David Warsh: Perhaps we're in the Third Reconstruction
Former slaves voting in New Orleans in 1867. After Reconstruction ended, in 1977, most Black people in much of the South lost the right to vote and didn’t regain it until the 1960s.
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
“Reconstruction” (1865–1877), as high school students encounter it, is the period of a dozen years following the American Civil War. Emancipation and abolition were carried through; attempts were made to redress the inequities of slavery; and problems were resolved involving the full re-admission to the Union of the 11 states that had seceded.
The latter measures were more successful than the former, but the process had a beginning and an end. After the back-room deals that followed the disputed election of 1876, the political system settled in a new equilibrium.
I’ve become intrigued by the possibility that one reconstruction wasn’t enough. Perhaps the American republic must periodically renegotiate the terms of the agreement that its founders reached in the summer of 1787 – the so-called “miracle in Philadelphia,” in which the Constitution of the United States was agreed upon, with all its striking imperfections.
Is it possible that we are now embroiled in a third such reconstruction?
The drama of Reconstruction is well documented and thoroughly understood. It started with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, continued with his Second Inaugural address, the surrender of the Confederate Army at Appomattox Courthouse; emerged from the political battles Andrew Johnson’s administration and the two terms of President U.S. Grant; and climaxed with the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution – the “Reconstruction Amendments.” It ended with the disputed election of 1876, when Southern senators supported the election of Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican, in exchange for a promise to formally end Reconstruction and Federal occupation he following year.
The shameful truce that followed came to be known as the Jim Crow era. It last 75 years. The subjugation of African-Americans and depredations of the Ku Klux Klan were eclipsed by the maudlin drama of reconciliation among of white veterans – a story brilliantly related in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, by David Blight, of Yale University. For an up-to-date account, see The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution, by Eric Foner, of Columbia University.
The second reconstruction, if that is what it was, was presaged in 1942 by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal’s book, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy, commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation. The political movement commenced in 1948 with the desegregation of the U.S. armed forces. The civil rights movement lasted from Rosa Parks’s arrest, in 1955, through the March on Washington, in 1963, at which Martin Luther King Jr. made delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, and culminated in the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Repression was far less violent than on the way to the Jim Crow era. There were murders in the civil rights era, but mostly they made newspaper front pages.
And while the second reconstruction entered on race, many other barriers were breached in those rears as well: ethnicity, gender and sexual preference. In Roe v Wade the Supreme Court established a constitutional right to abortion a decade after the invention of the Pill made pregnancy a fundamentally deliberate decision.
How do reconstructions end? In the aftermath of decisive elections, it would seem – in the case of the second reconstruction, with the 1968 election of Richard Nixon, based on a Southern strategy devised originally by Barry Goldwater. Nixon was in many ways the last in a line of liberal presidents who followed Franklin Roosevelt. He had promised to “end the {Vietnam} war” the war and he did. An armistice of sorts – Norman Lear’s All in the Family television sit-com – preceded his Watergate-inspired resignation. Peace lasted until the election of President Barack Obama.
So what can be said about this third reconstruction, if that is what it is? Certainly it is still more diffuse – not just Black Lives Matter, but #MeToo, transgender rights, immigration policy and climate change, all of it aggravated by the election of Donald Trump. This latest reconstruction is often described as a culture war, by those who have never seen an armed conflict. How might this episode end? In the usual way, with a decisive election. Armistice may takes longer to achieve.
For a slightly different view of the history, see Bret Stephens’s Why Wokeness Will Fail. We journalists are free to voice opinions, but we must ultimately leave these questions to political leaders, legal scholars, philosophers, historians and the passage of time. I was heartened, though, at the thought expressed by economic philosopher John Roemer, of Yale University, who knows much more than I do about these matters, when he wrote the other day to say “I think the formulation of the first, second, third…. Reconstructions is incisive. It reminds me of the way we measure the lifetime of a radioactive mineral. We celebrate its half-life, three-quarters life, etc….. but the radioactivity never completely disappears. Racism, like radioactivity, dissipates over time but never vanishes.”
David Warsh is a veteran columnist and an economic historian He’s proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first ran.
David Warsh: Toward a third Reconstruction
The March on Washington, D.C., on Aug. 28, 1963, during the Civil Rights Movement — what might be called the “Second Reconstruction.’’
