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CHAPTER 12
Struggle for Justice

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”¹

Martin Luther King Jr.

Humans commonly confine to the realm of the unconscious those aspects of the self that the conscious mind denies because they challenge a favored self-image. Psychoanalyst Carl Jung referred to these denied aspects of the self as the shadow. Actualizing the full potential of the self requires acknowledging and healing the pain underlying the denial.

It is much the same for nations as for individuals. We Americans have been inclined to confine both the stories of U.S. imperial expansion and the stories of the repression of nonwhites, women, and working-class people within our own borders to a collective unconscious as too painfully contrary to our national self-concept to acknowledge. It is not only a denial of the injustice in which we are complicit but also a denial of the reality of Empire and the troubling truth that our nation is not—and never has been—a democracy. To achieve the democracy that is central to our national self-image we must first acknowledge that we have never had it.

We are slowly making progress as a nation toward achieving liberty and justice for all only through the long and difficult struggles of the excluded. To know these struggles is to appreciate both the progress achieved and the magnitude of the challenge that remains.

WORDS THAT REFUSE TO DIE

The U.S. Constitution fell far short of securing for all the promise of the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet the bold words of the Declaration of Independence refused to die and continue to this day to inspire those who would make the promise a reality.

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The Declaration said, “All men are created equal.” There was nothing about only white men or men of property. If all men, why not all women? Such questions inspired a series of struggles, each of which made historic contributions to advancing the United States and the world on the path to the mature democracy of Earth Community—a journey that remains to this day far from complete.

Abolishing Slavery

Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, and David Walker were among the free blacks who campaigned openly, at the risk of their lives and freedom, to mobilize resistance against the institution of slavery.² Brave white allies of a mature democratic consciousness shared their outrage and joined in the struggle. The Quakers at Germantown, Pennsylvania, condemned slavery as early as 1688. Boston Puritan Samuel Sewall published America’s first abolitionist tract, The Selling of Joseph, in 1700. William Lloyd Garrison founded The Liberator in 1831, a newspaper dedicated to rallying public support for abolition. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1851, was one of history’s most influential books.³ In the end, it took the Civil War to bring an end to legally sanctioned slavery in the United States and to grant black men full citizenship and the right to vote—a legal recognition of their humanity that continued to be denied to women of any race.

Blacks were technically free, but whites owned the land and controlled the jobs on which blacks depended for survival. Continuing the imperial pattern, the rights of capital continued to trump the rights of labor as the moneylenders stepped in for the kill. Blatantly unfair sharecropper arrangements forced blacks into debts that became an instrument of bondage only one step removed from an outright return to slavery.⁴

Oppression and terror prevailed until the civil rights movement of the latter half of the twentieth century achieved an important, but still partial, cultural transformation in race relationships and backed it with legal sanctions against those who overtly denied African Americans their basic civil rights.

Securing Civil Rights for People of Color

The modern civil rights movement was born in Montgomery, Alabama, when Rosa Parks, a middle-aged African American seamstress and 203longtime activist leader with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was arrested on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat to a white patron. The success of the subsequent bus boycott led by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. unleashed a sense of pride and possibility in black communities across the country, inspiring wave after wave of protest—and often deadly white reprisals. As awareness of the injustices of segregation spread, thousands of whites were inspired to join blacks in their struggle. The resulting political pressures resulted in the omnibus Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited “discrimination by race, color, sex, religion, or national origin in voter registration, employment, public education, and public accommodations.”⁵

White backlash became increasingly deadly, causing many black leaders to question whether peaceful integration into the mainstream of society was possible or even desirable. Black anger found expression in increasingly violent inner-city rebellions, including the August 1965 Watts rebellion, in which thirty-four people were killed, nearly a thousand injured, and more than four thousand arrested. King’s valiant calls for nonviolence fell on increasingly deaf ears, and by the time of his assassination on April 4, 1968, the movement was beginning to stall as the FBI became increasingly aggressive in infiltrating, disrupting, and discrediting major civil rights groups.⁶

Within the broad limits permitted by the prevailing institutions and culture of Empire, the civil rights movement transformed the self-concept of African Americans, brought the issue of race relations to the fore of the national consciousness, and removed many of the more overt manifestations of racial discrimination. As with the American Revolution itself, the impetus for change came from an assertion of rights by the oppressed.

