The Story of American Freedom

“Unburdened by the institutions—monarchy, aristocracy, hereditary privilege—that oppressed peoples of the Old World, America, and America alone, was the place where the principle of universal freedom could take root.”

Foner refers to the fact that universal freedom would be impossible in a society in which one’s status is attached to their name rather than their merit. Even though true freedom was missing in America until the 20th century, it was always possible because of the foundational concept that “all men are created equal.”

“Blacks recognized both hypocrisy and opportunity in the ideology of freedom. The most insistent advocates of freedom as a universal entitlement were African-Americans, who demanded that the leaders of the struggle for independence live up to their professed creed, thus extending the concept of liberty into unintended realms.”

While the concept of liberty was the basis for the American Revolution, it was extremely hypocritical in that slavery was so institutionalized in the colonies. African Americans saw that they could use the ideology of freedom for their own purposes by exposing that hypocrisy. The result was that the notion of liberty now had to be considered for all humans, not just those escaping British tyranny.

“Indian removal—accomplished by fraud, intimidation, and violence—was indispensable to the triumph of manifest destiny and the American mission of spreading freedom.”

Manifest destiny, the idea that the United States had a God-given right to expand and take over the entire continent of North America, could not have succeeded without the removal of Indigenous tribes across frontier lands. In some cases, the government negotiated with tribes to move to federal land further west, and in cases where negotiation did not work, their land was taken by force.

“The rapid expansion of slavery and the consolidation of a distinctive southern ruling class led inexorably to the rise of a proslavery ideology that employed the contrast between freedom and slavery as a weapon against the self-proclaimed ‘free society’ of the North.”

Proslavery advocates in the South attempted to make the case that wage workers in the North were not truly free themselves, and that slavery kept Black Americans more economically secure than free work in factories or domestic service in the North. They also argued that, because of slavery, even non-slave-owning whites in the South were economically secure.

“Despite racial inequalities, many whites of the revolutionary generation had thought of African-Americans as ‘black Yankees,’ entitled to at least some of the rights of citizens and potential members of the body politic. But in the nineteenth century, as southern states tightened their laws to make manumission almost impossible and blacks in the North were subjected to political disenfranchisement, social segregation, and severe economic discrimination, the racial boundaries of the political nation became more and more impermeable.”

Foner refers to the sea change in attitudes about slavery that took place between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Foner explains that “as late as 1800, no northern state limited the suffrage on the basis of race. But every state that entered the Union after that year, with the single exception of Maine, restricted the right to vote to white males (74). The racial boundaries concerning political rights became more pronounced only when the possible emancipation of enslaved people became a legitimate issue.

“In a country where the right to vote had become intrinsic to understandings of freedom, it is difficult to overstate the importance of the fact that white male immigrants could vote almost from the moment they disembarked in America, while blacks, whose ancestors had lived in the country for centuries (and Indians, who had been there even longer), could not.”

Although initially property requirements for voting existed across the country, those were erased everywhere by 1860 in favor of universal white male suffrage. This ability to vote applied to the millions of men who immigrated to the United States in the mid-19th century, most of whom were from eastern Europe, simply because they were white.

“For years after the Civil War, white southerners would shun celebrations of Independence Day, while former slaves appropriated the holiday for themselves. To this day, few African-Americans share the instinctive sense among so many whites that freedom requires reining in federal authority.”

With this passage, Foner refers to the dichotomy that exists even today between those who think freedom is not having the government limit them and those who think freedom is having the government aid their freedom. Through the government’s exercise of national power, enslaved people were emancipated and thus saw Independence Day a worthy celebration, but proslavery southerners refused to celebrate because they somehow felt as though freedom had been taken away from them.

“Between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century, the United States underwent one of the most profound economic revolutions any country has ever experienced, and witnessed some of the most violent struggles between labor and employers in the history of capitalism.”

Following the Civil War, the United States economy transitioned from one based on agriculture and artisanal production to one based on coal, iron, and steam. Along with that transformation came economic concentration of individual wealth and industrial production. This unrestrained capitalism led to violent confrontations between employers and workers seeking better wages and safer working conditions.

“The disenfranchisement of Southern blacks (along with a considerable number of poor white voters), which began in Mississippi in 1890, not only halted and reversed the long trend of toward expanding political freedom, but transformed Deep South states into political rotten boroughs whose representatives in Congress would long wield far greater power on the national scene than their tiny electorates warranted.”

In the latter part of this quote, Foner refers to the fact that southern representatives in Congress held far more power than they actually should have. This is because many citizens in those districts, Black and white, were disenfranchised by the use of poll taxes and literacy tests, but still counted in determining Congressional representation and electoral votes.

“If the slave woman had served nineteenth-century feminists as an emblem of all women’s oppression, the working woman—both working-class and professional—became, for a new generation, the symbol of female emancipation.”

In the 19th century, as women were systematically shut out of the workforce and relegated to home life as part of the “separate spheres” ideology, many invoked slavery and equated their lives to those of enslaved women. As women began joining the workforce during the Progressive era of the 20th century, it was considered a form of emancipation.

“So central has freedom of expression become to Americans’ understanding of liberty that it is difficult to recall how fragile were its legal defenses in the early twentieth century.”

Foner points out in Chapter 8 that no “genuinely effective, legally enforceable right to freedom of speech existed in the United States before the 1920s” (163). Although public debate had always existed, speech considered radical or obscene had been restricted. In the early 20th century, however, as workers sought the right to strike and labor radicals sought to get their message out, freedom of speech became a significant issue.

“For all the administration’s exalted rhetoric, the war inaugurated the most intensive repression of civil liberties the nation has ever known. It laid the foundation not for the triumph of Progressivism but for one of the most conservative decades in American history.”

