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
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
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 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.