Gabriel Winant

Jim Cramer has responded by noting, angrily, that Jon Stewart is a comedian, which apparently makes Stewart unqualified to judge when someone is making a fool of himself. But rather than rely on “The Daily Show” for our opinions, even though we usually do, we at Salon decided to spend a day glued to CNBC and judge the network for ourselves. That is, my boss made me watch it.

What I found was a paradox at the channel’s core — one that seemed, late on the afternoon of Monday, March 9, to make Jim Cramer want to claw his own skin off. The station’s business model rests on its claim to insider wisdom and market smarts. CNBC’s army of analysts marshals a host of data to tell the daily story of the markets in the language of the markets. From that angle, the disorienting effect that hours of watching had on me is not surprising: I only sort of understand what derivatives are. No wonder my head was spinning.

At the same time, however, the network depends on a particular industry, and thrives on good economic news, which is in short supply. Nobody wants to tune in to cable day after day to hear yet another dirge for yet another one of their stocks. There is a financial imperative for the pundits to keep their core audience of investors coming back, and therefore an obligation for the pundits to distort empirical reality to make a grim future seem manageable. Or, as one commercial puts it, “In an unpredictable market, one man has the answers, the vision, the experience you can trust. In Cramer we trust.”

And yet the financial future is starting to seem unmanageable, even to the all-knowing pundits of CNBC. Someone must be to blame. Thus the essence of CNBC circa 2009 is an uneasy mixture of despair and boosterism, made to cohere with the liberal application of pure venom. And the venom is directed at the most convenient target: Barack Obama.

CNBC’s day starts off in the wee hours, with “Worldwide Exchange,” a largely unwatched look at world markets. By sunrise, “Squawk Box” is on, the first of the day’s many indistinguishable talking-heads panels. “Squawk” generally gives a look at what’s coming up on the markets that day, which on Monday was pharmaceutical giant Merck’s $41 billion acquisition of rival Schering-Plough. Monday’s was a very special episode of “Squawk Box” for another reason: Reporter Becky Quick was in an Omaha, Neb., furniture store, interviewing Warren Buffett. The normally reassuring, Obama-supporting “Oracle of Omaha” showed up uncharacteristically jittery about the economy, which Buffett said had “fallen off a cliff … not only has the economy slowed down a lot, people have really changed their behavior like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

At 9 a.m., the action shifts to CNBC’s field team, “Squawk on the Street,” who are waiting for the 9:30 bell to open trading in New York. “We are at the nerve center!” marvels anchor Mark Haines. “The raw, shingles-infested nerve center,” Erin Burnett responds. The Dow starts the day at 6,625, and though the Schering-Plough acquisition is supposed to juice the markets, it doesn’t seem to be happening. As, somewhere outside my apartment and far from the glow of the TV, the sun gets higher in the sky, it becomes clear that there is no pharmaceutical fix for the Dow. It will be another bad day at the market for CNBC to explain. “This was a long time coming. Consolidation in the sector is inevitable, but the market is clearly saying, ‘We hate it,’” puzzled one of the many interchangeable CNBC talkers.

As the morning goes on, the market continues to jitter, and the “Squawks” give way to “The Call,” which features ongoing, real-time analysis. Co-host Larry Kudlow (who will reappear later) laments the Dow’s gradual sinking. “In the morning, I wake up, I have a special Google alert to the Baltic dry shipping index, because I’m trying to glom onto something positive.” Kudlow sees nothing positive about Obama’s plans.  “They are spending their tuchises off!” he shouts. “That’s the problem! It’s Keynesian stimulus! What we need is tax cuts, lower tax rates.” At noon, “The Call” moves over for the two-hour “Power Lunch,” which is basically the same idea, but at lunchtime.

By now, I have noticed that I speak a different language than the people on this channel. Or maybe I’m just not as smart as they are. “I’ve decided that flat is the new up,” declares one talking head. “If they can’t get their heads together, there’s no way we’re going to get meat on the bone,” warns another. Their braying seems to mean something to their target audience, but not to me. Even most-esteemed sage Warren Buffett wasn’t immune. He spoke in an un-CNBC-like volume, but said things like, “It’s a lot better to have a goose that keeps laying eggs than a goose that just sits there and eats insurance.” Now, that is easy to understand, and probably true. Plus, can you imagine how gross that pâté would taste?

I have also noticed, by “Power Lunch,” that the seemingly endless market slide is posing a profound problem for cable news experts. As the hardheaded veterans, these guys are full of disdain for the weekday warriors who expect to work the market and make a quick buck. That’s how you know you can trust them. “Right now, attempts at stock-picking, for six months, have been completely unsuccessful,” warns Bob Pisani, standing on the trading floor. Guest Vern Hayden advises, “People have to not worry so much about missing the turn!” Bob Griffeth, agreeing, shakes his head in consternation at “human nature, wanting to get that last downtick.”

A heartbeat later, Sue Herera is asking Hayden, “What’s the signal of the turn, for you?” Because CNBC is aimed at making its viewers feel like masters of the universe, it has to offer them this bizarre sweet-and-sour cocktail of happy-days-around-the-corner optimism and I’m-no-sap flintiness.

When “Power Lunch” clears out, Erin Burnett of the “Squawk” series comes back to anchor “Street Signs.” This, too, is basically more of the same. With the trading day starting to wind down, Burnett pauses to try to place the day’s mediocre results in some larger analytical perspective; is it too late for an afternoon rebound? (Most likely.) What sectors have done OK? (Retail.) Which have taken a beating? (Finance.) Should investors fear “all-out class war”? (Probably not.)

Then Jim Cramer stops by at the end of her show, and turns in one of the more tortured and conflicted television performances I have ever seen. He personifies, in his very body, the war between boosterism and reality that lends CNBC such an air of anxiety. Dripping with contempt for Burnett, he berates her for citing a positive — and, one should note, true — statistic about Ford. “I could make you look really horrible on this show,” Cramer shouts. And then he admits that he’s just as guilty of searching desperately for silver linings. “Every night,” he barks, “I try to come out and say something good, but it’s difficult. It’s difficult, because it spits in the face of people who’ve lost so much.”

