George Fitzhugh Quotes
It is impossible to place labor and capital in harmonious or friendly relations, except by the means of slavery
At the time, it did seem impossible that labor and capital would ever have harmonious relations. But the notion that slavery would solve the problem is as preposterous as anything ever entered into the American political dialogue. But there were many in the South, and some in the North, who actually believed it. Even 150 years later, while labor and capital relations were much better than pre Civil War, they still could not be described as “harmonious” or “friendly”.
George Fitzhugh, 1806-1881, Southern Planter, Attorney & Pro-Slavery Advocate, Cannibals All, 1857
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Roosevelt shocked the conservative members of his own party with this statement. Labor unions were not then an accepted concept in American society. Anti trust legislation and enforcement was in its infancy and companies in an industry commonly conspired as to price fixing, labor negotiations and market share allocations. TR had a scrupulous sense of fairness and equity.
Jefferson was one of the first political and economic thinkers to express concern over the “wage slave” concept of the industrial revolution. This was one of the major reasons that he was not in consonance with Alexander Hamilton in his economic vision for America. While we followed the Hamilton direction, there are still issues of maintaining freedom and independence for an employee in modern nations and economies.
Sinclair had written an expose of the meat packing industry – the Jungle – which used as its setting the Armour meat packing factory. It changed the way the public thought about the industry, the role of government and regulation. President Roosevelt took up the reform role, and got Congress to Regulate the quality and cleanliness of the meat packing industry. Sinclair, however not only wanted that reform, but also wanted the labor wages and conditions reformed. He referred to the Armour plant as the fortress.
George Fitzhugh was an American social theorist who published racial and slavery-based sociological theories in the antebellum era. He argued that the negro "is but a grown up child" who needs the economic and social protections of slavery. Fitzhugh’s worldview has been described as fascist in its rejection of liberal values, defense of slavery, and perspectives toward race. Fitzhugh decried capitalism as practiced by the Northern United States and Great Britain as spawning "a war of the rich with the poor, and the poor with one another", rendering free blacks "far outstripped or outwitted in the chase of free competition." Slavery, he contended, ensured that blacks would be economically secure and morally civilized. Although most Northern whites at the time agreed with Fitzhugh that blacks were incapable of functioning in a free society, the necessity of free trade and the expansion of slavery to the Southern economy hurt Northern factory workers and Northern farmers, who wished to claim western land for small farms. Fitzhugh's claim that poor whites should be enslaved also infuriated Northern Whites, some of whom remembered that the British had occasionally enslaved white men during the Colonial Era. The British practice of enslaving men involved in rebellion against the British government in Scotland and Ireland on Barbados during the time of Oliver Cromwell and its subsequent practice of deporting convicts to the American Colonies had infuriated the Founding Fathers, this fact contributing to Thomas Jefferson's writing that "All Men Are Created Equal" in the Declaration of Independence. The combination of economic interests and the belief in the equal standing of white men before the law caused many Northerners to embrace abolitionism before the war, but not the concept of full equality between the races that Fitzhugh feared.
