Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896 by Charles Postel

Abstract

Reviewed by: Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896 by Charles Postel Daniel Mandell Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896. By Charles Postel. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. Pp. [x], 390. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-8090-7963-6.) Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896 examines the origins, leadership, policies, and evolution of three huge organizations—the farmers' Grange, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and the Knights of Labor—that emerged after the Civil War and became prominent national organizations pushing deep egalitarian reforms. Unfortunately, as Charles Postel shows, when these organizations each launched a southern strategy to gain national strength, they and their egalitarian ideals foundered on the rocks of racism and Redemption. Postel begins with the Grange, organized in December 1867 to advocate for farmers' rights against corporate interests. Although it embraced sexual equality, when the organization emphasized politics, women found themselves relegated to kitchens. More significant, one of the Grange founders, Oliver Kelley, sought sectional reconciliation, which meant "white solidarity between the northern farmer and the southern planter, and silence on the question of equality for African Americans" (p. 21). By the mid-1870s, Grange groups in the South were known for Ku Klux Klan activities and helped Democratic "redeemers" impose white rule, and those in the North built anticorporate coalitions with racist Democrats. Equality then delves into the WCTU, organized in 1873 and for decades the country's largest and most powerful women's organization. The WCTU [End Page 925] connected prohibition to sexual equality in the family, community, and workplace, with a liberal wing (led by Frances Willard) advocating woman suffrage. The WCTU similarly pursued white nationalist reconciliation, as Willard traveled to the South and returned to launch a national party that would "weld the Anglo-Saxons of the New World into one royal family" (p. 138). The WCTU incorporated racialist ideas in calls to limit the political rights of African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and Native Americans. Postel then examines how the Knights of Labor became the first significant national labor organization after Terence V. Powderly became its head in 1879. It enlisted all laborers regardless of trade, skill, sex, or race (with the glaring exception of the Chinese). But in 1885, Powderly went south, like Kelley and Willard, and endorsed racial separation. Black laborers in the South still joined in large numbers as Knights leadership continued to push for equal wages and conditions, but that egalitarian element was shattered when white Louisianans joined to massacre striking cane workers in 1887. Equality ends by examining how, despite these organizations and the egalitarian writings by Henry George and Edward Bellamy, the United States descended into the Gilded Age and violent apartheid in the late 1880s. The Supreme Court overrode the Fourteenth Amendment in order to protect economic and racial hierarchies; the WCTU defended lynch mobs as defenders of white women; and the Knights through Powderly applauded the explicitly "whites only" Farmers' Alliance. These organizations, in combination with other groups, formed the People's Party in 1892, which marked the crest of the post–Civil War egalitarian wave but ultimately failed as racism created fatal fissures. An epilogue brings readers to the present, noting how labor unions played a critical role in forging a more equal nation during the New Deal and the civil rights movement, but were dismantled by corporations and their political allies in the 1980s. Postel's view of late-nineteenth-century America spotlights how the efforts of reformers to counter the growing power of wealthy corporations and "bosses" were undermined by the embrace of racism. He emphasizes the role of the South in this process, as each organization went off the rails when their leadership forged alliances with white elites in the region. While readers might want to know more about the nation's racist soil that seemed so receptive to those southern seeds, Postel's deep dig into the farmers' Grange, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and the Knights of Labor provides useful lessons about reform efforts during that period as well as about the persistent fissures in the long effort to build "a just and equal society" (p. 318). Daniel Mandell Truman State University Copyright © 2020 Southern...