Glenn Beck, America's Own Roderick Spode

My last post, Glenn Beck, The World’s Greatest Authority on Slavery, included the phrase “America’s own Roderick Spode.” I cross-posted the blog on the Daily Kos, and one Mr. Dbug enjoyed it immensely.


The more I think about the comparison, the more apt and amusing it seems, so I thought I should delve into it some more.


This is Roderick Spode, as played by John Turner in an episode of the Jeeves and Wooster television series produced during the 1990s. Most Americans will probably not know who Spode is, save for those of us who enjoy British humor.




Roderick Spode is a recurring character in P.G. Wodehouse’s “Jeeves” novels. Spode, usually portrayed as a nemesis of Jeeves’ master Bertie Wooster, is an overbearing presence, described as looking “as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment.” In his spare time, Spode is an "amateur Dictator" and the leader of his own fascist movement, dubbed The Black Shorts. Spode is typically encountered as he stomps around the countryside, delivering passionate speeches at rallies (click to see Spode at full tilt) or marches consisting of a few dozen Black Shorts, while he poses and preens as if he was watching thousands go by.


Although an aristocrat—a baronet, and the 7th Earl of Sidcup-- and a wealthy man, Spode is a populist who believes that national industrial capacity, national prosperity and national unity are correlated, promising that “at birth, every citizen, as of right, will be issued with a British bicycle and an honest British-made umbrella. Thus assured of a mobile workforce adequately protected against the elements, this great country can go forward once more to glory!”


If Wodehouse’s satiric pen is laid aside for the moment, much of Spode’s ideology consists of a marriage of scientific rationalism (the idée du jour) to appeals to historic British nationalism, particularly the ideal of the “free-born Englishman.” Though in reality largely mythical, the idea was real enough in the heads of generation after generation of nostalgic working-class Britons as they sought a decent condition for themselves in the socioeconomic hammermill of the Industrial Revolution.


For all his buffoonery, Spode is unalterably convinced that he is right and bound only for success, and takes every opportunity to press his views on the idle landed gentry who are Bertie’s social circle. As Spode himself put it, “Nothing stands between us and our victory except defeat! Tomorrow is a new day! The future lies ahead!”


Like Beck, Spode had many strange fixations—his political platform included dedicating Wales entirely to the production of turnips; a ban on the import of foreign root vegetables; the mandatory eating of asparagus; widening railroads to allow for the transport of livestock; and the scientific measurement of all British male knees (a riff on the contemporary eugenics movement). Spode enthused at length on the knee issue in The Code of the Woosters, declaiming: “Not for the true-born Englishman the bony angular knee of the so-called intellectual, not for him the puffy knee of the criminal classes. The British knee is firm, the British knee is muscular, the British knee is on the march!” Spode is glib when it comes to defending his bizarre positions, with blandishments such as “I can assure you, it has all been worked out scientifically ...”


One of the easygoing Bertie Wooster’s few truly fiery moments was when he upbraided the overbearing Spode in The Code of the Woosters, written in 1938.


The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Heil, Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?"


—P. G. Wodehouse, Bertie Wooster in The Code of the Woosters (1938)



Granted, Bertie had an ace up his sleeve, courtesy of his valet Jeeves, concerning Spode’s own dark secret—that Spode’s other enterprise is a very successful ladies’ undergarment store. As Bertie later put it, "You can't be a successful dictator and design women's underclothes...one or the other, not both..."


Spode was a cutting parody of the UK’s real would-be fascist of the 1930s, the pompous but deadly serious Sir Oswald Mosley, the aristocratic leader of the British Union of Fascists, as well as other fascist leaders such as Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and the like. Most of Mosley’s BUF was consciously based on Mussolini’s Brown Shirts and similar fascist groups in other countries, and his Black Shirt paramilitary organization were a rising and ominous force in British politics during the 1930s, until their defeat in an East London street brawl known as the Battle of Cable Street brought about the Public Order Act of 1936, forbidding political uniforms and private paramilitary associations in the UK. Mosley and the BUF championed British isolationism both before and after the outbreak of the Second World War. Mosley himself was attacked by a mob after the German invasion of Norway, following which he was interned as a potential spy or traitor, and kept under arrest for the remainder of the war. Ironically, after the war he changed his politics dramatically and launched a new, non-fascist organization, the Union Movement, whose goal was a unified Europe. Mosley continued as a perennial fringe candidate in British politics until 1977.


