Category Archives: labor

by Joel | 5 March 2023 · 6:45 am

Eastern Europe After World War I

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 99-101:

The consequences of the war were grievous. The loss of manpower in this overpopulated region was the least of them. A large proportion of the survivors were exhausted, ill-clothed and had forgotten the skills they had possessed before the war. They were also ill-fed. Losses of livestock were to take twenty years to make up. Partly as a result of the dearth of draught animals, cereal production everywhere except Bulgaria had diminished by between a quarter and a half by comparison with 1913. Even if this had not been the case, the earning potential for agricultural exports, which had been very considerable before the war, especially from Romania, Hungary and Ukraine, had fallen sharply, for, thanks to the war, the United States and Canada had become the world’s granary instead of Eastern Europe. And increased production in the West had caused world prices to slump. Czech industry, among the least affected, was producing 30 per cent less than before the war; in most of the other countries production was halved. The war had also dissipated savings, so funds available for investment were scarce. Inflation grew apace, ruining many members of the middle classes; so did interest rates. Business confidence was very low.

Matters were made worse by the Peace Settlement, which allowed other criteria to override the concern to draw frontiers that made economic sense. As a result towns lost their agricultural hinterlands; villagers found their access to mountain pastures, on which they traditionally grazed their cattle, suddenly blocked by frontier posts; the headquarters and branch offices of many a firm found that, overnight, they were in different countries where different laws and taxation systems applied. Railways lines were cut off from their former termini and cities from their railway stations. Romania’s newly-acquired port of Bazias had no communications to link it with the rest of the country. Hungary’s second city, Szeged, once a thriving regional emporium, became a sleepy frontier town. Grass was soon growing on the once busy docks of Trieste, now part of Italy, which had no need of another port.

The new frontiers cut across communication systems in a way that made nation-building the more difficult and expensive. Resurrected Poland found herself with parts of three different railway networks, each with different gauges and signalling systems; and, since they had been built with military purposes rather than international trade in mind, they did not usually meet up with one another. In Czechoslovakia all the main lines ran north-south, radiating from the old centres of Vienna and Budapest, whereas the new country’s axis lay east-west. Her predicament led to a bitter struggle with Poland for possession of Tesin (Polish Cieszyn), whose stretch of line was the only link between the head and the tail of Czechoslovakia, although Tesin’s population was predominately Polish and its mines a hotly disputed prize for both countries.

Such predicaments encouraged the continuation of a ‘war psychosis’. There was not only a desperate concern to protect one’s territory against one’s neighbours (and, if possible, to acquire more from them), but a willingness to wage economic warfare and, when opportunity offered, to loot. When, with the encouragement of the Powers who wanted to see Bela Kun’s Communist regime brought down, Romanian troops occupied Budapest in August 1919, they carried away as much of the telephone equipment and railway rolling stock as they could, even if they could put it to no use. Hungary retaliated later by cutting Romania’s telephone access to the West. When Romania was in dispute with Yugoslavia, she closed the locks controlling the flow of water from the Danube and so brought river traffic on the Yugoslav side to a halt. The Czechs refused to supply Hungary or Austria with coal, or to allow Polish coal to be shipped to them across her territory. The frontiers between Poland and Lithuania and between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria were repeatedly closed, and it was to take fifteen years to repair a two-mile gap in the telephone line between Belgrade and Sofia. The beggar-my-neighbour attitude was also reflected in fierce tariff wars.

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by Joel | 4 March 2023 · 6:25 am

Eastern Europe’s Stalinist Years

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 86-89:

What does the balance-sheet of the Stalinist years add up to? A collection of Eastern European states had been converted into ‘people’s democracies’ in which, however, elected assemblies had virtually no political importance, and in which high-profile ‘popular councils’ were but appendages to the Party. The Party itself, which had absorbed the Socialists and much of the peasant parties, enjoyed a complete monopoly of political power. Purged of the dissidents, it was an instrument in the hands of a tiny elite, and it operated through a series of bureaucratic structures, most of whose functionaries, whether Party members or not, had been frightened into obedience, terrified of losing the perks and privileges that went with their jobs. The political edifice was supported by a propaganda machine which had monopolized the media and which blared out the party line.

