The author of this book, the eminent Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., provides an excellent summary of the loss of all gains of post-Civil War Reconstruction to Jim Crow oppression and disenfranchisement from Southern violence, Northern abandonment, and Supreme Court fiat in the following short NY Times opinion piece:

The book reviewed here pursues the same topic in greater depth, but is very painful to read because the author reproduces many images and quotations documenting the many degrading, humiliating caricatures depicting African-Americans in a decades-long flood of Southern White supremacist propaganda in support of Jim Crow. 

The following review of Professor Gate’s book is by Nell Irvin Painter in the New York Times.

The inauguration of Donald J. Trump as president seemed to come from some place other than America, as though the white nationalism, the sexism, the meanness of spirit belonged to some hateful foreign country. Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s “Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow,” an indispensable guide to the making of our times, addresses 2017’s mystifications. The book sets the Obama era beside Reconstruction and the Trump era beside the white supremacist terrorism of Redemption, the period beginning in 1877 during which Reconstruction’s nascent, biracial democracy was largely dismantled. Gates juxtaposes the optimism of Reconstruction, the despair of Redemption and the promise of the New Negro movement — the effort by black Americans, starting around the turn of the 20th century, to craft a counternarrative to white supremacy. In doing so, “Stony the Road” presents a bracing alternative to Trump-era white nationalism.

Gates takes his title from one of the New Negro’s most enduring cultural artifacts: “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” composed in 1900 and still widely known as the “Negro national anthem” (the “Negro” here is historically correct). The song looks back at enslavement and exclusion — at our people’s “dark past” and “stony road” — decrying its “chast’ning rod” and the “blood of the slaughtered.” It exhorts black Americans to stay “in the path” toward full emancipation, to remain faithful to “our God” and to “our native land.” The struggle remains a long way from over. But as Gates’s survey of the iconography of white supremacy from the past two centuries reminds us, 2017 represents far from the worst we have faced.

 “Stony the Road” offers a history lesson on connivance, or, in today’s idiom, collusion, by cataloging in words and pictures the white supremacy at the highest levels of American politics, including President Woodrow Wilson’s praise for “The Birth of a Nation,” a Negrophobic hymn to the Ku Klux Klan that was shown in the White House in 1915. By recreating such potent scenes, Gates makes clear what early-20th-century blacks were up against, and “Stony the Road” seems to encourage us to take hope. The book’s devastating inventory of cruel, ugly stereotypes, lynchings and torture puts our current era immediately in context.

Gates contrasts the iconography of Negrophobia with the New Negroes’ own cultural productions: family photographs and portraits of well-dressed and inevitably light-skinned African-Americans featured in black periodicals. In this matchup, white supremacy wins in volume and pungency over “the vain attempt to confect positive images of noble black people powerful enough to brace against the maelstrom of excruciating images that the white supremacist imagination had spawned.” Gates’s epilogue explains why. Upstanding New Negroes, no matter how pale, straight-haired, well dressed or impeccably educated, ultimately proved no contest for white supremacy, which had much more than iconography going for it. In the century after the Civil War, when most black men and women could not vote, white supremacy had political power — local, state and national. For all its hopeful eloquence, New Negro cultural expression could not overcome disfranchisement. Then, as now, the ballot held the key to a new Reconstruction.

Much of the scholarship Gates cites is not new, including W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1935 classic, “Black Reconstruction: An Essay of the History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880,” as well as an abundance of academic articles and books inspired by the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s (an era often termed the Second Reconstruction) and which effectively undermined the prevailing account of Reconstruction as an era of ignorant and corrupt Negro rule.

New in “Stony the Road” is a wealth of visual material related to “Reconstruction,” a documentary series that Gates produced for PBS and which aired this month. The visual bounty began to emerge in the late 20th century, thanks to the digitization of hitherto scattered archives. In “Stony the Road,” the vicious imagery — postcards, photographs, newspaper cartoons, political broadsides, knickknacks, theater posters, playing cards, children’s books, games of all sorts — forms a sickening onslaught that raises a question: Is the book African-American history or American history?

The winter of 2017 revealed stark contrasts between a vision of the country held by millions of blinkered Americans who insisted that the president’s attitude toward immigrants and minorities was “not the America” they knew and a fuller vision of history and society, including what has so often been buried under the rubric of “African-American history,” as though African-American history had little or nothing to do with American history. Those familiar with African-American history would hardly say, “This is not the America I know.” For in our current politics we recognize African-American history — the spot under our country’s rug where the terrorism and injustices of white supremacy are habitually swept. “Stony the Road” lifts the rug.

Now American history is once again at stake. As Gates so usefully phrases it, “Few American historical periods are more relevant to understanding our contemporary racial politics than Reconstruction. Think of the fundamental questions that the study of the period forces us to consider: Who is entitled to citizenship? Who should have the right to vote? What is the government’s responsibility in dealing with terrorism? What is the relationship between political and economic democracy?”

As essential history for our times, “Stony the Road” does a kind of cultural work that is only now becoming widespread in the United States but that Germans have been undertaking for decades. The German word for this effort is Vergangenheitsbewältigung — coming to terms with the past — and it carries connotations of a painful history that citizens would rather not confront but that must be confronted in order not to be repeated. Vergangenheitsbewältigung is essential for understanding the American past as a whole.

