History and memory are not one and the same but are often mistaken for one another. History is often victimized by our natural tendency to impose a cultural narrative on the past, one that usually supports the prevailing societal norms of the present. In 1919 statues of Nicholas the II were toppled throughout Russia, today they are being restored. The past is not retrievable in any absolute sense. They most we can do is to reassemble the remains as best we can without imposing preconceived notions of some narrative story that history is supposed to portray. It is in that spirit that this course will examine two competing demands that have dominated the historical narratives of our nation's political development: the right to liberty with minimal governmental restraint and the competing demands for government to support a just and equitable society. Many historians of the late twentieth century were convinced that there existed a continuity to the growth of liberal values which culminated in the triumph of liberal capitalism in the post World War II world. But is that the case?
Teacher: David Moore taught in the History Department at Newton North High School. He received his master’s degree from Boston College. He received the Charles Dana Meserve outstanding teacher award in 1993. His particular historical interests include classical Greece, American Studies and the Holocaust.
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Session One: The Non-Election of 1877 ~ The Promise Broken
Session Two: The Progressive Movement ~ Elitism by Another Name?
Session Three: Woodrow Wilson at Versailles ~ Idealism: Rhetoric and Reality
Session Four: The Twenties ~ Return to Normalcy
Session Five: FDR ~ The Survival of Liberal Democracy
Session Six: JFK ~ The Legacy of Camelot
Session Seven: Reagan: The Un-Revolution
Session Eight: The Selection of 2000
Session Nine: Obama ~ A Fragile Legacy
Session 10: Trump ~ The Great Undoing
Session One: The Non Election of 1877 ~ The Promise Broken
The American narrative has been and continues to be a long argument between the competing demands of personal liberty and the requirement for equal justice and equality of opportunity. The argument exhibits an almost cyclical dimension as first one and then the other defines the nation's consciousness. The Civil war and the period of Reconstruction that followed reflected the first full throated attempt by the national government to give life to "the proposition that all men are created equal." In 1877 the government and nation turned its back on this effort as if exhausted from the effort. The South was allowed to turn inward and develop its own Jim Crow solution to enforce white supremacy while the rest of the nation got down to the business of extending, well, just that.....business.
Compromise-Indeed! Thomas Nast, Harper's Weekly Magazine, January 27, 1877
It was "...widespread violence, coupled with a Northern retreat from the ideal of equality, that doomed Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan and kindred groups began a campaign of murder, assault and arson that can only be described as homegrown American terrorism. Meanwhile, as the Northern Republican Party became more conservative, Reconstruction came to be seen as a misguided attempt to uplift the lower classes of society.
One by one, the Reconstruction governments fell. As a result of a bargain after the disputed presidential election of 1876, the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes assumed the Oval Office and disavowed further national efforts to enforce the rights of black citizens, while white Democrats controlled the South.
By the turn of the century, with the acquiescence of the Supreme Court, a comprehensive system of racial, political and economic inequality, summarized in the phrase Jim Crow, had come into being across the South"
Eric Foner, Why Reconstruction Matters, New York Times, March 28, 2015
The hung election of 1876 and the "compromise" that followed are a fascinating study in and of themselves, but their historical significance lies more in that they finalized the end to what Eric Foner has called a "noble, if failed" attempt to bring interracial democracy to our nation. The white Jim Crow narrative castigated Reconstruction as a failure on an epic scale and thus justified their resumption of racial dominance in the South. The reality of Reconstruction, while it lasted, was more mixed and varied over time and from state to state. Though the gains in black voting and government participation were largely lost throughout the South, the gains made in family life, religious organization and education endured while the legal inheritance embodied in the Reconstruction Amendments would provide the framework for the Second Reconstruction of the 1960's. In reality, one might say that we are still living in the Reconstruction Era.
First Assignment
The folks at Facing History and Ourselves in Brookline MA have put together an extensive curriculum on race in United States History. The first film will provide you an overview of the changing historical interpretations of this period and the political agendas which informed them. The second creates an awareness of the connectedness between Reconstruction and the politics of race today.
