Gerald Horne
International Publishers, $24.99 (cloth)
David Waldstreicher
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| A Batalha de San Jacinto (1895), de Henry Arthur McArdle, retratando a batalha final da Revolução do Texas de 1836. Imagem: Wikipedia |
A história dos EUA é um campo de jogo estranho e excepcional, onde, parafraseando a famosa assinatura de Garrison Keillor no Lago Wobegon, todas as revoluções são fortes, todos os revolucionários são gentis e até mesmo as guerras civis estão acima da média.
Na narrativa ortodoxa, havia apenas uma revolução que importava, afinal. O fato de os revolucionários americanos terem conquistado sua independência em parte porque os franceses intervieram em sua guerra civil britânica tem sido frequentemente narrado como, no máximo, uma ironia útil. Certamente os africanos ou nativos não tiveram nada a ver com isso, exceto como lutadores desesperados por seus próprios propósitos marginais: definidos fora da história em parte porque perderam, mas principalmente porque, bem, foram definidos fora da história. No entanto, o debate de um século entre historiadores “progressistas” (leia-se: radicais) versus “whig” (liberais e conservadores) sobre se os brancos comuns se beneficiaram ou se as elites se beneficiaram começou a parecer quase irrelevante: havia mais em jogo para outros que não o republicanismo ou a nacionalidade.
A certeza de que “o povo” e suas liberdades triunfaram e abriram caminho para o progresso futuro não parece mais suficiente como história. Apresentar a Guerra Civil dos EUA como uma segunda boa revolução - uma resolução de negócios inacabados que finalmente acabou com a escravidão (como ela se mostrou teimosa!) e criou um verdadeiro estado-nação - deixa muitas perguntas sem resposta. Se as ideias da era revolucionária e as identidades da Guerra Civil são tão poderosas e se inclinam tão decisivamente em direção à justiça, por que os errados estão vencendo? Não é de se admirar que os colonos revolucionários de 1776 tenham percebido que a primeira prioridade era o spin – ou, como Thomas Jefferson colocou tão delicadamente na Declaração de Independência, “um respeito decente pelas opiniões da humanidade”.
Os Estados Unidos afirmaram ser a primeira nação autodeterminada, um modelo de antimonarquia e anticolonialismo. Em um mundo nacionalista e liberal, isso era tudo e, em particular, um farol contra a reação. Para os socialistas, era primitivo, senão pior do que nada: uma miragem burguesa, ou apenas uma exceção (o subtexto muitas vezes subestimado da famosa pergunta: “Por que não há socialismo nos Estados Unidos?”). Os marxistas há muito mantêm um cordão sanitário em torno da Revolução Americana, concentrando-se no imperialismo da nação resultante; suas investigações foram dominadas pelas revoluções francesa, russa e descolonizadora. O verdadeiro problema pode ter sido a incapacidade de ver a contra-revolução como algo que poderia acontecer aqui.
Essa maré está virando lentamente. Por duas décadas, Gerald Horne, o professor de história e estudos afro-americanos da Universidade de Houston, tem construído um argumento bem documentado para repensar toda a história dos EUA em termos de impérios, insurreições e contra-revoluções. Com seu último livro, The Counter-Revolution of 1836, ele nos deu uma magnum opus distinta: o mais longo e talvez o mais desafiador de seus muitos livros. Horne coloca o Texas e sua revolução no centro da história nacional que agora se estende, em sua série de estudos, do século XVI ao século XX, com apartes instrutivos ocasionais sobre como o ressurgimento da direita de nossa era não deveria ser surpreendente para qualquer pessoa com um conhecimento absoluto da história. Em vez de uma trajetória otimista de Jamestown ou Plymouth a Obama, é a história de Cristóvão Colombo a Trump, com a perda da redenção que isso deveria implicar e muito mais.
Historiadores profissionais de um tom mais pálido mantiveram distância de Horne, enquanto sua obra se tornou uma leitura essencial entre alguns pensadores e ativistas de esquerda. Mesmo reescrevendo a história anterior dos EUA, ele continua a publicar narrativas cuidadosamente documentadas sobre tópicos cada vez mais variados, expandindo-se mais recentemente para jazz, boxe e a história do jornalismo negro, bem como continuando com estudos de relações exteriores e radicais negros (e um fascista). Mas, ao contrário dos jornalistas e dos chamados “historiadores presidenciais” que produzem histórias populares com base no que lhes parece um número suficiente de fontes impressas fáceis de encontrar, Horne se delicia com fontes obscuras e negligenciadas de coleções de manuscritos, panfletos políticos disponíveis apenas em bibliotecas de pesquisa e teses e dissertações de mestrado de escolas regionais menores que até mesmo especialistas podem não ter percebido. Ele foi acusado de ser partidário e ideológico (como todos os historiadores da esquerda), e um livro é particularmente controverso (mais sobre isso abaixo), mas ele é indiscutivelmente mais completo do que a maioria.