Treating African-American history as American history in the interest of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, “Stony the Road” explains how the politics of 2017 belong squarely within our trajectory as a nation, another phase in the cycle of Reconstruction (expanded democracy), Redemption (democracy defeated) and the New Negro (black culture’s creation of a counternarrative to white supremacy). It is a history that very much needs telling and hearing in these times.

So, yes, to the history. But what of the historiographical infrastructure? While Gates rightly cites Du Bois and the historian Eric Foner as the period’s core experts, he also names, sometimes obsessively, authors of recent works who are mostly nonblack or foreign-born. The black scholars who laid the historiographical groundwork during and after the Second Reconstruction — call them the New New Negro historians — do not appear in the book. These scholars researched and wrote in the second half of the 20th century, when their scholarship was sidelined as black history. These scholars are many, but one name will stand for them all: John Hope Franklin. Gates cites Franklin’s influence on his thinking in his acknowledgments; I wish that he had cited Franklin’s scholarship and that of his peers in “Stony the Road.”

“Jim Crow,” an etching circa 1835-45.Credit…Library of Congress

(Review from anonymous historian at Edge Induced Cohesion website: https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017/05/07/book-review-the-myth-of-the-lost-cause/)

I have long wanted to read this book and have had it on my list of books to read from the library for years, but for some reason it took me a long time to get around to it–probably due to the fact that it was my highest priority to read books around 200 pages in length and this one showed up as longer despite only ending up around 260 pages in written material with extremely meticulous endnotes to help provide the evidence for the author’s sound but fierce contentions.  As someone who has done a large amount of reading on the Civil War myself [1], I can speak from my own reading that this author has done his homework and shown himself to be competent at handling the relevant Civil War historiography in order to debunk the key aspects of the neo-Confederate myth of the “Lost Cause.”  This book will make no enjoyable reading for adherents of that cause, but as someone who has spent a fair amount of my own life wrestling with such people and their bogus propaganda, this book was a breath of fresh air and an honest and bracing read and one whose conclusions I can wholeheartedly support.

In terms of its contents, this book is written in a polemical fashion, with a chapter designed for debunking key elements of the Lost Cause myth with overwhelming historical evidence and rhetorical ferocity.  The first chapter looks at the myth of the lost cause itself and how it came to be, and from whose writings and for what reasons it developed.  The second chapter examines the nature of slavery in 1861 and demonstrates that far from a dying institution it was strengthening its grip on the life and society of the antebellum South.  The third chapter demonstrates using the rhetoric of the seceding rebels themselves that slavery (often discussed in code words) was the clear and unmistakable cause of the Civil War, and that “state’s rights” was only inconsistently and selectively defended by the South in support of slavery in extensive fashion.  The fourth chapter of the book looks at ways the South could have won the Civil War, showing that it was not a hopeless contest.  The fifth chapter contains some lengthy and trenchant criticism of Lee’s performance as a general, demonstrating that Lee’s aggression and myopic view of the war kept him from reaching the highest levels of generalship.  The sixth chapter continues this theme of revisionist military history in defending the conduct of James Longstreet during the Battle of Gettysburg, a key element of the Lost Cause myth.  The seventh chapter gives a lengthy defense of Ulysses S. Grant’s conduct as a general and demonstrates through a detailed examination of his conduct in the Vicksburg campaign that he was not a butcher who hacked his way to victory but had a grasp of military strategy in a variety of ways–including logistics, operations, grand strategy, and Napoleonic tactics of seeking the flank or rear of one’s opponent and winning through audacity and celerity.  The eighth chapter discusses the way the North won by a hard war that was not a total war directed towards the extermination or rapine destruction of the civilian population.  The book then ends with a short conclusion, thoughtful acknowledgements, and a very long set of endnotes.

Admittedly, this book and its approach will not be to everyone’s taste.  As someone with a higher than average tolerance for polemic and someone who shares in detail the perspective and views of the author, I found this book to be wonderful and a necessary corrective to much of the biased pro-Southern historiography that one finds.  After reading this book, and others like it, a reader may wonder why it is that so much ink is spent on rehabilitating those civil and political figures who fought for some of the worst causes known to man–the Confederacy’s cause only slightly more noble than that of Nazi Germany.  If I was writing a book on the Lost Cause, it would probably be a lot like this one, and a lot less entertaining to read, which makes it worthwhile that this author has done any such work I would have done for me, so that I can simply recommend readers to this book if they want to read what I think about the Lost Cause and about the efforts of so many propagandists-cum-historians to turn the Confederacy and its adherents into something that they are not:  noble and heroic.  This book is revisionist history at its best and at its hardest hitting.

Reviewed by Jemar Tisby in the NY Times

In 1968, James Baldwin wrote in The New York Times: “I will flatly say that the bulk of this country’s white population impresses me, and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long.” Robert P. Jones, who leads the Public Religion Research Institute, a polling firm focused on the intersection of politics and religion, draws on Baldwin’s quote for the title of his book “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity.” Jones calls on his fellow white Christians to extricate themselves from what he asserts has defined their religion for too long: the imagined superiority of white people and anti-Black racism as its inevitable corollary.

