Civil Disobedience

In this class, and the next we will be focusing on civil liberties and civil rights, both important concepts, inseparable from the idea of citizenship. We will look at the idea of civil liberties through some of the most important figures in American history, all fierce champions of liberty, ready and willing to call out the abuses of government.

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), wrote, the essay "Civil Disobedience," and a true radical in a political history which usually idolizes moderate liberals. The idea of civil disobedience is unique to democratic societies. It means breaking the law and thus challenging the authorities, but usually in a non-violent fashion. In Thoreau's case he refused to pay his taxes in 1846 because he believed the money was being used for an immoral purpose, namely the Mexican-American War which he saw as a war to advance the interests of slave owners and he was put in jail. He was bailed out the next day by his friend and famous poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882). Supposedly, there was an exchange between the two, where Emerson questioned Thoreau on why he was in jail. Thoreau allegedly responded "why are you not in jail?" In other words, the idea behind civil disobedience is that  morality requires you to disobey unjust laws. Passively accepting a corrupt society, Thoreau argues, makes you as guilty as the people who actually oppress others and do violence to people. It is even worse in a democracy because here the citizens actually have some ability to alter the course of laws and government.


This idea is also a core component of the civil religion, and refers to the higher authority that is referred to in the Declaration, as "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights," in other words, a form of law based on natural rights higher than the laws of political states. The basis of civil disobedience can be found in the Declaration itself which explicitly authorizes disobedience to the extent in which government departs from protecting the rights of its citizens.

Thoreau, much like Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther King Jr., see natural law and human law as antagonistic, and separate, as he says: "Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first and subjects afterward" (p. 222). Thoreau was a big influence on King who similarly practiced civil disobedience in opposing segregation in the South, and in his later Poor People's Campaign which we will discuss next class. Like Thoreau, King was not afraid of going to jail and composed one of his most well known writings literally from the Birmingham, Alabama jail.

Thoreau was very conscious in which respect for laws or traditions and mores can easily turn into a mechanical and unthinking submission to whatever the authorities may be:

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army; and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgement of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens (p. 223).

Government is only as good or bad as the people who run it. It is not evil in itself nor is it good in itself, or as  he says, "But, to speak practically and as a citizen unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it" (p. 222). In other words a government closer to the ideas of equality and justice that we are entitled to according to the Declaration.

He is very clear on the source of his disgust for the current government, "I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave's government also" (p. 223) (referring to the slave owners not the actual slaves)

In The Federalist we discussed how the ideal of government was supposed to function like a machine and thus create an impersonal system of control that is not under the control of any one person. As long as the machine functions properly and maintains justice in society but what happens if the machine is creating injustice:

If the unjustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth––certainly the machine will wear out. If the unjustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank,  exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say break the law. Let you life be a counterfriction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn (p. 226).

"Civil Disobedience" was written about the same time as Karl Marx and Fredrick Engel's "Manifesto of the Communist Party", that begins its first chapter with the famous line, "the history of all hitherto existing society, is the history of class struggles." These writings stand in the same tradition of provocative literature as Thomas Paine's "Common Sense," something very much lacking in today's political discourse. The sociologist, Alvin Gouldner, spoke of a "culture of critical discourse" developing from the 18th century, establishing certain norms for how political debate, or any intellectual debate should take place. Gouldner addresses many issues connected with this, but George Orwell goes right to the heart of the matter in his essay "Politics and the English Language," where he speaks of the political uses (or misuses) of language, especially how language is used to mystify and deceive people. Anyone familiar with his novel, 1984, is aware of how the totalitarian government uses language to deceive the population. He even outlines six guidelines for writing that I think are important, and very counter-intuitive for how people are usually taught to write in college, where they are always thinking about page length and things like that: 

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit

I bring all this up because I want to bring attention not just to the content of the readings in question, but form as well, in other words how they write. In my opinion, they write with more passion and clarity than you see in today's political commentators.


Judith Shklar was a known political philosopher. Her lectures on citizenship, collected in the book, American Citizenship (1991), reveal some important insights into American culture, and why Americans value the idea of equality so much, even in a highly unequal society. Though not on the syllabus, I think this book explores several themes that relate to the readings this week. Shklar explains: 

The dignity of work and personal achievement, and the contempt for aristocratic idleness, were from colonial times onward at the very heart of American civic self-identification. The opportunity to work and to be paid an earned reward for one's labor was a social right, because it was a primary source of public respect. It was seen as such, however, not only because it was a defiant cultural and moral departure from the corrupt European past, but also because paid labor separated the free man from the slave (p. 387).

