Wednesday, April 24, 2019

Harold Meyerson on the Supreme Court as Trump’s Lackeys

I just got another e-mail from Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect magazine on how the U.S. Supreme Court, or at least its five-member Right-wing majority, has lost all judicial objectivity and will vote to uphold just about every racist, sexist, anti-Queer thing Donald Trump and his Administration wants to do. Meyerson’s specific target in this e-mail is the Trump Administration's determination to include the question, “Are you a U.S. citizen?,” on the 2020 census form despite warnings from the U.S. Census Bureau that this could cause an undercount of over 5 percent among communities of color in general and Latinos in particular. Of course, to the Trumpites undercounting people of color isn’t a glitch, it’s a feature! This also explains Trump’s attitude towards the Department of Homeland Security — particularly his orders to its personnel to go ahead and break the law, because he will pardon them. Trump obviously thinks he OWNS the Supreme Court, and therefore he can do anything he wants, including making it impossible for Congress to investigate his administration by barring all past and present staff members from speaking to Congressional committees, because he’s confident that, whatever the legal precedents, his five pet Justices will rule however he wants them to rule.

APRIL 23, 2019

Meyerson on TAP

The GOP Justices: Republicans First, White Guys Second, Constitutionalists Third. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments today on the constitutionality of President Trump’s Commerce Department adding a question on citizenship status to the 2020 census, and it looked like the five Republican pooh-bahs (Justices Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh) are poised to give it a thumbs-up.

What this means is that the census—for which the Constitution mandates “counting the whole number of persons in each state”—will likely produce what the Census Bureau calculated to be a 5.1 percent undercount of noncitizen households, as respondents understandably spooked by Trump’s war on immigrants decide not to return their forms. And what that means, of course, is an undercount of immigrants—disproportionately Latino, Asian, or African, and thus disproportionately Democrat—and an overrepresentation of whites, disproportionately Republican.

Opponents of adding the question have argued that it would violate the Constitution’s mandate by leading to that undercount, and that it also would violate the federal law requiring the commerce secretary (in whose department the Census Bureau is housed) to report all additional questions to Congress three years before the date of the census, which Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross clearly didn’t do.

Three of the Republican stalwarts—Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch—had already made clear in earlier actions that they favored including the question on the census. In today’s hearing, Kavanaugh made that clear as well, and Roberts, the only potential swing voter on the Court, also indicated by his questioning that he’s inclined to back the question’s inclusion.

If Roberts does indeed side with his four Republican colleagues, the ruling would be the third in a series of landmark 5-to-4 Roberts Court decisions whose chief purpose is to cement Republican control of federal and state governments. The first such ruling, the 2013 Shelby County decision, effectively neutered the 1965 Voting Rights Act, thereby permitting Republican state governments to toss minority voters off the rolls and make it difficult for them to register. Absent Shelby County, Democrat Stacey Abrams, not Republican Brian Kemp, would almost surely be the governor of Georgia today.

The second such decision was the 5-to-4 ruling in last year’s Janus case, in which the five GOP justices decreed that employees in a unionized public-sector workplace didn’t have to pay dues to the union, though the union was still required to represent and advocate for them in collective bargaining and any grievances they had with their employer. The ruling was expected to produce a sharp drop in the membership and thus the financial and people-power resources of public-employee unions, though at least the big four public unions—AFSCME, AFT, NEA, and SEIU—have seen no such drops because their members chose to stick with them, and because they also have since recruited new members. Nonetheless, as the Republican justices were acutely aware, the public-sector unions register and mobilize more potential voters—particularly in Black and Latino communities—than any other organizations, and thus play a major role in building Election Day support for Democratic candidates.

Should the Court now rule in favor of Ross’s citizenship question, that would add one more landmark ruling plainly intended to bolster Republican electoral prospects. And should the Court rule in a future case that it must keep its hands off deliberate Republican gerrymandering of districts, that would add yet one further ruling designed to enable Republicans to continue to hold power even if a majority of voters in a state or the nation vote (or try to vote) for Democrats.


If you were wondering why Trump and Mitch McConnell are determined to pack the courts, and the Court, with Republican hacks, wonder no longer. ~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Wednesday, April 17, 2019

Stony the Road: The Second Half of Henry Louis Gates’ “Reconstruction”

