Penn Press Log

Talking Douglass-like about Law--A Guest Blog Post by Jeannine Marie DeLombard

Would nineteenth-century Republican Frederick Douglass have agreed with twenty-first-century Republican Mitt Romney about the legal status of corporations? Jeannine Marie DeLombard, author of In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity, points toward an answer in the third and final guest blog post on the legacy of the African American activist.

Talking Douglass-like about Law

“Corporations are people, my friend!” With this August 2011 gaffe, financier turned Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney became the poster child for the Occupy movement that began in the following month. Outraged by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling that the First Amendment blocks governmental limits on independent political spending by corporations and unions, Occupiers across the country rejected corporate personhood on the basis that, as a resolution by Occupy Raleigh has it, “legal persons are defined as human beings requiring food, water, and oxygen for survival.” This same logic has yielded the recent spate of proposed anti-contraception “personhood” statutes and amendments.

The American struggle to distinguish the flesh-and-blood human being from the artificial bundle of rights and responsibilities that constitutes a legal person has its origins in Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) – decided a year after Frederick Douglass was born in Talbot County, Maryland. Unlike the college, the slave, as civilly dead property, did not have the standing to bring suit in a court of law. But, also unlike the New England college, the enslaved African American would have been recognized as a human being by his contemporaries. And, divided as they were in their respective claims to civil standing and humanness, the corporation and the slave were united in being legally accountable for their wrongful acts. Assigned the “mixed character of persons and of property” under law (as James Madison approvingly put it in the Federalist), slaves were denied civil and political rights yet responsible for their crimes. Slavery worked best when slaveholders’ exploitation of blacks’ human emotions and relationships was coordinated with legal authorities’ routine denial of slaves’ civil standing and occasional punitive recognition of their criminal culpability as legal persons.

This does not mean, however, that Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution (the notorious Three-Fifths Clause to which Madison referred) treats slaves as only fractionally human. Nor does it mean that corporations have been elevated to the status of people in Supreme Court cases like Woodward, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), and Citizens United.

Douglass understood this. Overcoming an initial reluctance to “talk ‘lawyer-like’ about law” in his early career as abolitionist orator, author, and editor, the celebrated autodidact drew on “well known rules of legal interpretation” to offer influential commentary on the U.S. Constitution and Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). This legal literacy, combined with a longstanding commitment to gender and racial equality, might have led Douglass to question the wisdom of current efforts to make personhood coterminous with humanness. For if Douglass knew the horror of being denied full personhood, he also anticipated countless other African Americans in demanding accountability from railroad companies whose employees violently segregated their black customers. And, in the devastating legal aftermath of Reconstruction, as Barbara Welke has shown in her brilliant book, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920 (Cambridge 2001), it was this liability that enabled black plaintiffs committed to the rule of law to extract from corporations the redress for racial discrimination denied them by the Supreme Court in The Civil Rights Cases (1883) and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

Instead of rejecting the human/person distinction as a cynical legal technicality, we might better learn to talk lawyer-like about law. Sharing in Douglass’s lay legal literacy, we could better gauge what some human persons (notably, women) stand to lose if every stage of human life is credited with personhood – and decide whether we really want to release corporations from legal responsibility for the injuries they cause.

Jeannine Marie DeLombard  is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto and the author of Slavery on Trial: Law, Print, and Abolitionism. Her forthcoming book, In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity, will be available this summer.

Activism After Douglass--a Guest Post by Shawn Leigh Alexander

This second guest blog post in our series on Frederick Douglass considers his legacy shortly after his death. Shawn Leigh Alexander, author of An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle Before the NAACP, observes that while the next generation of activists respected and honored Douglass for his undeniable achievements, many did not follow in his footsteps when it came to political strategy or party allegiance. Then, as now, African Americans questioned the value of affiliating with a single political party.

Activism After Douglass: Building on the Achievements, Departing from the Methods

Frederick Douglass, former slave, abolitionist, and Republican politician was the most prominent African American political leader and activist in years directly following the Civil War. In the early 1880s, however, his motto, “the Republican Party is the ship, all else is the Sea,” was losing favor among a growing segment of the black population. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s segregation increased and more importantly, African Americans were systematically disfranchised throughout the South. As blacks were stripped of their suffrage they lost the fragile footing they held in the political arena during Reconstruction and therefore the political tactics of Douglass’s generation were becoming increasingly less effective.

In response to this “revolution gone backwards,” a younger generation of activists began seeking a new model to agitate for their political and civil rights. T. Thomas Fortune, a journalist and activist in New York, was one of the most vocal advocates for change. “Enough!” Fortune argued. Douglass was a wise man but “in no sense a prophet.” Fortune urged the African American community to look out for itself first. “Throw away sentimentality in politics,” he urged, and act on the motto “Race first; then party.” In Fortune’s estimation, too many black leaders had sold out the race and themselves in the quest for power. As he explained, “Instead of loving the race, . . . each one of us seeks to get as far away from his African origin as circumstances will permit.” And in doing so, black leaders swallow “without a grimace every insult to their manhood or their rights which pseudo friends and avowed enemies have heaped upon them.” “You do not need” maintained Fortune, “to be a Democrat or a Republican to force from politicians your honest rights: You simply need to be men, conscious of your power.”