Advogado e ativista antes de se tornar professor de história, Horne arquiva seus documentos detalhados com uma urgência que combina com seu compromisso com o internacionalismo anticapitalista negro. Ele fez muitas contribuições, especialmente para a história da esquerda no século XX, mas ultimamente seus relatos amplos e ambiciosos de um antigo Estados Unidos em um hemisfério de impérios e pessoas escravizadas aumentaram, dando aos leitores um relato mais sinóptico e honesto do que temos recebido dos decanos e dos livros didáticos.
Um tema importante na obra de Horne tem sido a importância do engajamento político negro, da esquerda, com outras nações. Como ele disse em 2011, “o destino daqueles agora conhecidos como afro-americanos foi moldado indelevelmente pela correlação global de forças, ou o que os estudiosos mais antigos chamavam de 'movimento da história', e ignoramos essa realidade por nossa conta e risco." Enquanto ele continuou escrevendo livros como Black and Brown: African Americans and the Mexican Revolution, 1910–1920 (2005), Cold War in a Hot Zone: The United States Confronts Labour and Independence Struggles in the British West Indies (2007) e Mau Mau no Harlem? The U.S. and the Liberation of Kenya (2009), ele começou no início da década de 2010 a acompanhar a história até o século XIX. Em estudos como Negro Comrades of the Crown: African Americans and the British Empire Fight the U.S. Before Emancipation (2012), Horne chegou ao ponto de argumentar que “a aliança entre Londres e os africanos dentro da república foi provavelmente a mais importante ameaça à segurança nacional dos EUA” voltada para os primeiros Estados Unidos. (Horne acredita em John C. Calhoun em algumas coisas, assim como Eugene Genovese fez em outras.) Mais tarde, Horne publicou Confronting Black Jacobins: The U.S., the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic (2015) e volumes sobre Estados Unidos e Brasil e, mais recentemente, Cuba no século XIX, traçando paralelos com seus tratados sobre radicais negros e política externa em relação à África do Sul, Zimbábue, China, Japão, Índia e Quênia.
Alguém pode ser cético de que um campo de estudos cuidadoso possa ser produzida de forma tão prolífica, quase todos os anos. Às vezes, a escrita sofre de construções passivas e repetições. Horne lê como um escritor que raramente revisa, mesmo em resposta às críticas de revisores, e ele está decididamente desinteressado em complicações que não são essencialmente materiais ou geopolíticas. Mas tudo isso não é tão incomum quanto pode parecer. Acho que a melhor explicação para a negligência de Horne em algumas áreas é que ele escreve em um diálogo implícito (quando não explícito) com uma tradição comunista com o público internacional e negro em mente e nunca presume que seu público principal seja branco. (The Counter-Revolution of 1836 é publicada pela International Publishers, talvez mais conhecida como a editora interna do CPUSA, editora de traduções de Marx e Lenin e do historiador comunista Herbert Aptheker. Horne também publica regularmente com a Monthly Review Press, uma editora socialista, bem como a New York University Press.) Muitos historiadores hoje falam sobre história transnacional: Horne simplesmente faz isso, assumindo o quanto está em jogo para o povo negro comum na guerra, conquistas imperiais, movimentos de libertação no exterior, viagens, e empreendimentos diplomáticos oficiais e não oficiais. De certa forma, ele é um historiador imperial antiquado, com a sensação de que os choques de impérios afetam a todos. Onde ele difere está em seu foco no que os negros americanos, povos indígenas e seus aliados no exterior fizeram desses confrontos imperiais, e o que essa história fez daqueles encontros potencialmente e às vezes realmente revolucionários.
Como ninguém que escreve sobre a Revolução Americana ou a Guerra Civil, no entanto, Horne agora combinou seu internacionalismo marxista negro e seu realismo como historiador do império, construindo a partir dele os rudimentos de uma grande teoria da história dos EUA - tudo isto. Ele merece a atenção e consideração cuidadosa que está recebendo, e que poderia receber da academia ou da grande imprensa se fosse tudo explicado em um grande volume (não que eu ache que ele se importe em receber essa atenção, ou deveria). A teoria surgiu gradualmente à medida que Horne retrocedeu no tempo e rompeu algumas cronologias padrão e começou a compreender uma história americana verdadeiramente hemisférica. “Parte do problema é que os historiadores de hoje estão tão isolados, focados estritamente em uma era, como 1750-83 ou 1850-65, que permanecem alheios aos eventos anteriores - mesmo aqueles tão importantes quanto 1688, o verdadeiro precursor de 1776”, ele escreveu no ano passado no The Nation. “Esses estudiosos imitam o júri incompreensível no julgamento de 1992 dos policiais de Los Angeles cujo espancamento cruel de Rodney King foi capturado em fita. Em vez de permitir que a fita se desenrolasse perfeitamente do começo ao fim, os advogados de defesa astutos expuseram o júri a meros fragmentos e convenceram seus membros de que os episódios desconexos dificilmente representavam um crime.
