Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 293

April 15, 2016: American Outlaws: The Mafia

[In honor of the 150th anniversary of Butch Cassidy’s birth, in this week’s series I’ll AmericanStudy histories and images of some of our more famous—or infamous—outlaws.]Three telling stages in the strange evolution of our pop culture obsession with the mob.1)      The 70s: I’ve written before in this space (almost exactly five years ago!) about The Godfather, both the Puzo novel and the Coppola films. Although as I argue there the novel is significantly more pulpy than the films, both would have to be described as epics, and more exactly as works that treat the world of organized crime as both a serious subject in its own right and a reflection of broader and deeper American issues (immigration, the American Dream, politics, the rise and fall of cities, and more). In the same era, Martin Scorcese’s first feature film, Mean Streets (1973), used the mafia to tell a very similar story, one that (like Coppola’s films) does not downplay the mob’s more criminal and seedy sides yet at the same time (also like them) depicts this as an American story and community worth serious attention and reflection. (And, at least per one prominent book, as a vehicle for understanding Italian American experiences and identities.)2)      The 90s: The 90s kicked off with another Scorcese film, Goodfellas (1990), that used the mafia in similarly epic and symbolic ways. It ended with the first season of HBO’s The Sopranos (1999-2007), a hugely influential work that did the same on the small screen. Yet if both of these texts illustrate continuities in our pop culture engagements with the mob, I would point to another 1999 work as an indication that our narratives were nonetheless evolving. The film Analyze This (1999) seems to echo both Goodfellas (since it likewise stars Robert de Niro as a mob boss) and The Sopranos (since it’s about the relationship between that mob boss and his therapist). But that therapist is played by Billy Crystal, and the therapy, like the mafia and everything else in the film, is played for laughs. Mob comedies were actually a trend in the late 90s, including Jane Austen’s Mafia! (1998) and Corky Romano (2001) among others, reflecting a significant new possibility in the uses of mafia stories in our pop culture.3)      Today: It’s certainly possible for humorous works to engage thoughtfully with complicated issues, and I don’t want to suggest that those comic films were necessarily a step down from the more epic texts (although Jane Austen’s Mafia!, yeah, step down). But here in the second decade of the 21st century, our most famous pop culture engagement with the mafia is unquestionably, frustratingly vapid and awful: the vh1 reality show Mob Wives, which is currently airing episodes in its 6th and final season. Of course Mob Wives represents a direct response to the “real housewives” reality shows that have become one of the genre’s and our culture’s most dominant trends, and has to be contextualized and analyzed through that lens. But at the same time, the show embodies a cultural use of the mafia that is as mundane as Coppola’s and Scorcese’s was epic—and while there’s certainly something to be said for refusing to glorify organized crime, there’s also a great deal to be said against Mob Wives, and where our pop culture obsession with the mob has taken us.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other outlaws you’d analyze?

April 14, 2016: American Outlaws: Bonnie and Clyde

[In honor of the 150th anniversary of Butch Cassidy’s birth, in this week’s series I’ll AmericanStudy histories and images of some of our more famous—or infamous—outlaws.]On how images can reflect and shape but also distort our histories.Arthur Penn’s film Bonnie and Clyde (1967) might seem to fit perfectly into my argument in yesterday’s post about pop culture beautifications of outlaw stories: the film’s leading man Warren Beatty (as Clyde Barrow) was one of the few 1960s stars who could rival Paul Newman and Robert Redford in matinee idol appeal, and his co-star Faye Dunaway (as Bonnie Parker) was just as stunning. Yet in this case, the casting of beautiful Hollywood stars made particular sense, on a couple of significant levels. For one thing, Bonnie and Clyde’s early 1930s heyday (what came to be known as the Public Enemy era) was a period defined by famously attractive criminals: John Dillinger was said to be strikingly handsome, and the nickname Pretty Boy Floyd pretty much speaks for itself. And for another, even more specific thing, Bonnie and Clyde’s 1930s fame and narrative came to be thoroughly associated with a set of carefully posed images disseminated through mass media.In April 1933, police officers raided a Joplin, Missouri apartment that had been serving as a hideout for Bonnie and Clyde, as well as other gang members including Clyde’s older brother Buck, Buck’s wife Blanche, and William Daniel Jones. After a shootout that left two officers dead the criminals escaped, but among the possessions they left behind was a set of posed photographs of the gang, including a picture of Bonnie chomping a cigar and flaunting a gun that would become (and has remained) synonymous with her public image. Indeed, it’s entirely possible that Bonnie and Clyde intended for the pictures to be found and made public, as they seem overtly created in response to and amplification of the evolving narratives of the two as daredevil lovers. Even if the pictures were originally intended for their own personal use and enjoyment, they likewise reflect how much the pair were aware of and excited by those public narratives. And art went on to imitate life imitating art, as many of the moments and images in Penn’s film are drawn directly from those famous photos.Photographs are of course not the same as film recreations or historical fictions—even if they’re posed or staged, photographs capture aspects of reality (at least in the pre-Photoshop era) and in so doing become part of the real world as well. Yet at the same time, when photographs become a primary way in which we remember history (as they have so often in the 150 years since the development of the form), they risk distorting as much as reflecting or illuminating those histories. And that seems to be the case for the aforementioned iconic image of Bonnie Parker: per the FBI testimony of fellow gang member William Daniel Jones, as well as subsequent stories provided by Jones and other gang members, Bonnie neither smoked cigars nor (far more importantly) ever shot at a police officer. Even if we do not take Jones’s memories and perspective as authoritative, his statements remind us that neither can we see these posed photographs as necessarily illustrative of the duo’s identities or actions. As with so many American outlaws, the real Bonnie and Clyde reside alongside, but not quite within, such public images and narratives.Last outlaw tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other outlaws you’d analyze?

