Equality (Part III)

Labor Day badge from 1904

“The Images Ye Have Made of Me”

The Industrial Revolution was a great two-edged sword that cut very deeply in both directions. It was the greatest transformation in day to day living since the invention of agriculture. It dramatically improved daily life and created new possibilities for millions of people. The price for that change was, and remains, high. Industrialism transformed ideas of property and work that reduced once independent and skilled tradesmen to paid chattel minding mechanized assembly lines. Villagers who held resources like water and pasturelands in common for centuries now found themselves uprooted and homeless when rural commons became private property. The skilled trade became the unskilled job. The tradesman became an employee. People who once owned their homes and their shops became renters. The convenience of some depended on the misery of others.

Industrialism and mass production transformed daily life for millions of ordinary people in ways that were profound. It is hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the change. Simple things like mass-produced cotton underwear, wood furniture, ready to wear clothing, soap, canned food, inexpensive and replaceable dishes and pots and pans improved life and health for millions. Mass production put things like marble topped furniture, porcelain dishes, indoor plumbing, and silk fabric within the means of the children and grandchildren of indentured peasants.

Industrialism created a certain measure of basic dignity and decency for people who knew neither for generations, like this 19th century Scottish working class family seen here in an old photograph.


The Industrial Revolution raised the expectations of thousands upon thousands of people for their own lives, for their children, and for the world. Those great expectations went on display in London in 1851 in the great Crystal Palace exhibition. The prosperity created by industry and international commerce went on display in a building that was itself a creation of new technology; a building built entirely out of glass and cast iron. Even in retrospect, the Exhibition exudes confidence and great expectation.

The Crystal Palace exhibition building, 1851


interior of the Crystal Palace


display room in the Crystal Palace

While these improvements in life were unprecedented, they came through means that were timeless; conquest and exploitation. The new prosperity of the many depended on the poverty of many more. Beneath the public optimism of the mid 19th century lay a private anxiety, a deep terror of the poor.

There were those who advocated abandoning the ideal of equality all together. Social Darwinists applied (misapplied according to some) Darwin’s concept of “natural selection” to the social realm. Those who were best suited to survive and prosper in the new industrial world did so, while those who could not had no claim to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” frequently misattributed to Darwin. Spencer and others like him believed that some kind of natural competition for survival would do God’s work of sorting out the sheep from the goats. There were some like Cornelius Vanderbilt who believed that labor was a class of people to be sacrificed for the greater good. The problem with this point of view was that the playing field for this great game of king of the mountain never was level. No one chooses the circumstances into which they are born. And what happens when those assigned to the sacrifice refuse to go along with the ceremony? What is more, the boom and bust cycles of capitalism could transform today’s economic winners into tomorrow’s losers through no fault of their own. People who worked hard and honorably all their lives could be discarded for their failure to adapt to changed circumstance. People who thought gambling was a sin ended up losing everything through speculation. Hobbes’ nightmare vision of the state of nature as the “war of all against all” seemed to come true in the world remade through industrial capitalism.
The novelists of this time detected the deep anxiety behind the public confidence. Novelists like Dickens, Thackeray, and Edith Wharton exposed the savagery that lay just beneath the veneer of Victorian social convention.

In some ways, this terror of the poor, and of poverty, was the heir to the constant fear of rebellion by slave owners, the terror of being murdered in one’s bed by trusted hands, the terror of feeling the sting of the lash inflicted on others.

In 1848, the expectations, and the divisions created by industrialism, broke out into revolution. The worst nightmares of the privileged and newly prosperous came true. The poor (together with a large portion of the middle classes) rose up all over Europe and demanded bread and freedom. Almost all of those uprisings were brutally put down in the name of social peace and public safety. King Louis Phillipe of France fell from his throne, replaced by the short-lived Second Republic. The hopes for a "Social Democracy" came undone when the new conservative government reversed gains for the working class provoking the "June Days," three days of civil war in the streets of Paris between the National Guard and the Parisian poor. After the army was called in to put down the rebellion, 1500 lay dead in the streets, and thousands more were rounded up and sent to exile in Algeria.

After the revolutions of 1848 (the year Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto with the famous opening line “A spectre is haunting Europe…”), some artists built careers on the terror of the poor created by events like the June Days.

One of them was Gustave Courbet who rejected both the idealism of Neo-Classicism and the exoticism of Romanticism to concentrate on the world as it was then (as Courbet saw it). Courbet was a country bumpkin with a huge ego who scandalized Paris in the 1850s.
He exhibited an enormous painting almost 20 feet long, the size and format for a big Classical epic or Romantic spectacle.

Gustave Courbet, The Burial at Ornans, 1850

Instead what he shows us in this painting are his neighbors in his home town of Ornans together at a funeral. What people found so shocking about this painting was the complete absence of any kind of transcendent content concerning death. Courbet, consistent with the positivism that dominated his era, said, “Show me an angel and I will paint it.”
The deceased comes in stage left instead of in the center. The center of this centerless composition shows a group of town officials around the empty hole of the open grave. The town priest with a group of bored acolytes appears with the mayor and a group of magistrates and officials. Courbet’s sisters posed for the weeping women on the right. All the figures in the painting are portraits of people from Ornans. Death in the end is only death, and a loss for the family and friends. It is an occasion for the town. Courbet resorts to the old isocephalic composition to show equality in the face of death. “The only real equality is in the cemetery,” says a grim old German proverb.
The Burial at Ornans was only a warm-up.

