Completing the American Revolution

Completing the American Revolution


Americans are conditioned to see our present form of government as a representative democracy. We're almost incapable of understanding that:
We live in a plutocracy

The United States Constitution was deliberately constructed so that the nation is ruled by the wealthy

The Two American Revolutions

We've been taught to believe that there was only one American Revolution, a struggle to throw off the tyrannies of Great Britain. And relative to that revolution, we're conditioned to believe that the heroes were revolutionary patriots such as George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Sam Adams, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, James Otis, the Sons of Liberty, and the Committees of Correspondence.

But in reality there were two American Revolutions:
The revolt against British oppression by Americans
The revolt against wealthy American merchants and financiers by working class people of America

The first American Revolution was completed with the end of the Revolutionary War in 1781. The second American Revolution is seldom if ever taught in our schools. Because it would make clear just what kind of a country this is: a plutocracy--the rule of the wealthy. And it's this second American Revolution which we must now complete. Only a few of its battles have been won and much work remains in our efforts to rid ourselves of the ideology and practice of plutocracy: predatory capitalism and political fascism.

"We see then, that in the context of the struggle for independence, the specific aspirations of common people put them into conflict with the people we think of as the 'Founding Fathers' or Framers. The Sons of Liberty, the Loyal Nine, and the Boston Committee of Correspondence and other such groups which the Framers organized were rooted in the 'middling interests and well-to-do merchants' and upper classes. They have been wrongly described as revolutionary. The truth is that they took great measures to keep the peace and defuse revolutionary tendencies. As mass resistance to British policies mounted, for example, they urged, 'No Mobs or Tumults, let the Person and Properties of your most inveterate Enemies be safe.' Sam Adams agreed. James Otis urged, 'No possible circumstances, though ever so oppressive, could be supposed sufficient to justify tumults and disorders . . .' The Boston Committee of Correspondence actually did its best to contain and control the militancy of activists involved in the Boston Tea Party."

Jerry Fresia, Toward an American Revolution, 1988

What Was Colonial Life Really Like?

In Colonial America, the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting much poorer. In 1687 in Boston, the top 1% owned about 25% of the wealth. By 1770, the top 1% owned 44%. In those same years, the poor--those who owned no property--represented 14% in 1687 and 29% in 1770.

In the various colonies the wealthy merchant class introduced property qualifications for voting in order to disenfranchise the poor and protect their own privileges:

In Pennsylvania, white males had to have 50 pounds of "lawful money" or own fifty acres of land.

The result was that only 8% of the rural population and 2% of the urban population of Philadelphia could vote George Washington was the richest man in America, a man who enslaved 216 human beings who were not emancipated until after he and his wife had both died. Benjamin Franklin had a personal fortune worth at least $20 million in today's money. He was a champion of the Quaker plutocrats in Philadelphia and vigorously opposed the democratic western farmers of Pennsylvania.

John Hancock was an extremely wealthy Boston merchant who had made his fortune as a military contractor during King George's War (1739-1747). In 1748, Hancock engineered a merciless devaluation of Massachusetts currency as a cure to inflation, which reduced huge numbers of workers to poverty. Alexander Hamilton grew rich through his father-in-law's connections. James Madison created a large fortune with his vast slave plantations. The top 10 percent of the white male leaders in America owned half the wealth and held as slaves one-seventh of the country's people.

To common people, freedom meant freedom from the oppression of colonial aristocracy as well as freedom from British rule. One of their favorite slogans was: "Common people must be free from all 'Foreign or Domestic Oligarchy.'" They thought in terms of liberation from all oppression, not just "independence from Britain."



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Last Edited by Phennommennonn on 10/04/2011 06:40 PM