This political system had one major weakness, however: every grievance, every mistake tended to be blamed on the regime. The presentation of scapegoats to the public, the periodic admission of ‘mistakes’ and fierce anti-Western propaganda helped to deflect some of this discontent for a time, but time was to prove these measures to be no more than temporary expedients. The Kremlin kept the leaderships in line formally through the Cominform and other joint bodies, and informally through the debts of gratitude many of the leaders bore the Soviet Union, the operations of the secret police, and the ill-disguised presence of Soviet troops in all but Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Nevertheless they were not quite Soviet clones. Yugoslavia had defected, Poland had not collectivized, and persistent nationalism and the differing conditions in each country demanded variations in both the content and the pace of the economic, social and cultural re-structuring which Stalin’s ‘Road to Socialism’ called for. The achievements of this programme were not negligible, however.

Between 1948 and 1953 industrial production more than doubled in many countries of the Bloc. In the Soviet Union itself it rose by almost 50 per cent, and it is curious that deviant Yugoslavia achieved the least increase, though at a little over 25 per cent it was impressive enough. The East German economy had recovered better than the West German, Bulgaria had outpaced Greece. The successes gave rise to hopes of catching up with the West and eventually overtaking it. But the bare production statistics disguised grievous economic flaws and imbalances. The Stalinist recipe had fended off recession and laid the foundations of industry on the basis of a war economy which neglected the production of consumer goods and the short-term interests of the worker, whether rural or urban. Moreover the planning was too rigid to accommodate new technology or changing management requirements. It was in this period that the imbalances and inefficiencies, so much decried since, were built into the system. The achievements of those years were to hold the future hostage.

In social terms there was a revolution which also turned out to be flawed. Society was levelled, millions gained self-respect and opportunities that had formerly been denied them; and unemployment was eliminated, though at the cost of feather-bedding. Yet despite the deliberate social engineering, a new elite was arising in place of the elite which had been eliminated; new vested interests were created in place of the old; and the proliferation of bureaucracy not only entailed inefficiency but had the effect of nationalising endemic corruption which had formerly operated in dispersed networks. Not least, the crude social propaganda of the Stalinist years succeeded all too well. Many of the region’s subsequent troubles stemmed from an innocent belief in the truth of all those slogans.

The achievements of Stalinist educational policies were also mixed. Systems of universal education were set up and literacy was brought to the masses (though in several countries this had been in train beforehand). Scientific education saw a marked expansion at all levels while the classics and the law, formerly major features of elite education, declined sharply. Technological training received great emphasis, but succeeded in producing too many workers who could not adapt to new methods and technologies. The higher flights of scholarship suffered from their subjection to both Party ideology and bureaucratic control. On the other hand, women were given equal educational opportunities. This however, bore some unexpected fruit. As women came to occupy a high proportion of posts in medicine and the legal profession, these ceased to be premium professions in terms of pay and status.

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by Joel | 15 February 2023 · 3:31 am

Southern Indians in the U.S. Civil War

From Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War, by David Williams (New Press, 2010), Kindle pp. 209-210:

For the South’s other “persons of color,” the southern Indians, both those in the southern states and in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), loyalties were often more difficult to sort out. Many tried to steer a neutral course. But caught as they were “between two fires,” southern Indians were usually forced to weigh their options and, often against their better judgement, choose sides. In South Carolina’s tiny Catawba band, numbering just fifty-five, almost every adult male at one time or another served in the Confederate army. Long since stripped of their own land, most Catawbas were day laborers working plantation lands that had once belonged to their ancestors. The enlistment bounty of $50 was very attractive for these impoverished and dependent men. They were too few to form a company of their own, and there were no “colored” units in the Confederate army for them to join, so they fought alongside their white neighbors in several South Carolina regiments of the Army of Northern Virginia. These were among the Civil War’s few racially integrated units.

