,
15 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
1. The Chicken Little wails of "It's Socialism, those dangerous people are gonna confiscate all of your property!!!" are as old as the United States. Here's a version of that story from 1786.
2. In 1786 a group of Revolutionary War veterans in rural Massachusetts shut down the local courts to prevent the state from unjustly (in their estimation) foreclosing on their farms. We generally call this Shays Rebellion.
3. Those farmers were pissed because in the midst of the economic depression of the 1780s the government was siding with rich creditors over poor debtors. Many of these desperate debtors were rank and file veterans of the war. Most of the creditors were already very wealthy ppl.
4. The farmers begged for relief, for policies that would enable them to keep their farms, but instead the government largely sided largely with the well-connected creditors who insisted on getting paid immediately, even if folks' farms had to be foreclosed upon & auctioned off.
5. Henry Knox, a Continental Army officer who parlayed his social connections into a significant fortune based on land speculation, was very alarmed by the Shays Rebels.
6. This is how he described the Shaysites to George Washington in a 1786 letter. "Their creed is that the property of the United States...ought to be the *common property* of all." Good reader, this is NOT what the Shaysites thought.
7. The story has been repeated so many times in American history so as to be boring. Ordinary people call for policies based on a sense of economic fairness and justice. The rich cry "Socialism!!!! It must be stopped dead in its tracks or else the sky will fall!"
8. The Shaysites rebels were methodical and careful in their appeals. They and their supporters proposed a host of policies that would have *slightly* harmed the economic interests of rich creditors while protecting the interests of ordinary farmers. Knox responded w/ hysteria.
9. This emotional inversion is a common part of these "Henny Penny Cries Socialism" stories. The defensive rich whip up hysterical fears of "the Red menace," while the advocates of economic justice propose concrete policy solutions that are about fairness, not confiscation.
10. The other recurring theme captured in this story is that Knox's "work" involved using his connections to secure credit so he could buy up huge tracts of land to then sell at a jacked up price to poor people looking for a farm.
11. But Knox perceived those farmers, of course, to be the lazy and irresponsible ones who didn't want to work for what they had, and just wanted someone else to give it to them.
12. This book offers a sympathetic history of rural rebels like Shays and the range of populist economic policies they espoused, all of which had nothing to do with abolishing private property or establishing "socialism." amazon.com/Unruly-America…
13. And the article by Gregory Nobles in this excellent collection provides a succinct and compelling account of what Shays and his supporters were up to. books.google.com/books?id=QEzaL…
14. For more on Knox's land speculations and the farmers of Maine who resented him for it, I can't recommend this book highly enough. I read it early in grad school and it rocked my world. Still does. amazon.com/Liberty-Men-Gr…
15. One more fact to consider. Though Shays' Rebellion was put down by the Massachusetts government, most of the politicians responsible for that suppression were voted out of office in the next election. Shays may have lost, but many of his contemporaries sympathized with him.
