There have been numerous calls over the past year or so for what is being called a Third Reconstruction. Fair enough. However, what happened in the first two? Since there are calls for a third, that suggests that the others failed. Why and how did the other two fail? And what is a “reconstruction” anyway?
Starting with the last question, a Reconstruction, to be simplistic but direct, is kind of a do-over. The underlying assumption is that we did not really get it right the first time, or in our case the second time as well, so we need to try again. What didn’t we get right the first time? The answer is, “an awful lot.”
As background, our nation was founded, our founding documents created, primarily for the benefit of White, propertied men. In this formulation, women were excluded and the lots of poor White men, regarding voting matters, were left to the States, States run by rich White men. Blacks were not entirely excluded from consideration. Our constitution accepted the institution of slavery, forbidding it to be undermined by harboring slaves. Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3: “No person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due.” Additionally, Congress was precluded from passing any law limiting slavery for a generation and, for census purposes, slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person. Of course, these shortcomings led, less than a century later, directly to the Civil War, a war that killed more Americans than any other war in our history. The first Reconstruction followed shortly after end of the Civil War.
Here is a brief summary of events towards the end and following the Civil War, demonstrating how and why the first Reconstruction failed:
Post Civil War:
- General Sherman’s “march to the sea,” was followed by growing numbers of ex-slaves seeking protection and/or conscription into the Union Army (per Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation). This prompted Sherman to dedicate land forfeited by former slaveowners to ex-slaves. Sherman’s Field orders, followed by official circulars put out by the Freedmen’s Bureau, sought to use between 400,000 and 900,000 acres of forfeited Southern property for land distribution to former slaves, famously characterized as a commitment to provide ex-slaves with “40 acres and a mule.” After Lincoln’s assassination, Johnson rescinded these orders and most land was returned to the former owners.
- Following Johnson’s accommodation and granting of near universal amnesty for all those signing loyalty oaths, Southern States then passed the infamous Black Codes, which forbade Blacks from owning property, from engaging in most professions, and criminalized those out of work. By criminalizing “vagrancy,” this made it possible to imprison freed slaves and lease out ex-slaves to former slave-holders for work previously performed by slaves. Essentially, this re-enslaved those who were freed by the 13th Amendment, since the Amendment made an exception for those convicted of crimes. And what the vagrancy laws could not accomplish, the institution of sharecropping completed, keeping generations of landless Blacks impoverished and indebted to former slaveowners.
- The 14th and 15th Amendments were passed by the states, over the objection of President Johnson. These amendments in principle granted full citizenship rights to all who were born or naturalized in this country. Congress also established the Freedman’s Bureau under military jurisdiction, which provided some level of redress and opportunity for ex-slaves in the South. This marked the beginning of the First Reconstruction, which was undermined in different ways.
- State Legislation – Jim Crow Laws, upheld by the Supreme Court in its validation of the principle of “separate but equal,” kept Blacks and others effectively in a subordinate caste status for nearly the next century. Voting restrictions were rampant. The Supreme Court ruled that States were only precluded from excluding persons from voting based on race. The Southern States then passed laws that restricted voting for other reasons – from inability to pay poll taxes to literacy. Poor Whites, by and large, supported these laws to keep Blacks from voting even when those same laws precluded many of them from voting as well. Blacks were restricted from most professions. Starting in the late 19th Century, local jurisdictions in the South began passing zoning laws that designated “whites only” residential areas. These became prevalent in the South until the Supreme Court struck these provisions down in 1917. After the invalidation of racial zoning, Southern States looked north for more sophisticated ways to exclude Blacks and others from settling in white areas without showing explicit racial animus.
- Federal Legislation – The FDR era of progressive legislation created many rights not previously recognized. However, in order to convince Southern legislators to vote for these actions, the Roosevelt administration needed to exclude Blacks from utilizing these benefits – such as social security, unemployment insurance, union rights, and housing benefits, to name a few.
- Judicially – the Supreme Court, through numerous rulings, restricted the applicability of the post-Civil War Amendments, in many cases ruling that the Amendments did not apply to State law.
- Legal Conventions – Racial Covenants were one way to get around the unconstitutionality of racial zoning. And even though the Supreme Court (Shelly v. Kramer), in 1947, struck down these clauses as unconstitutional, they survived well into the 1960s before being entirely outlawed in 1968. In the interim, not only did private parties continue to use racially restricted covenants, but the Federal Housing Administration continued to insist on such covenants as a condition of getting federally insured mortgages. Their rationale? Since they were requiring these restrictive covenants for “economic reasons” (the assumption being that Blacks and other minorities being present in any residential setting will force a decline in home values), they were not engaging in racial discrimination but basing their policy on sound economic and fiscal policy. Other conventions with racially motivated tactics included blockbusting, racial steering, redlining, urban renewal, sub-prime lending, price gouging, predatory lending and more.
