Below is an article I wrote for my class on Atlantic Revolutions. It is about the roles played by the Committees of Safety established during the American Revolution. My take is that these committees, while tied into the revolution, were attached to a pre-revolutionary mindset that promoted things like property confiscation, price controls, and other measures not normally associated with the American Revolution. The purpose of the article is to respond to other historians who have presented the American Revolution as two revolutions, one of the people manipulated and thwarted by the conservative founding fathers who led the second, presented almost as a mere change in leadership. This theory I obviously do not agree with and I think this issue of committees presents an interesting way to explore this historiographical question.

Last Stand of Tradition: The Role of the Committee in the American Revolution

As the possibility of armed conflict seemed more and more likely in the summer and fall of 1774, American colonists began to form themselves into committees, largely for the purpose of communicating with their aggrieved compatriots. These committees of correspondence would evolve, along with the escalating situation, into much more expansive, powerful, and important bodies that would eventually usurp most political authority at the local level.[1] At their zenith of importance in the first years of the American Revolution, before most of the colonies adopted constitutions to establish themselves as independent states, these committees would exercise their considerable authority in two principal areas; loyalist control and market interference usually in the form of price controls. When new constitutions came into being in the former colonies, these committees either disappeared or were delimited in their powers, particularly their incursions into the marketplace. That the committees often acted in league with local mobs in respect to loyalist treatment and market price mechanisms ultimately assured their demise. The committee in the American Revolution represented the remaining vestiges of the traditional political order inherited from Europe, which the Revolution ended up overturning.

When the minutemen of Lexington met their British adversaries in the first skirmish of what would become the American Revolution, Massachusetts was already a state of numerous committees, including the primary Boston Committee of Correspondence, Safety, and Inspection. In the months before the Continental Congress made independence and revolution a formal certainty, the local jurisdictions throughout the colonies began the arduous task of revolutionary governance through the ubiquitous “Committee of Safety.”[2] The first task of these committees was to make sure those loyal to the British, the Tories, did not hamper the revolution. In some areas, like the counties around New York City, this was impossible due to overwhelming Tory majorities, but in most counties the numbers were more even or favoring the patriots. [3]

In Virginia, a young James Madison had been elected to the Orange County Committee of Safety at the close of 1774. Throughout 1775 the future author of the U.S. Bill of Rights reveled in squashing the free speech of Tories in rural Virginia. One of Madison’s biographers relates the tale of one Reverend John Wingate,

He [Madison] took part in the humbling of the Revered John Wingate, rector of St. Thomas Parish in Orange County, for his refusal to surrender to the committee some “seditious” pamphlets in his possession. They were, he said, his personal property and could not be taken from him legally. The committee nevertheless seized the “execrable” documents and burned them before the militia. Madison then gloated that the clergyman, “finding his protection to be not so much in the law as the favor of the people, is grown very supple and obsequious.”[4]

In another instance, Madison commented on a parson who had refused to preach on one of the fasting days declared by the Continental Congress, “I question, should this insolence not abate if he does not get ducked in a coat of Tar and surplice of feathers and then he may go in his new Canonicals and act under the lawful Authority of Gen. Gage if he pleases.”[5] Clearly, the revolutionary moment could easily inflame the passions of even the most reserved or legally aware of the founding fathers.

It is important to note that instances of committees or even mobs killing any suspected loyalists are very difficult to find.[6] In Albany County, where there existed a fairly even distribution of patriots and Tories,[7] historian Edward Countryman tells us that “People in the City of Albany were drinking the King’s health as late as 1779 and one evening in 1777, as Burgoyne’s army was approaching, 300 loyalists gathered in the town of Schenectady.”[8] With such hostility to the revolution it is no surprise that as early as May, 1776 the Albany Committee received a letter from the New York City Committee of Safety telling them “to disarm the more dangerous of such Persons as are disaffected to our Cause.”[9] Two days after this letter was received the committee was notified that Daniel Litts had “Cursed, the Committee, beat and abused Susannah Nagel, and spoken disrespectful of the Whigs” for which he disarmed and made to “enter into Bond in the penalty of forty pounds for his future good behaviour.”[10]