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

At 9 p.m. yesterday I watched the remaining two hours of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s PBS mini-series Reconstruction: America After the Civil War. The first two hours, shown last week, dealt with the Reconstruction period itself (1865-1877), when for much of the time the South was literally occupied by the U.S. military and, under the rule of a Republican Congress whose leaders took the rights of African-Americans seriously and used federal troops to enforce them, Black Americans became landowners, businesspeople and even elected officials.
Alas, the brave dream of achieving racial equality in America as an aftermath of the Civil War faded quickly under the lash of Southern terror — the Ku Klux Klan and similar organizations were founded, often by former Confederate Army officers, and their purpose was to destroy Black-owned property and intimidate Black people into abandoning their dreams of equality and accepting a perpetual state of servitude almost indistinguishable from slavery — and Northern war-weariness.
By the 1890’s Blacks had been driven from power and fortune through a series of increasingly restrictive measures, including voter suppression through poll taxes, literacy tests and bizarre qualifications (dramatized in the opening scene of the movie Selma in which a would-be Black voter, played in a cameo by Oprah Winfrey, is obliged to guess correctly how many jellybeans are in a large jar of them) that had the side effect of disenfranchising a lot of poor white people as well, along with outright terror — including an infamous massacre of Black officeholders and their supporters in Wilmington, North Carolina (the last redoubt of Black political power in the South at the end of the 19th century) that left 600 people dead and the Cape Fear River literally running red with blood.
Gates makes powerful points about the persistence and unscrupulousness of white supremacists in the South and how they’re still operating today — including the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia two years ago in which gangs of neo-Nazi and neo-Klan activists tried to defend a statue of Robert E. Lee against the efforts of a multiracial city government to have it taken down. Gates also discusses the history of these Confederate monuments in the first place, saying that they were part of a Southern propaganda campaign to rewrite the history of the Civil War as a noble “Lost Cause” in what paternal whites enslaved Blacks with deep kindness and humility and for their own good because these people simply weren’t as good as us. (Barf.)
The combination of racist propaganda, spread throughout the country via books, plays, posters, cartoons, and ultimately movies — including D. W. Griffith’s 1915 masterpiece The Birth of a Nation, both a landmark in the history of cinema as an art form and a bizarre piece of racist propaganda (Gates shows the infamous scene in which Mae Marsh, as the film’s second white female lead, jumps off a cliff to her death rather than allow herself the Fate Worse than Death of being raped by a Black man — played by a white actor in preposterously unconvincing blackface; for once Griffith’s racism overpowered his filmmaking acumen) which won the endorsement of President Woodrow Wilson and became the most popular movie of the entire silent era.
The racist propaganda campaign also extended into the halls of academe; not only did history departments rewrite the history of Reconstruction according to the Southern propaganda blueprint (as I’ve noted before, if anyone in 1915 had seen The Birth of a Nation or read about the controversy surrounding it and gone to a library to research whether the film was historically accurate, the books they would have found would have said it was), biologists and anthropologists published elaborate racial typographies to indicate that Blacks were a lower order of humanity, not fully human but simply intermediate stages on our evolution from apes. (I remember being startled, though not really surprised, to read reports at a recent Right-wing convention that they were presenting speakers denouncing the early 20th-century anthropologist Franz Boas, the first scientist to take on the scientific racists and debunk their ridiculous theories.)
Fortunately, Gates’s Reconstruction is not all gloom and doom; he also dramatizes the people in the Black community who fought back, including journalist Ida B. Wells, who traveled the country collecting stories of lynchings and wrote for a Black paper, the New York Age, after she was driven out of Memphis, Tennessee, her home town (I encountered her in an earlier PBS documentary on the Black press and said her story would make a great feature film — I even named Halle Berry as the actress who should play her) and W. E. B. Du Bois, a professor of such giant intellect it’s hard to categorize him into any one discipline, who published sociological studies of Black communities in Northern cities and “made his bones” in 1903 with a collection of essays called The Souls of Black Folk that directly challenged the leading African-American leader of his time, Booker T. Washington.
Washington (a name he chose for himself; the “T.” stood for the name of his former slavemaster, Taliaferro, pronounced “Tolliver”) had become a media superstar in 1895 through a speech he’d made at the Atlanta Cotton Exposition in which he basically said that Blacks should be content to be farmers and manual laborers, and Black schools should train them for these sorts of jobs and to be teachers in Black-only schools, and forget about voting or political power or building businesses or pursuing intellectual careers. Nuts to that, said Du Bois; he thought the Black community should not only aspire to anything whites could do, but should develop what he called a “Talented Tenth” — an intellectual elite who would not only lead the struggle for racial equality but would serve, by their own examples, as a response to the racist arguments about what Blacks were and weren’t capable of doing.
Du Bois also wrote the first major book by a qualified historian challenging the Southern white-supremacist version of Reconstruction, Black Reconstruction in America (1935) — a quarter-century before white historians like Erle McKitrick, Kenneth Stampp and Eric Foner (the last of whom is still alive and was interviewed for this program, one of the few white people Gates and the filmmakers cited as a source — in using mostly Black experts for his talking heads Gates was clearly doing a little Talented Tenthing of his own) — though by then he had become a member of the Communist Party, U.S.A. and he had adopted a Marxist analysis of Reconstruction for which Adam Gopnik, reviewing the Reconstruction film and Gates’s book Stony the Road, published in conjunction with the documentary, for the New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/how-the-south-won-the-civil-war), rather oddly faults him:

Du Bois tries strenuously to fit the story of the end of Reconstruction into a Marxist framework: the Southern capitalists were forcing serfdom upon their agricultural laborers in parallel to the way that the Northern ones were forcing it on their industrial workers. His effort is still echoed in some contemporary scholarship. But an agricultural class reduced to serfdom is exactly the kind of stagnant arrangement that capitalism chafes against. Sharecropping is not shareholding.