The Stone Breakers was another large painting, about 5 feet by 8 feet.

Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1851

We know it only from a few old color photographs. It was destroyed in World War II (during the firebombing of Dresden). It showed a father and a son together breaking large rocks into smaller gravel for road construction. The Parisian public was horrified, not only at the subject matter, but by the very prosaic way that they are painted. The two figures are almost faceless. The composition seems clumsy in its simplicity and directness. The lighting is very untheatrical and matter-of-fact. The stooped young man lifting a basket of gravel looking aged by his toil shocked the public. As the art historian Robert Rosenblum pointed out, it is a very dry-eyed look at human suffering.
The socialist author Pierre Joseph Prudhon used the painting as the basis for a long essay titled On The Principles of Art and Its Social Purposes proclaiming this painting to be an indictment of the greed and degradation of capitalism.
Courbet’s painting is much too matter-of-fact and undramatic to be useful for political propaganda. But, the very act of putting such laborers on the walls of the state salon exhibition before the eyes of the establishment that depended on such labor was a revolutionary act.

Courbet’s art never again had that kind of daring or inventiveness. He made himself into a kind of professional gadfly and revolutionary taking part in the Paris Commune uprising of 1871.

Jean Francois Millet had no such revolutionary ambitions. He remained very cagey about his political views in public and in private. That did not save him from getting into political scandal over his work. Millet was the son of peasants raised on a farm. He knew his subject matter through first hand experience. The subjects of his work are not prosperous peasants or independent farmers, but the rural poor; and the poorest of the poor.
Those rural poor are the subjects of his most famous painting, The Gleaners.

Jean Francois Millet, The Gleaners, 1857

In the background of the painting is the busy activity of the wheat harvest. In the foreground, a group of three women go through the harvested field, gleaning it, looking for any lost or discarded ears of wheat to take home. They are scavengers. They are the rural poor scrounging for scraps to feed themselves and their families.
Millet gives them the dignity and monumentality of French public classicism in the tradition of Poussin. Their large dense rounded forms follow an a-a-b rhythm echoed in the b-b-a rhythm of the haystacks in the background.
What bothered the Parisian public was Millet’s very frank depiction of toil. Instead of happy rosy-cheeked swains and milkmaids cavorting in an imaginary Arcadia, Millet shows us the back-breaking struggle to win bread out of the ground.

Millet, The Man With a Hoe, 1862

Instead of the shepherd playing his pipes as he watches his flocks, Millet gives us the Man With A Hoe, his face haggard with exhaustion from breaking up the weeds and clods of earth all around him. Millet too candidly showed the Parisian public the toil that sustained their comfort.

Vincent Van Gogh worshipped Millet. He spent the first years of his short career trying to emulate Millet’s monumental poor laborers. He tried to add Rembrandt’s tactile paint quality to give his own peasants and laborers a grainy material presence. Van Gogh came to art as a kind of last resort. He failed as a gallery employee, as a schoolteacher, and finally as a missionary preacher. He found a true productive outlet for his manic energy and passion in art. He was not the most gifted of draftsmen, and struggled with the demands of classical form. Out of that struggle he created something new, original, and movingly sincere.
Van Gogh came out of the once large and influential Christian Left. This was the now forgotten Christianity of the Social Gospel, of the Methodist preachers urging miners to strike in the northern English coalmines, of Christian Socialism, and Catholic labor organizations. The struggle for labor, for the freedom and dignity of working people, was the struggle against the nihilism of capitalism, against its reduction of all values to values of use and exchange (celebrated by Marx), against its denial of the very idea of meaning beyond what’s written on a price tag. In the Christian view, modern laborers were not only alienated from their work, but from their souls. Van Gogh made the re-integration of the spirit divided by modern materialism his life’s mission. He proposed to accomplish this through the power of aesthetic experience, through art.
In his first masterpiece, The Potato Eaters, Van Gogh gives the miners of the Borinage region of Belgium (to whom he was first sent as a missionary) a sacramental presence and dignity.

Vincent Van Gogh, The Potato Eaters, 1885

These very poor people eat a very poor meal of boiled potatoes and coffee. Van Gogh gives their meal the sense of drama and mystery of the Last Supper. The clumsiness of the painting technique only enhances its sincerity and pathos.

Van Gogh did several versions of Millet’s The Sower, seeing in the large powerful striding figure a religious meaning.

Millet, The Sower, 1850


The parable of the Sower in the Gospel is a parable about the Last Judgment. Millet may or may not have intended that dimension of meaning in his painting, but Van Gogh probably did in his versions of The Sower.

Van Gogh, The Sower, 1888

A large radiant yellow sun dominates the top center of one of his versions. Just below, a long row of yellow wheat ready for harvest runs across the full length of the picture. The ground dominates the lower two thirds of the painting. Van Gogh transforms Millet’s clods of earth into swirls of vivid color; blues and yellows. The sower strides off to the right sowing yellow grain; grain which is the same yellow as the sun.
There is no explicit religious imagery in this painting. However, the placement of the sun in the center of the picture, in the center of a radiating pattern of brushstrokes that fills the top of the picture, implies something divinely omnipotent. Color had emotional and symbolic meaning for Van Gogh, and yellow was always about light and power. Van Gogh was the son of a Calvinist preacher, and knew the Bible intimately since childhood. He knew that the Parable of the Sower was about the Last Judgment, about who was “good seed” and who was “bad seed.” He knew enough about agriculture to know that a field ripe for harvest would probably not be seen together with a newly plowed field ready to be seeded. The seed in the parable is about the future yield at the harvest at the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven, and perhaps that’s what Van Gogh’s picture is about.

