Nicholas LemannReseñas

A nifty and readable piece of journalism and social history.

Boring book. He promises a lot. but does not deliver. He writes up people including A.A. Berle, Mike Jensen and Reid Hoffman.

Another of the older titles that has been on my reading list too long. Some of this history is important to consider again, as the SATs were in theory going to be revamped again in 2019 before public backlash put the kibosh on the planned "adversity score" that test takers would also get. You can learn from this title that this feature was first devised in the middle 20th century! And some of what feels backwards about standardized testing as a student or a teacher did make more sense with detailed background about its inception. Still, it was a bit too fussy about including a play-by-play of the ETS Corporation when we didn't need that to get the overall point.½

Bill Kauffman turns the meaning of lib ral and conservative upside down in [b:America First: Its History Culture and Politics|885267|Counterculture Green The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (CultureAmerica)|Andrew G. Kirk|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179182237s/885267.jpg|870531]. He suggests that an examination of the history of isolationist and non-interventionist movements reveals them to be closely tied to the much maligned voice of the populists, a voice he says reveals the true nature of the" silent majority", a movement that owes much to George Washington and the founding fathers who desperately feared "foreign entanglements;" the messianic impulse to save the world being a creation of the Wall Street financiers and militarists who profited mightily from the wars ("a small war might take the people's minds off our economic problems," wrote one in 1898. Barely can one predict the impact of new inventions. Eli Whitney's cotton gin made possible the production of cheap cotton which led to the need for cheap labor to harvest it which led to an increased justification for slavery. The mass production of the cotton harvester in 1944, spurred on by high cotton prices and a shortage of labor, virtually eliminated the need for cheap labor and caused the migration of thousands of b lacks seeking jobs in the industrial north.

The impact of this movement and race relations in general are explored in Promised Land: The Great Black. Migration and How It Changed America by Nicholas Lemann. Labor supply in the south was intimately tie d to race. Segregatio n reinforced the share-cropper system created after the Civil War as a substitute for slavery. It prevented upward mobility of blacks, perpetuating cheap labor.

The sharecroppin system, devised by white plantation owners to trap their labor supply into a system of virtual peonage, left a society that by 1945 resembled a big city ghetto: high illegitimacy (with no AFDC), female-headed households, a miserable educational system, and a very high rate of violent crime. Home brewed-whiskey was "more physically perilous than crack cocaine is today."

In 1940, "rural south" was almost synonymous with "black, but by 1970 the euphemism had changed; now urban was synonymous with poor black.
By then race relations could no longer be ignored, except of course, by while, rural, Republicans to their discredit. The" decoupling of race from cotton [has influenced:] popular culture, presidential politics, urban geography, education, justice, [and:] social welfare." But urban liberals didn't get it either as they supported urban renewal which merely resulted in land developers and high-rise builders enriching their own pockets. Herbet Gans wrote in The Urban Villagers, "the low-income population was in effect subsidizing its own removal for the benefit of the wealthy."

Lemann's description of how the anti-poverty programs came to be is enlightening. Ironically, JFK had not formulated any serious plans for eliminating poverty, but he had several aides, including Walter Heller, who were captivated by the idea. After Kennedy's death, his supporters made a conscious effort to paint Kennedy as being much more liberal than he really was. Johnson visualized himself as more liberal than Kennedy, and he wanted an issue to call his own to carry him through the next presidential election. Many of the antipoverty plans made him uncomfortable because, being a pragmatist, he was looking for measurable solutions and programs that worked. The plans that were being foisted on him as Kennedy's legacy had not been tried; they were mere academic speculations. Yet he was forced to adopt many of them or look like he was abandoning the martyred president's legacy, something he politically could not afford to do. The assumption behind the war on poverty was that poverty was cultural in nature. This idea came from social anthropologists, and it meant that if parents could not acculturate their children to the bourgeois society, then government could. The rural migrants to the urban north fit the mold perfectly as guinea pigs for the great experiment.

The other side of the argument maintained that poverty was political and resulted from a lack of political power. The Irish, for example, struggled into the middle class by gaining control of the political structure. These two ideologies were to clash constantly. And the problem was that any program that offended white middle class sensibilities was doomed to failure from the start.

Contrary to current popular opinion, the War on Poverty, was not a failure. The huge numbers of jobs that were created to implement the programs went primarily to blacks and that, in effect, created a black middle class that promptly moved out of the ghettos leaving them in much worse shape because the motivated folks who got the jobs had provided the strength and structure to those communities.

Lemann discusses the failure of housing projects at some length. Apparently they have worked quite well in areas where the original rules and goals were adhered to, i.e. tenants were carefully screened using several criteria including the requirement that the tenant have a job and be part of a two parent household. In Chicago, those rules were discarded for two reasons: the ACLU filed suit claiming the rules were arbitrarily discriminatory (surely true, but another example of good intentions causing unintended results) and the lack of people meeting the criteria. It became essential for the politicians to prove the projects were a success but they were not filling the buildings fast enough so screening went out the window.

Lemann's analysis of the political maneuvering that went on in Washington and his descriptions of the hidden and not-so-secret agendas of all the groups is fascinating and ought to be required reading for everyone.