Alguém pode ser cético de que um campo de estudos cuidadoso possa ser produzida de forma tão prolífica, quase todos os anos. Às vezes, a escrita sofre de construções passivas e repetições. Horne lê como um escritor que raramente revisa, mesmo em resposta às críticas de revisores, e ele está decididamente desinteressado em complicações que não são essencialmente materiais ou geopolíticas. Mas tudo isso não é tão incomum quanto pode parecer. Acho que a melhor explicação para a negligência de Horne em algumas áreas é que ele escreve em um diálogo implícito (quando não explícito) com uma tradição comunista com o público internacional e negro em mente e nunca presume que seu público principal seja branco. (The Counter-Revolution of 1836 é publicada pela International Publishers, talvez mais conhecida como a editora interna do CPUSA, editora de traduções de Marx e Lenin e do historiador comunista Herbert Aptheker. Horne também publica regularmente com a Monthly Review Press, uma editora socialista, bem como a New York University Press.) Muitos historiadores hoje falam sobre história transnacional: Horne simplesmente faz isso, assumindo o quanto está em jogo para o povo negro comum na guerra, conquistas imperiais, movimentos de libertação no exterior, viagens, e empreendimentos diplomáticos oficiais e não oficiais. De certa forma, ele é um historiador imperial antiquado, com a sensação de que os choques de impérios afetam a todos. Onde ele difere está em seu foco no que os negros americanos, povos indígenas e seus aliados no exterior fizeram desses confrontos imperiais, e o que essa história fez daqueles encontros potencialmente e às vezes realmente revolucionários.
Como ninguém que escreve sobre a Revolução Americana ou a Guerra Civil, no entanto, Horne agora combinou seu internacionalismo marxista negro e seu realismo como historiador do império, construindo a partir dele os rudimentos de uma grande teoria da história dos EUA - tudo isto. Ele merece a atenção e consideração cuidadosa que está recebendo, e que poderia receber da academia ou da grande imprensa se fosse tudo explicado em um grande volume (não que eu ache que ele se importe em receber essa atenção, ou deveria). A teoria surgiu gradualmente à medida que Horne retrocedeu no tempo e rompeu algumas cronologias padrão e começou a compreender uma história americana verdadeiramente hemisférica. “Parte do problema é que os historiadores de hoje estão tão isolados, focados estritamente em uma era, como 1750-83 ou 1850-65, que permanecem alheios aos eventos anteriores - mesmo aqueles tão importantes quanto 1688, o verdadeiro precursor de 1776”, ele escreveu no ano passado no The Nation. “Esses estudiosos imitam o júri incompreensível no julgamento de 1992 dos policiais de Los Angeles cujo espancamento cruel de Rodney King foi capturado em fita. Em vez de permitir que a fita se desenrolasse perfeitamente do começo ao fim, os advogados de defesa astutos expuseram o júri a meros fragmentos e convenceram seus membros de que os episódios desconexos dificilmente representavam um crime.
Horne’s 1688 is not mainly the “Glorious” Revolution triumph of England’s Parliament over absolute monarchy: it’s when the merchants triumphed over the Royal African Company to deregulate the African slave trade. In The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (2014), after summarizing the expansion of slavery and of enslaved restiveness in the Caribbean and southern mainland, Horne pivoted to argue that rising British antislavery, in response to slave rebellions and disgust with North American and West Indian greed, motivated planter-rebels and their merchant allies to mount the ensuing civil war in the British empire. The real revolutionaries, in other words, were the enslaved; the vaunted American Revolution was nothing less—or, nothing more—than a counter-revolution against the strivings of the truly oppressed of America and their budding alliance with the metropole. We don’t have to wait for C. L. R. James’s “Black Jacobins”—the focus of his 1938 study of the Haitian revolution—to find enslaved rebels rocking the new world.