The most powerful images of early industrial labor are the photographs taken by reformers. They were out to document, and to show the larger public, the conditions of labor. The photographs of reformers like Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine remain powerful witnesses to the brutality of early capitalism.

Jacob Riis used a clumsy early flash camera to document the lives of the toiling poor of 19th century New York, determined to show the public how almost half the population of the most densely populated city in the world at that time lived.

Jacob Riis, "Five Cents a Spot," (Italian immigrant laborers in a Lower East Side Tenement photographed at 3AM.), photograph, circa 1890


Jacob Riis, Tenement Sweat Shop, Necktie Manufacturing, circa 1890


Lewis Hine’s photographs of child labor in the early 20th century United States are still shocking.


Lewis Hine, "Breaker Boys" at a Pennsylvania coal mine, 1911


Lewis Hine, young girl working in a cotton mill, 1908

These scenes are still with us. It is not hard to find tenement apartments crowded with poor immigrant laborers in New York today. All that has really changed is that they are scattered throughout the Five Boroughs instead of confined to the Lower East Side. We could find scenes of child labor as dramatic as anything photographed by Lewis Hine today in Latin America or southern Asia, if we cared enough to look. Now, as then, our comfort and convenience depends on the misery of many. If anything has really changed since the 19th century, it’s the contrast between “who may” versus “who must” became international. Conditions of brutal factory labor right out of the pages of Upton Sinclair remain even today in this country.

Jacob Riis began his book documenting the conditions of New York’s poor, How The Other Half Lives, with this poem by James Russell Lowell.

“With gates of silver and bars of gold
Ye have fenced my sheep from their father’s fold;
I have heard the dropping of their tears
In heaven these eighteen hundred years.”

“O Lord and Master, not ours the guilt,
We build but as our fathers built;
Behold thine images, how they stand,
Sovereign and sole, through all our land.”

Then Christ sought out an artisan,
A low-browed, stunted, haggard man,
And a motherless girl, whose fingers thin
Pushed from her faintly want and sin.

These set he in the midst of them,
And they drew back their garment-hem,
For fear of defilement, “Lo, here,” said he,
“The images ye have made of me!”


Jacob Riis, "Street Arabs," (homeless children, Mulberry Street, New York), circa 1890




The Power of the Earth.

Hannah Arendt begins the second chapter of her book On Revolution with this epigram from the French Revolutionary leader Louis Antoine de Saint Just:
Les Malheureux sont la puissance de la terre (“The wretched are the power of the earth”).
Arendt argues that the rage of the exploited and the wronged, the victims of the modern global economy with its vast impersonal forces, is like a force of nature that destroys nation states and the very idea of law and civil society.

The greatest artist to articulate that rage was the German artist Kathe Kollwitz. Like Van Gogh, she too came out of the Christian Left, but from an even more radical wing of it. Her father was a radical Social Democrat and her grandfather was a Lutheran pastor expelled from the church because of his socialist sympathies. Kollwitz made a series of large etchings illustrating the Peasants’ War of 1525, a violent uprising against the nobility and the church by indentured tenant farmers who were treated as slaves.

Kathe Kollwitz, Sharpening the Scythe, print, 1902 - 1908



Kathe Kollwitz, Outbreak, print, 1902 - 1908


Kathe Kollwitz, Prisoners, print, 1902 - 1908

The uprising was very violent and its suppression was even more violent. Kollwitz clearly intended this event from the distant past to reflect upon her own time.
Her prints from this series show a growing crescendo of pent up rage and frustration released in bursts of violence that are more desperate than heroic. They are as frightening as they are stirring.

The rage and frustration of millions of people made destitute in the boom and bust cycles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries drove the totalitarian movements of both right and left. Those movements destroyed nation states and the rule of law, and replaced them with systems of total domination. Modern political ideology, like earlier forms of religion, is all encompassing in its claims. It is not simply a matter of policy differences or differing forms of government, ideology is a total view of the world claiming every aspect of life. Matters of belief and identity are bound up with the ideology, which requires a total personal investment and absolute loyalty from its followers. This is true for all ideology, not just the right or the left.
Earlier tyrants couldn’t have cared less about the thoughts and feelings of those they ruled. Totalitarian tyrannies required absolute and unswerving allegiance to the movement from all of its subjects. Public opinion mattered to these movements. Propaganda went to great lengths to persuade mass opinion, and to create a sense of belonging to a historic cause. Coercion required not only the brutality and pervasiveness of the police, but the active cooperation of citizens spying on each other and watching each other’s views and actions for any sign of disloyalty to the movement. Totalitarianism was participatory tyranny that parodied the participatory society of democracy.
Who was in and who was out of the movement replaced equality. Totalitarian movements depended on ancient irrational tribal passions of us versus them despite their abstract ideologies and universal claims. The art of totalitarianism is all about agreement; mass agreement with the ruling ideology and the regime. So much totalitarian art is about spectacles of mass agreement and adoration of the regime.

