“…Three Fifths of All Other Persons…” Part 2; or, The Modern American Prometheus

I just finished Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus[1].  The power of Hollywood and popular iconography had me thinking the monster was the clumsy cadaverous composite of other peoples’ carcasses stitched together with needle and thread.  Come to find out, the monstrosity is young Victor Frankenstein—a chem major, not a doctor—who holes himself up in a turreted makeshift lab above what I’m guessing is his off-campus housing. He is intent on applying the scientific method to necromancy.  He spends all his time at gallows, gravesites and morgues, collecting the necessary raw materials to beget life already fully-formed.  But when lo! he succeeds, he is revolted. He violently rejects what he has taken great pains to create, calling it a demon (though now sentient and with super-human size and strength, thanks to the student-scientist’s ingenious engineering).   And like the most vicious—and immature—of fiends, Victor Frankenstein convinces himself and anyone who will listen that a ‘murderous machine’ exclusively of his own manufacture is the devil incarnate while he be poor victim. 

I’m not sure if the reader is familiar with the original Shelley text, but the point I wish to make is that the mother of science fiction has presented for me the perfect metaphor for how 40 tunnel-visioned signatories failed—by succeeding—in much the same way as Victor Frankenstein.  Like young Frankenstein, the authors of the United States Constitution consecrated their own abominableness by conceding the Three Fifths Compromise in order to conceive this country:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons…one for every thirty Thousand…(italics added; The United States Constitution, Article 1, Section 2)

From the document’s virtual inception—Article 1, Section 2 would be on the top half of the first page if it were a single-spaced printout—the cohort of propertied white guys gathered to craft what many still revere as sacred, were weak, unscrupulous and venal:  they granted slaveholders and pro-slavery sympathizers, not only a way for citizens to continue to make money by owning and thereby debasing other human beings, but as well, a political arbitrage opportunity wherein the presence in any state of 50,000 slaves would yield the same benefit of federal representation as the presence of thirty Thousand (sic.) free persons.  To be clear, where any relevant election was conducted, those 50,000 slaves could only be counted for their bodies, not their votes; by design those votes belonged exclusively to any one not them. (Whether or not slaves were classified as 3/5 human—whatever that means—per apocrypha seems irrelevant to debate; what is clear is that slaves meant an additional 60% voting opportunity for free people in support of continued ownership of other enslaved persons, profiting off of the backs of other human beings including their offspring at will).  From a white person’s perspective, the bondsmen in his state meant a 60% increase in his power in the House of Representative (doubtlessly to buttress then build upon legislation to maintain human bondage).  This political arb opportunity existed for whites only, irrespective of if the white person was indentured, property-less, or married to someone indentured or property-less:  all whites would have been aware that regardless of their status, their socio-political and socio-economic status should be above the status of whoever was Black.

As a Black person in America, I ponder, what makes the Constitution so special, so hallowed.  It made America a new host for the cancer cells called Europeans metastasizing across the Atlantic to proliferate by hunting and harvesting my eggs, my labor and my opportunity, without my consent and most certainly without my compensation.  But then I reflect, maybe I shouldn’t be pondering at all.  Though I am a person per the Constitution, I belong to the “all other Persons” category, the governmental classification that granted me no protections, nor any representation.  My body could only be used to convey power and profit to those who owned me, or who were hired to oversee me, or contracted to clad or shod me, or retained to patrol the road in wait for me; basically, every single other person—"excluding Indians not taxed”—except me.  Even though I probably shouldn’t be thinking (already it hurts…) the racing train of my thought collides into the ice-capped north face of truth: that Europeans could establish a way of life hunting and harvesting my eggs, my labor and my opportunity with impunity, with neither my volition nor my remuneration is what makes the United States and its Constitution so magnificent, so sacred, so great.    

To create a country born of conflict and vice—exiting another riddled with strife, abuse and corruption, attempting to bake the concepts of “just us” justice and hypocrisy into a new kind of cracker called democracy, while simultaneously offering some semblance of domestic tranquility, or at the very least order—sacrifice was inevitable.  The coterie of flawed and fallen mortals renowned as America’s Founding Fathers needed an offering to present to the altar of republic-building:  Black bodies would have to do. 