If you haven’t seen the Jeeves and Wooster series, incidentally you are seriously deprived—Hugh Laurie stars as Bertie Wooster, a well-meaning wastrel aristocrat, and the incredible Stephen Fry stars as Jeeves, valet to the gods. Hilarity ensues.


This is Glenn Beck. Most Americans will know who he is, mostly because he’s managed to attract a great deal of attention to his on-air and on-screen antics, as well as his recent rally at the Lincoln Memorial.




[I assure you, I had nothing to do with the coincidence in their poses and uniforms. All right, so I did, but it was only because the resemblance is what put the Beck = Spode thing in my head in the first place.]


Glenn Beck is a prominent conservative talk-radio personality, television presenter, and political activist, strongly allied with the more radical elements of the Republican party and other conservative organizations. He was born in 1964 and grew up in Washington State, having been raised Catholic. Catholicism notwithstanding, his parents divorced when he was 13, due to his mother’s alcoholism. Rather than attending college, Beck got married, worked a series of low-paying jobs at radio stations and “getting high every day” for fifteen years. After joining Alcoholics Anonymous in 1994, he remarried and converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, commonly known as the Mormons. From the late 1970s until 1999, Beck was a low-grade comedian and prankster, one step up from Jackass or Punkd.


Mr. Beck is frequently lampooned for his frantic blackboard diagramming and over-emotional delivery, including his famous March 13, 2009 ‘breakdown’ when he broke out in tears and theatrically sobbed, "I'm sorry, I just love my country and I fear for it." Jon Stewart of the Daily Show parodies Beck’s style here. The weeping was eventually revealed to be a not-even-very-clever stage trick, done by smearing Vick’s Vapo-Rub on his face to make his eyes water. Beck marries the fervor of the convert and true believer to the cynical charlatanry of the carnival huckster.


Beck is also frequently criticized by economists, scientists, historians, and other experts for gross errors of fact and repeated clumsy attempts to rewrite the republic’s history to fit his political views. These have included Beck’s supporting the patently false claim that Thomas Jefferson endorsed the idea of the US as a Christian republic, based on the evidence of his having signed shipping permits dated with the phrase “In the year of our lord, Christ.” As Chris Rodda promptly and succinctly pointed out, however, the documents in question were pre-printed forms prepared by the Dutch government, which was not separate from the Dutch Reformed Church, rather than the US government.


Beck’s standard approach to virtually any topic is to take any issue, whether a thing he favors or a straw-man iteration of something he opposes, and weaving around it a tangle of saccharine uber-patriotism, Leave-It-To-Beaver family values, and New World Order conspiracy theory, in which the latter imperils the former. He describes the federal government and the progressive movement as an enormous conspiracy dedicated to the repression of individual rights and the American way of life, staging a coup (referring to the 2008 presidential election, in which conservatives were sharply defeated) or ‘soft revolution,’ and amassing an army. He is essentially taking a large page out of Joe McCarthy’s “creeping communists” playbook and adding to it the ‘black helicopter’ antigovernment paranoia of the militia movement of the 1990s. He further accuses the left wing of preparing for mass violence. There is a black sort of irony in how much of Beck’s own fearmongering consists of allegations that the federal government is using fear tactics to further the progressive agenda. He has yet, to my knowledge, to comment on the Bush administration’s chronic and Machiavellian abuse of the Homeland Security “terror alert system” for political ends, including raising the warning level around election time or when the administration was having PR difficulties on other fronts.


In effect, he is working off the old ‘rights of the freeborn American’ idiom that has been kicked around the political sphere for two centuries, starting with a mythical golden age in which a Christian republic of happy freeholders basked in the glow of the free market, ruled over lightly by a limited federal government. What brought an end to these good old days—not that they ever actually existed—was supposedly creeping increases in government power, heavier taxes, and the evolution of the modern federal government from it’s 18th-century form, in a supposedly slow but steady march of big-government liberalism. This false continuity makes sense to people who only see history in black and white, but doesn’t even attempt to account for issues such as the legal status of slavery (more precisely, how could an ideal society embrace slavery as a fact of cold economics), the Industrial Revolution, evolutions in finance, the klepto-capitalist government from 1870 until 1930, and so on. It makes for a depressing story, a legacy of decline and defeat to rival that of Tolkien’s Sons of Feanor in the Silmarillion, or the humiliations of Israel in the Old Testament, but there always lingers the promise of eventual revenge and redemption.