Cramer is in pain, and he’s taking it out on Burnett. By the end of six of the more excruciating minutes I’ve witnessed on television, Burnett was scrambling for a graceful way out. “We can let everybody know, that now they know, that we have very real, frank discussions and disagreements in this segment. As people can do.” She changes the subject to his nightly show, which on Monday will cover carbon cap-and-trades. “And I believe you’re talking energy tonight?” offers Burnett, helpfully. “Some degree,” huffs Cramer. He’s just openly wrestled with the dilemmas of his job, and come out the loser. Burnett is visibly relieved to sign off for the day.

Maria Bartiromo, the famous “Money Honey” who was once the subject of a Ramones song, follows Burnett with “Closing Bell,” which runs from 3 p.m. to 5. Today, Bartiromo’s big draw is an interview with John McCain. Where should the president’s attention be, Senator? “I would focus on the pork-barrel spending.” I experience a strangely familiar urge to nap. Wall Street’s closing bell rings at 4:00, under Bartiromo’s watch. The Dow has sunk 79 points, to 6,547. Bartiromo sums up, and steps aside.

“Fast Money” comes on after Bartiromo, to kill an hour until the network’s true stars start to shine at 6. The show professes to arm its viewers with insight and analysis gleaned from the day’s gyrations. “Faster than a New York minute, Dylan Ratigan and the ‘Fast Money’ traders give you the information normally reserved for the Wall Street trading floor,” promises the Web site. This claim might be true, if the Wall Street trading floor is secretly run by Lewis Carroll. The hosts have all affected epithets like “the Commissioner,” “the Pit Boss” and “the Ambassador.” And they seemed, to an outsider’s ear, to speak nonsense, at an auctioneer’s manic pace, with exclamation points. “Look at Google at 290!” snapped the Ambassador. “Did you buy it?” beeped a voice off-screen. “I did look at it, I didn’t buy a share!” “Why not?” “I like to look at it!”

Then the Commissioner explained it all. “One company’s going to buy another company, and this company’s going to buy the company that’s going to buy that company.”

After “Fast Money,” it’s time for the channel’s marquee names to make sense of the day’s fiscal carnage. At 6 o’clock Eastern, two hours after the closing bell, Cramer is back on camera, this time as the host of his own show, “Mad Money.” I was vaguely aware that Cramer’s shtick involved high-volume, manic behavior and sound effects. I did not expect it to involve a confession of fallibility and ignorance. “My job is not just to entertain you but to educate you,” he says. “You know what drives market pros and grizzled veterans crazy about this particular market? It’s that no pattern that we’ve had before, ever, nothing that worked before, is working now.”

“We’re like navigators operating without a map or compass.” Now, with the Dow below 7,000, he tells us.

Never having seen the show before, I’m astonished, even though Cramer’s conniptions earlier in the day should’ve warned me. I thought the whole premise was that Cramer had a compass, and knew where he was taking us. Jon Stewart’s whole point in his criticisms of Cramer was that the guy gets things wrong all the damn time. Yet the show depends on his almost violent assertion of his own authority. He has to acknowledge that he’s been wrong if he wants to seem like a serious analyst, but he also has to keep pointing the way forward. A caller asks him if it’s a good time for new investors to break in. Cramer says there’s no hard-and-fast rule, we’ve got to go case-by-case, and then, without missing a beat, or seeking any further information, says, “Buy Verizon.”

Nobody knows what they’re doing, but hey, here’s what you should do. How can CNBC square this circle? The answer is, as Jon Stewart called it, cheap populism. That’s where Barack Obama comes in.

According to CNBC’s evening punditocracy, nightly tasked with explaining why another day has ended in the toilet, it’s not the market’s fault, it’s the government. Cramer warns that the Obama administration might cause another Great Depression, accuses the administration of “wealth destruction,” and compares Obama’s cap-and-trade carbon pricing scheme to the McCarthyite House Un-American Activities Committee. “It’s time to join the witch hunt against known polluters,” he snarks. “Will the Democrats carbon blacklist this company, unless it names names?”

Economist Larry Kudlow, whose hour-long “Kudlow & Company” follows “Mad Money” Monday through Friday at 7 Eastern, has even less shame than Cramer. Kudlow accuses Obama of “waging war against businesses and investors and entrepreneurs.” He tees up guest Art Laffer, a wholly discredited economist, who claims, “The political process started in late 2007. Since that time, the markets have been down 55 percent. Markets are forward-looking, not backward-looking. They saw what was coming in the election. They were anticipating what this guy would do, and they caused a slowdown.”

Got that? It’s not our fault none of the models are working. The economy collapsed because the government broke it. Buy Verizon. If it goes up, Cramer and Kudlow and Santelli are geniuses. If it goes down, it’s Obama’s fault. Either way CNBC wins.

CNBC’s audience is not a demographic cross section of America. If it was a cross section, the network wouldn’t make any money; CNBC attracts advertisers not with the size of its audience but with its maleness and its affluence. The network gets about a quarter million viewers a day, a tiny fraction of the U.S. population, but those viewers have a median household net worth of more than $1.2 million. Still, the financial pundits flatter viewers into thinking, as Rick Santelli put it during his famous trading floor rant, that they are “a pretty good statistical cross-section of America.” For these guys, investors are America. Jim Cramer asked at one point, of the Obama administration, “Who do they think owns stocks?” As if the obvious answer is, “Everybody!” Obama, Cramer complained, “seemed proud that he ignored the [market] averages, as if they’re some sort of distraction, and not a precursor of the economy.”

I’m not going to argue that the Dow Jones is irrelevant to the economy, but the fundamental problem of the bubble years was that the Dow Jones was growing and our actual assets were not. We weren’t really getting richer. We were just pretending to get richer.

