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Because the American state is dominated by economic elites and most (all) major decisions can be taken only with their collective approval (see Chapter 3), this curve corresponds very closely to the willingness of the elites to tax themselves; in other words, to sacrifice for the common benefit.
during the Civil War, the draft was met with stiff popular resistance (and was the chief cause of the 1863 Anti-Draft Riot in New York City, the bloodiest riot in US history,
According to polls conducted in 1940 and again in 1942, around 70 percent of Americans supported compulsory military training for all young men.
Ages of Discord—were characterized by particularistic mood, an inward rather than expansionist focus, and low state legitimacy.
Gilje defines a riot as “any group of 12 or more people attempting to assert their will immediately through the use of force outside the normal bounds of law”
For 200 years between 1780 and 1980, the most common manifestation of sociopolitical violence was the riot (Figure 3). Overall, riots account for 56 percent of all violent events in the database.
the issues motivating political violence, the most common is race or ethnicity, followed by labor and politics (for details, see Turchin 2012:
over the long term, changes in homicide rates correlated with the level of trust in government and government officials, patriotism and empathy for fellow citizens, and the belief that government is stable and that social hierarchy is legitimate.
Blumstein and Rosenfeld (1998: 1216) concluded that much of the decline in the homicide rate was associated with the doubling of the imprisonment rate between 1985 and 1995, although “that effect shows itself only in reduction in older individuals, since young people are only rarely candidates for incarceration”.
These instability peaks were not dominated by a single issue, and the violence took several forms, suggesting that they were caused by fundamental social forces affecting the American polity.
During the Red Summer of 1919 there were no fewer than 26 major race riots that collectively caused more than 1,000 fatalities.
The Structural-Demographic Theory assumes that such variables as popular wellbeing, elite overproduction, and political instability are part of a dynamical system.
these “metaethnic” labels (the Whites versus the Reds) were not evoked as soon as settlers and natives came into contact. Rather, during the course of the eighteenth century Europeans and Indians gradually abandoned an initial willingness to recognize in each other a common humanity.
the integration of “white people” developed explicitly in opposition to the Indians.
for white Americans “Indians existed as cultural glue, since the hatred of them was fast becoming a basis for order”.
“Jacksonian Democracy” (which broadened the participation of the public in government and promoted the strength of the executive branch at the expense of Congress).
the number of New Yorkers with fortunes assessed at $100,000 or more increased from 59 in 1828 to 440 in 1856
Lee Soltow (1975) estimated that there were 41 millionaires in 1860 and 545 millionaires in 1870 (wealth was estimated by adding together real estate and personal estate). Although these estimates are subject to wide sampling error (Soltow 1975:112), they confirm the dramatic increase in the number of millionaires discussed in Chapter 4. Furthermore, Lee’s analysis yielded estimates for how the numbers of lesser wealth-holders increased during this period.
TABLE 8.1 Estimated numbers of adult American males in various wealth classes (free males in 1850 and 1860, white males in 1870). Source: (Soltow 1975: Table A4).
in the Structural-Demographic Theory elite overproduction is the most important driver of increased political instability. The key link in this causal chain, which I examine in this section, is how elite overproduction breeds political fragmentation and intraelite conflict.
Before the Civil War, the United States was ruled by an economic elite dominated by the Southern slaveholders in collaboration with Northeastern merchants and bankers.
Seventy percent of the wealthiest 300 New Yorkers in 1845 were merchants, auctioneers, brokers, and agents (Beckert 2001:20). They exported Southern-grown commodities and imported European manufactured goods. An additional segment of the economic elites (especially in Massachusetts) used Southern cotton to produce textiles.
two-thirds of the wealthiest people in the US lived in the South—4,500 out of 7,000 Americans with wealth of $110,000 or more (Soltow 1975). Wealth-holders had the resources and leisure to pursue elected offices and careers in government, and to influence elections, and there were simply more of them in the South, compared with the North.
from 1789 to 1861 Southerners dominated the top government offices: presidents and vice-presidents, cabinet ministers, senators, and chief justices (Huston 2003:83). The Southerners held more than half of the top government posts (Richards 2000:92). Even under the Northern president, John Adams, 51 percent of high government officials were from the slave states.
The planter class (individuals who owned 20 or more slaves) numbered less than 50,000 but “they dominated state senates and controlled virtually all southern United States senators as well as a majority of the region’s governors” (Huston 2003:36–37).
during the second quarter of the nineteenth century: 92 percent of New York mayors and 100 percent of Philadelphia mayors were merchants or lawyers (Pessen 1973: Table 13.1).