Some southern Indians, more isolated and less dependent on the whites, were more successful in avoiding military entanglements. The Florida Seminoles, left to themselves nearly two decades earlier after fending off efforts to root them out, deftly maintained neutrality while allowing both the Union and the Confederacy to court them. In exchange for gifts and supplies, they shrewdly held out the possibility of an alliance without ever committing to either side.2

Others tried to remain neutral with less success. In Virginia’s tidewater region, descendants of the once powerful Powhatans—the Pamunkey, Mattaponi, Chickahominy, Gingaskin, Nansemond, and Rappahannock Indians—had little love for the Virginians who had stripped them of nearly all their lands and stigmatized them as “free persons of color.” With the war’s outbreak, the Powhatans tended to remain at least nominally neutral. But when Union forces arrived in the spring of 1862, they found ready allies among the Powhatans. Many served the Federals as river pilots, land guides, and spies. They led gunboats and supply vessels as far as one hundred miles inland along the navigable waterways of eastern Virginia.

The Lumbees of eastern North Carolina at first declared neutrality but became solidly pro-Union after Confederates began conscripting them to do forced labor, essentially enslaving them. Lumbee guerrilla bands took revenge by raiding local plantations, attacking Confederate supply depots, tearing up rail lines, and doing whatever else they could to disrupt Rebel operations. Most notable of the Lumbee bands was the one led by Henry Berry Lowry, whose exploits became the stuff of legend. Called The Robin Hood of Robeson County, Lowry became, in the words of one Lumbee scholar, “a folk hero to his people, a symbol of pride and manhood.”

The Confederacy also tried to conscript some Indians to serve as soldiers, though they proved to be no less resentful than those conscripted for forced labor. In the spring of 1863, Eastern Choctaws drafted into the First Choctaw Battalion, Mississippi Cavalry, deserted en masse to the Federals just before the Vicksburg Campaign got under way.

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by Joel | 13 February 2023 · 7:03 am

Recruiting Ex-slaves, 1863

From Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War, by David Williams (New Press, 2010), Kindle pp. 196-198:

The Emancipation Proclamation had its intended effect on African American men. Eager to enlist, they poured into recruiting offices across the North and flocked to Union lines across the South. Frederick Douglass was among the most enthusiastic supporters of black enlistment. “The iron gate of our prison stands half open,” he told African Americans as he urged them to arms. “One gallant rush … will fling it wide.” Two of Douglass’s sons joined that rush, along with more than two hundred thousand other black men who served in the Union’s land and naval forces. Over 80 percent of them were from the southern states. Nearly all of those had been slaves. But no longer. “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, ‘U.S.,’” Douglass proclaimed, “let him get an eagle on his buttons and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.” Prince Rivers, a self-emancipated sergeant in the First South Carolina Volunteers, made clear what that meant to him: “Now we sogers are men—men de first time in our lives.”

Despite the enthusiasm of men like Rivers, there were some former slaves who were reluctant to exchange one kind of servitude for another, much less fight for the Union. Recruiters in Kansas sometimes had difficulty finding volunteers among refugee slaves. In South Carolina, Union General David Hunter so often resorted to heavyhanded coercion in trying to get recruits for his first black regiment that some of the conscripts quickly deserted. When blacks enlisted, they did so for their own reasons. “Liberty is what we want and nothing shorter,” wrote an anonymous black soldier in Louisiana. “We care nothing about the union. we have been in it Slaves for over two hundred And fifty years.” At a “war meeting” of former slaves on Georgia’s St. Simons Island, a northern correspondent witnessed several speakers, including one black man, trying to draw new recruits.

They were asked to enlist for pay, rations and uniform, to fight for their country, for freedom and so forth, but not a man stirred. But when it was asked them to fight for themselves, to enlist to protect their wives and children from being sold away from them, and told of the little homes which they might secure to themselves and their families in after years, they all rose to their feet, the men cam forward and said “I’ll go,” and the women shouted, and the old men said “Amen.”