May Day parade, Moscow, 1966

Hitler Youth rally, 1937



Yuri Kugach, The Glorification of Stalin, 1950



Paul Matthias Padua, The Fuhrer Speaks, 1940


Since totalitarian movements all proclaim the end of history, and the final solution to history’s ills and conflicts, totalitarian art is usually very bland and dull. Drama presumes conflict, and a world with no more to fight or argue about is a world without drama. In the end, the art created by the totalitarian movements of both left and right looks like each other. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish the art created under Hitler from that created under Stalin without identifying movement symbols.

One of these paintings was created in Hitler’s Germany and the other in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Which is which?

The totalitarian movements of the 20th century tried to remake the world, human nature, and even the human species, in the image of a series of ideological abstractions. Those who fit the scheme remained, and those who did not were cut off.

In the end, the only real equality left was the equality of the damned in the labor and death camps.

Transportation of Soviet Prisoners

Prisoner Roll Call, Buchenwald

Haiti

Jacob Lawrence, Toussaint L'Ouverture

Haiti needs help desperately.
The earthquake last Tuesday was an epic catastrophe that may have taken 200,000 lives.

Haiti was the first African Republic. Haiti was created by a successful slave rebellion in 1791. Toussaint L'Ouverture ("Toussaint, the Opener" as he was known because of his ability to open up passages in French military lines) led a long campaign for Haitian independence and to end slavery. He was born into slavery in what is now Benin. Toussaint owned slaves at one time as a successful planter. He led the African population in a rebellion against French rule and slavery. It ended when Napoleon's forces invaded Haiti and re-imposed slavery. Toussaint died in captivity.
The rest of the world treated Haiti with either domination or neglect. The country was poor, and since poverty breeds corruption, Haiti long suffered from corrupt tyrannical leadership. Despite this later history, Haiti has a large and thriving professional class in the USA and in Haiti. Haitians are proud of their history, and deeply loyal to their country.

Some people are using "voodoo" and a purported "contract with the devil" as an excuse for continuing Haiti's neglect even in the face of catastrophe. Vodoun is the New World survival of the ancient religion of the Yoruba people through the Middle Passage of the slave trade. It is a religion of ancestors and nature spirits. It is not, and never was, about "devil worship" or "black magic." It is a survival of old Africa through the catastrophe of slavery.

And now, nature in its cruel indifference, strikes Haiti a terrible blow.

It's time to show solidarity with our Haitian neighbors.

I know it's late, but Haiti will need help for a long time. If you want to help out, then here are some places where you can go:

You can contact the American Red Cross.

You can donate to UNICEF for aid to children.

There is Doctors Without Borders.

Action Against Hunger has long been involved in Haiti.

Mercy Corps is an NGO that specializes in emergency disaster relief and is deployed in Haiti.

--Hat tip to Digby (there are more aid agencies on her site)

For those who wish to donate through the Episcopal Church...

... there is Episcopal Relief and Development.

The Episcopal Sisters of Saint Margaret are there in Haiti and are doing what they can to help out their neighbors despite their own losses and suffering.

UPDATE:

If you want to help Haiti, and other developing nations over the long term, there is debt relief.

Contact Jubilee USA for how you can help.

Thanks Toujoursdan.

Blog Notice

I will be out of town for a couple of days. I will be leaving tomorrow and be back Sunday. I will leave the comments on, but don't expect to see them posted until Sunday PM or Monday AM.

Ci Vediamo!

Financial Regulatory Reform

Bring back the Glass-Steagall Act.

Too big to fail is too big.

Haiti

As though that country hasn't suffered enough, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere suffered its worst quake in 200 years yesterday. As dawn breaks, it looks like the damage and the death toll are catastrophic.

Since this website truly believes pictures are worth a thousand words, take a look at the pictures on the BBC this morning.

The presidential palace is being described as "damaged." It looks more destroyed to me.

If you can help, here is the Red Cross Website, and the site for Episcopal Relief and Development,

Equality (Part II)

Carpenter's level of Equality with Phrygian Cap of Liberty from an 18th century Sevres plate


“All Men Are Created Equal”

The revolutions of the 18th century secularized and expanded the Christian idea of universal equality. Now there was not only a fundamental equality of all people regardless of condition before God, there was a broader equality of all people regardless of creed before the law. The Christian vision of universal salvation became the new liberal vision of universal enfranchisement.
The truly new and radical aspect of all of these revolutions was the conviction that the human condition could be changed. This sounded the death knell of both monarchy and slavery. The idea that people were born into a hierarchy ordained by God or the gods, and that was immutable, was over. People demanded that the old verities prove their credentials. Expectations rose in ways that were unprecedented. The unquestioned Way of the World was now called into question.

How to find a form language that would adequately express this very new experience?

John Trumbull, The Declaration of Independence, 1818

John Trumbull fell back upon the old tried and true isocephalic composition to express a new secularized idea of equality in his 1818 painting of the Signing of the Declaration of Independence. The heads of most of the signers are all in tidy rows. He tackles that old problem of Dutch painting; how to paint the individuals together with the group. His solution is memorable, though not very dramatic.

Jacques Louis David, a much greater artist, turns the beginning of the French Revolution into a kind of Pentecostal event.