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
Until recently, Reconstruction was a topic in American history of interest chiefly to high school juniors preparing to take the college Advanced Placement exam. During the 13 years after the Civil War, the United States reintegrated the states that had seceded from the Union and struggled to define the legal status in them of African-Americans under the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. By 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson reintroduced segregation to the federal workforce, the hard-fought gains of the episode had faded from living memory.
Then again, every America born before, say, 1960, has a first-hand experience of the Civil Rights Movement. It is often dated from President Harry Truman’s 1948 decision to integrate U.S. armed forces after the contradictions of segregation re-emerged and became untenable during World War II. There was Jackie Robinson and the integration of Major League Baseball, and then the marches with their dramatic confrontations. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968; George Wallace was roundly defeated as a third-party presidential candidate (though he did better than any third-party candidate between Theodore Roosevelt and H, Ross Perot). After 1970, most people turned their attention to other concerns. Ill-feelings were cosmetically treated away on television: Archie Bunker and the Cosby show.
Events of the last several years, often summed up by the assertion that Black lives matter, have often been portrayed as the beginnings of a Third Reconstruction. The implication is that the Civil Rights Movement was the second: historian C. Vann Woodward said as much. There may one day be a fourth. The Rev. William Barber II, pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church, in Goldsboro, N.C., anticipated as much in 2016 with The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement.
The view that the history of the Unites States is essentially inseparable from the history of slavery was forcefully voiced by The New York Times, in 2019, in its 1619 Project. “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written,” asserted Nikole Hanna-Jones, in an opening essay. “Black Americans have fought to make them true.” Not everyone was convinced. But the Trump administration’s rejoinder, the “1776 Project” of its 1776 Commission, released last week, has been quickly dismissed. The inauguration ceremonies brought all this to mind. Three books, more than any others in the last 30 years, have done more to open my eyes:
The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (1991), by Nicholas Lemann, then of The Atlantic Monthly, decisively put on the map the enormous changes wrought after 1944 by the introduction of the mechanical cotton picker, replacing workers whose numbers had soared after 1794, when the invention of the cotton gin made the crop newly much more profitable. The subsequent migration of unemployed farm workers from the rural South to the metropolitan North brought a cascade of changes in the lives of the migrants, and the cities in which they sought homes and jobs. Ghettoes, unemployment, single-parent families, drugs and crime were among the unintended effects. So was newfound political power and, for many, greater affluence.
Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2002), by David Blight, of Yale University, demonstrated that of the three quite different stories that emerged from the Civil War, it was the vision of reconciliation between the mostly white armies of the North and the South that came to dominate, permitting the White supremacist vision of continuing racial segregation and reasserted white privilege to eclipse an emancipationist vision of constitutional equality for African-Americans citizens. Blight followed up with a Pulitzer-Prize-winning biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018).
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (2017), by Richard Rothstein, of the Economic Policy Institute, recovered a lost history of how bankers and real-estate agents successfully enlisted federal, state and local policies to create and maintain racially homogenous neighborhoods in cities and suburbs nationwide. The patterns of segregation that resulted violate constitutional rights, he argued, and now require remediation. His memorable account of how such policies loomed in the background of the 2014 killing of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Mo., is here.
Last week I read Revisiting Time on the Cross after 45 Years: The Slavery Debate and the New Economic History, by Eric Hilt, of Wellesley College and the National Bureau of Economic Research. Hilt noted that a wave of celebrated books that have appeared in recent years evaluating the role of slavery in the development of the American economy, among them Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams; Edward Baptist’s The Half that Has Never Been Told; Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton; and Beckert and Seth Rockman’s Slavery’s Capitalism.
Yet some of the arguments resemble those that appeared first in Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, published in 1974. Time on the Cross was a work of enormous novelty, undertaken in the service of the much- ballyhooed variety of economic history calling itself “cliometrics” (or “econometric history’’). Its fundamental assertions were, as Hilt puts them, that slavery was “profitable, productive and humane.” A storm of controversy followed.
The debate over measurement issues has moved on since then, Hilt notes; the technical literature has become hard for layfolk to follow. Time on the Cross’s assertions of the fundamental benevolence of slaveholders have been thoroughly disproved. Yet Fogel and Engerman’s purely economic conclusions about the profitability and productivity of slavery stand up pretty well. Fogel later shared a Nobel Prize with economic historian Douglass North.
The slave economies of the South were thriving before the Civil War. Secessionist politicians and their business backers knew it. The North undertook the Civil War for the best of reasons. Its leaders knew that slavery was wrong. A hundred and fifty years later, Americans of all sorts are still working to mitigate its ill-effects.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first appeared.