind Europe a generation in the recognition that civil rights were human rights which all people are entitled to universally. AMERICAN WORK Four Centuries of Black and White Labor By Jacqueline Jones (Review by Anthony M. Platt, author of "E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered." He is a professor of social work at Cal State Sacramento) Not since the 1960s have we seen such a literary outpouring about race relations in the United States. More than 30 years ago, the country's racial discussion focused on exposing the destructiveness of racism and debating the merits of radical versus liberal solutions. Revolutionaries such as Malcolm X and Angela Davis on the one hand, and the reformist Kerner Commission on the other, defined the boundaries of the public discourse. By the 1990s, however, liberal and radical perspectives were eclipsed by the successes of the New Right: Affirmative Action is gutted; the jails and prisons are filled with more African Americans and Latinos than ever before; a record number of black families has been dropped from welfare rolls; and old-style nativism is once again guiding immigration policy. The current academic debates recall the atmosphere of the pre-civil rights 1950s. Racism is a problem of the past, argue Dinesh D'Souza in "The End of Racism" and Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom in "America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible." On the contrary, responds David Shipler, it's alive and flourishing, for we remain "a country of strangers," as he has titled his latest book. We shouldn't need a book that once again demonstrates the deep-rootedness of racism in the United States and patiently explains how racial conflicts "remain the moral burden of the country's history." But we do, and the challenge is eloquently and thoughtfully met by Jacqueline Jones, chair of the history department at Brandeis University and author of three previous books, including the prize-winning "Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family From Slavery to the Present." "American Work," as the author notes, is based on her previous research and hundreds of specialized studies produced by a generation of intellectuals, schooled in the activist '50s and '60s, who fundamentally changed how we conceptualize and do American history. It is a pleasure to read an academic historian who writes creatively, with attention to texture and detail. Jones communicates her passion without sacrificing analytical sophistication. The book ambitiously covers four centuries of American race relations by focusing on the history of work, in particular the ways in which race has operated to divide the labor force, to provide "certain kinds of workers with advantages over others" and to relegate Africans, slaves and African Americans to the hardest, most demeaning and most precarious ways of earning a living. Unlike most neoconservative writers, Jones puts class at the heart of her analysis of race. The book is organized as a chronological narrative with three major sections: the Colonial era from the early 17th century through the Revolution; the 19th century, with a focus on the Civil War; and the modern and postmodern eras of the 20th century. This is not so much a comprehensive history as it is an illustrative analysis of key moments in the transformation of American work. The author treats the 20th century quite cursorily, almost as an afterthought, but the earlier history is filled with rich, complex details: We vicariously experience what it was like to stoop in the humid tobacco fields of the 17th century Chesapeake region or to exert enormous physical strength clearing the forests for crops in 18th century Georgia or to do backbreaking, repetitive tasks in the new factory jobs unleashed by industrialism. Jones argues that race is not an inherent identity based on biological or ethnic characteristics but a "fluid set of rationalizations, always shifting in response to considerations related to military defense, labor supply and demand, and technological innovation." Nor is racism a universal and transcendental phenomenon, she argues, but rather socially constructed, historically specific policies shaped by the labor market, ideology, government intervention and political resistance. She makes this point by persuasively showing that before the institutionalization of slavery, Africans were just one of many exploited groups in the New World. In 17th century Virginia, Maryland and Georgia, for example, almost all workers were "bound to some form of exploitative relationship - children governed by their elders, servants by their masters, sharecroppers and tenants by their landlords, hirelings by their employers, women by their fathers and husbands, Indians and Africans by white men, criminals and sexual renegades by the state and church." But during the 17th and 18th centuries, white elites began to selectively use black slave labor and to stress the racial distinctiveness of Africans and their descendants. Africans became marked as "permanent strangers" who could not even aspire to "claim membership in a historic English community," a status "associated with white skin and European lineage." Slavery sealed the fate of Africans, ascribing to them the reputation of "cunning, bloodthirsty people" and relegating them to the most degraded work. "By excluding black people from the body politic of the new nation," writes Jones, "and by defining black people exclusively as enslaved workers, theorists of the American Revolution grounded an emergent liberal, democratic state upon the principles of a traditional feudalistic tyranny." (Some scholars certainly would argue the point that traditional and feudal characteristics are not always the same thing. Feudalism is a unique institution that existed during the Middle Ages, which came to an end at the time of the Enlightenment. Traditional institutions, on the other hand, only refers to institutions that owe their existence to tradition, that is, customs and practices the people embrace with or without the sanction of formal legislation. The Revolution, of course, did not produce an "emergent liberal state," but a reactionary mob-driven police state. WFI Editor) This book makes its strongest contribution to the literature in its illustration of how the labor force became racially categorized before, during and after the Civil War. We learn, for example, that with the development of commercial agriculture in the South, the most dangerous and demanding jobs were reserved for Africans and their children - tapping pine trees for pitch and tar, preparing fields for cultivation and planting and harvesting rice, cotton and indigo. In the Cotton Belt, the vast majority of black men and women worked as field hands. Before the Civil War, African Americans were systematically excluded from almost all the Northern mills and factories; after the War, Southern mills and factories also became reserved for whites. The near total exclusion of black workers from jobs as machine operatives in textile mills lasted until the mid-1960s. (It is also important to take notice of the fact that when the Abolitionists were campaigning for the abolition of slavery, the great majority were white men who