Inventing the Police

This post takes a “critical” criminological approach to the study of the evolution of modern police forces. Advocating for research-based problem-solving, the aim here is learn about how a data-informed approach, combined with critical interpretive methods, might shed light on the structures of policing and the role it plays historically in the construction of knowledge and power. For it is only by situating policing within this critical social context that we can begin to effectively understand the police.

We begin with some questions: Where does policing originate in the United States? How did policing come into being as the institution that we know today with the oft stated mission of “serve and protect?” How might police act on assumptions about people, particularly as this relates to the way criminals act? How might these assumptions and actions inform public understandings about crime and criminals? What are the actually police doing?

Slave Patrols and The Myth of Liberal Policing

What does modern policing have to do with slave patrols? What exactly is meant by the term “liberal policing?” These are some of the questions that scholar and criminologist, Alex Vitale, addresses in his 2017 book – The End of Policing, which takes a critical look at how modern policing in the United States has evolved over time.

The liberal state, as it were, is not about the classic political divide between democrats (liberals) and republicans (conservatives). What this term refers to is a general notion of statehood – an ideal invested in action – where the state/Justice Department invests in reforms like body cameras, community policing, officer diversity, and increased implicit bias and use of force training  as a means to rescue policing and restore its legitimacy. Vitale cautions that while this notion may be superficially appealing, the U.S. falls short of such aspirational ideals in practice. To understand how this occurred, he says we need to take stock of our police history and reconcile where we came from before we move forward.

[Note: the term “liberal state” does not mean liberal in the same sense as it is used by many people to characterize one political party/governing ideology. The term as it used here broadly refers to the state as a form of governance organized to protect and promote the economic and social well-being of citizens, based upon the principles of equal opportunity, equitable distribution of wealth, and public responsibility for citizens unable to avail themselves of the minimal provisions for a good life. 

Alternatively, “Liberalism” is a political and moral philosophy that espouses the values of liberty and equality. Professed “liberal” democracies espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but they generally support civil rights, democratic ideals, secular government, gender and racial equality, freedom of speech, press, and religion. Liberalism became a distinct movement during the Age of the Enlightenment when it became popular with Western philosophers and economists. Refuting norms of power based on heredity, monarchy, and the divine right of kings, liberalism sought to replace them with traditional conservatism, representative democracy, and rule of law. French liberalism emphasized rejecting authoritarianism linked to nation-building].

Sociologist T.H. Marshall described the modern liberal welfare state as a distinctive combination of democracy, welfare provision, and capitalism.

A liberal state, furthermore, is one which gives priority to the cause of the individuals. In the classic ‘individual vs state’ opposition, the liberal state is supposed to favor the interest and cause of individuals. Put another way, a  classic liberal state refers to limited government or limited state.

Early Policing

The London Model

Of course, one model for early police forces in the United States was the London Metropolitan Police of Sir Robert Peel. Peel’s police force focused on the protection of property and putting down strikes. Another far more sinister model is found in the Slave Patrols of the southern confederacy and the Texas Rangers. The impetus for both of these forces was to protect the property and financial interests of wealthy benefactors.

When we look at the influence of Peel, his efforts tend to be presented as a “noble endeavor.” Yet as Vitale points out, the core of his mission was not of crime-fighting; it was focused on managing disorder and protecting the propertied classes from the unwashed masses. Peel developed his ideas while managing the British colonial occupation of Ireland, where he struggled to foster new forms of social control that would allow for its continued political and economic domination in the face of growing uprisings (Vitale, 2017).

The London model was then imported to the U.S. beginning in Boston in 1838 and continuing through the northern cities over the next few decades. Massive immigration and rapid industrialization created an even more socially and politically chaotic environment than in the U.K.: New York was exploding with new immigrants who were being chewed up by a rapid and imiserating industrialization. Rioting was widespread during this period, occurring on a monthly basis for many years. After the 1828 Christmas riot, when 4,000 workers marched on the wealthy districts, newspapers began calling for a major expansion and professionalization of the night watch, which eventually led to the formation of the police (Vitale, 2017).

The Slave Model

Whereas in the industrial North police helped elites to keep control over their unruly, often immigrant, working-class populations, things evolved differently in the South. In the South, police were organized to help plantation owners break up efforts by slaves to organize. When they attempted to leave, even after being freed, they found ways to detain them for trivial offenses [in the case of the Texas Rangers, they were employed by wealthy settlers who were intent on stealing Mexican land].

The importance of this history to modern policing cannot be overstated. Why is it important? On the one hand, it helps to bring into awareness an important narrative that helps frame police violence against black people; a social fact that is particularly relevant to our contemporary moment. On the other hand, it can foster discussion and understanding, as it creates a point of entry into a conversation: What is happening in modern policing? What has changed over time? What has remained the same? How is the historical social context relevant to the situation we find ourselves in today?

Given all of this, we can draw from this history to observe similarities as well as contradictions. The violence as it was manifest in the form of slave patrols is not of the same order as the violence evident in contemporary police actions, who may be involved in BOTH protecting moneyed interests as well as working to reduce crime in black communities.

Police Brutality – Then vs. Now

In the old days, (early 20th century),  police brutality was a concern for different reasons than it is today. At the turn of the century, most of the police force was made up of Irish Americans. That is to say, there was an important social class and ethnic identity component embedded in  the criticism of the police. Metropolitan police reformers were chiefly concerned with addressing the problem of corruption in cities. Of foremost concern was how police tended to be deeply embedded in the machine politics of cities. This made them a prime target for reform.

Some might argue that very little has changed in this regard. Police corruption is still a factor; however, it presents itself in different ways now.  Whereas in the late nineteenth century, it was about extracting extortion money from criminals. For instance, there were robust relationships between brothel madams and the police that created a community of interest between the two. Today, police corruption takes the form of either cooking the books on crime statistics or, as we saw in the case of the Illinois police officer very recently, embezzling department funds.

Why Does This History Matter Today?

Understanding the past role played by police can tell us a lot about the patterns of violence we see in our modern police forces. Instead of seeing  police brutality and the targeting of black people as a newly evolved “anomaly” we can see it for what it is: an echo of past practice. It is important to recognize the historical resonances that are present here if we ever hope to change some of the current problems in contemporary policing, especially as this relates to police violence in communities of color.

Lets take Ferguson Missouri as an example. The main reason police had so much contact with black people in Ferguson was related to financial developments there – namely, a loss of revenue due to imposed budget cuts. Given the weak tax base (a reflection of low property values), the police there compensated by generating alternative revenue in the form of fines. That is to say, they seized upon a community of poor people and attempted to extract something from them that they didn’t have –  money. Over time, the relationship with residents deteriorated to the point of boiling over into street violence.

While this is arguably somewhat different than in the late 19th. century, it shares some resonance, as law enforcement in Western areas of the U.S. often operated on a fee-based patronage system. Under this system of control, the U.S. government invested U.S. marshals with the power to extract fees from the population in the form of court fees. This gave rise to a system where the marshals would often arrest people for questionable offenses, as the goal was to generate revenue from court fees. That is similar to what happened in Ferguson (police, even though they are paid a salary, are still paid indirectly from fees and fines that are collected by the courts).

The lesson learned in the 19th. century that apparently still needs to be learned again is that when you provide incentives to police to fight crime for money, they will do what you ask them to do.

Police and Social Inequality

Consequently, even as the stated mission of the police has evolved to one that extols its ability to “Serve and Protect,” Vitale argues to contrary. He maintains that the police continue to operate, as evidenced by their actions and practice, that they remain consistent with their origins. According to Vitale:

The reality is that the police have always been at the root of a system for managing and producing inequality. This is accomplished by suppressing social movements and tightly managing the behaviors of poor and nonwhite people in ways that benefit those already in positions of economic and political power. Police have always functioned as a force for controlling those on the losing end of these economic and political arrangements, quelling social upheavals that could no longer be managed by existing private, communal, and informal processes. This can be seen in the earliest origins of policing, which were tied to three basic social arrangements of inequality in the 18^thcentury: slavery, colonialism, and the control of an industrial working class.

In short, policing was built upon the bulwark of slavery (and the very backs of slaves) as it unfolded in the Confederacy of the United States. The role of the slave patrols was not to simply operate as “hired hands” of plantations; police became embedded within the profit motive and raison d’etre of the plantations. Put another way, police protected white economic and cultural power; they shored up profitability by ensuring that a racialized group of people – black people – would be perpetually hunted, socially disenfranchised, and kept as property, if not always for the plantation, but  the state itself.

According to Vitale, “this created what Allan Silver called a “policed society,” in which state power was significantly expanded to face down the demands for justice from those subject to these systems of domination and exploitation. Or, as Kristian Williams points out, “the police represent the point of contact between the coercive apparatus of the state and the lives of its citizens.”

Serve and Protect Who?

The emphasis on the public safety mission of police, says Vitale, has partly been driven by the desire of more liberal politicians to legitimize the force in the eyes of the population. And, as Vitale points out, everyone wants to live in safe communities. But in the past few decades, as inequality has increased, police forces have both been expanded and given increasingly lethal weapons. Training, rather than emphasizing de-escalation techniques and respectful treatment of people, has been focused on promoting police safety through quick, violent reaction to perceived threats Vitale, 2017).

How Are Private Policing Agencies Bound Up in This History?