April 13, 2016: American Outlaws: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

[In honor of the 150th anniversary of Butch Cassidy’s birth, in this week’s series I’ll AmericanStudy histories and images of some of our more famous—or infamous—outlaws.]On beautifying ugly men and deeds, and why we shouldn’t.In George Roy Hill’s film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), birthday boy Butch (the nickname of Robert Leroy Parker, one of the late 19th century’s most infamous bank and train robbers) was famously played by Paul Newman; Robert Redford played his partner, Harry “The Sundance Kid” Longabaugh. Newman and Redford were, while unquestionably talented and interesting actors, also two of their respective generations’ most attractive stars, charismatic heartthrobs with marquee movie-star good looks. The same could be said for many of the young men featured in the Young Guns films, of course, from the first film’s Emilio Estevez, Kiefer Sutherland, and Lou Diamond Phillips to the second film’s additions such as Christian Slater and Balthazar Getty. And in recent years the trend continued with the casting of matinee idol Brad Pitt as Jesse James in Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007).Such casting choices can no doubt be explained in part by the simple realities that movie stars tend to be good looking, that some of the most famous are also some of the best looking, and that the most famous are often good box-office draws. But if we consider the example of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid specifically, it’s worth noting that it’s not only the titular characters’ physical appearances that have been beautified. The film’s entire tone is light and comic, mostly in the vein of a buddy comedy with (in the famous, ground-breaking musical interlude in particular) the occasional interruption of a romantic comedy as well. There are of course moments of violence and darker turns, but even in the darkest of them—such as (SPOILER alert) the two men’s gun-blazing demisethat concludes the film—Hill takes a more upbeat and cheery tone than we might expect. That lightness becomes even more striking when we compare Butch to a film released in the same year and featuring many of the same characters and events: Sam Peckinpah’s dark, hyper-violent The Wild Bunch(1969).The stylization of violence in Peckinpah’s film isn’t necessarily realistic, and certainly could be seen as exploitative (in a similar critique to that which has been leveled at a filmmaker who learned a lot from Peckinpah, Quentin Tarantino). But at the same time, it’s difficult to watch The Wild Bunch and not remember that Butch, Sundance, and their outlaw peers were by and large hardened criminals for whom violence and the threat of it were principal tools and daily realities; a lesson that it’s far easier to forget when we’re watching Newman and Redford smile their movie-star smiles. Similarly, while the casting of Pitt as Jesse James allows the film to make some interesting points about the aging outlaw as a celebrity, it also depicts a man who has survived decades of violent crime and still looks like, well, Brad Pitt. If we’re going to keep telling the stories of American outlaws in our popular culture—and it seems likely that we will—it would help to find ways to include in our portrayals the darkness and ugliness that were central parts of those stories.Next outlaw tomorrow,                                BenPS. What do you think? Other outlaws you’d analyze?