Although we remain far from realizing King’s dream of a free and equal multiracial society, the accomplishments of the civil rights movement were a major step toward the realization of that democratic ideal. Furthermore, it inspired the many progressive movements that fol-lowed—giving impetus to a still ongoing cultural turning toward the partnership relations of Earth Community.

Equality for Women

The movement for equal rights for women has deep roots in the movement to abolish slavery based on race. Early on, a group of visionary 204women concluded that eliminating race-based slavery was a necessary first step toward eliminating gender-based slavery. Thus when, in February of 1828, Angelina Grimké became the first woman to address a legislative body in the United States, it was to present to the Massachusetts General Court an antislavery petition signed by twenty thousand women.⁷

A critical turning point in feminist activism occurred in 1840, when the male majority at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London barred women from participating in the proceedings. Feminist antislavery crusaders Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were so infuriated that they turned their attention to a direct demand for women’s rights. Stanton organized the first American Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848, which issued its own Declaration of Independence, beginning with the words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.”⁸

In 1920, the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment finally guaranteed female suffrage in the United States. Unfortunately, however, it no more guaranteed full dignity for women than early Constitutional Amendments had guaranteed it for black men.⁹

A second wave of feminism emerged in the 1960s, stirred by Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, and the experience of activist women in the civil rights and other liberation movements of the time. Friedan awakened a new consciousness of the extent to which women’s confining roles were socially constructed by men to secure their dominant position and by advertisers engaged in assuring demand for the often frivolous products of a growing economy. The result of the second wave of feminism was a cultural revolution that continues to transform the relationships between men and women and to challenge the underlying social structures of sexism worldwide.

Citizenship for the Original Citizens

One of the darkest of all the dark chapters of U.S. imperial history concerns the fate of the Native Americans against whom the European American settlers waged a campaign of genocide to expropriate their lands and destroy their cultures. Massive waves of European immigration fueled an explosive population growth in the new nation, which rose from an estimated 4 million people in 1790 to 31 million in 1860. Territorial expansion proceeded apace. The new nation occupied a land 205area of 865,000 square miles in 1790. When the westward expansion to the Pacific was completed in 1853, the continental United States occupied 3 million square miles.¹⁰ What was for the European immigrants an experience of liberty, expansion, prosperity, and opportunity was for the Native Americans who stood in their path an experience of tyranny, contraction, poverty, and confinement.

Initially the Native Americans—steeped in the values and ways of Community—sought accommodation with those they had at first greeted as their honored guests. Steeped in the values and ways of Empire, the guests responded with ruthless duplicity. It was the endlessly repeated story of the landing of Columbus.

As the United States encroached ever deeper into Native lands in the relentless drive to the West, Native resistance grew, but it was ultimately overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the immigration and the superior firepower of the U.S. military. Reduced to a tenth of their number from the days when the intrusions began, those Native peoples who remained were confined to reservations on isolated fragments of land the Europeans considered to be of little or no value. Even then, the press to appropriate what remained of Indian lands and to assimilate the remaining indigenous population into the European culture continued. In the period between 1946 and 1960, Indian tribes lost an additional 3.3 million acres of land.¹¹

Many of the Native American cultures those of European descent sought to destroy gave far greater expression to the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, democracy, and human dignity than any European culture before or since. Many Native peoples remain to this day repositories of the ancient wisdom of those who lived in Community, and they retain a memory of human possibilities that Empire denies. Those whose special status rests on the ruthless injustice of Empire have good reason to consider that memory a threat to their privilege.