- Politically – In the Great Compromise of 1876, the South brokered an electoral college victory for the North’s Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, in return for an agreement to remove all federal troops from the South, this officially ending the First Reconstruction and ushering in a new era of segregation, repression and violence against Blacks.
- Socially – Where legislation and judicial rulings fell short, white mob violence picked up the slack, particularly with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan but also in the North with countless incidents of mob violence against Blacks moving into White neighborhoods. Mob violence in response to attempts to integrate White neighborhoods was often done with the assistance or acquiescence of local law enforcement officials.
What is clear from the above, is that the First so-called Reconstruction failed. Why did it fail? It failed for a number of reasons, but primarily it failed because the South never really lost the Civil War since decisions were made to accommodate the persistence of White supremacy in the South, while the North, especially following the Great Migration of Blacks starting about the time of the First World War, adopted its own ways to disenfranchise and discriminate against Blacks and other minorities. In other words, the North won the war, but sympathized with the South when it came to White Supremacy. If the South fought to preserve White Supremacy and its most explicit expression, slavery, and the North, though opposing slavery, agreed with the norm but not its expression, it goes without saying, that White Supremacy remained, while the expressions manifested merely changed form. The effect was not the same, but similar enough to satisfy the needs of White Supremacists. Sharecropping is one example of this.
And what about the second Reconstruction? There appears to be disagreement about the start of this Second Reconstruction. Some look to the Truman Administration’s order to integrate the military. Others look to the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s, which is probably more on the mark. I would maintain that this Second Reconstruction was made possible through a combination of inter-related developments of the post-war period. First and foremost, the Civil Rights Movement, grounded in what were likely countless meetings in Church basements and elsewhere during the immediate post-war period, its manifestation served to wake the country up from its convenient racist slumber. When Civil Rights marchers took to the streets and particularly when peaceful demonstrations were met with violence, national consciousness was, at the very least, raised to a new height of awareness, with slain Martin Luther King, Jr. remaining as its symbolic, if at the time widely hated (by Whites), icon.
A corollary, perhaps with more potent consequences, was the Black Liberation/Black Power Movements of the 1960s. Embodied or motivated by the killing or imprisonment of leaders like Medgar Evans, Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Fred Hampton, Assata Shakur, and others, this movement earned special attention from the FBI and local law enforcement officials. In an affirmative effort to destroy this movement, the FBI and local law enforcement regularly used informants to fabricate pretenses for raids, used lies or threats to encourage street gangs to engage in violence against local groups like the Black Panther Party. Lies were also used to sew internal division, succeeding in turning leaders who were paranoid for good reason against one another. They pursued frivolous indictments and intensive media campaigns to disrupt operations that promoted community support, and employed other tactics targeted to destroy leadership. As a result of all this, groups eventually focused most of their energy on defense and eventually disbanded. The consciousness-raising and activist appeals of these movements, however, were a major spur for government and private support to redress conditions of urban poverty and systemic discrimination.
Communism and the fact that the world was politically divided into two camps – one promoting capitalism (under the guise of free market democracy, whatever that is) and the other promoting communism (under the guise of class struggle and historical inevitability). This bi-polar arrangement caused concern that not only did the American system have to worry about external threats to capitalism, but internal threats as well. These fears that were shared by government officials and many citizens were also a motivation for progressive legislation of the Second Reconstruction.
With regard to the global economy, emerging from the Second World War, the United States was the only Western country with a fully intact industrial sector, along with a work force not as decimated by the war as other countries. The United States held a substantial share of the world’s gold supply, still the standard for international trade. The dollar was king and was soon to provide the basis for international trade accounts.
The frequency of assassinations in the sixties probably also had an effect on this country. Starting with the assassination of JFK in 1963, this felt like the end of one era and the beginning of another. Assassinations, including Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton, Robert Kennedy, and others had to also have an impact that motivated support for change. Compounded by increasing and pervasive urban riots that shook the nation to its core, this also helped support Civil Rights legislation.
Finally, there is the strong possibility that, along with fear stoked by Black Power demands and rioting in urban centers from where many Whites still made a living, a sense of moderate generosity based on White, middle class progress and, perhaps what Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as a “coalition of conscience” based on guilt, laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights legislation and for the so-called “War on Poverty” Programs. In all, as a result of these legislative acts, along with many complementary Supreme Court decisions, federal law expanded health benefits, increased funding for public housing, and made it illegal to discriminate in the areas of housing, public accommodations, education, and employment.