As for Beck’s own particular interpretation of the ‘freeborn American’ idiom, religious scholar Joanna Brooks suspects that much of Beck’s almost religious reverence for the Founding Fathers and their era is an outgrowth of his newfound Mormon faith, where in her words, “reverence for the founders and the United States Constitution as divinely inspired are often-declared elements of orthodox belief.” At least one Mormon President claimed to have experienced divine visions including the signers of the Declaration of Independence.


Mr. Beck quite obviously doesn’t know his history very well—in fact, one of the major sources of his gratuitous factual errors is his partnership with David Barton, a controversial pseudo-historian, evangelical preacher, Republican political consultant, and textbook consultant to both the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps and the Texas State Board of Education. Mr. Barton is an ardent advocate of Biblical government of the United States, to the extent of excluding non-Christians from public office, and argues that the traditional “separation of church and state” aspired to in the US is a myth built from false pretenses. The latter assertion was, unfortunately, included in a core textbook provided to JROTC students.


Mr. Beck is also conspicuous for embracing antigovernment conspiracy theories of the sort beloved by the 1990s “tin-foil hat” sector. In addition to alleging that the federal government is out to get him, personally, Mr. Beck has repeatedly insisted that that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is running concentration camps in the continental united states (even after he was thoroughly spindled by Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman on the subject). Beck subsequently denied ever having mentioned FEMA, even though he was videotaped talking about the concentration camp issue on an episode of Fox & Friends.


In some ways, Beck also mirrors Stephen Colbert’s character on the Colbert Report, which presents the odd situation of Beck, a real person, being more off-the-wall than Colbert’s stage character pretends to be.


The significant difference is that while the worst damage Colbert has done is to conservatives who took too long to realize he was parodying them, not joining them, Beck has inspired people with short tempers and poor judgment to commit violent acts. As one example, an avowed Beck fan, Byron Williams of Oakland, California, in July 2010 engaged the California Highway Patrol in a gun battle in which two police officers were seriously injured. As it turned out, Beck had spent much of the previous several weeks ranting about the Tides Foundation, a harmless social justice nonprofit, and casting it as the nexus of a vast conspiracy of Beck’s enemies. Mr. Williams explained that listening to Beck had enraged him to the extent that he was attempting to start a revolution, and that the ACLU and the Tides Foundation were his targets.


As usual, Beck reacts to such criticism with his usual gormless and glib “who, me?” defense, and then goes right back to waving the same red flag in front of the bull. Despite the overtly political and heavily partisan nature of his programming, Beck has disingenuously claimed that his business is entertainment rather than the news, in an attempt to disassociate from the actions he quite plainly inspired. The extent to which Beck is responsible for their actions despite his own thinly-veiled advocacy of violence is starting to look like an increasingly valid legal question.


So to sum up, Beck and Spode have the following in common:


• A belief that modern society is sick and weak, and in need of rescue.
• Some really bizarre ideas about the proper order of human society, be they the proper agricultural economy of Wales or the role of the federal government in economics and religion.
• A belief that strongmen and motivated followers can effect change.
• Unabashed contempt for anyone who disagrees with them (c.f the title on the book cover above).
• Histrionic public speaking, and gross delusions of how many people are actually in the audience.
• A propensity to erratic behavior, and sweating.
• Outspoken interests in maintaining law and order, even though they also propose overthrowing or replacing the established order.
• A few embarrassing secrets. Please not that I am not equating being a Mormon with being a lingerie merchant, but it is quite likely that his following among evangelical Christians would shrink if his “heretical” Mormon religion were more widely known.
• A sense of messianic destiny, whether for themselves or for their movement.
• Horrible dress sense.







If there is one way in which Spode thoroughly outshines Beck, it is in having at least some intellectual respect for his audience. While Spode lays out his “worked out scientifically” platitudes, Beck reacts with a nauseatingly glib “who, me?” when called on the carpet, even when he’s not flatly denying that he said what he is caught on video as having said. Beck, it seems, simply doesn’t think his audience is smart enough to pick up flat-out lies and contradictions.


I can therefore assure you that it has all been scientifically worked out—that Glenn Beck is the United States’ own Roderick Spode. As with most American things appear when compared to their British counterparts, they are bigger, richer, louder, and cruder.