Foner alludes to the Wilson Administration and the crackdown on issues of free speech and civil liberties that it unleashed during World War I. The Espionage Act of 1917 prohibited “not only spying and interfering with the draft but also ‘false statements’ that might impede military success” (177). Similarly, the Sedition Act “criminalized spoken or printed statements intended to cast ‘contempt, scorn, contumely, or disrepute’ on the ‘form of government’ or that advocated interference with the war effort” (177).

“The pathbreaking legislation of the 1930s arose from the historical conjuncture of an unprecedented economic crisis, the coming to power of men and women long committed to government-sponsored reform, and a popular mobilization demanding far-reaching economic and social change.”

Foner refers to Roosevelt’s New Deal programs and policies which were put into place as a result of the Great Depression. All of these aspects came together in the 1930s to substantially expand the size and scope of the federal government to tackle the crisis.

“It was the Popular Front, not the mainstream Democratic Party, that forthrightly sought to popularize the idea that the country’s strength lay in diversity and tolerance, a love of equality, and a rejection of ethnic prejudice and class privilege.”

Foner describes the era of the Popular Front as when “the Communist Party actively sought to ally itself with liberals, socialists, and independent radicals in broadly based movements for social change” (212). The Democratic Party and the New Deal shied away from such an egalitarian message because of the fear of a backlash, but left-wing activists and organizations had no such reservations.

“Few events have transformed American life as broadly and deeply as World War II. From the development of the Sun Belt to the modern struggle for black equality, the economic trends and social movements we associate with the postwar world had their roots in the war years.

Many transformations took place due to America’s entry into World War II. Chief among these, like previous wars but on a much larger scale, was the size and scope of the government expansion due to wartime mobilization. An unprecedented economic boom occurred thanks to wartime production and employment, and a great migration of African Americans from the Deep South to northern industrial cities took place. The strong push for racial equality also resulted because the hypocrisy of fighting against Hitler’s racist ideologies while allowing it at home became clear.

“World War II reshaped Americans’ understanding of themselves as a people. The struggle against Nazi tyranny and its theory of a master race gave new emphasis to the civic definition of American nationality and discredited ethnic and racial inequality.”

Foner refers to the hypocrisy that the United States had opened itself up to by renouncing the Nazi ideology of inferior races while promoting similar prejudices at home. Many Americans saw this double standard and began to view matters of ethnic and racial discrimination differently.

“The CIA in the early 1950s organized military coups in Guatemala and Iran that replaced elected officials deemed to threaten foreign investments with dictators attuned to American interests. These events were hailed as examples of the ‘progress of freedom.’”

American interventions in Guatemala and Iran took place in the 1960s and 1970s, all justified by the Cold War rhetoric of stopping the spread of Communism. Regardless of the fact that the officials the U.S. replaced were often democratically elected, if they showed any allegiance to the Soviet Union or socialism, America supported coups to replace them. This is what Foner refers to as the circular logic of Cold War freedom.

“As late as 1993, nearly 90 percent of suburban whites lived in communities with non-white populations of less than 1 percent—the legacy of conscious decisions by government, real estate developers, banks, and initial residents.”

In the 1950s, as millions of Americans were moving to new suburbs outside of metropolitan areas, conscious decisions were made by the government, real estate developers, banks, and other residents to ensure that the areas remained segregated by race. In many cases, the developers promoted the segregation on behalf of residents, and in other cases, banks and federal lending agencies refused to subsidize mortgages for Black Americans.

“King presented the case for black rights in a vocabulary that bridged the gap between the races and fused the black experience with that of the nation.”

Martin Luther King Jr. used his religious background to infuse Christian themes into his calls for equality, which appealed to many white Americans. He also appealed to white Americans because he insisted that civil rights protesters were acting out of a mutual love of their country (279).

“Johnson’s Great Society represented a remarkable reaffirmation of the idea of social citizenship and racial equality, the most expansive effort in the nation’s history to mobilize the powers of the national government to address the needs of the least advantaged Americans.”

President Lyndon B. Johnson argued that “government was a force for liberation” when referencing the massive expansion of the federal government that took place under his “Great Society” programs (286). Although America’s “welfare state” bloomed during the programs of the New Deal in the 1930s, they largely failed to aid persons of color. This was not the case with the Great Society as Johnson’s programs could be more accurately described as “equal opportunity.”

“The war was both a logical extension and a reductio ad absurdum of Cold War policies and assumptions. It tragically exposed the dangers of viewing the entire world and every local situation within it through the either-or lens of an anti-Communism crusade.”

Foner alludes to the Vietnam War, which was a far more complex regional conflict than America had realized. As in many other cases of American military intervention across the globe during the Cold War, the United States ended up aiding a dictatorial South Vietnamese regime in the name of containing the spread of communism.

“Associated in many minds with the crimes of European fascism and the economic policies that had produced the Great Depression, and identified with conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism, and an elitist belief in social hierarchy, conservatism appeared to lack the intellectual resources to deal effectively with the problems of the postwar world.”

Because the conservative economic policies of deregulation and unrestrained free market capitalism led to the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, conservatism in America had a bad reputation in the middle of the 20th century. Likewise, the ideologies that led to European fascism in the 1940s shared many similarities with American conservatism at the same time. Because of this, the state of American conservatism was weak after World War II.

“Reagan’s years in office completed the process by which freedom, having been progressively abandoned by liberals and the left, became fully identified with conservative goals and values.”

Perhaps more than any other president, Reagan invoked freedom, but it certainly was not new. From the Revolution to the close of the 20th century, freedom was invoked for political reasons, but it took on a new meaning with the conservative movement of the 1980s, as it came to be associated the goals of limited government.