Jones sets out to prove that “American Christianity’s theological core has been thoroughly structured by an interest in protecting white supremacy.” According to him, white Christianity has not merely been a passive bystander in the construction of this nation’s racial caste system, it has been the primary cultural and religious institution creating, promoting and preserving it.

Jones builds his case with evidence, drawing on an eclectic blend of history, theology, sociology and memoir. His use of autobiography works especially well. Before the cascade of data can turn his narrative into a detached analyst’s clinical dissection of the problem, Jones gets personal, writing about his family’s slave-owning ancestors or his own teenage years sporting the Confederate battle flag on his car’s license plate.

The book reaches its apex of evidence around its midpoint, when Jones draws on his extensive experience with polling about religion to introduce a “racism index” — a set of 15 survey questions designed to assess attitudes toward white supremacy and Black people. The findings are clear: “The more racist attitudes a person holds, the more likely he or she is to identify as a white Christian.” The results hold true for regular and infrequent churchgoers, across geographical regions and for white evangelicals, mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics. It’s hard to argue with his conclusion that white supremacy is somehow genetically encoded into white Christianity in the United States.

“White Too Long” is part of a dynamic and growing field of contemporary nonfiction that calls the white church to task for its failings when it comes to racism. Recent works that pair well with this one include “Jesus and John Wayne,” by Kristin Kobes Du Mez, “Taking America Back for God,” by Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, and “Reconstructing the Gospel,” by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. These books reflect what may be a critical pivot point in the direction of white Christianity in the United States.

Events of the past decade and especially recent months have pushed conversations about race to the forefront of the national consciousness. It is a cultural moment that is forcing white Christians to declare their allegiances — whether to a religion that reinforces white supremacy or to one that dismantles it. Jones’s book challenges people of faith to chart a new path forward.

But that is where the real trouble begins. “White Too Long” convincingly reveals the myriad ways that white Christianity has cultivated the religious, political, economic and social superiority of white people despite all efforts, modest though they may have been, to fight these tendencies. If everything he says is true, there remains then a chilling question to address: Is there anything worth salvaging?

White Christians have to face the possibility that everything they have learned about how to practice their faith has been designed to explicitly or implicitly reinforce a racist structure. In the end, “White Too Long” seems to present a stark choice: Hold onto white Christianity or hold onto Jesus. It cannot be both.

(Reviewed by Colin Grant in The Guardian 2019)

In 2008, months before his election as president, Barack Obama assailed feckless black fathers who had reneged on responsibilities that ought not “to end at conception”. Where had all the black fathers gone, Obama wondered. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander has a simple answer to their whereabouts: they’ve gone to jail.

Her clear-eyed assessment, published in the UK almost a decade after it first stunned America, is an indictment of a society that, since the 1980s, has been complicit in the explosion of its prison population from around 300,000 to more than 2 million. Drug convictions have largely fueled the increase, and an extraordinary number of those new felons have been black. This is not coincidental. The Reagan administration’s “war on drugs” shifted the legal goalposts, Alexander asserts, so that mass incarceration “emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-designed system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow”.

In the years following the Civil War, Southern legislators designed “Jim Crow” laws to thwart the newly emancipated black population, notably curbing voting rights. Under the laws, black people also, increasingly, found themselves “relegated to convict leasing camps that were, in many ways, worse than slavery”. If Jim Crow was an effective means of controlling the black population, then modern mass incarceration, Alexander argues, is its successor.

The law is supposedly color-blind but narratives around crimes are framed according to those deemed worthy of pity

The figures are extraordinary. A decade ago in Chicago, for instance, 55% of the adult black male population had a felony record. In quiet yet forceful writing Alexander, a legal scholar, outlines how the Reagan government exploited 1980s hysteria over crack cocaine to demonize the black population so that “black” and “crime” became interchangeable. It was a war – not on drugs – but on black people. While churchgoing mothers in the ghetto might want politicians to be tough on crime, they don’t want to see their sons routinely arrested (suspected of being drug dealers for wearing baggy trousers).

Alexander doesn’t understate the devastation caused by crack cocaine, quoting the historian David Kennedy’s observation that it “blew through America’s black neighborhoods like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”. But if the “war on drugs” was simply a question of controlling crime then college campuses, rather than black ghettos, would have been a safer bet. In 2000, the National Institute on Drug Abuse reported that white students used crack cocaine at eight times the rate of black students.

First-time drug offenders can face 10 years imprisonment; thousands of black Americans, following plea-bargaining, languish in jail for crimes they did not commit because of fears of these mandatory sentences. On release, they enter a parallel shadow society, where employment opportunities disappear, creating “a closed circuit of marginality”.

Black people haven’t fared better under the Democrats. President Clinton’s “three strikes and you’re out” legislation led to a further surge in prisoners given mandatory life sentences after conviction of a violent third felony.

The law is supposedly color-blind but narratives around crimes are framed according to those deemed worthy or unworthy of compassion. Alexander draws stark comparisons with the prosecutions of drunk drivers. Cocaine is a scourge in US society but drunk driving (by white men 70% of the time) results in far more violent deaths, yet drunk drivers are often charged with misdemeanors.