Long before there was a Federal Bureau of Investigation, there was the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. The agency was established in the United States by a Scotsman, Allan Pinkerton. Pinkerton was at one time the largest private law enforcement organization in the world. Historian Frank Morn writes: “By the mid-1850s a few businessmen saw the need for greater control over their employees; their solution was to sponsor a private detective system. In February 1855, Allan Pinkerton, after consulting with six Midwestern railroads, created such an agency in Chicago.”

Pinkerton’s agents performed a variety of services for the people who hired them; this included basic security guard work, strike-breaking, and private military contract work. 

During the labor strikes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, businessmen hired the Pinkerton Agency to infiltrate unions. They provided guards to help keep strikers and union organizers out of factories; in some cases, they were employed to intimidate workers. The Pinkertons were also employed as guards in coal, iron, and lumber disputes in states that included Illinois, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.

As Vitale Points out, the early police forces were created specifically to suppress workers’ movements. Pennsylvania, as it turns out, was home to some of the most militant unionism, resulting in numerous strikes and violent confrontations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Local police were sometimes sympathetic toward the workers who were often the bulk of local constituents, so mine and factory owners turned to the state to provide them with armed forces to control strikes and intimidate organizers.

The Coal and Iron Police committed numerous atrocities, including the Latimer Massacre of 1897, in which they killed 19 unarmed miners and wounded 32 others. The final straw was the Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902, in which miners and employers waged a pitched battle that lasted five months and created national coal shortages.

Pinkerton’s Landing Bridge, Homestead, Pa

The Battle of Homestead

One of the most famous and bloody strikes of the nineteenth century occurred in Homestead, Pennsylvania. In 1892, the wealthy industrialist Andrew Carnegie demanded production to be raised. This was a demand that the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers union refused.

The striking workers took control of the mill and sealed it off, effectively denying the company its own mill. Carnegie’s plant manager Henry Clay Frick then hired a police force of Pinkerton Detectives to take back the mill using armed force if necessary. Industrialists like Frick employed Pinkertons to spy on their unions. The police acted as strikebreakers and were often implicated as agents provocateurs, fomenting violence as a way of justifying their continued paychecks.

Three hundred Pinkerton Detectives armed with rifles boarded barges and sailed up the river in the early hours of July 6, 1892. After arriving at the plant on the river barges, the Pinkerton agents squared off with thousands of striking workers in an all-day battle waged with guns, bricks, and even dynamite. But as it turned out, the strikers had discovered the plan and roused the town at 2:00 a.m. to defend the plant from the Pinkerton invasion. When the private police force made landfall they were meet with thousands of strikers and their families, who worked together to drive them off.

Before this, the State of Pennsylvania’s initial response to the uprising had been to authorize a privatized police – the Coal and Iron Police. Local employers had only to pay a commission fee of $1 dollar each to deputize anyone of their choosing to be an officer of the law working directly for the employer, under the supervision of the Pinkertons or other private security forces.

In the end, the vastly outnumbered Pinkertons surrendered. More than a dozen people were left dead ( 3 Pinkertons and 6 steelworkers) and others were wounded. On November 20, the strike officially ended and Carnegie achieved control over his labor force again.

The fallout from the melee crippled the steel union, but it also branded the Pinkertons as “hired thugs,” leading several states to pass laws banning the use of outside guards in labor disputes. In the aftermath, political leaders and employers decided that a new, more legitimate-seeming system of labor management was needed, to be paid for out of the public coffers. The result was the creation of the Pennsylvania State Police in 1905.

While Frick’s hardline stance ultimately led to the demise of the union the Pinkertons role in the conflict helped cement their reputation as the paramilitary wing of big business. Anarchists would later unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Frick. The broken union in Homestead eventually joined the United Steel Workers, formed later in 1942. The Homestead Strike still stands out in history as an example of how difficult it remains for unions to contest the power of management and secure the interests of workers.

“Pinkerton’s Landing Bridge,” as it is now known, is the nickname given to the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad Bridge at Munhall. The bridge crosses the Monongahela River between Muhall, Pa and Rankin, Pa.

Other Pinkerton confrontations that are noteworthy include the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and the Battle of Blair Mountain (West Virginia) in 1921.

Pinkertons Inspired the Term “Private Eye”

The Pinkerton agency first made its name in the late-1850s for hunting down outlaws and providing private security for railroads. As the company’s profile grew, its iconic logo—a large, unblinking eye accompanied by the slogan “We Never Sleep”—gave rise to the term “private eye” as a nickname for detectives.

Pinkertons Hired the Nation’s First Female Detective

In 1856, 23-year-old widow Kate Warne walked into Pinkerton’s Chicago office and requested a job as a detective. Allan Pinkerton was hesitant to hire a female investigator, but he gave in after Warne convinced him that she could “worm out secrets in many places to which it was impossible for male detectives to gain access.” True to her word, Warne proved to be an expert at working undercover, once busting a thief by cozying up to his wife and convincing her to reveal the location of the loot. During another case, she got a suspect to feed her crucial information by disguising herself as a fortune-teller. Pinkerton would later list Warne as one of the best investigators he ever hired. Following her death in 1868, he even had her buried in his family plot.

Molly Maguires

In the 1870s, Franklin B. Gowen, President of the Philadelphia Reading Railroad, hired the agency to “investigate” its labor unions in the company’s mines. When mine owners and managers docked pay and benefits, some Mollies, as they were known to locals, killed whoever stood in the Irish miner’s way of a better life.  A Pinkerton agent, James McParland,  using the alias “James McKenna”, infiltrated the Molly Maguires, a 19th-century secret-society of mainly Irish-American coal miners, which ultimately lead to the downfall of the labor organization.

Molly Maguires

Pinkertons May Have Foiled a Presidential Assassination Attempt

Shortly before Abraham Lincoln’s first inauguration in March 1861, Allan Pinkerton traveled to Baltimore on a mission for a railroad company. He was investigating rumors that Southern sympathizers might sabotage the rail lines to Washington, D.C., but while gathering undercover intelligence, he learned that a secret cabal also planned to assassinate Lincoln, who was at that time on a whistle-stop tour, as he switched trains in Baltimore on his way to the capital.

Pinkerton tracked down the president-elect and informed him of the alleged plot. With the help of Kate Warne and several other agents, he then arranged for Lincoln to secretly board an overnight train and pass through Baltimore several hours ahead of his published schedule. Pinkerton operatives also cut telegraph lines to ensure the conspirators couldn’t communicate with one another, and Warne had Lincoln pose as her invalid brother to cover up his identity. The president-elect arrived safely in Washington the next morning, but his decision to skirt through Baltimore saw him lampooned and labeled a coward in the press. Meanwhile, none of the would-be assassins was ever arrested, leading some historians to conclude that the threat may have been exaggerated or even invented by Pinkerton.

Pinkertons Spied for the Union Army During the Civil War

Allan Pinkerton was a staunch abolitionist and Union man, and during the Civil War, he organized a secret intelligence service for General George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac. Operating under the name E.J. Allen, Pinkerton set up spy rings behind enemy lines and infiltrated southern sympathizer groups in the North. He even had agents interview escaped slaves to glean information about the Confederacy.

Pinkertons Created One of the First Criminal Databases

One of the many ways the Pinkertons revolutionized law enforcement was with their so-called “Rogues’ Gallery,” a collection of mug shots and case histories that the agency used to research and keep track of wanted men. Along with noting suspects’ distinguishing marks and scars, agents also collected newspaper clippings and generated rap sheets detailing their previous arrests, known associates and areas of expertise. A more sophisticated criminal library wouldn’t be assembled until the early 20th century and the birth of the FBI.

Pinkerton Detectives guarding the coffin of actress Marilyn Monroe, 1962

Modern Era

Due to its history of conflicts with labor unions, the name Pinkerton continues to evoke negative associations. Pinkertons evolved over the course of time and diversified from labor spying following revelations publicized by the La Follette Committee hearings in 1937.  The firm’s criminal detection work likewise suffered from the police modernization movement. Calls for increased police professionalization saw the rise of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the bolstering of detective services offered by local police forces. All of these developments caused the Pinkertons influence to diminish over time.

In 1999, the company was bought by Securitas AB, a Swedish security company. This was followed by the acquisition of a longtime Pinkerton rival, the William J. Burns Detective Agency, to create an additional division, Securitas Security Services USA. The company thus continues to live on as a private security firm and guard service, however, it operates under the shortened name “Pinkerton.”

So What Do We Do Now? How Do We Fix the Police?

Vitale argues we need to rethink the role of policing and to reduce the ways in which police are used in our society. Does that mean we should eliminate police forces altogether? Probably not. History doesn’t have to be the template from which we base our present operations. We can and must find a way to chart a path so that we can realize a more progressive form of policing that serves our modern society; one that is not based on reinforcing and exacerbating existing social inequalities.

As Vitale argues, we need people who are trained to deal with our most vulnerable and difficult populations; people who understand their point of view and who take seriously their role to help them, not just arrest, restrain and control them.

Beyond that, we need to deal with the manifest social problems that derive from maintaining a society in which large parts of the population are considered surplus or undeserving.

Sources

“The Myth of Liberal Policing,” by Alex Vitale, 2017.

The End of Policing, by Alex Vitale, 2017.