No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success.  Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.  A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.  No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs (p. 52)

Victor Frankenstein’s sophomoric zeal to spawn a new kind of life form blinded him to the reality of negative consequences.  The rapturous soliloquy excerpted makes plain he had not fully contemplated the panoply of outcomes available when independent moral agents are created.  Perhaps his hubris (a father so completely deserving of claimed gratitude…?!!?) got in the way of his objectivity.  Perhaps his youthful exuberance delimited his awareness of what could go wrong when one vivifies a souped-up eight-foot super human scavenged from decomposing scraps at slaughterhouses.   Negative consequences ensued.  The creature is cursed by an original sin not of his own commission:  the young chemist is revolted by his experiment and spurns what he has painstakingly crafted; forsaking his unapproved science project—leaving him in utter isolation with no sponsor, no steward, no friend—Frankenstein’s only begotten is forced to live in exile as a grotesque voyeur, permanently watching human happenings from the outside.  Such was the life Victor Frankenstein architected for someone else, damning the other to ignominy.

The creature was banished from civilization by his creator’s initial treatment in much the same way the Constitution’s “all other Persons” were barred from democratic participation and freedom (and therefore all ensuing civilization-and-capital-formation in any meaningful self-determining or agentic way like all other citizenry around them—”excluding Indians not taxed”—would have been experiencing) from the very beginning.  Effectively, the injured parties were locked out of society before they ever had a chance to enter, through no fault of their own, then vilified, demonized and criminalized for having been trapped out of doors.  In Frankenstein’s case, the text makes plain that the consequences of his unbridled pursuit were unintended.  He described his results as a “catastrophe (p. 56).”  The framers of the federation, on the other hand, were very much aware that they were selling Black people down river, ratifying a government and an economy which 1) maintained that Black people could be bought and sold at all, and 2) in such a way as to enhance the economic and political advantage of the contingent owning and requiring those Black bodies to be a) at once full commodities with no rights whose profits were extracted and distributed to someone else, yet b) 60% of the requisite headcount for political representation necessitating the Three Fifths Compromise in the first place.

Black people were the seeds out of which the Union grew.

I’m sorry, who is the monster?

An aspect of Shelley’s narrative I find particularly fascinating (and very different from what pop culture propagates) is the asymmetry between the emotional and physical energy Victor expended obsessing over his enemy vs. the relative inertia and passive regard with which he bore responsibility for creating him in the first place.  The reason for the initial rejection is worth noting; Frankenstein’s new being had committed no wrong.  There was not one conscious action on the part of the created which justified the junior scientist’s categoric objection:

Oh!  No mortal could support the horror of that countenance…I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then, but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived (p. 57).

Victor Frankenstein—the monster—was dissatisfied with his creature for not being cute enough…though Victor was the one responsible for designing his appearance!  Moreover, how Victor—the clear loser in this tragedy—managed so poorly the disappointment of his own handywork was pathological.  His wildly irresponsible overreaction generated catastrophic consequences for his entire community. Rather than take ownership of his failed experiment (perhaps conceding to university authorities that his science project had gone awry, or even regaining enough composure to engage responsibly and reasonably with the new being) he fled the scene of his crimes, abnegating all accountability.

When I observe what Frankenstein created, I don’t see a monster:  I see Terrence Crutcher, Sandra Bland, Bigger Thomas, Ellison’s Invisible Man, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Emmett Till, John Brown, Eric Garner, Clarence Thomas, Omarosa, Maurice Clarette, Colin Kaepernick, Fred Hampton, Harriett Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Sonia Sotomayor, Michael Jackson, Leonard Peltier, Muhammed Ali…me…people borne into extraordinary circumstances and having to make sense out of situations they could not have possibly authored, precisely because the authors and their heirs refuse to claim their role in engineering and perpetuating the miseries they manufacture for us

Victor Frankenstein hotly pursued his ‘demon’ to the farthest reaches of the earth, hellbent on vengeance and vanquishment.  To his last breath he could not attach to himself all the wretchedness he had wrought—wittingly—to himself and others, not least of whom was the object of his pursuit.  I am perplexed still about how his character could generate so much sound and fury toward someone else yet devote hardly any energy to sitting with himself and constructively engaging with his own culpability.  Literally Frankenstein chose to chase what he mythologized as a demon to the North Pole rather than confront the one at hand—himself.  He was an abomination of the highest order. His sense of justice flowed only in one direction:  away from himself.  The very manner in which he pursued justice proved his inability to render it.

