How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

White southerners propagated the myth that this was necessary because black citizens were unable to self-govern; in the histories advanced at the time, Reconstruction was represented as a time of unparalleled political corruption, with stability restored only when whites were again given full power. W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1935 masterwork, Black Reconstruction, is a decisive refutation of the then official history of the Reconstruction era. As Du Bois shows, whites in the South, with the collusion of Northern elites, brought an end to the Reconstruction era because of the widespread fear among the wealthy classes that newly enfranchised black citizens would join with poor whites in developing a powerful labor movement to challenge the interests of capital. Du Bois shows how the Reconstruction era was a time of just governance, when black legislators not only did not govern from their own self-interest but bent over backward to accommodate the fears of their white fellow citizens. At the time, Black Reconstruction was largely ignored by white historians; but by the 1960s, the history Du Bois there recounts became widely recognized as fact.