In mistaking themselves for the country at large, and the bouncing of the market for the health of the economy as a whole, Cramer, Kudlow and the whole talking-head crew give the lie to Rick Santelli’s assertion about a “silent majority.” CNBC feels like bizarro world because, in an important sense, it is.

Last week, I went to a political rally, here in New Haven where I live. (Full disclosure: I was one of the many people who contributed to organizing the protest.) On its face, it was a prosaic thing: people pushing back against cuts to the city budget that would hit their wallets, cut their benefits, speed up or privatize their jobs, hurt their schools, push them from their homes. But I couldn’t help seeing it with the historian’s eye that I’m learning to use. And looking at it that way, I saw something I’ve never seen — or felt — at a progressive political event in my whole life (and I’ve been to a lot): Something new, being born.

New Haven, as it happens, has long been a place where researchers look to understand power and democracy. In 1961, Yale political scientist Robert Dahl published a classic on the subject, called “Who Governs?” Using New Haven as his case study, Dahl argued that different elites, representing the different interests in the city, balance each other out, producing a more or less democratic outcome. Power, he suggested, was widely distributed enough that nobody could abuse it.

Dahl’s was a rosy picture of another era. Today, New Haven is a city sharply segregated along racial lines. Like most American cities, it grew up around industry — specifically, shipping, rifles and corsets. And, as elsewhere, the industry is now gone. The docks are quiet, the rifle plant looks like it got hit by an air raid, and the corset factory has been turned into loft apartments. These are New Haven problems, but they should be recognizable to any city-dweller.

Certainly, they looked familiar to me. In fact, these are the issues I came to graduate school to study. I’m interested in how working people have adapted to the decay of the mid-century economy and the political alignment that went with it. Scholars sometimes describe this era in terms of two associated, large-scale social phenomena: “Fordist production” — referring to the dominant place of unionized, assembly-line mass manufacturing in the economy — and “the New Deal order” — meaning the persistent political power of the coalition that remade American politics in the 1930s. The assumption that characterized the 1930s-1970s regime was that mass production and mass consumption depended on each other. For the economy to grow, workers had to be able to buy the things they made — cars, houses, washing machines. Good wages and trade unions were understood as crucial components of a healthy economy, rather than hindrances to it.

What happened next should be familiar. Global industry recovered from the destruction of the war, and competition ramped up in the 1960s and 1970s. Facing the Toyotas and BMWs of the world, American companies started looking to save however they could. So they reneged on the deal. In the long run, this meant the hollowing out of the economy: instead of a broad middle class, buying the things that it made, we got a super-rich elite, lending money to consumers to buy on credit what they could no longer afford on stagnant wages. Manufacturing disappeared, and service work grew to replace it. Industrial unions withered, inequality soared and cities went into crisis. Welcome back to New Haven — my post-Fordist home.

At the heart of this impoverished city is an institution that represents exactly what an economy needs to grow today. New Haven is, of course, home to Yale University, an organization specializing in the only sectors that really prosper anymore: education and research (obviously), finance (the roughly $17 billion endowment), healthcare (the hospital) and real estate (Yale, like many wealthy universities, is a major landowner and investor). In an underemployed city, isn’t economic growth the order of the day? And, indeed, Yale has come, over the past several decades, to make up some of the gap in employment created by the death of industry, and has driven whatever economic growth happens here, in the dynamic, post-industrial sectors.

But as universities rebuild the new economy, the new economy rebuilds them too, from the inside out. Across Europe and the United States, institutions of higher education are increasingly reliant on casual academic labor — job-insecure, overworked, underpaid adjunct professors. We graduate students, meanwhile, at research institutions like Yale, are in positions of extraordinary privilege. The resources we have available to do new and exciting work are immense; Yale continues to educate its students as well as any institution in the country, and to turn out exciting research across academic disciplines. But even graduate students feel the pinch of the new economy. Increasingly, universities are run like businesses, and are squeezing Ph.D. programs to produce faster work — that is, worse work — in fields like history, philosophy and literature, which don’t turn a buck.

In a place this starkly unequal, it’d be naive to claim that everyone has the same problems. What’s increasingly clear, though, is that the people of this city — workers (public and private), students and the unemployed, at Yale and in the communities around it — are in the same fight. Today, we’re stuck in the opposite of Dahl’s mid-century utopia: The powerful players cooperate, and the people of the city lose out.

At the municipal level, according to the Connecticut Center for a New Economy (CCNE), the city’s tax base has actually grown. Yet New Haven is laying off high school teachers, has proposed a benefit cut for its cafeteria workers, and is privatizing custodial services in a move that would lead to a whopping 40 percent cut in janitors’ salaries.

As a major employer in an underemployed area, Yale has the power to hire casual and part-time labor, at low pay. As political scientist Gordon Lafer puts it, “Elite schools across the country have found themselves stranded by history, islands of wealth amid the surrounding poverty.” According to Lafer, town-gown relations have not necessarily prioritized the well-being of campus employees or of nearby communities. He cites a 1996 memo written by Yale’s director of operations, referring to one of New Haven’s poorest neighborhoods and advising staff how to avoid paying overtime: “I’m sure we can find a little contractor on the Hill who would be happy to reset a breaker in the dorm, or unstop a toilet … for $50 … if I lived in the neighborhood, I’d do it.”

This is a New Haven story. But it’s woven from the fabric of the national economy; the sectors that drive growth redistribute income upward. It’s happening in some form in most cities. If New Haven were New York, Yale would be Manhattan: Rich, famous, powerful and very good at what it does. Indeed, the cores of most urban economies are now made up of the same sectors that Yale thrives on: finance, education, healthcare, research and development and real estate. The jobs that do exist are in the services attendant to these businesses. But the rent is unaffordable downtown, so workers are ejected to outer neighborhoods. Cities, desperate to cut taxes to attract more high-end capital, curtail services in neighborhoods on the margins. Schools are closed, streets fall apart, public transit gets less reliable, and they call it successful urban governance.