April 12, 2016: American Outlaws: Billy the Kid

[In honor of the 150th anniversary of Butch Cassidy’s birth, in this week’s series I’ll AmericanStudy histories and images of some of our more famous—or infamous—outlaws.]On two telling layers to the famous outlaw’s mythos, and the context they both mostly miss.Like most outlaws, Billy the Kid went by a number of names and identities (each at least somewhat uncertain, due to the historical ambiguities that necessarily come with lives lived outside legal and social norms): he was born Henry McCarty, and renamed (by himself, apparently) at the age of 18 as William H. Bonney. But there’s a reason why Billy the Kid was and remains the one that stuck, and it’s not just because his first arrest came at 16, he was accused of murder at 18, and he was dead at 21. As best reflected in the two blockbuster Young Guns films of the late 1980s, and the portrayal of Billy therein by the baby-faced Emilio Estevez, Billy’s youth is a hugely evocative quality: partly because of the irony of a “kid” who is at the same time one of our most famous killers; but also, and I would argue most importantly, because the emphasis on his youth allows us to embrace and even celebrate a shadowy historical figure about whom virtually everything we know relates to crime.That embrace and celebration of Billy are elements of what I would call the romanticization of the outlaw, a trend illustrated by the Young Guns films but much more complicatedly evoked and analyzed by a book published in the same year that Young Guns was released: Larry McMurtry’s underrated historical novel Anything for Billy (1988). By creating as his first-person narrator a successful dime novelist who was also one of Billy’s most consistent companions, and thus an artist creating exaggerated, romanticized depictions for his outsider (Eastern) audiences of real figures and experiences, McMurtry makes the dual subjects of his novel both Billy himself and his legend. Yet although he certainly recognizes Billy’s flaws and failures, that narrator nonetheless (as the title suggests) comes to idolize the young outlaw, and thus his perspective (and, inevitably, McMurtry’s novel) participates in the romanticization process. Even referring to him as Billy (which of course conjures up the full Billy the Kid sobriquet) rather than William or Henry links McMurtry’s narrator and novel more to the mythos than whatever historical realities we might recover underneath it.Perhaps the most significant such historical reality, and one about which scholars have recovered a great deal, is the Lincoln County War of 1878. Interestingly, perhaps the best historical work on that war published to date, Robert Utley’s High Noon in Lincoln: Violence on the Western Frontier (1989), was released in between the two Young Guns films (the first film does, to its credit, depict some key aspects, figures, and moments from the war). Yet even Utley’s book, as the titular reference to the film High Noon implies, at least partly links the war to the same mythos of mano-a-mano, gunfighter violence that is so central to the romanticization of Billy and his murders. Whereas to my mind the details of the Lincoln County War and its culminating, mid-July Battle of Lincolndepict a much more organized, communal conflict between competing business interests, each deploying a mob of such violent individuals (Billy’s mob were known as the Regulators) to protect their assets. Which is to say, the ultimate irony of Billy the Kid might be how he can help us recognize that the Wild West was more capitalistic and corporate than it was wild or romantic.Next outlaw tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other outlaws you’d analyze?

April 11, 2016: American Outlaws: Pecos Bill and Joaquin Murrieta

[In honor of the 150th anniversary of Butch Cassidy’s birth, in this week’s series I’ll AmericanStudy histories and images of some of our more famous—or infamous—outlaws.]
On two folk heroes, and the competing frontier histories they reveal.
Even as a kid, encountering his stories in a compilation of tall tales, I could tell that Pecos Bill was a bit of a Paul Bunyan knockoff—an outlandish origin story (Bill fell out of his family’s wagon as a baby and was raised by a pack of wolves as one of their own), similarly larger-than-life animal companions (his otherwise un-rideable horse Widow-Maker, the rattlesnake Shake that he used as a lasso), an equally mythic love interest (Slue-Foot Sue, who rode a giant catfish down the Rio Grande). So I wasn’t surprised to learn that Bill was a late addition to the “big man” school of tall tales, likely created in 1916 by Edward O’Reilly and shoehorned back into the mythos of Westward expansion, the frontier, and the Wild West, one more addition to the roster of lawless heroes who had by the early 20th century come to define that American mythos so fully.
That Bill didn’t come into existence until a few decades after the closing of the frontier doesn’t lessen his symbolic status, however—if anything, it highlights just how much the mythos of the American West was and remains just that, a consciously created set of mythsthat have served to delineate after the fact a messy, dynamic, often dark, always complex region and history. Moreover, that mythos was as multi-cultural as the West itself, as illustrated by Mexican American folk hero Joaquin Murrieta, “the Robin Hood of El Dorado”: Murrieta, a California 49er from northern Mexico, first came to national prominence in a popular dime novel, John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (1854); the tales of his charming banditry have been a part of the region’s folk history ever since, including a cameo as Zorro’s older brother in the Antonio Banderas film The Mask of Zorro (1998).Yet however much Murrieta’s story has been fictionalized and mythologized, it did originate with an actual historical figure—and that distinction can help us see past the myths to some of the frontier’s messier, darker, and more defining realities. For one thing, Murrieta apparently began his outlaw career after he and his family were violently dispossessed of a land claim, events which connect to the social and legal aftermath of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. For another, his gang’s victims included not only Anglo settlers but also Chinese laborers, revealing California’s genuinely and often painfully multicultural community as of the mid-19th century. A fuller engagement with these histories would in part force Americans to confront the centuries of conflict and violence that have so frequently comprised the world of the frontier—but it would also allow us to push beyond tall tales of larger-than-life individuals and to recognize just how collective and communal are both the myths and realities of the Southwest, and of America.Next outlaw tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other outlaws you’d analyze?

