Luke: This is part two of our conversation with Manisha Sinha about Reconstruction. In part two, Manisha discusses the historiography of Reconstruction, the afterlives of Reconstruction and its discontents, the eventual defeat of Reconstruction as the U.S. rose to become an imperial power, and the lessons that contemporary activists can draw from the Reconstruction period.
What you said about wanting to bring all these events together under this general framework of Reconstruction is really important. And it makes me think that, in most ways that history is written, Or at least how I was taught, it does break things down into pretty distinct periods.
Manisha Sinha: I call Reconstruction also abolition democracy, as W. E. B. Du Bois did, because he understood that it was really the abolitionist vision of an interracial democracy that they were trying to implement. So, history is never as clean as our periodizations or interpretations want it to be.
We want to make sense of a messy past, but you can often see roots of ideas even in its downfall. Eventually in the progressive era, but more robustly during the New Deal, people return to the concept of an activist state.
This notion that the United States doesn't have a history of a strong state is also partially correct. The contest between these forces, even when one seems triumphant compared to the others, is never done with. The contest, what I call the great contest in the introduction, continues right down to our times. We can trace the roots of many of our political ideologies - whether it is modern liberalism or ideas of social democracy on the one hand, or the other hand, ideas of anti-big government and very staunch opposition to the very idea of equal black citizenship in this country - right back to Reconstruction.
Even all the debates over taxation. They have taxpayers' conventions to try and delegitimize the Reconstruction governments and their social programs. And the fact that they introduced a public school system (which then needed funds from the government to operate - the South didn't have a public school system before) … textbooks extraordinarily talk about Reconstruction. I think part of it has been the Dunning School and his entire group of Southern students who had a very biased view of Reconstruction. They create the lost cause mythology of the Civil War. Many white Southerners were Unionists, many of them predominantly nonslaveholding whites from nonslaveholding areas. There were many Black Southerners who were involved in Reconstruction.
There were grassroots contests over Black rights, over citizenship, and over economic democracy that were taking place in the South at this time. The struggle continues. I think that is part of slavery and the long lives of Reconstruction and its overthrow that continue to shadow American politics today.
Luke: Turning to the last chapter of your book, it's titled Nadir, the lowest point. It also features an introductory quote from Frederick Douglass. Your book starts with an introductory quote from Frederick Douglass. What happens to the Reconstruction movement? Where do you see some of that democratic spirit go? In what ways do you see some of that coming back?
Manisha Sinha: I begin with Douglas. I end with Douglas. It so happened that he had just the correct quote for both. Douglas is an important figure. His life spans abolition and the rise and fall of the American Republic, and he died in 1895, so he sees everything achieved. Then he sees everything going backward, which must have been dispirited.
Towards the end of his life, he was a Republican partisan, a nationalist, and even a bit of an imperialist. Old radicals and abolitionists like Garrison and Sumner say absolutely not—we should not be in the game of empire—that’s going against our republican traditions. But Douglass has become so wedded to the idea of the United States.
Douglas called the U.S. a composite nation and then saw it fall apart. He makes for a good bookend for the book. The nadir is the nadir because you have all these awful massacres - racial massacres - that again remind me a lot of colonial massacres. You have a regime of apartheid in the South.
The genocidal warfare against Indians that inspire fascists, including the Nazis. We think of the United States and the City on a Hill as inspiring experiments in democratic republicanism. But during the nadir, the United States could also act as a model of racial authoritarianism, especially in the Jim Crow South and especially in its imperial ventures.
I end at this period, but I also pay attention to those who tried reviving some of the old abolitionists and Reconstruction struggles. The social feminists are critical. They have essential ideas about the social state and the government's responsibility towards its citizens, especially those who are most vulnerable. That’s a tenet of modern liberalism. You have the foundation of the NAACP, which is still around in fighting for civil rights. You have the anti-imperialist league (some of those people are pretty racist and conservative, but a majority of them are progressives who think that the United States should not become another European imperial power). These people believe that the U.S. was born in opposition, as Thomas Paine had it, to monarchies and imperial ventures.
So it's not as if the ideas that animated Reconstruction completely disappear. In the Knights of Labor, the founder was a radical Republican. Many of them are addressing new questions of vast disparities in wealth.
This is, after all, the age of the robber barons and economic inequalities. I look at a lot of the thinkers of this period - people like Bellamy and others, who really are writing critiques of what they're seeing. So, it’s not as if those impulses have completely died down. They're still around even during the nadir.
