Seeds Planted and Grown

Andrea Wulf’s new book, Founding Gardeners, recently reached No. 32 on the New York Times bestseller list. You might think that an unlikely accomplishment for a gardening history of the United States written in English by a German national, but Wulf has taken a number of heroic figures of the American Revolution and wrapped them in the cloak of the postmodern victory garden. Her book argues that George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison among others were all dirt-under-the-fingernails gardeners whose love of the soil shaped the way they forged a newly born nation. Wulf goes to some lengths to explain how the Founders brought a new country and their own gardens simultaneously to fruition.

According to one review, “Wulf’s scholarship, passion and pleasing prose make for a happy combination: a history book for gardeners, a gardening book for historians.” My take on her subject is quite different.

Let’s ignore the gardens of the “Founding Fathers” — don’t you just love the patriarchal onomatopoeia — and look elsewhere for the seeds they planted and the fruits of their labor that are with us to this day. This past month provided a critical clue and a wonderful launch point for that search.

The month of May 2011 marked the 50^th anniversary of the travails of the largely forgotten Freedom Riders, those courageous blacks and whites who rode interstate buses in an attempt to integrate bus terminals in Alabama and Mississippi. The Freedom Riders were threatened with violence unimaginable today and were beaten savagely, fire-bombed, tear gassed, attacked by police dogs and mobs of brutal white thugs, and arrested, tried, and convicted for trying to get the police in those States to enforce earlier U.S. Supreme Court civil rights decisions. And today, you don’t have to listen very closely to right-wingers or conservatives to hear talk of states rights and angry complaints that the federal government has no right to force business owners to serve or employ anyone they don’t want to.

The seeds of racial hatred, prejudice, and discrimination were planted by eleven of the first 13 Presidents of the United States who were slave owners and by all the signers of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. It’s a dirty little fact few want to talk about today. Every one of our “Founding Fathers” were either slave owners or were directly complicit by allowing slave owners and slave states to prosper politically and financially. In essence, for at least the first 50 years of its existence this country was built on the backs and the sweat of black slaves. Those were the seeds planted by our “Founding Fathers.”

If Readers do not find much to agree with in my point of view, consider the reasons the "three-fifths" clause was inserted in the Constitution (Article I, section 2) to determine a state's representation in Congress and the number of Electors in the Electoral College. That insertion wasn’t an accident; it was an intentional act with intentional consequences. Through exercise of the "three-fifths" clause, slave states always had one-third more seats in Congress and in the Electoral College than their free population justified even though, naturally, slaves were unable to vote. Thus, slave states had greater voice in Congress and in presidential elections than a straight popular vote would have earned them. That meant southern states collectively gained an advantage that often provided the margin of victory in close elections, for example in 1800 when Thomas Jefferson won over northern rivals John Adams and Aaron Burr.

We know the results of those seeds: the Civil War, Reconstruction, the economic slavery imposed by tenant farming and share cropping, Jim Crow laws, KKK, White Citizens’ Councils, lynching and other mindless violence, voter “registration” laws in the South, de facto and de jure segregation, separate and unequal.

As a direct result of the seeds planted by our “Founding Fathers” we live in an America where racism is omnipresent. Don’t bother claiming that we are enjoying a justified moment of national pride over our racial progress, with a black man elected as President. Just listen to the context and subtext of what conservatives are saying about Obama not being born in America, not being one of us, not being qualified to go to Harvard, etc, etc.

In 21^st Century America, racism is definitely not extinguished or even totally sub-rosa, though many optimists believe it can be beaten. But not in the short life left to me. Those seeds were planted too well and have established deep roots. That’s what I see, an old white guy who’s been leaning left for a long time.

But, what do black people see? And I don’t mean about whether prejudice still flourishes in America because they all see that even if too many whites refuse to.

They saw Ronald Reagan launch his 1980 election campaign by invoking states’ rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, that bastion of White Citizens’ Councils and unrepentant racial hatred. They’ve seen a war on drugs that, if you judge by the convictions, looks like a war on black people. They saw George Bush gleefully drag the specter of Willie Horton from stump to stump. They saw the George W. Bush campaign’s scurrilous attack in South Carolina on John McCain’s mythological black love-child. They’ve seen the pathetic failures of half-hearted school busing and housing desegregation. They’ve seen Senator Trent Lott praise Strom Thurmond for his unadulterated racism, claiming this would be a better country if Thurmond had been elected President. They’ve seen the horrors brought by Hurricane Katrina as black citizens pleaded on national television for their government to help them. They see America for what it really is while whites see only what they want.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates argued in April 2008 in the Atlantic Monthly, a considerable portion of the black electorate consists of an “organic” tradition of conservatives "who favor hard work and moral reform over protests and government intervention." But the black American who feels that way inevitably "votes Democratic, not out of any love for abortion rights or progressive taxation, but because he feels — in fact, he knows — that the modern-day GOP draws on the support of people who hate him."

Seeds planted and grown.