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by Joel | 12 February 2023 · 6:46 am

Black Civil War Spy Networks

From Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War, by David Williams (New Press, 2010), Kindle pp. 187-189:

Harriet Tubman, famous for her prewar service on the Underground Railroad, headed a ring of spies and scouts who operated along the South Carolina coast. Mary Louveste, an employee at Virginia’s Gosport Navy Yard, where the Confederacy’s ironclad warship Virginia was under construction, smuggled out plans and other documents related to the new secret weapon. She carried the material to Washington, D.C., where she placed it in the hands of Union Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles. “Mrs. Louveste encountered no small risk in bringing this information … and other facts,” Welles recalled years later in support of her pension application. “I am aware of none more meritorious than this poor colored woman whose zeal and fidelity I remember and acknowledge with gratitude.” There was even a black Union spy in the Confederate White House. Mary Elizabeth Bowser, an associate of Unionist Richmond socialite Elizabeth Van Lew, worked as a maid at the presidential residence. She funneled anything worthy of note to Van Lew, who passed the information on to the Federals at City Point.

A black Virginia couple named Dabney proved to be one of the most innovative spy teams of the war. In early 1863, as Union and Confederate armies eyed each other across the Rappahannock River, they escaped enslavement and the husband found work as a cook and groom for the Federals stationed at the river. He became interested in the army’s telegraph system and asked some of the soldiers how it worked. Soon after, his wife went back across the lines to get a job doing laundry for a Confederate general. Within a short time, the husband began updating Union officers on Rebel troop movements. The officers were astonished at how accurate the information seemed to be and asked the man how he knew such things. He took them to a hill overlooking the river and pointed across to the headquarters of General Robert E. Lee.

That clothes-line tells me in half an hour just what goes on at Lee’s headquarters. You see my wife over there; she washes for the officers, and cooks, and waits around, and as soon as she hears about any movement or anything going on, she comes down and moves the clothes on that line so I can understand it in a minute. That there gray shirt is Longstreet; and when she takes it off, it means he’s gone down about Richmond. That white shirt means Hill; and when she moves it up to the west end of the line, Hill’s corps has moved upstream. That red one is Stonewall. He’s down on the right now, and if he moves, she will move that red shirt.

Blankets with pins at the bottom revealed deceptive troop movements intended to distract Union commanders. During the weeks leading up to the Battle of Chancellorsville, thanks to the Dabneys’ clothesline telegraph, Confederates could not make a move without the Federals knowing about it.

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by Joel | 10 February 2023 · 9:51 am

Southern White Union Army Recruits

From Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War, by David Williams (New Press, 2010), Kindle pp. 151-152:

David R. Snelling of Baldwin County, Georgia, had deeply personal reasons for his Union stand. David’s father, William, a man of modest means, died of fever when David was five. His mother, Elizabeth Lester Snelling, whose wealthy family had never approved of her marrying a poor man, was given only a small plot of land adjoining the large plantations her brothers owned. When Elizabeth died a few years later, young David was taken in by his uncle, David Lester. While Lester sent his own sons off to school, he put David to work in the fields along with the slaves. Treated much as a slave himself, David came to detest slavery. Threatened with conscription in the spring of 1862, David joined the Confederate army. That summer, he deserted and joined the Federals. Two years later, as a lieutenant in Sherman’s cavalry escort during the March to the Sea, David went out of his way to lead a raid against his uncle’s plantation a few miles from the state capital of Milledgeville. His troops seized as many provisions as they could carry and destroyed the cotton gin.

Though most Confederate soldiers were nonslaveholders and poorer than their slaveholding neighbors, white southerners who served the Union were most often poorer still. In the North Fork district of western North Carolina’s Ashe County, a comparison of thirty-four Union and forty-two Confederate volunteers shows that holdings in real and personal property among Confederates were more than twice that of their Union counterparts. In eastern North Carolina, the difference was even more dramatic. In Washington County, which supplied nearly equal numbers of troops to the Union and the Confederacy, Union soldiers were fourteen times poorer than those in the Confederate army. Such figures reflect a class-based Unionism that made itself felt all across the South. It was reflected too among members of the Union’s First Alabama Cavalry, recruited from poor farmers in the northern part of the state, who relished the opportunity to sack plantations during Sherman’s March to the Sea.