So what happened and how much progress did we make with regard to resolving inequality?
For sure, Jim Crow was dismantled. Separate facilities were made illegal. It was no longer illegal, to cite to just one absurd example, for Blacks to sit at the same park table as Whites to play a game of chess. But beyond the elimination of Jim Crow, an important change since all the laws and conventions constantly reinforced White Supremacy (like a Black person having to wait in a store to be served until all the White customers were served first), much seeming progress from that period seems to have been lost.
Housing segregation has not improved significantly. School segregation is about as bad as it ever has been. In terms of income and wealth, there has not been substantial progress. Racial wealth disparity is little changed since the early 1960s. In 1962, White wealth was 7X higher than in 2016. In 2016, that number was about 6.6X higher. In terms of median wealth, Black median wealth 50 years ago was about 9.4% of White median wealth. In 2016, it was 8.7% of White wealth. The Black homeownership in 1960 was about 38.4%. By 2020, that percentage increased to 44%. In terms of employment, pre-COVID, Blacks still had unemployment rates that were about 60% higher than Whites, even though they were low (5.5%) by historic standards. Post-COVID, White unemployment was about 12.4%, while unemployment for Blacks was about 16.8%.
What has changed:
A major change is the impact that economic and tax policies have had on the (White) middle class over the past 40 to 50 years. In 1971, the percentage of households making up the middle class (those households between 2/3 and 2X the median disposable household income) was about 61%. By 2019, pre-COVID, that number fell to 51% of households. If the middle class portion of the population held, about 33 million more Americans would be leading a middle class lifestyle.
The Black Power/Black Liberation movements of the 1960s, into the 1970s, have been completely destroyed. The Civil Rights Movement, as well, ebbed in the 1970s when, as was the case with the Black Power movements, its leaders were killed, died, grew older or joined the system by seeking and attaining elective office. Communism, as a competing political system, is no longer an issue from outside or within.
Globally, assisted both by Democratic neo-liberal policies and Republican conservative policies, particularly with regard to tax cuts favoring the uppermost class of taxpayers, the United States is no longer dominant in manufacturing and maintains a trade imbalance that has increased from about $3.9 billion in 1970 to about $900 billion in 2020, reflecting the balancing out of participation in the global production economy. For the future, it should be of concern that this country’s dependence on global acceptance of dollars, essentially on credit by the world at large, could be a problem if dependence shifts to another currency or basket of currencies.
Bringing all of this to more current events, the election of Donald Trump serves as an avatar for what is now clearly a very substantial aggrieved segment of the White population in this country. In many ways, similar to the White reaction to the First Reconstruction, including the creation and expansion of the KKK and legislative and judicial retrenchment on progressive racial and poverty matters, there was a second reaction to the Second Reconstruction in the form of legislative and judicial retrenchment, and the mobilization of white grievance through the proliferation and increased membership in hate groups, along with the increase in hate crimes.
This trend did not happen without a reaction from anti-racists and anti-fascists. Spurred on by decades of police and vigilante violence/killing against unarmed black men and women and the increased frequency of recording such events, a new, still largely (as of early 2021) defensive Black Power movement arose with the Black Lives Matter movement. Started in 2013, following the murder of Trayvon Martin by vigilante George Zimmerman, the movement has grown national and internationally. Beyond spearheading demonstrations against police brutality, the BLM movement also is focused on improving the lives of Blacks and other minorities by building local power. Most of the demonstrations led by BLM have been peaceful and (importantly) multi-racial and multi-ethnic, even if often met by violence. Politically, BLM participants (so far, they eschew the designation of select “leaders,” taking the position that all participants are leaders), have so far not promoted a Marxist agenda, like their predecessors of a generation or two ago, but seem inclined to favoring some middle ground between state socialism and free market capitalism.
Lessons Learned:
One general lesson from these experiences is that it seems that a “coalition of conscience,” to the extent it ever existed, is a fragile basis for lasting change. Change the circumstances and the conscience seems to adjust to accommodate. In fact, when people feel they are no longer or soon not to be in the majority and less likely to advance economically due to affiliation with a favored group, racism, fascism, and abandonment of democratic ideals appear to seem like acceptable options to many. The other major lesson is that capitalism is dynamic and, though humbled by the Second World in light of the global rise of communism, strong private unions and energetic government enforcement of labor laws, the corporate sector and the elite class of super-rich and potentially super-rich came roaring back to political dominance starting in the early 1970s and have been systematically, since that time, rolling back not only the advances made through Civil Rights (in some cases perversely, as in the case of predatory and sub-prime lending which, instead of not lending to people of color, loaned to them with abandon without regard to ability to repay) but also through progress achieved through the New Deal programs. We are left then, with how to learn from the past to implement progressive change that is being billed as a Third Reconstruction.