The degree of political consolidation among the urban elites in the early Republic was remarkable. During the era of the First Party System (1792–1824, when politics were dominated by the Federalist Party and the Democratic-Republican Party), the Bostonian patriciate overwhelmingly supported the Federalist Party, achieving “an almost comprehensive degree of political consolidation” (Jaher 1982:29). New York, similarly, was “a Federalist stronghold” (Jaher 1982:212). When
In Boston, for example, 86 percent of those worth at least $100,000 and 96 percent of millionaires between 1836 and 1848 voted Whig
the size of the political pie expanded fast enough to satisfy this modest growth of the elite strata. Thus, the number of states (and therefore senators, state legislators, etc) doubled between 1790 and 1837. At the same time, the number of representatives in the House almost quadrupled (Figure 8.3). Furthermore, the number of federal employees, an important source of patronage, expanded faster than the general population: from 0.57 per thousand in 1816 to 1.02 per thousand in 1841
Between 1837 and 1860, however, only seven more states were added, while the size of the House of Representatives slightly declined (from 242 to 237). The rate of growth of federal government also slowed: there were 1.09 and 1.14 federal employees per one thousand of population in 1851 and 1861, respectively.
the numbers of wealthy New Yorkers and Bostonians (with fortunes assessed at at least $100,000) exploded during the Antebellum Era (New York: from 59 in 1828 to 440 in 1856; Boston: from 79 in 1835 to 342 in 1860). This dramatic expansion of the elite numbers destroyed the equilibrium between the demand and supply of government posts. As a result, competition for political power intensified at both the federal and local levels. Some wealth-holders ran for office themselves, while others threw their resources behind rival politicians.
Obtaining legal training was, and still is, the chief route to political office in the United States and, as I argued in Chapter 3, the surging numbers of lawyers is a good proxy for elite overproduction.
President James Garfield was assassinated by a rejected office-seeker in 1881.
There was a great degree of divergence between the economic interests of the established elites and those of the elite aspirants. Most importantly, the new elites, who made their money in manufacturing, favored high tariffs to protect budding American industries and state support for “internal improvements” (turnpike, canal, and railroad construction). The established elites, who grew and exported cotton, and imported manufactured goods, naturally favored low tariffs. They also were against using state funds for internal improvements, because they shipped their products by river and sea to the
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only a small minority, the Abolitionists, pressed the argument that slavery was morally wrong. The majority of Northerners railed against the “slave power”—the wealthy and aristocratic Southerners—and their domination of national politics (Richards 2000).
Intensifying intraelite competition after 1845 fractured the ruling class by reducing the willingness of the elites to seek compromise.
“Martin Van Buren, an original architect of the Democracy, turned against slavery after losing a long and bitter battle with proslavery forces in his party during the mid-1840s.”
Northern elite aspirants, frustrated in their quest for power, used the new Republican Party as the vehicle for overthrowing the established elites in the election of 1860.
in 1861 the United States split along sectional lines, but during the 1850s nativism (opposition to immigrants and immigration) was no less important than antislavery as an issue in national politics.
popular movements, even in democracies, are ineffectual in the absence of leadership provided by elites or elite aspirants, and the political developments during the 1850s conformed to this rule. Even though the wellbeing of urban commoners was declining and curtailing immigration could reverse this trend (as happened much later, after the Immigration Acts of the 1920s; this will be discussed in a later chapter), nativism disintegrated as a political movement.
the very real dissatisfaction fueling the potential for mass mobilization was redirected by elite political entrepreneurs against the established elites, who were portrayed as the real culprits of the economic problems facing the commoners. This was accomplished by demonizing Southern elites as the Slaveocracy that was inimical to all free men (and women).
A prolonged period of economic malaise tends to delegitimize the prevailing ideology and pave the way for an ideological shift.
the key role in such trend reversals is played by long periods of persistent political instability. Eventually the elites become alarmed at incessant violence and disorder. They realize that they need to pull together, suppress their internal rivalries and switch to a more cooperative way of governing. Such a shift in the social mood is observed repeatedly in history (Turchin and Nefedov 2009)—towards the end of Roman civil wars (first century BC), following the English Wars of the Roses (1455–85), and after the Fronde (1648–53).
Although such political and business leaders as Herbert Hoover and Henry Ford had favored increased worker wages before 1920, shutting down immigration reduced labor supply and provided a powerful boost to real wages for many decades to come.
A very important aspect of this “search for order” was steps taken to reduce intraelite competition and limit upward social mobility. These steps took the form of limiting the numbers graduating from the prestigious universities, such as Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, and implementing discriminatory admission policies favoring white Protestant wealth-holders coming from upper class families.
American elites essentially entered into a “fragile, unwritten compact” (Fraser 1978) with the working classes. This implicit contract included the promise that the fruits of economic growth would be distributed equitably among both workers and owners. In return, the fundamentals of the political-economic system would not be challenged. Avoiding revolution was one of the most important reasons for this compact (although not the only one).
As Digby Baltzell, the sociologist of American elites, noted, “the patrician reformers who led the Progressive movement eventually took the steam out of the populist revolt”
the proportion of the American population born outside the country fell to less than five percent (see Figure 3.2b) in 1970, and has been growing vigorously since then. Currently it has reached and even exceeded the level achieved during the previous cycle. Another process affecting the demand for labor is the balance of foreign trade. Prior to 1970–75 the United States was a net exporter, which generated additional demand for labor to produce the exported goods.
prior to 1970 demand for labor grew faster than supply, but then the situation was reversed.
After 1970, numbers of lawyers began growing much faster and today approach the level of four lawyers/1,000 population