Not surprisingly, I think Du Bois got it right and Gopnik got it wrong. The Northern industrialists, financiers and other capitalists who dominated the Republican Party in the last third of the 19th century wanted the South as a largely dispossessed area, a sort of American latifundia that would produce cheap cotton to feed the North’s highly developed textile industry and would also provide a source of cheap industrial labor in case Northern white workers got too uppity and started demanding things like decent wages, limited hours, health and safety regulations and the right to form unions. That’s why there were huge steel mills in Birmingham, Alabama (actually in Bessemer, a suburb created especially to house them and named after one of the inventors of modern steel-making) by the end of the 19th century.
Nothing sums up the change in the attitudes of Northern Republicans like the two statements by Ohio Congressmember John Bingham, the principal author of the Fourteenth Amendment, who in 1871 said he had definitively intended the Amendment to protect the rights of African-Americans — and in 1881 said equally definitively that he had intended it to protect the rights of corporations. In the last fourth of the 19th Century the U.S. Supreme Court swung hard Right on both economic and racial issues: it was in 1886 that the Court declared that corporations were “persons” and therefore protected by the equal protection and due process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment — a doctrine that for the next 50 years would be used as a cudgel to strike down virtually any attempt to regulate giant corporations to protect workers, consumers or the environment.
It led to a concept called “substantive due process” which took the idea of “due process” beyond its surface meaning — that if you are going to be prosecuted or regulated, it has to be done within a legal process with certain safeguards to make it fair — and which ruled entire areas of potential government action, including minimum-wage legislation, health and safety regulation, and limits on the development and industrial exploitation of public lands, presumptively unconstitutional as a violation of the “substantive due process” rights of corporate “persons” under the Fourteenth Amendment.
It was also in 1883 that the Supreme Court, in a series of consolidated actions called the Civil Rights Cases, ruled that the 1875 Civil Rights Act, passed by a lame-duck Republican Congress after Democrats swept the 1874 midterms and which was virtually identical to the landmark bill of the same title passed in 1964, was unconstitutional because government had no business telling private business owners whom they may or may not serve. This argument is still heard today; Senator Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, said during his campaign that if he’d been in Congress he would have voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act for that reason.
It was also the argument Barry Goldwater made when he did vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a key step in the historic “flip” of America’s two main political parties on civil rights that started in the ’teens but became final in the 1960’s. The Democrats, the party of slavery, segregation and the Klan, became the party of equal rights for African-Americans and, later, other oppressed groups; while the Republicans became the party of white supremacy and racism, still calling themselves the “Party of Lincoln” but losing all connection to what Lincoln and the other Republican Unionists had actually been fighting for in the Civil War and ending up on the other side.

Why Jazz Was Born in New Orleans

The famous test case of Plessy v. Ferguson followed 13 years later and basically enshrined racial segregation into American law. What Gates deserves credit for pointing out in the program is that Plessy v. Ferguson was actually a test case, initiated in 1892 to challenge a law in Louisiana that required separate railroad cars for white and Black passengers. The significance of the case originating in Louisiana and the plaintiff, Homer Adolph Plessy, having a French-sounding last name is that Plessy wasn’t visibly Black at all: he was one of the mixed-race New Orleans Creoles who, like the mixed-race “Coloreds” in South Africa during apartheid, had an ambiguous social position, lower than whites but higher than Blacks.
As the only part of the United States that had originally been settled by the French, who had at least a somewhat gentler attitude towards racial mixing and interracial people than the Anglos who had settled the first 13 colonies that formed the United States, Louisiana had given birth to a class of Creoles that identified with white Western culture, specifically French culture, and regarded France, not Africa, as their true homeland.
Plessy was selected for the test case, brought by the railroads who didn’t want the extra expense of having to maintain segregated cars, because he was a New Orleans Creole who was only one-sixteenth Black, and in order to get himself arrested so he could start the test case he had to cross over from a Black to a white car and announce to a train steward that he was Black and was refusing to leave the white car, so the steward would have him arrested. Plessy v. Ferguson was decided in 1896 and ruled that the equal protection clause did not bar segregation as long as the facilities were “separate but equal” — which, not surprisingly, they never were; the film contains plenty of photographs of separate white and Black facilities that show, better than any narration or talking-heads could, how decidedly unequal the Black facilities were to the white ones.
Gates doesn’t mention the cultural dynamics created by the segregation laws, especially in Louisiana — though his book (albeit not the show itself) argues that, instead of the elaborate literary and scholarly books published by African-American intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but popular music in general and jazz in particular: “There was, in fact, a genuine renaissance occurring during the Harlem literary renaissance, but it wasn’t among the writers. The renaissance was occurring among those great geniuses of Black vernacular culture, the musicians who created the world’s greatest art form in the twentieth century—jazz.”
What this ignores is that the creation of jazz was itself a direct result of racial segregation, and in particular its imposition in Louisiana, where the proud Creoles were thrown down from their perch midway up the racial hierarchy from Blacks to whites and forced into the same category as the Blacks. That, I’ve long believed, is why jazz was born when (the 1890’s) and where (New Orleans) it was: the Creoles brought their European conservatory training and command of the Western musical instruments to the mix, while the Blacks brought their folk traditions and in particular the spirit of gospel music and the blues.
Had segregation not jammed the Creoles and the Blacks of New Orleans into the same bands and the same venues, I suspect African-American popular music would have bifurcated into the sophisticated ragtime of Scott Joplin and his contemporaries on one hand, and the rough-hewn folk blues of the Black working class on the other — just as white American pop music split between the relative sophistication of Tin Pan Alley and the Broadway (and, later, Hollywood) musical scores that have become known as the “Great American Songbook” on one hand, and the folk traditions of bluegrass, hillbilly and Western music that became the basis of country music on the other.
Tbe extent to which the origin of jazz came from a fusion between the Creole and Black cultures of New Orleans is illustrated by the personnel listings of early jazz bands, which are full of both Anglo (Black) and French (Creole) names. One can hear the tension between the great Creole genius Sidney Bechet and the great Black genius Louis Armstrong on the records they made together with Clarence Williams’ Blue Five and the Red Onion Jazz Babies in 1924.