April 9-10, 2016: Remembering Reconstruction: The Civil Rights Act of 1866

[April 9thmarks the 150th anniversary of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1866, one of many such Reconstruction sesquicentennials over the next decade. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied five Reconstruction histories, leading up to this special weekend post on the Civil Rights Act itself.]Why we don’t remember a controversial law, and a couple reasons why we should.There are many factors that contribute to the thoroughgoing absence of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 from our collective national memories. For one thing, as I hope this week’s series has made plain, there’s a long list of Reconstruction moments and histories that we don’t remember well; indeed, given the mythologized Dunning School narrative of Reconstruction history against which Du Bois was writing and which as I noted Friday has significantly endured into our own moment, it’s fair to ask whether we remember anything about Reconstruction with accuracy or clarity. More specifically, there was a good deal of debate surrounding the 1866 law about whether Congress had the power to grant civil or Constitutional rights at all; not coincidentally, some of the same language from the law had already made its way into the proposed 14th Amendment, and when that amendment was ratified two years later it was widely seen as incorporating the Civil Rights Act (a link made explicit by the subsequent Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871).So the Civil Rights Act of 1866 didn’t stand alone, and has to be contextualized in relationship to the 14th Amendment (and the 15th, for that matter), among other Reconstruction laws and debates. At the same time, I would make precisely the opposite point—that there are provisions and elements of the Civil Rights Act that are not part of or complement the amendments, and without which our understanding of those amendments is likewise incomplete. To name one particularly significant such element, the Civil Rights Act’s protections of all American workers from racial, ethnic, or other discriminatory practices is widely considered the nation’s first anti-discrimination employment statute, and as such represented a vital step not only in Reconstruction and racial histories but in the similarly evolving late 19th century histories of labor and government regulation. In Thursday’s post, I noted that toward the end of his presidency Andrew Johnson supported (and then early in his own presidency Ulysses S. Grant signed) a proclamation endorsing the 8-hour work day, another reflection of the complex but unmistakable intersections between Reconstruction and labor issues and activism. And those intersections truly began with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which helps us remember the parallel, longstanding links between race and work in American politics and society.While Andrew Johnson endorsed the 8-hour proclamation, however, he most definitely did not support the Civil Rights Act; indeed, he vetoed its first iteration in 1865 and then vetoed the 1866 version as well, but the House of Representatives overrode that second veto to pass the bill into law. Given that the House would vote to impeach Johnson a couple years later, this opposition or division between the branches might seem both unsurprising and not worth remarking upon. But I would argue the opposite—that while it might otherwise be possible to see Johnson’s impeachment as a political battle or clash between Washington agendas or the like, the dispute over the Civil Rights Act illustrates instead just how socially and culturally significant were the Radical Republicans’ disagreements with Johnson and his policies. One of the biggest problems with the mythologized narrative of the period is that it generally attributes Reconstruction’s failures to federal overreach and radicalism—whereas, as Du Bois and many other subsequent historians have amply demonstrated (and as I hope this week’s posts have also highlighted), it would be far more accurate to argue that Congressional Reconstruction succeeded on many levels despite the opposition of both Johhnson and Southern white supremacists. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 offers a telling moment and example of such successes.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other Reconstruction histories you’d highlight?

