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Scholars have long claimed that St. Louis carries outsized, if overlooked, historical weight. That historical weight has largely been defined as anticipatory, meaning that what occurred in St. Louis foretold racial and economic formations and the debate over their terms on a national scale. Landmark twentieth-century Supreme Court cases including Gaines v. Canada, Shelley v. Kraemer, and McDonnell-Douglas Corp v. Green, all originating in St. Louis, provide strong evidence for this idea. Relatedly, others have emphasized that the structural racism of the Gateway City was fundamentally representative of national trends. Walter Johnson, an esteemed scholar of slavery and empire, forwards a bolder argument: It was not simply that what happened in St. Louis predicted what would develop on a broader scale or that racism in St. Louis was paradigmatic. It is not even enough to say that racism was particularly bad or worse in St. Louis than in other locales, nor is it most useful to designate the city's rise and precipitous fall as the central story to tell. Johnson's account significantly magnifies the scope of St. Louis history beyond such touchstones to depict imperial violence on a continental and global scale (5–6). St. Louis was, at its core, Johnson argues, "the crucible of American history," the point at, from, and through which US imperialism and anti-Blackness connected and flowed (5).The Broken Heart of America is a compelling origin story of the United States. It is a narrative grounded in, the book argues, the inextricable link between Indian removal and slavery. Applying Cedric Robinson's theoretical formulation of racial capitalism, Broken Heart names the processes by which the materialist dimensions of enclosure were articulated by the volatile interplay of anti-Blackness, empire, white supremacy, capitalist extraction, and racial disposability. This violence was "dynamic, unstable, ever changing, and world-making," yes (6). It was also substrate. Relentless exploitation remained steady through the shifts of ever-evolving racial-economic formations.The generative utility of Broken Heart lies in its analytical tracing of racial violence through a sweeping two-hundred-year history. It is a meticulous practice that identifies empire and racial-capitalist extraction as overlapping, interconnected stages—"stages" not in terms of steps so much as in terms of processes or courses. Beginning with the fur trade of the nineteenth century, Johnson recasts the much-lauded stories of William Clark, Meriwether Lewis, Auguste Chouteau, and Pierre Laclède by describing their expeditions as "military reconnaissance operations" (18). They were leaders of "special forces" dispatched to perform the work of empire by way of theft, domination, genocide, settlement, and more. Later, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, once Andrew Jackson's enemy, became one of the president's strongest partners in the shared task of Indian removal, or advancement of "empire by any means necessary—and then some" (49). St. Louis, "the morning star of US imperialism," was the point at and from which such US imperial ambitions developed and expanded (5–6). It was where military expeditions of the Louisiana Purchase began and the Western Department of the US Army was headquartered. St. Louis was the portal through which military and state officials managed Indian removal in the Upper Midwest.Broken Heart convincingly shows that what flowed from and was inextricably connected to the systemic genocide of Native people was Black removal, not simply segregation or second-class citizenship. In the antebellum period, the murder of free Black sailor Francis McIntosh, one of, if not, the earliest victims of lynching in the United States; the Missouri Compromise debates; and the Dred Scott decision solidified white claims to land and power. White vigilantism was, in fact, above the rule of law, according to the judge in the McIntosh murder trial. The shift in the characterization of slavery as a necessary evil to that of a positive good reached national scale as an outcome of the Missouri Compromise debates, and so too was the move of Missouri's white political elites to inscribe a ban on the presence of free Black people in their new state constitution. The Dred Scott decision sanctioned this Western imperialist–inspired Black removal, shoring up the state's standing as a premier home of anti-Blackness. Following the Supreme Court decision, Missouri legislators introduced a bill to remove Black people from the state altogether. The bill did not pass, but that mattered little. The sentiment, codified by law and embedded in quotidian social life—a sort of faith tradition among white elites—was that Black people simply did not belong. The questions of the extrajudicial murder of Black people by whites, whether