This was a stunning about-face from the conventional wisdom, and in some respects it was overstated. Horne took arguments made by historians like Woody Holton—that slavery was one among several key motives, sometimes an ineffable and often ironic and contradictory factor in the making of the imperial controversy, the war for independence, and the outcomes of a long revolutionary era, but particularly for white Virginians and South Carolinians—to a different, if not necessarily higher, level: one of simple cause and effect. It’s also a stretch, because opposition to slavery wasn’t yet strong or even English per se, and American rebels had plenty of other economic motives, not all of which can be reduced to slavery. Horne is also unimpressed by the advance of antislavery in the northern colonies before 1775, whether it was motivated by passions for liberty, accusations of hypocrisy, or fears of armed slaves. Nor does he think much of the thousands who fought for the patriots and, like during the later civil war, undermined racial slavery by doing so. This is unsurprising given his sense of the Gulf South and Caribbean as the motors of U.S. history.
Still, Horne makes it clearer than it has ever been that powerful people perceived Africans as part of the play of alliances and events, before as well as after Lord Dunmore offered freedom to enslaved Virginians who would enlist to fight the rebels. There was no halcyon early America without resistance to slavery, racial boundary-marking, and the potential for more. The older conjoined images in U.S. history of North American Black people as beaten-down slaves—rare heroic individualists who ran away by themselves, or the even rarer insurrectionists—blinds us to how normal it was for people from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century to understand Africans as present or future political actors who might do things with others, including take advantage of turmoil in the empire, to improve their collective condition.
At the time the book was published, only specialists and aficionados remarked on how uncompromisingly Horne pressed his view of the American Revolution as a British civil war that functioned to shut down rather than inspire Black liberation. This changed in late 2019, after Nikole Hannah-Jones relied on Horne’s strongly worded argument, though without at first mentioning him, in the lead essay for the New York Times’s 1619 Project. Her assertion that a desire to hang onto their slaves was “one of the primary reasons” colonists “decided to declare their independence” provoked a firestorm, with major, celebrated historians like Gordon Wood and Sean Wilentz joining with right-wing outlets and Trotskyists alike to denounce Hannah-Jones as falsifying history. Of course, had the same historians engaged with Horne’s book—or any others that did not mainly celebrate the Revolutionaries’ antislavery ideals—they could not have acted so shocked that there are other ways of looking at its relationship to slavery. Instead, they had to rely on the World Socialist Web Site to publish their denunciations in a series of posts and podcasts that proved the truth of Horne’s frequent observation that alliances tend to reflect political convenience at least as much as they cement ideological affinities.
Since COVID-19, Horne has been in increasing demand for Zoom talks, which seems not to slow him down at all: in 2018 and 2020 he filled in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century backstories to his eighteenth-century narrative in The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism and The Dawning of the Apocalypse, respectively. These books narrate settler invasions as revolutions against indigenes that garnered support from some of the native nations against others. They were class alliances as well as imperial ventures. They were contested. There were variants. Eventually, a particularly genocidal and capitalist Anglo version evolved based on cynical uses of race. Indigenes and Africans resisted violently, and sometimes succeeded in the short term, especially when they could join together or find allies among competing empires at the borders of one colony or another. Meanwhile, successive English revolutions and civil wars, of the 1640s–50s and of 1688, led to expansions of the British slave trade. Finally, in the British colonies, settlers realized that their imperial overlords were not always their friends over against other subjects. The “revolting spawn” of Britain, not just planters but also merchants, committed counter-revolution—revolting against crown and against the threat from below—to increase their control over land and people. (Horne’s use of “spawn” throughout his books rebukes the happy “birth” and organic “growth” of the republic in conventional histories.)
Since COVID-19, Horne has been in increasing demand for Zoom talks, which seems not to slow him down at all: in 2018 and 2020 he filled in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century backstories to his eighteenth-century narrative in The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism and The Dawning of the Apocalypse, respectively. These books narrate settler invasions as revolutions against indigenes that garnered support from some of the native nations against others. They were class alliances as well as imperial ventures. They were contested. There were variants. Eventually, a particularly genocidal and capitalist Anglo version evolved based on cynical uses of race. Indigenes and Africans resisted violently, and sometimes succeeded in the short term, especially when they could join together or find allies among competing empires at the borders of one colony or another. Meanwhile, successive English revolutions and civil wars, of the 1640s–50s and of 1688, led to expansions of the British slave trade. Finally, in the British colonies, settlers realized that their imperial overlords were not always their friends over against other subjects. The “revolting spawn” of Britain, not just planters but also merchants, committed counter-revolution—revolting against crown and against the threat from below—to increase their control over land and people. (Horne’s use of “spawn” throughout his books rebukes the happy “birth” and organic “growth” of the republic in conventional histories.)
