The Nation, May 17, 2021
Crucible City
The tragedy of St. Louis.
By Robert Greene II
Certain cities in the United States have developed a claim to fame for
representing some vital aspect of America. New York City has often been
hailed as its financial and cultural capital. Chicago, the “big
shoulders” of the nation, has been depicted as its boisterous center of
industry. Berkeley, Calif., and Cambridge, Mass., serve as symbols of
American liberalism, and Atlanta as the political and economic capital
of Black America.
BOOKS IN REVIEW
THE BROKEN HEART OF AMERICA: ST. LOUIS AND THE VIOLENT HISTORY OF THE
UNITED STATES
By Walter Johnson
According to historian and native son Walter Johnson, St. Louis can
serve as a symbol of US imperial expansion and racial formation, a
“crucible of American history…[at] the juncture of empire and
anti-Blackness.” Throughout its existence, Johnson argues, St. Louis has
been a microcosm of America’s long-standing compulsion to subvert its
own high ideals for the sake of white supremacy and imperialism. But as
Johnson shows, the story of St. Louis is not just one of catastrophe; it
is also one of constant resistance to the worst in American history, led
by men and women spurred to dream of a better nation. It has been a site
for movements of radical hope and resistance to class injustice. St.
Louis is where workers established a commune in 1877 that rivaled the
one in Paris, and where organized Black working-class men and women
inspired people like the historian C. L. R. James and the journalist
Claudia Jones to draw lessons from them.
In his new book, The Broken Heart of America, Johnson sets out to convey
this twin narrative—of empire-building and racism and of the people
seeking to end those evils and remake the country into a genuine
democracy—through St. Louis’s incredible history. The city has been at
the forefront of American conquest and at the center of American race
relations, serving as both a military base and an industrial powerhouse.
At the same time, it has often been an arena for those seeking to resist
America’s usual predilections for empire and racism. American communism,
Black nationalism, the civil rights movement, and Black Lives Matter all
found in St. Louis a critical fulcrum on which American history turned,
morphed, and redefined itself. The Gateway to the West, as Johnson
shows, is also a gateway to understanding America’s violent,
unpredictable, and yet sometimes hopeful past.
The Broken Heart of America begins with the ancient Indigenous city of
Cahokia and then turns to the Lewis and Clark expedition, which set out
from St. Louis, then a frontier town and military installation, to map
the territory gained from the French Empire through the Louisiana
Purchase. While the expedition was dedicated to exploring what would
become the American West, it also helped chart the rise of the
burgeoning city. William Clark was an cartographer and leader of the
so-called Corps of Discovery, and his actions during and after the
expedition generated “knowledge in the service of empire”—a story that
Johnson uses to great effect. After Clark returned from the West, he was
appointed superintendent of Indian affairs for the Louisiana Territory,
an office based in St. Louis that he held for the rest of his life, with
an intervening stint as the first governor of the Missouri territory.
Clark soon found himself caught between two worlds, maintaining a
diplomatic and trade-based relationship with Indigenous groups while
also answering to increasingly land-hungry white settlers. He struggled
to balance these competing interests, which reflected two conflicting
Missouris: one that belonged to Native Americans and one that was being
conquered by a white settler population.
Clark’s balancing act didn’t last long and eventually led to his defeat
in the state’s first election for the governorship in 1820. Clark was
opposed by white settlers who insisted that he had not been forceful
enough against the tribes in the area, including the Osage and Mandan
peoples. Not that the tribes would have viewed their relationship with
Clark favorably, either: Remaining as superintendent of Indian Affairs
until his death in 1838, Clark would add “some 419 million acres to the
domain of the United States and remove over 81,000 Indians from their
homelands,” Johnson writes. Before the United States had military bases
dotting the globe, before American political and military might forced
the creation of the Panama Canal and the seizure of various lands in the
Caribbean and the Pacific, Clark’s St. Louis would serve as the
logistical and material hub of a growing US empire in North America. It
was a legacy, Johnson notes, that would continue into the 20th and 21st
centuries, as the city became a center of commerce in the Western
Hemisphere and a place where the lessons of empire would be implemented
at home by local police trying to suppress dissent.
The rise and fall of the slave power in the United States, like the rise
of the American empire, was also reflected in the history of St. Louis
and Missouri. The state’s request for entry to the union in 1818
precipitated the Missouri Crisis. Members of Congress repeatedly spoke
of disunion when describing the potential ill effects of Missouri’s
entrance as a slave state. Without a compromise—which was eventually
achieved by introducing Maine as a free state—civil war appeared to loom
on the horizon.
