Unjust, page 5
Among the Church’s more prominent theorists at the time was the Jesuit philosopher Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio. “Taparelli’s aim,” writes Thomas Patrick Burke, “ . . . was to develop a conservative and specifically Catholic theory of society that would be an alternative to the liberal and laissez-faire theories of [John] Locke and Adam Smith.”1 Locke, Smith, and their contemporaries advanced ideas that Taparelli viewed as products of the Protestant Reformation. For him, formulating an alternative to their vision of social organization wasn’t just a political imperative but an ethical one as well. Smith’s “invisible hand” was, to Taparelli, an abomination. Sound morals and communitarianism were the font from which social goods spring, not individualism and naked self-interest.
To counter the challenge of Protestant Enlightenment thinkers, Taparelli and his collaborators settled on an argument based on paternal authority, which is conferred by God and God alone, and an acknowledgment that men are inherently unequal—not as a species, but as individuals. The notion that political power is transferred from one man to another by virtue of a piece of parchment, Taparelli argued, was not only a novel idea but an unnatural one. The right to rule a society is conferred by divinity upon whoever brings order to that society.
In 1843, Taparelli became the first to use the phrase “social justice” (“giustizia sociale”) in a way that is rudimentarily consistent with its modern definition. His philosophical approach to developing a theory of social justice was informed by the revolutionary movements of the late eighteenth century and their secular character. He saw the Lockean vision of the rights of man and property being secured only through eternal conflict with one’s neighbors as tyranny by another name, which is why a collection of his essays on the subject was aptly titled Tyrannous Liberty.2
“[S]ociety is in a perpetual antagonism where each one offers the minimum in order to obtain the maximum,” Taparelli wrote. “[S]ociety is a war of all against all: war among the producers, war of the producers against the buyers, war of one nation against another in order to absorb its wealth by means of customs duties.” As such, governments (including but not limited to the Catholic Church) were obliged to insert themselves into private affairs to secure the revenue that was their lifeblood. To argue otherwise is to close one’s eyes to reality.
Taparelli’s case for social justice was not explicitly economic—indeed, he rejected the contention that charity should be the province of the public sector alone—but we can see the outlines of a collectivist theory of social organization in his work. “Taparelli did not seek to overthrow classical economic thought but rather to supplement its naturalism with a more coherent anthropology,” writes Thomas Behr. “He sought to ‘baptize’ economic science as he found it and return it to its place as a sub-discipline of ethics and politics, without diminishing its value as a positive science of the production, consumption, and distribution of wealth.”3 Taparelli argued that governing was a moral enterprise. All affairs of state—the meting out of justice, the administration of an economy, and the conduct of the art of statecraft—must be subordinated to the demands of ethics.
Taparelli’s teachings were reflected in the works of other influential Catholics, notably the Jesuit philosopher Matteo Liberatore, who was instrumental in drafting Pope Leo XIII’s seminal 1891 encyclical, Rerum novarum. This address on the “rights and duties of capital and labor” shaped the thinking of social justice advocates over the course of the following century, establishing the notion that social justice was a moral theory of societal and economic development. This idea will be discussed further in the chapters that follow.
Our Glorious Republic
These nineteenth-century theories of social justice sound familiar to us, but something is missing—the identity politics that animates today’s activists. Identity politics is bound up in the history of the American republic. Early nativist movements and the institution of slavery ensured that there was no period in which the United States was free from identity’s distorting influence on ideology. And yet, that’s not how citizens of the early republic would have seen it. They might have contended, with reason, that their political affiliations were organized around shared principles.
Caitlin Fitz demonstrates in her book Our Sister Republics: The United States in the Age of American Revolutions that the early nineteenth century was typified by gauzy idealism and the heady debate over whether anticolonial revolutionary republicanism should be exported elsewhere in the Western hemisphere. There were ethnic and religious tensions in the early United States, but they failed to dominate the American imagination in the way they soon would.