The emergence of black leaders hasn’t improved matters but, rather, has perpetuated the fantasy of a post-racial society. How can a system be racist when there are black heads of police departments? Alexander argues that if we understood its dependency on black exceptionalism, then “the existence of black police chiefs would be no more encouraging today than the presence of black slave drivers…hundreds of years ago”.

Alexander wrote recently in the New York Times that she’s encouraged by “the astonishing changes that have been made in the last several years on a wide range of criminal justice issues”, including Florida restoring voting rights to more than 1.4 million people with felony convictions. But she is skeptical about the technological fix championed by enthusiasts of algorithms determining who should or shouldn’t be incarcerated.

Notwithstanding improvements to the US judicial system, this distressing book offers important lessons for all societies that claim color-blindness but enact policies that scapegoat marginalized groups. Color-blindness leads to denial, believes Alexander; better to strive for color-consciousness.

Review by Tim Newburn, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2014/07/10/book-review-on-the-run-fugitive-life-in-an-american-city-by-alice-goffman/

There are currently 2.3 million people incarcerated in American prisons and jails. There are a further five million or more under some form of penal supervision – generally parole or probation. Such is the scale of imprisonment (America’s rate is close to five times that of England, and we are at record levels), and the disproportionate nature of its impact (one in 15 African-American males aged 18 or older is incarcerated compared with one in every 106 white males of the same age) that scholars have started to refer to what is occurring as mass incarceration. This unprecedented social ‘experiment’ has generated some wonderful, critical scholarship, most recently in the form of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Becky Pettit’s Invisible Men, both published in 2012.

Indeed, such has been the scale of academic work prompted by American penal expansion you might be forgiven for thinking that there was little new to say, and few new ways in which it might be explored. Any such concerns are however quickly dispelled by Alice Goffman’s extraordinary new book. On The Run is, by some distance, the most powerful work of ethnography that I have read for a very, very long time. The story of its genesis is almost as remarkable as the story at the heart of the book. But let’s leave that for now and begin with the substance of the book itself.

This is a study of some of the people – mainly the young men, but in important ways the women, old and young, too – in a small poor, Black neighborhood in Philadelphia. Located close to the University of Pennsylvania, where Alice Goffman was an undergraduate when she began the fieldwork for this book, ‘6^th Street’ is an area of about five blocks. Modestly prosperous in the 1950s and 1960s, by the early 2000s it had fallen on much harder times, though as Goffman says it was ‘not the poorest or the most dangerous neighborhood in the large Black section of Philadelphia of which it is a part’. That said, given Philadelphia has a homicide rate over ten times that of London, this is hardly especially reassuring.

The core of Goffman’s ethnography revolves around a small number of young men – Chuck, Mike, Tim, Reggie, Alex and one or two others – and tells the story of their legal entanglements, their ‘wars’ with other young men from neighboring territories, their attempts to lead some sort of life, to establish themselves as men and, more than anything else, to attempt the impossible task of avoiding the occupying force: the police. These are young men who have grown up knowing nothing else, for whom running from the cops is a set of skills that must be acquired very early on, and for whom a ‘straight’ life is so difficult to imagine it is rarely even a dream.

As Goffman acknowledges, the phrase ‘on the run’ only captures one half of these young men’s experiences. Yes, they are regularly seeking to avoid authority in almost all its forms, especially the police and the courts, and the strategies they use for keeping their heads down are described in detail. But the phrase ‘on the run’ is used interchangeably with the term ‘caught up’. For the other problem these young men face – and this is really the kernel of the Goffman’s thesis – is that once known to the system it is very difficult to escape. Arrested, charged and possibly imprisoned, certainly under penal supervision, these young men became, in Goffman’s terms, ‘legally compromised’. Their lives were now subject to a series of rules and regulations about where they could be seen, what they could do, and who they could be seen with. Any infraction – or, crucially, any alleged infraction – would likely mean an immediate return to prison or the escalation of punishment in some other form. It is this that so disfigures daily life for almost everyone in the neighborhood (though Goffman has some occasional, powerful tales of those struggling to maintain their ‘straight’ lives. For Mike, Tim, Reggie and others (Chuck was shot and died), life is lived in the main without the basic accoutrements of citizenship. It is a life on the edge. It is a fragile life in which ‘freedom’ could come to an end at any time, and for almost any (or seemingly, no), reason.

In essence, this is a study of the extraordinary reach of the penal system – a reach that goes far beyond the simple impact of the formal systems of prison, probation, parole and even policing, to become something that influences and infects almost every aspect of a neighborhood’s life. In short, in places like 6^th street, the penal system has come to be, after the family perhaps, the institution that marks and molds the lives of poor African-Americans in the 21^st Century. The modern carceral state has turned neighborhoods like this all over America into what Goffman calls ‘communities of suspects and fugitives’. Nowhere perhaps is this clearer than in the pressures placed on the women in these communities: on the one hand to protect or defend their men against police inquiries (to ‘ride’); and on the other to give them up to the police. In the latter regard there seemed almost no limit to which the police would not go to persuade, threaten, or blackmail the women into providing information about their husbands, partners, and sons. They were threatened with arrest, prosecution, imprisonment, or with the arrest of other family members if they didn’t co-operate, or they were threatened with having their jobs compromised or their benefits removed. Most dramatically, and by no means unusually, they were also threatened with having their children removed into care. That it is a precarious life for the men and for the women simply doesn’t do it justice.

