How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

Du Bois describes the labor movement that emerged during Reconstruction as putting “such power in the hands of Southern labor that, with intelligent and unselfish leadership and a clarifying ideal, it could have rebuilt the economic foundations of Southern society, confiscated and redistributed wealth, and built a real democracy of industry for the masses of men.”13 Du Bois documents how the emerging Southern labor movement was riven by racial resentment, with poor whites fearful of losing their place in the social hierarchy above newly emancipated black citizens. Du Bois argues that Northern industrialists together with the old white Southern power structures employed these resentments to smash any semblance of a cross-racial labor movement, and with it what would have been a powerful force for economic equality. When poor white workers lack class identification with poor black workers, they fall back on familiar lines of racial division and resentment.