In June of 1776 the Albany Committee decided that it had had enough of six Tories who were “notoriously disaffected to the measures pursued by the Friends to American Liberty.”[11] The committeemen wanted to be rid of them altogether, not by execution, but by being “removed under Guard to Hartford in Connecticut and that a Letter be wrote to his Honour Gov[ernor] Trumbull requesting him to dispose of them in his Colony as he shall think proper.”[12] This outlet for troublesome Tories was used again for a further twenty-six prisoners being held by the Albany Committee in the weeks immediately following the Declaration of Independence.[13]

In the ensuing months, the Albany Committee began to approve the confiscation of the property of these “disaffected” individuals to be used to pay for their maintenance while in jail or to support the committee’s activities.[14] Such actions occurred throughout 1777 until the Tory menace receded into the background and more pressing domestic issues arose. Even later controversies over merchants, prices, and hoarding were greatly colored by the experience of the early phases of committee governance and the fight against “disaffected” fellow Americans.

The committees were typically elected bodies and thus relied on zealous patriots not only for public support but, more importantly, to detect violations of Continental Congress boycotts, committee edicts, and to ferret out counter-revolutionary thought.[15] This relationship worked both ways however, as the committees would find out. The populace, once given such widespread powers, was reluctant to cede them back to the committees or even the newly constituted authorities once they came into existence. While this problem was displayed in the battle against Toryism, particularly its later phase of property confiscation, it was more apparent in the desire for market regulations and price control measures.

In his work, The American Revolution, Countryman lays out the basics of this public desire as it appeared throughout most of the northern colonies,

Merchants who played the market of held back goods and speculators who depreciated the currency became “monopolizers” and “hoarders.” Crowds, often made up largely of women, gathered and acted out the rituals of popular price setting that people of their time knew so well. Hearing that a trader had a supply of tea or salt, the crowd would visit him and offer a price its members thought just.[16]

Of course if the trader rejected this effort to set the price, he could expect his shop to be trashed with the only bright spot being that (usually) the crowd would leave behind the “just” price for the goods they took from him, but not the money needed to repair his place of business.[17] Caught up in the revolutionary fires of 1776-1777, most committees acquiesced or even encouraged this behavior as in the case of the Albany Committee, which was “fixing prices and jailing merchants for profiteering” in 1776 and “putting embargoes on needed supplies, setting prices, punishing hoarders, and regulating distribution” in 1777.[18] When moderation and rejection of these policies began to occur later in the revolution the committees “could find themselves targets [of the crowds] instead.”[19]

Before getting to the reaction and condemnation of revolutionary leaders against these market incursions is it important to get some idea of what these incursions were and how they exacerbated the very problems they were designed to eliminate. Writing from Loudoun County, Virginia, Nicholas Cresswell recorded in his journal,

Wednesday, January 8th, 1777. This is a most unhappy country. Every necessary of life is at an extravagant price, some of them indeed is not to be had for money. Poor people are almost naked. Congress or Committee of Safety or some of those infernal bodies have issued an Order that every one that is fortunate enough to be possessed of two coats is to give one to their naked soldiers. Grain now begins to bear a good price, owing to such great quantities being distilled and the small proportion that is in the ground. I am persuaded there will be a famine very soon as well as a War.[20]

Without the detailed and comprehensive economic statistics compiled on the American economy since the days of the Great Depression it is often difficult to reconstruct economic conditions in eighteenth century situations particularly confused revolutionary ones, but Cresswell does hint at some developments. For instance, he mentions that some of the necessaries of life could not be purchased with money, suggesting a great deal of inflation or expected inflation impacting the market in a very negative way. The fact that a small amount of grain was in the ground may be a reference to the existence of price ceilings discouraging further surplus production of grain.