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by Joel | 2 February 2023 · 11:41 am

Effects of Cotton Gin and Indian Removal on Slavery

From Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War, by David Williams (New Press, 2010), Kindle pp. 18-19:

Aside from the moral issues involved, most Americans of that era [c. 1800] saw slavery as an economic dead end. The institution thrived only in the tobacco fields of the Chesapeake region and the rice country of coastal Carolina and Georgia. As the nation expanded, slavery would become proportionally less important to the nation’s economy and would eventually die a natural death. But the development of an efficient cotton engine, or “gin,” in the eighteenth century’s last decade changed all that. The cotton gin became the vehicle by which slavery was carried across the Deep South. Not surprisingly, attitudes toward slavery changed with the institution’s growing economic importance.

That change did not occur overnight. Antislavery sentiment in the South remained open and active through the early 1830s. As of 1827, 106 of the country’s 130 abolitionist societies were in the South. To discourage the use of slave labor, some of those societies paid above-market prices for cotton produced without slave labor. North Carolina Quakers and Methodists repeatedly petitioned their state legislature for emancipation. In 1821, a leading Georgia newspaper insisted: “There is not a single editor in these States who dares advocate slavery as a principle.” Far from advocating slavery, Alabama editor James G. Birney started an abolitionist newspaper. In 1827, the Alabama legislature passed a law prohibiting the importation of slaves from other states, and at every session throughout the decade, members proposed legislation favoring gradual emancipation. As late as 1831, a proposal to end slavery was introduced in the Virginia state assembly.

But the early nineteenth century was also the era of Indian removal. In 1827, Georgia forced out its few remaining Creeks. Nine years later, Alabama did the same. The 1830s saw the Choctaws and Chickasaws driven out of Mississippi. And Georgia annexed Cherokee land following the 1829 discovery of gold there. In an effort that carried the hopes of all Indian nations with it, the Cherokees fought to keep their land through the court system. The United States Supreme Court finally responded in 1832 with its Worcester v. Georgia decision: by treaty obligation, by prior act of Congress, and by the Constitution itself, the Indians held legal title to their land. But President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce the ruling, and Congress declined to intervene. Georgia ignored the court order, and the Cherokees were driven westward on the Trail of Tears. A quarter of them died on that brutal forced march. In 1842, Florida’s Seminoles became the last of the southern nations to be violently relocated to land that they were promised would be theirs for “as long as grass grows or water runs.” At the time it was called Indian Territory. Today it is called Oklahoma.

Indian removal completed the transition in slaveholder attitudes begun a generation earlier. Slaveholders no longer viewed slavery as a temporary necessity but held it to be a positive good, divinely ordained, for the slaveholder, the slave, the nation, and the world. Though religion, racism, pride, and fear were all used to bolster slavery at home and justify it abroad, the driving force behind planters’ proslavery campaign was the same that caused their change of attitude in the first place—economic self-interest. Some planters, like Georgia’s Benjamin Harvey Hill, were candid enough to admit it: “In our early history the Southern statesmen were antislavery in feeling. So were Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Randolph, and many of that day who never studied the argument of the cotton gin, nor heard the eloquent productions of the great Mississippi Valley. Now our people not only see the justice of slavery, but its providence too.”31 It was cotton, along with tobacco, rice, and sugar, all cultivated by slave labor, that gave planters their economic power. And it was this power that gave planters the political strength with which to control the South’s lower classes and silence or exile slavery’s opponents.

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by Joel | 30 January 2023 · 6:41 am

Defeated Lakota, 1880s

From Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, by Pekka Hämäläinen (The Lamar Series in Western History; Yale U. Press, 2019), Kindle pp. 374-375:

The army’s withdrawal only opened the door for another assault by the federal government, now in the form of assertive agents, missionaries, school teachers, and “civilization” programs. The agents no longer sought to reform the Lakota society; that policy had expired the moment Custer died. They now aimed to hollow out Lakota society and fill the void with white American values, norms, words, customs, and thoughts. Once tribalism was pulverized, so went the logic, Lakotas could be absorbed into the American society as individuals and nuclear families.

