The Broken Heart of America
This week: a conversation with historian Walter Johnson about racism, capitalism, and the shape of American cities—focusing especially on St. Louis. Listen at 2 pm today, or anytime at our site.
White nationalists storming the Capitol, waving the Confederate flag in this week’s deadly attack, didn’t overturn the election. The violence did, however, bring new scrutiny to its inspirations, including Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, known (before his efforts to subvert the election) for decrying “cosmopolitan elites” and Silicon Valley, for combining cultural antipathy with language of economic populism.
From The Intercept, earlier this year:
Hawley is a faux-populist . . . like far-right ethno-nationalists in Europe such as Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orbán, he spins his reactionary welfare chauvinism as concern for the working poor. Hawley advocates for deep cuts to legal immigration and then — like Stephen Miller, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and others on the U.S. far right — pretends they will help the “great American middle.” (They won’t.)
On this week’s show, we’re thinking not about the Missouri senator, but about a related Missouri history behind a national tragedy of hate, dysfunction, and violence. The Harvard historian Walter Johnson’s new book, The Broken Heart of America, considers economic dimensions of American racism, specifically in terms of how racial capitalism, as he calls it, shapes American places. In the book and in our conversation, Johnson focuses on St. Louis (and St. Louis County, which includes Ferguson).
He describes a city designed by an ongoing, imperialist strain of American thinking, first trained against Native Americans and later maintained in St. Louis via the strategy of “huge removals.” These, Johnson says, are “removals that involve the destruction of hundreds of acres of the urban fabric of the city, the literal historical erasure of of the memory of black neighborhoods.”
The devastation has been manifold. In the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project of St. Louis, Johnson says,
Black people (who had been dispossessed from neighborhoods in the city that were actually just torn down as part of a giant, gigantic, violent reconfiguration of the city in the image of the automobile and a certain kind of real estate capitalism) . . . were converted into a resource for research for sociologists and then finally (and almost to me, at least, unimaginably horribly) for the United States military, which did tests of airborne radiological weapons in the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project in the early ‘60s.
There’s a deep history behind all this. Thinking particularly of the western US, Johnson says:
The notion of “the white man’s country” emerges initially out of a confrontation with Native Americans and Native American sovereignty and then is generalized out to the presence of African Americans . . .
Running underneath that is a contrast between the racial political economy of the West and of the South. The Deep South in particular, but really, most of the South, is a slave-based economy, and it’s an economy which depends upon African American labor and African American reproduction. Many of those who migrate to Missouri in the years after the War of 1812, which is to say in the years when that part of the Midwest has been cleared of Native American resistance to the satisfaction of white migrants, many of those people really do not want to live next to slaveholders. They are non-slaveholding white people who believe that slavery gives slaveholders an unfair advantage in places like Virginia. And so they want to move out there and have it be a kind of whites-only (and to their mind more democratic) society because they’re not going to be subordinated to slaveholders. Many of these people are the very same time anaphylactically upset about free people of color who they believe will degrade their labor and compete with them for jobs.
Now, a Missourian like Josh Hawley invokes hostility to cultural difference while gesturing toward class-specific hardship, and once again the effect is violence instead of economic equality. Hawley’s tried to drive a movement, encouraging suspicion of “cosmopolitans” and also of the votes in areas with higher black populations, that recently culminated in the violent effort to overturn an election. He’s urged on the animosity that maintains the racial capitalism Johnson describes:
What I’m trying to do with the notion racial capitalism is to try to help people understand the way that the history of capitalism and the history of racism, the history of imperialism, have never been separable from one another, or at least not from the time of the Atlantic slave trade—and so to force people to imagine that their commitment to live in an anti-racist world, a world without racist difference, has to be at the same time a critique of capitalism, and likewise to convince people that their critique of capitalism is one which must attend to the specificities of racial dispossession, extraction, and exploitation.
This is, again, a story both about St. Louis and about more than St. Louis. Johnson again:
I’m not sure there are cities in the United States that are exceptions to the effects of indigenous dispossession, slavery, coloniality, enclosure, extraction, exploitation. I mean, I think that is American history and the history of the relationship of American cities to hinterlands.
There is a reckoning with the history of imperialism on this continent that has yet to happen, is just beginning to happen. One could make the argument that the history of the relationship of northern cities to slavery, whether that’s particularly New York, but Providence: that’s that’s an untold story. Or a story that we we could stand to learn more about.
Read: Ida B. Wells
The removalism Johnson recounts is horrific, and it includes the East St. Louis Massacre of Black residents in 1917. One source Johnson (and our show) quotes on the massacre is the journalist Ida B. Wells.
From Mia Bay’s biography of Wells:
Born a slave in Civil War-ravaged Mississippi, Wells achieved freedom with emancipation, and international renown in the 1890s, when she rose to fame a s ajournalist, speaker, and civil rights activist who led an international crusade against lunching. She was just thirty years old when she first began her campaign to end the brutal white-on-black mob violence that took the lives of at least 3, 220 African American men, women, and children between 1882 and 1930 — a period that marks the high tide of this violence.
Read: “Of Work and Wealth,” by W.E.B. DuBois
Another chronicler of St. Louis is W.E.B. DuBois, who saw there connections between America’s economic and racial dynamics. You can read DuBois on St. Louis, and on the tragedy of East St. Louis, in his book Darkwater, specifically in the essay “Of Work and Wealth”:
We ask, and perhaps there is no answer, how far may the captain of the world’s industry do his deeds, despite the grinding tragedy of its doing? How far may men fight for the beginning of comfort, out beyond the horrid shadow of poverty, at the cost of starving other and what the world calls lesser men? How far may those who reach up out of the slime that fills the pits of the world’s damned compel men with loaves to divide with men who starve?
The answers to these questions are hard, but yet one answer looms above all, — justice lies with the lowest; the plight of the lowest man, — the plight of the black man — deserves the first answer, and the plight of the giants of industry, the last.
Little cared East St. Louis for all this bandying of human problems, so long as its grocers and saloon-keepers flourished and its industries steamed and screamed and smoked and its bankers grew rich. Stupidity, license, and graft sat enthroned in the City Hall.
Listen: Tef Poe
Our conversation about St. Louis led us back to rapper and activist Tef Poe, and an earlier conversation with him for Open Source. Find that conversation here!
Listen: Rumble Strip Vermont
Erica Heilman is one of our fellow podcast travelers. She’s a gifted storyteller, usually inviting us into the homes and lives of neighbors in her corner of Vermont. In COVID time she put out a call for stories of isolation and received recordings from all over the world. “It’s the darkest thing to happen in my lifetime, but also strangely the most unifying,” Erica said. “We’re all experiencing the very same thing. At the same time. But not together.” Collaborating with the audio magicians at Transom, she’s assembled these stories into a rich tapestry of six shows of about 20 minutes each that will be an important keepsake to mark this time and what it felt and sounded like.
On the Way: George Saunders and the Russians
We’ll be talking to George Saunders soon about his enlightening and glorious book on Russian fiction, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. Stay tuned and keep reading! In fact: get a head start, and read Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Gogol.
This week’s ephemeral library
Nicholson Baker: Did the Coronavirus Escape from a Lab? Lawrence Wright: The Plague Year. How Neil Sheehan Got the Pentagon Papers. Adam Shatz: The Four Year Assault. Ann Patchett: These Precious Days. Andy Goldsworthy’s Winter Ice Sculptures. David Blight on Lost Cause Trumpism.
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