Figure 1

(There would be a graph here demonstrating the effect of a price ceiling on a market with nifty arrows and such illustrating the creation of a shortage. Could not manage to get it onto the blog so you must imagine what it looks like. Got it? Yes, good. No, too bad)
[21]

Figure 1 shows exactly what occurs when price ceilings are imposed on the marketplace; they create a shortage, either through lack of production, or as was the case in the American Revolution, the practice of hoarding until the price could either be freed of the ceiling or until the ceiling rose sufficiently. Another reason for hoarding would be to reserve one’s product for the black market of free prices as opposed to the legal market of the price ceiling. In the debates in the Continental Congress over whether to offer support to New England price controls, Benjamin Rush pointed out that “The merchants, it is true, sold their rum, sugar, and molasses at the price limited by the committee, but they charged a heavy profit upon the barrel, or the paper which contained the rum or the sugar.” Unless the American revolutionaries were willing to place the whole price system under committee control which Dr. Witherspoon concisely dismissed in saying “If we limit one article, we must limit every thing, and this is impossible,” they could never hope to contain prices without also accepting the specter of mob enforcement.[22]

The inflation of the revolution along with price controls on various goods caused all sorts of odd and wildly varying price fluctuations. Benjamin Rush ranked the inflation caused by the Continental Congress and the individual colonies as the prime enemy, “The extortion we complain of arises only from the excessive quantity of our money.”[23] Those already producing under price controls looked in desperation to their committees to control the prices of every other good as was the case of the gunlock makers of Philadelphia, who petitioned their Committee of Safety in December of 1776. In their petition the gunlock makers said,

At the commencement they had materials to procure which were new and uncommon; hands to instruct who were strangers and unlearned, and even those to purchase at double their value; steel to provide, in which article their loss is manifest to their acquaintance. Still hoping that their perseverance would surmount every difficulty, they continued with labor and assiduity. Notwithstanding which, they now find it impossible to subsist, as their most painful endeavors bear no proportion to the present rate of things. Files are now double what they have been, and some treble; vices, double; steel, scarce any to be found good; thirty to forty shillings advance on one hundred bushels of coal; journeymen’s wages still rising; your Petitioners limited; and the enormous price of every other necessity too well known to trouble your Honors with a repetition.[24]

In response to inflation the New England states enacted legislation “that made paper legal tender in private and public transactions, set price ceilings for a host of domestic and imported goods and labor, and outlawed withholding from the market.”[25] It was these moves that sparked the debate in the Continental Congress where John Adams opposed the actions with comments which sound like a modern economist, “Perhaps I may here speak against the sense of my constituents, but I cannot help it. I much doubt the justice, policy and necessity of the resolution. The high price of many articles arises from their scarcity. If we regulate the price of imports we shall immediately put a stop to them forever.”[26]

Despite the best efforts of committees to placate traditional notions of fair pricing through price ceilings while also attempting to prevent the predictable hoarding response of producers, merchants continued to resist. We know this because the accounts of how those who continued to hoard or refuse to sell at set prices were dealt with are around to be read today. Countryman relates an interesting story from Boston where “a figure who called himself ‘Joyce, Jr.’ led crowds of up to five hundred people that carted monopolizers around town and enforced price controls.”[27] Resistance to these measures continued up until the leaders of the revolution turned their attention away from winning the military phase of it to securing what they thought the war had been fought for.

As early as the middle of 1777 the counter-attack against price controls was already well underway in Massachusetts and other New England states prompted largely by the alarm of men like Adams and Rush in the Continental Congress. Barbara Smith describes this counter-attack by starting with the Boston merchants who “rallied to carry the May town meeting against price controls.” The merchants pointed out that the laws operated “directly opposite to the Idea of Liberty” and began making explicit the connection between liberty and free trade. By the fall, the price controls were repealed in Massachusetts and New Hampshire with further portents against these measures brewing in other colonies.[28]

As alarming as the efforts to control prices were to those leading the revolution at the national level were, it was the willingness of local committees and eventually the state legislatures to print money backed with nothing as legal tender for debt payments which was their principle economic objection when the fight over the constitution became the focus in the late 1780s. The committees were largely reversed in their efforts to control prices, making their usefulness to those crowds which invoked their authority when demanding “just” prices negligible at best. The rhetoric of “monopolizers” and “hoarders” could never have been adopted by men like Washington,[29] Adams, or even Madison who by 1781 was in the Continental Congress complaining of the irresponsibility of the states and the Continental Congress itself in printing money.[30] Without the help of speculators like Robert Morris it is hard to fathom how Washington could have gotten much needed supplies that the Continental Congress could simply not pay for.