refused to allow any black men any leadership roles. WFI Editor) In the antebellum North, as millions of Irish and German immigrants entered the labor market, white men found themselves "in a tight place," as Sojourner Truth observed in 1851 - "the poor slave is on him, woman coming on him, and he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard." Jones thoughtfully captures the tensions antebellum whites felt about black progress, an echo of the assertion of white victimhood more than a hundred years later. "Blacks appeared menacing to whites in a variety of workplaces," she writes. "The lowly immigrant canal digger determined to hold on to his sense of superiority while toiling alongside a black co-worker; the failing artisan, who saw in the black hod carrier's poverty his own future degradation; and the haughty Philadelphia merchant, dependent on his southern slaveholding customers - all of these whites believed they had much to lose in any situation where blacks had anything to gain. From these tensions arose an image of African Americans as doubly dangerous: as poor people and yet also as politically aggressive people." This antebellum antagonism between whites and blacks left an enduring legacy of systemic impoverishment for black workers and deep divisions within the Northern working class. "African Americans performed the menial labor that served as the legs of a ladder of upward occupational mobility that so many whites… had realistic aspirations to climb." Meanwhile, what was lost for generations, observes Jones, was the potential class-wide unities that might have been forged, were it not for racism, between "white widows spinning in workhouse-manufactories," "former slaves toiling in the kitchens and stables of white households," indigenous peoples "deprived of their ancestral lands" and poor white men preoccupied with the "insecurity of their livelihood." The Civil War was a mixed blessing for African Americans. In the South during the war, "in the fields and factories, in iron forges and army camps, black men, women, and children as workers bore the burdens of a war fought to keep them in chains." (Indeed, there were instances of Southern blacks fighting on behalf of the Confederacy, probably because the Civil War was an attempt at a nationalist revolution, and the South was trying to establish an independent national identity; slavery was not introduced as a pivotal issue of the War until the Federal Government started losing. WFI Editor) After the war, what was gained politically and morally was lost in the workplace. As whites entered new jobs in the manufacturing, clerical and retail sectors, black workers were largely confined to domestic work in the South. In the North, racism and segregation combined to exclude them from work at the metal trades in New York forges, at power looms in Philadelphia textile factories, at machines in Berkshire paper mills and inside offices in Cincinnati. By the 20th century, African Americans all over the country found themselves in racially categorized jobs, typically cut off from the newly industrial technology. Three million emancipated slaves had been transformed into denizens, having graduated from slavery to neo-slavery as native-born Americans who were denied the legal protections achieved by white citizens. As blacks were excluded by government and craft unions alike, blackness became, in Jones' words, a "liability that could not be overcome through hard work, talent, or ambition." By the 1920s, "the creators of this new economy had decreed that black people would not participate in it, as sellers, as consumers, as managers, operators of sophisticated machinery, or as advertising icons touting new apparel or appliances. In the United States, modernization wore a white face." It is a pity that "American Work" does not close with this powerful observation. Jones decided to stretch what she admits began as "a series of long working papers" into a definitive treatise on the place of race within the labor market. Unfortunately, the last three chapters speed through the 20th century and a brief epilogue on affirmative action concludes with a skimpy assessment of the current state of race relations in America. Too much is skipped over or ignored in the book's last 75 pages: For example, racial violence connected to job competition during the era of World War I is not seriously addressed; the GI Bill, which provided millions of mostly white men with a leg up into professional careers after World War II, is not even mentioned; and the significant opening up of the public sector, union jobs and university careers for African Americans in the 1960s is too glibly dismissed as tokenism. (The violence of the late 1960s scared the hell out of the white establishment, the principal protagonist of which was the late J. Edgar Hoover. The Civil Rights Movement represented everything every Federal bureaucrat had been guarding against for 150 years: the combining of the people with such strength that they no longer depended upon the Federal Government as a mouthpiece. The violence used to suppress it expressed the real desperation and fear the Civil Rights and Peace Movements represented to the ruling class. The evolution of a black and hispanic middle class, above all, was meant to pacify the black and hispanic populations, which had justified claims of being discriminated against as second class citizens. Nothing creates a strident supporter of the status quo faster than being allowed to possess something that then needs to be guarded. WFI Editor) Finally, it is troubling that a book titled "American Work," written with great sensitivity to issues of race, gender and class, has limited itself to black and white relations and to a view of the United States that rarely ventures beyond the East and South. The role of American Indians in the labor force is acknowledged in chapters on the Colonial era, but it is absent from the analysis of the 19th century. When Latinos and Asians finally appear in the last chapters, they enter only as late 20th century immigrant workers. What about the Asian workers who came to the Americas in the early 17th century via the Spanish galleon trade, or the Filipinos who settled in Louisiana in the 18th century, or the vaqueros who herded cattle in the Southwest in the 1700s, or the Mexican farm workers who comprised more than 75% of beet workers in the Midwest during the 1920s? (And what about the Asians who were imported into the Hawaiian Islands as labor on the sugar plantations, until they outnumbered the native population, circa 1880? WFI Editor) A simple acknowledgment by the author of the book's limited scope and perhaps a more precise title would have addressed these issues and allowed us to give full attention to its considerable strengths: an instructive analysis of the racialization of American work, a repudiation of current policies of malign neglect and a compassionate insight into what it means to be permanent strangers in a homeland of 400 years. SOURCE: Reprinted from the 22 March, 1998, issue of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Reprinted in the public service of the national interest of the American people.

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