Quote of the Day (Wendell Phillips, on ‘Incorporated Wealth’ as a Threat to the U.S.)

“I confess that the only fear I have in regard to republican institutions is whether, in our day, any adequate remedy will be found for this incoming flood of the power of incorporated wealth.”—Wendell Phillips, address in The Music Hall, Boston, October 31, 1871, in Wendell Phillips, Speeches, Lectures and Letters: Second Series (1891)

Today marks the bicentennial of the birth of Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), who was enormously famous in his own time, considerably less so in ours. I have no doubt that if he were alive today, Bill O’Reilly would call this Boston blueblood (a Mayflower descendant with enough inherited wealth, between himself and his wife, to leave his job and concentrate on public speaking) a “patrician pinhead,” or perhaps even worse. 

Phillips deserves to be better remembered. As the United States continues to wrestle with questions involving racial and economic equality, his causes and his method of promoting them—full-throated, uncompromising advocacy—remain as pertinent today as they did when he unsettled the conscience of 19^th-century America.

For a short but provocative analysis of Phillips’ life and thought, you can’t do much better than Richard Hofstadter’s brilliant The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948). Indeed, it’s one of the strongest chapters in that history. As Nation columnist Jon Winer wrote, in a post for the blog History News Network: “even today, when the left famously dominates academia, who would have the chutzpah to put this abolitionist and socialist on the same plane as Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR?”

Unlike many of the other 11 portraits in the book--notably, Jefferson, William Jennings Bryan, and Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt--the chapter on Phillips doesn’t really take this agitator to task. In fact, he’s celebrated as a voice for “resistance and rebellion.” Moreover, Hofstadter contended, there was something hypocritical about castigating Phillips for “standing always for extremes that public opinion would not sustain”: “Somehow the same historians who have been indulgent with men who exaggerated because they wanted to be elected have been extremely severe with men who exaggerated because they wanted to free the slaves.”

To be sure, Phillips could be intemperate in his rhetoric—comparing the South, for instance, to a giant brothel for its subjugation of female slaves. And his refusal to endorse Abraham Lincoln for a second term--even after the President had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and the only conceivable alternative was a Democratic Party and candidate (George McClellan) with no real interest in doing anything about slavery--makes you wonder if he was willing to lose all in an effort to gain all--a stance that will seem quite familiar to those on left-wing Democrats today so sorely disappointed with Barack Obama that they're thinking of throwing their votes away in the next election. (Even as Phillips mourned Lincoln’s assassination, he reflected that perhaps his death had removed one of the most formidable foes of a universal franchise for freedmen--a thought that turned out to be unbelievably mistaken when the President’s successor, Andrew Johnson, turned out to be not merely considerably worse but positively reactionary. There is an excellent chance, of course, for the same outcome in 2012.)

Yet the movements that Phillips supported, considered decidedly fringe at the time--abolitionism, women’s suffrage, Irish independence, and the rights of labor--would in time carry the day. Unlike many in the Republican Party, he did not abandon the struggle for equal rights when the Civil War was over, but pressed on to strike at the gap between rich and poor that was already opening up at the dawn of the Gilded Age. “The social civilization which condemns every third man in it to be below the average in the nourishment God prepared for him, did not come from above; it came from below; and the sooner it goes down, the better,” he told the International Grand Lodge of the Knights of Saint Crispin in April 1872.

He used another argument, in this same address on “The Labor Question,” that echoes strongly today: “Let the debts of the country be paid, abolish the banks, and let the government lend every Illinois farmer (if he wants it), who is now borrowing money at ten per cent, money on the half-value of his land at three per cent. The same policy that gave a million acres to the Pacific Railroad, because it was a great national effort, will allow of our lending Chicago twenty millions of money, at three per cent, to rebuild it.”

It’s not hard to think of what Phillips would say today: If we can bail out Wall Street, can’t those Americans who have seen their homes foreclosed be helped, too?