Minstrelsy and Ethnic Humor in General

Gates’s discussion of Blacks in popular culture in the early 20th century is the one that’s become typical, presenting the whole minstrelsy tradition as racist propaganda and denying that the vaudeville and revue stages of the first 20 years of the 20th century contained equally insulting and stereotypical presentations of white ethnics. As I wrote in my article on Virginia Governor Ralph Northam and the demands by fellow Democrats for his resignation because he had posed in blackface during his college years:

One of the key elements of the Left-wing McCarthyist attack on Ralph Northam is an hysterical, ahistorical condemnation of the whole idea of blackface. Northam’s critics are speaking and acting as if Northam actually joined the Ku Klux Klan or led a lynch mob. To understand what blackface really means you have to look at it in historical context. It was part of a wide variety of ethnic stereotypes comedians and entertainers in the U.S. trafficked in from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries. Look at the products of classic Hollywood and you will see comedians who specialized in playing stereotyped Germans, stereotyped Swedes, stereotyped Irishmen, stereotyped Jews and stereotyped Blacks.
The Marx Brothers began their careers playing ethnic stereotypes: Groucho was the “comic Jew,” Chico the “comic Italian” and Harpo, until he gradually got fewer and fewer lines of dialogue until he stopped speaking on stage at all, was “Patsy Brannigan,” the “comic Irishman.” Since the Marx Brothers actually were Jewish, modern audiences watching their movies tend to regard Groucho as the most “authentic” of them — but the people who went to their vaudeville appearances, their Broadway musicals and the initial releases of their movies saw Groucho as just another ethnic comedian playing a Jew.
There’s evidence that at least some blackface performers regarded their work as a genuine, heartfelt tribute to authentic Black music and culture. One of the most interesting documents of this is the 1934 film Wonder Bar, in which Al Jolson — whose star power and status as the first person who played the lead in a successful sound film kept blackface and the minstrel-show tradition it sprang out of going for about two generations after it would have otherwise died out — has two large production numbers.
On his whiteface number, “Vive la France” (the film is set in Paris and casts Jolson as an American entertainer who owns a nightclub there), Jolson sings in a high, rather whiny tenor with a fast, irritating vibrato. On his blackface number, “Going to Heaven on a Mule,” he drops his register, sings from the chest instead of the throat, slows his vibrato and achieves a sound surprisingly like that of the genuinely African-American concert singers and Broadway performers of the time. The number itself, directed by Busby Berkeley, is a conglomeration of just about every racist stereotype you can imagine (which probably kept this film from being revived in the early 1970’s with Berkeley’s other major films), but Jolson’s sincerity and soul transcend the minstrelsy conventions and are genuinely moving.

Indeed, one of the most annoying aspects of the critique of blackface as ipso facto racism is it ignores the fact that many of the most prominent blackface performers, as well as the songwriters who supplied them material, were themselves members of a persecuted minority: they were Jews. That includes not only performers like Jolson, Eddie Cantor and Sophie Tucker (whose star-making hit, “Some of These Days,” was written by Black songwriter Shelton Brooks and who, though she didn’t perform in blackface, was advertised as a “coon shouter” — i.e., a white singer who could sound Black) but songwriters like Irving Berlin and George Gershwin, as well as producers like Florenz Ziegfeld.
When PBS ran the three-part series Broadway: The American Musical I argued that the entire Broadway musical tradition was a fusion of Black and Jewish culture, to the point where Broadway show creators who weren’t either Black or Jewish consciously tried to emulate those who were. Cole Porter once said that the reason he became a successful songwriter in the late 1920’s after a decade of disappointments was “I learned to write Jewish,” and Jerome Kern’s biggest hit was the faux-spiritual “Ol’ Man River.”
That’s why I got annoyed with the 2008 film Cadillac Records, in which Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody), real-life co-owner (with his brother) of a record label which marketed Black music to Black (and, later, white) audiences, is portrayed as so naïve about racism his Black artists have to explain it to him. Had I been writing the script, I would have had Chess respond, “Look, I know all about prejudice! I’m Jewish, and a lot of the people who don’t like you don’t like us, either!”
But then one of my problems with a lot of modern-day social criticism from African-Americans and their white supporters is they tend to lump everyone with fairer skin into an amorphous “white” category and ignore the often fierce ethnic and social prejudices between Euro-Americans depending on which part of Europe they came from. I was grimly amused when many of the white supremacists who protested in Charlottesville in 2017 had names that sounded Italian, Slavic or Celtic — i.e., they were people who wouldn’t have been considered “white” by previous generations of white supremacists in the 1890’s, the 1930’s or even the 1960’s.
One good thing Gates’s Reconstruction program did on the cultural front was mount a fairly long segment on the Black minstrel performer Bert Williams, who started out in a comedy team with George Walker and became a huge star on his own — he was the first Black performer featured in a Broadway musical and he joined the Ziegfeld Follies (where W. C. Fields met him and called him “the funniest man I’ve ever seen on stage — and the saddest man I’ve ever seen off stage”).
Gates argues that Williams was the pioneer of the “double act” a lot of Black performers trying to cross over to white audiences have done: played up to the stereotypes of the white audience while also giving his Black fans what Gates called “the wink,” the acknowledgment that he knew he was playing a stereotype that didn’t reflect what Blacks were really like, but he was also making fun of the stereotype and the whites who believed it was what Blacks were really like.
Williams took on the insulting designation of many Black performers, and characters in songs about Blacks, as “coons” and turned it on its head by advertising himself and Walker as “The Two Real Coons” — driving white minstrelsy performers up the wall with their bold claim that essentially said, “Don’t watch them pretending to be us. Watch the real deal!”
Gates compared them to the rap group N.W.A. (whose name stood for “Niggers with Attitude”), though I loathe rap — especially the so-called “gangsta rap” N.W.A. pioneered and personified, with its relentless glorification of murder, rape, crime in general and acquisition of material goods (including the horribly tasteless jewelry known as “bling”) — so much I get cold chills at any documentary that has anything nice to say about it. Still, the point is that Williams paved the way for a lot of Black performers (including Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway and Richard Pryor) who built huge white followings by at once superficially depicting and actually lampooning racist stereotypes.