It was not until 1924 that Native Americans won through their struggles an act of Congress granting them full and automatic citizenship in the land that was once their own. In 1978, the U.S. Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, guaranteeing the right of Native Americans to practice their traditional religions.¹² Finally, citizenship was restored to the original citizens of North America who in a more just world would have been the ones to decide who among the visiting Europeans were qualified to become citizens of the continent’s preexisting First Nations and on what conditions. 206

STRUGGLES OF THE MIDDLE AND WORKING CLASSES

Aristotle, Thomas Jefferson, and Adam Smith all shared an appreciation for the importance to a stable and democratic society of a strong middle class composed of independent farmers and artisans who owned the instruments of their production. A strong middle-class ownership society in which the same people who own the productive assets also provide the labor that makes the assets productive is the antithesis of Empire and an essential foundation of Earth Community.

In the immediate pre- and post-Revolution periods, most free white males made their living as independent farmers, merchants, and artisans of modest but adequate means. They prepared the way for the American Revolution, demanded that the Bill of Rights be added to the Constitution, and kept watch on the issuance of corporate charters. They presented a threat to the imperial designs of the domestic ruling class, which rallied to reduce the upstarts to serfdom.

Eroding the Middle Class

As population and markets grew, the merchant capitalists of New England who had built their fleets and fortunes through privateering, slaving, and war profiteering capitalized on growing demand for manufactured goods by importing cheap goods from England to undersell the independent local craftsmen and drive them out of business. Forced into the wage labor force, these artisans had no choice but to sell their labor to the owners of larger aggregations of capital on whatever terms the owners offered.

Growing numbers of white farmers in the Northeast suffered a similar fate as they were driven out of family farming by land shortages, debt, and competition from midwestern agriculture. Westward expansion provided a safety valve for the displaced until the closing of the western land frontier around 1860. As noted in chapter 11, however, the bankers followed and the farmers soon found themselves once again captive to a system that drove them to mortgage their lands to secure debts they had no means to repay.¹³ The resulting frustrations brought forth the rapid growth in the 1890s of an agrarian populist movement that took aim at the deeper structural causes of economic injustice and for a time became a potent rural force. Led primarily by land-owning family farmers, it was unable to bridge the divide between whites and 207blacks or between landowning farmers and landless farm workers. Its briefly successful but short-lived People’s Party was absorbed into the Democratic Party, and the movement disappeared.¹⁴

The displaced who were not attracted to homesteading sought work in mines, factories, and construction, where they were commonly required to work twelve- to fourteen-hour days, six days a week, with Sunday off to attend church. Women who lacked the support of a husband worked as domestics or in textile factories. Domestics had virtually no time to themselves. Workers of either sex had few if any rights, and bosses continually drove them to produce more for less pay.¹⁵ The greater the monopolization of productive assets by the money people, the fewer the options available to working people, and the greater the power advantage of the owners of capital—thus deepening the classic asymmetrical power relationship of Empire.

The recourse was the same as the recourse against British rule: to organize. The first to do so were white craftsmen, those who had the most resources and options and retained a foothold in the middle class.

In 1827 a number of craft unions in Philadelphia formed the Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations. Similar federations formed in thirteen cities from 1833 through 1836, coordinating their efforts through the National Trades Union founded in 1834. They sponsored labor newspapers, supported strikes, organized other workers, and lobbied for reforms that included improving public education, eliminating compulsory militia musters, and repealing legal restrictions on the formation of labor unions. Their defining cause was a demand to reduce the workday to ten hours.¹⁶

Employers responded by firing and blacklisting labor organizers and taking unions to court on charges of criminal conspiracy to violate the constitutional rights of employers. In 1835, the New York State Supreme Court ruled unions and strikes illegal under conspiracy laws. The court thus affirmed the owners’ claim that it was legal for owners to organize to deny workers their basic rights, but that workers who organized in defense of their rights were engaged in an illegal conspiracy to restrain trade and the beneficial forces of the free market.¹⁷