For her, citizenship in America is essentially defined by two things, voting, and the ability to earn. However, she values citizenship more for the social recognition, or status, it brings, rather then the formalities of voting and limited participation:

The significance of the two great emblems of public standing, the vote and the opportunity to earn, seems clearest to these excluded men and women. They have regarded voting and earning not as just the ability to promote their interests and to make money. They have seen them as the attributes of an American citizen. And people who are not granted these marks of civic dignity feel dishonored, not just powerless and poor. They are also scorned by their fellow citizens. The struggle for citizenship in America has, therefore, been overwhelmingly a demand for inclusion in the polity, an effort to break down excluding barriers to recognition, rather than civic participation as a deeply involving activity (p. 388).

Frederick Douglass

The historical development of rights for African-Americans follows a dramatically different path then that of the white working class in this country. As Frederick Douglass illustrates in his most famous speech. Douglass, points to a glaring gap in the creed of America, which according to Chesterton is embodied in the Declaration of Independence: 

But such is not the sate of the case. I sat it with a sad sense of disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeather by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people! 

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour. 

In his other writing, Douglass distinguishes between various forms of the abolition movement that in his eyes are inadequate. He refers to the Free Soil Party founded in 1848 of former Democrats and some radical abolitionists. The party failed to win any presidential elections, but helped transition anti-slavery democrats to the   Republican Party, originally formed as an anti-slavery party in 1854 and supported by papers like Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune.

The Democratic Party at the same time which was so powerful in the South and New York has become the party of slavery. However, in Douglass' view the Free Soil movement does not go far enough because it only wants to restrict the further expansion of slavery, not to abolish it where it already is. Although scientific reason was opposed to slavery it did create the "cautious" attitude that you do not do things too radically. Douglass is equally opposed to the Garrison Abolitionists, named after William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879), a New England journalist who became one of the most well known abolitionists. Garrison favored total abolition, but he was apolitical, in other words he thought the best way to fight slavery was not to deal with it or people who benefit from it. Douglass saw this as little better than closing your eyes to a problem, and like the Republicans, favored political involvement, but like Garrison, wanted total abolition.

Until the 1960s, most African-Americans could not even claim to have basic civil rights, let alone political or social rights. Even though there were people before then like Douglass, DuBois, and others, unfortunately they had not been able to make much progress, at least in getting the country as a whole, to accept rights for African-Americans. In many ways, democracy is a fairly new idea in this country. If you accept the basic notion that a democracy is where all the citizens are allowed to vote, then the country can not really be considered a democracy until about 1965. Clearly, the idea of democracy frightens many people and there has been a strong backlash against these democratic forces since then.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906), and Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) were all active members of the abolition and women's rights movements, which originally were united, and who used the idea of civil disobedience that Thoreau spoke of, as a means to agitate the political system, to initiate radical reforms, and ultimately to win full citizenship. 

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Stanton and Anthony were leaders of the Women's Rights movement which since the 1840s had been organizing to win for women the right to vote. They shared leadership of the movement, with Stanton being more of a writer, and Anthony being more of an orator. Stanton's Declaration of Rights and Sentiments is modeled after the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights..." (pp. 231-32). 


Besides their ideological strength, they were skilled organizers and were able to create a network of political institutions composed of voluntary associations, small political parties, and newspapers. All were involved early on with the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), supported by newspapers like The Liberator or the National Anti-Slavery Standard. Frederick Douglass published his own abolitionist paper The North Star, which later merged with the newspaper of the abolitionist political party, the Liberty Party to form Frederick Douglass' Paper. Anthony published her own women's rights paper The Revolution which was the official paper of the National Women's Suffrage Association (NWSA) formed by Stanton and Anthony in 1869. The NWSA was formed after the breakup of the earlier American Equal Rights Association between 1866-1869, which split over the issue of granting voting rights (suffrage) to women and freed slaves. The text of the 15th amendment to the Constitution (1870) shows clearly that the right to vote cannot be taken away because of a person's race or color, but it does not specify gender. Women would not win the right to vote in the country until 1920 (after Stanton and Anthony had died) with the passage of the 19th amendment. They also illustrate the importance of third parties in the US, which although it is common knowledge the US is a two party system, the history of third parities like the Liberty Party in the 1840s, the Communist Party in the 1930s, and arguably the Green Party today, or Democratic Socialists of America (as well as others), have all had a tremendous impact on public policy and even how we talk about politics, even if they failed to win at electoral politics.

Today, the network of organizations, media, and activists is known as the public sphere, but the development of this sphere was supported by the beneficial economic advantages of the U.S. including relative economic equality, as well as a literate population. Also, civil liberties which, of course, include freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press. 

