Johnson, Walter

The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States

Basic Books (New York)

2020

OUR SYNOPSIS: Walter Johnson argues “that St. Louis has been the crucible of American history—that much of American history has unfolded from the juncture of empire and anti-Blackness in the city of St. Louis.” (5) He locates the intertwined histories of violence and racial capitalism at the center of this story. Starting with Native Americans and the first colonizers who arrived in what would become St. Louis in the mid-eighteenth century, he demonstrates continued centrality of these themes into the present day. The Black population of St. Louis increased dramatically during the 1860s and the ensuing push for rights led to white backlash by 1870, when white supremacy surged. He argues that after the Civil War, “the counterrevolution of property” shaped St. Louis and the United States by combining white property ownership, imperial expansion, and racial capitalism (155).

BIG QUESTIONS:

How did settler-colonial genocide and chattel slavery interrelate in the development of American racial capitalism?
How does it change conceptualizations of U.S. history to place St. Louis at the center?

FEATURE QUOTES:

“Viewed from St. Louis, the history of capitalism in the United States seems to have as much to do with eviction and extraction as with exploitation and production. History in St. Louis unfolded at the juncture of racism and real estate, of the violent management of population and the speculative valuation of property.” (9)
“Genocide was the vanguard of the empire, and anti-Blackness followed immediately in its wake. In the South, and in the more familiar story, anti-Blackness took the form of slavery, and there was certainly slavery in St. Louis. But western anti-Blackness, the sort pioneered and promulgated in St. Louis, had as much to do with the model Indian removal and empire as it did with the exploitation of enslaved labor as it asserted its vision: there was no room for Black people—at least not free Black people—in the city of St. Louis.” (71)

PRIMARY SOURCES:

Theodore Dwight Weld, American Slavery As It Is (New York: The American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839), 157, https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/weld/weld.html#p157.

BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:

Relate to Baltimore's histories of and place within racial capitalism.