Historians of the committees of the American Revolution are largely concerned with their rise in the early phase of the revolution and their subsequent downfall at the hands of merchants and revolutionary leaders. Barbara Smith writes, “By 1780, it had become clear that neither Congress nor the states would pursue price control policies; both, moreover, would discourage popular political forms. By 1780, the Revolution had changed.”[31] Countryman has echoed this sentiment in broader terms, writing, “It [the constitution] marked not only the end of the Revolution but also a reaction against it.”[32] In a way this idea is undercut by these historians own focus on continuity of tradition in respect to mob activity and price controlling. The Revolution was proclaimed for freedom and liberty, fought to secure the inalienable rights of man including “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In the moment of declaring independence the Continental Congress rejected the traditional notion of collective rights in favor of the enlightenment ideal of individual rights, implicitly at the very least.

After the first and most precarious years of revolution were over the Patriots began to realize that their ideals needed to be implemented in practice, regardless of traditional norms. In Providence, Rhode Island, the town meeting unequivocally condemned price ceilings and anti-withholding laws, saying these laws “render a Man’s House and Store liable to be opened and searched in a Manner most ignominious and unworthy of Freemen.”[33] In New York the provincial congress similarly condemned the traditional practice of taking tea from merchants who would not accept “just” prices. The congress pointed to what the revolution was about, “In a free country no man ought to be divested of his property, but by his own consent or the law of the land.”[34] One should not view the fall of committees and the fall of pre-revolutionary market relationships as the failure of an alternate American Revolution and the beginning of a conservative counter-revolution, but as the logical fulfillment of the revolution’s ideals as stated from its beginning.


[1] See Edward Countryman, The American Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 107; Ralph Ketchum, James Madison (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 63; and Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 213.
[2] Ketchum, James Madison, 63.
[3] Edward Countryman, “Consolidating Power in Revolutionary America: The Case of New York, 1775-1783,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 6, No. 4, Interdisciplinary Studies of the American Revolution (Spring, 1976), 650-651.
[4] Ketchum, James Madison, 63.
[5] Madison quoted by Ketchum, James Madison, 63.
[6] Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, 214.
[7] Countryman, “Consolidating Power,” 651.
[8] Ibid, 652.
[9] Minutes of the Albany Committee of Correspondence, vol. 1, 8 May 1776, compiled by James Sullivan (Albany: The University of The State of New York, 1923), 399.
[10] Ibid, 10 May 1776, 403.
[11] Ibid, 13 June 1776, 445.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid, 26 July 1776, 503.
[14] Ibid; 14 May 1777, 753; 15 May 1777, 756; 28 May 1777, 770; 13 June 1777, 793.
[15] Barbara Clark Smith, “Food Rioters and the American Revolution,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 51, No. 1 (Jan., 1994), 15.
[16] Countryman, The American Revolution, 138.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Countryman, “Consolidating Power,” 660-61.
[19] Smith, “Food Rioters,” 18.
[20] Nicholas Cresswell, Journal, January 5-17, 1777, The American Revolution, ed. John Rhodehamel (New York: The Library of America, 2001), 264.
[21] If the price were set above the market price (where the supply and demand curves meet) it would be a price floor and cause a market surplus. The question of how these regulations actually effect the market depends on how far above or below the market price the artificial price is placed.
[22] From the Diary of Dr. Benjamin Rush of debates on price controls in the Continental Congress on February 14, 1777, The Spirit of Seventy-Six, ed. Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris (Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 2002), 782-784.
[23] Ibid, 782-83.
[24] James Walsh and Samuel Kinder on behalf of the gunlock makers of Philadelphia to the Philadelphia Committee of Safety, December, 1776, The Spirit of Seventy-Six, 777.
[25] Smith, “Food Rioters,” 19.
[26] From the Diary of Dr. Benjamin Rush of debates on price controls in the Continental Congress on February 14, 1777, The Spirit of Seventy-Six, 784.
[27] Countryman, The American Revolution, 138. See also Smith, “Food Rioters,” where Joyce, Jr. is identified as a member of the Committee of Safety, John Winthrop.
[28] Smith, “Food Rioters,” 22.
[29] That being said, Washington could get riled up over the prospect of those who purposely tried to bleed the congress dry when selling vital war supplies or even necessaries to the public, commenting to Joseph Reed in 1778 that “No punishment in my opinion is too great for the Man who can build his greatness upon his Country’s ruin.” The Spirit of Seventy-Six, 804.
[30] James Madison to Philip Mazzei, July 7, 1781, The Spirit of Seventy-Six, 795-96.
[31] Smith, “Food Rioters,” 25.
[32] Countryman, The American Revolution, 203.
[33] Smith, “Food Rioters,” 22.
[34] Ibid, 24.