Fitz observes that such animosity as there was in the nation’s press toward Latin American revolutionaries was less a matter of race than of religion. The Catholic Church of the early nineteenth century was hostile toward the Lockean ideals on which the American Constitution was based, and the feeling was mutual.
Newspaper editors in Louisiana, Baltimore, and New York, for example, hoped that revolutionary movements would throw off Spanish chains, but they were nevertheless skeptical that the priesthood would allow it. “The clergy of Spanish America, whose influence is every thing, cannot be friendly to equal rights,” wrote the St. Louis Gazette’s editors about the insurrection in Venezuela that led to independence in 1811.4
This sentiment was, however, more or less limited to the Federalist faction in early America. These believers in centralized authority argued that the American Revolution was a self-contained phenomenon. As the French Revolution’s bloody descent into despotism confirmed, the American Revolution could not be duplicated, much less exported. Jeffersonian Republicans, idealists that they were, disagreed. Though they were no doubt as cynical about what they perceived to be the backwardness of Iberian Catholicism, they did not believe that the Jacobite plague that had consumed France would find new hosts on the American continent.
Fitz’s study of the Fourth of July toasts of the period, as recorded in local newspaper accounts and the documents of planning committees, reveals that by 1812 more Americans had begun to see Latin American revolutionaries as brothers in arms. Of course, as the persistence of human slavery in the United States demonstrates, equality in this period is a relative notion. But for many in the early republic, the South Americans’ revolt against the Spanish crown was itself evidence of their enlightenment.
Agents of revolution who came to the United States from South America seeking support were surprised to find that many Americans did not regard them as white, even though they perceived themselves to be and were treated as whites at home. Those diplomats who left behind records of their American sojourns were, however, still able to navigate elite society. By espousing the ideals of revolutionary republicanism and anti-colonialism, they successfully advocated their interests and won the support of wealthy benefactors and policymakers alike.
The wealth of some of these emissaries surely helped. Describing the mission to America of Antônio Gonçalves da Cruz, a “swarthy” Portuguese-speaker from Pernambuco, Fitz cites the Brazilian adage “o dinheiro embranquece”—money whitens. “If Cruz told anyone about his African ancestry, they kept quiet, leaving the nation’s adoring white legions to welcome Cruz into their ports and homes without so much as a shrug.”5
Early America’s republican egalitarianism was a function of its relative isolation. Before 1820, immigration was modest and records were sparse; most U.S. population growth up to that point was the result of domestic births. By 1830, however, federal records keepers began accumulating passenger ship logs, which allowed a more accurate accounting of immigration. From 1820 to 1845, between ten thousand and one hundred thousand immigrants arrived in the United States annually. In the 1830 census, two hundred thousand Americans described themselves as foreign-born. A decade later, on the eve of the potato blight that would send an unprecedented wave of Catholic immigrants across the ocean from Ireland, the number had surged to eight hundred thousand. By 1850, nearly 10 percent of the American population had been born on foreign soil. All the while, an early American Identitarianism was taking shape: nativism.6
The Origins of Identity
They had secret rituals and rites of passage. They took oaths of loyalty and swore to their racial purity. They formed small clubs dedicated to anti-Catholicism and the preservation of America’s Anglo-Protestant identity. And if you asked them about any of this, most were obliged to reply, “I know nothing.”
In the mid-1820s, “Know-Nothing” political chapters had begun claiming elected offices by rallying voters against the non-Protestant immigrant groups that were dominant in their particular regions. As the Whig Party began to crumble under the weight of its internal differences in the 1850s, most of which orbited around the issue of slavery, Know-Nothing organizations filled the void. They avoided the slavery trap by focusing their energies on immigration. They favored draconian anti-Catholic policies, including mandatory Protestant education in schools, a twenty-one-year naturalization period for all immigrants, and barring practicing Catholics from public office. Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, the nativists experienced some remarkable successes over a short period.