When the constitutional conventioneers agreed to infect their infant country with the clause permitting human ownership for profit AND political advantage, the corruption was complete.  Key to the American growth and governance model was the crystalline notion that profiteering from another’s body should be both permissible and politically expedient.   The Three Fifth Compromise rewarded human traffickers with wealth, respectability, legitimacy, and more political power.

This particular brand of human rights’ abuse—state-sponsored slavery—churned out persons by the millions who by design were dispossessed, with no formalized procedures for ingression into society (a process usually facilitated by the fact of birth, if not being…) to acquire property, education, gainful employment, nor chance to either inherit material wealth from a previous generation or any to pass on to a next.  The plan for how to create disposable people was set; “all other Persons” could only be used [up] by someone else and, therefore were unable to maximize their own utility.  While this time period described may constitute the era in America’s history when she was thought to be great, it needs to be noted that what she was doing was legally eviscerating one population to enrich another. 

Fall 2018 marked the bicentennial of Frankenstein’s original publication.  Thanks to my excellent NYPL cardholder standing, I was able to check the book out and read it.  Afterward, I conducted an ad hoc survey of others who had actually read the text.  I was so pleased to discover that an overwhelming majority felt Victor Frankenstein’s character was wrong—he created a living being then abandoned and forsook it.  The Founding Fathers did far worse:  they breathed life into a system which blessed human trafficking as a legitimate business enterprise and rewarded the regions where this peculiar brand of business proliferated with more political power to protect the profits and economic growth derived from this industry.  The trafficked humans, the “all other Persons,” were at the same time written out of the pursuit of their own prosperity, denied the prospects of justice, protection, or advancement—typically the fundamental fruits of one’s own labor and a part of any package of unalienable rights—yet somehow made to be responsible for their behaviors and decisions via this country’s criminal justice system.  This perversion and miscarriage of justice supported the farce that those “all other Persons” were agentic and in control of their own destinies whilst they were in fact prevented from so being by abuses on multiple levels: 1) being shackled in the first place, 2) being made to feel inferior for being barred from participation in society—particularly the arenas of the marketplace and public governance—while 3) still being compelled to maintain an order intended to keep them and their heirs in a permanent underclass (the class originally contemplated for them by the Three Fifths Clause in the first place) but  most importantly 4) not having any legal recourse or ombudsman to challenge any portion of the base, structure or superstructure of said society, or otherwise constructively and productively advocate for their own best interests as members of an intentionally excluded minority class.  This last point forms the crux of my comparison between Victor Frankenstein and the society the Founding Fathers begot:  the circumstances facilitating creation was a violation to what was created, by the creator(s).  In either case, the creators could not, or would not, adequately or at all take themselves to task for their offenses and so transferred criminalization, consternation and other forms of public scorn rightly due themselves to those harmed by what they created.   

In The Modern Prometheus Victor carried his misguided quest for justice to the grave.  To my mind, only at that point was justice truly served. On the other hand, neither the Founding Fathers, nor any of their heirs, have yet to properly render justice to those “all other Persons” prejudiced by their policies and privileges.  Instead, the heirs have grown fat off of the cannibalization of their fellow man and have come to espouse profiting off of the labors of any others as that which should be emulated, that to which Americans wanting to be great should aspire.   But the thing is, cannibals aren’t great.  They aren’t even good.  They are a danger to themselves and everyone else around them.  If America ever wants to be great, she is going to have to sit with herself and listen to those voices gnawing at her gut…the ones speaking to her from the inside, from the bodies she is currently digesting.  

[1] Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus, Signet Classic (New York: Penguin Books USA Inc.)