April 8, 2016: Remembering Reconstruction: DuBois’ Vital Revisionism

[This weekend marks the 150th anniversary of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1866, one of many such Reconstruction sesquicentennials over the next decade. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five Reconstruction histories, leading up to a special weekend post on the Civil Rights Act.]On the book that revised Reconstruction historiography, redefined an entire profession, and then went even further.The development of American historiography is a complex and multi-part story, and would certainly have to include mid-19th century pioneers such as Francis Parkman, the 1884 founding of the American Historical Association, and the turn-of-the-century popularization of scholarly history by figures such as Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles and Mary Beard, among many other moments and figures. So it’d be crazy of me to suggest that one historiographical book stands out as both the single most significant turning point in the profession and the best reflection upon its prior inadequacies, right? Well, then you’re going to have to call me crazy, because I would describe W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America (1935) as both of those things. Du Bois had published books in virtually every genre by the time of Black Reconstruction’s release, but interestingly none since his Harvard PhD dissertation ( The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 ) could quite be categorized as American historical scholarship. But when he returned fully to that genre, he not only produced one of his very best works, but a book that changed everything about both Reconstruction historiography and the discipline as a whole.Even if we knew nothing of the half-century of American historical writing that preceded Du Bois’s book, its strengths and achievements would be clear and impressive. In an era when extended archival research was almost impossible for most scholars, especially those not supported by wealthy institutions (which Du Bois had not been for decades by the time he published Black Reconstruction, having worked primarily at Atlanta University), Du Bois produced a work of history that relied entirely on archival and primary documents, materials he used to develop original, thorough, and hugely sophisticated and convincing analyses of Reconstruction’s efforts, effects, successes, and shortcomings in every relevant state and community. Moreover, since that prior half-century of historical writing, at least on Reconstruction and related themes, had been almost entirely driven by established narratives and myths (ones that, frustratingly, have apparently endured into our own moment), Du Bois could not do what virtually every other historian since has done—build on the work done by his or her peers, add his or her voice to existing conversations. He had to invent that work and those conversations anew, and did so with nuance, care, and unequivocal brilliance.That’d be more than enough to make Black Reconstructiona must-read, but in its final chapter, “The Propaganda of History,” Du Bois added two striking additional layers to the book. First and foremost, he called out that half-century of historiographical mythmaking, creating a devastatingly thorough and convincing critique of the historians and works that had combined to produce such a false and destructive narrative of Reconstruction (one echoed and extended by pop cultural works such as Thomas Dixon’s novels, The Birth of a Nation, Claude Bowers’ bestselling The Tragic Era , and, a year after Du Bois’s book, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind ). Yet at the same time, decades before Hayden White, Du Bois used the particular case of Reconstruction historiography to analyze the subjective and political contexts that inform even the best history writing, recognizing the limitations of the concept of “scientific” scholarship well before the profession as a whole was able or willing to do so. On every level, a book ahead of its time—and still vital to ours.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other Reconstruction histories you’d highlight?

