I am currently teaching a course called “Can Democracy Be Saved?” which is a surreal experience in the current political environment. Almost every day feels like someone is taking a wrecking ball to the political and legal institutions in this country. Of course, this is not a new state of affairs; these are not entirely new problems. As political scientists, we understand that democracy has been under threat in the United States and elsewhere, leading to widespread concern about human rights, election legitimacy, and the delivery of essential government services. Many of us have contributed scholarship to help make sense of the current period of democratic backsliding, polarization, and decline in the United States. Out of the numerous scholarly treatments written about the current crisis, the research I find most helpful span two different areas: (1) scholarship that takes a longer view of the development of federal institutions that confer rights to citizens and (2) scholarship that takes seriously the political mobilization of marginalized groups of people—especially in periods where we would least expect organizing to occur. Emily Zackin and Chloe Thurston’s brilliant book, The Political Development of American Debt Relief successfully takes up both of these challenges and in doing so, provides an important contribution about how “citizenship” and “democracy” have been contested over time.
Zackin and Thurston’s book urges us to consider the longer story of how the state has been helpful and harmful to different groups of citizens. To be clear, The Political Development of American Debt Relief is not a book about democracy and citizenship per se; it is a book squarely about the politics of debt and bankruptcy. Zackin and Thurston utilize the tools of American political development to provide a deeply historical account about the rise and fall of state and federal debt relief. The authors bring us into the contestation that took place around the Bankruptcy Acts of 1800, 1841, and 1867. While these three acts were eventually repealed, each of these acts involved a struggle between people with different visions of what citizenship meant and what the responsibility of the state entailed to provide protection. Indeed, Thurston and Zackin write, “When debtors and their advocates argued for debt relief, they insisted that their standing as equal democratic citizens was at stake.” In this way, the authors center fights around economic justice squarely inside of broader discussions about the meaning and promise of American democracy.
Today, most people are familiar with the movement to forgive student loan debt and President Biden’s subsequent decision to forgive more student debt than any other president in history. The movement around student loan debt can be traced back to Occupy and the formation of the Debt Collective. Astra Taylor, one of the founders of the Debt Collective, outlines the case for economic democracy and debt abolition in an important book. Once fringe, this movement gained more supporters as income inequality deepened and those who were over-indebted lives got worse. Fueled by the explosion in student and medical debt, the Debt Collective sought to make two important interventions: First, shift the narrative from the shame of “carrying debt” to “people who are over indebted,” and second, pressure the government to do something to alleviate the debt burden. A burning question for many observers (both grassroots activists and ivory tower academics) was: could this be a real social movement? The coronavirus pandemic turned into a tipping moment as millions of indebted Americans witnessed the state rescuing people and demanded more. A mass movement focused on debt relief was front-page news. Yet nearly everyone—from the President to the Supreme Court to the media—has failed to trace the contemporary movement of debt activists and debtor politics to the 19th century. Zackin and Thurston do not deny this more recent history as a critical frame for understanding debt relief in the United States, but they argue that a longer timeframe is helpful in both elucidating the connectedness of struggle and the field of possibilities of state action.
Race and Debt
What I find so compelling about this book is the broad applicability of the research on debt relief. In other scholars’ hands, this book could have been narrowly focused on bankruptcy law or debt-focused social policy or on pro-debtor agrarian politics, and it *still* would have been important—unearthing something new about American political and constitutional development. However, Zackin and Thurston refuse a traditional, siloed focus and instead take the more difficult course of engaging different subfields in their study of the politics of debt relief. In doing so, what emerges from the pages of this book is a story about the American state in the 19th and 20th centuries told through the lens of debt-centered politics.
This is a piece of scholarship that takes the contributions of other subfields seriously and delicately weaves insight from others (including but not limited to the fields of constitutional law, legal and political history, gender studies, public policy, and congressional studies) into a study of the rise and fall of debt relief. As a result, the authors are able to tell a new story and deepen well-trodden ground in other subfields. Take, for example, the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (REP) subfield which I am closely aligned; there is much that this book contributes to the subfield—specifically to the study of Black politics.
Indeed, The Political Development of American Debt Relief offers an opportunity to deepen our understanding of how the federal government unfairly treated Black people and undercut their path to full citizenship. In the most searing parts of the book, Zackin and Thurston demonstrate how the debt apparatus was made possible by propagating a vision of white beneficiaries and excluding Black people. Black people as southern sharecroppers, Black people as northern wage earners, and Black mobilization via civil rights organizations in the 1960s/70s, were treated differently and thus had a different relationship to debt relief. From this perspective, it is clear how the system of debt relief reinforced racial inequality and harmed Black people.
