Like many people, my feelings toward my country are complicated. My parents raised us with an implicit appreciation for what it provides to many, but also steered us away from being uncritically patriotic.
I’ve done enough travel and living in other cultures that I have an emotional attachment to being from this place, combined with a sense that, as a society, we’re neither uniquely good nor remarkably bad.
And still it is possible to experience a bitter shock at something that I sort of knew, newly brought to my attention.
I’m just about done reading Eric Foner’s The second founding, about the three constitutional amendments passed after the Civil War. We often learn history in layers. First a simple story about a war to end slavery, leading to changes in the Constitution to codify that result. Then you learn a more complicated story about the nature of that war. And new for me in Foner’s book is how much contention there was around the amendments, and how much they grew out of the evolving political situation after the war.
Like many works that have been increasingly on people’s radar—such as Watchmen with its references to the destruction of Black Tulsa by a White mob—Foner also explains the role of the Klan and other ways that Blacks and their White supporters were violently attacked.
Part of that was familiar. I already knew the outlines of what White terrorism had done to Blacks. I already knew that Blacks in the South attained a significant degree of political and social standing during Reconstruction. I knew that there had been a big increase in schooling for Blacks. I knew that Blacks had served in state governments and in Congress. And I knew that all of that had been undone by the Klan and others using what can only be called terrorism.
What was new for me—and it probably shouldn’t have been—was the realization of just how far the politics of the whole country had been shaped by that same terrorism.
The biracial Republican governments in Southern states during Reconstruction tried to modernize the region, most notably by creating universal public education. (In most places, those schools were segregated, but just having them available for everyone was progress not just for Blacks, but for many Whites as well.)
Those biracial state governments depended on an almost monolithic vote from Black people, plus the support of a crucial minority of White voters. After 1877, White terrorism pushed Blacks out of the political process until by about 1900 hardly any Blacks in the South could actually exercise the franchise that the 15th amendment supposedly gave them. Progressive, biracial Republican governments were replaced by White supremacist 19th-century Democratic governments that re-subjugated Blacks as much as they could, enshrining “separate and very much unequal.”
If we picture an alternative history in which southern Whites obeyed the law and didn’t use terrorism to get their way, it’s not that I imagine progressive Republicans holding power indefinitely, nor do I think that would have been healthy.
But a southern Democratic party that had to compete in fair elections, without enforcing its will through terrorism, would be a very different creature. If it remained devoted to racism, it would have to give up on getting more than a sliver of Black votes and so would have to make itself acceptable to progressive Whites. Alternatively, if it wanted to pursue regressive economic policy, it would have to drop the racism in order to get enough Black votes for a majority.
In an alternative history with the southern White terrorism removed, not only does the South itself experience different policies. The median Senator or Congressman sent from the region to D.C. would represent a different constituency and a different set of national coalitions would be possible.
The terrorism of the Klan fell far more on Blacks than on anyone else. It was mostly Blacks who got killed, and it was Blacks who lost the right to vote, lost the right to a normal public life, while we Whites went about with our rights intact.
But still, when we accepted the legitimacy of a regime installed and maintained by force, we were all scarred to some extent.