Introduction: A Contested History
The Legacies of Reconstruction
Second Assignment: Reconstruction Timeline
The American Experience at PBS has put together a timeline that will walk you through the significant events from the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 up to the Election of Hayes in 1877.
Link
Third Assignment: AP US History Notes: The End of Reconstruction
Its been twenty years since I taught Advanced Placement US History. Back in the day the web was becoming a rich resource for history students, but nothing like this had yet become available. Here you will find the basic narrative of all you really need to know to understand the basic history of this period.
Link
Fourth Assignment:
Reconstruction and the End of History
Allen C. Guelzo, American Affairs Journal, Fall 2018, Vol. II, No. 3
"Dr. Allen C. Guelzo is the Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities and Director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania.... Professor Guelzo is the author of numerous books on American intellectual history, Abraham Lincoln, and the Civil War era. His publication awards include the Lincoln Prize as well as the Abraham Lincoln Institute Prize for two of his books-Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America–making him the first double Lincoln laureate in the history of both prizes. His critically acclaimed book, Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Defined America, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2008."1
Guelzo is not in agreement with recent historiographers focus on race as the foremost cause for the failure of Reconstruction. Rather, he sees a more fundamental underlying problem: "the story of Republican Reconstruction after 1865 is also a story about economics, for in the eyes of Lincoln’s Republicans, the offenses of the slave South ran far deeper than either slavery or race. Eliminating slavery was easy enough (that was done through the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified eight months after the end of the Civil War, in December 1865). What was not easy was persuading white Southerners to turn away economically from the neo-feudalism of plantation agriculture and to accept the freed slaves as equal participants in a new system of “free labor,” which would then open the path to solving the problems posed by race and politics.
Link
Fifth Assignment:
Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy and the Rise of Jim Crow
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., New York: Penguin Press, 2019.
"Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored or co-authored twenty-one books and created fifteen documentary films, including Wonders of the African World, African American Lives, Faces of America, Black in Latin America, and Finding Your Roots, his groundbreaking genealogy series now in its third season on PBS."1
In Stony the Road Gates provides a more traditional explanation of the failure of Reconstruction. From the opening of the first chapter, excerpted here, Gates sees a continuity in the "white supremacist ideology" that erupted with the election of the first back president and "surge of white supremacy" that followed the end of the Civil War. "The Civil War ended slavery, but it didn’t end antiblack racism. Proslavery rhetoric and white supremacist ideology had naturally marched arm in arm. But when the South lost the Civil War — at a staggering cost in blood and treasure — white supremacist ideologies continued, unbridled and disengaged from the institution of slavery."
Download Here
Session Two: The Progressive Movement ~ Elitism by Another Name?
I can still recall first opening my high school history text, The American Nation, and leafing with pleasure through the maps, charts and photographs which greeted my eye. Think back to a similar day in your own high school experience and try recalling the chapter on the Progressive Era. You'll probably remember a picture of Jane Addams and Hull House in Chicago, or perhaps on a facing page there is one of Jacob Riis's photographs of an East-Side tenement. Further on you will also probably find an insert with a selection from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, and of course there will be the ubiquitous cartoon of Teddy Roosevelt as Trust Buster.
My impression both then and for many years afterward was of the Progressive Era as a breath of fresh air following and correcting the evils of the Gilded Age, and in many respects it was. Government, federal, state and local, tried to ameliorate the worst aspects of industrialization. Universities and social scientists brought their insights to bear upon the problems of urbanization. Quasi-independent governmental agencies brought their expertise to bear on the regulation of everything from municipal water systems to the inspection of slaughter houses. Muckraking journalists exposed the corruption and venality of government on all levels fostering changes such as party primaries , the direct election of senators, and the initiative and referendum. It is important, however, to distinguish between the Progressive reform impulse and the libera
l capitalism which evolved out of the New Deal. Progressivism at its heart was an attempt to ameliorate the worst aspects of capitalism by imposing rules on its operation. The New Deal sought to directly address the inequalities resulting from capitalism by directly inserting the government in an activist role to better the lives of its citizens. The result was an increase in wages and living standards from 1937 to 1970 that redefined the American Dream until it ended with the Reagan Revolution.
