Hine Butler, Progressive Era photographer from Oshkosh, captured photographs of industrial inequality in the Pittsburgh Survey (1907-8) for the R. Sage Foundation and then for the federal National Child Labor Committee until WWI. Between the wars he photographed New Deal TVA programs. During the wars he took pictures of Red Cross relief work. This private/public progressive muckraking influenced labor laws.
The political force in tension with progressives like Butler during this period was a right wing military-industrial-corporate consolidation that benefited from things like national patriotism, child labor and imperialism. Butler's visual evidence of this inequality is one of the few obstacles hindering capital in the free market.
Hine Butler was in a tradition of American photographers who were also social activists. This includes photos by Jacob Riis of New York City tenements during the Gilded Age and Dorthea Lange of Dust Bowl tenant families during the Great Depression. The humans that Butler, Riis and Lange photographed are the necessary reciprocal inequality embedded in America's economy. These three popular photographers provide continual evidence of structural poverty from the Gilded Age through the Depression.
This record is accompanied in America by literary muckrakers like Upton Sinclair and Jack London. Through this combination there is ample evidence of the economic precariousness of urban industry and housing, sharecropping, extractive industry and the settlement of the country. Steinbeck described the poverty embedded in the American economy in Grapes of Wrath about Lange's people in the Dust Bowl. In this version everything, including, the tenants and their children, are a commodity. Labor market manipulation prevails. The humans became economic objects. Their humanity is secondary to the prevailing economic profit motive. The human costs of the transition from tenant to industrialized farming--starving children, broken families, men in prisons and spirit-crushing debt--is the reciprocal of profit.
Let us now Praise Famous Men written by James Agee and photographed by Walker Evans is a collaboration of print and image composed during eight weeks in Alabama during 1936. Agee the journalist, unlike Steinbeck the novelist, is a visible part of the narrative. The class divide between the viewer and subject that is usually obscured by photographs, novels and history is brought out by Agee's participant observer record. There are some other "down and out" style memoirs by fiction writers London (The People of the Abyss, 1903) and George Orwell (Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933) that provide industrial, urban models for this type of top-down reporting. More bottom-up version of these narratives can be found in tramp stories like popular boxer-vagrant Jim Tully's Beggars of Life (1924).
The remarkable part of poverty narratives and photos is the mass of work inspired by this change in the mode of production. Industrial poverty continues and so does the coverage in media like 1940 adaptation of the Joad family. Let us now Praise Famous Men aired on CBC-radio in 1966. Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson published And Their Children After Them in 1989. The Library of Congress has archived Evans' photos for study today. This uninterrupted chronicle of American poverty is remarkable because human misery is the inverse of the basic capitalist premise of prosperity which informs popular conceptions of the American century. When we de-emphasize the constant visible poverty in America from the Gilded Age today, today's impoverished class appears as a partisan political cause instead of an economic reality that both capitalist parties support. This myopic analysis makes for harmless elections between domestic economic austerity and Military-Industrial welfare.
In the intro to Maj. Gen. Smedly Butler's War is A Racket Adam Parfrey, famed Seattle publisher of occluded knowledge, describes a "corporate Fascist Putsch in the mid-1930s" that Butler delayed. The Putsch was a concentration of military, industry and capital that profited from the misery in the photos by Riis, Lange, Evans and Hine Butler. During America's industrial period there have been other political moments which, if not right wing or fascist, are at least interventionist and imperial. In these, American troops, funded by the citizens, were used to secure land or resources on the periphery. This was done on behalf of the banks that were evicting Americans at home. This tension between military-and-industry conquest and those disposessed by progress is how American economics creates profit. Chapter 19 of Grapes of Wrath is a short history of dispossession of Western America that begins when the land was stolen from Mexico.
The version that Maj. Gen. Butler delayed in the 1930's he called the "racket" which demanded intervention in Europe, Russia, East Asia and more Orwellian sounding places. This was the same time that American industrialist bankers were evicting the Dust Bowl tenant farmers. FDR's presidential administration's solution was first a vigorous domestic spending campaign known as the New Deal. The Military-Industrial-Complex overcame FDR's domestic priority. The non-interventionists were overcome by the Lend Lease Act that started in 1941, years before entering the war formally.
Parfrey wrote his introduction just after the Patriot Act and wonders if Maj. Gen. Butler's delay from the 1930's was permanent. With historical perspective it is clear that the "delay" was unsuccessful. The rise of the M-I-C identified by president Eisenhower suggests a permanent war economy emerged. This became visible in Korea and Vietnam. After 9/11 it was obvious to people like Parfrey, even if he writes about it skeptically.
Photos by Riis, Hine Butler, Lange and Evans suggest the enduring capitalist underclass--what historian Jacqueline Jones describes as a trans-racial post-Civil War "Dispossessed"--existed before Maj. Gen. Butler's delayed putsch and continues today. This is apparent to Parfrey because he writes in the Homeland Security era which amplified some of America's fascist tendencies domestically making them more historically apparent. Through Gilded Age photographs and poverty narratives one can observe this continuity.
Maj. Gen. Butler's classic description of entranced soldiers sold on a racket might be a Spartan set of this underclass that also includes workers in industrial labor, poor people in the American south and settler colonialists. This also includes Dust Bowl tractor drivers that destroy their neighbor's homesteads on bank orders. These individuals all follow what Butler called, "beautiful ideals...painted for [those] sent out to die." This individual tragedy serves a larger goal. This goal is capitalist industrial development. In nationalism this will lead to imperialism, which ends in international conflict, which (again) fuels the M-I-C. When humans have become commodity then the slaughter of industrial soldiers and the starvation of agrarian citizens are the cost of doing business.
Pres. Eisenhower and Maj. Gen. Butler attribute a militaristic component to the American version of this developing political-economy. America is not unique in this regard. Mussolini's version of a completely enveloping state was the mix of corporation, military and government as a universal mandate upon every citizen. This compounded through imperialism to impact non-citizens as well.
Corporate advertising and the national security state have methods of ignoring the photographic evidence of class inequality. Instead of appealing to humanity the appeal is to the market. This manufactured ignorance serves consolidating political, government, military and corporate structures. This consolidation is contrary to warnings by Pres. Eisenhower and Maj. Gen. Butler. The end result is human suffering. This is the trade off of American's style of political-economy.
American Fascism has historical roots in settler colonialism and industrial labor management. The republican constitution represents both the capitalists and laborers in this society. The capitalists have funded mechanisms like the military, national security complex and prison system that historically target members of the laboring class for some national purpose. The resulting individual consequences seem disproportionate compared to the development of national political economy.