Workers responded by turning from strikes to petition drives aimed at winning legislators to their cause and to voter mobilization in support of political candidates sympathetic to their demands, which included a ten-hour day and the distribution of public lands to homesteaders to 208reduce unemployment and the downward pressure on wages. As fast as state legislatures yielded to worker pressures to pass laws on working hours, however, employers found and exploited loopholes to circumvent them, often with the support of judges sympathetic to their interests.¹⁸

Growing Power of Property

As the country and the railroads expanded, vast tracts of the land expropriated by the government from the Native Americans by deadly force were given to railroad corporations as an incentive to rapidly extend their rail networks into lands newly opened to white settlement. The railroads in turn sold the land to major corporate forestry, agribusiness, or mining interests.

Corporations combined this windfall with the proceeds of profiteering from the Civil War to create large pools of financial capital at a time when new energy technologies were coming online to substitute fossil fuels for the sheer muscle power of labor. The loss of jobs from this conversion combined with rapid population growth to create a significant labor surplus and a corresponding downward pressure on wages that further increased the profits and influence of the leading industrialists.

In 1860, the United States ranked fourth behind the United Kingdom, France, and Germany in the value of its manufacturing production. By 1894, it ranked number one, with an output of manufactured goods more than double that of the United Kingdom, its nearest rival. As industrial corporations became even more powerful, hopes for economic justice for the working class suffered a corresponding decline.¹⁹

Corporate leverage over workers was further increased by an economic recession that led to widespread joblessness and starvation. Employers imposed deep wage cuts that fanned growing resentment.

In 1877, the resentment culminated in the Great Railroad Strike. All across the country blacks and whites, women and men, joined in solidarity to block rail transport and shut down ports, shipping, and factories in what came close to a national strike. State and federal governments sided unerringly with the corporations. At the behest of the railroads, state militias were called out. When state militia units refused to fire on their neighbors, federal troops stepped in, firing on the crowds and making arrests until the plutocracy was firmly back in control.²⁰ Once again, the federal troops were used to insure domestic tranquility as defined by the owning class. 209

True to the original intention, the courts sided with the owning class in case after case. The Supreme Court consistently upheld decisions of state courts that nullified laws limiting an employee’s hours of work, establishing a minimum wage, or otherwise restricting the rights of employers.²¹ In virtually every sector money power prevailed over people power. The opinion-making forces of the press, schools, and churches all aligned with the interests of money.²² The barons of wealth and Imperial Consciousness saw themselves as instruments of a great religious mission based on a Darwinian vision of human progress ordained by God. Priscilla Murolo and A.B. Chitty sum it up:

The steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie wrote in 1889 that, “Individualism, Private Property, the Law of Accumulation of Wealth, and the Law of Competition” were “the highest result of human experience.” John D. Rockefeller, Sr., the oil and mining potentate, declared in a lecture to Sunday-school students: “The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest.… This is not an evil tendency in business… merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God.” William Graham Sumner, Yale professor of political and social science and a favorite lapdog of the rich, opined that, “The millionaires are a product of natural selection, acting on the whole body of men to pick out those who can meet the requirement.”²³

Millionaires built ostentatious mansions and summer homes modeled on European castles, while the less fortunate went homeless and scavenged for crumbs. The disdain of the powerful for the working class was exemplified by the famous boast of Jay Gould, whose empire included several steamship lines, the Western Union Telegraph Company, and a number of railroads: “I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half,” he proclaimed.²⁴ Gould may have been right about his half of the labor force, but the half he could not hire continued organizing with an impressive solidarity among men, women, whites, and blacks even in the face of violent repression by courts, private security guards, and federal troops.

