Although rightly rejected today, the Virginia-born Fitzhugh attained national prominence in the late antebellum period as one of the most widely read defenders of a slave-based economy. Charles Sumner called him a “leading writer among Slave-masters,” and his regular contributions to the pro-South magazine DeBow’s Review gained him a national readership in the 1850s.
In 1855 Fitzhugh embarked on a publicity tour of the Northeast, jousting with abolitionist Wendell Phillips in a series of back-to-back lectures on the slavery question. By 1861, he had added his voice to the cause of southern secessionism and began mapping out an elaborate slave-based industrialization policy for the Confederacy’s wartime economy.
Fitzhugh was also an avowed anti-capitalist. Slavery’s greatest threat came from the free market economic doctrines of Europe, which were “tainted with abolition, and at war with our institutions.” To survive, he declared, the South must “throw Adam Smith, Say, Ricardo & Co., in the fire.”
These are three key paragraphs (actually, the article is so tight that there are no “un-key” paragraphs) in economic historian Phil Magness’s piece “The Anti-Capitalist Ideology of Slavery,” American Institute of Economic Research, August 16, 2019.
Why does he publish it now? In part, it’s his response to a truly bizarre piece published in the New York Times Magazine on August 14. The piece, by Princeton University sociology professor Matthew Desmond, is titled “In Order to Understand the Brutality of American Capitalism, You Have to Start on the Plantation.”
As I know from long experience, authors of pieces in publications like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, etc. rarely have their titles accepted. (My one piece I published in the New York Times, which I titled “The Case for Ed Clark,” the Libertarian Party candidate for president in 1980, was retitled “The Gospel According to Clark.” See the difference?) So I won’t hold Desmond to account for the title.
I will, however, hold Desmond accountable for the article’s content. He undercuts American capitalism by connecting it to 19th century American slavery. His Exhibit A is that slave owners–are you ready?–used accounting to run their plantations. He writes:
When an accountant depreciates an asset to save on taxes or when a midlevel manager spends an afternoon filling in rows and columns on an Excel spreadsheet, they are repeating business procedures whose roots twist back to slave-labor camps.
Actually, notes Phil Magness, Desmond gets the roots wrong. Magness writes:
Many leading examples of NHC [New History of Capitalism] scholarship in the academy today are plagued by shoddy economic analysis and documented misuse of historical evidence. These works often present historically implausible arguments, such as the notion that modern double-entry accounting emerged from plantation ledger books (the practice actually traces to the banking economies of Renaissance Italy), or that its use by slave owners is distinctively capitalistic (even the Soviets employed modern accounting practices, despite attempting to centrally plan their entire economy).
Postscript
Here’s an interesting fact from the Wikipedia entry on George Fitzhugh:
Sociology for the South [by Fitzhugh] is the first known English-language book to include the term “sociology” in its title.[6]
Now, let’s see. If I were to use Professor Desmond’s methodology, I would find a sinister connection between sociologist Fitzhugh and sociologist Desmond. Of course, I find no such connection.
READER COMMENTS
David
Aug 16 2019 at 11:54am
William Anderson
Aug 16 2019 at 1:45pm
The New York Times often is the source of disinformation, not only about capitalism, but about nearly everything else that involves progressive politics and the worldviews of progressives.
My personal experience with the NYT and its hostility to facts (and, yes, Joe Biden, the truth, too) came with the Duke Lacrosse Case. Very early in the case, the newspaper’s editorial staff and it’s columnists decided that their work would follow the hard-left, feminist narrative and that everything that happened would fit within that narrative. Thus, the paper put a spin on just about everything, even doubling back on itself regarding the forensic evidence.
Take the DNA, for example. The accuser, Crystal Mangum (who now is in prison for stabbing her boyfriend to death), claimed that three lacrosse players beat her for 30 minutes with their fists, then one ejaculated in her mouth (she said she spit out the semen and it landed near the toilet in the bathroom), another ejaculated on her (and he wiped it off with a towel), and another penetrated her vagina and ejaculated there. Furthermore, she said they didn’t use condoms and no one used any chemicals (such as bleach) with which to clean her.
In such a situation, DNA would be all over the place and when the DA, Michael Nifong, got a judge to order all the white members of the lacrosse team to give DNA samples, he confidently predicted that the DNA would give him the right information. Well, there was NO DNA match, period. Not one speck of a lacrosse player’s DNA was anywhere on her body, which should have ended the case right there.
Instead, upon receiving this information, the NY Times contacted Peter Neufeld, a co-founder of the Innocence Project (which uses DNA to prove innocence) to get him to say that DNA really didn’t matter and that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” The problem, of course, was that there was no way that Mangum’s account could be even close to true and no DNA of the accused be found on her, but the NY Times casually dismissed that evidence in order to hold to its narrative.
But, it gets better. In August 2006, just six months after Mangum made the original charges, one of the investigating officers, Sgt. Mark Gottlieb, wrote a single-spaced, 33-page report USING NO NOTES and constructing it entirely from memory. It magically papered over all of the inconsistent statements from Mangum and contradicted virtually all of the previous police reports on the incident.