The desire for some kind of state regulation comes back in fashion. Of course, in the downfall of Reconstruction many of the progressive era Reformers, especially in the South, were pretty racist and elitist. Many are willing to cooperate with government and enlightened capitalists to think of some sort of regulation, to get rid of some of the worst abuses of capitalism and of the free market.
It’s not until the Great Depression where finally these ideas triumph once again. Debs constantly evokes Lincoln and the Abolitionists. In Europe, in the Spanish Civil War, there was the Lincoln Brigade. The figures of the second American Republic completely vanish; they remain inspirational for progressive activists, subsequently, and they should remain inspirational for us.
I think it's easy to kind of say, “oh, the United States has always been racist and awful.” But actually that's not true. These things have always been contested and sometimes hard fought victories have been won. It behooves all American citizens and certainly all progressive activists - certainly all members of the democratic socialists of America t - to be proud of those traditions and to re-energize them.
You can see them today in campus ferment that we haven't seen since 1968. You can see them also in the enormous threat that the Republic itself faces today. Today, political actors can really learn a lot from the history of the rise and fall of Reconstruction.
Luke: How can Reconstruction, and especially Reconstruction as you’ve expanded it, serve as an example to the left? How should we be looking at this history?
Manisha Sinha: That’s an important question for people on the left today in the United States in terms of not just understanding their own traditions (the radical tradition within the United States), but also in terms of mobilization and how to motivate people. The right has always used events to come down hard on the left and any kind of progressive reform. You see them using the specter of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror as the 1848 revolutions in Europe - they put all these together and say that abolition, socialism, feminism, they're all of the same ilk,and we need to defeat them.
You see this with the Russian Revolution around the First World War when they used the specter of the Red Scare to really violate people's civil liberties and deport people. It's not just African Americans, but also the IWW and all kinds of labor organizations that are being put down brutally without the benefit of any of the sort of wanted legal and political rights that the Republic claimed to believe in.
You see that again during the Cold War with the McCarthy era, how they go after progressives and even people in government until they're completely shamed. As we see in the history of authoritarianism today and in the rise of fascism earlier, but also in the history of the left (of the Abolitionists International, the Workers International), these ideas are global and they circulate amongst people.
It's really important for the American left to also be inspired by homegrown traditions of radicalism that don't make them vulnerable to being seen as something alien to the United States. It isn't. We have a pretty strong and good tradition of radicalism in this country and we should be able to use those resources too because that's how you appeal to people.
You know, if you fly the American flag upside down or you commit treason against the United States government, you're not a patriot. I don't see why the left should shy from taking the good parts of American republicanism while being critical. You know, we've seen that in the Vietnam War and now with the Israel Gaza War: you can be critical and yet be patriotic.
I always tell my students that Lincoln began his national political career by criticizing the Mexican War as a land grab for slavery. He was an anti-war guy, so there's nothing wrong with opposing wars of empire. There's nothing wrong with being critical of the United States government but adhering to American principles.
I wrote a piece in 2016 that kind of went viral about socialism being as American as apple pie. I quoted something that Garrison had said about Wall Street and people thought it was Bernie Sanders. It was William Lloyd Garrison who had made a critique of finance capitalism. It sounded like Bernie. But actually it was Garrison saying that in the 1830s and 1840s.
We shouldn't shy away from our own radical traditions. That's why Eugene Debs was so successful initially, because his socialist party was the American Socialist Party. He evoked American traditions of radicalism. There’s a superb biography of him by Nick Salvatore that shows that you can evoke homegrown traditions of radicalism, that you don't necessarily have to look at external examples. Though, as I said, there's a cross fertilization of ideas.
If you look at Thomas Paine, he's a true revolutionary of the world - from England to the United States, and then to France. It's important for American radicals to understand that we shouldn't poo-poo our own homegrown traditions of radicalism as bourgeois, as, “oh, they just never really got it.” As a historian I think a lot of them did and a lot of them didn't.
This is why I wrote the book on abolition: I thought the abolitionist movement had been so misunderstood even in the academy. I have a chapter called the Abolitionists International, where I look at the cross fertilization between European radicals and American abolitionists. I thought it was important to bring that to those who would dismiss the movement as a bourgeois movement.
Debs, as a true socialist, opposed World War One - what my former professors at Columbia used to call the tribal wars of Europe. Debs on principle opposed the United States entry into WWI and the funding of the first military industrial complex. For that, he was jailed. He stuck by his universal socialist principles.
The SPA collapsed. European socialist parties made those compromises and survived. The Americans in principle died, and I think these are all lessons that we can learn in the history of American radicalism today. We can’t buy into the Right's demonization of the Left as unpatriotic, as un-American.
Manisha Sinha: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
