Comparative analysis of books and literary works

¶ … Donald Spivey's Schooling for a New Slavery: Black Industrial Education, 1868-1915 and Ellen Schrecker's the Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents function as cultural critiques of apparently benevolent ideologies that harmed rather than helped the Americans they were designed to protect. Donald Spivey tells the tale of the attempt by White philanthropists to educate African-Americans after the end of slavery. These attempts only reinforced societal notions of Black Americans as an inferior class of persons. Ellen Schrecker examines the U.S. government's desire to eradicate foreign, anti-democratic influences from state department and American society in a manner that curtailed free speech at home. The results of these efforts were, respectively, paternalism and McCarthyism -- and an overall inhibition of the freedoms they were designed to protect.

After the end of slavery, Blacks were supposed to become free and equal citizens with Whites under the law. Instead, despite the previous centuries of oppression that were supposed to be undone by legal enfranchisement of Blacks, most Blacks were denied their rights of civic participation, and their education was limited to manual, rather than intellectual pursuits. This is why Spivey's book ultimately emerges as the more frightening of the two scenarios -- while McCarthyism lasted for a relatively short period of time, the racism chronicled by Spivey and the attitudes that hampered Black progress still exist today.

Both ideologies chronicled had a veneer of surface patriotism -- supposedly, by learning a trade, Blacks would become more 'useful' to the progress or rehabilitation of their race. This became a justification for training Blacks for similar occupations that they had performed during the age of slavery, and for denying most Blacks access to meaningful higher education. Denying Blacks the right to vote under Jim Crow became a kind of self-serving prophesy for Whites as well -- as Blacks were not educated, they should not vote (hence the use of prohibitive questionnaires for prospective voters) and Blacks were denied an education by the state governments they did not elect that would make them 'fit' to be voters. Of course, McCarthyism also had its hypocrisy, such as its demand that the accused 'name names' to reduce their culpability in the supposed vast communist conspiracy, thus creating an incentive for the accused to perpetrate the paranoid suspicion that communists were everywhere.

The histories use different presentational techniques -- Schrecker begins with a framing narrative and interpretation, followed by primary source documents of the period that allow the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. This seems appropriate given that Schrecker's cultural history is government-driven and preoccupied, rather than cultural, although state institutions undoubtedly conspired to create Jim Crow and inequitable laws for Blacks. However Schrecker notes: "What transformed the Communist threat into a national obsession was not its plausibility, but the involvement of the federal government" (Schrecker 25). Although some of the fear may have been at the grass roots level, and there were certainly witch-hunts in the past, McCarthyism was a top-down phenomenon, while racism has been rife within American society since its inception.

Both the Great Crash of 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith and the Wal-Mart Effect are economic studies, one of how rampant speculation in the stock market caused the destruction of the American economy, the other how exploitation as used as an economic tool by a single large company has caused cheaper goods but a less ethical society. Both authors regard the federal government as complacent and negligent in its duty to properly police the economy: "freed at last of all government regulation or retribution, the market sallied off in to the wild blue yonder" (Galbraith 42). However, Galbraith's fundamental contention is that although clearly better regulation was needed in terms of how securities were traded and to curtail the over-willingness of banks to lend, the real reason for the Crash of 1929 was not simply the state of the stock market, but the structure of the American economy as a whole, which he calls fundamentally unsound (Galbraith 177). The rich had grown so rich and the poor had grown so poor that there were simply not enough dollars to support the explosion in manufacturing.

These types of inequities are also the concern of the Wal-Mart Effect by Charles Fishman. However, while Galbraith attempts to use a past, historical scenario to explain the present, Fishman analyzes an economic phenomenon of the here and now. He is less interested in discussing economic theory than Galbraith, and devotes more attention to specific aspects of the Wal-Mart supply chain. His style is less linear, and more anecdotal, and also more passionate, because the abuses are going in the present day, rather than are abuses that occurred in the past.