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Peter Burgess
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Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess | |||||||||
| Skip to content FacebookTwitterInstagramDonateLog In CORONAVIRUSBLACK LIVES MATTERCLIMATEOPP-ARTPODCASTS The Nation PoliticsWorldCultureEventsShop Current IssueNewslettersSubscribeSearch By using this website, you consent to our use of cookies. For more information, visit our Privacy PolicyX THE RIGHTPLUTOCRACYBOOKS & THE ARTSOCTOBER 19/26, 2020, ISSUE The Oligarchs’ Revenge The making of the modern right. By Manisha SinhaTODAY 5:45 AM fbtwmailPrint Sinha-Oligarchs-ftr_img The Magnet, from Puck, 1911. (Udo J. Keppler / Library of Congress) The average person may be forgiven for thinking that the South actually won the Civil War. Despite a brief experiment in interracial democracy during the Reconstruction years, for much of its history the region has upheld a regime of brutal racial subordination. In the late 19th century, after the overthrow of Reconstruction, many of its state governments disenfranchised Black men, instituted racial segregation, condoned racial terrorism and violence, and kept a majority of Black and white Southerners economically bound through sharecropping, debt peonage, convict lease labor, and tenancy. By the 20th century, Franklin Roosevelt called the South the nation’s No. 1 economic problem, resistant to unionization and social policies. Even today it leads in indices for poverty and weak educational systems. The Jim Crow South was upended by the civil rights revolution. Yet even in defeat, its language of oligarchy and its opposition to progressive political and economic policies through an appeal to racism has been adopted by the modern Republican Party. BOOKS IN REVIEW HOW THE SOUTH WON THE CIVIL WAR: OLIGARCHY, DEMOCRACY, AND THE CONTINUING FIGHT FOR THE SOUL OF AMERICA By Heather Cox Richardson Buy this book This is the argument presented in Heather Cox Richardson’s new book, How the South Won the Civil War. Throughout American history, she contends, the forces of oligarchy and democracy have been involved in a mortal struggle for the nation’s future, and she wants to show how the visions of oligarchy have often won out—how, in other words, we got from the era of emancipation and Confederate defeat to the presidency of Donald Trump. A history professor at Boston College, Richardson has written numerous books on the Civil War and Reconstruction as well as on the Republican Party, and she draws from her considerable scholarly oeuvre for this slim and accessible volume. Known for her newsletter Letters From an American, which seeks to explain current political events through a historical lens, she deftly demonstrates her skill writing for a public audience in How the South Won the Civil War. Arguing that the slaveholders’ idea of an oligarchic America triumphed with the growth of the second American oligarchy in the latter half of the 20th century, Richardson shows how the rise of movement conservatism, as personified by Barry Goldwater in his 1964 presidential campaign, came to embody this vision of an oligarchic America. The new oligarchy’s triumph—one that combined economic domination with racial inequality—lay in a political alliance between the South and the West, Richardson argues, and in the Republican presidencies of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, and finally Trump. Her interpretive scheme is simple yet also compelling and clear. The title of the book, of course, is not meant literally, but Richardson does show that while the South lost the Civil War, it eventually, in many respects, won the peace. According to Richardson, the unending struggle between American democracy and oligarchy began with the birth of the nation. Many historians of early America have argued that the ideology of the American Revolution was democratic republicanism, born during the English Civil War in the 17th century and then embraced by the colonies. As the quintessential radical of the Age of Revolution, Thomas Paine, proclaimed, “The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind.” But not all historians agree that this republicanism was the sole ideology then in circulation in North America. As Edmund Morgan observes in American Slavery, American Freedom, the seeming paradox of American republicanism was the simultaneous emergence of slavery and freedom in the colonial world. From the outset, the American idea of freedom was exclusive: It was for property-owning men only and was based on the enslavement of people of African descent. The Virginian founding fathers solved the problem of inequality by simply enslaving a racially outcast working poor and at the same time elevating the status of all white men, slaveholders and nonslaveholders alike. For Richardson, the American paradox is a bit different: Slavery and democracy were opposing forces