“10 Things You May Not Know About the Pinkertons,” by Evan Andrews, 2015

Consequently, while the stated mission of the police might have changed to “Serve and Protect,” Vitale argues that they continue to operate, as demonstrated by police practice, in ways that are consistent with their origins. Vitale argues:

The reality is that the police have always been at the root of a system for managing and producing inequality. This is accomplished by suppressing social movements and tightly managing the behaviors of poor and nonwhite people in ways that benefit those already in positions of economic and political power. Police have always functioned as a force for controlling those on the losing end of these economic and political arrangements, quelling social upheavals that could no longer be managed by existing private, communal, and informal processes.

This can be seen in the earliest origins of policing, which were tied to three basic social arrangements of inequality in the 18^thcentury: slavery, colonialism, and the control of an industrial working class.

In other words, policing was built upon the bulwark of slavery (and the backs of slaves) as this unfolded in the old Confederacy of the United States. The role of the slave patrols was not to simply operate as “hired hands” of plantations; they were embedded deep into the profit motive and raison d’etre of the plantations. Put another way, they protected white economic and cultural power; they shored up profitability by ensuring that a racialized group of black people would be perpetually hunted, socially disenfranchised, and kept as property, if not for the plantation, but rather for the state.

According to Vitale, “this created what Allan Silver called a “policed society,” in which state power was significantly expanded to face down the demands for justice from those subject to these systems of domination and exploitation. As Kristian Williams points out, “the police represent the point of contact between the coercive apparatus of the state and the lives of its citizens.”

The emphasis on the public safety mission of police, says Vitale, has partly been driven by the desire of more liberal politicians to legitimize the force in the eyes of the population. And, as Vitale points out, everyone wants to live in safe communities. But in the past few decades, as inequality has increased, police forces have both been expanded and given increasingly lethal weapons. Training, rather than emphasizing de-escalation techniques and respectful treatment of people, has been focused on promoting police safety through quick, violent reaction to perceived threats Vitale, 2017).

[Definition of “Liberal State”: Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy that espouses the values of liberty and equality. Liberal democracies espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but they generally support civil rights, democratic ideals, secular government, gender and racial equality, freedom of speech, press, and religion. Liberalism became a distinct movement during the Age of the Enlightenment when it became popular with Western philosophers and economists. Refuting norms of power based on heredity, monarchy, and the divine right of kings, liberalism sought to replace them with traditional conservatism, representative democracy, and rule of law. French liberalism emphasized rejecting authoritarianism linked to nation-building].

How Are Private Policing Agencies Bound Up in This History?

Long before there was a Federal Bureau of Investigation, there was the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. The agency was established in the United States by a Scotsman, Allan Pinkerton. Pinkerton was at one time the largest private law enforcement organization in the world. Historian Frank Morn writes: “By the mid-1850s a few businessmen saw the need for greater control over their employees; their solution was to sponsor a private detective system. In February 1855, Allan Pinkerton, after consulting with six Midwestern railroads, created such an agency in Chicago.”

Pinkerton’s agents performed a variety of services for the people who hired them; this included basic security guard work, strike-breaking, and private military contract work. 

During the labor strikes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, businessmen hired the Pinkerton Agency to infiltrate unions. They provided guards to help keep strikers and union organizers out of factories; in some cases, they were employed to intimidate workers. The Pinkertons were also employed as guards in coal, iron, and lumber disputes in states that included Illinois, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.

As Vitale Points out, the early police forces were created specifically to suppress workers’ movements. Pennsylvania, as it turns out, was home to some of the most militant unionism, resulting in numerous strikes and violent confrontations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Local police were sometimes sympathetic toward the workers who were often the bulk of local constituents, so mine and factory owners turned to the state to provide them with armed forces to control strikes and intimidate organizers.

The Coal and Iron Police committed numerous atrocities, including the Latimer Massacre of 1897, in which they killed 19 unarmed miners and wounded 32 others. The final straw was the Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902, in which miners and employers waged a pitched battle that lasted five months and created national coal shortages.

Pinkerton’s Landing Bridge, Homestead, Pa

The Battle of Homestead

One of the most famous and bloody strikes of the nineteenth century occurred in Homestead, Pennsylvania. In 1892, the wealthy industrialist Andrew Carnegie demanded production to be raised. This was a demand that the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers union refused.

The striking workers took control of the mill and sealed it off, effectively denying the company its own mill. Carnegie’s plant manager Henry Clay Frick then hired a police force of Pinkerton Detectives to take back the mill using armed force if necessary. Industrialists like Frick employed Pinkertons to spy on their unions. The police acted as strikebreakers and were often implicated as agents provocateurs, fomenting violence as a way of justifying their continued paychecks.

Three hundred Pinkerton Detectives armed with rifles boarded barges and sailed up the river in the early hours of July 6, 1892. After arriving at the plant on the river barges, the Pinkerton agents squared off with thousands of striking workers in an all-day battle waged with guns, bricks, and even dynamite. But as it turned out, the strikers had discovered the plan and roused the town at 2:00 a.m. to defend the plant from the Pinkerton invasion. When the private police force made landfall they were meet with thousands of strikers and their families, who worked together to drive them off.

Before this, the State of Pennsylvania’s initial response to the uprising had been to authorize a privatized police – the Coal and Iron Police. Local employers had only to pay a commission fee of $1 dollar each to deputize anyone of their choosing to be an officer of the law working directly for the employer, under the supervision of the Pinkertons or other private security forces.

In the end, the vastly outnumbered Pinkertons surrendered. More than a dozen people were left dead ( 3 Pinkertons and 6 steelworkers) and others were wounded. On November 20, the strike officially ended and Carnegie achieved control over his labor force again.

The fallout from the melee crippled the steel union, but it also branded the Pinkertons as “hired thugs,” leading several states to pass laws banning the use of outside guards in labor disputes. In the aftermath, political leaders and employers decided that a new, more legitimate-seeming system of labor management was needed, to be paid for out of the public coffers. The result was the creation of the Pennsylvania State Police in 1905.

While Frick’s hardline stance ultimately led to the demise of the union the Pinkertons role in the conflict helped cement their reputation as the paramilitary wing of big business. Anarchists would later unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Frick. The broken union in Homestead eventually joined the United Steel Workers, formed later in 1942. The Homestead Strike still stands out in history as an example of how difficult it remains for unions to contest the power of management and secure the interests of workers.

“Pinkerton’s Landing Bridge,” as it is now known, is the nickname given to the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad Bridge at Munhall. The bridge crosses the Monongahela River between Muhall, Pa and Rankin, Pa.

Other Pinkerton confrontations that are noteworthy include the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and the Battle of Blair Mountain (West Virginia) in 1921.

Pinkertons Inspired the Term “Private Eye”

The Pinkerton agency first made its name in the late-1850s for hunting down outlaws and providing private security for railroads. As the company’s profile grew, its iconic logo—a large, unblinking eye accompanied by the slogan “We Never Sleep”—gave rise to the term “private eye” as a nickname for detectives.

Pinkertons Hired the Nation’s First Female Detective

In 1856, 23-year-old widow Kate Warne walked into Pinkerton’s Chicago office and requested a job as a detective. Allan Pinkerton was hesitant to hire a female investigator, but he gave in after Warne convinced him that she could “worm out secrets in many places to which it was impossible for male detectives to gain access.” True to her word, Warne proved to be an expert at working undercover, once busting a thief by cozying up to his wife and convincing her to reveal the location of the loot. During another case, she got a suspect to feed her crucial information by disguising herself as a fortune-teller. Pinkerton would later list Warne as one of the best investigators he ever hired. Following her death in 1868, he even had her buried in his family plot.

Molly Maguires

In the 1870s, Franklin B. Gowen, President of the Philadelphia Reading Railroad, hired the agency to “investigate” its labor unions in the company’s mines. When mine owners and managers docked pay and benefits, some Mollies, as they were known to locals, killed whoever stood in the Irish miner’s way of a better life.  A Pinkerton agent, James McParland,  using the alias “James McKenna”, infiltrated the Molly Maguires, a 19th-century secret-society of mainly Irish-American coal miners, which ultimately lead to the downfall of the labor organization.

Molly Maguires

Pinkertons May Have Foiled a Presidential Assassination Attempt

Shortly before Abraham Lincoln’s first inauguration in March 1861, Allan Pinkerton traveled to Baltimore on a mission for a railroad company. He was investigating rumors that Southern sympathizers might sabotage the rail lines to Washington, D.C., but while gathering undercover intelligence, he learned that a secret cabal also planned to assassinate Lincoln, who was at that time on a whistle-stop tour, as he switched trains in Baltimore on his way to the capital.

Pinkerton tracked down the president-elect and informed him of the alleged plot. With the help of Kate Warne and several other agents, he then arranged for Lincoln to secretly board an overnight train and pass through Baltimore several hours ahead of his published schedule. Pinkerton operatives also cut telegraph lines to ensure the conspirators couldn’t communicate with one another, and Warne had Lincoln pose as her invalid brother to cover up his identity. The president-elect arrived safely in Washington the next morning, but his decision to skirt through Baltimore saw him lampooned and labeled a coward in the press. Meanwhile, none of the would-be assassins was ever arrested, leading some historians to conclude that the threat may have been exaggerated or even invented by Pinkerton.

Pinkertons Spied for the Union Army During the Civil War

Allan Pinkerton was a staunch abolitionist and Union man, and during the Civil War, he organized a secret intelligence service for General George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac. Operating under the name E.J. Allen, Pinkerton set up spy rings behind enemy lines and infiltrated southern sympathizer groups in the North. He even had agents interview escaped slaves to glean information about the Confederacy.