Jacques Louis David, The Oath of the Tennis Court, drawing, 1791

An almost religious ecstasy fills the legislators as the members of the Third Estate, who are locked out of their usual meeting place and assemble on the tennis court of the Palace of Versailles. They transform themselves into the National Assembly and vow not to adjourn until they have drafted a new constitution for France. Lightning strikes the Royal Chapel of the Palace of Versailles (that really happened; the oath took place during a violent summer thunderstorm), and Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite enter the room and all hearts like the Holy Spirit. David falls back upon the language of religion to express a new kind of ecstatic transformative experience, one that is political instead of spiritual.
In the foreground, members of the three estates embrace; a priest representing the First Estate, and a nobleman representing the Second Estate, are brought together by a robed lawyer representing the Third Estate. This was not entirely wishful thinking. In its beginning stages, the Revolution had a lot of support from the nobility and the lower clergy.
This picture is a drawing for a proposed painting that was never completed. Most of the men in this picture perished as the Revolution became an ideological bloodbath of competing abstractions.



“Am I Not a Man and a Brother?”

Ceramic medallion designed and manufactured by Josiah Wedgwood, a founding member of an abolitionist society.


Far from eliminating slavery, early capitalism transformed it in a Faustian bargain. Slave labor now became integral to the global economy by keeping expenses and prices low for a new mass market. It began with the sugar industry in Brazil in the 17th century. The harvesting and refining of sugar was very hot and brutal work. Indentured debtors, usually young people from Western Europe, were the first ones to work in the sugar plantations, and they died like flies from the hard labor, heat, and brutality. Plantation owners decided to use people they considered more “accustomed” to labor in a tropical climate. They began raiding local Indian tribes for a limited supply of slave labor, and then turned their attention to a vast supply of slave labor, Africa. The supply of industrial slaves from Africa to plantations in the Americas became a huge and profitable business in itself. The Africans, like the Indians, and Europeans before them, died like flies from the harsh labor, but the supply of them seemed inexhaustible. Their uncompensated forced labor did indeed keep the global prices of sugar, tobacco, and cotton low for the international markets.

Diagram of a slave ship, circa 1850


Modern slavery flew in the face of both Christian and secular ideas of equality. How could people justify such brutality in the name of profit? Somehow these new slaves had to be seen as less than fully human.

Race is a modern concept. It is rooted in ancient and abiding tribal passions, but the idea of separating people into fixed categories based on physical characteristics and inheritance is modern. Racism begins in a very modern experience, cross-cultural contact. Peoples who did not even suspect each other’s existence now came into regular contact in the global economy. The first reaction was mutual horror and disgust.


detail from a Japanese screen painting showing Portuguese merchants, 16th century

A 16th century Japanese screen painter records the horror of the first encounter with Portuguese merchants and missionaries. The Japanese saw Westerners as ugly crude barbarians with ridiculous clothes, bad manners, and hopelessly obscure religion. Westerners responded in kind seeing the Japanese, and Asians in general, as superstitious and perfidious.

Racism was created out of experiences like these together with modern ideas of nationalism, social Darwinism, and eugenic pseudo-science. Racism was the established orthodoxy of the 19th century and much of the 20th century. Those who differed in color and custom were assumed to be inferior.


"The White Race" from Frye's Complete Geography, 1895


"The Brown Race," from Frye's Complete Geography, 1895


That belief was expressed in the language of science, even in elementary school textbooks, such as the geography textbook my grandmother used.

Belief in the defective humanity of other races made it easier to exploit their labor and take their resources to guarantee the general prosperity of the “civilized.” Somehow their differences were faults that had to be corrected with hard labor and education.

New students at a boarding school for American Indians where children and young people were brought against their will and without their parents' consent, to be assimilated into 19th century American mainstream culture. The stated mission of these schools was to "kill the Indian and save the man," to cure them of their Indian identity (sound vaguely familiar to anyone?)


Second year students at Hampton School in Virginia, a boarding school for American Indians.


There were those very few who stood against racism in the name of equality and humanity. Most of them, like Frederic Douglass, came from the ranks of marginalized peoples. A few came from the dominant peoples.


I have a biologist colleague at the community college where I work who declares that race is a fiction. All humanity is descended from common ancestors in east Africa and is genetically the same. The physical differences between the “races” are so slight as to be meaningless in biological terms. They are more about individuation and regional adaptation than they are about any kind of real distinction. He argues that race is a cultural and historical construct and not a biological reality.
The old religious idea (not exclusive to Christianity, but shared by many faiths) of The Family of Man may be literal reality after all. Some geneticists argue that there may not have been an Adam, but that there was an Eve, and she lived somewhere in East Africa about 200,000 years ago, and we are all her descendents. As the idea of race came in with modernity, it may well eventually die out with advances in science and technology.

There were artists (not very many) who questioned and resisted the racist orthodoxy of the early modern era in their work.

A very ambiguous artist on this score is a pupil of Jacques Louis David, and a favorite artist of Napoleon, Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson.

Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, Jean Baptiste Bellay, 1797

In 1797 Girodet painted this striking portrait of Jean Baptiste Bellay, delegate to the Convention of the French Republic from the French Caribbean colony of Saint Dominique. Bellay was born a slave in Senegal, and was a leader in the Haitian slave revolution of 1791. He was the first black delegate to the Convention, and a leader in the cause to abolish the slave trade. The ambivalent feelings of the French revolutionaries come through in Girodet’s portrait.