What makes the odious Spode more tolerable than the odious Beck, of course, is that the former is a fictional character, while Mr. Beck exists in this universe, which means we are unfortunately stuck with him. To be more precise, Mr. Beck’s corporeal form exists in this universe, but quite where his strange little mind is at any given time is…well, that is a damn good question, but it’s almost certainly not the same reality in which we live.

Glenn Beck, The World's Greatest Authority on Slavery

I saw a clip on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown program last night that made me want to bang my head on the table, even though my head already hurt.


He played a clip of Glenn Beck, America’s own Roderick Spode, discussing slavery. I reproduce Beck’s monologue below under the Fair Use doctrine:

The President is exactly right when he said ’slaves sitting around the campfire didn’t know when slavery was going to end, but they knew that it would. And it took a long time to end slavery.’ yes it did. But it also took a long time to start slavery.

And it started small, and it started with seemingly innocent ideas. And then a little court order here, and a court order there and a little regulation here and a little more regulation there. And before we knew it, America had slavery.

It didn’t come over in a ship to begin with, as an evil slave trade. The government began to regulate things because the people needed answers and needed solutions. It started in a court room then it went to the legislatures. That’s how slavery began. And it took a long time to enslave an entire race of people, and convince another race of people that they were somehow or another, less than them. But it can be done.

I would ask you to decide, are we freeing slaves? Or are we creating slaves? That’s a question that must be answered.

Now I know from having heard Beck’s monologues, rants, sermons, and Jimmy Swaggart-style tearful breakdowns that he really just doesn’t know much about history. He’s demonstrated his remarkable gullibility and willingness to make stuff up more times than I can count. Case in point, his disingenuous claim that Thomas Jefferson intended the US to be run on Christian principles by citing one-countem-one example of a document dated "in the year of our Lord Christ.” Never mind that this document was a pre-printed form issued by the Dutch government, not the United States, and which Jefferson merely filled in.


As a side note, one would think that a nation run with Biblical law and Protestant customs well in mind would have had a rather more ‘old-fashioned’ take on one Joseph Smith, founder of Beck’s own Mormon religion. Old-fashioned, perhaps, in the sense of John Calvin’s regime in Geneva, under whose authority the philosopher and astronomer Michael Servetus was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1553.


Still, this comment about slavery really pushes the envelope—but then again, when you’re in the middle of a midterm election season that many conservatives see as a war for the preservation of civilization, and if you want to keep your audience well-fed on populist bile, and if you’re really just not that bright to begin with, you have to be able to take any topic and relate it back to conservative talking points. It’s Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with history, politics, economics, philosophy, religion, you name it.


In typical Beck fashion, he manages to avoid any specifics—he speaks of court orders and the like. What court orders? Without data, it’s just hot air from another right-wing blowhard. Then again, most if not all of what Beck says, week in and week out, probably can’t survive facts.


The fact is, slavery is a result of the free market. More precisely, it is the product of what we today would consider to be a part of the free market, since the concept of the free market didn’t really exist in the modern sense in the early 17th Century.


Many of the colonies that later became the United States were the result of land grants by European governments, made to aristocrats, speculators, and other parties (what we might term venture capitalists), by which the rulers hoped to turn a profit from all this trackless wilderness. William Penn, for example, was given what is now Pennsylvania (and much else besides) as repayment of a 16,000-pound debt floated to Charles II, the perpetually profligate king of England. Never mind that Penn didn’t want land, he wanted cash, and had no idea at first what to do with the land.


The point was simple—give someone land, charge him with the responsibility for populating it and making it productive, and then get some tax revenue out of it. Welcome to capitalism, even when it was cameralism or mercantilism.


Most of the Hudson River valley in New York State, for example, was originally settled under the Dutch government of New Amsterdam, and was divided into vast ‘patroonships,’ where absentee landlords rented land out to tenant farmers on terms only slightly better than serfdom (for example, the tenants could only bring complaints against landlords in the courts run by the landlords). Many of these quasi-feudal landlords’ rights lingered on well after the American Revolution, until the Anti-Rent movement of the 1840s. Some of these estates were immense almost beyond belief—the “Manor of Rensselaerswyck” covered almost all of present-day Albany and Rensselaer counties and parts of present-day Columbia and Greene counties.


