David O. Stowell. Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999.
The Great Strike of 1877 has long served as an important "periodizational" function, providing a dramatic break between the Reconstruction era (which formally ended that same year with the deal which put Hayes in the White House) and the Gilded Age. Given the degree to which the Gilded Age was marked by frequent labor strife and intermittent major strikes, the neatness of this temporal demarcation is almost too good to be true.
But while the utility of the Great Strike as a milestone event is nearly impossible to argue with, David Stowell argues that traditional interpretations of the Great Strike as a spontaneous outbreak of working-class unity should not be accepted as settled fact. He argues that while traditional interpretations have approached the strike from a labor history perspective, the widespread public support generated by the original railroad strike wasn't necessarily a matter of working class solidarity.
He compares three Erie Canal cities--Buffalo Syracuse, and Albany--which experienced different levels of intensity, violence, and public support. By comparing reports and arrest records with maps, he regards the Great Strike from the perspective of urban history and also spatial history, he persuasively argues a counter-narrative in which most participants in the Great Strike were local residents and business owners who wanted to resist the intrusion of railroads into urban spaces and streets. Railroads were a constant menace to safety and quality of life, and they had on often detrimental effect on local economic activity as well.
Stowell acknowledges that his argument is somewhat speculative, but then again he points out that the traditional labor history interpretations relied largely on statements, speeches, and rhetorical assumptions.
Friday, November 18, 2016
Saturday, November 12, 2016
The Incorporation of America
Alan Trachtenberg. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982, 2007.
Trachtenberg's study straddles the fields of history and culture, coming from a point of view which attempted to analyze the development of the United States in ways which transcended rigid interpretive frameworks. In the Preface to this 25th Anniversary edition he notes that when the book was first published in 1982, "American Studies" was then a more "transgressive enterprise." (xiv) Even now, the book has a breadth of reach which sets it apart from many more traditional historical monographs.
"Incorporation" is most commonly used in the context of creating a business, and while Trachtenberg is using the term in a much broader sense--both in the sense of creating a unity out of parts as well as the sense of creating a body or a "person"--he deliberately plays on that common understanding by saying that America was "incorporated" because in many ways the cultural transformation the nation and its people went through at that time were driven by the aggressive growth of industrial capitalism and attendant phenomena, including mechanization, urban growth, the rapid opening of western land to cash-crop based agricultural, the spread of railroads, the development of finance capital, and so on.
Trachtenberg depicts the people of the United States grappling with complex, sometimes logically conflicting, notions of identity and purpose. Their society still spoke the language of stable Republican virtue and the moral economy of self-sufficient producers, but they were being driven to participate in an aggressive capitalist cycle of dynamic, creative destructive, and towards becoming consumers of mass-produced goods which were advertised in ways which turned products into abstractions tied to personal desires and detached from the act of manufacture.
This was a country where politics became a matter of fierce partisan rivalry masking a complete detachment of the Federal government from substantive action in the national economy--as in so many other areas of American society, politicians found themselves being "incorporated" into an America where the big economic questions increasingly were addressed only from the outside, by dissident groups such as the Populists who struggled to articulate new grievances in language befitting the new order.
Trachtenberg's study straddles the fields of history and culture, coming from a point of view which attempted to analyze the development of the United States in ways which transcended rigid interpretive frameworks. In the Preface to this 25th Anniversary edition he notes that when the book was first published in 1982, "American Studies" was then a more "transgressive enterprise." (xiv) Even now, the book has a breadth of reach which sets it apart from many more traditional historical monographs.
"Incorporation" is most commonly used in the context of creating a business, and while Trachtenberg is using the term in a much broader sense--both in the sense of creating a unity out of parts as well as the sense of creating a body or a "person"--he deliberately plays on that common understanding by saying that America was "incorporated" because in many ways the cultural transformation the nation and its people went through at that time were driven by the aggressive growth of industrial capitalism and attendant phenomena, including mechanization, urban growth, the rapid opening of western land to cash-crop based agricultural, the spread of railroads, the development of finance capital, and so on.
Trachtenberg depicts the people of the United States grappling with complex, sometimes logically conflicting, notions of identity and purpose. Their society still spoke the language of stable Republican virtue and the moral economy of self-sufficient producers, but they were being driven to participate in an aggressive capitalist cycle of dynamic, creative destructive, and towards becoming consumers of mass-produced goods which were advertised in ways which turned products into abstractions tied to personal desires and detached from the act of manufacture.
This was a country where politics became a matter of fierce partisan rivalry masking a complete detachment of the Federal government from substantive action in the national economy--as in so many other areas of American society, politicians found themselves being "incorporated" into an America where the big economic questions increasingly were addressed only from the outside, by dissident groups such as the Populists who struggled to articulate new grievances in language befitting the new order.
Thursday, November 3, 2016
Reconstruction as a Process of Statist Freedom
Gregory P. Downs. After Apomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.
It has been several decades since historians began the long process of redeeming the memory of Reconstruction from the dustbin the era had been consigned to by the Dunning school and subsequent scholars. It is no longer unthinkable, perhaps not even all that controversial, to argue that the era was marked by a noble, if ultimately limited and in many ways failed, experiment in expanding freedom. Reconstruction is no longer seen as a period of corruption and misrule imposed upon a defeated white Southern population, but rather as the first Civil Rights movement in American history.