But Missouri was not only an emblem of the slave power’s increasing hold
on the American republic. In the years after achieving statehood,
Missouri—and St. Louis in particular—became the site of a growing
resistance within the South to slavery and the slave power’s national
and international influence. Dred Scott, an enslaved man living in
Missouri, sued his master Irene Emerson. Scott and Scott’s wife, Harriet
Robinson, had lived for six years in the Illinois and Wisconsin
territories while still under the ownership of Emerson and her late
husband. Because slavery was illegal in those territories, Scott argued
that the time he and Robinson had spent there had made them free. The
case was immortalized in 1857, when the Supreme Court ruled against Scott.
Yet the struggle against the slave power continued as St. Louis became
home to a large population of German immigrants fleeing their homeland
after the failed revolutions of 1848. Their impact on the Civil War and
post-Civil War history of St. Louis, and on the country in general, also
marked a powerful moment of radicalism in the Atlantic world, as the
dreams of European egalitarians merged with those of radicals in the
United States.
As a result, Johnson suggests, St. Louis could have followed one of two
political paths. The first was blazed by Thomas Hart Benton, the
Missouri senator whom Johnson describes as the “prophet” of an imperial
United States stretching to the Pacific Ocean and beyond. While serving
in the Senate, Benton sponsored several Western expeditions and
repeatedly pushed for the construction of military bases throughout the
West, to dominate trade with various Indigenous groups, and for a
transcontinental railroad. The other was the path supported by
Missouri’s radical European immigrants and free Blacks and represented
by people like Joseph Weydemeyer, one of the greatest left-wing figures
and socialist activists in American history.
Joseph Weydemeyer should be at the top of any list of people in American
history whose untimely death provokes the question “What if?” Described
by Karl Marx as “one of our best people” in the United States,
Weydemeyer arrived in the country in 1851 and pushed activists and
intellectuals to forcefully address the problem of slavery. When war
finally came in 1861, he and many other German immigrants offered their
services to the Union. For Weydemeyer and some of his radical allies,
the slave power had to be broken before communism could come to the
United States. Weydemeyer ended up serving as a colonel in charge of the
defense of St. Louis. Yet his most important contributions were not
military in nature, but rather the central role he and his comrades
played in the political battles of Civil War–era St. Louis.
Not all of the city’s German residents saw the end of slavery and the
victory of the Union as a way to open the nation to more radical dreams.
Carl Schurz, who came to the United States in 1852, supported the end of
slavery, but after the Union’s victory in 1865, he backed the liberal
wing of the Republican Party, which was much less devoted to
establishing Black civil and political rights than to enshrining the
ideal of free labor across the land—often at the expense of those doing
this labor. As Johnson documents, the divisions among Missouri’s Germans
over the course of Reconstruction—embodied by the competing visions of
Weydemeyer and Schurz—mirrored the divides within the Republican Party
and the United States itself. Schurz, like many other Republicans early
in the Reconstruction era in 1866 and ‘67, supported political measures
that helped enfranchise and empower the newly freed African Americans.
But by 1872, he was one of those liberal Republicans who turned away
from the racial progress of Reconstruction and saw the plight of Black
Americans as something to be solved by the white South.
Weydemeyer, meanwhile, continued as a left-wing beacon. Who knows what
would have become of his vision had he not died of cholera in 1866, at
age 48. But even after his death, his radical vision lived on—notably in
a set of class and labor struggles taking place in St. Louis in the late
1870s. In 1877, the city would be so fundamentally altered by a general
strike that, briefly, Americans from New York to California spoke of
“the St. Louis commune.”
The labor strife underscored the need for solidarity among white and
Black workers, as American capital consolidated and liberal Republicans
began to retreat from the egalitarian promise of Reconstruction during
the Gilded Age. A key strength of Johnson’s work is his reminder that
even as the Great Compromise of 1877 brought Reconstruction to a formal
end in the South, class conflict threatened to tear the nation apart
again—and as was the case in the Civil War era, St. Louis was at the
forefront of this bitter struggle.
The St. Louis general strike of 1877 actually began with strikes in
Martinsburg, W.Va., by railway workers angered by, among other things,
their terrible working conditions. The strikes soon spread along the
rail lines to major cities across the nation. It was in St. Louis,
however, that they reached their radical apogee. To achieve this
extraordinary moment of radicalized power, Black and white workers
joined forces to fight for their rights as laborers. This was
revolutionary in itself, considering that many German Americans had
already thrown in the towel on the struggle for Black voting rights
during the recent Reconstruction period. This historic moment in St.