While American nativist sentiments have evolved since the mid-nineteenth century, the thematic notes struck by the Know-Nothing movement’s leaders ring familiar today. The views of Thomas Whitney, the son of a New York City tradesman and the author of the Know-Nothing mission statement “A Defense of the American Policy,” would be familiar to those who are drawn to the alt-right today. People are “entitled to such privileges, social and political, as they are capable of employing rationally,” he insisted.7 Rationality was presumed to be the province of white Protestants.
Whitney and his followers steeped themselves not only in nationalism and religious chauvinism but also in their own working-class identity. Immigration, they believed, was a boon to elites alone, robbing the native-born of work. Of course, that depends on how you define elite. Irish immigrants of the period were often pitted against African-American freedmen in the North, as both struggled to secure the lowest-paying, most undesirable jobs. The Irish would be employed to perform the most menial of tasks—often by those who could hardly be called elite—because they would work for less than the average black laborer. When the Irish bucked their tasks or demanded higher wages, African-Americans would be brought in as strikebreakers—that is, where they were paid any wage whatever.
Meanwhile, in Europe, the series of crop failures that sent scores of Catholics from Ireland and mainland Europe across the Atlantic were also fueling political unrest. By 1848, the increasing appeal of popular liberalism, nationalism, and antipathy toward the old aristocratic structures that still dominated Europe gave rise to a year of popular revolutions. Though he was inclined to look more favorably upon liberalism and democracy than his predecessors—and certainly more than neo-Thomists like Taparelli—Pope Pius IX was not inclined to support the kind of anti-monarchist rabble that made up the bulk of the 1848 revolutionaries.
The Pope’s refusal to support an Italian nationalist war of liberation against the Catholic Habsburg Empire and his mistrust of the constitutional revolutions of 1848 served as a pretext for American nativists to claim that Catholic immigration to the United States was the product of a vast papist plot. This flimsy premise provided Know-Nothings, now organized under the banner of the Native American Party, with a superficially valid political grievance. They began to recruit even non-nativist Protestants to the cause. The excuse of 1848 helped to legitimize American nativists’ otherwise unsavory antipathy toward Irish and German Catholic immigrants.
The nativist fever began to break when the issue the Know-Nothings tried so hard to avoid became unavoidable. The Compromise of 1850 allowed select territories vying for statehood to resolve the slavery question on their own. That compromise made it easier for Southern slave owners to retrieve their “property,” fueling the Dred Scott case—a national scandal that dominated American headlines off and on for years. Four years later, the idea that slavery should be a matter for “popular sovereignty” to resolve led to the outbreak of a proto-civil war in Kansas. In October 1859, John Brown led a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, which foreshadowed the cataclysmic clash of arms to come.
By 1860, the issue of slavery had proved more urgent than unregulated immigration. As the Republican Party gathered under the “Wigwam” in Chicago to nominate Abraham Lincoln for the presidency, the political irrelevance of the once formidable American Party, as the Know-Nothings had been renamed, became obvious.
At the convention, Carl Christian Schurz—a refugee from Prussian militarism, a member of the Republican platform committee, and a future U.S. senator and secretary of the interior—rose in defense of immigrants. Schurz endorsed a resolution protecting the rights of “emigrants from foreign lands” and rejecting changes to naturalization laws. Pointedly referring to their status as “citizens,” Schurz declared that the party must “be washed clean of the taint of Know-Nothingism.”8 Though they had just rejected a resolution endorsing the extension of voting rights to free black Americans, the Republicans in attendance eagerly approved this measure.
Though it was short-lived, the American Party enjoyed some remarkable triumphs in a relatively short period. Practitioners of Identitarian social justice being nothing if not opportunistic, the political success of nativist organizations, strangely enough, set the stage for an Identitarian backlash.
The Urban Machine
The art of strategically molding unrefined potential voters into disciplined blocs organized around class or racial identity was perfected by the earliest urban political machines. The most notable and most effective of these was New York City’s Tammany Hall.