April 7, 2016: Remembering Reconstruction: Andrew Johnson

[This weekend marks the 150th anniversary of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1866, one of many such Reconstruction sesquicentennialsover the next decade. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five Reconstruction histories, leading up to a special weekend post on the Civil Rights Act.]On three telling stages in the life and career of one of our worst presidents.Maybe it’s just a coincidence that Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches young adult novels first became bestsellers with 1868’s Ragged Dick, Fame and Fortune, and Struggling Upward , but I don’t think so. In many ways, these works can be seen as Reconstruction texts—their protagonists tend to begin their stories at the lowest possible point, after all, and struggle to work their way toward a more stable, successful, and even ideal future. Seen in that light, Andrew Johnsonwas a perfect president for the start of the Reconstruction era, as his life to that point seemed to mirror an Alger story. Born into abject poverty in Raleigh, North Carolina, where his father died when Andrew was only three years old, he began his professional life as a tailor’s apprentice before running away to Tennessee, entering politics at the most local level, and working his way up to Governor and then Senator. And it was his bold and impressive choice at one crucial turning point, his decision to side with the Union when Tennessee seceded (he was the only Senator not to give up his seat when his state seceded), that cemented his national status and led to his appointment as Military Governor of Tennessee and then his nomination as Lincoln’s running mate in the 1864 election.As I wrote in that hyperlinked piece on 1864, however, “impressive” is one of the least likely words that historians would apply to Johnson’s term as president, which began when Lincoln was assassinated only a month into his second term. It’s not just that Johnson was an overt white supremacist—he had never tried to hide that perspective, which of course he shared with many of his fellow Southerners and Americans. Nor is it that he advocated for a different form of Reconstruction (Presidential, as it came to be known) than Congressional Republicans—policy disagrements are part of governance and the separation of powers, and Johnson did seek to uphold the Constitution as he understood it. Instead, what truly defines the awfulness of Johnson’s presidency was how far out of his way he went to oppose even the most basic rights for freed slaves and African Americans, a stance exemplified by his veto of the 1866 bill that would have renewed the Freedmen’s Bureau. Johnson’s concludes that veto by arguing that in taking this action he is “presenting [the] just claims” of the eleven states that are “not, at this time, represented by either branch of Congress”—yet of course, the veto served only the claims of the white supremacists within those states. The question of whether Johnson deserved to be impeached for actions such as his veto (and other similar stances taken in opposition to Reconstruction) is a thorny one, but I have no qualms in saying he deserves our condemnation for it, and all that it illustrates about his presidency.Johnson survived the impeachment trial (by one Senate vote), and continued his destructive policies for the remainder of his presidential term (although he did also support the proclamation that nationalized the 8-hour workday, evidence that even the worst presidencies are not without their complexities). Yet his life and career did not end with Ulysses Grant’s 1868 election to the presidency, and two 1870s moments reflect how both sides of Johnson’s American story continued into his later life. In 1873, Johnson both nearly died of cholera and lost $73,000 in the national Panic, but recovered from both of these traumas to successfully run for the Senate once more in 1875, becoming the only past president to serve in the Senate and adding one more rags-to-riches moment to his legacy. Yet in his brief stint as a Senator (the seat was only open for one special session), Johnson’s only significant contribution was a speech attacking President Grant for using federal troops as part of Reconstruction in Louisiana; “How far off is military despotism?,” Johnson warned, one final mythologized and destructive critique of Reconstruction from the man who did as much to undermine it as any American.Last Reconstruction remembrance tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Reconstruction histories you’d highlight?

April 6, 2016: Remembering Reconstruction: Massacres

[This weekend marks the 150th anniversary of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1866, one of many such Reconstruction sesquicentennialsover the next decade. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five Reconstruction histories, leading up to a special weekend post on the Civil Rights Act.]I’ve written a good deal, in this space and elsewhere, about the 1898 Wilmington massacre and the 1921 Tulsa massacre (both too often described as “race riots”), among other such acts of racial violence. But just as under-remembered, and perhaps even more historically telling, are the massacres that marred and helped undermine Reconstruction. Here are three:1)      New Orleans(1866): In late July, 1866, a group of African Americans (many of them Civil War veterans) marching to the Louisiana Constitutional Convention were stopped and attacked by Mayor John Monroe (a longtime Confederate sympathizer and white supremacist), New Orleans police forces, and an angry white mob. As happened in Wilmington, Tulsa, and so many other massacres, this individual starting point morphed into a city-wide rampage against African Americans citizens and communities, one that ended with hundreds of African Americans (both convention delegates and others) dead and wounded. This massacre took place early enough in Reconstruction that a federal response was both possible and swift—Monroe and many other officials were moved from office, and Reconstruction efforts in the city intensified. Yet at the same time, the New Orleans massacre (along with another 1866 massacre, in Memphis) reveals just how fully white supremacists were prepared to use official and political as well as mob and vigilante violence to oppose both Reconstruction and African American rights.2)      Colfax(1873): By the early 1870s, such white supremacist racial violence had been codified into organized groups—most famously the Ku Klux Klan, but also parallel groups such as Louisiana’s White League (which, as that platform reflects, was not only a paramilitary terrorist group but also a political appendage of the state’s Democratic Party). Not coincidentally, the League’s first organized action was the Colfax Massacre, in which members attacked an African American militia; although at first shots were exchanged by both sides, the militiamen were outnumbered and quickly surrendered, only to continue being massacred by the League members. All told more than 100 African Americans were killed, and only three White League members convicted of murder—and those convictions were overturned by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. The Charles Lane book reviewed at that last hyperlink argues in its subtitle that both Colfax and the Court decision represented “the betrayal of Reconstruction,” and it’s hard not to agree that by this time, every level of America’s social and political power structure seemed allied with the white supremacists.3)      Hamburg (1876): The ultimate betrayal and abandonment of Reconstruction are usually associated with the 1876 Presidential election, but racial violence played a significant part in that culminating year as well. In many ways, the massacre in Hamburg (South Carolina) echoes the others I’ve written about here: a seemingly small incident of racial tension (two white farmers had a difficult time driving their wagon through a July 4th march by African American militiamen) exploded into an orgy of racial violence, as a July 8thattempt to disband the militia was followed by the arrival of a white mob who first attacked the militia’s armory and then expanded their massacre to much of the city’s African American population. Yet not only were there no federal or legal responses to the massacre, but instead it became part of the Democratic Party’s triumph in the state’s elections, as white supremacist candidate Wade Hampton uses a mythologized narrative of the massacre as a “race riot” to help gain the governor’s seat and put an end to Reconstruction in South Carolina—one more reflection of the central role that these acts of racial violence played in opposing and undermining Reconstruction throughout the period.Next Reconstruction remembrance tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Reconstruction histories you’d highlight?