The obvious vehicle for pushing back — the labor movement — has been crippled by decline and internal division. For the past few decades, as private sector unions have disappeared and public sector unions have clung to life, the gap between the two has threatened to swallow up what remains of the movement. As the only real stronghold of unionism remaining, public employees are denounced as parasites, rather than held up as models for a fair economy. This was the line that the Republicans took during the recent showdown in Wisconsin: why should these workers have it better than the rest of us? And despite the race to the bottom that the argument implies, by and large, it’s worked. Public and private sector unions have been bad at cooperating. Certainly, both have consistently failed to develop a movement with other victims of the hollowed-out economy — the unemployed, students, neighborhood coalitions.

We have, in other words, all the ingredients lying around for the next grass-roots left, here in New Haven, and likely in every city. We know who will make up this alliance. Yet we’ve been unable to realize it. Somehow, amid a deep recession that exposed the flaws in the new economy, it’s thus far been the right wing that’s monopolized all the grass-roots energy.

A few weeks ago I attended a joint meeting of the unions of Yale University workers. It was just a chance for people to come during their lunch hour and talk about how cutbacks affected them. Several hundred people filled up the lecture hall. I heard janitors and clerical workers at the university describing having to do more work in less time, because their bosses refused to fill open positions; graduate students described theirs fears of running out of time to work and having to face a hostile job market unprepared. We were custodians and building staff, graduate students and clerical workers. We were white, black and Latino; male and female; pimple-faced and gray-haired.

Off campus, New Haven folks have been packing in to town hall meetings to let elected officials have it — including our Democratic governor and mayor. The budgeting process in New Haven kicked off with a unilateral refusal to consider tax hikes. And, as CCNE notes, the proposed cuts look awfully like a manufactured crisis, jammed through under cover of a recession.

The simmer seemed to boil over last week. A crowd of a few thousand people marched around New Haven, finally gathering in front of City Hall in support of CCNE’s demands. The crowd included city lunch ladies, AT&T employees, steelworkers, high school kids, leather-jacketed Teamsters, clerical workers, grad students in art history and comparative literature, all cheek-to-jowl. I saw a few of my professors in the crowd, marching along with the residents of the substandard housing complex who are demanding an affordable replacement. The members of the crowd on Church Street seemed to speak directly to Dahl’s question — who governs? — chanting, “Whose streets? Our streets! Whose city? Our city!”

John Wilhelm, the president of the UNITE-HERE union — who was a Yale undergraduate, and cut his teeth organizing workers at the university — came back to town for the rally. There was something exciting going on here, he told the crowd — something energetic. “We’re lucky to be alive because there’s a new spirit in this world. You can see it in Wisconsin. You can see it in Egypt. You can see it here.” Wilhelm’s right. This kind of solidarity — well, it just hasn’t happened lately.

If you remember me from when I wrote here regularly, you’ll know I’ve always been a lefty. But it’s always been more about pounding the books than pounding the pavement for me — more theory than practice. Progressive activism seemed nostalgic for better times, almost pantomime-like. It seemed old. (I don’t mean to downplay the heroic struggles of people, in New Haven and around the country. I have healthcare, after all, thanks to the 20 years of organizing work by our unrecognized graduate student union here, GESO. My point is simply that slowly won, hard-fought gains on multiple fronts are important, but they don’t necessarily add up to a movement. Important and exciting are not the same.) Whatever exciting work I could do, I figured, would be in the form of a book, not a struggle.

But here in New Haven, the city’s powerful have done the job that organizers have only been able to accomplish intermittently. They’ve brought together the different communities of the city, each struggling with localized aspects of the same economy, and the same crisis. And — not that this is the important part — they got me out on the streets. We have yet to stop the mayor’s budget or win union recognition for graduate students on campus, let alone start reversing the explosion of inequality, here and around the country. But while I read and write about American history over the coming years, I think I’m going to understand a little bit better who governs — and for how long — thanks to living in New Haven and being part of this movement. I’m getting some good ideas about the birth of the new.

Elsewhere on the Gulf of Mexico, BP has pulled off the neat trick of hiring cleanup workers at depressed pay, thanks to its own malfeasance: The spill ruined Gulf maritime industries,  further glutting the already flooded labor market, and driving down wages. That’s the freely-employed, of course. But BP, like the Florida tomato growers, is also availing itself of another variety of unfree labor — prison workers, happily offered up by local officials to do a job that The Nation has called “arguably the most toxic in America.”

This is America, on Labor Day week in 2010. But in more ways than we like to notice, it feels like 1910. Somehow, the labor laws and basic protections that we once thought were part of the fabric of American democracy have been quietly excised. Of course, in the South, the postwar dream of free, prosperous, safe labor was never really there at all. The region has always been poorer. It’s always had more rapacious bosses. And Southern workers (especially white ones) have always seemed mysteriously willing to take it, as far as often-condescending Northern liberals can tell.

It’s the glaring question that sharp students always notice and want to ask about Southern politics: Why have poor white people, seemingly such obvious beneficiaries of progressive politics, never joined with their oppressed black neighbors to overthrow their outnumbered overlords?

Conservative habits tell much of the story. Racism has long kept white Southerners from forming the biracial alliance that progressives see as so obviously beneficial; but if racism is costly in this sense, in another it is a lucrative investment, and not casually abandoned. Gender norms keep the peace too. Southern white men have long understood that they are, as one historian has put it, “masters of small worlds,” and a threat to one master is a threat to all.

But, despite the temptation to liberal arrogance, it’d be a mistake to imagine that poor white Southerners are befuddled fools, with no understanding of their class identity and class interest. That’s the view of someone who won’t grant the courtesy of knowing some of the history of workers in the region. And there’s no better week than this one to remember.

On September 6, 1934 — 76 years ago Monday — gunmen guarding Chiquola Mill in Honea Path, South Carolina opened fire on a crowd of picketing textile workers. They killed seven, and wounded about 30. If the history of industrial labor in the South has been a stage tragedy, this was the climactic moment; the rest, for white workers at least, is denouement.