Pinkertons Created One of the First Criminal Databases

One of the many ways the Pinkertons revolutionized law enforcement was with their so-called “Rogues’ Gallery,” a collection of mug shots and case histories that the agency used to research and keep track of wanted men. Along with noting suspects’ distinguishing marks and scars, agents also collected newspaper clippings and generated rap sheets detailing their previous arrests, known associates and areas of expertise. A more sophisticated criminal library wouldn’t be assembled until the early 20th century and the birth of the FBI.

Pinkerton Detectives guarding the coffin of actress Marilyn Monroe, 1962

Modern Era

Due to its history of conflicts with labor unions, the name Pinkerton continues to evoke negative associations. Pinkertons evolved over the course of time and diversified from labor spying following revelations publicized by the La Follette Committee hearings in 1937.  The firm’s criminal detection work likewise suffered from the police modernization movement. Calls for increased police professionalization saw the rise of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the bolstering of detective services offered by local police forces. All of these developments caused the Pinkertons influence to diminish over time.

In 1999, the company was bought by Securitas AB, a Swedish security company. This was followed by the acquisition of a longtime Pinkerton rival, the William J. Burns Detective Agency, to create an additional division, Securitas Security Services USA. The company thus continues to live on as a private security firm and guard service, however, it operates under the shortened name “Pinkerton.”

So What Do We Do Now? How Do We Fix the Police?

Vitale argues we need to rethink the role of policing and to reduce the ways in which police are used in our society. Does that mean we should eliminate police forces altogether? Probably not. History doesn’t have to be the template from which we base our present operations. We can and must find a way to chart a path so that we can realize a more progressive form of policing that serves our modern society; one that is not based on reinforcing and exacerbating existing social inequalities.

As Vitale argues, we need people who are trained to deal with our most vulnerable and difficult populations; people who understand their point of view and who take seriously their role to help them, not just arrest, restrain and control them.

Beyond that, we need to deal with the manifest social problems that derive from maintaining a society in which large parts of the population are considered surplus or undeserving.

Sources

“The Myth of Liberal Policing,” by Alex Vitale, 2017.

The End of Policing, by Alex Vitale, 2017.

“10 Things You May Not Know About the Pinkertons,” by Evan Andrews, 2015

Consequently, while the stated mission of the police might have changed to “Serve and Protect,” Vitale argues that they continue to operate, as demonstrated by police practice, in ways that are consistent with their origins. Vitale argues:

The reality is that the police have always been at the root of a system for managing and producing inequality. This is accomplished by suppressing social movements and tightly managing the behaviors of poor and nonwhite people in ways that benefit those already in positions of economic and political power. Police have always functioned as a force for controlling those on the losing end of these economic and political arrangements, quelling social upheavals that could no longer be managed by existing private, communal, and informal processes.

This can be seen in the earliest origins of policing, which were tied to three basic social arrangements of inequality in the 18^thcentury: slavery, colonialism, and the control of an industrial working class.

In other words, policing was built upon the bulwark of slavery (and the backs of slaves) as this unfolded in the old Confederacy of the United States. The role of the slave patrols was not to simply operate as “hired hands” of plantations; they were embedded deep into the profit motive and raison d’etre of the plantations. Put another way, they protected white economic and cultural power; they shored up profitability by ensuring that a racialized group of black people would be perpetually hunted, socially disenfranchised, and kept as property, if not for the plantation, but rather for the state.

According to Vitale, “this created what Allan Silver called a “policed society,” in which state power was significantly expanded to face down the demands for justice from those subject to these systems of domination and exploitation. As Kristian Williams points out, “the police represent the point of contact between the coercive apparatus of the state and the lives of its citizens.”

The emphasis on the public safety mission of police, says Vitale, has partly been driven by the desire of more liberal politicians to legitimize the force in the eyes of the population. And, as Vitale points out, everyone wants to live in safe communities. But in the past few decades, as inequality has increased, police forces have both been expanded and given increasingly lethal weapons. Training, rather than emphasizing de-escalation techniques and respectful treatment of people, has been focused on promoting police safety through quick, violent reaction to perceived threats Vitale, 2017).

[Definition of “Liberal State”: Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy that espouses the values of liberty and equality. Liberal democracies espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but they generally support civil rights, democratic ideals, secular government, gender and racial equality, freedom of speech, press, and religion. Liberalism became a distinct movement during the Age of the Enlightenment when it became popular with Western philosophers and economists. Refuting norms of power based on heredity, monarchy, and the divine right of kings, liberalism sought to replace them with traditional conservatism, representative democracy, and rule of law. French liberalism emphasized rejecting authoritarianism linked to nation-building].

How Are Private Policing Agencies Bound Up in This History?

Long before there was a Federal Bureau of Investigation, there was the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. The agency was established in the United States by a Scotsman, Allan Pinkerton. Pinkerton was at one time the largest private law enforcement organization in the world. Historian Frank Morn writes: “By the mid-1850s a few businessmen saw the need for greater control over their employees; their solution was to sponsor a private detective system. In February 1855, Allan Pinkerton, after consulting with six Midwestern railroads, created such an agency in Chicago.”

Pinkerton’s agents performed a variety of services for the people who hired them; this included basic security guard work, strike-breaking, and private military contract work. 

During the labor strikes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, businessmen hired the Pinkerton Agency to infiltrate unions. They provided guards to help keep strikers and union organizers out of factories; in some cases, they were employed to intimidate workers. The Pinkertons were also employed as guards in coal, iron, and lumber disputes in states that included Illinois, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.

As Vitale Points out, the early police forces were created specifically to suppress workers’ movements. Pennsylvania, as it turns out, was home to some of the most militant unionism, resulting in numerous strikes and violent confrontations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Local police were sometimes sympathetic toward the workers who were often the bulk of local constituents, so mine and factory owners turned to the state to provide them with armed forces to control strikes and intimidate organizers.

The Coal and Iron Police committed numerous atrocities, including the Latimer Massacre of 1897, in which they killed 19 unarmed miners and wounded 32 others. The final straw was the Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902, in which miners and employers waged a pitched battle that lasted five months and created national coal shortages.

Pinkerton’s Landing Bridge, Homestead, Pa

The Battle of Homestead

One of the most famous and bloody strikes of the nineteenth century occurred in Homestead, Pennsylvania. In 1892, the wealthy industrialist Andrew Carnegie demanded production to be raised. This was a demand that the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers union refused.

The striking workers took control of the mill and sealed it off, effectively denying the company its own mill. Carnegie’s plant manager Henry Clay Frick then hired a police force of Pinkerton Detectives to take back the mill using armed force if necessary. Industrialists like Frick employed Pinkertons to spy on their unions. The police acted as strikebreakers and were often implicated as agents provocateurs, fomenting violence as a way of justifying their continued paychecks.

Three hundred Pinkerton Detectives armed with rifles boarded barges and sailed up the river in the early hours of July 6, 1892. After arriving at the plant on the river barges, the Pinkerton agents squared off with thousands of striking workers in an all-day battle waged with guns, bricks, and even dynamite. But as it turned out, the strikers had discovered the plan and roused the town at 2:00 a.m. to defend the plant from the Pinkerton invasion. When the private police force made landfall they were meet with thousands of strikers and their families, who worked together to drive them off.

Before this, the State of Pennsylvania’s initial response to the uprising had been to authorize a privatized police – the Coal and Iron Police. Local employers had only to pay a commission fee of $1 dollar each to deputize anyone of their choosing to be an officer of the law working directly for the employer, under the supervision of the Pinkertons or other private security forces.

In the end, the vastly outnumbered Pinkertons surrendered. More than a dozen people were left dead ( 3 Pinkertons and 6 steelworkers) and others were wounded. On November 20, the strike officially ended and Carnegie achieved control over his labor force again.

The fallout from the melee crippled the steel union, but it also branded the Pinkertons as “hired thugs,” leading several states to pass laws banning the use of outside guards in labor disputes. In the aftermath, political leaders and employers decided that a new, more legitimate-seeming system of labor management was needed, to be paid for out of the public coffers. The result was the creation of the Pennsylvania State Police in 1905.

While Frick’s hardline stance ultimately led to the demise of the union the Pinkertons role in the conflict helped cement their reputation as the paramilitary wing of big business. Anarchists would later unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Frick. The broken union in Homestead eventually joined the United Steel Workers, formed later in 1942. The Homestead Strike still stands out in history as an example of how difficult it remains for unions to contest the power of management and secure the interests of workers.

“Pinkerton’s Landing Bridge,” as it is now known, is the nickname given to the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad Bridge at Munhall. The bridge crosses the Monongahela River between Muhall, Pa and Rankin, Pa.

Other Pinkerton confrontations that are noteworthy include the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and the Battle of Blair Mountain (West Virginia) in 1921.

Pinkertons Inspired the Term “Private Eye”

The Pinkerton agency first made its name in the late-1850s for hunting down outlaws and providing private security for railroads. As the company’s profile grew, its iconic logo—a large, unblinking eye accompanied by the slogan “We Never Sleep”—gave rise to the term “private eye” as a nickname for detectives.