Our picture of Progressivism is not complete without an examination of its darker underside. Not a cohesive movement per se, Progressives were largely drawn from the urban, white, middle class and reflected the full gamut of values and prejudices thereof. This included an underlying elitism which assumed superior knowledge and insight into the causes and solutions needed for the nation's ills. There was little attention paid to the evils of Jim Crow, including the 2,743 lynchings of black Americans during this period. Working class issues, especially those of recent eastern and southern Europeans, were not on the reformers horizons. Quite to the contrary, this period witnessed some of the most severe limits ever placed on immigration from these regions as well as from Asia. Progressives were also enthusiastic advocates of the new "science" of eugenics as a means to maintain the dominance of the genetically fit, or as Margaret Sanger put it, to protect the interests of those "...who must pay in one way or another for these biological and racial mistakes."1
In the era of Trumpism we are experiencing a resurgent interest in the progressive values and politics of this period of history. [see Why a Second Progressive Era Is Emerging- and How Not to Blow It by Paul Glastris] Mark Twain is said to have observed that while not repeating itself, history "often rhymes." In that spirit it is all the more important to take a closer look at the realities of this period in an effort to develop a more balanced view. The Progressives of today are far from a perfect match for those of the 1920's, but there are some intriguing points of congruence, especially in the mind of those who support Trump in Flyover Country. Progressives, then and now, were, for the most part statists, who advocated government administration and regulation as the corrective for society's ills. Both trusted in the ability of educated elites and academic research to provide the insights and solutions necessary for progress. Both were often unaware of the condescending attitude that underlay their often sincere desire to correct the ills of their respective societies. Perhaps if we learn our history we can avoid "rhyming" with it.
Session Three: Wilson at Versailles ~ Idealism and Reality
Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to transform the international world order at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 is one chapter of a much larger theme that has dominated the past 250 years of US foreign policy. To what extent are we an "exceptional” nation, one obligated to extend the blessings of liberal democracy to those less fortunate, whether they are appreciative or not. Or are the demands on our exceptionalism limited to serving as a model for others to follow or not as they please. You’ll notice that in either case the “exceptionalism” usually remains unquestioned.
The first imperative has produced what is called the "internationalist" strand of American foreign policy, and the second our more traditional "isolationist" outlook. For most of the nineteenth century, the demands of Manifest Destiny and the Civil War preoccupied our attention and isolationism dominated the outlook of American foreign policy. Only at the end of the century did we begin to flirt with an imperial foreign policy in our relations with the nations of Central America and the Pacific rim. Since then US foreign policy has exhibited an almost bi-polar character. It has swung from the internationalism of the Wilsonian world order to the isolationism of the 1920’s Republican ascendancy of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. It was then followed by our embrace of the American Century during World War II and the Cold War which followed. After our defeat in Vietnam and the demise of the Soviet Union we would begin a calculated withdrawal from the demands of exceptionalism only to see it re-emerge in the neo-conservative intervention of Bush '43 in Iraq, the reaction to which resulted in the substitution of soft power by the liberal realists of the Obama administration. Today the retreat from internationalism has culminated in the "America First" isolationist rhetoric of the Trump administration.
David Milne put it best in his Wilson Agonistes: The Battle Over Woodrow Wilson:
And this is why Wilson’s presidency continues to speak to us. More than anyone’s, Wilson’s historical luster corresponds with the foreign policy in vogue at any given time. When retrenchment and realism hold sway, Wilson appears misguided, a blind eye doctor. When internationalism drives American diplomacy, Wilson is a visionary, his presidency a lodestar.
As you peruse the materials below keep In mind the following issues that emerge from a close look at Wilson’s policy and its implementation at the Versailles Peace Conference.
Reading
The Paris Peace Conference and its Consequences
, Alan Sharp.
