The fight over Reconstruction in John Kennedy's "Profiles in Courage" (1 of 2)

This is the first on two posts relating to Reconstruction and its overthrow. This is the kind of thing I post about every April as a counter-celebration of Confederate "Heritage" Month. But I'm posting this because of its relevance to the Trump impeachment.

John F. Kennedy’s book Profiles in Courage (1956) is an interesting enigma.

Kennedy was a Senator at the time he wrote it and, as we know, had higher political ambitions. The book is a series of historical sketches about Senators who displayed what JFK took to be political courage. (Theodore Sorenson was a significant collaborator on the book.)

The book is now mainly famous for its author, not so much for the content. But it won a Pulitzer Prize and is obviously very well-informed about nineteenth-century American history. Of the seven chapters devoted to individual men, five of them deal with 19th-century political figures and events.

It’s also, unsurprisingly, written with careful attention to contemporary political alignments. Which also makes the book fascinating as a historical document. Because in 1956, phrases like “reaching across the aisle” and “bipartisanship” had not yet taken on their 2019 meaning of Democrats surrendering to Republicans. The segregated South was still the “Solid South” where conservative Democrats were overwhelmingly dominant. The ideological differences between liberal (left/center-left) and conservative cut across both parties. Notably, there were many Republicans who were willing to support some civil rights legislation, in part to weaken the Solid South segregationist bloc.

This context shows up in his chapters on Mississippi Sen. Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar (Senator 1873-85) and Sen. Edmund Gibson Ross of Kansas (Senator 1866-71). Both chapters apply what in 1956 was still the respectable mainstream academic view that held Reconstruction to have been a bad enterprise driven by vengeful Northerners egged on by malicious, fanatical Radical Republican politicians.

LQC Lamar had the dubious distinction of having been a pre-Civil War Congressman from Mississippi, author of the treasonous Mississippi state secession ordinance, and a soldier in the Confederate Army which was dedicated to killing the soldiers of the United States Army.

The Reconstruction period ended in 1977. As a Senator, Lamar played a double role. In Mississippi, he fired up Klan violence. In the Senate, he played the dignified reconciler, the role Kennedy celebrated as a profile in courage. He praised Lamar as “a man of law and honor” without appraising the sinister double role he played with people in Mississippi. This chapter is genuinely bad because it is so immersed in the “Redeemer” (anti-democracy, anti-Reconstruction) that was still the dominant view even among white historians.

A more progressive and realistic view of Reconstruction was still held and actively defended at the time, even if was considered disreputably left. The Journal of Negro History (now the Journal of African-American History), published the more realistic version. The October 1955 issue of that journal, for instance, published an article by Clarence Bacote (“William Finch, Negro Councilman and Political Activities in Atlanta During Early Reconstruction”), which presented a view of the real stakes in Reconstruction that sounds perfectly mainstream now, but didn’t fit the picture of vengeful Yankee fanaticism dominant at the time that so influenced Kennedy’s own view:

In the political history of the Negro in Atlanta, there are two dates that have great significance, namely, December 7, 1870, and May 13, 1953. On the first date, Negroes for the first time were elected to public office in the city; on the second date, after a lapse of eighty-three years, Negroes again were elected. However, the climate of opinion in 1870 was entirely different from that which prevailed in 1953. The first date fell in a period when the social, economic, and political conditions were unsettled, and when the Negro faced insurmountable odds in trying to adjust himself in an hostile environment. Despite these obstacles, Negro leaders were struggling to lay the foundation for those rights and privileges which accompany first-class citizenship. [my emphasis]

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., sometimes called the court historian of Camelot, would later write that Kennedy’s experience as President with hardcore segregationists like Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett led him to wonder whether he had been overly harsh in his view of the pro-Reconstruction Radical Republicans.

Part 2 will cover JFK's treatment of Edmund Ross, who played a pivotal role in obstructing democratic Reconstruction in the former Confederacy.