The great intractable American social problem is race. There is, undeniably, a vast difference in wealth, social status, and achievement between blacks and whites in this country; a disproportionate share of the poor and the incarcerated are blacks and other minorities. It is also undeniable that these differences can, at least in part, be traced to the legacy of racism, both explicit slavery and political action upon emancipation. There are those, understandably, who see this as a fundamental injustice—one calling for a fundamental restructuring of our economic, our constitutional, and our legal institutions.
The most noteworthy effort of this sort is the 1619 Project of the New York Times, which has apparently convinced many educational leaders and others that slavery is not only the original sin of America, but that key events in our history, including the American Revolution itself, must be attributed to slaveowners’ desire to perpetuate their peculiar and nefarious institution. That this is a retelling of American history that is, in some ways, demonstrably false, has not seemed to bother its proponents, even though some of our greatest historians have pointed out its shortcomings. This is not to say, however, that there are not great historians who have been haunted by the manner in which we have grappled with our mixed race heritage.
Perhaps the greatest of those was the late C. Vann Woodward (1908–1999), professor at Johns Hopkins, and then Yale, whose most famous work, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), was acknowledged by Martin Luther King Jr. to be “the historical bible of the Civil Rights Movement.” In Strange Career, Woodward argued that segregation in the South was a post-Reconstruction phenomenon, and that it was anything but inevitable. The implication of his work, then, was that racist policies in the South wrongly resulted in subjugation of the black race, that the freedmen had escaped one form of bondage to be trapped in another, and that this glaring injustice cried out for social action to correct it. Earlier, Woodward had published The Origins of the New South 1877–1913 (1951), which offered a Beardian economic interpretation of Post-Reconstruction Southern history. Origins blasted the romantic notion of the South as the preserve of chivalrous aristocrats, and found venality and racism in abundance.
Woodward was himself a son of the South (from Arkansas), but he clearly had an ambivalent relationship to his native region. If anything emerges from this intriguing collection of some of his previously unpublished lectures and writing, it is that core ambivalence. Looming in the shadows of this collection is Reconstruction—the post-Civil War effort by the North to mandate Southern institutions to replace slavery, and to protect the freedmen, an effort which Woodward clearly condemns here as the single greatest failure in American history.
Reading this collection is a bit like assembling the pieces to an incomplete puzzle, and, as the insightful foreword by Edward L. Ayers, and the excellent introduction by the editors, suggest, this might be because some of these unpublished writings were part of an effort, never realized, to complete a contracted book on Reconstruction.
While Woodward was contemplating that book, the scholarship on Reconstruction was undergoing an important revision. It had been the view for several decades preceding the years of the Civil Rights Revolution (1957–66) that Reconstruction had failed because it was administered by Northern fanatics, miscreants, and scoundrels bent on subjugating noble Southerners to the advantage of the North, and also because the freedmen were simply not yet capable of responsible political participation.[1] Perhaps seeking inspiration for their contemporary crusade to overturn perceived Southern injustice, Reconstruction revisionists argued that the Radical Republicans of the 1860s actually had a noble purpose, and that the freedmen had, in fact, participated in politics admirably, and performed quite as adequately as at least some voters in the North.[2]
Read Full Article »