Reconstruction

Re-reading a book from my college days, it portrays the Republican party's inconsistency between what their rhetoric has always said and what reality has always been.

The Republican party was founded on the idea of 'Free Men, Free Soil, Free Labor', as in no man tied to anyone else for their survival. What today would probably be most ideologically considered part of the Libertarian party. Yet, at the time of the Republican rise, the end of 'Free Soil' and the end of 'Free Labor' had started.

Urban migration was increasing. In control of these workers coming to the cities were industrial magnates, who cared little, generally speaking, about the care of those workers. In many cases the magnates were creating company towns which took over any freedom the workers supposedly had. The workers had to live in company housing, buy from the company store, send their kids to company schools, and so forth.

But the Republicans stuck to their convictions of 'free labor'. Man was free to control his destiny. Even if that destiny was stuck as a wage slave, frequently with no alternatives. Lincoln said, "no such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the conditions of a hired laborer. Men, with their families, work for themselves on their farms, in their houses, and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves and asking no favors of capital on the one hand nor of hired laborers or slaves on the other." (quoted in Foner, 12-3).

Today, virtually everyone is a wage slave. We are "free" to switch jobs, or even start our own company, or to not work. But we are not "free" to earn a living from the land - that's in the control of huge corporations. And that is what the Republican party was always championing: the independent farmer. They portray the independent farmer's life as their ideal - working on the land, eschewing cities, etc.

But what they have always championed in the backrooms was the centralization of political and economic power: the formation of monopolies. protective tariffs, and government subsidies of private enterprise.

Good to know nothing has changed in 140 years.