Pinkertons Hired the Nation’s First Female Detective

In 1856, 23-year-old widow Kate Warne walked into Pinkerton’s Chicago office and requested a job as a detective. Allan Pinkerton was hesitant to hire a female investigator, but he gave in after Warne convinced him that she could “worm out secrets in many places to which it was impossible for male detectives to gain access.” True to her word, Warne proved to be an expert at working undercover, once busting a thief by cozying up to his wife and convincing her to reveal the location of the loot. During another case, she got a suspect to feed her crucial information by disguising herself as a fortune-teller. Pinkerton would later list Warne as one of the best investigators he ever hired. Following her death in 1868, he even had her buried in his family plot.

Molly Maguires

In the 1870s, Franklin B. Gowen, President of the Philadelphia Reading Railroad, hired the agency to “investigate” its labor unions in the company’s mines. When mine owners and managers docked pay and benefits, some Mollies, as they were known to locals, killed whoever stood in the Irish miner’s way of a better life.  A Pinkerton agent, James McParland,  using the alias “James McKenna”, infiltrated the Molly Maguires, a 19th-century secret-society of mainly Irish-American coal miners, which ultimately lead to the downfall of the labor organization.

Molly Maguires

Pinkertons May Have Foiled a Presidential Assassination Attempt

Shortly before Abraham Lincoln’s first inauguration in March 1861, Allan Pinkerton traveled to Baltimore on a mission for a railroad company. He was investigating rumors that Southern sympathizers might sabotage the rail lines to Washington, D.C., but while gathering undercover intelligence, he learned that a secret cabal also planned to assassinate Lincoln, who was at that time on a whistle-stop tour, as he switched trains in Baltimore on his way to the capital.

Pinkerton tracked down the president-elect and informed him of the alleged plot. With the help of Kate Warne and several other agents, he then arranged for Lincoln to secretly board an overnight train and pass through Baltimore several hours ahead of his published schedule. Pinkerton operatives also cut telegraph lines to ensure the conspirators couldn’t communicate with one another, and Warne had Lincoln pose as her invalid brother to cover up his identity. The president-elect arrived safely in Washington the next morning, but his decision to skirt through Baltimore saw him lampooned and labeled a coward in the press. Meanwhile, none of the would-be assassins was ever arrested, leading some historians to conclude that the threat may have been exaggerated or even invented by Pinkerton.

Pinkertons Spied for the Union Army During the Civil War

Allan Pinkerton was a staunch abolitionist and Union man, and during the Civil War, he organized a secret intelligence service for General George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac. Operating under the name E.J. Allen, Pinkerton set up spy rings behind enemy lines and infiltrated southern sympathizer groups in the North. He even had agents interview escaped slaves to glean information about the Confederacy.

Pinkertons Created One of the First Criminal Databases

One of the many ways the Pinkertons revolutionized law enforcement was with their so-called “Rogues’ Gallery,” a collection of mug shots and case histories that the agency used to research and keep track of wanted men. Along with noting suspects’ distinguishing marks and scars, agents also collected newspaper clippings and generated rap sheets detailing their previous arrests, known associates and areas of expertise. A more sophisticated criminal library wouldn’t be assembled until the early 20th century and the birth of the FBI.

Pinkerton Detectives guarding the coffin of actress Marilyn Monroe, 1962

Modern Era

Due to its history of conflicts with labor unions, the name Pinkerton continues to evoke negative associations. Pinkertons evolved over the course of time and diversified from labor spying following revelations publicized by the La Follette Committee hearings in 1937.  The firm’s criminal detection work likewise suffered from the police modernization movement. Calls for increased police professionalization saw the rise of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the bolstering of detective services offered by local police forces. All of these developments caused the Pinkertons influence to diminish over time.

In 1999, the company was bought by Securitas AB, a Swedish security company. This was followed by the acquisition of a longtime Pinkerton rival, the William J. Burns Detective Agency, to create an additional division, Securitas Security Services USA. The company thus continues to live on as a private security firm and guard service, however, it operates under the shortened name “Pinkerton.”

So What Do We Do Now? How Do We Fix the Police?

Vitale argues we need to rethink the role of policing and to reduce the ways in which police are used in our society. Does that mean we should eliminate police forces altogether? Probably not. History doesn’t have to be the template from which we base our present operations. We can and must find a way to chart a path so that we can realize a more progressive form of policing that serves our modern society; one that is not based on reinforcing and exacerbating existing social inequalities.

As Vitale argues, we need people who are trained to deal with our most vulnerable and difficult populations; people who understand their point of view and who take seriously their role to help them, not just arrest, restrain and control them.

Beyond that, we need to deal with the manifest social problems that derive from maintaining a society in which large parts of the population are considered surplus or undeserving.

Sources

“The Myth of Liberal Policing,” by Alex Vitale, 2017.

The End of Policing, by Alex Vitale, 2017.

“10 Things You May Not Know About the Pinkertons,” by Evan Andrews, 2015

Poverty in America

Considering how an estimated 43.1 million Americans live in poverty (14%) and one in every 31 adults in the United States are under some form of penal control (one out of eleven African American men), no one can claim that important aspects of our society are not fundamentally “broken” in the United States. This issue is taken up by Elizabeth Hinton in her 2016 book From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America.

In this book, her research question is a simple one: how did the “land of the free” become the home of the world’s largest prison system?

Challenging the belief that America’s prison problem simply originated with the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs, Hinton reveals the bipartisan Federal roots of mass incarceration in the United States. To really understand what went wrong, she argues that we have to go back to the administrations of Johnson and Kennedy to learn about how the programs were originally launched.

Hinton, in other words, challenges the prevailing understanding of mass incarceration (that it simply started with Reagan). Instead, she locates the seeds of mass incarceration within an ironic source: the era of liberal reform and the social welfare programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which occurred at the height of the civil rights era. Johnson’s poverty policies sought to foster equality and economic opportunity. But these initiatives were also rooted in widely shared assumptions about African Americans’ role in urban disorder, which prompted Johnson to call for a simultaneous war on crime.

Briefly put, Hinton shows us how federal policy helped drive up the number of people incarcerated by or under the supervision of the criminal justice system. On the flip side, considering how much effort was put into “making” this problem, we can similarly invest effort to unmake it.

I Knew the Welfare State Was Evil!

Before you lapse into thinking “Of course, welfare programs are a waste of money and they make people lazy/criminal” you should note that this is not Hinton’s argument. She’s making a far more nuanced argument than is typically related through the lens of partisan politics by directing us to follow the policy and law changes over time.

This need that people have, which is to reduce understanding of important issues to mere partisan politics (left vs. right or liberal vs. conservative) gets in the way of attaining a full understanding of what went wrong and what continues to go wrong. Consequently, people are left to think that it is simply too difficult to fix the problems.

Hinton is not saying that social welfare programs and poor people themselves are the cause of poverty and mass incarceration. Nor is she reducing what is a massive problem to a technical debate over a narrow set of economic issues. The story she is telling is more complicated.  For as it turns out, the road to failure, not surprisingly, is often paved with good intentions.

Hinton’s work reflects the methodological approach of a careful historian. That is, she argues by pointing to data and information contained in archival records, taking care to excavate and cite specific programs, policies, and laws, which she argues worked together and failed over the course of successive presidential administrations.

One of her aims is to challenge conventional thinking, which is to simply locate the beginning of the mass incarceration problems with Reagan era policies – this is a major point of distinction and represents an important contribution to scholarship. Now, let’s hold this thought for a moment because we need to unpack things a bit before examining Hinton’s claims.

First, we need to agree on an operational definition of things like “poverty” and how we measure it before we proceed to examine the poverty/crime/mass incarceration connection. Anything short of this prevents an evaluation of truth claims in regards to how or whether or not poverty increased/decreased over time. Likewise, it makes it difficult to evaluate whether or not government stimulus is an essential and viable mechanism to engage as well as accomplish poverty problem-solving.

Robert Kennedy on Gates Avenue, Brooklyn, New York

How Do We Define and Measure Poverty?

Poverty is measured in many different ways by not only governments but also international organizations, policymakers and practitioners. Typically, poverty is understood as multidimensional comprising social, natural, and economic factors situated within wider socio-political processes.

Poverty is understood based on the terms “absolute” and “relative” poverty. Absolute poverty refers to a set standard that is consistent over time and between countries. One example of an absolute measurement takes as a measure the percentage of a given population eating less food than is required to sustain the human body (approximately 2000–2500 calories per day).

By way of contrast, relative poverty privileges poverty within a social context. One relative measurement would be to compare the total wealth of the poorest one-third of the population with the total wealth of the richest 1% of the population. In this case, the number of people counted as poor could increase even as income levels rise.

There are several different income inequality metrics. One that is common is referred to as the Gini coefficient. This is by far the most common measure of social inequality. The Gini coefficient measures the inequality among values of a frequency distribution (i.e. levels of income). A Gini coefficient of zero expresses perfect equality, where all values are the same (for example, where everyone has the same income). For OECD countries, in the late 20th century, the income Gini coefficient in 2014 ranged between 0.24 and 0.49, with Slovenia exhibiting the lowest inequality and Chile exhibiting the highest.

Absolute poverty, however, is more common in developing countries, even though poverty and inequality exist across the world.

The main poverty line used by OECD countries and the European Union is a relative poverty measure based on “economic distance,” a level of income usually set at 60% of the median household income.

In the United States, the U.S. Census Bureau counts people in poverty by using two measures: the official and supplemental poverty measures are based on estimates of the level of income needed to cover basic needs.