In its earliest days, Tammany was a nativist organization. Membership was restricted to “native-born patriots,” and its mission was to preserve the political privileges enjoyed by the city’s Anglo-Protestant establishment. Tammany’s true calling arrived in the form of a mob of Irish protesters.
In April 1817, angered by the organization’s efforts to uphold a code of conduct that kept Catholics out of public office, what the New York Evening Standard called “a boat of adopted citizens”—two hundred or so—invaded a meeting of Tammany’s general committee before it had even convened. A bitter war of words ensued between Tammany loyalists and the Irish upstarts, who had quite effectively demonstrated their organizational skills and political potency. Fists started flying, along with whatever furniture that wasn’t nailed down.9
Though egos and flesh were bruised, the melee made it clear who would soon become the real power brokers in New York City. “[T]he Irish had made their point,” writes Terry Golway. “They had left behind a country where they were routinely denied access to power. They were not about to let that happen again.”10
When immigration made Irish Catholics the city’s largest voting bloc, Tammany shifted gears, ostensibly dedicating itself to the enfranchisement of Irish voters. In 1854, just as American nativism was on the cusp of decline, the Tammany-Catholic alliance neared the zenith of its power when it managed to elect former congressman Fernando Wood mayor. The campaign was nakedly Identitarian. Wood and his allies pandered remorselessly to Irish voters, often by demonizing New York City’s free blacks and appealing to Irish prejudices against their primary source of competition for work. Wood tacitly aligned himself with some of New York’s worst Irish gangs of the period, to say nothing of the Municipal Police, who amounted to little more than an organized crime syndicate themselves.
Wood’s election was a jarring demonstration of the political power wielded by urban political machines aligned with the immigrant masses. It was such a shock, in fact, that the Republicans in control of the legislature in Albany went to work shortening Wood’s term in office and establishing a competing police force that would enjoy supremacy over the one loyal to the city’s mayor.
Despite the controversy, Tammany had demonstrated that the future of urban politics lay in the forgotten ethnic ghettos. By organizing, registering, and pandering to ethnic interests—the Irish in New York, the Germans in St. Louis, the Polish in Chicago—the machines of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came to dominate urban politics.
Samuel Johnson is said to have called patriotism the last refuge of a scoundrel. There was an old Tammany saying that Johnson had “underestimated the possibilities of compassion.” It was in the name of compassion and Catholic doctrine, to which Tammany’s new constituents were already amenable, that Identitarian social justice as we know it today was first practiced.
Payback for the Planter Class
In the eyes of some of its advocates, social justice is a way of addressing grievances that can’t be adjudicated by a legal system that is blind, by design, to historical injustices suffered by groups. A system that ignores the intangible factors of historical and institutional discrimination, they say, does not deliver justice. In the case of present-day America, this is fatuous nonsense.
The United States is not a broken society in which the justice system has become an instrument of a vindictive, unrepresentative government. Any assertion to the contrary is a fairy tale invented by activists looking to justify their radical program as a moral imperative. But there are occasions in history when a state’s justice system is incapable of bringing about restitution and reconciliation, usually following massive social upheaval. That is when a nation must appeal to restorative or transitional justice.
After a civil war or when institutional abuses have been wrought by a repressive government, a nation must occasionally abandon the Anglo-American model of depoliticized justice to reestablish social cohesion. Pádraig McAuliffe has studied the many forms that justice may take, including sectional, non-state, or even extrajudicial institutions established to address extraordinary circumstances. “[T]raditional justice mechanisms present a ‘clash of two goods,’ ” he writes. “Respect for local customs and practices, on the one hand, and the goals of sustainable, rights-based, non-discriminatory state-building on the other.”11 In other words, a post-conflict society is occasionally obliged to mete out retribution that would be gravely unjust in any other context. In the early years after the Civil War, the American South was just such a society. Near the end of the war, the country engaged in fractious debate over how conciliatory the victorious North should be and what kind of justice the vanquished rebels deserved.
