sakaisettlersocr

taxation and other measures to give aid "alike on the high
and low, the rich and the poor ..." of settler society.(l5)
Jackson was the historic founder of today's
Democratic Party; not only in organization, but in first
welding together the electoral coalition of Southern
planters and Northern "ethnic" workers. He was the first
President to claim that he was born in a log cabin, of lowly
circumstances. This "redneck" posture, enhanced by his
bloody military adventures, was very popular with the
mass of small slave-owners in his native South-and with
Northern workers as well! Detailed voting studies confirm
that in both the 1828 and 1832 elections, Jackson received
the overwhelming majority of the votes of immigrant Irish
and German workers in the North.(l6) White workmen
joined his Democratic Party as a new crusade for equality
among settlers. In the New York mayoral election of 1834,
organized white labor marched in groups to the polls singing:
"Mechanics, cartmen, laborers
Must form a close connection,
And show the rich Aristocrats,
Their powers at this election.. .
"Yankee Doodle, smoke 'em out
The Proud, the banking faction.
None but such as Hartford Feds
Oppose the poor and Jackson.. . "(17)
Underneath the surface appearance of militant popular
reform, of workers taking on the wealthy, these
movements were only attempts to more equally distribute
the loot and privileges of Empire among its citizens. That's
why the oppressed colonial subjects of the Empire had no
place in these movements.
The line between oppressors and oppressed was
unmistakeably drawn. Afrikan and Indian alike opposed
this "Jacksonian Democracy". The English visitor Edward
Abdy remarked that he "never knew a man of color
that was not an anti-Jackson man0.(l8) On their side, the
white workingmen of the 1830's knowingly embraced the
architects of genocide as their heroes and leaders. Far from
joining the democratic struggles around the rights of the
oppressed, the white workers were firmly committed to
crushing them.
Even as they were gradually being pressed
downward by the emerging juggernaut of industrial
capitalism - faced with wage cuts, increasing speed-up of
machine-powered production, individual craft production
disappearing in the regimented workshop, etc.-those
Euro-Amerikan workers saw their hope for salvation in
non-proletarian special privileges and a desperate clinging
to petit-bourgeois status. At a time when the brute labor of
the Empire primarily rested on the backs of the unpaid,
captured Afrikan proletariat, the white workers of the
1830's were only concerned with winning the Ten-Hour
Day for themselves. In the 1840's as the Empire annexed
the Northern 40% of Mexico and by savage invasion
reduced truncated Mexico to a semi-colony, the only issue
to the white workingmen's movement was how large would
their share of the looting be? It is one thing to be bribed by
the bourgeoisie, and still another to demand, organize,
argue and beg to be bribed.
The dominant political slogan of the white
workers movement of the 1840's was "Vote Yourself A
Farm". This expressed the widespread view that it was
each settler's right to have cheap land to farm, and that the
ideal lifestyle was the old colonial-era model of the selfemployed
craftsmen who also possessed the security of being
part-time farmers. The white labor movement, most
particularly the influential newspaper, Working Man's
Advocate of New York, called for new legislation under
which the Empire would guarantee cheap tracts of Indian
and Mexican land to all European settlers (and impoverished
workmen in particular).*(19) The white workers literally
demanded their traditional settler right to be petitbourgeois-"little
bourgeois", petty imitators who would
annex their small, individual plots each time the real
bourgeoisie annexed another oppressed nation. It should
be clear that the backwardness of white labor is not a matter
of "racism", of "mistaken ideas", of "being tricked
by the capitalists" (all idealistic instead of materialist formulations);
rather, it is a class question and a national
question.
This stratum came into being with its feet'on top
of the proletariat and its head straining up into the petitbourgeoisie.
It's startling how narrow and petty its concerns
were in an age when the destiny of peoples and nations
was being decided, when the settler Empire was trying
to take into its hands the power to decree death to
whole nations. We keep coming back to genocide, the'inescapable
center of settler politics in the 19th Century. So
to fully grasp the politics of emerging white labor, we must
penetrate to the connection between their class viewpoint
and genocide.
* The Homestead Act of 1851 was one result of this campaign.
2. The Popular Appeal of Genocide
By 1840 most of the Indian nations of the East had tradictions within the fragmented settler bourgeoisie, betbeen
swept away, slaughtered or relocated. By 18W the ween planter and mercantilehndustrial ~apital~contradic-
Empire had consolidated its grip on the Pacific Coast, tions which were reflected in all facets of settler society.
overrunning and occupying Northern Mexico. The Empire The tremendous economic expansion of the conquests was
had succeeded in bringing the continent under its control. a catalyst.
These victories produced that famous "opportunity" that
the new waves of European immigrants were coming for. The ripping open of the "New South" to extend
But these changes also brought to a nodal point the con- 28 the plantation system meant a great rise of Afrikan slaves