Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)
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Before Moynihan: Stanley Elkins's Slavery (1959), Psychoanalytic Discourse and the Cold War / Mark J. Goodman
<1> Drawing on the neglected connection between racial politics and the Cold War, Mary Dudziak (379, quoted in Mullen, 378-380) emphasizes that the Justice Department in this period urged an end to segregation "because of its use in Soviet propaganda". But if the Brown decision (1954) served that need, broadcasting abroad America's democratic intentions - and perhaps stimulating, inadvertently, the Southern movement - it proved otherwise ineffectual. Despite the long and thorough legal preparation by NAACP and other groups, through the mid-1960s, Southern schools remained racially divided; and segregation in the North was not challenged until a decade later. The pace of change depended less on legal argument than on politics; and today, under the leadership of Federal judges appointed under a succession of Republican presidents, the schools are firmly re-segregated (Bell; Ogletree; Orfield, Eaton and Harvard Project on School Desegregation), making transparent the politics of the process, both in its advertised ascent and quiet decline.
<2> Daniel Patrick Moynihan's diagnosis, depending on Elkins and labor statistics, also targeted employment policy and welfare reform, calling for a coordinated effort. But hammered by the Republicans' "Southern" electoral strategy, first effected by Richard M. Nixon in 1968, a withering institutional displacement, and legal challenges, affirmative action also failed, dwindling to a rationalizing "diversity management" (Pedriana and Stryker). Likewise, removing AFDC and other categorical aids, so crucial to African-American households and the African-American community, supposedly to strike a blow against "welfare dependency," only deepened black poverty, fostering an even more stigmatized and policed, carceral condition (Hays; Wacquant).
<3> Cut short by the dynamic of the Vietnam escalation and then frozen by the rightward political turn after Nixon's election, what survived from Moynihan and Elkins's intervention was not the urgency and positive energy it might have infused in Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty, still marked by a New Deal enthusiasm for an interventionist state, but only the dispiriting psychoanalytic diagnosis. In the decades following, the image of black moral incapacity served to justify a neo-conservative and neo-segregationist politics of retrenchment, a remorseless toughening of bureaucratic controls. War on poverty, always hedged by imperatives of accumulation, became more simply, a war on the poor.
<4> Elkins's account needs to be looked at afresh in its historical context, reflecting, as it did, an attempt to replace the older biological racism with a seemingly more benign cultural interpretation. In this, it reflects Hofstadter's revisionist influence (Hofstadter; Elkins and McKitrick), as well as the anxieties so tellingly expressed in Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism. These are some of key markers of the broader cultural trends in the late 1950s and early 1960s which need to be re-explored to order to place Elkins's work in proper perspective.
<5> But taken more narrowly, within the mainstream of the historical profession as it was organized at the time, it has to be said that the African-American's condition of being locked up and locked out did not cause terrible concern. Indeed, in the seventy years which elapsed between an early piece by Du Bois on Reconstruction (1910) and John Hope Franklin's 1980 AHA Presidential Address, not one article by an African-American author appeared in the journal (Lewis, cited in Meier and Rudwick) - a circumstance, no doubt, which contributed to Kenneth Stampp's strategic decision to avoid Du Bois's provocative and troubling ideas on black "double-consciousness," facing outward and inward at the same time (Reed), and seek what he understood as neutral, middle ground - arguing in his magisterial The Peculiar Institution that race was "irrelevant," that black people under slavery were only "white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less" (Stampp, "Southern Negro Slavery"; Stampp, Peculiar Institution, vii, cited in Lewis, 770 n.15).
<6> Within the established tradition of writing on Southern and African-American history, Stampp was responding to the legacy of Ulrich Phillips. Phillips, of course, was a thoroughgoing racist, pinning much of the blame for antebellum Southern troubles on the laziness of blacks. Writing during World War I from the Army YMCA (Camp Gordon, Georgia) he could still see black soldiers exhibiting, he thought, the same "easy going, amiable, serio comic obedience and the same personal attachments to white men, as well as the same sturdy light heartedness and the same love of laughter and of rhythm, which distinguished their forbears" on the plantation (American Negro Slavery, Preface).
<7> To get a flavor of this earlier writing, so long hegemonic, consider, as well, John Spencer Bassett's The Southern Overseer (1925). As Michael Tadman remarks in his study of the interstate slave trade, Bassett's cold appreciation of the African-American family and its fate "reads like the writings of an antebellum planter restored to the sinister comfort of the Old South" (216) [1]. Indeed, Bassett (5, 18, 22, 16) doubts that tearing slave families apart mattered very much to blacks, for they "did not esteem marriage as the white people esteemed it." He explains that "slavery was a hard school but in it the Africans learned some good lessons." The overseer, uneducated, confronted a "child race of black men." Whipping was needed.
