Reseñas
Tragic Era America After Lincoln por Claude G. Bowers
A longtime Democrat who served as FDR’s ambassador to Spain, Bowers advocated U.S. support for the Spanish republic against Nazi-backed Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War. But in his history of Reconstruction America Bowers shows no signs of such liberal impulses. Bowers never expresses a moral objection to slavery, and he writes approvingly of “white supremacy” (439, 503). ”Freedom” for blacks, he writes, “meant idleness . . . promiscuity . . . venereal disease” (49). He heaps scorn on freedmen’s attempts to gain access to public accommodations and attend school with whites (201), and he catalogs officials in the reconstructed South by the color of their skin (448). Stereotypes repeated by Bowers include, “Those on the coast and rivers were little above the intellectual level of the mules they drove,” while a “more intelligent class” of blacks “with mechanical skills” sought to improve their lives outside of politics (358).
Bowers never uses the term “The Lost Cause”, but he makes clear he would have favored the emergence of a “powerful white man’s party” (277) of conservative Democrats and Republicans ruling the South after the Civil War. He believes that Lincoln would have been conciliatory toward Southern whites if he had lived, and claims that President Andrew Johnson tried to carry out Lincoln’s policy. Bowers is a supporter of Johnson personally and of Johnson’s view that Southern white farmers and tradesmen were victims of the planter aristocracy and the slaves. Blacks were thus the enemies of whites. It was unrealistic to give illiterate blacks the vote, and unjust to give whites’ land to blacks.
A startling half-chapter on the Ku Klux Klan, pp. 306-312, ascribes naive motives to its founders, but gets straight to the alleged real issue: “It was not until the original Klan began to ride that white women felt some sense of security.” Bowers praises the ex-Confederate generals who tried to manage the Klan, describing Nathan Bedford Forrest as a “morally a superior man.” He claims though, that the old generals could not prevent “spurious organizations” from springing up “among men of the lower order bent on personal vengeance and violence,” and that soon anti-Klan forces were “indulging in outrages” of their own.
Bowers writes of the women of Washington society, and the “dusky maidens” of South Carolina (350-353)—their clothes, their jewelry, the beauty of some of them, and their influence on men—with creepy enthusiasm and thoroughness.
He also has a sharp eye for the Republicans’ entanglement with the banks and railroads, and the resulting corruption. He is eloquent in describing how “the rule of the industrialists had come with the war” (405). History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Bowers describes the impeachment of President Johnson as a sham and disgrace, and how the House attempted unsuccessfully to impeach Grant’s vice president, Schuyler Colfax. In these confrontations, the Grant administration often gave Congress the back of its hand. A House committee found that James A. Garfield, a future president, had perjured himself over a payoff “and was therefore innocent” (398). The sole congressman they punished was a Democrat, who, unlike the Republicans, had taken no bribe (402).
Other instances of nothing new under the Sun: The Industrial League of Pennsylvania began “interrogating presidents of colleges as to the [economics] textbooks they used” (405). Henry Ward Beecher preached that “It is good to get rich” (408). The Panic and depression of 1873 ensued, with Grant starting his second term, a year after the Republicans had warned that the election of Greeley, the Democrat, “would disturb the unprecedented prosperity” (410). And a dodgy transfer of the Naval account was arranged by Grant’s brother Orvil (411).
“The laws had been laxly enforced or utterly ignored in the interest of great financiers who had been generous with campaign funds and easy on private creditors of political distinction” (412).Workers hit by the depression demanded “suspension of Rent for three months” (412). “The press was beginning to treat poverty . . . as a crime to be handled with the mailed fist. . . . The entire police force of New York was kept on duty (416). And officials sent from Washington purged thousands of presumably Democratic ballots in Louisiana and Florida, enabling the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, to prevail in the Electoral College by one vote.
2 
HerbThomas | 2 reseñas más. | Sep 2, 2020 |
HerbThomas | 2 reseñas más. | Sep 2, 2020 | 
Enlaces
Wikipedia (English)
American National Biography author page (English)
Este sitio utiliza cookies para ofrecer nuestros servicios, mejorar el rendimiento, análisis y (si no estás registrado) publicidad. Al usar LibraryThing reconoces que has leído y comprendido nuestros términos de servicio y política de privacidad. El uso del sitio y de los servicios está sujeto a estas políticas y términos.