The PBS website for it has a Timeline, which with a little fumbling around with your mouse you can make talk.
Gopnik stresses the key role that violence played in the anti-Reconstruction, anti-democracy "Redemption" movement that by the mid-1970s, had sucessfully overthrown the Reconstruction governments. "The historian David Blight estimates that, between 1867 and 1868, something like ten per cent of the blacks who attended constitutional conventions in the South were attacked by the Klan."
The period of Reconstruction was tragically short, extending basically from 1865-1877. In other words, basically the length of time between the 2008 Presidential election campaign and now. But "tragically" doesn't adequately describe it. Because the classic Greek notion of tragedy was about a hero done in by fate. It wasn't Fate that destroyed Reconstruction democracy. It was the deliberate policitical and violent actions by the white supremacist Redeemers and the lack of commitment to democracy on the part of Republicans and Northern Democrats, as well.
Gopnik describes how powerful the Lost Cause narrative that justified the violent overthrow of Reconstruction was, and for how long it persisted as the dominanbt narrative. It's one of the most important narrative of American history illustrating how a view of the past frames current political disputes in important ways.
The historical literature that arose to defend white supremacy was soon accepted as a chronicle of truths, especially in the countless sober-seeming memoirs of the former leaders of the slave states, including Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, who insisted that slavery was a side issue in a states’-rights war. The “Lost Cause” took on popular literary form in Thomas Dixon’s novel “The Clansman,” which became the basis for D. W. Griffith’s 1915 “The Birth of a Nation,” the first great American feature film. In Griffith’s Reconstruction, blacks, many played by white actors in blackface, are either menaces or morons (black legislators of the kind depicted in that lithograph spend their time in the statehouse drinking and eating), and are, thankfully, routed by the Klan - shown dressing in sheets because they have grasped the primitive African fear of ghosts.It's always good to see a decent article about Reconstruction. , As Gopnik indicates, it wasn't until the 1960s or so that a realistic, democratic history of Reconstruction became more widely respectable.
It is still difficult to credit how long the Lost Cause lie lasted. Writing in the left-wing The Nation, James Agee, the brilliant film critic and the author of the text for “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” could announce, in 1948, that “Griffith’s absolute desire to be fair, and understandable, is written all over the picture; so are degrees of understanding, honesty, and compassion far beyond the capacity of his accusers. So, of course, are the salient facts of the so-called Reconstruction years.” Even as late as the nineteen-sixties, the Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, in what was then a standard “Oxford History of the American People,” called for “ten thousand curses on the memory of that foulest of assassins, J. Wilkes Booth” - but for a surprising reason. “Not only did he kill a great and good President; he gave fresh life to the very forces of hate and vengeance which Lincoln himself was trying to kill,” Morison wrote. “Had Lincoln lived, there is every likelihood that his magnanimous policy towards the South would have prevailed; for, even after his death, it almost went through despite the Radicals.” The thought that the failure of Reconstruction had been its insufficient attention to the feelings and the interests of the white majority - like the thought that “The Birth of a Nation” should be considered to hold the “salient facts” of Reconstruction - strikes us now as astounding, but it was orthodox textbook history and criticism for an unimaginably long time, and among people who believed themselves to be progressive. [my emphasis]
But for people who sought it out, there was always a strand of pro-democracy histories of Reconstruction. They were not the dominant narrative in the historical profession, but they were there.
In addition to W.E B. Du Bois, the Journal of Negro History (Journal of African American History since 2002) and historians associated with it, for example, kept the realistic narrative alive. The New Yorker piece mentions Mississippi's black Senator Hiram Revels, who seemed to echo a Redemptionist (anti-Reconstruction) position. But John Roy Lynch, the first African-America Mississippi Congressman, elected to Congress in 1873, was a consistent defender of Reconstruction. He published a book called The Facts of Reconstruction in 1913 and lived well into the second FDR Administration and was writing defences of Reconstruction and criticisms of the dominant but false and reactionary accounts by mainstream historians.
Historians like Kenneth Stampp (who taught at UC-Berkeley) and John Hope Franklin were influential in making an honest evaluation of Reconstruction more mainstream respectable in the profession. Richard Current's 1988 book Those Terrible Carpetbaggers: A Reinterpretation (1988) is one of my favorite accounts of the period, and very pro-Reconstruction. It has a great account of Mississippi Gov. Adelbert Ames' desperate attempt to prevent a Redeemer takeover in Mississiippi. Eric Foner, who Gopnik describes as a "great revisionist [pro-Reconstruction] historian," was dismissive of Ames in his book Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (2005), something that has always struck me as bizarre.
[04/13/2019: Updated to clarify that Hiram Revels was the first African-American Mississippi Senator and John Roy Lynch was Mississippi's first African-American Member of the House of Representatives. Revels became Senator in 1870, elected to that office by the state legislature, which was the method of electing Senators in the 19th century.]
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