Slave Socialism

But nobody ought to be poor. There ought to be a competence for all. Warranteeism is a contrivance to procure a competence for everybody. It actualizes this competence and is progressive. It distributes to warrantees a comfortable sufficiency not for strength only, but for health. Warranteeism is not political and economic only. It is hygienic. This also is its essence. It warrants the necessaries of health. It is both curative and preventive. - Henry Hughes, 1854

The South was not always a seat of "conservative" politics and opposition to Federal intervention. In fact, one of the most sweeping calls for an intrusive socialist-style bureaucracy was made by southern sociologist Henry Hughes. His writings are particularly instructive because of their call for a system of nationalized healthcare in...1854. Socialized medicine is by no means a new idea, nor confined to "free," "liberal" societies. As historian Michael O'Brien has said, southerners were not "obsessed" with race and slavery to the exclusion of everything else, but engaged with the intellectual currents then prevalent in the Atlantic world - they saw themselves as a modern, "progressive" people, albeit with a peculiar form of modernity based around slavery (the tensions and contradictions inherent in this insistence on modernity and slavery are exciting for history nerds like myself). In fact, sociology was a southern project before it was a project anywhere else in America. "Sociology" first appears in print in the English language in a book that aims to preserve a system of white supremacy.

Henry Hughes was born in Port Gibson, Mississippi, in 1829. He was a genius. His diary reveals that he viewed himself with a sense of almost messianic purpose. He was going to save the South and the world through his intellectual powers. Despite his sense of destiny and intellectual acumen, he was largely unknown by the southern public, and died in 1862 of disease while out on campaign with the Confederate army. Hughes wrote his magnum opus, a "Treatise on sociology, theoretical and practical" in 1854, in which he envisioned a new system of labor known as "warranteeism." Under warranteeism, slaveholders would become "warrantors," charged by the state with providing for the laborers assigned to work in their households. Hughes believed that coercive force was needed to compel individuals to work - it constituted a civic duty. Individual property in man would cease, but the master-servant relationship would be preserved in its essence, and upheld by a powerful central government ("The relation of master and servant must not be private; it must be public; that of magistrate to people.") This highly regulated, "progressive" (his adjective) society would eliminate want, crime, and even disease. Simply put, Hughes envisioned a peculiar brand of socialism that enshrined inequality and the racial inferiority of blacks to whites. It was socialism for a slave society.

Hughes was preoccupied with the creation of a hygienic polity. To effect the elimination of disease, the state was charged with providing for the health and hygiene of the warrantees. To carry out this goal, Hughes called for the the creation of a health bureaucracy, known as "the body hygienic" - part of a heptarchy of departments or "municipalities" given charge over various facets of public welfare. "The body hygienic" was given a wide scope of powers, many of which today fall under various departments of the Federal government:

The body hygienic shall have jurisdiction over hygienic matters. Of this system, the special end is health, or the normal conservation and progress of the human hody.

It shall have power:—

To establish quarantines; and pass all laws necessary and proper, for the prevention of infections, and contagions :

To order sanitary inspections, or surveys; sanitary scavenging, draining, and purifications; to establish sanitary police, watchmen, and surveyors :

To declare and establish hygienic districts and sub- districts :

To order hygienic statistics or censuses; to keep records of births, deaths, and marriages; and to keep public hygienic registers:

To declare and abate hygienic nuisances:

To interdict food, raiment, and habitation, grossly and manifestly pernicious to health :

To regulate the structure of all habitations and houses ; of all tenements, whether on land or water; and to issue hygienic certificates, probating all architectural plans:

To regulate the number and hygienic disposal, of all tenants whether of houses, water-craft or other tenements :

To order vaccination and other necessary precautions:

To enforce ventilation of public and private buildings and places:

To provide for the inspection, and prohibit the adulteration, of food, and of drugs and medicines:

To provide for the care, and to regulate the use, of poisons, explosives, combustibles, and other materials, dangerous to the unskilled or incautious:

To have jurisdiction of public baths, dispensaries, warming-fires, and life-preservers; and of hygienic asylums and hospitals:

...

To order the qualifications, rights, duties, powers, and responsibilities of medical doctors, surgeons, druggists and apothecaries.