Bellay leans on a bust of the Abbe Raynal who died the year before. Raynal was a pioneering activist for the abolition of the slave trade. The dead Raynal and the living Bellay look past each other. Girodet poses Bellay in a way that is both relaxed and defiant, in the uniform of a French Revolutionary official. The head is slightly too large. Girodet is fascinated by the strangeness (to him) of the man’s features. In Girodet’s picture, Bellay comes across as slightly threatening and grotesque. The French Revolutionaries were proud of Les Droits de l’Homme inspiring a slave revolt. Many (though not all) believed in the fundamental equality of all races. At the same time, this large exotic presence in their midst made them uncomfortable. Bellay constantly fought off insinuations because of his color and was deeply frustrated by the reluctance and inaction of his colleagues on the issue of slavery.

Race was an even deeper and more central issue in the early United States whose economy was closely bound up with African slavery.

William Sidney Mount, The Power of Music, 1847

In 1847, William Sidney Mount painted a daring picture by the standards of his day titled The Power of Music. Black and white come together (almost) through a common love of music.

The black man remains separated. Mount plays down the physical differences between black and white (in contrast to Girodet’s horrified fascination). Though kept separate, and with a patronizing tone, Mount’s painting is a radical (for the time) declaration of common humanity.

The most radical declarations of common humanity came from the brushes of African American artists.

Henry Ossawa Tanner was Thomas Eakins’ only African American student, and his most successful student. Tanner made a flourishing career in France as a religious painter. Any similar career for an African American would have been impossible in the United States at the time. Tanner's work regularly won prizes at the Salon exhibitions and entered many prominent public and private collections. For a while, Tanner’s fame eclipsed that of his teacher.

Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Banjo Lesson, 1893

Tanner wanted to use his art to proclaim the dignity of his people in an age that denied it. Tanner frequently took the standard repertoire of racist imagery and turned it inside out. One of those common racist images was of the banjo playing black man. Tanner completely reverses the racism of that image in his painting of The Banjo Lesson. The banjo is an African instrument. Tanner turns this image into a much more moving image of the power of music than Mount’s picture. Here, music is a means of education and the passing on of inheritance from one generation to another.

Perhaps the most moving of all works of art concerned with the struggles against racism is Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, a series of paintings about the mass migration of African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North between the World Wars. It was one of the great mass migrations of American history, and until recently, was little noted.

Part of Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series on display at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City

African Americans fled the poverty and violence of the South in the years following World War I. Returning African American veterans met a wave of racist violence intended to intimidate them into abandoning their rising expectations in the wake of their service. Industries in northern US cities took advantage of this huge pool of cheap labor by encouraging blacks to leave the South and move north with promises of housing and employment. African Americans arrived to find low wages and poor housing together with legal and de facto segregation in northern cities, but managed to build a new life despite those realities. Lawrence’s paintings are about a common struggle for basic human dignity by ordinary people looking for something better.











Lawrence knew the grand manner of the Italian High Renaissance well, and loved it dearly. For this particular monument, he decided to do the opposite of the Grand Manner. The series is painted in cheap paints on small inexpensive prepared boards. Originally, he carried the whole series from exhibit to exhibit in a cheap suitcase, which he would include in the show. This was a monument created out of available materials and intended to travel; something an itinerant people carry with them. Though formally trained as an artist, he deliberately cultivated a kind of naïve style in these pictures, as though they are the spontaneous expressions of the migrants themselves retelling their experiences.
He kept the forms simple and the colors vivid. Unlike so much melodramatic social realism from the 1930s throughout the world (from Ben Shahn to Otto Dix), Lawrence’s panels have an emotional understatement that makes them all the more dramatically powerful. The forms and colors of each picture carry the drama as much as the action itself.

Racism may no longer be established orthodoxy anymore, but it is still alive and well. It is now a great unmentionable, but it is still here. The experience of racism leaves behind a tangled and difficult legacy.
The artist Martin Puryear is a celebrated and successful artist, but one who is controversial in some circles because of issues surrounding his race. He is African American. His work is very much within the mainstream of late 20th century modernism.

Martin Puryear, Bower, 1980

For that reason, some critics attack his work for not being black enough. Other more purist modern critics attack his work for importing “other issues” of race into what is supposed to be the search for pure and meaningful form.

I will close this essay with Puryear’s Ladder for Booker T. Washington, a very moving work that is a simple wooden ladder made out of tree branches that appears to go on forever and ever.



It is deeply critical of Washington’s mixed legacy of accomplishment and accommodation, and at the same time, the Ladder is very tragic. The infinite Ladder expresses poignantly the aspiration, frustration, and futility felt by those who have never been allowed to take their dignity for granted.