Black people could file suit in a court of law, and the rights of Black people in general were as much matters of spatial concern as they were anything else, since, at bottom, they stemmed from measures intended to deny Black mobility. Fears of Black labor competition and of the fragility of slavery set the context in which violence was required to manage power in St. Louis, the heart of slavery's borderlands (99).The afterlives of the "low-intensity open war" of slavery carried on well into the twentieth century (92). The 1904 World's Fair was not the shining pinnacle of St. Louis history but a showcase of imperial power by white city elites designed to communicate to poor and working-class whites that although they lacked economic power, at least they were not Black or Brown, members of an uncivilized "race." Not long after the fair, there was an obscene display of the "sanitized and idealized projection of the self-regarding fantasy life of the city's ruling class": the massacre of Black people across the Mississippi River in East St. Louis, Illinois (215). The massacre—not riot, Johnson stresses, adopting the language used by writers Ida B. Wells and W. E. B. Du Bois—found striking white laborers vowing to rid East St. Louis of Black people, whom they saw as threats to their lives and property. Johnson points out that the massacre of 1917 "began the dialectic of segregation and removal that would define twentieth-century Black life in the United States—a shifting set of alliances between industrialists, real estate rentiers, and white labor to control the Black population and settlement, to take advantage of Blacks when they could, and to drive them out when they could not" (228). Indeed, this blueprint could be traced from 1917 forward with stunning precision. The faith tradition of Black removal decimated the Black working-class district Mill Creek Valley. It was a violent process of forced relocation funded by state subsidies in the name of "renewal." It infused the creation of housing policies built on containment and removal, pillaging institutions like debtors' prisons, militarized police forces, a spiteful fine and fee apparatus wielded against Black residents of St. Louis County, and other financially extractive mechanisms like payday lending and profit-generating policing and imprisonment. Economic predation, police abuse and violence, and extraction and accumulation, racial-capitalist forms of the twentieth century, were policies adapted from an old playbook.If St. Louis was a "leading edge" of slavery, segregation, and removal, it was also a "leading edge" of political radicalism. Broken Heart does well to trace this history, too, to name the insurgent ground cultivated by, for example, German immigrants to St. Louis such as Civil War military officials Joseph Weydemeyer and Franz Siegel, whose anticapitalist commitment and critique of property meaningfully informed their support for abolition. The St. Louis General Strike of 1877, a large-scale interracial worker insurgency, marked moments of revolutionary possibility in the Reconstruction era. The Communist Party fomented powerful forms of organizing in the city, helping to stage some of the more promising, if fleeting, moments of interracial solidarity and Black mobilization, particularly that which was generated by Black women in the 1930s. The Black freedom struggle was unrelenting in its push for working-class power, decent jobs, housing, and a living wage. Highly skilled political organizers like Jamala Rogers, Ivory Perry, Ora Lee Malone, Herschel Walker, and Percy Green, for example, mobilized Black communities to create what George Lipsitz calls a "Black spatial imaginary" that refused a politics of racial removal (How Racism Takes Place Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011, 13). The scope, trajectory, and power of this insurgent Black tradition meant that "there is nothing uncanny about the fact that the uprising that touched off the most recent wave of Black radical organizing—the Michael Brown moment in American history—happened in St. Louis" (5).With each case study, from the fur trade of the early nineteenth century to the police murder of Michael Brown in 2014, from strikes and political organizing campaigns of the nineteenth century to that of the early and late twentieth, Johnson inserts the refrain that it is unsurprising or "was no accident" that St. Louis was the epicenter of imperial violence, racism, and radicalism. Ever attuned to the spatial formulation of racial capitalism, to the violence of extraction and dispossession, Broken Heart offers a stunning history of the present. With vivid narratives and a searing analysis, the book renders a blistering account of racism, capitalism, and resistance that radically rewrites US history from and through the standpoint of its bleeding center.
Keona K. Ervin (Wed,) studied this question.