Anthony was arrested in 1872 after attempting to vote in New York. The same year women's rights activists Victoria Woodhull ran a presidential campaign under the the Equal Rights Party, with Frederick Douglass as Vice-President (Douglass never responded to the nomination), though they received no electoral votes and a very tiny amount of the popular vote. The excerpt here is from the closing statements of the trial United States v. Anthony. Anthony is skillfully able to turn the trial itself into a trial of the American system by pointing out the obvious hypocrisies and contradictions in a political system based on the idea of citizenship and equality but that excludes almost half the population from being a real citizen, which she notes emphatically is impossible without real political rights including of course the right to vote:

All my prosecutors, from the 8th Ward corner grocery politician, who entered the complaint, to the United States Marshal, Commissioner, District Attorney, District Judge, your honor on the bench, not one is my peer, but each and all are my political sovereigns; and had your honor submitted my case to the jury, as was clearly your duty, even when I should have had just cause of protest, for not one of those men was my peer; but native or foreign, white or black, rich or poor, educated or ignorant, awake or asleep, sober or drunk, each and every man of them was my political superior; hence, in no sense, my peer.

Susan B. Anthony

The 14th amendment to the Constitution explicitly states that all people born or naturalized within the United States are citizens of the United States and are entitled to all the protections of the law and all the rights and privileges that come with citizenship. Anthony argues quite clearly that her arrest and trial clearly contradict her rights as defined by this amendment in the Constitution.

As important as the formal rights in the Constitution are, the preservation of these rights depends on democratic political institutions and an open society. Social norms can sometimes prevent change as they become dogmatic, but because of the struggles of people, civil disobedience itself is an established norm in American culture, in other words, somewhat paradoxically, a tradition of opposing authority.

Besides voting, Shklar also points to the economic aspects of citizenship, of earning a living, and being independent, something which creates certain obsessive qualities in American culture, as she says:

The addiction to work that this induced was noted by every visitor the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. So was the passion for money, which, as the most astute noted, meant not just gain, but also independence, the freedom to do with one's life as one pleased. To have money is to spend and save and give as one chooses, without asking leave of any superior. It had taken the place that honor occupied in aristocratic societies. And indeed, independence had replaced honor as the object of social aspiration. It was an enormously radical change. Independent citizens in a democratic order had now not only to be respected for working, they also had a right to self-improvement, to education and unblocked opportunities for self-advancement. These rights partly fulfilled the promise of equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, and partly they were the necessary corollary of the duty to contribute to the progress and prosperity of the republic. For the individual citizen that also meant that socially he was what he as an earner at any given moment in his life (pp. 416-17).

The importance of earning, and how one earned a living, became even more of a focus after the Civil War, as some of the barriers to voting began to fall. However, the economic class struggles that defined the late 19th century were only beginning to intensify. One cannot talk about class struggle without mentioning Karl Marx. Marx, of all people, actually wrote a letter to Abraham Lincoln, congratulating him on the North's efforts to end slavery in the South: "If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery," and concludes the letter with: 

The workingmen of Europe feel sure, that as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendance for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.

Marx, then, understood that the struggle against slavery was a struggle of humanity against oppression, and would reverberate throughout the world. It was also an important step in modernizing the American economy, which Marx always believed would eventually lead to socialism.

It has become common to be dismissive or cynical towards the motives of the North in fighting slavery, for example in the movie Gangs of New York, by Martin Scorsese, the working class is portrayed as racist and hostile to the war effort. It is true that Lincoln was reluctant, at first, to call for the end of slavery, and there were riots in New York City when the North instituted the first draft for military service. On the other hand, 80 percent of Northern soldiers voted for Abraham Lincoln in 1864, after three hard years of fighting, with the war still going on, and after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, clearly signaling their support for the cause.

One of Marx's most important insights was that under a capitalist economic system, which was still developing in their time, the class structure of society becomes simplified into two classes of owners and workers, or as Marx termed them, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This marks a change from earlier feudal and slave societies that had more complex class structures, or in simpler terms, pre-capitalist societies had "caste" systems that were fairly complex, while capitalist societies have a class system.

In the American context, Shklar argues that the radical nature of the American revolution destroyed the feudal ideas of privileged classes and hierarchy that had infected European life, just as much as Japan, or elsewhere. However, the growth of a class system under capitalism was something that was just beginning to develop at the time of the revolution, and posed new challenges that are still unresolved today. Furthermore, the racial aspects of class struggle in American life also pose significant challenges, as slavery and segregation afterwards, have always had an economic aspect of exploitation, as much as politically denying the vote and representation.


Next class, we will talk more about rights.