For Horne, 1836 is as much a linchpin of this history as 1776 because it turns the original Caribbean and coastal dynamics of settler colonialism into a continental force that has endured up to our own age of rising neo-fascism. Here the counter-revolution is against Mexico, which had infuriated the Anglo settlers it had warily welcomed by intermittently abolishing slavery by law as well as by failing to protect its northern provinces against the Comanche and other native nations. The revolutionary republic of Texas (1836–45), in this sense, anticipated the dilemma of the southern states after gradual emancipation in the northern United States: they had abolitionists at their door, not to mention the threat—or opportunity—of scheming British and French empires looking to limit the growing United States, whether that meant safeguarding slavery or liberating slaves. The very fluid borders that enabled slave drivers to move to Texas continued to beckon fugitives and raiders of cattle and persons.
Texas was born in border crisis and civil war that repeatedly slid into race war in the name of nation-making. Gary Clayton Anderson called it a fifty-year war that amounted, as he put it in the title of his 2005 book, to The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land. The dynamic of border, or really regional, violence has also been captured more recently by Brian DeLay and Pekka Hämäläinen with emphasis on the role of the Comanche. Andrew Torget’s Seeds of Empire (2015) portrayed the contest for Texas in light of the rise of cotton, and in South to Freedom (2020), Alice Baumgartner has analyzed the role of fugitive slaves in shaping southern border politics all the way to the Civil War. Horne brings these insights together at great length, tracing how Texas followed upon Indian removal in Georgia in combining corrupt theft of land with the rapid expansion of slavery.
In Texas and bordering Indian Territory as well as New Mexico, Native refugees suffered and sometimes exacerbated the pattern of civil wars and enslaving ventures. This counter-revolution by slavers might as easily be called a Mexican civil war over slavery, since Mexico’s insistence on abolition only stiffened in the ensuing years. Northward, the sheer disorder, and the distinct possibility of international intervention (British, but also French) became an excuse to argue, anew, for annexation to the United States. White Texans displayed only a very conditional loyalty to the United States, though: pushing for security for their property, they bought off and slaughtered Natives on their own terms regardless of federal policy. Like the Virginians and Carolinians of 1776, they dominated a slavocracy that, Horne implies, provided just enough incentives, or American dreams, for poorer whites who stuck around.
Texas was born in border crisis and civil war that repeatedly slid into race war in the name of nation-making. Gary Clayton Anderson called it a fifty-year war that amounted, as he put it in the title of his 2005 book, to The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land. The dynamic of border, or really regional, violence has also been captured more recently by Brian DeLay and Pekka Hämäläinen with emphasis on the role of the Comanche. Andrew Torget’s Seeds of Empire (2015) portrayed the contest for Texas in light of the rise of cotton, and in South to Freedom (2020), Alice Baumgartner has analyzed the role of fugitive slaves in shaping southern border politics all the way to the Civil War. Horne brings these insights together at great length, tracing how Texas followed upon Indian removal in Georgia in combining corrupt theft of land with the rapid expansion of slavery.
In Texas and bordering Indian Territory as well as New Mexico, Native refugees suffered and sometimes exacerbated the pattern of civil wars and enslaving ventures. This counter-revolution by slavers might as easily be called a Mexican civil war over slavery, since Mexico’s insistence on abolition only stiffened in the ensuing years. Northward, the sheer disorder, and the distinct possibility of international intervention (British, but also French) became an excuse to argue, anew, for annexation to the United States. White Texans displayed only a very conditional loyalty to the United States, though: pushing for security for their property, they bought off and slaughtered Natives on their own terms regardless of federal policy. Like the Virginians and Carolinians of 1776, they dominated a slavocracy that, Horne implies, provided just enough incentives, or American dreams, for poorer whites who stuck around.
Much of this long book is a retelling of the sheer violence and brutality of early Texas, “bent” as it was “on dismembering Mexico” and exterminating Natives in order to sustain an economy built on land speculation and slave labor. The period of Texas independence was characterized by “incessant warfare,” “an overall culture of rampant violence that has yet to dissipate.” The United States, wisely or not, rode to the rescue of Texas from its own contradictions in order to establish facts on the ground, goaded by the dubious threat that a hostile or even pro-British Mexican or independent neighbor would have posed to the nation (or really, the southern states and their property in humans). The more enslaved people (and refugees of native dispossession and war) who entered Texas, though, the wealthier—but less secure—the new state seemed. Here, “repression . . . was so severe in part because of the resistance encountered.” The threat of foreign subversion, the continued, mutually reinforcing conflict with Natives, and resistance by the enslaved bred an extreme form of racism and insistence on local control.