Me at graduate school, hard at work (allegedly.)

Posting Comments

As some may have noticed a rather annoying person has been posting link-filled comments lately, prompting me to reconfigure the way comments will be handled on this blog from now on. If you wish to be a commenter on this blog please e-mail me your blogger id and I will put you onto the approved list. Sorry for the sudden formalities, but some people like to ruin it for everyone.

Regards,
Alexander Marriott

From the front, Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Well graduate school is proceeding along very well. The first real showdown in the Social History class occurred yesterday concerning a book called The Wages of Whiteness, which is a Marxist monograph dealing with the ways in which white workers separated themselves from their free black brothers through perceived and real benefits they gained by being defined and thinking of themselves as white. That is the best summary I can give and consider yourself lucky in not having to read all 189 pages to get that summary. There are myriad problems with the book from language subjectivism to psycho-analytical theory being grafted onto the past without any evidentiary support.

I wrote an essay and argued in class for this book being a "good" example of the inefficacy of Marxist history and this particular historian. But the essay could only be five pages long and thus not very explanatory. I have included it below. Upon further reflection on the essay, I wish I had included an explicit condemnation of Marxist history's willingness, like Marxist political theory, to deny reality. But the time for such a reworking is over, since it is already turned in and since I don't wish to return to this topic unless it is in a much larger historiographical critique of the Marxist school as a whole, which is a good idea, though very painful since I would have to read many more Marxist history books.

I enjoyed the debate and am still alive to tell the tale. Will report on more later.



The Limitations of the Marxist Approach to Writing History: David R. Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness

Ever since Karl Marx wrote about communism as “the end of history,”[1] there have been historians fascinated by his suggestions on how they should be working towards that end. Many have studied and taken up his methods of looking at the past, implicitly accepting (perhaps unwittingly or even unwillingly) the underlying point that, as Keith Windschuttle has put it, “Under Marxism, history would end with the achievement of a universal, communist society that would finally abolish the class distinctions that had themselves driven the historical process.”[2]

An interesting progression in the Marxist historical approach has been forwarded by historian David R. Roediger in his book, The Wages of Whiteness, in which he applies Marxist methods to the study of the concept of “whiteness” among the working classes of American cities in the nineteenth century. Despite an interesting thesis, the weaknesses of his Marxist method ultimately and fatally cripple his argument in a number of ways. The most obvious flaw, which Roediger does not even attempt to hide, is that he explicitly states his motivation for writing the book as being drawn from contemporary political events and a desire to effect some sort of contemporary political change. This is hardly the kind of inspiration one should want to see for an attempt at serious historical scholarship. Another problem with his argument is his recurring attempt to castigate the historical actors he is examining for not living up to Marxist ideals, much the same way Marxists had castigated workers in World War I for being blinded by nationalism, but in Roediger’s case the phantom menace is race. Lastly, the fundamental flaw of Roediger’s efforts is the logical flaws within Marxist historical theory itself, making the entire endeavor an exercise in futility.