The story of how white Southern workers ended up looking down the barrel of a gun starts, however, much earlier.

After the destruction of slavery in the Civil War, the last remaining pocket unconquered by industrial capitalism was opened up. Investors realized that the undeveloped South was easy pickings. Starting around 1880, textile mills abandoned the New England towns we associate them with — Lowell, Lawrence, and so forth — and moved to the Southern Piedmont, the region running from Virginia to Alabama that sits above the coastal plain but below the Appalachians. Think Greensboro, Charlotte and Birmingham.

At first running on water-power from Appalachian streams and labor power from uprooted farmers, the Southern mills quickly became the largest industrial enterprises around, the symbols of the New South. But this profit rested on intensive exploitation and domination: whole families worked in the mills, including children. The “mill-hands” received appallingly low pay, worked in nightmare conditions, and were utterly dependent on the companies: the general rule was that they lived in mill-owned villages, inhabited company-owned houses, shopped at company stores and went to company doctors. For a few years before going to work, the children might go to company schools, and the men played on company baseball teams. They even worshiped, typically, in churches that were paid for by the mill. (Of course, while the executives might pay the salary of the mill-hands’ Holiness preacher, they wouldn’t dream of going to the same church themselves. The mill towns were strictly segregated along class lines, as well as racially. To the “uptown” folk, the mill workers were the “lintheads,” their stunted, pale and diseased neighbors, to be pitied and loathed.)

The institution of the mill town was an endless paradox. It was a kind of half-prison, half-fortress. Mill-hands couldn’t control their collective destiny, but they could, and did, control some of their own lives and take care of each other. Said one, Hoyle McCorkle, “It was a two-hundred-headed family. Everybody on this hill, we looked after one another.” (Another paradox: McCorkle’s sentiment is both a statement of fact, and a glossing over of the widespread realities of alcoholism, early-and-often pregnancies and domestic violence.)

Mill-hands were plagued by pellagra, a malnourishment disease caused by their limited diets of pinto beans, mustard and turnip greens, fatback meat, and often little else. They lived in low-grade shotgun shacks. Yet for all that their conditions were brutal and the experience of industrial work was generally degrading and humiliating to these uprooted rural folk, they were still fed and housed. This was more than they could count on while back on the farm. And it was more than black Southerners could ever take for granted — a grim privilege that the almost universally white and racist mill-hands were well aware of.

This system, stretched taut by irony though it was, remained stable until World War I. If the mill-hands kept quiet enough — which they knew to do — they could usually scrape by. But the mills overexpanded to meet wartime demand, and the tightly-drawn fabric of mill life started to unravel. Recession followed recession for textiles, and the whole industry was in depression well before the great crash in 1929.

To keep profits from sinking too far, the companies deployed then-voguish “scientific management” techniques. College-educated consultants — often Northerners to boot — working in the tradition of management guru Frederick Taylor patrolled the factory floors with stopwatches and clipboards, telling mill-hands how to do their jobs faster. Workers were decimated by layoffs, yet still found production quotas doubling, tripling, or more, while their pay stagnated or sank. For the masses of Southern textile workers, the depression was almost two decades long, and was associated with one word, describing the new factory regime: “stretchout.”

The stretchout brought workers into the streets. “During the last few years men have been carried away from their work dead or unconscious. I ask you to read of the cruelty of Pharoah to the Israelites to get a comparison,” wrote one. At one protest, a group of eight mill-hands carried a coffin down the street; a ninth was lying in it, dressed up as their superintendent. Periodically, the “superintendent” would sit up and ask, “How many men are carrying this thing?” “Eight,” the marchers would reply. Then the faux-superintendent would command, “Lay off two; six can do the work.”

A strike wave broke out in 1929, but it was spontaneous and ill-organized. A series of bloody crackdowns extinguished the flashes of protest easily enough — most famously at Gastonia, N.C., where a fairly fraudulent trial followed a massacre, and ended with communist organizers fleeing to Russia.

Hope was renewed, after the failure of this first series of uprisings, by the election of Franklin Roosevelt. Mill-hands viewed the new president as a near-spiritual personal savior. In huge numbers, they wrote letters to him, to Eleanor Roosevelt and to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. Wrote one, “I want you to know that I am for you in this most wonderful undertaking. I am a long ways from you in distance yet my faith is in you my heart with you and I am for you sink or swim.” And they didn’t hesitate to tell him what they really thought. The mill bosses, wrote another, were “old slimy serpants crowling spiting their Poison fighting your program.” In one now-famous letter, a mill-hand wrote to FDR, “You are the first man in the White House to understand that my boss is a son of a bitch.”

Yet the New Deal turned out not to be Kingdom Come for textile workers. Under the National Recovery Administration, various boards were set up to arbitrate between labor and capital, and new codes were written to regulate the industry. But Roosevelt let the companies write them. Ed Bruere, the head of the new Cotton Textile Labor Relations Board, scoffed, “Every introduction of improved machinery or technical methods is likely to be interpreted as stretchout.” Bruere’s CTLRB received thousands of complaints from August 1933 to 1934. It ruled only one time in a worker’s favor in a wage-and-hour dispute.

Although they still felt the president himself was on their side, mill-hands understood that negotiations were over. After a summer of watching the textile companies flout their demands, Alabama workers decided they’d had it. The union, the United Textile Workers, was reluctant, but they walked off the job anyway in midsummer of 1934. Word spread up the Piedmont virtually overnight. Strikers piled into trucks and cars and raced from mill town to mill town to call mill-hands out to join them before the bosses could catch on. Since the strike was obviously happening one way or the other, the UTW — a generally feeble and conservative union — called a meeting, and endorsed the thing. On September 1, 1934, the general textile strike began. With participation between 200,000 and 400,000, from Maine to Alabama, it was the largest labor rebellion in American history to that point. The only prior uprising that exceeded it was the collapse of slavery during the Civil War.

