That's Not Slavery

Currently, the chances of a 2011-2012 NFL season are not good. Almost non-existent, if you will. Something about the collective bargaining contract expiring and the players unions and the owners not being able to agree on new terms. And while I lean toward being on the side of the players (there's no reasonable argument for why the season should consist of eighteen games instead of the current sixteen), I really don't feel sorry for anyone in this scenario except for the fans. All I want is for September to roll around and have NFL games on TV. That's what I want. And I don't care how they make it happen just as long as they make it happen.

Seriously, who am I supposed to feel sorry for in this scenario? It's millionaires arguing with billionaires. There's an awful lot to not like there. (And the NFL is super hot right now. It would be asinine for both sides to end up forgoing an entire season because of any of this.) But you know what makes the whole thing even less likable? When one of the players compares the current agreement in the NFL to "modern-day slavery". For cryin' out loud.

According to an article over at The Huddle at USAToday, a one Adrian Peterson was talking to Yahoo! Sports and made the following statement: "It's modern-day slavery, you know? People kind of laugh at that, but there are people working at regular jobs who get treated the same way, too. With all the money … the owners are trying to get a different percentage, and bring in more money. I understand that; these are business-minded people. Of course this is what they are going to want to do. I understand that; it's how they got to where they are now. But as players, we have to stand our ground and say, 'Hey — without us, there's no football."

Now, look...I don't know what "modern-day slavery" would even look like. Because slavery, in and of itself, seems like it would be a timeless profession. You work for someone, you do what they tell you to do, you don't have a choice in the matter and you don't get compensated for your work. That's slavery. So, would "modern-day slavery" simply be with different clothes and with different chores? I guess it would. It's hard to say why I'm taking so much time trying to noodle this one through, as his entire statement is asinine.

I think what he was trying to say is that by making the players play an extra two games per season and not giving them any more monetary compensation for those two games, it is like when people were slaves and didn't get paid for the work that they were forced to perform. What he neglects to realize is that the non-modern-day slaves were not millionaires who were seen by millions on TV every Sunday. Yeah, not a good comparison. Not a good comparison at all. And I don't know that the real slaves of yore would take all that kindly to your making that comparison, as they were far from millionaires. They were barely dollar-aires.

I didn't know if there was any way that I could feel any less sorry for the parties involved. But apparently, I can. Quit your whining, Adrian Peterson. Focus on getting talks between the owners and the players back on track so that I can watch football all the live long day every Sunday for four months come September. That's what's really important here. My leisure time. So chop-chop! Time's a-wastin'.

Side note: The article at USAToday, which was published at 1:07 EST, noted that Yahoo! Sports, where the ill-advised "modern-day slavery" comment first appears, had removed that comment from its story at 2:47 EST. Although it does go on to say that the author of the story did confirm on his Twitter page that Peterson had made the remark. Even weirder than that is that it goes on to say that by 4:24 EST, Yahoo! Sports had returned Peterson's comments to the article. Good to know that Yahoo! Sports will be editing the content of interviews in their articles as to not "offend" anyone. Nice. Just what we all don't need. Edited reporting. Jackasses. I've sent them an email asking them why they removed the comment in the first place. I'm sure you will be shocked, simply shocked, to learn that I have not yet heard back. Don't hold your breath, either. I'm not.

"Disunion" (Civil War History Series) in the New York Times

I'm going to sing the praises of The New York Times today, and note that since October 30, 2010, it has been publishing one of the best and most informative series of articles, mini-essays, and nonfiction stories (tales, in the older sense), under the title "Disunion," that I have read in any newspaper, journal or other periodical anywhere, ever. The pieces, along with a timeline, interactive maps and documents, and photos and engravings, commemorate the 150th anniversary of the breakup of the United States, in 1860, from period leading up to the election of Abraham Lincoln, to the chain of state secessions that provoked the four-year US Civil War (1861-1865). Each day one of several eminent and less well known historians, archivists and writers (Adam Goodheart, Ted Widmer, Susan Schulten, Jill Lepore, Jamie Malanowski, etc.) produces a short imaginative, usually narrative entry, based on their own or others' historical research, journalistic and archival documentation, and so forth, that fills in key gaps about how the North and South split, or rather, the cultural roots of the national divorce, in which North pressed its political, economic and sociocultural case to represent the nearly 100-year-old country's best interests, prevent its dissolution and end slavery, while the South hewed to the interests of its slave-owning leaders and began the process of secession to defend this odious institution. Some are more engaging than others, many incorporate the various trends underway in contemporary historiography (material, cultural and political history, the role of various discourses, the role of race and racism, feminist historiography to some degree, historical theorization and cultural theory, and quantitative methods), yet present vivid stories of our national unbecoming and becoming.

