Re: The Death of Reconstruction [H-South]

[Waistline2]

Heather Cox Richardson. The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and
Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901. Cambridge and
London: Harvard University Press, 2001. xvi + 312 pp. Notes index.
$39.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-674-00637-2.

It is really exciting and wonderful to read in your review an attempt to unravel the class factors of Reconstruction, outside the ideological stink of race. I am an African American and most certainly live the reality of the color factor in our collective history. More than that I am also a Yankee and industrial worker, who has labored amongst the highest paid workers ad the thin labor aristocracy - which is not a bad word in my opinion, but a material reality that cannot be wished away.

I am also an old school communist at age 49 and recently retired from DaimlerChrysler after 30 years. I wanted to do something else in life - like work in a Casino or something - and read books.

Race and concepts of race obscure the obvious and magnify the absurd. You point out how under Reconstruction  the various bourgeois democratic governments enacted class policy directed against the former slave holding class and favorable to the freed peoples - a term I really like, and small farmers.

Others tend to paint Reconstruction as a fantasy in harmonious racial relations devoid of class content. This is my objection. People of various hue can and will sooner or later live in peace as far as that goes, but class factors tend to divide more fundamentally than the assertions by the theorist of "an authentic Marxist conception of race."

Great review.

Eric Foner - indeed. The "unfinished revolution" concept is very old indeed and I first encountered it perhaps 30 years ago in James Allen 1936 Reconstruction, a book somewhere in the mountain of books in the basement of my second wife home. If memory serves me correct, this generation of authors - who did the best they could, proceeded from a standpoint of concrete feudal economic relations in the South, rather than feudal-like social relations housing the economic logic of a form of capitalist slavery - latifundia.

On another note, I do have a somewhat different point of view concerning the role of Booker T. Washington and his Up From Slavery. Part of my attitude and outlook probably has much to do with being a Yankee, and never having lived behind the Cotton Curtain of the period of the 1890s.  

Nevertheless, I view Washington as an intellectual extension of Sambo, from the novel "Uncle Toms Cabin."  

Ouch.

Melvin P.