Both the official and supplemental poverty measures are annual estimates based on a sampling of U.S. households. In 2016, the Current Population Survey (CPS) Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) was sent to about 95,000 U.S. households across the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Since the CPS is a household survey, the sample excludes many who might otherwise be considered to be living in poverty. For example, the sample excludes those who are homeless and not living in shelters. It also excludes military personnel who do not live with at least one civilian adult, as well as people in institutions such as prisons, long-term care hospitals, and nursing homes.

The supplemental poverty measure (SPM) provides a more complex statistical understanding of poverty by including money income from all sources, including government programs, and an estimate of real household expenditures. This information is valuable, but this measure’s thresholds are not the basis for government program income eligibility.

Measuring Poverty in the United States

The Federal initiative to establish a poverty level originated during President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. His administration developed the guideline to function as a policy tool to help eradicate poverty.  In his Inaugural address, Johnson challenged “the richest nation on earth” to win the war on poverty. His declaration of “war” in this instance created many of today’s social welfare programs.

Following the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Statistical Policy Directive 14, the Census Bureau uses a set of money income thresholds that vary by family size and composition to determine who is in poverty. Those who live in households with earnings below those incomes are considered to be living in poverty.

HHS prefers the term “poverty guidelines” instead of “poverty level” because it is considered to be more precise. Nonetheless, people still use the term poverty level or “poverty line” to describe poverty guidelines and the federal poverty threshold. The official poverty threshold does not vary geographically, but it is adjusted for inflation using the Consumer Price Index (CPI-U).

The official poverty threshold is computed using money income before taxes (it does not include capital gains or noncash benefits such as money benefits for public housing, Medicaid, and food stamps).

Put simply, the poverty threshold for a household of four in 2022 is an annual income of $27,750.

Programs That Use Poverty Guidelines

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is available to those who earn 130 percent of the federal poverty level. Households must also have less than $3,500 in assets with an elderly or disabled person or $2,250 or less in households without an elderly or disabled member.

Medicaid is available to families whose income is 138 percent of the poverty level.

The Affordable Care Act provides insurance subsidies for households between 138 percent and 400 percent of the poverty level.

Other programs include Head Start, the National School Lunch Program, the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

Note that Federal programs that hand out cash don’t use the poverty guidelines. These programs include Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Supplemental Security Income.

1964 – LBJ’s Great Society

In 1964 “The Great Society” was a set of domestic programs in the United States launched by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson had been sworn in as President of the United States after the killing of President John F. Kennedy. The year 1964 also saw the passage of the Civil Rights Act and marked the launching of the War on Poverty.

Inspired by the previous efforts of President Kennedy and his New Frontier, Johnson pledged to fulfill his promise of equal opportunity for all by enacting several comprehensive changes within the federal government. In August of that same year, the Economic Opportunity Act was signed into law by President Johnson creating the nationwide Community Action Network.

No doubt Johnson was also keenly focused on reelection that year (1964), and as a result, Johnson set into motion his ideas for a Great Society, which turned out to be the largest social reform plan in modern history. The Great Society, in terms of its breadth and scope, shared much in common with former President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda. Johnson first used the term “Great Society” during a speech at Ohio University on May 7, 1964, he described “a society where no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled.”

Often invoked interchangeably with the “War on Poverty,” Johnson’s Great Society antipoverty programs were ambitious, to say the least. He wanted nothing less than to create an opportunity for every citizen to maximize their abilities so they might reach their fullest potential. As he put it in an another expansive speech given weeks later at the University of Michigan, “The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all.” It was here that he vowed he would lead an effort to put “an end to poverty and racial injustice.”

Kennedy’s assassination in many respects created an opportunity for Johnson, who was able to leverage public support to enact key provisions from Kennedy’s legislative agenda— namely, civil rights legislation and tax cuts. The main goal of the programs was to eliminate poverty, social inequality, and racial injustice, which had become entrenched due to discriminatory institutions and practices that were carried over from the Civil War time period. Additionally, Johnson wanted to institutionalize programs to improve the environment.

New major spending programs addressed to education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, and transportation were all launched during this period. Though there were some other figures in the Johnson administration that supported what were considered to be more radical redistributive wealth policies—notably, i.e. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, assistant secretary at the Department of Labor, others like Sargent Shriver, John F. Kennedy’s brother-in-law, who were eventually appointed to run Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity, he never gave serious consideration to these policy recommendations.

In the case of Shriver, he didn’t have adequate funding to begin the process of addressing national poverty issues. He did, however, assemble an impressive team of advisers, including Michael Harrington, author of “The Other America” and began to implement new policies and actions to resolve these issues.

Why Community Action?

Taking a community action approach was a bold idea for its time, especially for the federal government. For the government was essentially handing over control of important programs to be administered at the local level, this way programs could be geared specifically to target population needs. The concept of “maximum feasible participation,” represented a new paradigm in the government and many sectors were wary of its innovative ideas.

Community Action equips low-income citizens with the tools and potential for becoming self-sufficient. The structure of the program is unique – federal dollars are used locally to offer specialized programming in communities. It is a coordinated effort to address the root effects of poverty and, ultimately, to move families and individuals to self-sufficiency.

Keep in mind, in the 1950s there were no civil rights for black people, women were still largely dependent on men, the age of sexual consent in many states was nine or ten, alcoholism and drug abuse were more rampant than they are today, and teenage childbearing was at its peak.

As Stephanie Coontz points out in her (1993) book The Way We Never Were, the period of the 1950s (World War II era) nor any other moment from our past presents workable models for how to conduct our personal lives today. One of the most powerful takeaways from this book that is that consoling nostalgia for a mythical past of “traditional values” is a trap that cripples our capacity to solve today’s problems.

Setting aside nostalgia for a moment, it is important to distinguish how Capitalism, as an economic system, and government are not separate discrete entities; they worked (and continue to work) together, before and after the war. These economic gains occurred in the United States while the world burned, as many countries were the wars were fought (both I &II) had to rise from the ashes of the devastation to recover what was lost in the fighting.

Slave Population, Southern States – 1860 Census

History

The American Civil War, fought between the years of 1861 and 1865 has often been called the first “modern” war, or as Richard Brown (1976) termed it, “the conflict of a modernizing society” (Brown, 1976: 161). Contemporary debates continue to flourish, although there is a pronounced tendency to “cherry pick” and distort the historical record. Partial truths, half facts, myths and in some instances bold-face lies animate the longest running trauma narrative in the history of United States – the history of the Civil War.

Traditional timelines date the beginning of the Civil War with the attack on Fort Sumter in 1861. As for the ending of the war, many point to the December 1865 ratification of the Emancipation Proclamation, whereas others cite the date Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865 at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. And for reasons that  I will explain here, there is a strong argument to be made that the war never really ever ended, despite the fact that almost 150 year of time have now passed since the last rifle shot was fired.

Although its duration was a mere four years, the Civil War established the high water mark for combat casualties. With well over a million casualties, a number which includes soldiers as well as civilians, it still stands as the bloodiest and most costly war fought in American history. According to Howard Zinn, “the United States government’s support of slavery was based on an overpowering practicality. In 1790, a thousand tons of cotton were being produced every year in the South. By 1860, it was a million tons. In the same period, 500,000 slaves grew to 4 million” (Zinn, 2010).

Put another way, 4 million slaves represented almost one out of every three residents residing in the South at that time (Ransom). When the war was ended, the economic impact devastated the North as well as the South.

Slaves & Human Capital

Slavery was the engine of profit that turned humans into capital for the plantation (investor) class. During the year 1805, there were just over one million slaves in the United States. Their worth was estimated to be about $300 million dollars. Five years later, there were four million slaves, bringing the total closer to $3 billion (Ransom).

Now, if we were to look at this strictly in terms of the 11 states that formed the original Confederacy, 4 out of 10 people in those states were slaves in 1860 (about half the agricultural labor in those states). Put differently,  slaves, who constituted around 38 percent of the population, provided 23 percent of whites’ income” (Ransom).

In the cotton regions, the importance of slave labor was even greater. In the seven states where most of the cotton was grown, almost half of the population were slaves; they accounted for 31 percent of the income of white people’s income.

Here’s another way look at this – the value of capital invested in slaves roughly equaled the total value of all farmland and farm buildings in the South. Though the value of slaves fluctuated from year to year, there was no prolonged period during which the value of the slaves owned in the United States did not increase markedly. In the book Crucible of the Civil War, Edward Ayers estimates that the monetized value of Southern slaves was greater than the combined value of all the railroads and factories in the North (Ayers et al, 2006).

Fast forward to our present time period in the United States and we find states’ rights arguments continue to hold sway in contemporary public discourses. States’ rights were invoked during the 1960s civil rights movement and have more recently been raised in connection with issues of governance that address ongoing discrimination (i.e. religious discrimination as this pertains to LGBT issues, access to birth control, gun control, in addition to other forms of gender and wage discrimination). Legislation aimed at curtailing the discriminatory actions of employers and corporations has also been opposed recently on the basis of the states’ rights arguments originally used to justify slavery.

The Biopolitics of the U.S. Civil War

The Civil War was the first U.S. war fought both over and on a distinctly human terrain. Going to war was deemed both logical and rational because keeping the South in the union was the only way Lincoln could ensure the legislative program to not only simply contain but to also control slavery could be accomplished. Social stability―or what some are prone to otherwise refer to as keeping the “peace” ― was only ever achievable through an act of war.