Roediger starts The Wages of Whiteness innocuously enough, alluding to his animating impetus as an historian as an effort “to combine commitment, principle, and scholarship.”[3] The full meaning of this phrase becomes clearer when one reads the book, but one need not rely on inference to get at why Roediger wrote it or why he takes the positions he does, because he is quite upfront and honest about it. He says in his afterword to the revised edition that, “Almost all of the much-heralded recent outpouring of historical writing on whiteness in the US has come from activist scholars deeply indebted to Marxism and committed to seeing workers as central to progressive political change. This is true of Saxton, Allen, Ignatiev, Lott, Karen Brodkin, George Lipsitz and myself.”[4] Even more enlightening and, perhaps, more shocking is his subsequent affirmation that he had, “Written in reaction to the appalling extent to which white male workers voted for Reaganism in the 1980s.”[5] Regardless of what one thinks of “Reaganism,” it is highly problematic that an historian would write a book partly out of his negative reaction to how he thinks people should have acted towards contemporary political figures. This is no surprise by the end of the book however, for his argument is interspersed with the exact same negative reactions to how workers in the nineteenth century actually acted. The reason for this disappointment has two probable causes, the first being the most obvious, that workers in the nineteenth century acted in a shameful manner in issues concerning race. The second cause for his negative reaction is his disenchantment with the inability of the workers, white and black, to unite in a common front against the “dictatorial powers”[6] of capitalists.

The theme, which is common throughout the work, that conceptions of race, particularly “whiteness,” prevented labor unity is itself common to Marxists, though often in regard to a wider gamut of dividing lines among workers like nationality, religion, etc. This disappointment in his subjects, the white workers of nineteenth century America, leads Roediger to conclude rather anti-climactically that the whole concept of “whiteness” is “a bad idea.”[7] This familiar frustration of Marxists harkens back famously to World War I, when workers of different nations did not unite as Marx and Engels suggested they do in The Communist Manifesto, but instead went to war with each other under the banners of their respective homelands. Roediger brings up an earlier American Marxist, W.E.B. Du Bois, in order to illustrate this point further,

"Du Bois argued that white supremacy undermined not just working class unity but the very vision of many white workers. He connected racism among whites with a disdain for hard work itself, a seeking of satisfaction off the job and a desire to evade rather than confront exploitation. Du Bois held that this would have been a better and more class-conscious nation and world had the heritage of slavery and racism not led the working class to prize whiteness."[8]

Roediger then finishes up the point by stating that he plans to present this failure of the working class in a way “more tragic than angry.”[9] [Italics mine] The question arises; why is this dichotomy presented? Why should the failure of workers to do something together against any perceived wrongs be viewed first and foremost by the historian as a tragedy or something to be upset about (as if the historian can correct any perceived historical wrongs at all, let alone by writing “angry” history)? The answer is quite simple in Roediger’s case; his Marxism requires disappointment and lamentation over this missed opportunity for proletarian unity. Examples of this dismay crop up throughout, for instance he concludes one chapter by saying, “Only with Black emancipation could a more straightforward critique of wage slavery, and a fierce battle over the meaning of free labor; develop. By that time, the importance of a sense of whiteness to the white US worker was a long-established fact, not only politically but culturally as well.”[10] This conclusion assumes many things that Roediger never establishes, such as the existence, not to mention a coherent definition, of “wage slavery.” The fact that workers in the nineteenth century and in the 1980s did not react to events and figures the way Roediger thinks they should have acted according to his own appraisal of their interests is irrelevant to anything he is writing about as an historian. The fact that he keeps bringing it up only serves to demonstrate the weakness of the Marxist approach in its fixation on how things should have happened as opposed to how they did happen.