But, while a general strike is an inspiring thing, it’s not easy to pull off. Strikers quickly started finding themselves evicted from company houses, and homeless. As people who lived to hand-to-mouth, how could they last without paychecks? The UTW, broke and disorganized as it was already, was in no position to feed a few hundred thousand hungry people. The churches — another common fallback — were largely unfriendly. Worst of all, the federal government was nowhere to be seen, and state and local officials were getting their response ready.

In South Carolina, Gov. Ibra Blackwood rounded up a posse, promising to deputize “mayors, sheriffs, peace officers and every good citizen.” In Georgia, Gov. Eugene Talmadge declared martial law, and rounded up strikers in internment camps. (Newspapers in Nazi Germany crowed that this was a sign of fascism’s coming global triumph.) Mill companies did what they had always done: buy up a quick-assembly industrial army — some police, some goons-for-hire — to menace picketers. And at Honea Path, on the sixth day of the general strike, the inevitable massacre happened.

It wasn’t immediately obvious that it was all over then. 10,000 mourners showed up to the funeral for the Honea Path dead, seemingly defiant. (Nor was Honea Path the only case of violence, although it was the most famous. Machine gun nests became a normal sight on the roofs of textile mills during the strike.) Bessie Shankle remembered that her family “nearly starved to death” during the strike. Now they were being shot at too, and it had become clear that no help was on the way. After a few weeks, with the dead likely numbering in the dozens, the uprising began to disintegrate.

Roosevelt appointed a board to arbitrate a deal. But, revealing his lack of interest in the workers’ cause, he put a Republican in charge, New Hampshire Gov. John G. Winant (no relation of mine). The Winant board sided with the workers on virtually nothing; Roosevelt politely asked the mills not to blacklist strikers — a request that they denied. But the union, desperate to seem successful, wanly declared victory anyway. The workers, betrayed, walked away and never came back. “You seem to think we won something,” wrote Mollie Dowd. “I just cannot see it and things here are in a much worse condition than they were three months ago.”

The crushing of the strike imparted a clear enough lesson: keep your head down. For a whole generation of mill workers, the disaster became a taboo, bad luck even to mention. “I took a man’s hat off his head and fanned him ’til he died, ’til the breath left him. But I ain’t got no more to say into it. I’ve been trying to forget about all of that, and this is just bringing it all back up,” remembered a veteran of Honea Path. When interviewed later, a daughter of a striker marveled that she didn’t know the story herself. “I can’t understand why my Dad didn’t tell me. He could talk about the war and about people being blown to bits, but he couldn’t talk about his neighbors being killed. It’s like somebody trying to hide a dirty secret about their family, like they’re ashamed.”

After 1934, the labor movement would try every few years to organize Southern textiles. The rise of the CIO unions starting in 1935, left the cotton mills as the biggest industry without a major union presence. An attempt in 1937 failed when organizers tried to convince bosses that the union and the manager could be friends. The mill-hands were disgusted. A more serious campaign in 1946, dubbed “Operation Dixie,” showed little ability to uproot or challenge the now-institutionalized and intensifying stretchout. Seeing no reason to go out on a limb again, the workers held onto their skepticism; little else had ever worked for them. The union, explained mill-hand Ila Dodson, is “nothing but trouble.”

The basic tenets of 20th-century progressive politics in America — unionism, the welfare state, public-safety regulations — all failed the mill-hands, the largest class of industrial workers in the South. And the failure was spectacular, a once-in-a-generation trauma. The inability of New Deal liberalism to bring on board the Southern white working class was, it seems in retrospect, its ultimate undoing. Who was it that voted for Wallace, then Nixon, then Reagan? The depressing question points to the politically weak people for whom racism was the only bullet left in the chamber. We can’t excuse their racism this way. But we can start to understand it.

The historian Robert Zieger has said that, although we are fond of thinking of the South as stuck in the past, when it comes to labor relations, Dixie is not where we have been. It’s where we are going. It is exaggerating, but not by too much, to say that the unraveling public safety state and the union-free country we know today emerged from the violence at Honea Path. This descent has been possible, in part, because we forgot about 1934. And we forgot about 1934 because the mill-hands did themselves. It was too painful to remember.

Referenced in this article

This article relies on the work of more scholars than I can name here. A good guide to this story, however, begins with “Like a Family,” by Jacquelyn Hall et al., the true bible on the Southern textile mills. Other vital reading on the subject includes Bryant Simon’s “A Fabric of Defeat,” Glenda Gilmore’s “Defying Dixie,” Dolores Janiewski’s “Sisterhood Denied,” Janet Irons’ “Testing the New Deal,” John Salmond’s “The General Strike of 1934,” Douglas Flamming’s “Creating the Modern South,” Michelle Brattain’s “The Politics of Whiteness,” David Carlton’s “Mill and Town in South Carolina,” G.C. Waldrep’s “Southern Workers in Search of Community,” and Timothy Minchin’s “What Do We Need a Union For?”

Anyone interested in more specific recommendations is welcome to ask in the comments, and I’ll do my best to keep up.

So what makes for hallowed ground? The New York financial district is apparently too holy for a mosque, but not for strip clubs and bodegas and the rest of the features of a Manhattan neighborhood. (Nor, for that matter, does it seem to be too sacred for the financiers themselves. Aren’t they the real bad neighbors?) And Palin and Beck and I could all agree that the Lincoln Memorial has transcendent symbolic importance. But the way it’s important to me and the way it’s important to them are different. If they thought their Saturday rally was about using the legacy of Lincoln and King to “restore honor” to America, it seemed to me to be about exploiting that legacy to smuggle in a different meaning about our history and national character. In other words, sacred places aren’t sacred in the same way to everyone. They’re contested terrain; when we see significance in a patch of dirt, we’re saying something about the meaning of past events there. And when we say something about the meaning of past events, we are always, truly, arguing about the present.

L.P. Hartley famously wrote that the past “is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” It’s tempting to say that for the Tea Partiers, this isn’t true; their past is just America. But that’s not quite right, because it’s a kitschified, fictitious version: Americana-land. It’s a place where everyone was in the right, and everyone got along, back when everything was sepia-toned and men were men and the whole town played baseball on Saturday mornings.