Good arable land was perhaps cheaper than at any time in history; Charles II, James II, William III, Anne, and George I all handed out vast tracts without a second thought, and often without even knowing where the borders were. Many of the colonies were originally chartered to extend all the way to the Pacific Ocean. In some areas, such as New England, land could be had in freehold simply by building a house on it and filling out the appropriate paperwork, provided you had all the livestock, tools, seed, and other necessities for making a go of farming. One bad crop, though, and you would probably have to sell your land and continue as a tenant or hired hand.


The major problem was labor. Colonial America was chronically short of manpower, since most of the potentially valuable land was trackless wilderness inhabited only by Native Americans. Whether you are growing sugar cane or tobacco, or growing foodstuffs rather than cash crops, you need people to do the work and extract the valuable stuff from the land. Without workers, land was worthless, and each worker represented an investment. This was a time period when “human resources” would have meant something rather different to what it means now.


Workers—slaves, freeholders, hired hands, or indentured servants—were industrial capital, the equivalent of manufacturing equipment or the tractors and combine harvesters on an agribusiness facility (after all, a 16,000-acre tract of land, staffed by 150 people from veterinarians to mechanics, with an operating budget in the millions of dollars and owned by a Delaware corporation can hardly be called a farm without laughing).


As bad as things were in Europe for many in the lower social classes, in the absence of a motivator like ready plunder (the Spanish colonies) or religious fervor (the Pilgrims) it is a tough prospect to encourage hundreds of people to pack up and move to a wilderness on the other side of the planet, likely never to see home again. It’s also expensive to ship them and all the necessary equipment across the Atlantic, so establishing a colony was a major undertaking, usually underwritten by stocks or bonds sold in London or Amsterdam.


Indentured servants were an attempt to recruit manpower for the nascent agribusinesses of the New World, and something over half of the immigrants to the English New World between 1650 and 1750 were indentured servants. In theory, a plucky young volunteer from Dorset or Lincolnshire would sign up, sail across the sea, work on a plantation for some years in order to pay off the cost of his trip, and muster out with enough savings to set up on his own freehold. Unfortunately, the prospect of selling oneself into a life of unremitting toil to pay off your sea passage’s cost never recruited as many willing hands as the venture capitalists of the 17th and 18th Centuries had hoped, and certainly nowhere near enough to keep up with the demand for tobacco, the fortune-making boom product of the English New World’s agribusiness.


A finite supply of labor meant that the supply of commodities was limited—if you have X field hands, you can only grow Y tobacco—which thus limited the amount of tobacco you could sell and the amount of money you could make. Expanding production meant expanding the labor force.


Slave labor had been an option in the New World for centuries—the Spanish and Portuguese dominions had been shipping Africans to the Caribbean since the early 16th Century, within decades of Columbus’ first voyage. British and French colonies in the Caribbean had followed suit in the late 17th Century, when establishing sugar plantations on islands such as Jamaica, which was essentially one immense sugar plantation by 1700. The first slaves to be shipped to Virginia arrived in 1619, the year before the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, Massachusetts.


The London business community had been waist-deep in the slave trade since the 1570s, but by 1700 the London Exchange saw sufficient potential revenue in a monopoly of the slave trade that gaining control over the asiento, or the official contract to supply slave labor to the Spanish New World, became a major policy goal of the English government. The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession (known in most of the English-speaking world at the time, and to two centuries worth of beleaguered high school students, as Queen Anne’s War) granted the asiento to the United Kingdom, who promptly turned it over to the South Sea Company, a London-based corporation, most of whose stockholders and directors were members of Parliament or otherwise creatures of the British establishment.


This accomplishment was actually one of the biggest and most remarkable financial shenanigans in history The British government (no longer English, the Act of Union with Scotland having been passed in 1707) took advantage of the historically fuzzy line between the British government and the financial community to create the South Sea Company in 1711, as part of an elaborate scheme to bankroll the national debt and keep the nearly bankrupt government afloat during wartime. The Lord Treasurer Robert Harley and a number of other government officials, acting in what was officially their private capacities as businessmen in the London Exchange, chartered the company, sold stock, and used the proceeds to buy up 11.7 million pounds sterling worth of the government’s debts, keeping the government solvent for the last several years of the war. Once the war was won and Spain signed over the Asiento to the government, the government promptly signed the Asiento over to the South Sea Company. The effect is similar to, say, the US Secretary of the Treasury or the Chairman of the Federal Reserve conniving with Wall Street to buy up federal bonds during the occupation of Iraq and receiving in exchange a monopoly on the Iraqi oil industry.