Louis came after years of organizing by German American radicals,
abolitionists, and African Americans in the region. Organizations like
the Workingmen’s Party led rallies in the city—and yet they too found
themselves not radical enough for the moment. Johnson recounts the
election of a committee of laborers to meet with the mayor about the
crisis; one of them was a Black man known to history only as Wilson. The
Workingmen’s Party, Johnson writes, “was being led by the exigency of
the moment and the logic of its own rhetoric toward a revolutionary
alliance with the Black workers of St. Louis.”
The national media was both appalled by and dismissive of the biracial
labor coalition that had formed in St. Louis. Even among some of the
strike’s white leaders, Johnson writes, there was surprise at the
prominent role their Black comrades played in the movement, creating a
rare moment “of interracial working-class solidarity being made plain in
the streets.”
Sadly, the eventual collapse of the St. Louis general strike was—like
Schurz’s turn to liberal Republicanism and Weydemeyer’s sudden death—a
harbinger of the lost opportunities for radicals across the nation. The
strike leaders decided to end the outdoor meetings to regain control
over the turn of events but found that they had instead “surrendered
control of the streets to the police” who then broke up the strike with
the Army. Once again, in St. Louis and the country as a whole, a moment
for revolutionary change had ended in defeat.
Historians like Heather Cox Richardson, Eric Foner, Richard White,
Manisha Sinha, and others have argued for the importance of tying
together Reconstruction, westward expansion, and the Gilded Age. After
all, they occurred in the same period and were certainly related in the
minds the people living at that time. But Johnson reminds us how all
three converged in St. Louis—and how they left a lasting imprint on the
city.
After the collapse of Reconstruction and the end of the St. Louis
commune, the city continued to serve as the central depot for America’s
wars against Indigenous people in the West. By the turn of the 20th
century, St. Louis’s remained central in American life—geographically,
politically, and culturally—even after its periods of radical
possibility had passed. At that point, it had already become the capital
of ragtime music—“the soundtrack of the emergence of modern African
American urban culture,” Johnson writes. Theodore Dreiser used the city
to represent the social ills of urban life in a country that was rapidly
industrializing and modernizing. And in recognition of its growing
cultural significance, St. Louis became the site of the 1904 World’s Fair.
The fair gave the city’s fathers the opportunity to showcase St. Louis
to the world. Yet what they showcased was not a city of radical
possibility and cultural creativity, but rather one of urban modernity,
laced with racism and white supremacy, in all its industrial and
technological splendor. Inadvertently, the fair gave the world a view
onto modern American capitalism itself. St. Louis’s drive to become a
great city—one built on weak government, rampant racism, and deepening
class tensions—exemplified the United States at the turn of the 20th
century. As Johnson notes, the fair proved to be an ingathering “of
professional racists, keepers of human zoos, and Western civilizational
luminaries.” A decade before World War I, the technological dreams of
Western society were difficult to separate from the racist nightmares
being dreamed up by America’s elite—and once again, these converging
realities were on ample display in St. Louis.
The fear of interracial solidarity and social democracy was a major
presence in the minds of much of America’s elite during the Gilded Age
and the early Jim Crow years. The World’s Fair reflected this fear.
“There was no room at the fair,” Johnson writes, “for a story about
African American racial progress.” The fair’s expositions served as a
cultural battleground over the place of racism in American society, with
white supremacy almost always winning out. The fairgrounds were filled
with segregated restaurants and included a tribute to the enslavement of
Black Americans called “the Old Plantation.”
The fair’s racism was a portent of the worsening racial divide in the
city and its surrounding area. In 1917, white residents of East St.
Louis, a city just across the Illinois border that was becoming an
industrial powerhouse in its own right, attacked their Black
counterparts in a stunning example of early-20th-century anti-Black
violence, one that left anywhere from 39 to over 200 Black Americans
dead and drove more than 5,000 from their homes. The events in the
summer of 1917 became known as the East St. Louis Massacre. Serving as a
prelude to the wave of anti-Black pogroms that would take place in the
country in the coming years, the massacre gained international
attention—a considerable feat given that World War I was still raging.
“This was an attack not just on Black voters or Black workers or Black
migrants or Black ‘gun-toters,’ ” Johnson writes; “it was an attack on
Black families, on women and children, on the fabric of Black domestic
life, on Black houses and bedsteads and photographs and pianos and
phonographs and bric-a-brac, on Black wealth as much as Black labor.”
