Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866-1896
By Charles Postel
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow
By Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Penguin Press
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” William Faulkner’s mordant reflection on the intransigence of racial bigotry in a country dedicated to equal rights has easily been forgotten at moments of liberal optimism when the arc of the moral universe seems to be bending toward justice. Three years into the Trump administration, however, Faulkner’s admonition seems all too relevant. Despite the toppling of some Confederate monuments, we are once again facing the kind of Southern revanchism that killed off the achievements of Reconstruction after 1876 and that reversed many of the gains of the civil rights movement after the 1960s.
“Who could have predicted,” muses Henry Louis Gates Jr., in his new book Stony the Road, “that the election of the first black president would become a focal point for triggering a dramatic rise in the public expression of some of the oldest, nastiest, and most vulgar white supremacist animus about black people?”
Perhaps nobody predicted that Obama would be a trigger point, but Gates’s book is all about the white supremacist reaction to black progress and political power. A highly informative and readable companion to his PBS documentary, Stony the Road chronicles the heroic determination of a small and influential group of elite black activists—lawmakers, scholars, writers, artists, and musicians—to confront the obstacles white Americans had strewn in their path. Another new history, Charles Postel’s Equality, covers egalitarian politics in the same period as Stony the Road, but from a different angle. Postel tells the story of three white, or mostly white, organizations: the Grange, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and the Knights of Labor.
No obstacle to equality in the post–Civil War era was greater than “redemption”—the white supremacist, reactionary countermovement of ex-Confederates against Reconstruction. Redemption began with the removal of federal troops from the South in 1877 and was finally completed in North Carolina in 1898, when white supremacists decisively smashed a fragile white-black political alliance.
The malevolent power of white supremacy is a familiar theme in historical writing on the post–Civil War South, one of the darkest chapters in all of American history. Gates provides us with a salutary reminder of some of its more notorious features. After the Civil War, anti-black white activists mounted a “rhetorical and martial terrorist campaign to reestablish white supremacy as the unofficial law of the land.” Fearful that the ex-slaves would attack their former masters, white mobs organized immediately after the war to brutalize countless black men and women in an orgy of extralegal violence spearheaded by a new terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan.
In the decades to come, white lawmakers whittled away the black civil rights guaranteed by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, culminating in the Supreme Court’s promulgation of the “separate but equal” doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. In 1915, white filmmaker D.W. Griffith riveted audiences with the country’s first cinematic blockbuster, Birth of a Nation, an effusive paean to the Ku Klux Klan, complete with historical commentary by then-President Woodrow Wilson. Gates doubts the authenticity of the oft-repeated story that, after a private viewing in the White House, Wilson praised the film as “history written with lightning.” Later, after the U.S. entry into the First World War, Wilson expressed misgivings about the screening, especially to black audiences.
Yet the damage had been done. The failure of Reconstruction was at once political, economic, and legal. If the federal government had stripped secessionist planters of their land and used it to compensate the freedmen for their lives of unpaid labor, this would have been the “single most dramatic change conceivable” for the defeated South. But the early plans for land redistribution to former slaves were crushed.
In explaining this tragic denouement, Gates puts special emphasis on the deleterious consequences of new kinds of visual iconography, which included photography and multicolor chromolithography as well as film. Gates’s book features four multipage inserts of expertly chosen images that illustrate both the achievement of blacks and their visual denigration. Technical advances in printing, Gates observes, made it possible for the first time to “produce vivid visual imagery that could literalize the metaphorical imagery of novels and scientific tracts of black people as less than human.” Those images are an important part of the story of American racism.
In his final chapter, Gates shows how a rising generation of black activists responded to this relentlessly demeaning media barrage. Among the most imaginative of their counterthrusts was the creation of an oppositional culture structured around the “New Negro,” a cultural archetype that Gates traces to an essay published by a white missionary in 1894. Though the New Negro was originally envisioned to be narrowly preoccupied only with his material betterment, black public intellectuals reimagined him in the decades to come as a source of inspiration.
Library of Congress
Frank Farrell, a black delegate, introduces Terence Powderly, the head of the Knights of Labor, at its 1886 convention (Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper). The biggest labor organization of its time, the Knights were relatively open to black participation.
Postel’s argument follows a similar trajectory, though it is more original, and, in certain respects, even more unsettling. The “great social movements” of the age did not revolve, as is often assumed, around the pursuit of liberty. On the contrary, they “reflected an understanding” that “without equality there could be no freedom, and without solidarity there could be no equality.”
To make his argument, Postel re-examines the three most influential post–Civil War movement organizations. The Grange was long the country’s most powerful farmers’ lobby. The WCTU, though remembered mainly for its opposition to alcohol, was the leading women’s advocacy group of its time. The Knights of Labor was the largest workers’ federation in the country, if not the world.