With story after story, building on many histories of Texas written since the turn of the century, Horne paints a convincing picture of an essentially violent order that was imperialist, capitalist (based in heavily leveraged land purchases, seeking new markets for cotton), generatively racist and genocidal by the 1850s, and bent variously on swallowing California, New Mexico, and in some versions all of Mexico itself. The liberals of Texas like Sam Houston talked about good Indians and the need for reservations, but they were more than balanced by the extreme haters whose names grace other cities and institutions, like Stephen Austin, John Baylor, and Francis Lubbock.
Never satisfied with enough fertile land or slaves, ever nervous about its borders, Texas ultimately set the stage for the next counter-revolution by enslavers in 1861. In the standard history, the Civil War represents the most fundamental break with the American past; for Horne, Texas is the Civil War exception that proves the rule. Planters flocked to Texas with their slaves from the threat and reality of Union occupation; after the war, Confederates made it their base, along with French-occupied Mexico. The “real and imagined indignities” of having their property expropriated by government-sponsored emancipation (if not for the refugees among them) “fed a terrorist insurgency” and white Texans’ enduring hatred of the federal government “that propels politics even today.” That government also armed Black people, though the protections offered to Black Texans by the Union Army suffered from deployments west to put down Natives.
Black and indigenous people fought the war after the war heroically but were “bound to be overwhelmed,” Horne argues, to the extent that they could not join together or win some kind of international support. The ensuing “race war” that was Reconstruction in Texas was as bad or worse than anywhere in the South, including Louisiana. Many African Americans refugeed to Indian Territory, where by the 1870s they often had familial ties. But the violent transition to Oklahoma statehood turned that state into a laboratory for Jim Crow, which Horne describes at one point as a kind of “internal exile.” Without allies until the nation again became embarrassed on the world stage for its hypocrisy during and after World War I and II, people of color faced a form of oppression that became the explicit model for European fascists, including Hitler. Texas became not only the largest state but the home of the most rabid anticommunism, funded by oil wealth. It all goes back, in this telling, to settler “rage” at the revolution that was abolition, and fear that the counter-revolutions of the past could be overturned. If there was another Texas—the populist, producerist, sometimes radical Texas in Lawrence Goodwyn’s books—it’s hiding over a distant horizon.
The basic pieces of this story are not new, Horne acknowledges. Like most historians writing from below, Horne hangs the oppressors with their own web of words. (It’s easier to do for Texans in the 1800s, who seem to have written each other constantly about their fears, than for Northerners in 1776; the likes of Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin actually had liberal ideals and had to worry what the British and the French would say, given that the entire justification of colonial protests and eventually rebellion rested not just on traditional English liberties but on “natural rights.”) What’s new and worthy of careful consideration is the framing. Horne is not interested in explicit theorizing: when he sees a concept that’s useful, like settler colonialism, he adopts rather than refining it. He avoids talk of “racial capitalism,” but he gives it empirical grounding. Texas renewed and turbo-charged the relationship between settler colonialism, enslavement, capitalism, and racism.
Most of all, Horne is breaking out of a certain hardline Marxist reluctance to view the United States as anything but capitalism liberated from feudal restraints. That rigid attitude isn’t exactly popular among U.S. socialists today—it hasn’t been since at least the 1960s, and especially since Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism (1983) gained a wide audience—but it still exerts a historiographic pressure and rears its head in perennial debates over the relation between race and class. Horne’s strategy isn’t to repudiate Marxism but to evoke (though not explicitly) Marx’s theory of political reaction—the Marx of the Eighteenth Brumaire (1852), where history returns as tragedy and then as regime-changing farce, but with no less suffering for the absurdity. If revolution is defined as not-necessarily-successful liberatory struggles from below aided by outside forces in a world of competing empires, and counter-revolution is what shuts it down, then fascism is the politics that sacrifices everything to the unity and rule of the blood-defined class: racial capitalism with few restraints. It is always complaining about borders even as it occupies others’ lands, and it is ever identifying enemies, foreign and domestic. It tends toward extreme corruption as the economy is not recognized to have any independent existence beyond the political rule that sustains it and its small ruling class. Violence is continually justified and celebrated. It’s not inherently European: maybe Germany and Italy were the exceptions, the late wannabe empires. It’s a politics of nouveau-riche property owners and slavers: settlers let loose and threatened from all sides. It is home grown.