Some Lakotas accepted and actively embraced farming and schools, but most were horrified by the assimilationist zeal. After all, Lakotas had possessed an extensive reservation and dominated the vast northern plains only a year earlier; their fall from power had been shockingly fast and complete. The acreage under the plow increased across the reduced reservation, but so too did resentment and despair. Chiefs struggled to maintain their status in a strange world where government agents incited rivalries among them, mobilized the akíčhitas [= marshals, camp police] to control them, and withheld rations to weaken them. Former hunters and warriors were reduced to eking out a living by driving wagons, hauling freight, and cutting wood. Women’s traditional roles narrowed in the male-dominated reservation milieu and their standing as providers deteriorated as men took up farming and secured wage jobs. Children were removed from their families and taken to boarding schools where, separated from what was traditional and safe, they received an education geared to extinguish the Lakota culture.

The Great Sioux Reservation became a battleground for competing visions of the Lakota future. In 1881 Spotted Tail was killed by Crow Dog, a captain of the Indian police, who could not accept the old chief’s defiant traditionalism, persisting popularity, and multiple wives. That same year Sitting Bull, no longer able to hold on to his starving followers, crossed the medicine line [Canadian border] again and formally surrendered at Fort Buford with Crow King. He gave his rifle to his six-year-old son who handed it over to an army officer. “I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle,” the fifty-year-old chief said. “This boy has given it to you, and now wants to know how he is going to make a living,” he said, intimating the struggles his son and others of his generation would face in the alien world the wašíčus [whites] imposed on the Lakotas. Crow King asked a Chicago Tribune correspondent for two dollars to buy dolls for his girls.

Sitting Bull was taken to Fort Randall on the Missouri River where he was held as a prisoner of war for nearly two years. He then settled in the Standing Rock Agency where James McLaughlin, a ruthlessly effective assimilation crusader, was tearing the fabric of the Lakota society apart by recruiting “boss” farmers, policemen, and judges among the Lakotas to educate, monitor, and punish other Lakotas. The rift between the Indian police and traditional spiritual leaders became particularly corrosive.

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by Joel | 28 January 2023 · 4:28 pm

Custer’s Black Hills Expedition, 1874

From Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, by Pekka Hämäläinen (The Lamar Series in Western History; Yale U. Press, 2019), Kindle p. 342:

In 1874 the times were bad, spectacularly so, and when news arrived that rich veins of gold had been found in the Black Hills, it galvanized the nation. Gold had helped lift the nation from the material and moral ruins of the Civil War; now it could lift it from a debilitating depression.

The news came from one of the many small expeditions that the U.S. Army had sent in to find a suitable site for a fort near the Black Hills to protect the tracklayers of the blocked Northern Pacific Railroad. The fort, Sherman thought, would allow the army to deliver a crippling blow to the seemingly invincible Lakotas whom the national media now conflated with rebellious blacks, Chinese immigrants, disaffected farmers, and labor activists as an acute threat to the fragile industrial order. Sheridan, who had orchestrated total war against Native civilians during Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Comanche campaigns in 1868–69, believed that Lakota hostility now amounted to “a general Indian war” and proposed to President Grant that military forts in the Black Hills would “make it a little hot for the [Lakota] villages and stock if these Indians attempted to raid on the settlements south.” Grant agreed, and Sheridan picked Custer, whose conduct during the Yellowstone Expedition had much enhanced his professional standing, to lead the Black Hills Expedition: one hundred covered wagons; more than nine hundred cavalry and infantry; sixty-one Arikara scouts; several guides, engineers, and “practical miners”; three Gatling machine guns; three journalists; a photographer; and a geologist, Newton H. Winchell from the University of Minnesota, all moving out of Fort Abraham Lincoln, skirting the Great Sioux Reservation and entering the hills from the north. In mid-August, after six weeks of travel, the convoy found traces of gold. Custer exaggerated the discovery, and the expedition delivered what he had geared it up for: it created a national event. Reporters dispatched excited press releases, newspapers picked up and magnified the story, and in the late fall of 1874 the Black Hills gold rush was a reality.