This political motto was pushed forth in 1887 when the fiery editor called for the creation of a national civil rights organization, the National Afro- American League. He had first raised the issue in early 1884 following the infamous Supreme Court decision on civil rights and the Danville, Virginia, riot of the previous year. With such backward steps taking place, the editor called for an organization that would stand as an “uncompromising defense of the race with which we are identified.” Using a line Douglass himself had used before, Fortune declared, “Let us agitate! agitate! AGITATE! until the protest shall wake the nation from its indifference.” “You must fight your own battles,” Fortune urged. “You must come together. Brave men, men of brains—these must come to the front, and laying aside all selfish and personal aims labor for the upbuilding of the race and the full concession to us of each and every right guaranteed to us by the Constitution of the United States. And the masses must sustain such men.”

The Afro-American League became the country’s first national civil rights organization, and though many were trying to move away from Douglass and his generation, they did not forget who laid the groundwork for them to protest for their rights. When the League delegates came to Chicago in January 1890 to form the organization, Douglass’ portrait was displayed on the stage as a symbol of race pride and civil rights activism. Despite many trying to find an alternative to Douglass’s model, he was still the father of the struggle and historic symbol of civil rights leadership and activism. As Fortune would later explain in poetic verse at the dedication of the Douglass Monument and the formation of the Afro-American Council:

We cannot measure here the dizzy heights he trod
To who this glyptic shaft is lifted from the sod,
Towards the matchless azure of sweet Freedom’s skies,
If we forget the depths whence God bade him arise,
Above the slave’s log cabin and a sireless birth,
To be a prince among the children of the earth!
No giant who has placed one foot upon the land
And one upon the sea, with power to them command,
To bid the angry turbulence of each be still,
And have them bend obedient to his master’s will –
Ever started lower in the social scale them than he –
This Champion of the Slave, this Spokesman of the Free!

Shawn Leigh Alexander is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and the interim director of the Langston Hughes Center at the University of Kansas. An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle Before the NAACP is now available.

Douglass and the Daguerreotype--a Guest Post by Marcy J. Dinius

Frederick Douglass, who was born on an unknown date in February 1818 and died on this day in 1895, plays a significant role in a number of forthcoming Penn Press books on American history and culture. To mark the life and legacy of the iconic civil rights activist, we invited a few of our authors to share their thoughts on Douglass with blog readers. Marcy J. Dinius, author of The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype, writes on the surprising connection between Douglass's birth and the birth of photography.

Douglass and the Daguerreotype

Frederick Douglass’s first year of life beyond slavery’s grasp coincided with the birth of photography. Word of the daguerreotype, a wondrous new invention for making incredibly detailed and lifelike images, was published in every newspaper that the self-taught reader Douglass would have encountered in late 1839 and early 1840. When he became a newspaper editor himself just a few years later, Douglass’s work kept him up-to-date on the latest technological advances as they circulated through the periodical press. He was well aware of innovations in the daguerreotype process and their anticipated contributions to the medium’s popularly celebrated accuracy and affordability. 

In time, Douglass became so interested in the connection between  the visual arts, imagination, humanity, and progress toward liberty and justice that he wrote and delivered a set of lectures on the subject between 1861 and 1865. He began both the earlier and the later versions of his “Lecture on Pictures” with an extended consideration of the daguerreotype. After being daguerreotyped multiple times in the 1840s and 1850s, the former slave had become a man in his daguerreian portrait. His lectures suggest that if his audiences were to look at his or any other African American’s image and reflect on its likeness to their own, the daguerreotype would show them the reality of blacks’ humanity and awaken them to their own.

In the sun’s “picture gallery,” Douglass declares in the most complete version of his speech, “[m]en of all conditions may see themselves as others see them. What was once the exclusive luxury of the rich and great is now within reach of all. The humbled servant girl whose income is but a few shillings per week may now possess a more perfect likeness of herself than noble ladies and even royalty, with all its precious treasures could purchase fifty years ago.” The “ease and cheapness with which we get our pictures has brought us all within range of the daguerrian apparatus.”

Douglass compared the daguerreian portrait to the mirror. Mirrors were once luxuries for the wealthy that had become widely available over time. Both mirrors and daguerreotypes allowed people of “all conditions” to experience a full sense of selfhood by complementing one’s internal self-awareness with an embodied view of one’s self as it appears to others. In the uniquely reflective polished daguerreotype plate, this view itself is also double: one is able to see oneself in the moment of seeing oneself as a portrait on the mirror-like surface of the image.

In Douglass’s view, shaped by discussions of daguerreotypy in popular print, the democracy realized by the birth of photography not only rested in the daguerreotype’s affordability but also in its ability to make the full experience of selfhood available to all. The the daguerreian medium differed from other forms of photography in both material characteristics and in social and political consequence. For Douglass, the daguerreian medium had become the message of democracy.