One power stood out from all of the others. It called for making "laws for the conservation and progress of the race; and for this to prevent degeneration, by prohibiting intermarriages manifestly and perniciously degenerative." For Hughes, "hygiene" was just as much (if not more) a matter of race as of cleanliness. Fundamental to a hygienic polity was insuring that certain pregnancies be prevented, that the polity not be burdened by those who might degenerate it. Hughes did not sanction abortion, but he sought to place restrictions on who could mate with whom. Race, hygiene, progress, and religion were all intertwined for Hughes:

The preservation and progress of a race, is a moral duty of the races. Degeneration is evil. It is a sin. That sin is extreme. Hybridism is heinous. Impurity of races is against the law of nature. Mulattoes are monsters. The law of nature is the law of God. The same law which forbids consanguineous amalgamation forbids ethnical amalgamation. Both are incestuous. Amalgamation is incest.

Hughes' society was an intrusive apartheid state that treated its second class citizens - blacks - as wards of the state.

I recently had to listen to one of my professors - who I have a great deal of respect for - rant to a classroom of 300 undergrads about how the progressives were great guys. He was upset with Glenn Beck - who I by no means mean to defend - for decrying all progressives as horrible people who ruined America. I disagree with Beck, but I also don't agree that the Progressives of the 19th and 20th centuries were universally great people, or that everything they proposed had a positive impact on the nation.

I also want to challenge this notion that historically, opposition among southerners to an expansive state is somehow intimately tied to racism, when there have been other currents in southern intellectual discourse that are exactly the reverse. Southerners looked to other foundations upon which to build and defend their peculiar institution than limited government. Another notable southerner who engaged in a socialist-style critique of free-labor societies was George Fitzhugh. "Slavery," Fitzhugh wrote in 1854, "is a form, and the very best form, of socialism."

The one individual who exercised the greatest influence on both Hughes and Fitzhugh was Auguste Comte, a French philosopher and the founder of both the field of sociology and the philosophical movement known as positivism. Comte was a great influence on other "progressive" sociologists, particularly Herbert Croly. Croly was not a southerner, but was born in New York in 1869. Apart from his work in sociology, he was the founder of the New Republic. He's a bit of a celebrated figure among "progressives" even today. In a recent Newsweek write-up, Louisa Thomas opined that Croly's writings had unleashed a wave of legislation that "appealed to basic decency: child labor laws, workers' compensation, the expansion of suffrage, anti-corruption measures, health care, etc. Isn't it time for that spirit again?" Thomas allowed that Croly had gotten "a lot wrong," but there is no explanation of what, exactly, Croly got wrong.

Croly's vision, which called for an interventionist economic and social policy, was an unacknowledged elaboration on the ideas of Henry Hughes. Croly supported the use of coercion to ensure that individuals fulfilled their obligation to work in an appropriate field, a notion which is very similar to core aspects of Hughes' warranteeism. Croly deemed those who lived in rural areas, particularly blacks, to be unfit for life in urban settings, and therefore fit only for agricultural work. He believed that the proslavery intellectuals were correct when they asserted that "negroes were a race possessed of moral and intellectual qualities inferior to those of white men." By asserting that the least trained and intelligent would be more prosperous and moral in a rural farm setting, Croly was carrying the intellectual torch of antebellum proslavery thinkers into the new century.

Croly's ideas laid the groundwork for and partly found their embodiment in the New Deal. The "New Nationalism" he called for aimed at checking the greed and self-interest that had characterized the individualistic/libertarian spirit of colonial and antebellum America. This spirit, Croly wrote, "resulted in a morally and socially undesirable distribution of wealth." I do not mean to argue that the New Deal was racist. While it did uphold the racial status quo in many ways - partly as a concession to southerners - the New Deal was not explicitly racist. The point I wish to make is that the intellectual wellspring of progressivism, and hence modern liberalism, is also deeply implicated in the white supremacist project.

To paraphrase Jonah Goldberg, if "progressives" and liberals had to own their intellectual history the way conservatives do, they would be forced to renounce Croly, not call for his rediscovery.

I want to undermine the notion that opposition to big government is somehow historically rooted in racism, when in fact strands - and indeed some of the roots - of American progressivism were nourished and grew out of a sociological project that sought to maintain white supremacy.

Furthermore, I want to complicate how we conceive of the so-called benevolence (some might even say paternalism) of a state entity that presumes to know what is best for us. The intellectual roots of socialism in this country are anything but lily-white (so to speak). One of the most sweeping (and earliest), radical calls for a highly regulated socialist-style system in this country was made by a man who did so in the defense of a system of white supremacy. The intellectual tradition out of which social welfare emerged is not purely one with its roots in "revolutionary" movements that had in mind the so-called welfare of the brotherhood of man, but also the subjection of one group to another.