rather than constitutive of each other. She traces the birth of oligarchy, democracy’s enemy, to the ship that brought about 20 enslaved Africans to the British North American mainland in 1619. From then until today, she argues, the history of the United States has been a history of the conflict between democracy and oligarchy. For Morgan, American democracy was based on slavery; for Richardson, though she relies on Morgan’s book, American oligarchy has always rested on combining elite domination with racial and economic inequality. Ever since the arrival of that ship, she maintains, the American republic has allowed its elites to conflate “class and race,” thereby giving them “the language to take over the government and undermine democracy.” At many points in American history, oligarchy—from the slaveholding elite to the robber barons of the Gilded Age—has had the upper hand. But repeatedly, ordinary Americans, especially those who were disenfranchised, like women and African Americans, have pushed back, leading to the triumph of democracy with slavery’s abolition, women’s suffrage, and the enactment of the New Deal and civil rights legislation. By offering an account of the forces of both democratic progress and oligarchic reaction, Richardson provides historical detail to Corey Robin’s argument in The Reactionary Mind, which traced the antidemocratic origins of American conservatism while offering insight into the democratic forces that resisted it. While Robin situates American conservatism in the longue durée of a Western reactionary philosophical tradition, Richardson locates it in a quintessentially Southern political tradition of oligarchy: anti-statism combined with virulent racism and misogyny. For Robin, too, the proslavery ideology exemplified American conservatism. But for Richardson, after the Civil War, the West and eventually the Republican Party helped reinvent the South’s language of oligarchy with an appeal to individualism that overlays a reactionary commitment to racial hierarchy and opposition to a welfare state. Key to Richardson’s argument is the Civil War. For her, the struggle between the free North and the slaveholding South was essentially a struggle between people and property, as exemplified in the antislavery free labor ideology of the original Republican Party, which valorized workers over capitalists. The egalitarian impulse that informed the party of Lincoln, she says, was countered by the elitism of the slaveholding oligarchy, as personified by South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond in his “Mudsill speech.” Hammond advocated an alliance of Northern capitalists and Southern slaveholders—what abolitionists called an unholy pact between “the lords of the loom,” or the textile mill owners of New England, and “the lords of the lash,” the Southern slaveholding planters, against the working stiffs, or “mudsills,” of their respective societies. Small wonder that electoral banners in the North would announce “Small-fisted farmers, mudsills of society, greasy mechanics for A. Lincoln.” CURRENT ISSUE View our current issue Subscribe today and Save up to $129. When understood as a conflict between oligarchs and democrats, the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction represent the victory not just of democracy but also of the working classes over the slaveholding oligarchy. It also marked, as Richardson notes, a victory for big government. As a result of the war, the federal government implemented a progressive income tax, land-grant colleges, the Homestead Act and money for railroads (which came at the expense of Native populations), and federal protection for Black rights in the postwar South. In response to this new egalitarian federal government, the opposition of Southern elites to Reconstruction was often couched—almost always disingenuously—in the language of local governance and opposition to corruption and taxation. Southerners opposing African American citizenship invoked the image of a corrupt federal government usurping their rights to promote Black equality. Racism became a way to protect the political and economic prerogatives of a Southern oligarchy no longer in control of the national government and, in many cases, state and local governments as well. The language of race became a potent weapon wielded against efforts to address inequality, which would supposedly benefit people of color and dependent women at the cost of white men. According to Richardson, this political formula developed by Southern racists got a big boost with the conquest of the West and the subjugation of the Plains Indians. As federal troops retreated from enforcing Black rights in the South, they let slip the dogs of war in the West, which held the key, she writes, to the national triumph of white supremacy. John C. Calhoun, a proslavery senator from South Carolina, had long dreamed of a South-West alliance as the basis for national political dominance by a white elite, one that would marginalize the antislavery Northeast. Calhoun even put aside his objections, grounded in the notion of states’ rights, to internal improvements (the 19th century term for federal infrastructure projects) in order to woo the West. Richardson does not mention Calhoun’s dream of a South-West alliance, but she does describe a postwar settlement that strongly resembled it. While feeding off federal largesse, land and water improvements, and the might of the US Army to displace and kill Native populations, the West became fertile ground for the myth of American individualism, represented by the white cowboy single-handedly taming the frontier and its “savage” population. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously viewed the Western frontier as a laboratory for American democracy. The region, however, was built on Indian dispossession and slavery, Mexican peonage, Chinese exclusion, and the abuse of immigrant labor in extractive mining industries and in the construction of railroads, which led to spectacularly violent labor conflicts, such as those along Idaho’s Coeur d’Alene River in 1892. As Richardson writes, the Civil War and its aftermath in the West “reinforced a society in which the oligarchic ideas of the defeated South would thrive.” The West, Richardson contends, also used the myth of the cowboy to put a gloss on its own brutal and exploitative history. In popular literature and culture, the cowboy captivated the American imagination. But the actual history of the West aligned it closely with the Jim Crow South. As Richardson writes, “The resurrection of antebellum southern ideology through the rise of the western individualist rewrote American history.” By the turn of the century, the national victory of white supremacy was complete, with Western politicians helping Southerners defeat federal bills against lynching and to ensure fair elections in the South. The Nation THE VEXED MEANING OF EQUALITY IN GILDED AGE AMERICA Eric Foner No one personified the myth of Western individualism and the realities of American imperialism better than Teddy Roosevelt, who gained fame as a Rough Rider in Cuba during the Spanish-American War in 1898. As president, he took on the plutocrats, but as Richardson shows, his Square Deal also favored white men at the cost of nonwhite men and women both at home and abroad, where his military adventurism was put to service in the acquisition of a formal American empire. As Richardson notes, “He kept America from turning into an oligarchy…but he did so in the same way the Founders had: by creating an ideological underclass.” Roosevelt, however, was not just replicating the Virginian founders’ contradictions. A conservationist and a naturalist, he also supported women’s suffrage and drove Southern segregationists into fits of rage by inviting Booker T. Washington to dine with him in the White House. If anything, Roosevelt represented the unique paradoxes of the Progressive Era: salutary democratic and economic reforms accompanied by nativism and imperialism. It is difficult to square (pun intended) Roosevelt as the individualistic Western cowboy with the president who championed the government’s regulation of the economy. His successor, Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern-born president since the Civil War, was also a vaunted progressive reformer. Yet he introduced racial segregation to the nation’s capital, and in 1925, one year after his death, a newly resurrected Ku Klux Klan would march triumphantly down the streets of Washington, D.C. The suppression of dissent during the first Red Scare by his attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer (who gives William Barr a run for his money as the worst attorney general in US history), reveals the racial and political intolerance that defined Wilsonian liberalism. Wilson’s allegedly liberal internationalism and commitment to democratic self-rule were also not meant for the colonies, as he made clear to nationalists from Asia and Africa after World War I. If, as Richardson writes, American oligarchs have traditionally used the language of race to stymie the rise of a modern welfare state in the United States, then her book also reminds us that racism and racial inequality have proved central to many figures speaking in the name of democracy as well. Roosevelt’s and especially Wilson’s strains of progressivism upheld white supremacy. This remained partly true during the New Deal years, too. In 1932 most African Americans who could vote became part of a massive partisan realignment, moving with liberals into the Democratic Party and leaving the Republican Party to become more than ever the party of hidebound conservatism and big business. But even Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal ran up against the shoals of racism and obdurate Southern Democratic opposition to the extension of its