With story after story, building on many histories of Texas written since the turn of the century, Horne paints a convincing picture of an essentially violent order that was imperialist, capitalist (based in heavily leveraged land purchases, seeking new markets for cotton), generatively racist and genocidal by the 1850s, and bent variously on swallowing California, New Mexico, and in some versions all of Mexico itself. The liberals of Texas like Sam Houston talked about good Indians and the need for reservations, but they were more than balanced by the extreme haters whose names grace other cities and institutions, like Stephen Austin, John Baylor, and Francis Lubbock.
Never satisfied with enough fertile land or slaves, ever nervous about its borders, Texas ultimately set the stage for the next counter-revolution by enslavers in 1861. In the standard history, the Civil War represents the most fundamental break with the American past; for Horne, Texas is the Civil War exception that proves the rule. Planters flocked to Texas with their slaves from the threat and reality of Union occupation; after the war, Confederates made it their base, along with French-occupied Mexico. The “real and imagined indignities” of having their property expropriated by government-sponsored emancipation (if not for the refugees among them) “fed a terrorist insurgency” and white Texans’ enduring hatred of the federal government “that propels politics even today.” That government also armed Black people, though the protections offered to Black Texans by the Union Army suffered from deployments west to put down Natives.
Black and indigenous people fought the war after the war heroically but were “bound to be overwhelmed,” Horne argues, to the extent that they could not join together or win some kind of international support. The ensuing “race war” that was Reconstruction in Texas was as bad or worse than anywhere in the South, including Louisiana. Many African Americans refugeed to Indian Territory, where by the 1870s they often had familial ties. But the violent transition to Oklahoma statehood turned that state into a laboratory for Jim Crow, which Horne describes at one point as a kind of “internal exile.” Without allies until the nation again became embarrassed on the world stage for its hypocrisy during and after World War I and II, people of color faced a form of oppression that became the explicit model for European fascists, including Hitler. Texas became not only the largest state but the home of the most rabid anticommunism, funded by oil wealth. It all goes back, in this telling, to settler “rage” at the revolution that was abolition, and fear that the counter-revolutions of the past could be overturned. If there was another Texas—the populist, producerist, sometimes radical Texas in Lawrence Goodwyn’s books—it’s hiding over a distant horizon.
The basic pieces of this story are not new, Horne acknowledges. Like most historians writing from below, Horne hangs the oppressors with their own web of words. (It’s easier to do for Texans in the 1800s, who seem to have written each other constantly about their fears, than for Northerners in 1776; the likes of Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin actually had liberal ideals and had to worry what the British and the French would say, given that the entire justification of colonial protests and eventually rebellion rested not just on traditional English liberties but on “natural rights.”) What’s new and worthy of careful consideration is the framing. Horne is not interested in explicit theorizing: when he sees a concept that’s useful, like settler colonialism, he adopts rather than refining it. He avoids talk of “racial capitalism,” but he gives it empirical grounding. Texas renewed and turbo-charged the relationship between settler colonialism, enslavement, capitalism, and racism.
Most of all, Horne is breaking out of a certain hardline Marxist reluctance to view the United States as anything but capitalism liberated from feudal restraints. That rigid attitude isn’t exactly popular among U.S. socialists today—it hasn’t been since at least the 1960s, and especially since Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism (1983) gained a wide audience—but it still exerts a historiographic pressure and rears its head in perennial debates over the relation between race and class. Horne’s strategy isn’t to repudiate Marxism but to evoke (though not explicitly) Marx’s theory of political reaction—the Marx of the Eighteenth Brumaire (1852), where history returns as tragedy and then as regime-changing farce, but with no less suffering for the absurdity. If revolution is defined as not-necessarily-successful liberatory struggles from below aided by outside forces in a world of competing empires, and counter-revolution is what shuts it down, then fascism is the politics that sacrifices everything to the unity and rule of the blood-defined class: racial capitalism with few restraints. It is always complaining about borders even as it occupies others’ lands, and it is ever identifying enemies, foreign and domestic. It tends toward extreme corruption as the economy is not recognized to have any independent existence beyond the political rule that sustains it and its small ruling class. Violence is continually justified and celebrated. It’s not inherently European: maybe Germany and Italy were the exceptions, the late wannabe empires. It’s a politics of nouveau-riche property owners and slavers: settlers let loose and threatened from all sides. It is home grown.