As they had done following Bacon’s Rebellion, employers used every opportunity to exploit divisions between men and women, and between whites and blacks. Labor proved to be strongest when it succeeded in maintaining solidarity among working people across race, gender, and occupational lines. 210

Labor Populists versus Labor Plutocrats

The most powerful labor organization of the post–Civil War period was the Knights of Labor, formed in 1869 in Philadelphia as a secret organization of garment workers. Of a deeply inclusive populist persuasion, the Knights welcomed all “producing classes” to its membership, including housewives, farmers, clergymen, shopkeepers, and professionals. It even included employers if they had come from the wage-earning class and treated their workers fairly. Only corporate lawyers, bankers, stockbrokers, professional gamblers, and liquor dealers were excluded summarily. The Knights grew to be a significant force with a comprehensive agenda of reforms intended to transform the system, including a progressive income tax, the abolition of child labor, workers’ compensation, an eight-hour day, and public ownership of the railroads. It also embraced a program of economic democratization by organizing mines and factories as worker cooperatives.²⁵

As economic conditions for labor deteriorated further, strikes became more frequent and the confrontations more violent. Police fired on strikers and arrested leaders. Four labor leaders were hanged based on what many believed to be trumped-up charges. The military and police firepower of the state ultimately restored domestic tranquility for the corporate robber barons. As the Knights faded into history, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) emerged to take its place.²⁶

The AFL, which was less expansive in its membership and more narrowly focused in its aims, was only interested in organizing skilled workers to win them a bigger piece of the pie through the negotiation of favorable contracts. It took no interest in less skilled workers, women, African Americans, and new immigrants or in matters of public policy.²⁷

Whereas the Knights had more of the qualities of a self-organizing social movement, the AFL created an institutional superstructure of professional negotiators and organizers with a classic imperial gap between its own management and the rank-and-file workers it professed to serve. Functioning much like a corporation in the business of supplying contract labor to other corporations, AFL leaders were perfectly comfortable with the established system of power, moved easily within the circles of the plutocracy, and negotiated sweetheart deals with employers in return for bribes. With a substantial lock on worker access to jobs, the AFL’s membership grew rapidly from the 1890s through the first decade of the twentieth century, even as corporations continued to 211undermine union power and the Supreme Court continued to side with management.

In 1905, workers of a more radical political bent formed the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), as a counterforce to the AFL. In contrast to the AFL, which largely aligned itself with the capitalist cause, the declared mission of the IWW was to overthrow the capitalist system. Popularly known as the Wobblies, the IWW was at the center of labor activism in the early twentieth century. It catered to African Americans, unskilled workers, and new immigrants, pursued a broad agenda of social reform, and threatened the establishment. Its members hated the more conservative AFL almost as much as they hated capitalism.²⁸

The labor unrest of this period built up to a massive 1913 mine-workers strike against the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, which ended in a major defeat for the workers when company guards and state militiamen fired on the strikers with machine guns and torched their tent colony. By the time the strikers returned to work, sixty-nine miners and family members had been murdered.²⁹

Capitalist Excess and the Great Depression

In the 1920s, the Republican presidencies of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, backed by a Republican-controlled Congress, carried corporate influence over government to what for that time was a new extreme. The Harding administration was famous for graft and corruption, the fraudulent sale of government property, and the looting of Native American assets. Coolidge cut the income taxes of the rich in half and sharply reduced the inheritance tax. Hoover supported U.S. corporate expansion into foreign markets. These administrations promoted loans to foreign governments to create more markets for U.S. corporations and regularly fielded troops to protect overseas corporate investments in China, Haiti, Honduras, and Nicaragua.³⁰

Inequality grew rapidly in the 1920s. Privileged groups, including skilled workers in unionized trades, generally did well. Most working people, however, gained little or nothing from the burst of prosperity, and many workers suffered falling wages. Labor racketeering became well established in the building trades, and the Mafia took over some local unions to raid their treasuries and sell “strike insurance” to employers.³¹

Working people were not earning enough to buy the goods being produced by the overheated economy. Fraud and speculation were 212rampant in unregulated financial markets. The excesses of materialism, political corruption, speculation, and financial fraud could not be sustained. The illusion evaporated, and the nation was hit by the economic collapse of October 1929, which brought on the Great Depression.