<8> Despite his firm rejection of such racist ideas and their moral basis, Stanley Elkins's empirical description of the regime as an energetic enterprise which "stripped away" African culture fits in this tradition; and, in the end, his conclusions are not far from Phillips,' joining paternalism, an asserted black childishness and an unmitigated violence. At the same time, the theoretical route to the conclusion is completely different, reflecting the novelty of the new post-war historical writing which looked to the social sciences and to psychoanalysis for a guide.
<9> Writing in the shadow of the Holocaust and assuming greater accessibility to it than to the disparate and scattered records on slavery in Africa and the Americas, Elkins (129-130 n. 101) [2] lays out a provocative analogy between the circumstance of the slaves and prisoners in the camps, a psychic profile of the coffle line and dreaded Atlantic passage, "seasoning" in American ports and sale on the auction block in Charlestown or New Orleans as compared with the sequence of shocks administered by the Nazis. In his now-famous "Sambo" thesis, Elkins argues that the masters exerted tremendous control over their slaves, depriving them, in the end, of every vestige of social or psychical space. This cramped and terrifying thesis sparked a fierce historiographic debate on black oppression and resistance that lasted three decades (Lewis, 771, citing Meier and Rudwick, 241-147; Novick, 480-486).
<10> Although he also refers to other works in social psychology, Bruno Bettelheim's 1944 account of his incarceration in Auschwitz, since much-debated, provided the crucial model for the fateful destruction of personality rehearsed for American slaves by Elkins; and Elkins's view was figurative in the characterization which subsequently appeared in the Moynihan Report of blacks as incapable and violence-prone, lacking male leadership, and thus needful of intervention.
<11> Elkins depends on Bettelheim for the Nazi side to the story [3]. But Bettelheim does not provide the data needed. Instead, deliberately opaque about his standing as a member of the old Jewish-German bourgeoisie, he constructs a vision of infantile regression as mass-conversion experience in which camp guards stand in for Freud's figure of the biological "father," the demanding, tough, but always high-minded disciplinarian featured in the Oedipal configuration [4]. But unlike Freud, Bettelheim insists that circumstances exist where the deep emotional connection between child and parent can be utterly overthrown, where the camp inmate - and, later, for Elkins, the American slave - can be thrust into a condition of hopeless dependence on those who whip him until he bleeds, humiliate and torment him, and threaten, at every moment, to end his life.
<12> Could it be that, for Elkins, the pressures of the Cold War atmosphere made these circumstances seem repeatable, more insistently vivid and alive, and somehow more accessible than the cultural traces left by African-Americans themselves? This would reflect a peculiar historiography. Indeed, the reader of Elkins will notice a variety of horrific contemporary instances which clutter its pages, and particularly the footnotes, which deal neither with Dachau nor the coffle line.
<13> We are told, for example, that during the Korean War, "the Chinese" "were able to get large numbers of Americans to act as informers" without physical torture or extreme deprivation, but only by isolating leaders, "emphasizing the captors' power," and by "judicious manipulation of petty rewards and punishments" (Schein, cited in Elkins 128 n. 99); that British prisoners returning from German or Japanese camps suffered psychiatric disorders when attempts were made to re-socialize them in the civilian setting (Newcomb, 476-7, 482, quoted in Elkins, 127 n. 98); that Israeli social workers came to understand that former camp inmates were "unable to control their greed for food" and that "concern for their neighbors' sensibilities was more than one could expect" (Friedman, quoted ion Elkins, 128 n. 98) [5].
<14> Why are these here? Do they add to the particularity of the experience sketched by Bettelheim for the camps, sustaining Elkins's claimed analogy in Slavery or filling in the gaps on the historical experience of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the US South? Or are they instanced, rather, to support the view that great injuries could be accomplished through the hidden persuaders, manipulated alike under slavery, the Nazis and America's foes in the Cold War? Thus, the suggestion is that the thinking of the period blended primitive racial and political ideas, and partly drew its potency from this combination. This is a hypothesis which I believe could be explored further. The psychology of fear was important in making the connection.
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Notes
[1] In his subsequent work (1996), Tadman shows the deceptively feigned innocence and the deep personal interest of planters in the interstate slave trade, the most violent (and hidden) aspect of the system (compare Gudmestad; Deyle). [^]
[2] Still, to substantiate the "Sambo" thesis, Elkins quotes from sources which he clearly understood as racist (Pollard; Tillinghast), suggesting that such testimony must bear a kernel of truth. [^]
[3] See Bettelheim's contribution on the camps (1943) and his related notions of anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hatred (1947). Bettelheim's view of the camps is contested (Marcus, Pingel). Arendt extensively cites and discusses Bettelheim's views in Origins of Totalitarianism (439, 444-445, 449, 451, 453). [^]
[4] See, for example, Freud's "Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes" (248-251). [^]
[5] Two other examples are provided by Schein (1959) and Biderman. [^]
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