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by Joel | 16 January 2023 · 4:27 pm

Lakota Elites, c. 1850s

From Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, by Pekka Hämäläinen (The Lamar Series in Western History; Yale U. Press, 2019), Kindle pp. 184-185:

In the early nineteenth century Lakota men were born into an increasingly competitive world with an uneven playing field. Boys were raised to be brave and ambitious in war, hunting, horsemanship, and courtship, and aspiring young men had to participate in several raiding expeditions to accumulate enough horses for a dowry. Many accomplished this in their late twenties after which they could settle down to family life, gradually give up raiding, and assume the role of an elder. As their families grew, they could marry off their daughters to other prominent men, receive handsome bride prices, and embed their families into expansive kinship networks that brought prestige, prosperity, and security. The most successful men—those who had become wiča, complete men—could sponsor extravagant feasts and giveaways in their sons’ name, paving their way within the fiercely competitive male sphere. Many celebrated Lakota leaders were born into this kind of privilege and were in turn able to bestow their sons with similar benefits. If competent, their sons could succeed them as hereditary chiefs and assume their names. They Fear Even His Horses the Younger and American Horse the Younger belonged to old and highly esteemed lineages, their names both a privilege and an obligation.

If not quite aristocracy, such men nonetheless possessed decisive advantages over others. Sitting Bull was born into a long line of chiefs and raised by two powerful uncles—Four Horns, a prominent band leader, and Looks-For-Him-in-A-Tent, a renowned war leader—whose eminence reflected on him, propelling his rise among aspiring Hunkpapa men. Camp heralds publicized his exploits as a hunter and a warrior—he earned his first military honors at fourteen, chasing a fleeing Crow on horseback and bringing him down with a hatchet-blow to the head—a position of advantage that blended with his innate spiritual prowess, physical courage, and quiet charisma to elevate him above rivals. He had a powerful dream in a vision quest at a young age and became the leader of the prestigious Strong Hearts warrior society in his mid-twenties.

Curly Hair was the son of Crazy Horse, who was the headman of the leading Hunkpatila band of the Oglalas, which traced a proud lineage of elders and holy men. At the time of Curly Hair’s birth in 1840, his father’s band included over ten tipis of blood relatives and in-laws, all of whom looked to Crazy Horse for spiritual and political leadership. Curly Hair was a child of privilege who grew up having his first steps and words celebrated with public feasts and gifts to the poor. Through his Minneconjou mother Curly Hair found another set of supportive kin relations and a further source of esteem: his family was the key proponent of an Oglala-Minneconjou alliance that shaped Lakota politics for a generation. His family promoted solidarity in both oyátes through giveaways, accruing admiration and followers; High Backbone, an ambitious Minneconjou headman, adopted Curly Hair as his protégé, engaging him in two-way character-hardening play fights and equestrian feats. When Curly Hair became a man and assumed his father’s name, he was primed for success. Young women wanted him for a husband, fathers wanted their daughters to marry him, young men wanted to be his kȟolá, and warriors were willing to follow him into war.

Men like the young Crazy Horse inevitably overshadowed less privileged men who lacked their kin connections, family wealth, and fame. For them the path for social recognition was paved with toil, anxiety, and violence—relentless raiding that gradually, often after several years, yielded enough clout to court women and enough horses and robes to pay bride prices. Lakotas raided and fought several neighboring groups in the mid-nineteenth century, but they did not do so as a monolith. Elite men raided horses to augment their possessions, but, backed with wealthy relatives, they could also afford to focus on collecting coups—war honors earned through audacious exploits like touching the enemy with a hand or a coupstick in the midst of hot battle—which further solidified their credentials as leaders. For other men raiding was an economic necessity that could consume their lives into early middle age. Some of them succeeded in turning themselves into warrior-traders with several wives, but many died trying. Their raw, anguished ambition to become men of substance was a latent impetus behind the expansion that made Lakotas the masters of the northern plains. Red Cloud, who lacked the pedigree of some of his rivals, spent nearly twenty years raiding before he dared to make a formal bid for chieftainship.