But according to Downs, an important aspect of Reconstruction has been left out of the picture--the role of the military. While most historians of the period recognize there was such as thing as "military reconstruction" that understanding largely focuses on the role of the army in specific policing actions,and as the byproduct of a period in which the Federal government struggled to create new civic institutions and to populate political positions in the former Confederacy. Downs argues that the army played a much more central and proactive role in the period. This was made possible by an important fact that most histories get wrong--the Civil War did not end at Appomattox; in fact, it did not for several years after Lee surrendered to Grant. The lack of open warfare between formal armies, and the vanquishing of the Confederacy as a functioning polity meant the end of large-scale combat, but a formal, legal state of war existed until 1868 in most former CSA states, and until 1871 in a few others, finishing in Georgia. Until States were readmitted into the Union--under conditions imposed on them--and their elected representatives were seated in Congress, Republicans would insist that a state of war existed.
This didn't merely give the army an increased role in the enforcement of civil law--it some cases it meant that the army created law, and acted as the final arbiter of legal and judicial authority. In essence, the fact of martial law created the space for Republicans--both Radical and moderates, and even many conservatives--to rally together and take steps which in peacetime would have been impossible. The conditions of war allowed Republicans intent on stamping out white Southern insurgency and defending African-American (and white Republican) lives to go beyond the limits of the Constitution. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were passed under circumstances which would not have passed Constitutional muster in normal times.
But Republicans and many in the army argued that as Reconstruction was not a normal time, they had both the opportunity and the obligation to go beyond the legal powers of the Constitution in order to save their conception of how it should work. In the Introduction, Downs writes "Constitutional protections that we still take for granted--due process, equal protection, birthright citizenship, the vote--were by-products of martial law." (2) The state of war gave Republicans the extra-legal space in which to expand the definition of citizenship and rights beyond all Antebellum norms. The presence of the army gave force to these experiments--it also gave physical, tangible support to freedmen's collective aspirations and bold experiments in building civic institutions and political organizations in the shadows of their former masters and the white society which had kept them enslaved prior to the arrival of liberating soldiers.
The experience of relying on the army to defend and support efforts and asserting political and economic freedom in the face of stiff and violent resistance meant that African-Americans in the South came to understand the role of government as being a defender of freedom and the basis of its implementation. This statist conception of liberty was completely at odds with the libertarian notion of the importance of freedom from government which was the ideological basis of the Democratic Party which would lead the assault on the political, social, and economic gains created during Reconstruction.
Downs admits that there are hard questions to consider in this story. The gains of Reconstruction were made through a temporary cession of full Constitutional supremacy. At the same time, recognizing that those gains were significant (if often tenuous and ephemeral) forces the reader to consider the degree to which rights are the product not just of abstract law, but of the plain fact of force and the willingness to use it.
It has been several decades since historians began the long process of redeeming the memory of Reconstruction from the dustbin the era had been consigned to by the Dunning school and subsequent scholars. It is no longer unthinkable, perhaps not even all that controversial, to argue that the era was marked by a noble, if ultimately limited and in many ways failed, experiment in expanding freedom. Reconstruction is no longer seen as a period of corruption and misrule imposed upon a defeated white Southern population, but rather as the first Civil Rights movement in American history.
But according to Downs, an important aspect of Reconstruction has been left out of the picture--the role of the military. While most historians of the period recognize there was such as thing as "military reconstruction" that understanding largely focuses on the role of the army in specific policing actions,and as the byproduct of a period in which the Federal government struggled to create new civic institutions and to populate political positions in the former Confederacy. Downs argues that the army played a much more central and proactive role in the period. This was made possible by an important fact that most histories get wrong--the Civil War did not end at Appomattox; in fact, it did not for several years after Lee surrendered to Grant. The lack of open warfare between formal armies, and the vanquishing of the Confederacy as a functioning polity meant the end of large-scale combat, but a formal, legal state of war existed until 1868 in most former CSA states, and until 1871 in a few others, finishing in Georgia. Until States were readmitted into the Union--under conditions imposed on them--and their elected representatives were seated in Congress, Republicans would insist that a state of war existed.
This didn't merely give the army an increased role in the enforcement of civil law--it some cases it meant that the army created law, and acted as the final arbiter of legal and judicial authority. In essence, the fact of martial law created the space for Republicans--both Radical and moderates, and even many conservatives--to rally together and take steps which in peacetime would have been impossible. The conditions of war allowed Republicans intent on stamping out white Southern insurgency and defending African-American (and white Republican) lives to go beyond the limits of the Constitution. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were passed under circumstances which would not have passed Constitutional muster in normal times.
But Republicans and many in the army argued that as Reconstruction was not a normal time, they had both the opportunity and the obligation to go beyond the legal powers of the Constitution in order to save their conception of how it should work. In the Introduction, Downs writes "Constitutional protections that we still take for granted--due process, equal protection, birthright citizenship, the vote--were by-products of martial law." (2) The state of war gave Republicans the extra-legal space in which to expand the definition of citizenship and rights beyond all Antebellum norms. The presence of the army gave force to these experiments--it also gave physical, tangible support to freedmen's collective aspirations and bold experiments in building civic institutions and political organizations in the shadows of their former masters and the white society which had kept them enslaved prior to the arrival of liberating soldiers.
The experience of relying on the army to defend and support efforts and asserting political and economic freedom in the face of stiff and violent resistance meant that African-Americans in the South came to understand the role of government as being a defender of freedom and the basis of its implementation. This statist conception of liberty was completely at odds with the libertarian notion of the importance of freedom from government which was the ideological basis of the Democratic Party which would lead the assault on the political, social, and economic gains created during Reconstruction.
Downs admits that there are hard questions to consider in this story. The gains of Reconstruction were made through a temporary cession of full Constitutional supremacy. At the same time, recognizing that those gains were significant (if often tenuous and ephemeral) forces the reader to consider the degree to which rights are the product not just of abstract law, but of the plain fact of force and the willingness to use it.
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