benefits to most African American workers in the domestic, agricultural, and service industries. The New Deal and World War II inaugurated the American Century. After the fight against the Nazis and fascism, racism became unfashionable in academia and popular culture. The federal government developed color-blind social policies, from the GI Bill to Social Security, and encouraged the unionization of the labor force, all of which created a prosperous middle class and economy. But residential redlining and the racial stratification of the labor market, not to mention Jim Crow in the South, all persisted. Even as the avatar of American liberalism and social democracy, FDR failed when it came to race, his record blemished by, among other things, the internment of Japanese Americans during the war. Richardson’s book gathers steam in the postwar years with the rise of the modern GOP, when the lines between democracy and oligarchy become clearer once again, with Republicans increasingly abandoning racial liberalism and Democrats beginning to disavow white supremacy. Movement conservatism, from McCarthyism to the rise of the John Birch Society and William Buckley’s National Review, waged an unrelenting ideological campaign to undo the New Deal. Die-hard Southern segregationists gained intellectual respectability, their defense of Jim Crow couched in the anti-big-government, anti-socialist, anti-tax rhetoric of conservatism. Once at the fringes of the Republican Party, these men would replace established conservatives as well as the remnants of the Northern liberal Rockefeller Republicans to create a truly right-wing party. This reactionary strain had long been present, but it became ascendant with the presidential candidacy of Goldwater, who represented a toxic mix of opposition to civil rights, women’s rights, and labor rights and an aggressive championing of American unilateralism in world affairs. Most of these Republicans were opponents of democracy in the manner of proslavery ideologues like Hammond. The new conservatism produced Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, Pat Buchanan, and the modern GOP’s Southern strategy. As the Democratic Party became identified with civil rights for Black people and equal rights for women, Republicans swerved right, opposing all progressive social policies as government handouts and taxes on the rich as a secret scheme to redistribute wealth from hard-working white men to unworthy Blacks and women. Reagan’s cowboy image—coupled with his decision to launch his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights activists had been viciously murdered—symbolized the fruition of the South-West alliance. Or as Richardson writes, “Thanks to the American West, the ideology of the Confederacy had regained a foothold in national politics.” Having grown up in India, I can vouch that thanks to Reagan’s misadventures in Grenada and Central America, his cowboy persona became a global symbol of blundering Yankee imperialism, an image of an American hubris that would even glibly take credit for Mikhail Gorbachev’s reformist policies in the Soviet Union after trying to reignite the Cold War. In measured tones, Richardson documents the deep venality and anti-democratic nature of the modern Republican Party, including Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America, the stolen presidential election of 2000, the dismantling of civil and voting rights, the culture wars attacking theexpansion of rights for disenfranchised groups, Mitch McConnell’s slash-and-burn tactics against Barack Obama’s administration, and finally Trump’s “American carnage,” a crucial theme in a dark inaugural speech that foretold the course of his grim presidency. Like the Southern slaveholders of yore, who dreaded abolitionism, socialism, communism, feminism, and all the -isms of modernity, our modern oligarchs and their GOP enablers use the same bugbears and racist dog whistles to prevent the United States from developing a strong welfare state. Richardson tells her story well, but while she delves into domestic politics with a sure hand, she strangely neglects the Cold War (except in its use as a scare tactic for domestic purposes), US foreign policy, and the national security state. What role does foreign affairs, surely an important part of the postwar story, play in the rise of the current oligarchy? Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex; the Vietnam War; the covert and sometimes overt undermining of democracy in Latin America, Africa, and Asia; and the imperialist adventurism in the Middle East are all missing from her account. The violent policing and mass incarceration of African Americans—a topic of great urgency today—and the prison-industrial complex are also not discussed in any great depth. Perhaps it is because these subjects, in her view, don’t fit neatly into the oligarchy-democracy binary. SUPPORT OUR WORK WITH A DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTION. Get unlimited access: $9.50 for six months. The combination of American empire, racism, and state violence has reinvigorated oligarchic tendencies in the United States to create a crisis of unchecked proportions. The world today looks on aghast as the American republic, with a criminally incompetent and kleptocratic oligarchy hell-bent on undermining democracy, self-combusts in the midst of a global crisis. Within the Democratic Party, attempts by the left to formulate a multiracial social democracy might yet realize the unfulfilled promises of the New Deal and the Great Society. The forces demanding democratic change are also out on the streets, protesting against police brutality and racial inequality while oligarchy rides high under Trump. Even though Richardson’s book was completed before the pandemic and the mass protests sweeping the country, her study is a useful history of the deterioration of the party of Lincoln into a revanchist, right-wing, white supremacist political organization. Richardson is fond of saying that although history doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes. The taking down of prominent Confederate statues and symbols in 2020 might mark the beginning of the end of the slaveholding South’s oligarchic vision for the future of the American republic. If the current American oligarchy, with its commitment to antidemocratic values and economic elitism, reminds one of the South’s slaveholding aristocracy, it is about time that we consign it, like the Confederacy, to the dustbin of history. MOST POPULAR 1 TRUMP IS GETTING AWAY WITH MUCH MORE THAN MURDER 2 HOW ICE BECAME A ‘PROPAGANDA MACHINE’ FOR TRUMP 3 WHILE THE POOR GET SICK, BILL GATES JUST GETS RICHER 4 AMERICA’S UNENDING STRUGGLE BETWEEN OLIGARCHY AND DEMOCRACY 5 RICHARD HOFSTADTER’S DISCONTENTS Manisha Sinhateaches at the University of Connecticut. Her latest book is The Slave’s Cause. To submit a correction for our consideration, click here. For Reprints and Permissions, click here. COMMENTS (2) Trending Today Pennsylvania Launches New Policy For Cars Used Less Than 50 Miles/Day Pennsylvania Launches New Policy For Cars Used Less Than 50 Miles/Day InsHunter Tommy Chong: Throw Away Your CBD Now Tommy Chong: Throw Away Your CBD Now Tommy Chong Seniors On Medicare Are In For A Big Surprise This October Seniors On Medicare Are In For A Big Surprise This October QuickMedigap CORONAVIRUSPHOTO ESSAYWHAT’S AT STAKE Chinatown Will Recover From the Coronavirus But it won’t be the same. By Alan Chin and Magnum FoundationTODAY 5:00 AM fbtwmailPrint 201001-00422-img With businesses reopening and street life returning, Chinatown residents are slowly surveying the damage the pandemic has wrought. (Alan Chin) The ongoing struggle for racial justice. The future for immigrant families. The health and well-being of all Americans. The very fate of our fragile planet. The US faces a crossroads in this year’s elections. Seeking out the stories flying under the national radar, The Nation and Magnum Foundation are partnering on What’s At Stake, a series of photo essays from across the country through the lenses of independent imagemakers. Follow the whole series here. On sunny days, Manhattan’s Chinatown feels and looks almost lively again. Streets are no longer as deserted as they were when the coronavirus pandemic first hit New York. Diners sit at outdoor tables in front of restaurants, masked shoppers line up in front of stores that limit the number of customers inside at any given time. The unceasing wail of sirens have thankfully died down, but the damage done to New York City—nearly 24,000 dead and countless lives interrupted—will be hard to recover from. The consequences of the pandemic came to Chinatown early: As President Trump called it the “China Flu” and the “China Plague,” local businesses’ income plummeted in January and February. Incidents of anti-Asian harassment and violence rose. By the time the rest of New York City and then the country was locked down in mid-March, Chinatown was already reeling. And its recovery has been slow and lagging, with many shops closed forever. Masks are ubiquitous in Chinatown. (Alan Chin) I’ve been a resident of Chinatown since I was 2 years old, and I confess that as the virus ravaged the elderly at nursing homes, killing them in shocking numbers, I was mournfully relieved that my own parents, grandmother, and great-uncles are no longer alive to suffer or die this way. But I am often reminded of them in the many senior citizens that live in the neighborhood today. Many speak Toishanese (Hoisanwa), my family’s Cantonese variant once dominant in American Chinatowns but long overtaken by standard Cantonese, Mandarin, and Fujianese. The Chung Pak Senior Housing building, the only retirement home in Chinatown, has a vegetable garden on its roof and a years-long waitlist. (Alan Chin) The Chung Pak Senior Housing building