Before going over lessons that can be carried over to a Third Reconstruction, we may want to consider what distinguishes where we are now with where we were when the first two Reconstructions occurred.
In the immediate post-Civil War period, we had a Democratic President and a mostly Democratic South and Republican North. Before the Civil War, the country’s economy was substantially dependent upon the South for raw materials to feed an expanding industrial sector, with the South dependent on slave labor to produce what is estimated as making up as much as 80% of pre-bellum Gross National Product (See Carol Anderson, White Rage). The North was concerned that the South could maintain favorable labor conditions (the equivalent of slavery without being slavery), develop its own industrial capacity, and then undercut the North in that regard, while expanding westward from there. Given this rivalry, the Republican North wanted to hold the South accountable in order to prevent it from competing with the North. The first Reconstruction, then, served the abolitionist goals of Northerners looking to punish the South for the evils of slavery but also served the agenda of the industrial North looking to further develop and expand a capitalist economy with free (though unorganized) labor. When the majority of Northerners grew weary of continued promotion of black civil and human rights, and when it looked like the South could have one of its own candidates declared the winner of the 1876 Presidential election, the compromise brokered by Northern industrialists was to hand the electoral college vote to Rutherford B. Hayes in return for agreement to remove federal troops from the South and effectively end Reconstruction. This ushered in the era of Jim Crow, the KKK, every excuse to lynch a black man, sanctioned violence whenever Blacks collectively succeeded, and more.
What Nixon saw as this country’s silent majority with a relatively safe and comfortable middle-class lifestyle, seems now to have transformed into a very vocal, violence prone substantial minority with grievances and diminished outlooks for future prosperity. The White middle class in the 1950s and 1960s may have struggled, but there was a general sense that hard work led to success and that their children would do better than they did. That is not the case now, at least in how this country works and for whom. According to a recent study conducted by Siwei Cheng of New York University, and reported by Susan Pinker in a 9/27/19 article in the Wall Street Journal, Professor Cheng is quoted: “I study how children are doing in relation to their parents… America is not doing that well, compared to other Western countries.” The article states that in Canada, for example, the chances of a low-income child entering the middle class are twice as great as they are in the U.S. There is also a disconnect in projecting the future. Americans underestimate the future earnings of children depending upon whether they are rich or poor. “The reality is that there is indeed a [mobility] gap, by international standards. But what people have in their mind is a larger gap, in terms of how rich and poor kids will do. They’re pessimistic about equality of opportunity,” said Prof. Cheng. “The American public perceives the gap in economic outcomes between children from rich and poor families to be twice as large as it actually is.” This goes a long way towards explaining some of the outsized enthusiasm for Donald Trump by those who do not see much to look forward to for themselves or their children.
Backing up the pessimism, besides the diminishing of the middle class, mentioned above, we can look at another basic indicator, labor’s share in the economy. In 1950 the rate, as a percentage of Gross National Product, was 63%. In 2019, and this was pre-COVID and therefore prior to the massive lay-offs that occurred during the pandemic, the “K” shaped performance that followed and the concomitant recession for most of the country, the rate was about 60%. Three percentage points may not seem like a lot, but in an economy as large as ours, 3% represents $640 billion, which translates to about $5,000 per American household.
Gross inequality, accompanied by its economic sibling of economic malaise for a substantial portion of the population, underlying racism that has always been a defining trait of this country from its beginning, a self-defeating continuation of poor Whites accepting the lack or loss of public benefits if those benefits will be shared by people of color, and a social media reality that joins people in search of affirmation, as opposed to information, and loose affiliation, as opposed to substantive association, brings us to our current circumstances and the potential for a Third Reconstruction.