Reconstruction: The Sequel(s)

Gates races through the last parts of his story — perhaps someday he will be able to do a follow-up about African-American civil-rights activism in the first half of the 20th century, both the relatively sedate legal kind practiced by the NAACP (whose founding is depicted here as part of the segment on Du Bois, who moved from the Black-led Niagara Movement — so called because it had its inaugural convention at Niagara Falls — to the largely white-led National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1909 and of which Du Bois was the only Black member of the founding board; instead of taking the group’s presidency he picked the role of what was essentially its information minister, editing and writing a great deal of its flagship magazine, The Crisis) and more upfront activism that led to the Brown v. Board of Education decision invalidating racial segregation in education in 1954 and creating what I’ve argued elsewhere was a sort of “hunting license” to the African-American community.

Brown didn’t grant civil rights immediately but did spark the most intensive decade of African-American activism in U.S. history — even though, as I said when I wrote about the first half of this program, we shouldn’t make the easy assumption that Martin Luther King, Jr. was right when he said, “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.” One could read the reaction of America under President Trump and the resurgence of white supremacism and ethnic nationalism in general not only in this country but through much of the world as a temporary setback in the arc of history bending towards justice — or one could read the possibility that the gains of the 1960’s civil rights movement, which then and since has often been called “The Second Reconstruction,” will turn out to be as evanescent as the first, as the forces of white supremacism regain control of both America’s politics (which they’ve come close to achieving) and its culture (from which they’re a lot farther away) and make the idea that there ever was an African-American U.S. President as inconceivable as it was 100 years ago that there had ever been an African-American U.S. Senator.

Wednesday, April 10, 2019

The Past as Prologue: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Looks at Reconstruction