The white citizens of East St. Louis did their best to make the Black
community feel unwelcome, and they succeeded beyond their wildest,
cruelest dreams.
Yet even amid such oppression, the dream of a multiracial industrial and
social democracy lingered in the consciousness of the city’s residents.
During the bleak years of the Depression, communists worked side by side
with Black activists in St. Louis to fight for economic
justice—anticipating, as Johnson notes, the broader national context in
which the radicals of the ’30s and ’40s laid the foundations for the
civil rights movement that emerged in the 1950s. It is no coincidence
that Black radicals like C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, and William H.
Patterson went to St. Louis to see this energized freedom movement in
person—“not because they thought working-class Black people in the
Midwest needed their guidance,” Johnson writes, “but because they wanted
to find out what working-class Black people in the Midwest were doing
and learn from them.”
Once again, however, the dream of interracial solidarity proved
vulnerable to reactionary attack, as the anti-communist backlash forced
the movement to go underground in many ways. But another complicating
factor was the inability of radicals—Black and white—to truly connect
with the city’s Black residents. As Johnson notes, though the communists
had some success in organizing Black workers, they struggled to
transform these bonds into a movement for radical change.
The failure to create lasting institutions was a problem not just in St.
Louis, though a victory there could have made a crucial difference in
the fight for industrial democracy and civil rights during the 1930s and
’40s. Homegrown Black communists like Hershel Walker were well aware of
this failure. “We should have left them where they were,” he
said—meaning that he and his fellow organizers should have focused on
the day-to-day experiences and needs of Black workers in St. Louis
instead of trying to transform them into communists.
The St. Louis we know today provides a sobering conclusion to the story
Johnson tells. The city continues to be riven by racial and class
injustice, and Johnson traces these divisions, in part, to all those
missed opportunities. With the collapse of the left in the city, the
right was emboldened to make its presence felt and to reshape St. Louis
in its image. Far-right activist Gerald L. K. Smith published his
long-running Christian nationalist magazine, The Cross and the Flag,
there from 1942 to 1977. Phyllis Schlafly and Pat Buchanan, two
stalwarts of the modern right who often served as a bridge between the
far-right beliefs of Smith and his ilk and the more respectable
conservatism of the Republican Party, both had their political start in
St. Louis.
The use of military equipment and tactics by the police, not to mention
their ever-present antagonism toward Black Americans, also have some
roots in St. Louis, where the police have long viewed Black residents as
the enemy. Starting in the late 1950s, St. Louis cops often referred to
the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects, with their predominantly Black
residents, as “Korea,” and many of these officers were veterans of that
“forgotten war.” The corroded relationship between the police and
residents still prevails today. In a 2015 report, the Justice Department
under President Obama found “a pattern or practice of unlawful conduct”
by the cops in the Greater St. Louis city of Ferguson, including
extensive violations of “the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments to
the United States Constitution.” St. Louis began its life as a military
installation intended to push Indigenous people from the American West.
Today it serves as a continual reminder of the attempts to deprive Black
Americans of any and every shred of equal citizenship, often by force.
But as Johnson stresses, the rise of conservative politics in St. Louis
was accompanied by a revitalized radicalism. Out of the death of Michael
Brown and the organized resistance to the long history of police
brutality in Ferguson emerged one of the pillars of the Black Lives
Matter movement. This movement brought to the fore a truth that most
Americans have refused to deal with in the first two decades of the 21st
century: that Black and Indigenous people in the United States,
generations after the heyday of the civil rights and Black Power eras,
still lag behind everyone else in the country in terms of almost every
health and social marker. That the movement has also pushed the American
left to think critically about the intersections of race, class, gender,
and sexual orientation has been a boon to grassroots activists, who have
struggled to make this very point for years.
St. Louis, though it is no longer a city on the rise, remains a mirror
of American political life—both its possibilities and its grim
realities. A seat of imperial expansion in the 19th century, the city is
also rich in radical history, a place where Ferguson activist Cori Bush
could win a seat in Congress. St. Louis, as Johnson reminds us, not only
represents the worst of American racism; it also remains a beacon
illuminating the possibility of a different America. As we begin to
grapple with a new age in American politics—one with Joe Biden, not
Donald Trump, in the White House—we might look to the example of radical
St. Louis for lessons on how to rise above our country’s reactionary and
racist heritage.
Robert Greene IIis an assistant professor of history at Claflin
University and has written for Jacobin, In These Times, and Dissent.
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