Others have focused on the particulars of candidate and then elected-but-not-yet-inaugurated new president Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican to hold office, shrewdly announced one approach publicly but manipulated his fellow party members behind the scenes; how Southern leaders, like Senators Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, James Henry Hammond of South Carolina, and Robert Toombs of Georgia, and plantocrats like Robert Barnwell Rhett, uttered rhetoric as harsh as any heard today espousing a desire to defend slavery at all costs, white supremacy as the social, cultural and political ideals of the Confederacy to come, and, in Toombs' case, the possible extermination of all black people if the Southerners did not get their way; how leading authors, like Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, discursively and creatively imagined this moment of national fracture; and how famous former US residents, like Giuseppe Garibaldi, a revolutionary in Brazil (Rio Grande do Sul) the founding hero of a united Italy, were linked directly what was occurring on these shores.

In today's paper, Harvard historian Lepore historicizes Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride" to show how it was as much about preparation for the coming war as about the Revolutionary era hero, and writer and memoirist Edward Ball shows that South Carolina, the first southern state to secede (and which will celebrate the 150th anniversary of its secession tomorrow), made clear in its articles of secession that the right to enslave fellow human beings as property was central to its traitorous fissure.

One of Goodheart's entry, one of the most moving and riveting I have read yet, described Harriet Tubman's final pre-war journey south, to rescue her sister and niece and nephew in Maryland. Yet when Tubman learned that her sister had died and then her family members did not turn up at the appointed meeting place, Tubman helped a couple escape, which entailed a drama fitting of the best narrative poem or short story one might imagine (an allegedly "crazed" white man was repeated walking about and mumbling to himself in a clearing near where Tubman and the fugitives had hidden, and after a while Tubman realized he was giving them secret instructions about how to get away!). Tubman, the couple and their infant, who had to be drugged to remain quiet, did make it across the Mason-Dixon line, they heading on to Canada and she back to her home in Auburn, New York, and this story, which I have read about in more than one book, came to life for me again in a way that felt as fresh and thrilling as any version I'd heard of it before.
Yet another entry, Schulten's exceptional interactive entry, "Visualizing Slavery," discussed the demographic particulars of the slavocracy on the eve of the war, in 1860, with a superb map I have pored over. One could compare this to current racial-ethnic demographics as well as voting patterns and draw obvious conclusions.  My native state, Missouri, interestingly enough, had the second largest total population of any of the slave states (after Virginia) of over 1.1 million people, the second largest free population (mostly white), and the second smallest population, by percentage, of enslaved people (only Delaware's was smaller). That free white population by 1860, I know from my own reading and research, consisted of many immigrants from German-speaking Europe (many having fled after the failed Revolution of 1848) and Ireland, as well as a good number of internal migrants from upper South states like Kentucky, Tennessee, and western Virginia (which would, during the Civil War, become its own state). Though the article did not discuss this, it fascinates me to consider how Missouri's demographics accounted in part for why the state split during the Civil War, with a pro-Union governor and both its Congresspeople still in Washington, and a Confederate government in exile, in Texas.  It was to this government, another "Disunion" article noted, that Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, appealed for resolve, as the likely depredations of the looming war became ever clearer.  Missouri remains split, now mainly between the two Blue-Democratic urban-suburban poles (Saint Louis and Kansas City, and their surrounding counties/suburban areas) and the rest of the state, which is often mostly a sea of red (GOP-conservative). The parties have flipped, but the ethos, 150 years later, would not be so strange to residents of that earlier era....

The US slaveholding states, as of 1860 (Texas to Delaware)

I highly recommend reading as many of these pieces as possible. One thread that emerges clearly is Lincoln's steely, far-sighted skill as a tactician even before the War, and the utter failure of his predecessors, particularly James Buchanan (at right), as inept a president as ever held the office. However horrible we may consider George W. Bush, or notable ringers like Warren Harding, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Pierce, etc., none apparently compares to the extremely qualified but extremely ineffectual, feckless Pennsylvanian, who watched South Carolina, and then a handful of other states, threaten and then leave the United States, and responded with blandishments, a non-binding agreement and then silence, which only emboldened the other states thereafter. His cabinet also disintegrated apace. Lincoln, "spewed out of the bowels of Kentucky into Illinois," as the South Carolinian fire-eater Rhett labeled him, was quite aware of what would transpire if the Senate passed the Crittenden Act, which would have papered over the growing political rifts, or similar legislation, and pushed the country towards division, such that the federal government, through its military, would have to confront and end the slave system. How he did this was masterful, but as entry after entry demonstrates, it was bound and had to occur. In the best of hands, thankfully, the nation's fate landed, after a long stretch of some of the worst tenure imaginable.

It would be a great boon to all if the New York Times would pick other periods and other skillful scholars and writers to focus on. Concerning the US, perhaps the Gilded Age, or the Great Depression, or the Vietnam War, or, going further back, the pre-Revolutionary period, or the War of 1812, would be moments to choose. Historical periods outside the US, such as the era of European encounters with Africa and the New World beginning in the 1500s, or earlier moments of political, economic and cultural exchange between China, Japan, and Korea, or the revolutionary period in 19th century Latin America, say, might also be enlightening. The success of this series, which I suppose is still to be measured, might also point to the Times regularly publishing fiction, poetry, and other imaginative work, as well as accessible scholarship too. The blogging format is a good one for short pieces, and as the "Disunion" series demonstrates, when done well, it can provide news, 150 years old yet, as anything else appearing in a newspaper's pages.