is the only retirement home in Chinatown, within easy walking distance to the fresh vegetable, seafood, and meat markets that Chinatown is famous for. Its 88 units have a waiting list of many years. Its roof is open to the residents and has a blooming vegetable patch that was started as a multigenerational project between the seniors and grade school students from PS 130. But this year, the students haven’t been able to come. Mrs. Wong in her unit at the Chung Pak Senior Housing building. (Alan Chin) Mrs. Wong, at age 99, is one of the older residents, and has lived in Chung Pak for over 10 years. Like both my parents, she emigrated from Toishan (台山) and was a garment worker. She said, “It’s been hard. I’ve been stuck at home. And the home aides didn’t come. They couldn’t work. My daughters took turns coming to take care of me. They came and stayed the nights. I’m very bored. But there’s no recourse. I’ll go out again when everything opens up again. I hope it’s soon.” Mrs. Chin made her living as a garment worker before moving into the Chung Pak Senior Housing building. (Alan Chin) Mrs. Chin, age 85, came to America in 1976, from the town of Doushan (斗山) just 12 miles from my parents’ hometowns of Samhop (三合) and Ngaugam (那金). She, too, was a garment worker. She said, “I’m still afraid to move around. I’ve only been out twice, to see doctors: the eye doctor in August and to get my flu shot in September. My health isn’t so good and I have fainting spells. My most frightening moment of this pandemic time was when I woke up and it felt like the whole house was spinning. It went on for over half an hour until my daughter drove here. I think it comes from high blood pressure.” She regretted that “I’m not literate. There was no chance to go to school; that was only for boys.” She did have some advice for me: “My husband caught wild snakes. Use the snake to infuse liquor for at least two to three years. Then drink it. Snakes are the key to longevity.” Mr. and Mrs. Lee in their unit. “This pandemic feels like being in jail,” Mrs. Lee admitted. (Alan Chin) Mrs. Lee was the only resident I met still with her husband; they live in one of the corner units with stunning views of Little Italy and Chinatown. But he, suffering from dementia, didn’t speak when I visited them. She said, “I’m depressed. This pandemic feels like being in jail. I forget, sometimes, because I don’t want to think about it. It’s been hard for our children to visit us in these times, too. But I do appreciate how the staff here have been very concerned about us.” Sam Wu, the superintendent for the Chung Pak Senior Housing building, has been working overtime during the pandemic. (Alan Chin) One of the health aides at the Chung Pak Senior Housing building volunteers to clean the hallways due to limited staffing. (Alan Chin) Sam Wu, the superintendent, lives in the building, but his staff has been reduced from seven to only one, so he doubles as the doorman. To make up the shortfall, the residents’ home health attendants volunteer to mop the floors and stairways. He encourages them with positive words—“We must all act as family here, in this emergency”—and thanks them with gift certificates for the bakery next door. Only a year in his job, he says, “Seniors have their children, grandchildren, and health aides visiting them all the time, and spending money. Build a condo, that’s just those two young people in a unit. For the neighborhood to remain sustainable, senior housing is a societal gain.” Chinatown has been changing in recent years, subject to the same forces pressuring other neighborhoods in the city: gentrification, inequality, rising housing costs. Add to that the anti-Chinese rhetoric that accompanied the coronavirus crisis, and the neighborhood has needed some protecting. In February, Karlin Chan, a retired fiber optics engineer and lifelong Chinatown resident, called some friends and formed the Chinatown Block Watch, patrolling the streets on alternating days with the Guardian Angels. He said, “More than half of incidents of harassment aren’t reported to the police. I myself have been profiled twice, as a senior. I was in a line shopping and a guy was following me. Another store, a person walked right up to me. Hairs on your back, sixth sense, body language. In early March the streets were so empty. They look for vulnerable targets: Single women walking by themselves and seniors.” Karlin Chan, in gray, leads members of the Chinatown Block Watch, in their signature orange shirts and vests, on October 4. Chan started Chinatown Block Watch to look out for the neighborhood’s residents. (Alan Chin) Kiyoe Takada, in black—a member of the Chinatown Block Watch— performs a wellness check on a homeless woman on the corner of Canal and Baxter Streets. (Alan Chin) He added that conflicts also arise because of “language issues: Sometimes a misunderstanding turns into a racist tirade. People are frustrated, locked down for