Equality (Part I)

Prologue

Egalite is so out of fashion, and has been for a long time.
The only people who still use the term with a straight face are my kind, for the simple reason that legal enfranchisement remains an issue for us. The very idea of equality is now routinely savaged and parodied by everyone from the Christian Right to the readers of Atlas Shrugged. Supremacism in its racial, gender, religious, and social forms is so much sexier than visions of earnest hippies in their communes sharing a meal of tofu and groats. The old Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer, and the new Social Darwinism of Ayn Rand, speaks to our inner striver, and to an even deeper sense of entitlement, our inner bourgeois. We worked hard for what we have, by God, and why should we share it with a bunch of losers and parasites? Why should some alien government confiscate our hard earned dough? (Never mind that this point of view makes no distinction between the democracy of the Federalist Papers and the Absolutism of Louis XIV; never mind that everyone stands on the shoulders of those who came before and blazed the trail, and that no one’s success is possible without a polis to protect everyone from the tyranny of aggression, chaos, and necessity, and to make possible “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; and that maintaining that polis is a basic responsibility of adulthood).
Equality is so 1960s.
And yet, the word “equal” is right there in the center of the founding document of the United States; “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal…” The central problem of the history of the United States is how to reconcile an egalitarian legal structure with a very anti-egalitarian society. Exactly who gets included in the opening phrase of the Constitution, “We the People of the United States of America…” Who are “the People?” The United States has always been sharply divided along lines of race, gender, and class. People who lived right next to each other refused to see each other as equal even if the law did.
Egalite was a fighting word of the French Revolution along with Liberte et Fraternite. France faced a similar problem in its modern history, not only who is a citizen; but, who is French, and what makes a person French.
In the United States, it is always a struggle to get individuals and groups to see past their own solipsism “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…”

The Equality of Christians

Universal equality was unknown in the ancient world. Kings and slavery were accepted as facts of life. Royalty was mostly the result of luck. Most kings had the luck to be born into dynasties and lines of succession. Slavery was the result of bad luck. If a warrior surrendered in battle, then it was assumed that he valued his life over his freedom, and was sold at the slave market. Conquered people were completely at the mercy of their conquerors. Whole cities were sometimes sold into slavery. Creditors could, and did, sell their debtors (and their families) into slavery to satisfy debts (well, it was one form of “tough love” to teach people responsibility). Bandits frequently sold kidnapping victims into slavery when their families could not pay ransom. Tough luck. This was accepted by nearly everyone as the Way of the World, and was not seriously questioned until the beginning of the Modern Era.
And how “free” was everyone else? For centuries most people were born into their stations and into their trades and stayed there. In the ancient world, the only upward mobility in most societies was through the military. In the Middle Ages, it was through the Church. In China and much of the rest of the Far East, it was through the civil service. The ancient Egyptians believed that this hierarchy extended into the after-life; the tenant farmer in life was a tenant farmer in death.

It is possible that the idea of universal equality began with Christianity. Hannah Arendt pointed out the radicalism of Jesus declaring sins to be forgiven and telling His listeners to forgive the sins of others. In the ancient world, only the gods and their agents, kings and priests, could forgive sins. Now, Jesus puts that power into the hands of everyone. The Gospels everywhere proclaim the universal sanctity of all people regardless of station or nationality. Saint Paul extends this idea in his efforts to proselytize among the Gentiles. Salvation is not just the free gift of God to each, but to all. I strongly suspect that it was the egalitarianism of early Christian communities that most deeply threatened and offended the Roman Conventional Wisdom. Rich and poor, slave and free, men and women participated in Christian rituals as equals, scandalizing their Roman neighbors.

Something of that early Christian egalitarianism survived long after the Way of the World reasserted itself in the wake of the Emperor Constantine’s transformation of Christianity into an imperial cult. We see it in Christian religious art in forms that are both light and dark.


detail from a page from The Saint Sever Apocalypse, 11th century

The 11th century Saint Sever Apocalypse shows the Blessed at the end of time together with no distinction of rank. Even rows of the Saints holding palms of victory sing eternal praises to the Lamb of God. The absolute universal Christian egalitarianism proclaimed in this illumination from the Saint Sever Apocalypse anticipates the abstract concept of universal equality in the Modern era. The page of the Saints with their even uniformity anticipates the abstract imagery used to express the idea of equality in the 20th century.

The Last Judgment showed a dark and vindictive side to Christian egalitarianism. Jan Van Eyck, or a follower, painted one of the most vivid of all hell scenes in a small diptych showing The Crucifixion and The Last Judgment.

Jan Van Eyck (or follower), Crucifixion and Last Judgement, circa 1440




If you look carefully at this hell scene, you will notice a number of crowns and miters, and even a papal tiara or two. We see this a lot in hell scenes from the 12th through the 17th centuries. This reminded people that we all stand equally before the Seat of Judgment, that earthly station and privilege in no way exempts anyone from this trial. Certainly the hard-pressed peasant or the heavily taxed townsman took some satisfaction at the prospect of their landlords getting their just deserts by the hand of The Almighty.

Martin Landauer commissioned Albrecht Durer to paint an altarpiece for the chapel of a new hospital for the indigent, which he founded. Landauer spent his last days in this hospital at his own request. Durer includes him in the company of the saints adoring the Trinity in Heaven.

Albrecht Durer, Landauer Altarpiece, 1511, Landauer is on the lower left being introduced by St. Jerome dressed in cardinal's robes.

. Landauer and Durer intended this painting to assure people who were suffering and probably dying. Durer shows them a paradise where they would be welcome, centered on a crucified Christ who shares their suffering.


The company of the saints welcomes a work-worn peasant into their midst. It’s not quite egalitarianism that we would understand. In fact, there’s an uncomfortable element of tokenism here. But, it’s as close as the 16th century ever came to anything like equality; if not on earth, then in heaven.

