Contesting Commemoration: The 1876 Centennial, Independence Day, and the Reconstruction-Era South by Jack Noe

Abstract

Reviewed by: Contesting Commemoration: The 1876 Centennial, Independence Day, and the Reconstruction-Era South by Jack Noe Daniel E. Cone (bio) Contesting Commemoration: The 1876 Centennial, Independence Day, and the Reconstruction-Era South. By Jack Noe. ( Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. 240. Cloth, $45.00.) Pop culturists have noted that, strange as it may seem, 2021 is as far from 2000 as 2000 is from 1979. Here is something else worth noting: David Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) is nearly equidistant from contemporary publications and from Charles Reagan Wilson's Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (1980). Not so long ago, Blight's account of the cultural [End Page 136] triumph of a white nationalist reconciliatory narrative of the Civil War and Reconstruction was thought to have superseded Wilson's older account of the peculiarly southern essence of that narrative. Now, in light of studies by Adam Domby, Barbara Gannon, and Caroline Janney, to name a few—all challenging the notion of an untroubled reconciliation—Race and Reunion seems like an artifact of another era. Jack Noe has joined the ranks of those dissenting from Blight with his concise, accessible examination of how the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, occasioned southern and Black dissatisfaction with and withdrawal from the celebration of a "reunited" America. From its first pages, which outline the partisan uses of July 4 dating back to the early republic, Noe's Contesting Commemoration shows that rather than bringing Americans together, this anniversary "amplified ideas of regional distinctiveness and served as a rhetorical proxy for the political and social divisions" of the postbellum United States (4). As Noe frames it, the Centennial had limited marketability below the Mason-Dixon Line. When the northern-dominated, national organizing committee met seven years after Appomattox, southern bitterness in defeat was still acute and southern state funds were short. Poor timing was compounded by white southerners' fears of being swindled by the exhibition's commercial backers, their collective wartime distancing from outward celebrations of Independence Day (although crucially not the holiday's legacy), and their distaste for the exhibition's rationale. Most rural ex-Confederates, feeling like second-class citizens under Reconstruction and military occupation, did not want to pay big bucks to go cheer for "American unity, nationhood, and [urban, industrial] technological progress" (177), when none of those mattered to them. Also, lest we forget, Noe reminds us that 1875 to 1876 witnessed not only bloody Independence Day race massacres in the South, but also a contentious presidential election amounting to a referendum on the war, citizenship, and equality. For all these reasons, many white southerners sought to keep physical and emotional distance from Philadelphia. Some others, though, wanted to be involved, and Noe reviews the arguments of white southern Centennial advocates as found in an array of newspapers and letter collections. They include "New Departure" Democrats dreaming of a white America reunified at heart through sectional compromise, New South boosters courting northern financial aid, and female elites looking to form commemorative partnerships with white northern ladies. Each group envisioned the Centennial as a way to achieve its own ends. Excepting the women, however, none were keen to champion national commemoration for its own sake. On the contrary, as Noe recounts in a [End Page 137] chapter on Centennial commissioner appointments in Texas, debates over being represented at the exhibition were a way to codify southern, rather than American, identities. In the end, the Lone Star state opted out of the Centennial, as did all other southern states save Arkansas and Mississippi. Although there were additional "variations … in [southern] willingness to [participate]," Noe believes that these can be explained by delays in "the reassertion of Democratic political control … across the South throughout the early and middle 1870s" (37). In other words, white southern support for the Centennial was contingent on first winning back control at home. By contrast, Black Americans started out as cautious fans of the Centennial. Noe portrays African American engagement with July 4 as an inverse of white southern behavior: avoiding the holiday before the war and embracing it after 1865 when...