Sins of Our Fathers

...Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation. (Exodus 34:7)

Several months ago, I caught Traces of the Trade on PBS, a documentary about the descendants of a prominent North American family that, back in the day, made its fortune shipping and selling African slaves. As film goes, the whole thing is hit and miss. It indulges in long, heavy-handed sessions of modern confrontation and reconciliation, and while the accessibility of the various present-day DeWolfs is relatively interesting (why, they look just like my family), there's only so much wallowing in guilt that I really want to see. The lengthy discussions looked too much like half a dozen white folks struggling to find some depth of character. The documentary does establish, however, a fairly innovative and damn interesting historical context. The largest traders in sugar, rum, and forced labor were centered in Bristol, Rhode Island (America's most patriotic town!), and operated with special government dispensation well into the 1800s, well after slavery was officially banned in the state, and well after we normally imagine the peculiar institution to be a strictly southern evil and a strictly southern economic base. I mean, think about it--Rhode Island was a Quaker hotbed of abolitionism. The film documents the attenuated boons that the trade has provided the family in the late generations, some hundred fifty years out. Even if an hour and a half of self-flagellation is too much for you, I still recommend reading PBS's synopsis.

The documentary managed to illustrate the way that slavery fit into the small northern community. The DeWolfs were honored residents of Bristol, philanthropists, men of station, worthwhile citizens, and the reputation passed down through the generations. The presence of Africans in town, according to the film, was surprisingly low-key, but there was plenty of influence--the DeWolfs were traders and sugar magnates, sucking in money from operations in Cuba and customers in the south. And the slave fortune eventually dissolved, but the heirs of it have still done well in the birth lottery, made it as Harvard legacies, and come from of a family tradition of success, measured against good stock. More than a boon to the individual DeWolfs, the trade floated the local economy even for those not directly involved, even for those who objected to the fucking practice. Thanks to the family's filthy enterprise, all sorts of outfitters had jobs, and so did shipbuilders, grocers, construction workers, retailers, and Bristol prospered, owing its collective livlihood to slavery. Did J. Random Cooper love or hate the slave trade for granting him his livlihood? More likely he was just trying to keep up with the property values. But Bristol loved the DeWolfs just fine.

In the engineering community, Rhode Island these days remains a center for ocean and fluid mechanics research. The Navy Undersea Research Center is there, and General Dynamics, builders and designers of fine Navy submarines, keeps half the state, as well as a good chunk of southeastern Connecticut, employed. Slavery ranks up there with the Nazi movement as an example of uncontested nastiness, but it's not hard to extend the thought to other industries. What's defense busy applying itself to these days? Old-moneyed dorks like Tom Friedman may extol the sciences, but if you're ill-disposed to university research, there's not a hell of a lot of alternative funding outside of the defense sector, and even entering the academy your odds of serving it are still pretty high. In the world of contracting, health sciences take a distant second to defense, and the Department of Energy labs are not much differentiated from the contractors anymore. And to be fair, they're just giddy when civilian applications are generated from the effort, and for serving the military, you can get a pretty sweet entrepreneurial deal. Government funding is a business model that ain't entirely broken, at least for applied science, and if you think it's fine to offer a little extra libation to the DoD in exchange for egghead welfare, then it's doing fine indeed. But let's not kid ourselves: the potential to kill or defend is what drives the development. How much defense do we need?

And that's not the only industry that's centrally enhanced. How much power do we really need to grant capital? You will do better than other workers if you're skilled in a challenging field, but Jesus, you still can't do better than your cut-rate simpleton who has his hands on the payroll. The finance industry is absurdly lucrative because that's where the money is, and thanks to policy, it's been that much safer a bet, provided you're deep enough in the game. Investment is a good thing, and opportunities for innovation and ownership are great, but when capital concentrates it has a damnable tendency to keep itself in the in-club over the generations, and iniquity seems to be the usual historical course.*

It would have been nice to see working people benefit more from the recent boom, but wages pretty much crapped out in the midst of the valuation balloon, but there's another unpleasant truth here too: the whole American economy tends to ride just a little bit high. The macroeconomic balance begins to address this global inequality a little--we've been consuming a whole lot more than we produce for a while now--but there's more than that. The American economy has often grown at the expanse of injustice to others, and you can quibble about how the tide affects the boats, but have you looked what you're floating on? In our case, the idea of the inviolability of American capital seems to be contemporary with its seizure (but we're a young country and all of our atrocities are relatively recent). I'd rather leave the important discussion of the precise timing of individualism, classical economics and colonialism to better historical minds (these things are all roughly simultaneous in my cartoon brain), but it's hard to deny that slavery and genocide really got us that leg up. In an otherwise reasonable economics discussion, Charles Wheelan has ascribed the woes of the third world to craptastic government policies--which they no doubt have--but that's not why they suck. They were on the losing side of slavery, colonialism and military-industrial complexes two centuries ago. You don't break into the top tier overnight.

I'm sure that many a crafty preacher has woven a fine sermon around the biblical passage. The most charitable analysis I can think of would require that worldly success is trumped by supernatural disapproval, which seems to fit a Christian message well enough. After all, sin at a big scale has often made the generations stinkin' rich, and just ask the DeWolfs for starters. It's difficult, at least for me, to picture the many mechanisms of how rational individual decisions can result in a collective political evil (or good), although it's not hard to accept that they do. Unfortunately, I have fuckall of an idea what to do about any of it, but if it wasn't a hard question, if it would ride on any number of convenient approximations, and the economists, sociologists and politicians paid to ponder it would earn no respect. It's an easier ride for Americans than for a lot of other people, and if that's not really fair, it's not like very many of us has the luxury to quit.




*I'm really sorry for this post, by the way--I keep bumping into radicalism from every angle, and I swear it's not my fault. I didn't expect, for example, that Neil Peart's favorite author would be a hardcore communist sympathizer. I'm not clear how much Dos Passos documented his late-life conservative turn--I suspect it had something to do with how those workers' revolutions actually turned out.