Marcy J. Dinius is an Assistant Professor of English at DePaul University. The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype will be available this spring.

Good News Comes in Threes from Foundation for Landscape Studies

Hot on the heels of the Foundation for Landscape Studies announcement that a forthcoming Penn Press book will receive a David Coffin Publication Grant, we learned today two of our books won the Foundation's John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize.

Karen M'Closkey received the Coffin Publication Grant for her work-in-progress Unearthed: The Landscapes of Hargreaves Associates. The Press plans to publish Unearthed  in 2013.

Both A Life Spent Changing Places by the late Lawrence Halprin with a foreword by Laurie Olin and Flora's Empire: British Gardens in India by Eugenia W. Herbert received the 2012 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize, which rewards "contributors to the intellectual vitality of garden history and landscape studies."

Congratulations to M'Closkey, Olin, and Herbert for earning these honors in landscape studies. Naturally, we are proud to publish their work.

Paul's Pick for February, a Free Article from the Journal of the History of Ideas

Every month, Paul Chase in the Penn Press Journals department invites our blog readers to download a complimentary article from one of our many scholarly journals.

Paul's Pick for February, Freedom, the Common Good, and the Rule of Law: Lippmann and Hayek on Economic Planning by Ben Jackson, appears in the latest issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas.

In the article, Jackson writes:

Walter Lippmann’s case against economic planning, formed in response to certain aspects of the New Deal, provided a striking first approximation of key arguments that [Friedrich] Hayek would later articulate in his own work: the objection to economic planning on the grounds that it would destroy not just valued economic liberties but also civil and political freedoms; an emphasis on the importance of a certain form of legal order for the preservation of liberty; and the need for critics of planning to offer a positive liberal reform agenda that was compatible with this understanding of the law.

To download this free article and learn more about the Journal of the History of Ideas, click here.

Check the Penn Press Log on March 15 for Paul's next pick.

Penn Press Authors Receive National Humanities Medals

Congratulations to Robert Darnton and Teofilo F. Ruiz, Penn Press authors and 2011 National Humanities Medalists. The National Endowment for the Humanities created the National Humanities Medal to honor "individuals or groups whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities, broadened our citizens’ engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand Americans’ access to important resources in the humanities." President Barack Obama presented the awards to Darnton, Ruiz, and other honorees at a White House ceremony yesterday.

Darnton, author of The Devil in the Holy Water, or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon, received a medal for his commitment to making knowledge accessible to everyone. "An eminent cultural historian and librarian, Dr. Darnton has illuminated the world of Enlightenment and Revolutionary France, and has pursued his vision for a national library of digitized books," said the president. 

Teofilo F. Ruiz, author of Crisis and Continuity: Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile, received a medal for his outstanding scholarship in history. The president praised Ruiz for "deepening our knowledge of medieval Spain and Europe, and exploring the role terror has played in society for centuries."

After the ceremony, the medalists attended a reception with President Obama and Michelle Obama.

Books of Love

Love takes many forms in Penn Press books, from the courtly to the commercial. This love note may not be the most romantic thing you'll read on Valentine's Day, but as with most holiday gifts, it's the thought that counts.

Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility
C. Stephen Jaeger

Public avowals of love between men were common from antiquity through the Middle Ages. What do these expressions leave to interpretation? An extraordinary amount, as Stephen Jaeger demonstrates.

Brotherly Love
Daniel Hoffman

Brotherly Love is a long poem that evokes William Penn's luminous vision of America and shows what has become of it as the intractable conflicts of our history--struggles over the land, keeping faith with the Indians, the uses and abuses of power--threaten Penn's ideal.

Love and Honor in the Himalayas: Coming To Know Another Culture
Ernestine McHugh

Love and Honor in the Himalayas is McHugh's gripping ethnographic memoir based on research among the Gurungs conducted over a span of fourteen years. As she chronicles the events of her fieldwork, she also tells a story that admits feeling and involvement, writing of the people who housed her in the terms in which they cast their relationship with her, that of family.

Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture
E. Jane Burns

In Courtly Love Undressed, E. Jane Burns unfolds the rich display of costly garments worn by amorous partners in literary texts and other cultural documents in the French High Middle Ages.

Food Is Love: Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America
Katherine J. Parkin

Parkin examines how advertisers have historically promoted food in distinctly gendered terms, returning repeatedly to themes that associated shopping and cooking with women. Foremost among them was that, regardless of the actual work involved, women should serve food to demonstrate love for their families.

Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America
Helen Sheumaker

Using a wide array of evidence drawn from poetry, fiction, diaries, letters, and examples of hairwork, Love Entwined traces the widespread popularity of the craft from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Victorian men and women treasured hairwork not only as remembrances of loved ones and memorials of relationships but also as objects of beauty and means of personal expression.

On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea
Sealing Cheng

Following the lives of a group of migrant Filipinas who worked as entertainers in South Korea and then journeyed to other parts of Asia, Europe, and the U.S., this ethnography provides a look at how work, sex, love, and ambition in migrants' lives intersect with larger issues of transnationalism, identity, and global hierarchies of inequality.