Timely Reminder on US Bigotry

GIVEN THE BROAD SPREAD OF MEDIA I COVER, most of them fleeting and ephemeral, it’s good to turn occasionally to a medium that can boast some lasting solidity. I mean the perhaps humble, certainly technologically uncomplicated medium of a book.

I want to focus this week on a new (and at 560 pages a very hefty) volume from Liveright Books, the house that’s historically noted as the first publisher to put before American readers the work of Sigmund Freud, e.e. cummings and T. S. Eliot, most notably his modern epic poem The Waste Land.

The new book is timely. Its main title is The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic and it’s written by the University of Connecticut’s Professor of American History, Manisha Sinha. That’s perhaps a curious verbal usage for her to use, the Second Republic, to denote a certain epoch in our history, though that kind of terminology is fairly common in Europe. There, we’ll recognize it in labels like France’s First Republic (following the Revolution in 1789), or the Second Empire (under Napoleon from 1852), or more recently the Fifth Republic (under Charles De Gaulle in the 1950s) – and perhaps with a shudder the Third Reich in Germany, under Hitler.

Professor Sinha (below right) adds a subtitle to specify exactly what period she means. Reconstruction, 1860 to 1920. That very word remains arresting to me. When I first immigrated to the US over thirty years ago, I had already in my first homeland of Britain undergone a certain amount of education in the humanities area, to bachelor degree level at least, but I had — appallingly — been taught nothing about America’s Reconstruction period. I made it my business to find out – no reporter covering American politics and society would be complete, after all, without such knowledge. But interestingly, later on when I pursued my obligatory studies of the American Constitution and History, in order to earn my US citizenship, Reconstruction was never mentioned then either, despite all the many official quiz questions I had to answer.

What’s at issue of course is that period which followed the South’s surrender in the Civil War — when efforts were made to extend more fully, now that slavery had been abolished, the guiding principle of equality among Americans. Those efforts we can now of course see as failed efforts. But Professor Sinha offers a strikingly full picture of how widespread the changes were during Reconstruction, if not (in the end) so deeply embedded.

For instance, Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution were passed that guaranteed Black Americans full citizenship including, for men at least, the right to vote. Some indication of how incomplete in their effect these reforms might finally turn out to be was demonstrated by Abraham Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson (below, left) who so stubbornly opposed the changes.

Johnson appeared nostalgic for his days as a slave-holder – though not completely happy with them, since he claimed, about the enslaved African Americans who worked for him, that he himself was “their slave instead of their being mine.” That whining phrase echoes or prefigures the kind of self-pitying grievance that we’ve all gotten used to hearing from the current White House occupant. Johnson also made an emphatic point to a southern governor, as Professor Sinha is careful to recall. Johnson said:

“This is a country for white men, and … as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.” 

That same 1860s President angrily vetoed one civil rights measure after another that came onto his desk. But — significantly for the Reconstruction process — the Congress usually overrode him. Quite unlike our Legislature in 2025. The two chambers of that Congress included, remarkably for the time, though obviously in the end insufficiently, sixteen Black members: – fourteen in the House, and two in the Senate.

HISTORIANS FROM W.E,B, DUBOIS ONWARD have noted that America’s liberalizing zeal also extended during that idealistic period (at least in part) to wider reforms. Sinha draws attention to moves toward rights for Native Americans and for women. For example, the state of Alabama (yes, Alabama, in the 1860s) established not only an agricultural college that young Blacks could attend but in addition property rights were introduced even for women, for married women at least. The state’s Constitutional Convention also resolved that former slaves could collect pay from their former so-called owners, for the period they were kept enslaved after the Emancipation Proclamation — and that certainly sounds a lot like this country’s first attempt at a Reparations Bill.

The radicalism evident here was indeed widespread in its scope. Journalism of the period makes this clear if we examine it. America’s simultaneous expansion into the so-called “Wild” West called forth spirited opposition. And it prompted comparison with the evils of Southern white supremacy.  The commentator and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison protested that “the same contempt is generally felt [in] the West for the Indians as was felt [in] the South for the negroes.”

The international context was not forgotten, either. The country’s first Black daily newspaper, the New Orleans Tribune, declared that “whether the victim is called serf in Russia, peasant in Austria, Jew in Prussia, proletarian in France, pariah in India, Negro in the United States, at heart it is the same denial of justice.”  And with a certain irony that’s very apparent to us in our modern times, an Illinois gathering of Black citizens issued a warning about the dangers of an American “coup d’état” (those very words), just like the one staged in France a few years earlier by Napoleon, when he crowned himself as Emperor. Their statement also drew attention to “the aboriginal man of America, once the undisputed possessor of this continent,” who was, they said, robbed of his land “by coercion.”

Amid these condemnations of oppression and calls for reform, major change was achieved institutionally in America, if only for Reconstruction’s all-too-short-lived period. As well as in the federal government, six hundred Black Southerners were elected to state legislatures. Woefully insufficient to what was needed, undeniably, but nonetheless substantial.

However … and herein lies the shameful tragedy that this book so painstakingly charts … the backlash against all the reformist change was to prove powerfully obdurate.

There came about the strangely unwritten but nonetheless very real “Compromise of 1877.” In essence it allowed – following a hotly disputed presidential election, a Northern Republican, Rutherford Hayes, to take office in return for concessions made to the Southern Democrats. The agreement’s most obvious effect? Federal troops were withdrawn from the South, a military presence that many on the Union side had considered essential, in order to ensure the final arrival of what the Constitution a century earlier had called “a more perfect union” – that familiar but often forlorn-sounding notion.

White Southerners now felt free to impose the Jim Crow laws and poll taxes, plus a more ruthless wave of lynching, and a campaign of murders and mutilation to terrorize the Black population. This population was — perhaps most crucially — prevented from voting, enabling the South to remain white-dominated and divisively segregated through the whole hundred years or more that followed.

I strongly recommend you pick up and digest The Second American Republic.

It’s not just a highly instructive exercise in “what might have been,” both detailed and deep. It’s also a powerful and timely reminder of how endemic in America is its capacity for a successful backlash by bigotry against progressive reforms.