All three organizations supported progressive causes. Yet, as Postel argues, the “dynamics” of reform posed an “inescapable dilemma”: “Mighty farmer, labor, and women’s rights movements undertaken in the name of equality were accompanied by the destruction of political, economic, and civil rights for African Americans and other racial minorities.” Among the era’s conspicuous losers were not only blacks, but also Indians, Mexicans, and Chinese.
The Grange, the WCTU, and the Knights were all large, sophisticated, and influential. Of the three, the largest and “most impactful” was the Grange. Founded in 1867, it originated, improbably enough for a farm lobby, in the bowels of the federal bureaucracy: All but one of its founders held high government positions in Washington, D.C. To expand its reach, Grange leader Oliver Kelley struck out for the South, where he quickly built a coalition between Northern and Southern white farmers that included many plantation owners, effectively ensuring that the organization would privilege the interests of whites over blacks.
Although land distribution was a pressing issue for ex-slaves, the Grange studiously avoided it. U.S. history textbooks typically characterize the Grange as a bottom-up social movement that pitted yeoman farmers against plutocratic railroad barons. Postel demurs. Not farmer solidarity, but sectional reconciliation was its leaders’ highest priority. They preached equality and solidarity between the Northern and Southern states, not between white and black farmers. In fact, the recruitment by Grange leaders of violent white supremacist ex-Confederates significantly impeded the Grant administration’s pro-black Reconstruction efforts. By championing the equality of the states, the Grange rested its appeal on “white solidarity” and a “disregard for the equal rights claims of the former slaves.”
Though the Grange was ostensibly nonpartisan, it engaged in an “impressive array of political activism” to reorder the political economy in accordance with a “rational and egalitarian nationalism” (egalitarian, that is, except for racial minorities). Cooperative stores and crop insurance were high on its agenda, as was the enactment of state laws to regulate the rates that railroads could charge to haul their produce to market and the fees warehouses could demand to store their produce while awaiting shipment.
Though the Grange supported the resurgent post–Civil War anti-monopoly movement, it was relatively late to the cause. Contrary to what many might assume, it faulted railroads not for being too large, but for being too small. Neither the Grange nor the anti-monopolists objected to the impersonal rationalization of the economy. On the contrary, they tried to bring “rational system and bureaucratic order out of the real and perceived turmoil of the increasingly corporate economy.” Grange leaders, in short, pursued “egalitarian goals” through “bureaucratic and centralized means” in a search for order to tame “corporate chaos,” and, in particular, alleviate the “speculative disorder and mayhem that the corporate owners of railroads, banks, coal mines, and other industries imposed on the post–Civil War economy.” Not until the 20th century would a new generation of anti-monopolists, led by the lawyer-turned-jurist Louis Brandeis, reject the big-is-beautiful mantra.
The WCTU is a hard sell for 21st-century progressives. Prohibition, its greatest achievement, is today better remembered as a prelude to the carceral state than as the culmination of a decades-long crusade against the ravages of substance abuse. Even so, the WCTU was by far the country’s largest women’s organization and, under the leadership of the redoubtable Frances Willard, championed causes dear to the heart of present-day feminists, including women’s suffrage, gender equality, and government-funded early education. In addition, and to a much greater extent than the Grange, it sporadically reached out to like-minded blacks.
The Knights of Labor proved even more successful at bridging the racial divide. This was partly a matter of necessity: Employers hired blacks as strikebreakers, obliging labor leaders to make common cause, lest their members lose their jobs. But the “cooperative alternatives” to existing institutional arrangements that the Knights championed could do little in the long run to relieve what they called the “monstrous evils of competition” and the failure of the government to “fulfill its primary functions of protecting equal rights and enforcing justice.”
Neither Gates nor Postel writes in a triumphalist vein. Yet the stories they tell do not lack for heroes. Gates’s heroes are mostly luminaries in the black pantheon: Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston. Postel’s are organization-builders who bridged the color line: for the WCTU, the black activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper; for the Knights, the white organizer of black field hands Hiram Hover. Neither author sentimentalizes the people.
Progressives today confront a dilemma not unlike the challenge that confronted Gates’s black activists and Postel’s organization-builders. White supremacy had its appeal to many whites then, and it has its appeal to some whites now. The menace of redemption may be forgotten, but it has not disappeared. Gates is hopeful that we may finally be able to “come to terms” with the “original sin” of slavery. Yet cultural uplift is not enough. “No people, in all of human history,” Gates wryly observes, “has ever been liberated by the creation of art. None.” The challenge of our age—like the challenge of Reconstruction—is, at bottom, rooted neither in culture, nor even in economics, but in politics.
Postel pins his hopes on the resurgence of a multipronged quest for equality and solidarity—“the multiple struggles of women and men to realize their visions of a just and equal society.” Gates looks instead to the emancipatory potential of an adversary culture: “If the Redeemed South could magically transform itself into a ‘New South,’ despite looking suspiciously like the Old South of slavery times, then why shouldn’t—or couldn’t—the African American middle class reinvent itself as well?” Hard times can prepare people for new movements for change. These two fine books leave us with the hope that, out of the darkness of the present, a new day might just be aborning.