months, but they have to understand that in an ethnic enclave, not everybody can speak English. Frustration turns into anger.” Over the months of walking, Karlin said that they’ve had to directly intervene only once: “We chased a guy out of the neighborhood. He was making racist remarks to a bunch of old ladies on Grand and Elizabeth [streets]. We ushered him out.” Grayson Chin, who lives in the same building as Karlin and joined the group at the beginning, added, “You don’t hear about Asians fighting back, and anti-Asian sentiment is still going on. We just want to be a visible deterrent, so that Asians feel safer and better.” The small, family-run businesses that make Chinatown unique are also under threat. At the Double Crispy Bakery on Grand Street, owner Huang Weizhou told me, “We reopened on May 25 but we’re down to seven employees from over a dozen, and my wife and I are here seven days a week from 6 AM to 7 PM. She hadn’t needed to come in for years, but she’s full-time now. We just barely started breaking even again. Some of our workers, they’re the only wage-earner in their family.” Huang Weizhou explained that his Double Crispy Bakery on Grand Street is struggling because of reduced business during the crisis. (Alan Chin) Jennifer Yu Tam and Victoria Lee, who work corporate jobs by day, created a fund for small business grants to help the family-run businesses that make Chinatown unique survive the crisis. (Alan Chin) Huang was glad to receive an application for Welcome To Chinatown’s Longevity Fund small-business grants, a nonprofit initiative that formed in response to the pandemic. Jennifer Yu Tam and Victoria Lee both work in corporate jobs, and at first glance, might seem to be unlikely activists; they are of the younger generation that is more fluent in English than Cantonese, that fulfilled their families’ aspirations for upward mobility. They wrote on their website, “The prolonged impact of the COVID-19 pandemic poses a great risk to accelerate the gentrification of Chinatown and the displacement of its residents and small businesses. The shuttering of such businesses would not only result in the loss of one of the oldest Chinese enclaves and one of the most culturally significant neighborhoods for Asian Americans, but it would also pose an irreversible risk to the working class residents it uplifts.” (Alan Chin) In Columbus Park, Chinatown’s largest public space, the Chinese chess players are back at their tables, but removing their masks only to smoke and drink coffee. Life goes on, but hardly normally: At Chatham Square, a long line formed for a free mask distribution as part of the China National Day celebration on October 1. On Mulberry Street, later that same week, the decades-old Lung Moon Bakery shuttered its doors for the last time, another storied business disappeared. A group of men gather to play Chinese chess in Columbus Park. (Alan Chin) The last day of business for the Lung Moon Bakery on Mulberry Street. (Alan Chin) Manhattan’s Chinatown has been part of the New York’s landscape and history since the 1850s. It has endured the Chinese Exclusion Act, racist housing and hiring practices, world wars, recessions, and depressions. I was the first of my family to be born in the United States and the first to speak English without an accent. I am old enough to remember when the old men and women in Columbus Park were people born in the 1890s, under the empire ruled by the Qing Dynasty. I find myself in this pandemic moment thinking a lot about their extraordinary courage and tenacity. I am confident that our generation of Chinatown, too, will survive. Now, as then, that task remains full of challenge and struggle. Life goes on: Community activist Amy Chin measures a storefront window on the corner of Mulberry and Bayard Streets that will host a projected shadow-puppet slideshow for Chinatown Arts Week later this month, organized by her non-profit Think!Chinatown. Corner of Mulberry and Bayard Streets. (Alan Chin) KEEP READING Handmaids Heads and Tails. By Ellen Weinstein and Rob Rogers YESTERDAY 8:30 AM fbtwmailPrint (Ellen Weinstein) (Rob Rogers) Check out all installments in the OppArt series. Ellen WeinsteinEllen Weinstein is an illustrator/author and regular contributor to The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Pentagram Design, and many others. Instagram: @ellenweinsteinilloz Rob RogersRob Rogers is an award-winning nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist, lately of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where he was fired for mocking Donald Trump. To submit a correction for our consideration, click here. COMMENTS (2) Trending Today Tommy Chong: Throw Away Your CBD Now Tommy Chong Research For Better Health Urologist: Try This If You Have An Enlarged Prostate (Watch) FastProstateFix SUPPORT PROGRESSIVE JOURNALISM If you like this article, please give today to help fund The Nation’s work. | |||||||||