"Alan Sharp is Emeritus Professor of International History at Ulster University, from which he retired as Provost of its Coleraine campus in 2009. He is the author of 'The Versailles Settlement: Peacemaking after the First World War, 1919-1923' (Macmillan, 1991, third edition 2018) and was general editor of the 32 volume Haus series Makers of the Modern World to which he contributed' David Lloyd George: Great Britain' (2008) and 'Consequences of Peace: The Versailles Settlement: Aftermath and Legacy 1919-2010' (2010) revised and reissued as Versailles 1919: A Centennial Perspective' (2018)."
https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/the_paris_peace_conference_and_its_consequences
“This article offers an overview of peacemaking after the First World War from the armistices of 1918 until 1923. It considers the outcomes of the five Parisian treaties (Versailles, Saint-Germain and Neuilly in 1919 and Trianon and Sèvres in 1920) together with the renegotiated settlement with Turkey at Lausanne in 1923. It analyzes the organization of the conference and the aims and ambitions of the leading personalities involved, concluding with an appraisal of reparations, self-determination and the reputation of the settlements.”
Woodrow Wilson's Second Term, 60 minute clip.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4716310/wilsons-term
This is well worth your time. MacMillian is perhaps today's pre-eminent scholar on this period of history. Insightful and easy to listen to. "Oxford Professor Margaret MacMillan talks about President Woodrow Wilson’s second term from 1917 to 1921. Once the U.S. entered the first World War in 1917, the majority of President Wilson’s efforts focused on foreign affairs and diplomacy. Professor MacMillan speaks about President Wilson’s involvement in the Great War and his attempts at a 'lasting peace' through the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and the League of Nations."
Session Four: The Twenties ~ "Return to Normalcy"
Americans were tired of the years of chaos and uncertainty, the labour strikes and race riots, the bomb threats and progressive agitators, the muckrakers and constant wars, from the Mexican War to the Spanish-American War and then the Great War, which they had been assured would end all wars. They wanted stability and security. . .1
Sarah Churchwell. Behold, America.
That longing for sursease would find its outlet in 1920 with the nomination and election of Warren Harding, perhaps the handsomest and least qualified man ever to occupy the White House. Unwittingly or not, Warren Gamaliel Harding, life long Ohioan, former newspaper editor, lieutenant Governor and now Senator, captured the unvoiced, inchoate mood of America. Twenty years of populist revolt and progressive reform culminating in the war to end all wars had exhausted the collective psyche of a nation. A return to "normalcy," a nostalgia for a romanticized past became a siren song. Harding won 60.2 percent of the popular vote and 404 electoral votes ushering in twelve years of what historian John D. Hicks has called the Republican Ascendancy.1
America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.
Warren G. Harding, Home Market Club of Boston on May 14, 1920.
"William Edward Leuchtenburg (born 1922) is the William Rand Kenan Jr. professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a leading scholar of the life and career of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He received his BA degree in 1943 from Cornell University, where he was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society. He later received his PhD from Columbia University in 1951. He won the 2007 North Carolina Award for Literature. He is a past president of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society of American Historians. Eric Foner is the only other historian to claim that distinction."1
Talking Points
"Sarah Churchwell (born 1970) is a professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of London, UK. Her expertise is in 20th- and 21st-century fiction. Churchwell lectured at the University of East Anglia from 1999 until 2015, when she became Professor at the School of Advanced Study of the London University. She has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, the New Statesman, The Guardian and The Observer. Her books include The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (2004); and Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby (2013) about F. Scott Fitzgerald."1
Talking Points
"Charles Kesler is a Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute, Editor of the Claremont Review of Books, host of Claremont’s The American Mind video series, and the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College.
Dr. Kesler also teaches in the Claremont Institute’s Publius Fellows Program and Lincoln Fellows Program. He received his B.A. in Social Studies and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University. From 1989 to 2008, Dr. Kesler was director of CMC’s Henry Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World. Dr. Kesler is the author of I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism."1. Kesler is a leading conservative political philosopher once described as the "presiding chieftain of an obscure. . . tribe of political philosophers known as the "West Coast Straussians."2
Talking Points
