The competing economic visions of our two most famous presidents have big implications for the middle class today
George Washington, our first president, and Abraham Lincoln, our 16th, are the twin icons of that office. Their portraits are side by side in our wallets, in our change purses and on classroom walls during Presidents’ Day observances. Yet they represent different visions of an American economic order, differences that persist to this day. Washington stood for a system in which one man enriches himself by skimming off the excess value of his underlings’ work. Lincoln stood for the principle that every worker is entitled to the full value of his own labor. Call it the battle between Washingtonomics and Lincolnomics. From the founding of this country up until the Civil War, Washington’s order was dominant. It’s been dominant in our era, too, ever since Washington’s native South regained control of the federal government in the 1970s.
If you want to understand why the United States has never achieved the same level of economic equality as other industrialized nations, you have to look back at Washington’s life and career. And then you have to look back even further, to Washington’s ancestors, who settled Virginia. You’ll find that inequality was one of this nation’s founding principles.
In his socio-historical study “Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America,” David Hackett Fischer argued that American slavery did not result in a stratified society, but was established in order to create one. The early Virginia settlers were the second and third sons of aristocratic families in the south and west of England, and they intended to enjoy in the New World the lifestyle that primogeniture had denied them on their fathers’ manors in the Old. At first, they tried to enslave the Natives. When that failed, they imported Africans.
“Virginia’s ruling elite … required an underclass that would remain firmly fixed in its condition of subordination,” Fischer wrote. “The culture of the English countryside could not be reproduced in the New World without this rural proletariat.”
From its origins in America’s first colony, this aristocratic system spread throughout the entire South. Its success could be found “in the small and very powerful class of landed gentry, in the large majority of landless tenants and laborers, in the minority status of its middle class, in the general level of wealth inequality (Gini ratios of .60 to .75), in the magnitude of poverty and in the degradation of the poor.”
As a result of the Virginians’ social engineering, the United States became a colonial nation in which a European elite has traditionally dominated a combination of indigenous people and descendants of Africans imported to work as slaves. We’re a first-world country and a third-world country, coexisting within the same borders.