As communities of suspects and fugitives these were neighborhoods that were of course extraordinarily heavily policed. Ironically, they were simultaneously extremely under-protected. The legal entanglements surrounding so many neighborhood residents mean that the police cannot easily, for which read pretty much ever, be contacted for ‘help’. As Goffman puts it, pithily, the ‘police are everywhere, but as guarantors of public safety, they are still out of reach’.  The same can be said of other social institutions, for the potential presence of the police – on the lookout for ‘suspects’ – makes attendance at funerals, hospitals, even workplaces a dangerous activity for the legally compromised. In places like 6^th Street an informal health care system has consequently come into being to provide a wide variety of services that some community members can no longer access via public health care. In one episode, one of the young men, Eddie, breaks his arm and Goffman’s description of the resetting of the damaged limb – in his mother’s kitchen – is an eye-watering illustration of the impact of being caught up/on the run.

Like all good ethnographies it is sometimes the small details – from the plates of corn bread and chicken offered in part-compensation to the local nurse who reset Eddie’s arm, to the almost throwaway manner in which Goffman reports witnessing the police strangle a young man to death – that sets it apart from other work.  This, and the sheer scale of the enterprise, is what distinguishes On The Run. At the end of the book there is a 50-page ‘methodological note’ in which Goffman begins to reveal the extraordinary lengths she took to immerse herself in 6^th Street. Beginning as an undergraduate student, rather serendipitously she began to tutor two children in the neighborhood and gradually, by building friendships with Chuck, Mike and others, almost imperceptibly became part and parcel of 6^th St life. Over the years so immersed did she become that she left behind much of her previous life and, indeed, much of her previous identity, and she talks movingly, if briefly, about the consequences of this.

Goffman’s approach – as an educated white woman attempting ethnography in a poor Black community – was to ‘take up as little social space’ as she could. This ‘invisibility’ translates into her writing. There were numerous occasions when I wanted to know more about her, to hear more about her thoughts and feelings, to feel the authorial presence more strongly. But this is not her style. In the methodological note, however, Goffman puts her head a little above the parapet, beginning for the first time explicitly to discuss the effort involved in the work, the risks and dangers she faced, and some of the ethical dilemmas involved. This ‘note’ is terrific, and as far from a dry methodological appendix as it is possible to imagine. Indeed, it ends on a note that is both hugely important and very shocking (deliberately so). I won’t spoil it by revealing what she says, and when you read the book you should wait until the end also.

This book is already making a significant name for itself – and deservedly so. The best part of a decade’s work has gone in to it, and the dedication of the ethnographer concerned goes beyond anything one could reasonably expect, or was probably sensible. In an age where ethics committees and the increasingly instrumental nature of academic life are making imaginative and risky work less and less possible, one can only be thankful that there are (very) occasional Alice Goffmans around to remind us just what can be achieved by sociology at its best. As a work of ethnography it is outstanding. As a piece of social science it is refreshingly and gloriously readable –how often can one say that of sociology these days? And as an insight into the reach and effect of the contemporary penal state on the day-to-day lives of Black urban America it is unparalleled.

(Edited review from the website Andrew: https://medium.com/@ahseeder/a-short-summary-of-kathleen-belews-bring-the-war-home-8ac4a74f3fe2)

Belew’s book is a history of the white power movement’s “groundswell” in the United States, between 1979 and 1995, culminating in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Michael Fortier.  The movement “brought together members of the Klan, militias, radical tax resisters, white separatists, neo-Nazis, and proponents of white theologies such as Christian Identity, Odinism, and Dualism.”

Belew writes that as the white power movement matured, it became more violent, and “[as] violence came to the fore of the movement, distinctions among white power factions melted away.”  Belew calls this process “violent community formation” (34). Yet as a social movement, Belew makes a distinction between the white power movement’s “revolutionary violence” and the Ku Klux Klan’s “vigilante violence.”

Vigilante violence “served to constitute, shore up, and enforce systemic power.” Revolutionary violence, however, sought to overthrow the state. It is the white power movement’s goal of overthrowing the federal government that sets it apart in the history of white supremacy in the U.S.

The “formative” years of the white power movement, between 1979 and 1983, are defined by experiences of the Vietnam War.  Belew writes that: “Embattled white power activists saw the Vietnam War as emblematic of all that had gone wrong.”  Veterans were among the white power movement’s key organizers, including Louis Beam, Richard Butler, Tom Metzger, Robert Miles, Glenn Miller, and Tom Posey.

