You just keep spinning out these nutty digressions. Refuting them only encourages you. But here goes.
They were socialists opposed to non-socialism. Plunk them down in the "Workers' Paradise" of 1950's East Germany, and every damned one of them would have joined the Stasi or the Vopos.
First of all, not all the 48ers were socialists. Secondly, most of the socialists in Germany (Social Democrats) in the 1950s opposed Communism and the GDR. Third, taking somebody from one era and popping them in another century when they weren't alive and asking what they would think or do is nonsensical. A person, say, from the 19th century with 19th century ideas confronted with 20th century realities would take some time to figure out just what was going on. So are you talking about some naive person who has done no thinking at all about new circumstances or somebody who's painfully thought things through and come to some knowledge about the new age? Either way, what you're talking about can't be proved one way or the other because the experiment can't be performed. It's sort of like saying that if you lived in 1860 you would have supported slavery -- so I guess it's okay to say that now.
But finally, I was originally talking about today's Midwestern farmers, shopkeepers, and working people of German or Scandinavian ancestry, who certainly aren't socialists or liberals or intellectuals, but who don't think as you do and don't share your affection for the old South. That you insult them and have to go back half a century or a century and a half for your attack suggests that maybe you aren't their best friend or their natural ally, which was the point I was trying to make.
No, I am not talking about immigrant Poles stoking blast furnaces or mill girls getting porked by their supervisors, which was one of the charming features of the Millocracy prewar that so set them apart from the planters they accused of miscegenation with the help.
Such "porking" (do we really have to use that word?) happened. But it was more likely to happen with household servants and their masters, and more likely to occur in conditions of slavery than in free labor situations. So back in your court (though you're the one who brought it up).
What I was getting at, though, is that not everybody in New England was a Cabot or a Lowell, just as not everybody in the South was a Randolph or a Pinckney. But somehow the Yankees are always "Muffy and Buffy and Skip and Chip and all the other legacy snots who've directed America like a toy train set since 1860 while sneering at anyone who didn't own a Yale sweater," as you put it, and the Southerners are always the put-upon working guys.
But those Cabots and Lowells weren't a large part even of the native born population. Ask the old Yankees in the Berkshires or on the Maine Coast who staffed (along with Irish and other immigrants) the mansions of the New York millionaires. It wasn't their palaces they were cleaning.
Part of the poverty of the South after the Civil War had to do with losing the war. Part of it had to do with the slump in agricultural prices, something which affected farmers in other parts of the country as well (including the West and the rural Northeast).
Those were hard times for a lot of people. Putting so much reliance on cotton, though, was a lousy move. Even without the war and even without increases in domestic production those prices were going to fall when Africa, India, Latin America and other parts of the world enter production in a big way.
But I don't know about clinging to grievances from a century ago. Being perpetually angry about things that happened before you were born (and being so one-sided about everything that happened) may stoke your self-righteousness, but it may not be the best way to make friends or win allies.
Way to stand your own proposition on its head, x. You've buried your own value judgment in your postulated modern condemnation of slavery out-of-hand, and demanded that the 19th-century slaveholder concur. Nice sleight of hand.
No, I said that the Germans (on scholarly authority) supported Lincoln and the Union cause reflexively because of their traditional inurement to the claims of authoritarianism. The Leviathan is good, all praise the Leviathan: Bow down, bow down, bow ye all down before the Light of the World! </Off Ivanhoe>
The authoritarian susceptibility of German immigrants in the 19 century lingers, and is detectable in Democrat politics today, in e.g. "the Portland Project" in which the local and state PTB have begun to turn an American city into their beau ideal of the Paris Commune made good. The original failed; but they will succeed, this time.
It is not a great stretch to transport 48'ers to the halcyon hammer-and-sickle People's Republic they once aspired to, which was established in their land by authentic, direct-line-of-descent German Communists, who as young men will have cut their teeth on imperial bones with the Spartakists and Rosa Luxemburg.
From the 48ers to the Commune to the Spartakists to the GDR: Show me the break in the thread -- the rope -- that connects them. From Engels to Ulbricht, it's a continuous rope.
I hope that is compact enough for you.
But the ones who achieved high public office and Lincolnian appointments as political generals (e.g. Schurz), were.