Since 2016 some American left intellectuals have vigorously attacked this home-grown fascism thesis. In the crudest cases, the attitude seems to be that it can’t possibly be right—or at least shouldn’t be expressed too loudly in the press—because many Democrats call Trump a fascist but do nothing to dismantle neoliberalism (to say nothing of capitalism). If we talk of fascism, these critics seem to worry, we might forget to tax the wealthy or otherwise lull ourselves into centrist complacency—satisfaction merely with beating the GOP, instead of with real change. Whatever one thinks of the Democrats, the limitations of this kind of rhetorical critique should be obvious enough; anyone can bend language to their own ends (witness what philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò calls the “elite capture” of identity politics), and even left political scientist Adolph Reed, an unsparing (if pragmatic) critic of the Democratic Party, has come around to asserting “the whole country is the Reichstag.” What we do about fascism is one thing: whether it exists, and who advances it, is quite another. The inference from any talk of U.S. fascism to support for the pre-Trump status quo is a symptom of the broadening tendency to turn substantial questions of analysis into tests of political affiliation, yet even construed that way the attitude is perplexing. If you use the F-word, we must not share the same goals, these critics conclude—as if antifascism has no radical heritage, in the past or present.
For his part, Horne is at his most persuasive in stressing the long origins and long effects of what happened in 1836, and he is very clear that the implications for our times are disturbing. The United States is “fundamentally right-wing” because of this legacy, he concludes, so much so that “traditional political labels tend to lose meaning.” We couldn’t be much further from hoary invocations of American liberalism—but that’s what’s so valuable here, as that venerable tradition seems unable to grapple with racial domination as anything other than irony, contradiction, or paradox.
For his part, Horne is at his most persuasive in stressing the long origins and long effects of what happened in 1836, and he is very clear that the implications for our times are disturbing. The United States is “fundamentally right-wing” because of this legacy, he concludes, so much so that “traditional political labels tend to lose meaning.” We couldn’t be much further from hoary invocations of American liberalism—but that’s what’s so valuable here, as that venerable tradition seems unable to grapple with racial domination as anything other than irony, contradiction, or paradox.
Graças em parte à influência de uma série de histórias antirracistas que informam a síntese de Horne, os educadores americanos estão em um impasse: a Revolução (ou a Guerra Civil) ainda representa um passado utilizável? Pode explicar algo sobre onde estamos, exceto como um exemplo de mudança revolucionária fracassada? O Projeto de 1619 expôs esse impasse, ainda que amplamente ignorado nos primeiros anos da América, vasta ou inglesa, fora de sua invocação de antinegritude precoce. Mas, por mais constrangido, e apesar das limitações de seu desejo de substituir um ano de fundação por outro, mostrou para que lado sopra o vento.
A Guerra Civil ou a Revolução podem ter colocado decisivamente os Estados Unidos em uma trajetória antiescravagista e antirracista de longo prazo, pontuada por revoluções, guerras civis, emancipações e reconstruções, todas com dimensões ou consequências contrarrevolucionárias. Mas o passado e o presente do Texas - como avatar tanto do "cataclismo" quanto da reação, da independência e da secessão, do estado-prisão e do ressurgimento da direita, acima de tudo como símbolo do futuro e do passado - sugere que a história ainda não acabou. A abertura de Horne sobre a questão da revolução e do internacionalismo, para um passado distante, onde as pessoas eram tão partidárias e tão violentas quanto nós, em um Texas e uma América tão diversos, conflituosos e hipócritas quanto nós, provavelmente surgirá. É mais fácil entender essas pessoas em uma tradição de contrarrevolução do que de consenso liberal-republicano baseado na razão esclarecida e igualdade para todos. Horne não nega que a Revolução e a Guerra Civil importaram. Em vez disso, ele traz à tona suas dimensões contrarrevolucionárias e relembra episódios negligenciados que podem ter sido tão ou mais importantes, por exemplo, no Texas. Embora ele não diga isso explicitamente, sua história norte-americana orientada para o Golfo Sul é uma réplica a várias variedades de formas norte-sul ou leste-oeste de olhar para o nosso passado. Em vez do excepcionalismo do Texas, é a América como Texas.
Que contraponto emocionante, embora deprimente, isso é para a versão lírica, igualmente estimulante, mas no final otimista da história do Texas como americano oferecida por On Juneteenth (2021), de Annette Gordon-Reed. Não é por acaso que Horne está inclinado a zombar das pretensões do dia 1º de junho como feriado nacional, se isso reduzir a emancipação a um dia em que um general da União entrou em Galveston. Seu Texas é mais parecido com o St. Louis de Walter Johnson em The Broken Heart of America (2020), onde “grande parte da história americana se desenrolou a partir da junção do império e da anti-negritude” e as mudanças revelam continuidades essenciais. A questão não é ser fatalmente pessimista - ver o futuro como uma conclusão precipitada - mas ver o desafio com clareza. A estrutura mais ampla e a obra de Horne exigem nossa atenção como o exercício de maior alcance oferecido hoje.
Sobre o autor
David Waldstreicher is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His latest book is The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence.
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