Beam became the Grand Wizard of the Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan before organizing his own “Texas Emergency Reserve, a Special-Forces-style Klan unit with extensive weaponry and rigorous training.”  Beam and other white power activists organized paramilitary training [that] prepared white power activists to “wage a race war” right at the moment when the United States and the Soviet Union would bomb each other with nuclear warheads

Groups like the California KKKK, the Christian Patriots Defense League, the Invisible Empire KKKK, and the Covenant, Sword, and the Arm of the Lord organized paramilitary camps all across the country (51). The camps “emerged directly from the combat experiences of key activists in Vietnam” (34), meaning that the camps “sought to remake recruits and inculcate a disposition toward violence” (36).

The camps were not just for show. Belew details three frightening examples of early white power organizing: The Greensboro massacre and subsequent acquittal of 14 Neo-Nazis and Klansman; Klan Border Watch patrols along the US-Mexico border, and the Texas KKKK’s terrorizing of a Vietnamese refugee fishing community [near] Galveston.

After Galveston, a federal judge ordered “ the Klan to ‘stop paramilitary training,’ in Texas entirely, and permanently enjoined the Klan from combat, combat-related training, or parading in public with firearms.” The camps moved to Idaho. The ease with which organizers relocated paramilitary compounds to another part of the country goes far to demonstrate the national reach of the white power movement’s ideology.

In Part 2, “The War Comes Home,” Belew identifies the white power movement’s “revolutionary turn” to a single moment in time: The 1983 Aryan Nations World Congress in Hayden Lake, Idaho, when, during a “private, heavily guarded meeting,” the white power movement went from carrying out paramilitary actions on behalf of the United States to carrying out paramilitary actions to overthrow the United States.

 “Following the convention in Idaho, activists widely adopted two new strategies: using computer networks to mobilize and coordinate action, and ‘leaderless resistance,’ cell-style organizing in which activists could work in common purpose without direct communication from movement leaders.”

The Turner Diaries, [a 1978 novel of violent government overthrow, revenge mass executions, and removal or racial minorities] by William Luther Pierce, is the key to understanding the strategy of the white power movement.  In addition to The Turner Diaries, Belew’s book includes a list of 32 sources that make up an archive of white power literature. These include [many print sources and] an online message board called Liberty Net.

Belew dedicates a chapter of Bring the War Home to the role white women played in the movement: “Protection of white women and their reproductive capacity represented one ideology motivating white power activists to wage war. The future of the white race, activists believed, rested with the mothers of white children. In the movement, this went far beyond anti-miscegenation to the demand that every white woman attempt to bear children” (160).

Members of the Order traveled to Robert Mathews’s farm to take their oath, where they surrounded a white infant girl, “raised their arms in a ‘Hitler salute,’” and “pledged their lives to race war until victory or until death” (116). Members of the Order modeled their name and their strategy directly from the Turner Diaries and planned to establish a “white separatist nation” in the Pacific Northwest.

Ultimately the material conditions of the white power movement depended on stealing cash, weapons, and ammunition. One armored car robbery in 1984 may have sustained the movement for years. Twelve Order members stole $3.6 million in Ukiah, California and then, according to a federal indictment, distributed hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to other white power organizers in North Carolina, California, Arkansas, Virginia, Idaho, and Michigan (133).

If law enforcement inaction is a pattern during the formative years of the white power movement, catastrophic law enforcement action defined the later years. The rest of Belew’s history describes escalating white power violence in the wake of law enforcement sieges at Ruby Ridge and Waco.  Among some white power activists, Ruby Ridge and Waco represented the fulfillment of an apocalyptic vision that had become the focal point of their ideology. The title of Part 3 of Bring the War Home is “Apocalypse.”

The passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994, however, was the final motivating force behind the Oklahoma City bombing plot (221). The white power activists behind the plot — McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Michael Fortier — staged their actions from a compound in Elohim City, Oklahoma. The truck bomb was prepared from a design described in The Turner Diaries. The explosion killed 167 people, including 19 children.

Belew’s history describes important aspects of the white power movement’s current strategy.  To be clear: The white power movement’s goal is to incite a “race war” and then overthrow the U.S. government. Over the decades, the movement built an underground network of cells by training together, reading the same literature and sharing it over social media, by inter-marrying and enforcing religious control over women’s bodies, by stealing weapons and cash, counterfeiting money, and committing acts of violence.

Reviewed by Sean Wilentz in the NY Times

At the close of his First Inaugural Address, President Abraham Lincoln entreated the seceding slaveholders to “swell the chorus of the Union” until the nation was touched “by the better angels of our nature.” It is among the most eloquent sentences by our most eloquent president, and subsequent speechwriters and pundits have quoted it nearly to death. But as Lincoln knew well, eloquence is not necessarily the same as efficacy. Five weeks after his inauguration, the secessionists fired on Fort Sumter and the slaughter of the Civil War began.

Jon Meacham is the latest writer to cite Lincoln’s plea, which helps suggest why his new book, “The Soul of America,” is at once so engaging and troubling. Appalled by the ascendancy of Donald J. Trump, and shaken by the deadly white nationalist rallies in Charlottesville in 2017, Meacham returns to other moments in our history when fear and division seemed rampant. He wants to remind us that the current political turmoil is not unprecedented, that as a nation we have survived times worse than this. And initially this sounds a little too reassuring.