Specifically, one of the most important interventions this book offers is the placing of a story of the passage and repealing of the 1876 Bankruptcy Act squarely in the history of Reconstruction. The authors do not suggest they are telling a new story of Reconstruction, but they are offering a new analysis that sheds light on how it was so easily undone. In most accounts, the history of Black people during Reconstruction is told separate and apart from the history of bankruptcy laws. But in Zackin and Thurston’s book, the Bankruptcy Act of 1876 and the protection of land it provided to white planters via state-level property exemptions, is foundational to understanding how everything else in the South took place. Zackin and Thurston demonstrate the way racialized debt relief reinscribed difference (discharge vs. repayment) and made it possible for many white people to maintain their hold on land even in the midst of widespread economic devastation. And after they received these benefits, white landowners lobbied to repeal the Bankruptcy Act of 1876, thereby closing the door behind them. Read in this light, the numerous, well-documented, instruments of white supremacy that come into place after Reconstruction such as the system of debt peonage, the Black Codes, and convict leasing—were the legacy of racialized bankruptcy laws.
After reading Chapter 3, which discusses the Bankruptcy Act of 1876, there is no denying that the long development of debt relief has shaped the politics of race today. Indeed, it is possible to read portions of this book in much the same way that people have interpreted Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White, as a justification for continuing race-based affirmative action programs. Because federal debt relief was racialized during Reconstruction, the amount of wealth and land assets for Black and white people were set on two different paths that would impact future homeownership and inheritance. Therefore, this book helps to provide valuable insight around efforts to address the persisting Black-white racial wealth gap in the United States.
But it is not simply that the Bankruptcy Act of 1876 has unfairly hurt Black people, but the broader implications of their analysis—something the authors do not address head-on—is how a racialized debt regime has undermined the development of Black-led social movements. Here I am thinking about Risa Goluboff's important work recovering an economic-centered vision of civil rights and how Zackin and Thurston’s research provides additional background into the sundering of this vision. The economic-focused vision of civil rights doesn’t simply go away because a legacy civil rights organization decided on an agenda shift. If one reads The Political Development of American Debt Relief closely, perhaps, one of the reasons the economic-centered vision loses out to an education desegregation-centered vision, is because Black people in the South had developed firsthand skepticism with the federal government’s ability to provide a modicum of economic justice for Black people. In other words, actual experience of disparate treatment by the state shaped some Black people’s conception of what type of “civil rights” the state could affirmatively protect. Therefore, the consequences of this disparate treatment were not confined to the lives of individual Black people, but likely impacted some elements of the strategizing around the agenda of the civil rights movement.
Citizenship, Debt, and Democracy
In addition to documenting the role of the state in persisting racial economic inequality, The Political Development of American Debt Relief challenges how we think about the relationship between citizenship and debt. This is a book about the vulnerability of citizenship and how it is constructed through the state. At different points in history, debt has been used as a tool to undermine the exercise of citizenship: debt for Black people in the post-Reconstruction South meant they were more likely to be imprisoned or to lose their labor autonomy in exploitive sharecropping arrangements. Debt for landless white farmers meant they were at the mercy of courts and planters. And debt during the New Deal impacted who could receive certain social services from the state. In addition, over the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries— indebted individuals were/are increasingly vulnerable to individual and state violence. Yet, citizenship did not have to be this vulnerable, as the authors show over and over again: debt was something the state had a large role in mediating. The state could pass laws and provide economic protection for those unable to meet debt obligations OR it could side with creditors and protect repayment and seizure of assets.
We are fighting many of these similar battles today. Some of the questions we face as a nation include: What is the purpose of government? Who is a citizen? If Congress and the President create a regulatory regime that impedes the rights of citizens, what is the role of Courts to intervene? Who is deserving of government assistance (tax cuts for the wealthy or loan forgiveness for the working class)? What is the role of government to protect citizens from predatory corporate and tech interests? What type of ideational change is possible in the current political environment?
There are no easy answers. The Political Development of American Debt Relief shows us that fights around the treatment of the multi-racial working class did not just begin recently but are much longer fights connected to citizenship and power. So, where does that leave us? The lessons for today from this book are mixed: the federal government wields power over people and can make life more difficult. But there are plentiful examples within this book of people organizing in creative ways to make demands on the state and shaping the law and policymaking in their interests. Through the action of well-organized citizens, new laws were created, reinterpreted, and sometimes enforced. The successes, as well as the failures, of debtor organizing reveal a refusal to accept the political projects of the powerful. Power, as this book shows, is held by the indebted masses—who refused to be silent even in the face of wealthy political elites. In this way, The Political Development of American Debt Relief is a book about a different time, yet written for our time.