This means that the “perfect union” Lincoln dreamed of achieving was founded as much on the idea of the unification of states as it was a vision for achieving a unified labor pool of physically dominated and subordinated laboring bodies. What is worse, however, is that economic practices of human subjugation didn’t stop with slavery; labor practices were merely refined, laws were designed to be exclusionary, as they continued to target African Americans and others, who were marginalized and exploited in new and different ways.

In light of this, the purpose of the Emancipation Proclamation was never really fulfilled (as many believe it was). As it was conceived, the proclamation was superficially designed to serve/protect the interests blacks. But even Lincoln himself admitted that it was really conceived with two objectives in mind: 1) to further the economic interests of the Union; and 2) to help maintain control over the South by keeping them in the Union. Alternatively, had the South had been permitted to leave the union of states, scholars have argued the North could not have ever leveraged the means necessary to exert control over slavery (Ransom 1989; Ransom and Sutch 2001; Weingast 1998; Weingast 1995; Wolfson 1995).

Slavery helped to institutionalize hierarchical social relations based on notions of domination and subordination, which were paramount to efforts to secure the life and livelihood of all Southern whites —not just the ones who owned slaves. This explains then why people regionally affiliated with the South (and even some now who reside outside of the South) believed the war constituted an existential threat to their preferred lifestyle. Slavery was the glue that held the social order together.

Even outside the South, the subordination of blacks to whites as part of the “natural order of things” maintained currency. North and South were thus in many respects bound together as a union on the basis of the collective willingness of a people to ignore the contradiction of supporting freedom through slavery; both regions benefited from the structural legitimization, through force of violence and law, the linking of property rights with white identity and  white bodies, and were committed to maintaining a system of race-based privilege.

Much as was the case with Southerners, Northerners also saw themselves fighting the good fight. In their view, they were reprising the Patriots’ struggle of the 1776 Revolutionary War. Unlike their neighbors in the South, the North was, ideologically, more invested in the idea of maintaining the American union at all costs. Even though many among them benefitted from slavery, there remained a wide-spread consensus among Northerners that slavery was antithetical to democracy and good governance. Nevertheless, if there was one idea that both sides could get behind, it was the idea that the principals of egalitarianism—life, liberty, freedom, and self-governance— ideals that breathed life into American governmentality, were in terms of design and intent dedicated solely to protecting the interests of property-holding white men.

White property rights were thus, by decree as well as declaration, institutionalized in the legal documents that established the founding of the U.S. republic. This basic sensibility was and remains sacrosanct, as we see even in our present era there are contested narratives about who made America “Great,” which speaks to who “built” and thus “owns” the property that is the nation.

The Great Migration – 1920-1950

The early 1920’s were distinguished by one of the greatest internal migrations in world history. Fleeing the decaying Jim Crow system of agricultural labor in the fields and farms of the South, more than a million African Americans sought opportunity elsewhere and many moved to the industrial North, West, and Mid-west.

Unfortunately, the found little opportunity when they moved. African Americans were herded into exclusionary residential housing tracts – traditional ghettos, which expanded and morphed into new ghettos. Here, they lived under deplorable conditions, which was bad enough, but often they found they lived under the threat of “Negro Removal” that occurred in concert with large urban housing projects, many of which were little more than stacks of shacks built to house the migrants. To make matters worse, they often confronted overcrowded and neglected schools that provided poor or non-existent education for their children. Many of these “ghetto-like” conditions persist in the present day.

[Note: the term “ghetto” was originally used in Venice (the neighborhood of Cannaregio) to describe the part of the city where Jews were restricted and segregated. Playwright August Wilson also used the term “ghetto” in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984) and Fences (1987), both of which draw upon the author’s experience growing up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, a traditionally black neighborhood that might be referred to as a “ghetto.” 

Today, the term, while impolitic, is often used as slang or as an adjective to describe different social contexts. Urban neighborhoods in decline have been referred to as ghettos or nicknamed “the hood,” colloquial slang for neighborhood. It may be used to refer to inner city or black culture, or it may simply be used to designate something as “low class” and/or low quality. Some others, particularly rap artists in the hip-hop scene, have reclaimed the power of the work for themselves and have been using it in positive ways that are meant to transcend/overcome the word’s derogatory origins].

Post World War II

In the years following World War II, many white Americans began to move away from inner cities to newer suburban communities, a process known as “white flight.” White flight occurred, in part, as a response to black people moving into white urban neighborhoods. Discriminatory housing and real estate practices, like “redlining,” [more on the history of “redlining” below] were employed as a means to “preserve” emerging white suburbs, restricted the ability of blacks to move from inner cities to the suburbs, even when they were economically able to afford it.

In contrast to this, the same period in history marked a massive suburban expansion available primarily to whites of both wealthy and working-class backgrounds, facilitated through highway construction and the availability of federally subsidized home mortgages (VA, FHA, HOLC). These federal programs made it easier for families to buy new homes in the suburbs, but not to rent apartments in cities. Programs like the VA (Veterans Administration) were designed to help veterans buy homes, yet in terms of practice, African Americans who served in the war were not provided opportunity to access to their VA housing benefits.

In the same way that housing access was restricted, so was access to cars. Many car dealerships wouldn’t sell to or help underwrite car loans and insurance for black people. Even if they did sell cars to blacks, they were often quoted inflated prices (a practice that research has shown continues today). At a time when car ownership increasingly signified status for people, the inability to own and drive a car was materially and symbolically significant (Beras, 2016).

Deindustrialization and Suburban Sprawl – 1967-1987

Two main factors ensured further separation between races and classes, and ultimately the development of what people have come to identify as contemporary urban neighborhoods using the impolitic term “ghetto”: the relocation of industrial enterprises to poor neighborhoods, and the movement of middle and  upper-class residents out of cities and into suburban neighborhoods.

Between 1967 and 1987, economic restructuring resulted in a dramatic decline of manufacturing jobs. The once thriving northern industrial cities underwent a shift from manufacturing to service occupations. This development occured in combination with the movement of middle-class families and other businesses to the outer suburbs, which created more economic devastation in the inner cities among poor people, many of whom did not own cars and could not relocate.

These changes fell hardest on African Americans, who were disproportionately affected, as they became unemployed or underemployed and were left with low wages and reduced benefits. Accordingly, a concentration of African Americans became established in inner-city neighborhoods, including places like New York, Chicago, Detroit, and other  cities like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

Additionally, a key feature that developed throughout the postindustrial era, which continues to symbolize the demographics of American ghettos is the prevalence of poverty. Poverty exacerbates the physical circumstance of social exclusion from other suburbanized or private neighborhoods. Given the difficulties of out-migration, the deteriorated economic and social conditions that produce a culture of poverty tend to reproduce constraining social opportunities and inequalities in society. The residents of these neighborhoods are often trapped and remain there for generations.

Contemporary African-American ghettos are characterized by an overrepresentation of a particular ethnicity or race, vulnerability to crime, social problems, governmental reliance and political disempowerment. City University of New York scholar, Sharon Zukin, explains that it is through these reasons that society rationalizes the term “bad neighborhoods.” Zukin points out that these material circumstances are largely related to “racial concentration, residential abandonment, and deconstitution and reconstitution of communal institutions” (Zukin).

The lack of autonomy and growing dependence on the state, especially in a neoliberal/capitalistic economy, remains a key indicator of the prevalence of African-American ghettos. This “dependence” is picked up on and circulates within the culture as a whole as a problem due not to a combination of individual and structural factors/institutional failure; rather, people tend to short-sightedly see the problems as the exclusive domain of individual failure, “bad choices,” and not “working hard.”

Despite this, the concept of “the ghetto” and the “underclass” (below working class) has faced criticism both theoretically and empirically. Research has shown it was not only race that accounted for neighborhood-level differences, but also social class (low income) in addition to public policies that allocated resources for neighborhoods differently; these patterns were found to occur with similar populations across cities over time. Neighborhoods that were predominantly low income and housed racial minority populations were hit the hardest.

To a large extent, the problem with our understanding of the ‘ghetto’ and concepts like “low class/underclass” is that they stem from a reliance on early 20th century ecological case studies (in particular studies from Chicago), which have tended to limit social scientists’ understandings of the more complex dynamics of socially disadvantaged neighborhoods.

“Redlined” Map of Pittsburgh

Social Inequality: Housing, Education & Wealth

Economic success in America is often seen as a reflection of what kind of family a person was born into, how hard they work, and what kinds of opportunities exist in the economy. The story, of course, is a bit more complicated than this. For as we all know, how well a person is positioned financially tends to reflect the well-being of the family they grew up in, how their parents and grandparents did, etc.

Family wealth can take generations to build. The process, by its nature, confers advantages that grow over time. If your great-grandparents bought a home, chances are that your grandparents inherited at least some of their family wealth from them. That means that your parents might have had opportunities to go to college that didn’t require them to take out loans. Or they might have gotten a helping hand with a down payment for a house early in life in a neighborhood with top schools. That means you got a great public education instead of a lousy one, allowing you to get into a good college and set yourself up to confer advantages on your own kids. And so on.

Discriminatory housing policies meant that racial and ethnic minorities could not secure mortgage loans (or if they did, the could only get them in certain areas). This resulted in a large increase in the residential racial segregation and urban decay that is evident in the United States today.

Consequently, there are lots of reasons that whites have so much more wealth than nonwhites. How the GI Bill and VA housing mortgage program played out is yet another one of those reasons. Whites were able to use the government guaranteed housing loans that were a pillar of the bill to buy homes in the fast-growing suburbs. Those homes subsequently increased their value in the decades that followed, thereby creating vast new household wealth for whites during the postwar era.