But Meacham quickly adds that America’s survival has never been automatic. Covering the century that stretched from the abolition of slavery to the civil-rights victories of the mid-1960s, he explains how the nation has required activist liberal presidents — above all Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson — to replace fear with hope and then to reverse injustice and expand equality. Our better angels, Meacham implies, reside in that part of the American soul that inspired the Square Deal, the New Deal and the Great Society.

At a time when liberalism is besieged by populisms of both the right and the left, these portions of Meacham’s book offer a strong if unfashionable reminder of all that progressive American government has achieved. His book even recalls the kinds of confident histories written 50 years ago by the likes of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Eric Goldman, in which the nation was delivered from the forces of complacency and reaction, and achieved great political and social reforms. Meacham widens the field of historical influence to include activists and intellectuals usually deemed outside the mainstream, above all W. E. B. Du Bois.

Meacham commends a particular liberal disposition that once dominated our politics but whose influence has long since waned. It is a public philosophy akin to what Schlesinger described as the politics of “the vital center,” devoted to egalitarian reform but disbelieving in human perfection, fierce in its advocacy but humble in the face of human folly. Above all, it is pragmatic, its idealism tempered not by timidity or cupidity or corporate fealty but by a respect for its own limits. This is also, of course, the view of James Madison, and it undergirds the Constitution. By its very nature, it is anti-Trump, whose narcissism is only the beginning of his antithesis to the American political tradition. Yet it is also at odds with the strident purism so evident today from many quarters that insists on turning politics into a kind of crusading hysteria.

Those are the engaging parts of “The Soul of America.” What’s troubling is the continuing history, amply if less fully documented in the book, of another abiding element of the American “soul,” an authoritarian politics that is absolutist, oligarchic, anti-egalitarian, demagogic and almost always racist. This political strain emerged before Meacham fully begins his story, flowering in the Confederate States of America, the modern world’s first experiment in building a nation founded explicitly on racial supremacy. Although defeated in 1865, this dark strain was never destroyed; indeed, if the Confederacy lost the Civil War, Meacham remarks, in important ways it won the peace following the white South’s fitful overthrow of Reconstruction.

Thereafter, he shows, the authoritarian strain mutated into numerous deplorable appeals and movements that incited white racism, demonized immigrants and promoted plutocracy. For adherents — as he observes of the original racist neo-Confederates during Reconstruction — the rejection of federal rule was “a holy cause.”

Although these antidemocratic impulses have sometimes infected conventional partisan politics, for the most part national parties and politicians have kept them at bay. Under President Trump, however, they have become not just ascendant in the White House but entrenched in what was long ago Lincoln’s Republican Party. In response, Meacham tries to summon the better angels by looking back at when America truly has been great.

He is effective as ever at writing history for a broad readership. A journalist and presidential biographer who won a Pulitzer for his life of Andrew Jackson, he has seen how American politics works close up, as most academic historians have not, yet he has remained uncynical. He is an adroit and appealing storyteller. While interested in providing a usable history with lessons for the present, he tries to judge the past on its own terms, resisting the easy moralizing that smugly elevates the right-thinking living above the thoroughly unenlightened dead. Yet he does not on that account pardon his heroes’ serious shortcomings, whether it be Theodore Roosevelt’s Anglo-Saxon imperialism or Franklin D. Roosevelt’s’s wartime order to intern Japanese-Americans.

Some of the book’s most surprising passages describe how political leaders well outside Meacham’s pantheon stood up to racists and right-wing demagogues. When the second Ku Klux Klan arose in the 1920s, President Warren G. Harding, in a speech in Birmingham, Ala., bravely and pointedly (if less than ardently) defended blacks’ civil rights. His successor, Calvin Coolidge, called the guarantee of equal rights for blacks a constitutional imperative that was fundamental “to the traditions and … the principles of the Republican Party.” Thirty years later, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s fate was sealed when Senate Republicans, including Ralph Flanders and Prescott Bush, denounced him. Meacham leaves it to his readers to draw the connections — or the stunning lack thereof — between the better angels then and the dark side now.

Unfortunately, the book’s historical narrative ends with a rousing account of the collaboration between Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. in achieving the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Vietnam War, the explosion of white backlash and ghetto violence, and the fitful collapse of the New Deal coalition receive extremely short shrift. Suddenly, we are thrust back into the present, with little understanding of how we got here from there. Specifically, there is virtually nothing about how the well-documented right-wing radicalization of the Republican Party paved the way for Donald Trump — from Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy to Ronald Reagan’s dog-whistle appeals to states’ rights racism, to Newt Gingrich’s systematic smear tactics and the devolution of the G.O.P. into what the political scientists Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann have called an “insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme.” Perhaps Meacham understands the last half century of American politics differently, which would be interesting to consider. Absent that central explanation, though, his book cannot adequately address and measure what’s gone so wrong with the American soul and what we can do to right it.

The book concludes with some worthy injunctions about getting active in politics, rejecting tribalism and respecting facts. But these fail to convey the profound depth of the crisis. Not since 1861 has the authoritarian part of the American soul so damaged and endangered our democracy and the rule of law. It will not be overcome easily. And so it makes sense to recall, as Meacham does, Lincoln’s invocation of our better angels in his First Inaugural, but only if we understand that history brought not an “easier triumph,” as Lincoln reflected in his Second Inaugural, but a fearsome fight for the survival of the nation’s ideals, one that required more than angels.