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9 p.m. last night I watched the first half of a fascinating PBS documentary program on Reconstruction, given the rather academic title Reconstruction: America After the Civil War for a political era that could almost be described as a second American Civil War, coming right after the first one — spanning the years 1865 to 1877 — and featuring some of the same combatants, including generals Ulysses S. Grant, William Sherman and Phil Sheridan for the North and Robert E. Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest for the South. The outcome, however, was profoundly different: the South, losers of the first U.S. Civil War, won the second one and were able, through sheer tenacity and resort to violence and terrorism, to revert the South’s African-American population to a state as close to slavery as possible without violating the Thirteenth Amendment.
Reconstruction was produced under the overall supervision of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., an African-American professor at Harvard and a distinguished academic who a few years ago felt the hot breath of white supremacy up close and personal when police in Boston arrested him for trying to enter his own house. They assumed he was a burglar because they couldn’t conceive of any African-American actually being affluent enough to own a house in that neighborhood. At the time Barack Obama was President and he invited Gates and the police that arrested him to the White House, where he brokered an apology. One suspects our current President would have had the white officers to the White House on their own and congratulated them on a job well done!
Interestingly, the show is structured into four episodes, of which only the first two (the ones shown back-to-back last night) deal with what most historians consider the actual Reconstruction period, 1865 to 1877. The first hour dealt with the presidency of Andrew Johnson, who had been appointed by President Abraham Lincoln as his running mate in 1864 on a so-called “National Union” ticket (those Republicans who still insist on calling their party the “Party of Lincoln” forget that in 1864 the Republican Party actually repudiated Lincoln and failed to renominate him, then couldn’t find a candidate willing to run against him), replacing Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln’s first-term vice-president.
According to Gates’s narration here, two days before his assassination Lincoln gave a speech in which he advocated giving the vote to some African-Americans — mainly landowners and veterans of the Union Army — and John Wilkes Booth was in the crowd and, upon hearing that announcement, turned to the person standing next to him and said, “That’s the last public speech he’ll ever give.” Gates made it seem like Lincoln’s advocacy of at least some Black suffrage was what made Booth decide to kill him; in fact Booth was part of a conspiracy that involved at least seven other people and was an attempt by Southern bitter-enders to achieve by decapitating the Union government what they had failed to win on the battlefield.
An assassin entered the bedroom of Secretary of State William Seward and slashed his face open; Seward survived but the newspapers of the time reported the attack on Seward in the same articles in which they covered the Lincoln assassination and the reporters obviously understood the link between the two events. Andrew Johnson was spared only because his would-be assassin, George Adzerodt, got drunk and lost his nerve — ironic that Johnson, himself an alcoholic, was spared assassination because his designated killer was also fond of the bottle.
Gates points out in the program that Johnson, a poor-white Tennessean who had worked himself up (the show does not mention that Johnson grew up not knowing how to read or write: he learned those skills only as an adult, after he married a schoolteacher who taught him), hated both the rich white Southern planters who owned the slaves and the slaves themselves. The way Johnson set up Reconstruction, the Southern white aristocrats had to come to him and beg him for pardons personally, but once he had exacted his ritual humiliation against them he generally came through and restored their full civil and political rights. Frederick Douglass met Johnson early on in his presidency and noticed booze on his breath (the meeting took place at 11 a.m.); Johnson made enough racist statements that Douglass reported back on the meeting, “Whatever he is, Andrew Johnson is no friend of the Black man.”
Johnson had the advantage that he took power in April 1865 and the next session of the U.S. Congress didn’t start until that December; he decided to enact his own version of Reconstruction by executive order (sound familiar?). Oliver Howard, who had been put in charge of the Freedmen’s Bureau — the federal agency charged with responsibility for easing and ensuring the ex-slaves’ transition to freedom — wanted to break up the old Southern plantations and give 40-acre plots to former Black slaves on a three-year loan with the proviso that if the Black farmers did well enough to make enough money to pay the loan, they would own the land free and clear (the origin of the famous phrase “40 acres and a mule”).
Johnson countermanded the order and instead said that the federal government would restore the plantations to their former white owners, and he stood back as the white men of the South re-elected their old Confederate officials to the new “Union” state governments and enacted the so-called “Black Codes” by which every adult Black resident had to sign an employment contract to a white landowner or employer, and if they didn’t they would be arrested and fined, and their services would “belong” to any white person who paid their fine.
In December 1865 the U.S. Congress reconvened and, led by the so-called “Radical Republican” leaders Congressmember Thaddeus Stevens (who got mentioned in this program) and Senator Charles Sumner (who didn’t), started passing laws to clamp down on the attempts of white Southerners to force Blacks back into near-slave conditions. Their main weapon was the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which they passed over Johnson’s veto and which they soon sought to protect against judicial review by inserting it into the U.S. Constitution as the Fourteenth Amendment.
As Gates pointed out, the three constitutional amendments passed just after the Civil War — the Thirteenth, which formally abolished slavery and “involuntary servitude”; the Fourteenth, which established birthright citizenship[1] and barred state governments from denying their citizens the “equal protection” of the laws, or “due process” under law (terms that would launch seemingly endless judicial arguments over what they meant and how much they constrained states from acting against broadly defined groups of their citizens); and the Fifteenth, which said that states could not infringe on the right to vote on the basis of race[2] — basically transformed the U.S. Constitution and made it at least potentially a tool for achieving racial equality.
The first hour of Reconstruction told the story of the Johnson Administration and its clashes with Congress over who should have authority over the Southern states — in particular whether they could automatically be readmitted to the U.S. or they had to go through a process and petition for readmission as states — as well as how deeply the federal government would intervene to protect the rights of Southern Blacks against the attacks of Southern whites.