Noteworthy is how black veterans weren’t able to make use of the housing provisions of the GI Bill. And that’s because banks generally wouldn’t make loans for home mortgages in black neighborhoods. Given how African-Americans were excluded from living in the suburbs through a combination of deed covenants and informal racism, they were unable to use their housing benefits like their white counterparts. In short, their military service didn’t convey the same benefits to them as their white counterparts.

In short, the GI Bill helped fostered a long-term boom in white wealth but did almost nothing to help blacks to build wealth. We are still living with the effects of that exclusion today — and will be for a long time to come. The one big upside of the GI Bill is that it did pay for many black veterans to go to college and graduate school. While these veterans were often only able to choose among overcrowded black colleges (HBCUs), the influx of subsidized black students forced many white universities to open their doors to nonwhites, helping begin the great integration of higher education.

Deindustrialization,”White-flight,” and Braddock, Pa

Mapping Social Inequality

As it stands today, more than a century and a half after the U.S. Civil War was ended, racial inequalities in America are staggering by any measure. That is why it is important to remember the influence of the Civil War and the fact that it continues to cast a long shadow. The influence of the war helps to explain persistent patterns of social relations that include intransigent ideas about social hierarchies – i.e. “who is on top and who is on the bottom”- as well as the ongoing challenges of African-Americans to build wealth and achieve intergenerational mobility. To put this in perspective, let’s first take a look at a map that highlights the 11 states of the old Confederacy. Keep this map in mind as you continue to scroll down and look at the other maps that reflect social inequalities for income, health, and social welfare benefits.

The 11 former States of the Confederacy

Wealth & Income 

The wealth and income divide are not simply due to individual behaviors (i.e. who works hard and who doesn’t). Rather, there are other historical and systemic social factors in play here.

In terms of income, the median income for nonwhites is only 65 percent that of whites. The wealth gap is even wider, with white families’ net worth six times that of non-whites. While individual research studies may vary, almost all of them calculate wealth by adding up total assets (e.g., cash, retirement accounts, home, etc.), after which they subtract existing liabilities (e.g., credit card debt, student loans, mortgage, etc.) The figure that results is one’s net worth.

A few statistics worth noting:

• According to the New York Times, for every $100 in white family wealth, black families hold just $5.04.
• The Economic Policy Institute found that more than one in four black households have zero or negative net worth, compared to less than one in ten white families without wealth.
• The Institute for Policy Studies recent report The Road to Zero Wealth: How the Racial Divide is Hollowing Out the America’s Middle Class (RZW) showed that between 1983 and 2013, the wealth of the median black household declined 75 percent (from $6,800 to $1,700), and the median Latino household declined 50 percent (from $4,000 to $2,000). At the same time, wealth for the median white household increased 14 percent from $102,000 to $116,800.

Income Inequality – data from the 2000 Census

How did this happen? (reblog Brian Thompson)

The term “systemic racism” ruffles a lot of feathers. It often triggers emotional arguments about how people feel about racism and its effects. Yet concrete data over long periods of time shows very clearly that systemic racism exists.

Blacks were historically prevented from building wealth by slavery and Jim Crow Laws (laws that enforced segregation in the south until the Civil Rights Act of 1964). Government policies including The Homestead Act, The Chinese Exclusion Act and even the Social Security Act, were often designed to exclude people of color.

For example, in the 1930s, as part of the New Deal, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) created loan programs to help make home ownership accessible to more Americans. The Government created color-coded maps — green for good neighborhoods and red for bad neighborhoods — to determine who got those loans. Spoiler alert: many neighborhoods were designated as red because blacks and other people of color lived in them. This process, known as redlining, systematically prevented them from not only getting home loans but also encouraged developers in green areas to explicitly discriminate against non-whites. This often led households of color into wealth stripping “land contracts,” where they paid exorbitant prices for homes that they could lose very easily. Veterans, who were eligible for VA loans, could not use them in neighborhoods that were redlined.

These policies resulted in 98% of home loans going to white families, from 1934 to 1962. Not only did the ability to purchase homes give whites the ability to accrue wealth, it also attracted new businesses to those neighborhoods, which increased property values and allowed those homeowners access to other wealth building vehicles like going to college. As a result, wealth in the white communities compounded and passed to future generations.

Even after these policies were eliminated, the lack of wealth still prevented minorities from moving up to the green neighborhoods and kept the communities separated by race. Additionally, certain structures like a racially skewed criminal justice system and the tax code favoring the rich continue to contribute to this divide. The compounding effects of these types of laws have led to the wealth chasm that now exists. Even now, these effects are felt between otherwise similar families of different races. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the typical black family with a graduate or professional degree lagged its white counterpart in wealth by more than $200,000.

Racial wealth inequality is a huge problem that needs to be rectified. If the moral argument does not persuade you, maybe the economic one will. Considering how nearly 70% of our economic growth comes from consumer spending, as black and Latino households grow to become the majority of the population, their inability to spend due to the lack of wealth and paying down debt will slow U.S. economic growth. We owe it to ourselves and future generations to start correcting this problem now.

For more on this, see the full RZW study here.

Social Welfare Benefits (SNAP) (still working on this)

SNAP Benefits Use (food stamps) – 2010

Health: Obesity and Life Expectancy (still working on this)

Obesity – 2008

U.S. Life Expectancy By County

Summary

So why should you read or know anything about the Civil War? Why does it matter in a course on Race, Crime, and Justice? Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news – it’s because the Civil War never really ended. “Everything about the Civil War is present tense,” says author C.R. Gibbs. “This is not settled.” The Southern and border states continue to be marked by social issues and problems that affect them at rates that are higher than those seen in the North.

Consequently, to truly understand modern-day social problems that involve issues of race, crime, and justice, one has to have some minimal level of competency when it comes to understanding the Civil War history of the United States.  Present-day protests of contemporary KKKlansmen and supporters of “Alt-right” politics against Antifa (Antifascists) and their allies are modern-day examples of how Civil War era ideologies about race, dominance, and even “states rights” continue to animate people’s thinking about who are the rightful “owners” of American society. There is perhaps no better example than police brutality and the targeting of black men by police, which owes its roots to the slave patrols of the post-war Reconstruction era [slave patrols were hired by wealthy plantation owners – the first privatized police forces – to catch runaway slaves]. Likewise, we might point to the riots in Ferguson and Baltimore, which according to Gibbs, are merely match flares on a long historical fuse.

Keep in mind, the Civil War led to the passage of the 14th Amendment; an amendment that was designed to ensure that the U.S. federal government would protect African-Americans, even if (when) states did not. African Americans don’t feel safe in their cities and towns today and they don’t feel protected. And this is not happening only in the South; the North too has problems. In this respect, it is simply not possible to fully understand why some neighborhoods are poor and crime-ridden (or to use the impolitic term – ghettos) without first knowing something about the history of slavery and racial segregation in America; how these so-called “ghettos” were made by powerful wealthy white people (bankers, lawyers, and real estate agents). This helps explain on some level why people are rioting in the streets.

It’s, furthermore, not possible to understand why some marginalized groups rely on public welfare benefits without first developing an understanding of Who is poor and how they became poor. The vast majority of people on “food stamp” benefits are white people, even as the largest proportional representation of people on benefits are people of color. This paradox is not well understood by many Americans, most of whom rely on racial tropes to inform their understanding of who is poor and “getting a free ride” in the United States.

Put another way, the cumulative economic and social forces that gave rise to racial discrimination and the establishment of ghettos were the precursors to further social, political and economic isolation and inequality, which evidence material differences – differences that directly, indirectly, and symbolically define a separation between superior and inferior status groups.

Finally, I think that if you find it difficult to understand this history – and more specifically how modern-day social problems find their roots in the Civil War – you will find it difficult to understand some of the major issues and problems that currently afflict our criminal justice system – police brutality, disparate arrest and sentencing outcomes, the War on Drugs, Mass Incarceration. All of these problems find their roots in Civil War era politics and culture, which continue to resonate and shape our modern day social relations.

Discussion Question

How might historic social relations, based on the system of slavery, continue to be reflected in our contemporary social climate as it relates to the following: policing, the War on Drugs, the existence of poor neighborhoods and how we police them, firearms laws and the perceived need/desire for people to open carry, and public perceptions about “who is safe to carry” and “who is a threat?”

Sources

Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States 1492 – Present. This citation is the opening paragraph of Chapter 9: “Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom,” Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2010).

Roger Ransom’s analysis is posted at EH.net, a publication of the Economic History Association. Last accessed Jan 16, 2018.

Edward Ayers, Gary W. Gallagher, and Andrew J. Torget (eds.), Crucible of the Civil War: Virginia from Secession to Commemoration. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006.

Charles and Mary Beard. The Rise of American Civilization. Two volumes. New York: Macmillan, 1927.

Louis Hacker, The Triumph of American Capitalism: The Development of Forces in American History to the End of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), p. 373.

“The Racial Wealth Gap: Addressing America’s Most Pressing Epidemic,” by Brian Thompson, 2018.

“How Redlining Blocked Black Car Ownership in Pittsburgh,” by Erica Beras, 2016.

Sandra L. Trappen, “Empty Metal Jacket: The Biopolitical Economy of War and Medicine,” 2016.