A NEW DEAL

Elected by a landslide on a visionary reform platform, a New York patrician named Franklin D. Roosevelt took office as president on March 4, 1933, at the depth of the Great Depression. His proclaimed commitment was to save capitalism from itself. Immediately on taking office, he began implementing a program of regulatory reform to limit the worst excesses of capitalism and to revitalize the economy by putting more money in the hands of working people. He immediately tightened the public regulation of banks and financial markets, implemented employment-generating public works programs, funded relief programs that extended aid to a fifth of the national population, and pushed through legislation guaranteeing labor’s right to organize and bargain collectively.³² Roosevelt’s actions energized labor and appalled his peers, who denounced him as a class traitor.

Leveling the Playing Field

Although the federal government proved unable to enforce its own labor rights guarantees in the face of defiance by the corporate plutocrats, Roosevelt, unlike previous presidents, declined to send out troops to fight on the side of the corporations. That made all the difference. Union membership skyrocketed, and everywhere workers struck for better wages and working conditions.

Corporations responded by mobilizing support from hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan to “save America from labor radicals,” hired private goon squads to rough up union members, launched public relations campaigns to denounce labor organizers as Communists, and called on local police and national guard units to put down strikers. The excesses of the industrialists succeeded in swinging public sentiment in the favor of labor and strengthening Roosevelt’s political base and resolve.

In 1935, Roosevelt initiated the Second New Deal based on a partnership with workers. It included Social Security, national unemployment 213insurance, substantial tax increases for corporations and wealthy individuals, and antitrust action to break up corporate monopolies. Reelected with strong union support against a pro-business Republican in 1936, Roosevelt won over 60 percent of the popular vote and carried every state but Maine and Vermont. Aggressive organizing drives increased union membership from 3.6 million in 1935 to 8.7 million in 1940.

Right-wing sentiment surged in the 1938–40 period among corporate leaders, a number of whom expressed overt sympathy for German and Italian fascism. Henry Ford and James Watson (president of IBM) accepted Nazi medals. Major corporations formed the America First Committee to oppose intervention against Hitler. A former president of the National Association of Manufacturers suggested that “American business might be forced to turn to some form of disguised Fascist dictatorship,” and the association distributed two million copies of a pamphlet titled “Join the CIO and Help Build a Soviet America.”³³

Middle-Class Ascendance

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched a surprise air attack on the U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. A suddenly unified nation mobilized to defeat a common enemy. Pumping money into defense industries, it created the most powerful industrial and military force the world had ever known, paid for in part by raising marginal tax rates on the rich. The economy boomed, corporate profits soared on cost-plus government contracts, and widespread unemployment was replaced by critical labor shortages.

Unions generally lived by their pledge not to strike during the war but continued organizing. By 1945, union membership had risen to 14.3 million, which was 35.5 percent of the workforce.³⁴ Following the war, the defense industries retooled for civilian production as pent-up consumer demand fueled the economy.

Backing their demands with a wave of strikes, labor pressed for and won major wage increases and brought working people more rights and benefits than they had enjoyed at any other time in U.S. history. Unions were strong. Health care and retirement benefits were pretty much a given for working people. The earnings of a typical wage earner were adequate to support a family, and working parents came home to have dinner with their children. Home ownership was growing, and 214everyone was capturing a portion of the gains from the increasing economic output—narrowing the wealth gap and decreasing the relative power of the plutocracy.³⁵

The terms downsizing and outsourcing had not yet entered the vocabulary. The American Dream of comfortable affluence continued to elude people of color, but for most Americans of European descent, it had become a reality.

The United States became the envy of the world and the model that others sought to emulate at a time when, in the world at large, the great colonial empires of the past were being dismantled. People everywhere were demanding a democratic voice and a fair share of the wealth they helped to create. For a time it seemed the entire world might eventually enjoy a level of affluence comparable to that of the American middle class.