Most people would immediately realize what Gottlieb was doing, but the NYT instead treated the report as being authentic and authoritative. Furthermore, the NYT tried to claim that non-evidence was actual evidence of the crime. First, the paper declared that police had found a towel with David Evans’ (one of the accused) semen on it — and then added that Mangum claimed that he wiped her with a towel. Of course, if that had been the case, the towel would have had HER DNA on it, too, but that was well beyond the NYT’s ability to get past its narrative.
The paper also noted that police found the DNA from the semen of Matt Zash (a lacrosse captain who, like Evans, lived in that house, but was not one of the accused) near the toilet, and then reminded viewers that Mangum claimed to have spit out the DNA and it landed near the toilet. Now, anyone whose body isn’t at room temperature would know that if that were true, then Mangum’s DNA would be in that mix, as saliva does have DNA (Ancestry tests, anyone?), but that also was beyond the NYT’s comprehension.
We know how this case concluded, and in the end, even the NYT had to come around and admit that the entire thing was bogus. However, the then- executive editor Bill Keller claimed that his paper had done an excellent job covering the case, which was a mind-boggling statement to any one of us who had done our research and had written about the affair. Perhaps the best expert of that case, KC Johnson, whose blog “Durham-in-Wonderland” best exposed Nifong’s dishonesty, was not buying anything Keller had to sell and responded with a devastating criticism of that paper’s performance:
http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/07/times-still-misleading.html
Anyone who is not a True Believing Progressive and who has dealt with the NY Times over something controversial will tell you that the paper has an agenda and its reporters cannot be trusted, despite what its editors might claim. In the Duke case, the coverage was so bad that a reporter from the NYT actually contacted me to tell me just how angry he was at Keller and the others and that the paper was just plain wrong. And, after it was over, even the lead reporter on the story contacted me to tell me that he really had done a bad job.
So, while I know there are lots of talented writers at the NYT and that not everything the paper does is bad, I am safe in saying that one needs to read between the lines when reading the NYT.
William Anderson
Aug 16 2019 at 1:50pm
I should add that I am friends with a former public editor for the NYT and he has been equally critical of his former employer in a number of things, including the Duke case AND Paul Krugman’s columns. (Yes, he actually criticized Krugman, accusing him of writing things that were not true and needed to be corrected.) So, it is not just me with my conservative/libertarian preferences speaking.
JK Brown
Aug 16 2019 at 2:15pm
It was Alex Tabarrok using “capitalist” to describe the plantation operation in contrast to the yeoman wheat farmer of North America in his “The Effect of Geography on Institutions” lecture in the MRU Development Economics course that took me on a, as it turns out futile, search for a firm definition of capitalism. As the plantation owner and the wheat farmer both own their means of production, they technically are both capitalist according to the 11th grade econ definition of “private ownership of the means of production”.
As Lincoln said of liberty, so it is with capitalism.
Capitalism is thrown out whenever there is not total government ownership of the means of production. A childish description. But in reality whatever word we use for the liberty to keep and use that which you earn in excess of subsistence and use this “capital” to participate in markets and enterprises to generate wealth for oneself, it is a spectrum governed by who is afforded the liberty. In laissez faire capitalism few, if any, restrictions on who may exercise the liberty are imposed. Crony capitalism is where the connected are afforded more liberty than others. Socialism in its various forms limits who can exercise the liberty up to full bureaucratic control where only the “distinguished holders of important offices” may exercise the liberty (usually through their cronies).
The plantation was from the beginning a feudal set up with, just as in the Dark Ages, only the “aristocratic lord” granted the liberty to keep and use that generated beyond subsistence to participate in markets and enterprises. “Precisely what makes a slave is that he is allowed no use of productive capital to make wealth on his own account.”(Stimson).
Hazel Meade
Aug 16 2019 at 2:31pm
This is particularly ridiculous.
If the idea is that somehow double-entry accounting is tainted by having been used to manage the ledgers on slave plantations, why not the entire shipping industry? After all SHIPS were used to transport slaves!
Mark Z
Aug 16 2019 at 5:22pm
Indeed, it’s the same kind of argument as: the Nazis were the first animal rights enthusiasts, so naziism is at the root of vegetarianism. Both false and morally irrelevant even if true. We don’t look down on Nazis for their attitudes toward animals, nor slave owners for their bookkeeping practices.
Mark Z
Aug 16 2019 at 5:28pm
Somewhat tangential, but I hate the practice of newspapers of shamelessly picking loaded titles that are clearly designed to bias the reader against the article. It’s bothersome that such a dishonest practice is accepted as normal. The author should at least get the option to put an asterisk with a sizable note underneath saying, “this title reflects the opinion of the newspaper, not that of the writer of the article.”
Weir
Aug 18 2019 at 6:05pm
Slave-owning Athenian aristocrats thought it was demeaning to work for a living, and so did Marx. If you provide a service, you’re servile.
Serve a customer or a client, and you toil in what Marx called “the realm of physical necessity.” As opposed to “the realm of freedom,” the ancient Greek ideal.
That dream of Greece inspired Marx as it still inspires Corey Robin: “The socialist argument against capitalism isn’t that it makes us poor. It’s that it makes us unfree. When my well-being depends upon your whim, when the basic needs of life compel submission to the market and subjugation at work, we live not in freedom but in domination. Socialists want to end that domination: to establish freedom from rule by the boss, from the need to smile for the sake of a sale, from the obligation to sell for the sake of survival.”
That’s from the New York Times, August 24th, 2018.
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