Funny how we don't run into deepthink articles in middlebrow Stateside magazines about the socialists' bromance with Lincoln, and vice versa.
Outrageous hypothetical: "Would Lincoln have supported suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolt?"
The Southern legacy boys were mostly killed on the battlefield during the Late Unpleasantness. I'm sure you'll have heard.
The old man may have received a Confederate governmental pass to go home and keep his slaves from rising and slaying a la the heroic Nat Turner and Cincque; but his sons and stepsons did not; and like Bobby Lee's junior kinsmen, they remained in the saddle while they were able.
Which was the triumph of the risen Gilded Age class, or O. Henry's "Four Hundred".
Northeastern businessmen have always lived on the spread between materials cost and selling price. That's why (not even my colleagues, a lot of them, figured it out) the Bush family have been the biggest enemies the American oil industry has had since John D. Rockefeller tried to corner it by himself.
Northeastern businessmen hate farm prosperity and oil-patch prosperity alike, and for the same reason: They're on the opposite side of the table, when the dullards come to market with their goods, not realizing that the Chicago pits are rigged against them -- for over 140 years, rigged I said. Yellow sheets, Henry Hub gas, West Texas Intermediate quotes -- all phonied up by the meddlesome hands of businessmen's conspiracies, exactly the ones Adam Smith warned us about, now all grown up from huddling in a back booth at the Rose and Crown, to mahogany-paneled back rooms at the Chamber of Commerce, to unlocatable chatrooms in Vaporland. Occasionally, a few words escape a keyhole, as when Enron's traders were caught notoriously laughing and sneering about mulcting natural-gas and electricity prices on the West Coast markets. But mostly it's business as usual, with evergreen quarterly checks rolling out to Muffy and Buffy and Chip and Skip, and irreproachable blue-haired ladies living in you-can't-afford-it-here-do-we-need-to-explain-it-to-you "good buildings" on Fifth Avenue.
Meanwhile, the land has fallen into the hands of the same corporations that beggared its former owners, corporations that now have created something like a Leninist agricultural economy and foster "modern" agronomy with hireling hands who would be lucky to share the old kholkhozy's payout of annual crop receipts to its workers' soviet.
Modern access-capitalists (Ayn Rand's loathesome Orren Boyle) don't hate socialism; they just want to be the guy you can't dissent from.
Certainly in the 30's the socialist and communist parties of central Europe kept separate identities (although Hitler, in his purges and his rants, seems to have treated them as interchangeable) -- I rely on Wm. Shirer here -- but after World War II, who constituted Germany's GDR but "reliable" people (see Robert Conquest on "reliability" versus doctrinal purity for Communist 'crats working at the practical level), and did it matter whether they'd been members of the Communist Party in the interwar period? I ask not to push an answer, because I don't know about the composition of the GDR's rank and file, but because I sense a weak supposition in your argument, that interwar Party affiliation counted for a lot.
I'd need to know more about the size and composition of the GDR government before I could guess whether only simon-pure Communists filled its ranks.
True, even without hardship-generating moves by big bankers to capture the wealth of others by engineering market crashes (the German bank crash of 1877, which went international, and the Panic of 1893, for which the smoking gun has now been found in an old desk drawer: a contemporary banker's memo that nails the blame and limns the conspiracy) that allow them to skim off assets at hugely-depressed prices.
But it's a mistake to think that U.S. cotton growers and northeastern banks lending against their crops in 1857, say, were wrong to foresee clear sailing. The Egyptian and other cotton industries were initiated by the Union blockade and Confederate boycott of the war years, aggravating postwar problems by enlarging supplies.
But I don't know about clinging to grievances from a century ago. Being perpetually angry about things that happened before you were born (and being so one-sided about everything that happened) may stoke your self-righteousness, but it may not be the best way to make friends or win allies.
Tell it to the Jews. They only need one good ally, just as they did in the time of the Maccabees.
Tell it to the Irish. Tell it to the Russians. Tell it to everyone who desires a Great Justice against historical malefactors and, as one of the Roosevelts called them, "malefactors of great wealth".
And lastly, to your warning that I will die friendless in a cardboard box, it's like Kenny Loggins sang it: "I'm alright -- Nobody's worried 'bout me", which would be true in any case.
“It isn’t so much that lentil is ignorant. It’s just that he knows so many things that aren’t so.” (with apologies to RR)