(Review by John S Gardner in The Guardian—US Edition, 2020)

Heather Cox Richardson’s How the South Won the Civil War is not principally about that war. Instead, it is a broad sweep of American history on the theme of the struggle between democracy and oligarchy – between the vision that “all men are created equal” and the frequency with which power has accumulated in the hands of a few, who have then sought to thwart equality.

What she terms the “paradox” of the founding – that “the principle of equality depended on inequality”, that democracy relied on the subjugation of others so that those who were considered “equal”, principally white men, could rule, led to this continuing struggle. She draws a line, more or less straight, between “the oligarchic principles of the Confederacy” based on the cotton economy and racial inequality, western oligarchs in agribusiness and mining, and “movement conservatives in the Republican party”.

More specifically, she writes that the west was “based on hierarchies”. California was a free state but with racial inequality in its constitution. Racism was rife in the west, from lynchings of Mexicans and “Juan Crow” to killings of Native Americans and migrants who built the transcontinental railroad but were the target of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

There, aided by migration of white southerners, “Confederate ideology took on a new life, and from there over the course of the next 150 years, it came to dominate America.” This ranged from western Republicans working with southern Democrats on issues like agriculture, in opposition to eastern interests, to shared feelings on race.

Does American democracy somehow require the subjugation and subordination of others?

Once Reconstruction ended, and with it black voting in the south, Republicans looked west. Anti-lynching and voting rights legislation lost because of the votes of westerners, and new states aligned for decades more “with the hierarchical structure of the south than with the democratic principles of the civil war Republicans”, thanks to their reliance on extractive industries and agribusiness.

For Richardson, Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act in 1964 was thus not an electoral strategy but a culmination of a century of history between the south and west, designed to preserve oligarchic government in “a world defined by hierarchies”. Richardson sees Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the reaction against it as “almost an exact replay of Reconstruction”. What she terms the “movement conservative” reaction promoted ideals of individualism – but cemented the power of oligarchies once again.

But isn’t America the home of individualism? Richardson agrees, to a point. The images of the yeoman farmer before the civil war and the cowboy afterwards were defining tropes but ultimately only that, as oligarchies sought to maintain power. Indeed, she believes, during Reconstruction, “to oppose Republican policies, Democrats mythologized the cowboy, self-reliant and tough, making his way in the world on his own”, notably ignoring the brutal work required and the fact that about a third of cowboys were people of color.

These tropes mattered: “Just as the image of the rising yeoman farmer had helped pave the way for the rise of wealthy southern planters, so the image of the independent rising westerner helped pave the way for the rise of industrialists.” And for Jim and Juan Crow and discrimination against other races and women, which put inequality firmly in American law once again.

The flame was never fully extinguished, despite the burdens of inequality on so many

Yet ironically, as in the movies, the archetype came to the rescue: “Inequality did not spell the triumph of oligarchy, though, for the simple reason that the emergence of the western individualist as a national archetype re-engaged the paradox at the core of America’s foundation.” In the Depression, “when for many the walls seemed to be closing in, John Wayne’s cowboy turned the American paradox into the American dream.” (Wayne’s Ringo Kid in Stagecoach marked the emergence of the western antihero as hero.)

Indeed, the flame was never fully extinguished despite the burdens of inequality on so many. In Reconstruction, the Radical Republicans fought for equality for black people. The “liberal consensus” during and after the second world war promoted democracy and tolerance. Superman fought racial discrimination.

In all it is a fascinating thesis, and Richardson marshals strong support for it in noting everything from personal connections to voting patterns in Congress over decades. She errs slightly at times. John Kennedy, not Ronald Reagan, first said “a rising tide lifts all boats” (it apparently derives from a marketing slogan for New England); she is too harsh on Theodore Roosevelt’s reforms; and William Jennings Bryan – a western populist Democrat who railed against oligarchy even as he did not support racial equality – belongs in the story.

Richardson has achieved prominence for her Letters from an American series, which daily chronicles the latest from the Trump administration. As with many American histories these days, Trump and Trumpism form a backdrop to her work. She subtly draws connections between echoes of the past and actions of the Trump administration which appear as their natural, if absurd, conclusion.

As Richardson writes, after the Kansas-Nebraska Act extended the possibility of slavery in those territories, “moderate Democrats were gone, and slave owners had taken control of the national party”. She needn’t finish the analogy, other than to say that “[t]he world of 2018 looked a lot like that of 1860”.

The broader question is vital: does American democracy somehow require the subjugation and subordination of others? Richardson eloquently and passionately accounts why that principle is so dangerous and damaging.

Refuting it – precisely by asking America to extend the benefits of the founding to everyone – is the principal task for Americans today. She concludes that “for the second time, we are called to defend the principle of democracy” – something that can be done only by expanding its definition in practice to match the ideal. Only in that way can the American paradox be resolved.

Or, as Joe Biden recently said in fewer words: “Democracy is on the ballot.”