This is what Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement mean to the Tea Party folks who got together at the Mall on Saturday. It’s what Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War mean too, and George Washington and the American Revolution. Utah GOP Rep. Jason Chaffetz described the attendees as “good old-fashioned Americans.” For Palin, Washington and Lincoln and King are distinguished by their identical, ironclad faith in God, and their “steel spines.” Beck himself has said, of himself and his followers, “We will reclaim the civil rights movement.” This cuts straight against the grain of history: white conservatives were of course the bedrock of opposition to civil rights. No matter, though, to the Fox showman. “We will take that movement because we were the people that did it in the first place.” This lost heroic past was somehow conveniently free of villains.

Unfortunately, this is a myth of white supremacy. The right wing is busy evacuating the real, troubling meanings from important historical sites, and replacing them with legends of self-flattery.

This is an ignoble tradition that began after the Civil War. David Blight, one of our leading historians of the era, has shown how the process of reconciliation between North and South entailed an agreement that what the war was about was the valor of the soldiers , the romance of blue and gray. Countless memorial events and battlefield reunions featured veterans shaking hands. At newly-sacred places — cemeteries, battlefields and memorials that still dot the South and the border states — white Northerners and Southerners forgave one another and dismissed the meaning of the bloodletting. “I think that we were both right and both wrong,” wrote one soldier, capturing the essence of the moment. “Life and history, and right and wrong and minds of men look out of more windows than we used to think! Did you never hear of the shield that had two sides and both were precious metal?”

The true, central catalyst of the war, which lent it its moral meaning — that is, slavery — was pushed out of mind. Even Northerners came to believe in the myth of the South’s noble, doomed “Lost Cause.” Human bondage, wrote former Confederate President Jefferson Davis, was “in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident.” Northerners proved willing enough to go along, and to transmute their past into an ennobling myth; there’s a reason that people in both regions, even now, try to deny what the war was about, or to say that slavery was going out on its own anyway, or that the Confederacy had black soldiers. “Gone With the Wind” and “Birth of a Nation,” which in one way or another dramatize this argument, were enormous national hits for just this reason as well. Reconciling white people meant writing out black people. White Americans looked at their black countrymen and said, in effect, “This is our story now, not yours.”

This is what’s just happened at the Mall. Nobody was in the wrong during the civil rights years; King was a happy saint in the American tradition, not a dangerous radical.

The story with the hallowed ground of New York City is a little more complicated, but not too different. The real meaning of the disaster on September 11 — the way violence begets violence and fanaticism begets fanaticism, the way geopolitical maneuvering makes victims of ordinary people — is all gone. In its place is the vacuous sanctimony that it the place is “hallowed,” but all that seems to mean is that it is not open to Muslims.

Appropriately enough, just a few feet behind Palin’s podium on the Lincoln Memorial are Lincoln’s own words, on just this topic, carved into the marble. At Gettysburg cemetery, he warned, “We can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground.”

What is the meaning of the tragedy of September 11 supposed to be, that makes the place holy? For what purpose did those people die? And who are Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich to decide? What about the civil rights revolution? If conservatives can appropriate a movement that their ideological ancestors universally opposed, then surely, like the reunionists of the 19th century, they have warped its meaning.

Lincoln’s lesson at Gettsyburg was that, while the willingness of Union soldiers to die sanctified the battlefield, so did the cause itself: the “new birth of freedom,” the end of slavery. His words read now like an admonishment against sanctimony and narcissism. Don’t make this about you, he seems to say. “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

In classic Tea Party fashion, Palin and Gingrich and Beck have been exaggerating their numbers. But they’re padding the figures with an army of the dead, unwillingly conscripted. That’s not just dishonest. It’s ghoulish, and it’s racist to boot. African-Americans and Muslim-Americans are being treated like supporting characters, not capable of their own citizenship, their own causes, their own struggles, and their own history. In the temples of Americana being built, the parts of our national past that don’t belong to the white, conservative population are being sacrificed.

Referenced in this article

David W. Blight’s book “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory“

It’s hard to imagine a more up-is-down, freedom-is-slavery rendition of American history. Because if the struggle for racial equality under the law was anything, it was radical. For years, the only people willing to talk about redistributing rights were the ones who were also pretty interested in redistributing land and wealth. By and large, the struggle for civil rights was initiated by activists whom Glenn Beck might actually be right to call “radical revolutionaries.”

It’s now an annual custom, every January, for progressive pundits to repeat that Martin Luther King was a left-liberal social democrat. This is utterly beyond any honest dispute, but it still hews to the textbook version of the Civil Rights Movement that starts with Brown vs. Board of Education. In recent years, however, American historians have been rewriting the story. In particular, they’ve been moving back its start date. It may seem pedantic to quibble about when the movement began, but it’s got enormous political implications.

The synthesis of this idea — it’s called the “Long Civil Rights Movement” — comes from a University of North Carolina historian named Jacquelyn Dowd Hall. In her presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, Hall argued that the neat bookends applied to the movement have concealed its true radical roots. There’s a vast wealth of historical scholarship to back this up.

For decades after Reconstruction, the best-organized resistance to white supremacy looked a lot like what we’d now call black nationalism, in various incarnations: the Garveyites, the Exodusters. And when, at the pinnacle of the American left — the 1930s — even the sainted Franklin Roosevelt proved unwilling to carry the torch of racial equality, radicals to his left picked it up. (Roosevelt, dependent on the racist arm of his party, never had much interest in fighting for equality.)

The New Deal didn’t have much to offer for many poor rural Southern folk, whose economy had been in depression since before the crash in 1929. So dirt-poor Southern farmers — especially black ones — didn’t gain much from schemes devised in Washington. Social security and the minimum wage were laws were written to exclude them. Federal dollars headed south tended to get intercepted by “Big Mule” types — the landlords and businessmen who owned the regional Democratic Party. The only major resistance came from groups like the racially integrated, politically radical Southern Tenant Farmers Union — that is, the socialist left.