April 5, 2016: Remembering Reconstruction: African American Legislators

[This weekend marks the 150th anniversary of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1866, one of many such Reconstruction sesquicentennialsover the next decade. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five Reconstruction histories, leading up to a special weekend post on the Civil Rights Act.]I’m quite sure that every one of the more than 1500 African Americans who held elected office during Reconstruction has an amazing story we should better remember. (And that each of them would fully counteract the awful stereotyping created by “historical” texts like Birth of a Nation.) Here are three distinct but equally important and inspiring such individuals and stories:1)      Benjamin Turner: Born into slavery in 1825 North Carolina, sold down river to Alabama with his mother when he was only five, and freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, Turner became a self-made businessman and farmer in Selma while the war was still raging. By 1865, he had enough local clout to found one of the areas first freedmen’s schools; two years later he attended the state Republican Convention, launching his political career with an appointment as the county’s tax collector. In 1870 he ran successfully for the U.S. House of Representatives; although he only served one term, it was a productive two years, including authoring private pension bills for Civil War veterans and opposing a cotton tax that he saw as disproportionately affecting African Americans. After his 1872 defeat he mostly returned to farming, although he did attend the 1880 Republican National Convention in Chicago—one more reflection of his political and communal prominence.2)      Hiram Revels: Born in 1827 to free African Americans in Fayetteville, North Carolina, educated for the ministry in Northern seminaries, an itinerant minister for the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church throughout the 1850s and the chaplain for one of the first African American regiments in the Civil War, Revels’ story differs from Turner’s in just about every way. Yet he too opened one of the earliest freedmen’s schools (this one in St. Louis, where he had been a pastor before the war) and he too became one of the first African Americans in Congress when he was appointed to the Senate by the Mississippi state legislature in January 1870. Like Turner, Revels served only one term (or in his case, only part of one), as he declined a number of appointments after his Senate term ended in March 1871; yet in that brief time, Revels managed both to fight for the education and rights of freed people and to advocate for universal amnesty for former Confederate soldiers. And in his post-Senate life he continued along both paths, serving as president of Alcorn A&M College (now Alcorn State University) and writing a famous 1875 letter to President Grant denouncing “carpetbaggers”—a duality that illustrates the breadth of perspectives found among these Reconstruction legislators.3)      P.B.S. Pinchback: Subject of some of the most interesting sections in Allyson Hobbs’ wonderful A Chosen Exile, Pinchback was the mixed-race son of a freed slave and her former master (some of his siblings were born while she was still a slave, but Pinchback was born in 1837, a year after she was freed). Like Revels, he moved north to attend school and stayed there until the outbreak of the war; during the war he moved to New Orleans and worked to raise companies of African American soldiers for the Union army, becoming a captain in one such company. After the war he became active in the Georgia Republican Party, was elected to the State Senate in 1868, and succeeded Oscar Dunn (the first elected African American Lieutenant Governor of any state) as the state’s Lieutenant Governor upon Dunn’s death in 1871. A year later, Governor Henry Clay Warmouth was tried for impeachment; state law required Warmouth to step down while on trial, and for the final six weeks of his term Pinchback served as Georgia’s governor, becoming the first African American governor in the process. The moment reveals the chaotic histories unfolding in every Southern state during Reconstruction—but Pinchback’s readiness and ability to step into the governor’s role are one more reminder of how many impressive and inspiring African American leaders made their mark throughout the period.Next Reconstruction remembrance tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Reconstruction histories you’d highlight?