Thread by @LarryGlickman

A few comments about Bret Stephens's column about the need for the Democrats to "embrace" capitalism, or else face a backlash. 1/

https://twitter.com/bretstephensnyt/status/1104197091147108352

Stephens was referring to the viral interview that @JoeNBC did with John Hickenlooper, in which the former Colorado Governor, successful businessmen, and Democratic candidate, John Hickenlooper, refused to accept the label "capitalist." /2
msnbc.com/morning-joe/wa…

After the interview, Scarborough said that the Democratic Party is "in crisis" and that Trump would "devour" the Democrats as a result. /3

Hickenlooper, however, wasn't the first "American success story," as Scarborough called him, to disclaim the label capitalist. 4/

I'm sure I'm not the only historian who thought of the testimony of John Keogh, a Fall River job printer, to Senate Committee on Labor and Capital in the 1880s. 4/

As Leon Fink, the labor historian who unearthed Keogh's testimony, noted in his fantastic 1983 book, Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics, it wasn't unusual in the Gilded Age for shopkeepers and small manufacturers to disclaim this label. /5

The exchange between Keogh and the questioner was very much like that between Scarborough and Hickenlooper. Since the Fall River printer owns his business ("conducting business for yourself") his interlocuter assumes he considers himself a capitalist. 6/

But Keogh surprises him by saying that he does not, by noting that he had previously been an "operative" in the mills of Fall River for 11 years. The questioner follows by saying "but you have an establishment of your own now"...../7

and pronounces, much like Scarborough, "you are a capitalist" which he qualifies by saying "you control yourself, and your own money, and do your own business as you please." /8

Keogh acknowledges all of this but says, much like Hickenlooper, "I do not consider myself a capitalist." /9

As Leon Fink writes of this exchange, being a capitalist at that time implied a certain outlook, which Keogh rejected: "disregard for workers' self-respect, the open defense of the laws of classical political economy, the working assumption of labor as a commodity." /10

In the 19th century, "capitalist" was a label first used by its enemies to those who embraced this ideology. It was one that many small producers, like Keogh, rejected. Capitalism implied not just the ownership of production but the embrace of an anti-republican ideology. /11

Many members of the Knights of Labor, whose membership grew to about 800,000 people, in 1886, were small business owners. The key was to be a member of the "producing classes," very broadly defined. Many members of this group disliked the practice of Gilded Age capitalism. /12

In 1885, Charles H Litchtman, a KofL leader, distinguished between "two kinds of capital," one produced by "labor done" and the other produced by "no particular labor done." Since "labor creates all value" he took only the first to be legitimate. /13
newspapers.com/clip/29307465/

Here Litchtman gives an example of what he means by the "distinction between two kinds of capital," one "legitimate" and the other not (in which capital was created by "statute law" favoring corporations and not by labor). 14/
newspapers.com/clip/29307573/

There was a popular belief in that era that to be a "capitalist" was to be able to make money without honest labor. /15
newspapers.com/clip/29307708/

The Knights and others frequently tied these issues to the question of democracy and feared the rise of undemocratic "railroad kings" and "cotton lords," as Alex Gourevitch has shown in his recent study of "labor and republican liberty." /16
cambridge.org/core/books/fro…

Rather than seeing capitalism & democracy as virtual synonyms, in other words, they took these two forces to be in tension with one another. A KofL journal (quoted by Gourevitch , p. 105) feared that immense wealth would lead capitalists to "buy up legislatures, sway judges" /17

This is why George McNeill wrote in 1887, "there is an inevitable & irresistible conflict between the wage-system of labor and the republican system of government--the wage-laborer attempting to save the government, & the capitalist class ignorantly attempting to subvert it." /18

Getting back to Keogh's testimony, what is interesting is that the questioner (in a part not quoted by Fink), did not respond like Joe Scarborough. Rather he qualified what he meant by capitalist, saying to Keogh, "I did not mean it in the large and perhaps offensive sense." /19

The questioners concession suggests a crucial point: "capitalism" had a variety of connotations, some of them widely understood to be unsavory and inimical to democracy. /20