It mentions Andrew Johnson’s impeachment and narrow escape (his conviction was defeated in the U.S. Senate by just one vote) just in passing, without explaining what the motivation for it was: at a time when the U.S. had no civil service system, government jobs were patronage appointments and the people holding them were routinely fired en masse when the White House changed parties. Andrew Johnson may have run for vice-president as the running mate of the Republican Lincoln, but once he was President he thought of himself as a Democrat (indeed, in 1868 he sought the Democratic, not the Republican, nomination to continue as President — and got exactly nowhere) and fired Republican officeholders en masse and replaced them with Democrats.
The Republicans who were subject to Johnson’s purges appealed to Congress to pass the Tenure of Office Act to put the brakes on Johnson firing them and replacing them with Democrats, and Johnson really ticked off the Congressional Republicans when he tried to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. A lot of Northerners thought Stanton had been the key player in the North’s victory in the Civil War; picked by Lincoln in 1862 to replace the corrupt Simon Cameron (to whom Lincoln had promised the job in exchange for enough convention delegates to win the 1860 nomination over the party establishment’s favorite, William Seward[3]), Stanton had made sure the Union Army got the weapons and supplies Northern taxpayers were paying for, and many people attributed the victory to Stanton’s honest and effective management of the War Department.
The Stanton firing led directly to Johnson’s impeachment and near-removal from office, though the real conflict between Johnson and Congressional leaders (who won a veto-proof majority of over two-thirds in both houses in the 1866 midterms) was over the Reconstruction Acts of 1867. These acts essentially called for the division of the former Confederate states into five zones of occupation, each one under the command of a Union general, and essentially suspended local authority until new state governments could be constituted through elections in which all free men, Black as well as white, could vote. The Reconstruction Acts also required the states to petition the federal government for permission to rejoin the Union, and as a condition of doing so required them to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment.
Under the occupation, quite a number of African-American men won political office in the formerly secessionist South — and one of the most fascinating aspects of the Reconstruction program is that, though Gates’ narration doesn’t mention it, a lot of these people don’t look especially Black in their surviving photos. It seems likely some of them were the mixed-race children of white Southern planters and the Black women slaves they took as mistresses or simply raped. Aside from Louisiana, a former French colony in which the mixed-race Creoles were recognized as a distinct social class with lower standing and fewer privileges than the whites but higher standing and more privileges than the Blacks, in the rest of the South mixed-race children were considered Black (indeed, some of the most effective anti-slavery propaganda before the Civil War consisted of photos of white-looking mixed-race children which were distributed by abolitionist groups to get people angry that people who looked white were nonetheless being considered “Black” and kept in slavery).
Gates mentions several of the Black politicians who won office during the Reconstruction era, including Hiram Revels (R-Mississippi), the first African-American U.S. Senator, but the one he presents as his paradigmatic figure of Black advancement during Reconstruction is Robert Smalls. Robert Smalls escaped slavery on May 13, 1862, when he and a crew of fellow slaves commandeered a Confederate cotton steamer, sailed it to the Union blockade line and surrendered it. After the war Smalls got elected to the Mississippi state legislature and eventually to Congress, and he wrote a memoir that was one of Gates’s primary sources on the rise and fall of Black political power in the South during Reconstruction.
America looked well on its way to a peaceful resolution of the issues raised by the Civil War and an effective transition to a multi-racial society, but the white Southerners fought back with a mix of terrorism and propaganda. In 1865 white Southern bitter-enders formed the Ku Klux Klan, which Gates explains was an extension of the former white slave patrols, freelance vigilantes who had patrolled the South looking for fugitive slaves. The Klan and similar organizations like the Knights of the White Camellia launched a campaign of no-holds-barred terrorism to intimidate Black officials from taking office and rank-and-file Blacks from voting at all.
They also sought to steal the property of Blacks who had built up successful farms and businesses — one woman farmer depicted in the show said she was tied to a tree by a white mob whose leader said he would either rape her or kill her, her “choice” — and as the 1870’s continued they were largely successful in wearing down Northern resistance. The white Southerners, particular the landed aristocracy that had owned most of the slaves in the first place, not only fought a terror campaign against free Southern Blacks, especially Black landowners, business owners and politicians, they bolstered it with a two-pronged propaganda campaign.
One prong was aimed at poor Southern whites to make them identify their interests with those of the white planter class rather than poor Southern Blacks — not the first time nor the last time that lower-income whites have been induced by racist and prejudicial appeals to vote against their own economic interests (this was revived by the Republican Party, after the historical reversal of the 1960’s in which the two major political parties switched their positions on civil rights in general and African-American equality in particular, in the so-called “Southern Strategy” by which Richard Nixon and Strom Thurmond neutralized the threat of George Wallace’s independent Presidential candidacy in 1968; originally intended just to stop Wallace from splitting the Right-wing vote in 1968, the appeals to racism at the heart of the “Southern Strategy” proved effective at winning Northern working-class whites as well, splitting the New Deal coalition and putting the Republican Party and the Right in general in ongoing control of American politics, with only minor and transitory interruptions, ever since).
The other prong was aimed at public opinion in the North. Part of this was a deliberate romanticization of the cause of the Confederacy — it became known as the “Lost Cause,” following the publication of a successful book of that title by Virginian author and journalist Edward Pollard in 1866 — which presented the pre-war South as a gentle, well-mannered aristocracy and said the Civil War had been fought for “State’s Rights.” Pollard’s (and his fellow “Lost Cause” authors’) attitude towards slavery and their willful ignorance of the fact (demonstrated, as Gates points out, in the ordinances of secession themselves) that the “right” the Southern states were fighting the federal government over was the “right” to own other people as slaves — is indicated in this passage from Pollard’s book, quoted on the Wikipedia page about the “lost cause” mythology generally:

We shall not enter upon the discussion of the moral question of slavery. But we may suggest a doubt here whether that odious term “slavery” which has been so long imposed, by the exaggeration of Northern writers, upon the judgment and sympathies of the world, is properly applied to that system of servitude in the South, which was really the mildest in the world; which did not rest on acts of debasement and disenfranchisement, but elevated the African, and was in the interest of human improvement; and which, by the law of the land, protected the negro in life and limb, and in many personal rights, and, by the practice of the system, bestowed upon him a sum of individual indulgences, which made him altogether the most striking type in the world of cheerfulness and contentment.

The romanticization of the Confederacy went into hyper-drive in 1870, when the death of Confederate commander Robert E. Lee was used as an occasion for both official and unofficial mourning throughout the South — Gates’ program includes a photo of a Southern courthouse in which every one of the outside columns was wrapped in a black spiral ribbon of mourning — including the erection of statues of Lee, usually on horseback, in public places throughout the South. These statues have become flash points of controversy in public life today as anti-racist Blacks and whites have demanded they be taken down, and white racists and nationalists (including President Trump) have insisted that they should remain. The bitter clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 began when a liberal mixed-race city government in Charlottesville ordered a Lee monument removed from a public park and Right-wing nationalist and racist Richard Spencer issued a nationwide call, “Unite the Right,” for white supremacists, nationalists and conservatives in general to come to Charlottesville to protect the Lee statue — which led to the death of one counter-protester and President Trump’s statement that “there were good people on both sides.”
White authors, not just in the South but the North as well, put out propaganda that said the Black-run state governments in power during the Reconstruction years had been either incompetent, corrupt or both; Gates’s program includes cartoons, some drawn by the legendary Thomas Nast, which depicted Black legislators as little more than apes. Probably the most powerful piece of propaganda for the “lost cause” mythology was D. W. Griffith’s 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation, based on a novel called The Clansman by the fanatically racist North Carolina author Thomas Dixon — which, in one of those uncomfortable bits of history, also turned out to be the finest film, from purely artistic criteria, made to that time. It depicts the Black legislators of the Reconstruction government (almost all played by white actors in blackface) as eye-rolling stereotypes playing craps on the legislative floor and lusting after innocent, virginal white women.
The good guys in Griffith’s film are the Ku Klux Klan, who seize power back from these corrupt monsters and secure renewed white rule by taking the Blacks’ guns away — all to the strains of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” (It was a silent film but it went out with a musical score to be played in the theatre as the film was shown, and for his exciting finale with the Klan saving the white South from the depradations of the Blacks, Griffith and his musical director, Joseph Carl Breil, specified the “Ride of the Valkyries.”)
Northern Republicans in Congress and the newly elected president from the 1868 election, Ulysses S. Grant, fought back. In 1871 Congress held hearings as part of an elaborate investigation into the activities of the Klan and other Southern vigilante groups, and as a result they passed the so-called “Enforcement Acts” under the provision of the Fourteenth Amendment (which has since become boilerplate in most subsequent Constitutional amendments) that “The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
Alas for the cause of racial equality in the U.S., the Grant administration also turned out to be spectacularly corrupt; while Grant himself (like later Republican President Warren G. Harding and unlike Donald Trump) was apparently personally honest, he appointed a lot of crooks and grafters to his Cabinet, The most famous scandal of the Grant administration was the Crédit Mobilier, a sham “bank” through which the Union Pacific Railroad funneled its construction contracts and created what amounted to a slush fund through which they could buy influence in Washington, D.C. through outright bribes of public officials.
The Democratic Party swept into power in both houses of Congress in the 1874 midterms — though the outgoing Republicans managed to hold out long enough that in their lame-duck session they passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which like the one a much later Congress passed in 1964 made it illegal for private businesses to discriminate in public accommodations on the basis of race. Unlike the one passed in 1964, the one passed in 1875 was thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1883, saying that the government had no authority to tell private business owners whom they could or couldn’t serve.
Earlier, in 1876, the Supreme Court had gutted the Enforcement Acts by ruling that a group of private vigilantes who slaughtered African-Americans en masse could not be convicted in federal court of violating their civil rights because they were not “state actors” — i.e., part of the state government. The final blow to Reconstruction came with the 1876 Presidential election, in which the Democrats nominated New York Governor Samuel J. Tilden — who based his campaign almost exclusively on the corruption of the federal government by Northern business interests and the economic “Panic” (19th-century speak for “depression”) of 1873 caused largely by the rampant self-dealing of the giant corporations that were taking over both the American economy and, through campaign contributions and out-and-out bribery of public officials, American politics.
The Republicans nominated Rutherford B. Hayes, whose main qualifications seem to have been that he’d been a Union general in the Civil War and he’d somehow escaped being corrupted by the Grant administration scandals. Tilden won the popular vote but Hayes and the Republicans made a deal with the governments of three Southern states where the election was still in dispute to get their electoral votes in exchange for withdrawing the last federal troops from the South.
One curious thing about this program is that though it’s scheduled to be four hours long, only the first two hours deal with the actual Reconstruction period, 1865-1877; the rest of it deals with the success of the self-styled “Redeemers” of the South — the white politicians, activists and vigilantes who restored white supremacy after Reconstruction and kept the terror campaign going through, among other things, lynchings — along with the nationwide success of their anti-Black propaganda campaign and the efforts of African-Americans and their shrinking (and then growing) number of white allies to reverse the racist trend and win Black equality in the courts, in the law generally and in society.
The tenacity of white racists in the South in particular — and in the nation generally — is illustrated by how quickly Southern (and some Northern) states enacted laws aimed at suppressing Democratic voters in general and Black and Latino voters in particular were passed as soon as the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act and removed the “pre-clearance” requirement by which states with a history of racial discrimination in voting had to get any changes in their elections laws approved in advance by the federal government to make sure they did not have a discriminatory intent or effect.
It’s clear Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and the many people (mostly Black, though one quite important white person in Reconstruction historiography — Eric Foner, who along with white historians Eric McKitrick and Kenneth Stampp and Black historian John Hope Franklin began the re-examination of Reconstruction in the early 1960’s[4] and started moving away from the pro-white, pro-“Redeemer,” anti-Black consensus that had ruled Reconstruction historiography since the 1890’s — was prominently featured) he interviewed on screen are seeing the current upsurge in white racism that helped elect Donald Trump President is merely an interruption in what Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the arc of history … bend[ing] towards justice” and that the civil rights movement that started in the 1960’s (or earlier) was the beginning of a permanent trend towards racial (and other) equality in this country.
But what if it isn’t? What if Donald Trump and the racists in his coalition will be as successful in snuffing out the gains of the civil rights movement (what some historians have actually called the “Second Reconstruction”) long-term as their predecessors in the white-supremacist “Redeemer” movement were in snuffing out the gains of the first Reconstruction? What if America’s future is a so-called “nationalist populist” one in which the nation is ruled indefinitely by a Right-wing coalition who regards the ideas that whites are inherently superior to people of color, men are inherently superior to women, and Queers are pond scum who deserve jail instead of marriage? What if someday Barack Obama is viewed as as bizarre an anomaly in his historical era as Robert Smalls is viewed today in his?
If nothing else, the tragic story of Reconstruction is an object lesson in the dogged persistence of America’s racists and their determination, no matter how many strides African-Americans make towards equality, to push them back into the subservient position they regard as their inborn “nature”? At this point I’d have to say that one of those futures is as least as likely as the other!



[1]The guarantee in the Fourteenth Amendment that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside” — so hated by modern-day Right-wingers for granting automatic U.S. citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants if they are born on American soil — was largely intended to reverse the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 decision Dred Scott v. Sandford, which held that African-Americans were not U.S. citizens and “the Black man has no rights which the white man is obliged to respect.”

[2] — One of the most misunderstood aspects of American constitutional law is that it gives state governments virtually unlimited authority to determine who may — or may not — vote in their states. The great amendments that extended the franchise — the 15th, which extended the vote to people of color; the 19th, which extended it to women; the 24th, which barred disqualification of voters for failing to pay a poll tax (a favorite device of white Southern governments to deny the vote to Blacks); and the 26th, which lowered the minimum voting age to 18 nationwide — are all framed as specific limits on the otherwise absolute power of state government to enfranchise or disenfranchise people.

[3] — An historical parallel: in 1860 Lincoln, an upstart failed Senate candidate from Illinois, beat William Seward, based in New York and the party elite’s favorite, for his party’s Presidential nomination and then, once in office, appointed Seward Secretary of State. In 2008 Barack Obama, an upstart Senator from Illinois, beat the New York-based Hillary Clinton, the party establishment’s favorite for the nomination, and once he was elected he appointed Clinton Secretary of State.

[4] — Actually, the first serious historian to challenge the mythology of Reconstruction as an oppression against white Southerners by unworthy Blacks, white “carpetbaggers” from the North and Southern white “scalawags” who helped them was W. E. B. DuBois in his 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America. But because DuBois was both Black and a Communist his book was dismissed as special pleading and the challenge to the white-supremacist view of Reconstruction didn’t catch fire in academe for another quarter-century.