Starting in 1714, cheap slaves became readily available in the English New World in unprecedented numbers—an estimated 645,000 people over a century’s time. While slaves were present in all of the English colonies, their greatest impact was the southern colonies, where they flooded the labor market and contributed to the rapid increase of the plantation system, which grew as fast as slaves could be shipped and land could be cleared. Plantations sprouted like toadstools between the coast and the Appalachian Mountains before the American Revolution, and spread to the Mississippi and beyond in the half-century after independence, all built overwhelmingly by slave labor, and at tremendous profit.


Slavery meant not just cheap and readily available labor, but labor that was more easily controlled than a group of indentured servants who remembered what life was like in Dorset or Lincolnshire, and who insisted on having personal freedoms and legal rights. Indentured servants, after all, had a notorious habit of pulling up stakes and moving out to the fringe of settlement to start out on their own, understood the concept of a legal contract, and could only be pushed so far.


A slave could be fed the worst food capable of sustaining life, could be beaten nearly to death as punishment, or sold on a whim—in other words, slaves could be subjected to the sort of treatment that no European would put up with. As a simple contrast, the Rensselaers of the Hudson Valley depended on private courts and legal arm-twisting to control their tenants, while slaves in the Carolinas or Virginia could simply be beaten or tortured, or (more rarely) hanged as an example. Hanging slaves in other than extreme circumstances was generally seen as wasteful, akin to shooting a valuable and healthy horse, which is why punishment usually stopped short of death or crippling injury.


By introducing chattel slavery into the economy, the slaveholders created a permanent underclass of biped humanoid who was in many respects outside the definition of ‘human being,’ a legal distinction supported by theological and philosophical sophistry (c.f. the Aristotelian hair-splitting of the Valladolid Controversy), embraced by the financial world because it was useful. Slaves were property except when it suited their masters to claim them as human beings. For example, witness the Three-Fifths Compromise in the United States Constitution, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a human being for electoral purposes, thus granting the southern states an artificially inflated congressional delegation, which was dominated by the slave-owning interests until the Civil War.


Slavery, which was never as prominent in the colonies north of Virginia, died out in the northern colonies shortly after the American Revolution. Even where it wasn’t abolished by popular vote, it faded into extinction because it wasn’t economically viable in a region unsuitable to cash-crop monoculture, and where the main economic sectors were logging, shipping, quarrying, fishing and whaling, and manufactures, which were unsuitable for slave labor.


At the other end of the seaboard, however, the southern ‘plantocracy’ had a good racket going and knew it—with a permanent, cheap (slaves cost money, but did not have to be paid) and tightly-controlled labor force and a near monopoly on several sought-after commodities, such as tobacco, indigo, and of course cotton, they buttressed their financial interests with an enormous legal and regulatory infrastructure dedicated to keeping slaves in their place (literally). State and federal laws were rammed through by slaveowner-dominated legislatures, ultimately culminating in the odious Dred Scott decision, arguably the nadir of American jurisprudence.


In other words, the plantocracy used the ‘freedoms’ won in the Revolution to keep another class of people in chattel slavery, essentially using government to support and maintain their economic arrangements.


The worse part is that the United States was one of the last countries in what 19th-Century Europeans would have considered the ‘civilized’ world to abolish slavery, and the second to last in the Western Hemisphere. Great Britain abolished the slave trade in all Britain’s colonies and possessions in 1807, and abolished slavery itself in 1833. France abolished slavery in 1848. The former Spanish colonies abolished the practice during their wars of independence from Spain. Tsar Alexander II freed the Russian peasantry from serfdom in 1861. Brazil held out until 1888.


Mr. Beck, all of this sounds a lot like series of calculated policy decisions made by educated businessmen who had their eyes firmly on the bottom line, and who knew full well what they were doing and why. How exactly is this not evil?


What regulations are we talking about? The colonists and the Old World didn’t ship free Africans here only to enslave them later. They were slaves when they got on the boat in Africa. They were slaves when they got off the boat in Charleston, Savannah, Norfolk, or Portsmouth, and they were slaves when white colonists bought them for a labor force. That sounds evil from the get-go.


Slavery was the answer to a labor shortage experienced by colonial agribusiness. That’s an answer. That might not be the answer Glenn Beck likes, but at least it has the benefit of being a documentable truth.


The long and short of it, Mr. Beck, is that the analogues of the free market and capitalism from three centuries ago are what brought slavery to North America in the first place, not your boogeyman of government regulation.