The ideals set forth in the stirring rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence notwithstanding, the founding of the United States and the drafting and ratification of the U.S. Constitution did not bring democracy to North America. Rather, it created a context for a long struggle to overcome an inherited cultural and institutional legacy of five thousand years of Empire—a struggle violently opposed by the elites in power. The historical reality of the genocide against Native Americans, the enslavement of blacks, the denial of the basic rights and humanity of women, and the denial of a just share of profits to those who toil to make capital productive manifests this legacy, underscores the magnitude of the challenge, and reveals how much remains undone.

It is only from a deeper historical perspective that we can appreciate the substantial accomplishments of these struggles. Monarchy is now little more than a historical curiosity. A clear separation of church and state secures freedom of religious conscience and worship. A system of checks and balances has for over two centuries successfully barred one elite faction from establishing permanent control of the institutions of government. Active genocide against Native Americans has ended and genocide against any group is now universally condemned. Slavery is no longer a legally protected institution and is culturally unacceptable. 215

Native Americans, people of color, people without property, and women now all have the legal right to vote and to participate fully in the political process. Pervasive though it remains in practice, open discrimination to deny the political rights of any group is now culturally unacceptable.

The fact that we now take these accomplishments for granted underscores how significant our progress has been, given that not so long ago they would have been considered unthinkable. Each of these achievements depended on the sustained commitment and sacrifice of millions of extraordinary people committed to a vision of a world that works for all.

Many of us who grew up in the United States in the post–World War II years came to accept democracy and economic justice as something of an automatic birthright. We were raised to believe that we were blessed to live in a classless society of opportunity for all who are willing to apply themselves and play by the rules.

The experience of the middle class in those years seemed to confirm this story, and those of us who were a part of it were inclined to dismiss people who spoke of issues of class as malcontents who would rather promote class warfare than accept responsibility for putting in an honest day’s work. Sure, there had been problems in the past, but thanks to our intellectual genius and high ideals, we Americans had resolved them and rendered them irrelevant to our present. Now it was our due and our responsibility to make the rest of the world more like us. I now recognize how wrong we were.

Yet the middle-class ascendance of the post–World War II years was in fact an extraordinary demonstration of the possibilities of democracy grounded in a belief that everyone should share in the benefits of a well-functioning society. Unfortunately, however, it turned out to be only a temporary popular victory in the war of the owning class against the rest that is a defining condition of Empire and that has defined the American experience from the day Columbus first set foot on a Caribbean island. All the disparate popular struggles of our history to achieve justice for workers, women, and people of color, as well as the struggles for peace and the environment, are subtexts of a larger meta-struggle against the cultural mindset and institutions of Empire.

The owning classes have long recognized that their imperial class privilege is placed at risk by a unification of the oppressed. The claims 216of identity politics based on race, gender, and occupational specialization are tolerable to Empire because they emphasize and perpetuate division. Discussion of class, however, is forbidden, because it exposes common interests and deeper structural issues with a potential to lead to a unified resistance.

The enduring class divide is between owners and workers—between those who live on the returns to capital and those who live on the returns to their own labor. Jefferson sought to close the divide by making every worker an owner. Hamilton sought to secure the position of an elite ruling class by assuring that ownership remained concentrated in its hands.

As I document in the next chapter, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the heirs to the Hamiltonian vision reminded us of their presence and their commitment to the dominator relationships of Empire even as the changing human condition renders their vision untenable. I still find it difficult to accept that there are those among the leaders of the most powerful U.S. institutions who pursue Empire as a holy mission and are prepared to use every means —from lies to assassinations to perpetual war—to block progress toward justice for all and to roll back the gains already achieved. I can no longer deny, however, that such people do exist, that they have successfully manipulated the culture to achieve substantial followings, and that a necessary part of the work of the Great Turning is to neutralize their power by exposing their lies, methods, and imperial agendas.