Finally, there are the underlying assumptions of Marxist historical theory and their logical incongruence which makes Roediger’s efforts nearly fated for failure. David Hackett Fischer, in his book Historians’ Fallacies, captures something of the essence of where Roediger goes wrong when he writes,

"The pragmatic fallacy selects useful facts—immediately and directly useful facts—in the service of a social cause. Most historians hope their work is, or will be, useful to somebody, somewhere, someday. … But the pragmatic fallacy short-circuits the problem. It consists in the attempt to combine scholarly monographs and social manifestoes in a single operation. The result is double trouble: distorted monographs and dull manifestoes."[11]

It is not just Roediger’s desire to blend social manifesto and monograph together that is problematic. A logical problem of enormous magnitude exists in the whole Marxist theory of history, namely that it all operates mechanistically, passing through set stages, finally terminating in universal communism where the passage of time no longer makes any difference. Fischer classifies the fallacy of Marxist history as the “reductive fallacy” which “reduces complexity to simplicity, or diversity to uniformity, in causal explanations.”[12] He then goes on to eloquently sum up that even Marxists who recognize the existence of this fallacy, as Frankfurt school Marxists do and as Roediger does, will find that “their explicit rejection of reduction is contradicted by the implicitly reductive nature of their interpretations.”[13] This emphasis on reduction leads back to the first problem discussed about Roediger’s work, the fact that the motivation for writing it was derived from contemporary political events seen as “appalling” by Roediger. Marxist history is ultimately more concerned with “commitment” and “principle” than with anything else, which is what one should expect from a historical methodology born out of a political philosophy.

David R. Roediger’s book, The Wages of Whiteness, is illustrative of certain flaws with his own Marxist approach, but also, more broadly, with Marxist historical theory in general. Roediger’s inspiration for writing the book was born more out of his concern with political developments in his own day than with anything specifically going on in the past. His Marxism, in a dash of irony, almost mechanistically required him to feel sorry for his subjects and reflect sadly on the missed opportunities that may have existed or could have existed for all workers to unite against their capitalist “masters.” Ultimately, there is not much that one can expect from Roediger given the underlying flaws in Marxist historical theory which consist mainly in its illogical rigidity and its primarily political, as opposed to scholarly and historical, motives. All of these problems combine in Roediger’s work to demonstrate the limitations of Marxist historical theory in addressing not just Roediger’s concern about the conception white workers had of “whiteness,” but any conceivable topic in all of human history.


[1] The Portable Karl Marx, ed. Eugene Kamenka, The German Ideology, Volume One (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), 189.
[2] Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 1996), 174.
[3] David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (New York: Verso, 1999), vii.
[4] Ibid, 188.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid, 69.
[7] Ibid, 186.
[8] Ibid, 13.
[9] Ibid. The concept of this story being a “tragedy” reappears, on page 55, when Roediger refers to the dilemma of those trying to coming up with alternative names for their jobs, i.e. servants calling themselves “help,” etc. He also states in the afterword, on page 186, that the book “is cast as a tragedy destructive to Americans across color lines.”
[10] Ibid, 87.
[11] David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies (New York: HarperPerennial, 1970), 82.
[12] Ibid, 172.
[13] Ibid, 174.

Goodbye, Simon

One of the heroes of the twentieth century passed away today at the age of 96. Simon Wiesenthal devoted his life, after incredibly surviving the full gamut of Nazi death camps, to hunting down the killers who escaped the fall of Hitler's outlaw regime. His greatest achievement came in 1960 when his work in finding Adolf Eichmann, chief in charge of the "final solution," led to his capture by Israeli agents. Eichmann was then brought to trial in Israel, convicted, and executed. But Wiesenthal brought hundreds, and even thousands, more Nazi killers to justice over his lifetime. His committment to justice was a heroic response to his personal tragedy at the hands of the Nazis, who killed 89 of his relatives and had starved him to 99 lbs. by the end of the war. Such devotion to justice is always inspiring. Goodbye, Simon.