Likewise, communism, particularly in Alabama, became in many ways the home base for African-American political action. Most famously, the Communist Party’s legal arm took over the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, the group of black teenagers facing trumped-up rape charges in Tennessee. Obviously, the Party was very far from perfect. Its agents were pursuing its own interests, and in this period of reflexive loyalty to the Kremlin — Stalin’s Kremlin — its members were hardly saints. Indeed, some black Southern radicals eventually went to Moscow, where they found out how much was wrong with the Soviet Union.  But pointing all that out does nothing to wash the guilt off of the political mainstream. And even the idea of a Southern African-American communist taking a pilgrimage to Red Square should be enough to give our right-wing heritage-burglars some pause.

Even after the crucible years of the Great Depression, the labor and socialist left continued to push for the full meaning of equality when few others would. In the immediate postwar period, the only major mass agitation for civil rights came out of the union movement, newly powerful since the 1930s. It was the explicitly left-wing, working-class institutions who pushed hardest on the boundaries of Jim Crow. Some workers’ organizations, like the tobacco workers’ union in North Carolina, were just about the only examples around of integrated institutions.

Labor radicals had a vantage point on society alienated enough to see what most people refused to. In fact, the originator of the idea of marching on Washington, A. Philip Randolph, was the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and a socialist. Randolph and Bayard Rustin, another socialist activist largely erased from the public memory, were arguably the two most important mentors to Martin Luther King.

Through these years, many mainstream liberals averted their eyes from the South (and, by the way, from the North too, which was hardly an egalitarian paradise). And conservatives actively fought against the incipient movement for racial equality. Alas, they were pretty successful. The coming of the Cold War and McCarthyism slowed the push for civil rights that had started on the radical left. The right wing succeeded in pushing back by years the onset of legal equality, and used charges of communism to devastate racially integrated organizations like the tobacco workers’ union. They also pushed out of memory the original demand for economic redistribution alongside civil rights.

Admitting that this coalition of communists, socialists and labor activists deserves credit — and the mainstream political class didn’t do itself proud — doesn’t make you a communist. And there are some good academic points to be made against the “Long Civil Rights Movement” argument. But none of them come from the right.

The “safe” civil rights movement we know and celebrate came out of this decidedly dangerous phenomenon. Just out of college, Shirley Sherrod — the former Agriculture Department official recently martyred to Fox News race-baiting — helped start an organization called New Communities. The group worked on getting a black communal farm up and running in rural Georgia, modeled on the Israeli kibbutz — itself, of course a socialist institution. They were hobbled by opposition by white supremacist Governor Lester Maddox, and faced unremitting hostility from white neighbors, who thought they smelled a whiff of communism coming from the New Communities land. Sherrod’s husband, Charles Sherrod, was an early member of SNCC, the crucial group behind what Beck might call the “civil unrest” of the 1960s. SNCC eventually became a seedbed of the Black Panther Party, which has lately been resurrected by Fox News to stir up racial panic.

It’s hard to miss all the historical echoes here. After a couple of years of ritual denunciations of officials and activists somehow associated with Barack Obama — loosely or not really at all — as Marxists or Maoists or communists or Black Panthers, we’re used to it. We get it already.

Laugh away at Glenn Beck’s paranoia, but — presumably unbeknownst to him — he’s actually got a point. The fact is that the basic norms of equality that we now think of as natural are indeed the result of radical agitation. Whatever her own politics are, Shirley Sherrod really was working in a tradition that goes back to people and groups whose beliefs Beck would find truly heinous. The grandparents of civil rights were folks who would never get through the vetting process for a job in the Obama administration today. They were much more like Van Jones than like his tormentor, Glenn Beck.

This August, Beck is planning a rally at the Lincoln Memorial, on the anniversary of the famous speech King gave there. The explicit point is to reclaim the legacy that the left has “perverted.” (This from the guy who accused Rep. John Lewis — one of King’s top lieutenants — of besmirching the memory of the Civil Rights Movement.)

Much as he’s done with the atheist radical Tom Paine, Beck is now trying to appropriate the memory of a cause that he’d undoubtedly fight tooth-and-nail if it were contemporary.  While bashing the NAACP as radical and anti-white, right-wing pundits like Beck have tried to identify themselves with true racial equality. But in trying to steal the legacy of the movement, they aren’t only scrubbing the truth about U.S. history. They’re making a mockery of the struggle for racial equality in one way, and of themselves in another. Beck and his comrades at Fox have robbed and defaced the graves of our heroes on the left, and are now strutting around in their stolen, ill-fitting burial suits. And if that’s grotesque and insulting, it’s also ironic beyond expression. If only Beck knew the real meaning of the ideas he pretends to believe.

It’s an amazing publication, committed all at once to serious news reporting, honest and hard-hitting opinion, the best popular feminist writing around, voluminous, brilliant books coverage, incisive and witty culture critics and a fantastic new food section. (Seriously, the number of these recipes I’ve used…) I could go on, but you can just click around for yourself. To manage all that while being independent, intimately involved with its readership, and, above all, good-humored makes this place a true treasure.

I’m leaving, but the truth is, you won’t be all the way rid of me just yet. This fall, I’ll be starting a PhD in American history. (I’ve been doing a master’s this year, and I imagine some readers have spotted the influence of my graduate work show up in my writing already.) A doctoral program is going to take up the better part of the time I can now give to Salon. But the folks here have generously offered to have me back to write more explicitly historically-informed commentary in the fall. I’ll do my solid best to bring important pieces of the past to bear on the present, and not to bore you to tears in the process.

For now, though, I’m going to go spend some time in California walking my dog, reading my books and playing my banjo — that kind of stuff. I’ll miss you guys, and hopefully see you again pretty soon. I hope you’ve liked what I’ve had to say. I’ve certainly appreciated the chance to say it.