To learn from the past, an analogy may assist. If someone hates me with a passion or wants my land (we are both small farmers) and he poisons my well to encourage me to leave, I have a number of choices as to how to respond. In this instance, let’s assume that I push for and succeed in getting legislation passed that make poisoning another’s well a crime. With this accomplished, I followed by drilling elsewhere (and deeper) on my property and install a new well. Fear of enforcement and criminal liability protect me for a while, but over time fewer people get their water from wells, ours are the only two farms left in the area and, as a result, enforcement lessens as a priority and the effectiveness of enforcement wanes. My well is poisoned again. I complain to the authorities but they have no enforcement mechanism and just tell me that I should apply for municipal water. I cannot afford to do that or it is more practical for me to maintain a well and besides, the criminal act of poisoning my well is not being done so that I get municipal water. It is being done to take what’s mine or destroy my ability to provide for me and my family. What, then, are my options?
I believe my realistic options are, as follows:
- Directly confront the person and be prepared for a confrontation;
- Pay-off the person to avoid confrontation;
- Divert the attention of the person to a goal other than destroying me;
- Give up my land.
There may be other options, but let’s focus on these. So as not to reward bad behavior, the second option should be removed from consideration, along with the fourth. This leaves confrontation or diversion. But what if we were to decide that the confrontation be used for the purpose of not simply diverting the transgressors’ attention away from me, but for the purpose of joining in a common cause that not only stops the criminal and immoral behavior but gets to the heart of our mutual vulnerability – my inability to stop his behavior without being a criminal myself and his inability to accept me and my family as a neighbor? Of course, in order to get to this point, a number of things need to occur. We have to meet face to face so that there is an opportunity to interact on the basis of our mutually shared humanity. Beyond this process of “subjectifying” one another, there will be a need to understand one another’s circumstances. Why do I want or need to keep my property and why is he so intent on having me give it up? We may, perhaps, discover that he is being put out of business by demands by government to increase the size of his farm to accommodate more production through more mechanization. His agreement to mechanize more has put him into oppressive debt and as a result his barn and equipment are beautiful but his residence is falling apart, he has trouble making ends meet and is always in danger of default. Taking on more debt seems like it would be a final nail in the coffin.
I am also a small farmer and struggle. After numerous conversations and some research we both decide to join a Small Farmers Union that operates in the State. We become advocates for small farms and small farmers and target common enemies who are not only killing us financially but destroying the environment and making our neighbors sick through corporate faming techniques. We are now no longer enemies. We are not only partners but also part of a larger community working for self-and public-interest.
I believe that this frames the challenge we have and the general direction we need to go in so as to avoid another cycle of illusory “change” only to find ourselves right back where we started. And as comforting as it is to believe that the “arc of history always bends towards justice,” it seems that recent history suggests otherwise, starting with the election of Obama, leading to the election of Trump, and culminating in his 2020 defeat, but a defeat defined by the largest popular vote in Presidential election history, except for the popular vote garnered by Biden. This is too huge of a following to fall back on a pleasant platitude. And reaching out in the hopes of uniting, even if not universally successful, could be successful enough to marginalize those racists and fascists who are beyond redemption.
To learn from past mistakes, it will be necessary not only to bolster and protect human rights initiatives, groups and leaders, but to directly challenge all marginalized segments of society, to confront the real source of division and oppression – the economic system we labor within, where profit is the universal overarching goal of human activity; where capital is King; where the environment is destroyed in the name of progress; where efficiency and productivity are lauded values regardless of how the systems of production of goods and services denigrates humanity; where technology is a tool for profit, not human progress and where people are subject to manipulation for political and commercial benefit, isolated in their insecurity, and disposable in their replicability. We need a new Rainbow Coalition that joins all who are deemed of little or no importance to join together in a new movement, similar to the Populist Movement of the late 19th Century, while recognizing that one important reason for the downfall of the Populist Party and its base in the Farmer’s Alliance — its inability to come together as a multi-racial movement. In more recent times, the failure of the original Rainbow Coalition was largely due to the assassination of Fred Hampton specifically, and the murder, incarceration, forced exile and harassment of movement leaders nationally. But now we have a chance to support new efforts, from the Black Lives Matter to Reverend Barber’s Poor Peoples Campaign. With renewed optimism and faith we may prevail, if the moment is right and to the extent that we make the moment through our actions. As academic and activist, Keenanga Yamahtta-Taylor states, “there are moments of struggle when the mutual interests of workers are laid bare, and when the suspicion is finally turned in the other direction – at the plutocrats who live well while the rest of us suffer.” [#BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, Haymarket Books (2016), 227]
To summarize, we must put as much, if not more, of our efforts not only looking for reform legislation and protecting progressive groups and leaders, but also into efforts to join all marginalized segments of society and all who are sympathetic to humanistic human development and progress into a mutual political and economic platform and endeavor. That is the challenge before us. That is the way we work to avoid a new Civil War or the revival of fascism.