This book shows how, in 1875, political power in Mississippi was wrested by violent means from the black-supported (and largely black-staffed) Republican government by what was essentially the pre-war white power structure. Many blacks were killed in the state in that year, and blacks were prevented from voting. Lemann's documentation of what happened, based on testimony in Congressional investigations and on other contemporary sources, is impeccable, and his conclusion is overwhelming. Local whites, with the covert and sometimes overt support of whites elsewhere in the South, carried out with extreme violence a successful rebellion against the authority of the U.S. central government. Its purpose -- and result -- was the disenfranchisement of the black population, which in turn led to black political powerlessness, black economic subordination, and Jim Crow. The process, or "Mississippi Plan" was adopted throughout the South in the wake of the Compromise of 1877, which gave the Republicans the Presidency and the Democrats a free hand in the south.

The book is fascinating in itself-- it shows more clearly than anything else I have read how we got from the Emancipation Proclamation to Jim Crow -- but it is also a compelling illustration of the power of political myth. In the latter part of his book, Lemann describes how the racist violence of 1875 was converted into the "Redemption" myth of a valiant Southern effort to oust corrupt carpet-baggers, and restore self-government in the south. This myth took hold not only of popular culture (viz "Birth of a Nation" and "Gone With the Wind") but of serious academic discussion, all the way into the second half of the 20th century. Myths like this can, and do, kill.½

4262 Redemption The Last Battle of the Civil War, by Nicholas Lemann (read 20 Jan 2007) This book tells of the lawless way whites in the South subverted the legal right of the Negroes in the 1870s. Most of the book dwells on Mississippi, and Adelbert Ames, Republican governor of Mississippi and his effort to get President Grant to effectually aid the rule of law in the South. Murder and blatant use of economic power caused blacks not to vote and in 1876 whites regained control of the state. The extensiveness of the use of murder by whites was a surprise even though I knew that in those years the Civil War was won by the South, as to all but outright slavery. The last chapter relates how Reconstruction has been viewed by historians in the years since, and is the most interesting chapter in the book.½

Little lives rock big boats in Lemann's twofold drama of Pres. Johnson's Great Society venture. Act 1 introduces us to black victims of white progress in the sharecropper South, as they cast their hopes & fates northward to "the promised land" of Chicago in the 1940's. Act 2 presents the political quandary of the Johnson and Nixon administrations in confronting the new eruption of poverty & black anger in urban America. Act 3 returns us to the streets of Chicago for the denoument of all that political palpitation in the all too rapid breakdown of the War On Poverty. Lemann makes more of people than of policy; if this is not the best history of the War as a government program, it is certainly the best account of its human creation, its human frustration, and its human compassion.

http://www.amazon.com/Redemption-Last-Battle-Civil-War/dp/0374248559/ref=cm_cr-m...

'Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War' is a short (207 pages) non-academic history aimed at the 'general reader' or 'popular audience'. The author is not an historian, but rather is Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism. I write these things not to denigrate the book in any way, but rather to alert the prospective reader to the nature of the book.

The book is well written and focuses on the collapse of reconstruction under the open violent assault of 'White Liners' in Mississippi. This tale is well known and nothing particularly new is added here, but the failure of reconstruction is a hugely important story in American history. You really can not understand 20th century America without understanding what happened in the South after the Civil War.

Ironically one of the better parts of the book comes near the end when Lemann reviews the way the story of Reconstruction was revised beyond all recognition beginning especially in the early 1900's.

Lemann's telling still lends too much credence to the role of so-called Northern carpetbaggers in Reconstruction. The Republican leaders of Reconstruction were not all cut from the same clothe.

Lemann gets off to an extraordinarily bad start with a real howler on the first page when he asserts that the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in the areas that the Union Army controlled. Of course, that is exactly incorrect. In fact, perhaps the biggest criticism of the Proclamation was that it freed no slaves because it did not apply in the areas then under Union control.

If you do not know about this crucial piece of history Redemption will give you a reasonably good examination, albeit focused on one state. However, there are far better accounts available, such as Eric Foner's 'A Short History of Reconstruction' (about 300 pages) and the much longer James M. McPherson's 'Ordeal By Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction' or Foner's full scale treatment 'Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877'.

Review by on Amazon.com:
Mostly through the eyes of Adelbert Ames, the Civil War hero from Maine, who served as the Governor of Mississippi, the author tells about how the 14th and 15th Amendments were declared null and void. Through unremitting murder, brutality and terror by white vigilante groups, the weak kneed Northern occupiers eventually gave in to the southern brand of terror and insurrection, which the author refers to as the "last battle of the Civil War." Neighborhood and regional terror involving the most grotesque and inhuman violence was the motif that was spread across the region and led to a reversal of the Northern victory and a win of the Civil War for the South, a victory that still reverberates through American's race-based culture.

The subtext of the book is at least as important and as potent as are the details of the context. It makes clear that the real birth of the American nation occurred in the aftermath of the Civil War, when the South was Redeemed, in the ineptness and utter lack of commitment on the part of the Northern occupiers to protect what was important about the nation -- its laws and the Constitution against 911-styled terrorism. For the North, Reconstruction was just an overwhelming "mop-up" operation; for the South, it was existential, a matter of the survival of the white race and the southern way of life.½