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by
Steven Hahn
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July 26 - September 4, 2025
Nowhere did such an interracial alliance prove more consequential than in Virginia. It would not have been expected. Alone among the former rebellious states, Virginia did not give rise to a Republican Reconstruction regime.
Edward Bellamy, the latter in growing numbers of Nationalist Clubs that commemorated the utopian collectivist society elaborated in Bellamy’s best-selling Looking Backward (1888).
They were happy to get black votes but reluctant to give blacks power, and so the black support that Populists received tended to be lukewarm and decline over time.
socialism remained less a specific program or vision than a set of political predispositions—counterpoints to liberal individualism, market competition, economic hierarchies, and elite rule.
Indeed, a political culture of social democracy might well have been the most significant legacy that the great struggles of the late nineteenth century bequeathed to the country’s future.
capital would increasingly be raised through the institutions that were either born or dramatically strengthened by the government requirements of suppressing the slaveholders’ rebellion—the
But they also became interested in sweeping aside a significant roadblock on the shop floor, where skilled workers with the technical knowledge required to make the goods retained important power.
What Gompers did not embrace was a new reliance on the state; “voluntarism,” with its emphasis on unions and the workplace as the locus of struggle, remained central to his philosophy—that is to say, except for immigration restriction, especially concerning the Chinese, for which he welcomed federal government support.
The enemies were Reconstruction, popular democracy, and birthright citizenship;
“The right of voting cannot be taken away,” the Atlantic Monthly concluded in 1879, “but the subjects of voting can be much reduced.”
The “Negro problem,” that is, was really a “white problem,” and first and foremost it seemed to be one of “management.”
Race riots together with politically motivated attacks exploded sporadically in large cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago as well as in small ones like Akron, Ohio, and Springfield, Illinois.
Small wonder that the Chinese population of the United States, concentrated in the Far West, dropped by one-third between 1890 and 1910 and by as much as half in California,
no boundaries or violations were more intimate and fundamental than those of patriarchy, household, gender, and sexuality.
Segregation was understood by its advocates as a thoroughly modern way to organize—to
Booker T. Washington was thereby regarded as the model of black leadership and foresight, “the greatest man save General Lee, born in the South in a hundred years,”
Jim Crow flowed through the streets as it did through the fields, on currents of blood. Still, as a measure of the consensus that racial reconstruction was establishing in ruling and progressive circles, there was remarkably little resistance let alone protest.
Ever since moving forcefully against the slaveholders’ rebellion in the 1860s, the newly constructed American nation-state had been extending its imperial arms across a variety of spaces. Chiefly through the military, it abolished slavery,
McKinley now claimed that Hawai’i was necessary to the United States as a military base. “We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California,” he declared. “It is manifest destiny.” Congress yielded in a close vote.
Exterminism was not, in the end, the main vehicle of Anglo rule; political reorganization, with disfranchisement, segregation, and the creation of new counties, proved more effective and lasting.
