Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles over the Meaning of America’s Most Turbulent Era ed. by Carole Emberton and Bruce E. Baker

Abstract

Reviewed by: Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles over the Meaning of America’s Most Turbulent Era ed. by Carole Emberton and Bruce E. Baker Thomas J. Brown (bio) Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles over the Meaning of America’s Most Turbulent Era. Edited by Carole Emberton and Bruce E. Baker. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. 296. Cloth, $45.00.) President Barack Obama’s designation of the Reconstruction Era National Monument in Beaufort County, South Carolina, as a unit of the National Park Service in January 2017 invites examination of the ways in which Americans have previously remembered Reconstruction. This collection offers an eloquent introduction by W. Fitzhugh Brundage and ten essays that address Reconstruction narratives advanced variously by white supremacists during the Jim Crow era, African Americans during the [End Page 164] same time period, internationalists during the overseas expansion of the American empire, textbook authors since the end of Reconstruction, and community boosters around 1970. The opening section confirms that invocation of the supposed horrors of Reconstruction served as a useful polemical tactic for white supremacists from the defeat of the Lodge Bill in 1890 through the defeat of antilynching legislation and a ban on the poll tax during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency. K. Stephen Prince’s contribution, drawn in part from his Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865–1915 (2014), emphasizes that canonical works by Hilary A. Herbert, Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, and Thomas Dixon warned northerners to leave racial issues in the control of white southerners. Jason Morgan Ward finds the same historical arguments still effective a half century later, though he identifies a decline in their potency during the Dixiecrat movement. The section on African American remembrance is significant not only for tracing a different vision of Reconstruction but also for highlighting direct recollections of personal experiences. Shawn Leigh Alexander’s excellent sketch of T. Thomas Fortune explores the activist’s efforts to draw a story of black resiliency from his memories of white supremacist violence in Jackson County, Florida. Justin Behrend’s careful reading of John R. Lynch’s The Facts of Reconstruction (1913) stresses that the Mississippian understated Republican radicalism and Democratic racial terrorism in an effort to reach across the color line. Coeditor Carole Emberton shifts the focus away from public figures in a promising preview of her current research into black vernacular memories of emancipation. These complex responses to trauma were not as politically didactic as Fortune’s and Lynch’s accounts but were no less purposeful in fashioning strategies for survival in a persistently dangerous racial landscape. Three essays ably trace reverberations of Reconstruction in wider policy discussions during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mark Elliott’s analysis of attempts by liberal-minded northerners to engage white southerners in discussion of the “Negro question” in the early 1890s shows that Indian policy of the 1870s and 1880s, in important ways an outgrowth of Reconstruction, had become by the end of the century a lens through which would-be reformers saw African Americans and would soon see people of color in the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Africa. Natalie J. Ring’s similarly thoughtful treatment of the “southern problem” describes the early-twentieth-century overlap between imperialist ideology and proposals for a “New Reconstruction” that would reform public health, education, and the economy in a quasi-colonial region while firmly avoiding any [End Page 165] return to biracial democracy. Samuel L. Schaffer explains how Woodrow Wilson’s remembrance of Reconstruction—less a specific autobiographical recollection than a generational white southern grievance, though Wilson was born in the same year as T. Thomas Fortune—shaped the president’s approach to peacemaking and decolonization in the Treaty of Versailles. The final two essays are the most chronologically expansive and the most tightly focused. Elaine Parsons achieves impressive results with an old research design in plotting interpretations of the Ku Klux Klan in history textbooks from 1883 to 2015. She finds a useful gauge of racial attitudes as well as a continuing pattern of sensationalism that implies an impermeability of the Klan, and racial violence more generally, to rational analysis. Coeditor Bruce E. Baker closes the...