The isocephalic composition is all about equality. Isocephalic is a hundred dollar word for all heads on the same level.

Frieze from the Ara Pacis in Rome showing the damaged figure of the Emperor Augustus on the left.

The Romans had equality of a kind, though it was definitely not universal equality. The Emperor Augustus, attempting to sell the idea of “emperor” to Roman public opinion, had himself shown on the frieze of the Ara Pacis in Rome as a primus inter pares, a first among equals. This is not the equality of all Romans, but the equality of the Roman Patriciate. This Roman artist uses the isocephalic composition to show that sense of patrician equality.

Masaccio uses this Roman isocephalic composition to express something like Christian universal equality.

Masaccio, detail from The Tribute Money in the Brancacci Chapel, Sta. Maria del Carmine, Florence, c.1427

Instead of members of the Roman Patriciate, Masaccio shows poor men stymied by the demand for payment of an entry tax into Capernaum. Masaccio presents Christ and the Apostles as equals in The Tribute Money. They are equal in their poverty and humanity. They are also equal in their monumentality. The faces of these men are not ideal or prettified. The likes of some of them you can still see on the streets of Florence today. Masaccio shows these ordinary men sharing in a momentous occasion, presented with a Roman grandeur once reserved for the Emperor and his court.

The 17th century Dutch burghers were certainly not liberals in any sense we would recognize. There were no liberals until the 18th century. But, among themselves, equality mattered a lot. Their state was a republic that had only recently won its independence from Spain after a long bloody struggle. The Dutch burghers were not only interested in getting rich off the global economy, but in public responsibility. They were very public spirited, coming together to form volunteer societies for the common defense and welfare. Those volunteer associations of wealthy eminent citizens wanted commemoration in works of art. Each member of each association would pay a separate fee to be included in the painting. Artists had to paint the group and its individual members, an extremely difficult and even contradictory project.
Dutch artists went to great lengths to avoid the visual inertia of the isocephalic composition; a composition in which “one could, in a manner of speaking, behead them all with a single blow,” in the words of Samuel van Hoogstraten, a contemporary of Rembrandt.

One artist who succeeded in preserving the equality of the members of the group while making remarkable compositions was Frans Hals.

Frans Hals, Archers of Saint Adrian, 1633

The Dutch then, just like the Dutch now, had little taste for standing armies and professional soldiers. Most of the fighters for independence from Spain were irregulars; guerillas or citizen soldiers. By the mid 17th century, those once fearsome bands of warriors became citizen militias whose primary activity was parading and feasting. Hals shows the Archers of Saint Adrian feasting after parading. There is a certain measure of military rank. The captain of the company sits enthroned like a monarch facing us. Hals rescues the egalitarianism of the company by pushing him far to the left. Toward the center, he puts the lieutenant facing the captain. Between them is the ensign with the company colors. Standing on the far left and the center right are the 2 sergeants. Hals preserves the military rank while showing the basic equality of a group of weekend warriors who elect their officers.

There is no such rank in the group portrait of the governesses of a poor house for elderly men (Hals died bankrupt, and it is said that these were the governesses of the place where he spent his last years).

Frans Hals, Governesses of the Old Men's Alms House of Haarlem, 1664

The women as individuals and as a group appear as sober, conscientious, responsible administrators of a public charity. The simplicity of the composition and the plainness of the coloring express that dutiful sobriety, and their equality.

Rembrandt painted the most famous of these group portraits, a portrait of an Amsterdam militia company known by the apocryphal title “The Nightwatch.”

Rembrandt, "The Nightwatch," 1645

Rembrandt makes the group portrait dramatic and full of noise and excitement. The Captain instructs his lieutenant to sound the call to muster, to form up the men to parade toward us right out of the picture. Orders are shouted. The drummer sounds the muster. People scurry out of the way. Dogs bark. Guns fire. Pike staffs rattle. It is chaos coming to order. Unlike Hals and other Dutch artists, Rembrandt includes a lot of extras, a cross section of the population of Amsterdam. This is a very democratic picture showing the abounding irrepressible life of the great commercial city.
There is an old story that this painting was a failure for Rembrandt, that the patrons did not like it. The evidence indicates the contrary. The captain of the company had the painting copied twice. Each of the men paid 100 guilders to be in the painting. That’s a lot of money. A guilder then was a gold coin. Rembrandt made 1600 guilders off this painting. All the records indicate that the men were happy with the painting. It hung prominently in their assembly hall well into the 18th century. The critical reception was largely enthusiastic.

Perhaps Rembrandt’s most important statement about equality was in his religious work. In the famous print known as “The Hundred Guilder Print,” the Christian concept of universal equality has one of its last and most original presentations.

Rembrandt, "The Hundred Guilder Print," etching, 1649

Rembrandt shows us all the events in the 19th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. The sick and suffering come in from the right to be cured. The little children approach Him for a blessing. The rich young man sits confounded by the answer to his question, “What must I do to win eternal life?” The lawyers on the left plot how to trick Christ. This print is as noisy and democratic as The Nightwatch. It is a cross section of classes and conditions of people. Christ stands in the midst of them, in solidarity with them all. All are equal, not in their qualities, but in their sufferings and their sinfulness. Christ stands in solidarity with flawed and suffering humanity.