[To say that the
2020 presidential election will be a pivotal one in American history is to
significantly under-state the case. But while in some clear ways this moment
feels singular, this is of course far from our only such crucial election. So
this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of others, leading up to a special
weekend post on this year’s results.]
On what really
happened in 1876, and why that remains a vital lesson for 2020.
I’ve written quite
a bit in this space about the controversial presidential election of 1876:
thinking about AmericanStudies
contexts for it; and connecting
it to the 2016 election (which, obviously, ended up going even worse than
that comparison would have suggested). I’ve also written about how we can see
the seeds of that 1876 debacle in the
significant gains won by Southern Democrats in the 1874 midterms. All of
those posts have offered attempts to understand not just literally what took
place in 1876 (and the compromise, or “crooked bargain”
depending on whom you ask, that facilitated those results), but also and
especially the broader national situation and moment for Rutherford B. Hayes’
installation as president.
But I’m ashamed
to say that in all those posts and analyses, I don’t think I’ve ever said as
overtly as I should have what really happened in 1876: the American political
system entirely abandoned the African American community. More exactly, the Republican
Party that had
originated out of the 1850s abolitionist movement, fought a Civil War in
order to achieve that goal, and (at least in its Radical Republican
wing) worked to ensure that Reconstruction would help freed African Americans
gain vital rights, turned its back on all those efforts and goals in order to
get its candidate, Hayes, elected. Maybe Hayes didn’t directly trade the end of
Reconstruction for the presidency (historians are
torn on that question), but in any case his first main act as president was
to end those policies. When The
Nation editorialized not long
after Hayes’ inauguration that “the negro will disappear from the field of
national politics. Henceforth the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more
to do with him,” they weren’t just making a prediction—they were assessing, and
to be clear were agreeing with, that national political abandonment of the African
American community.
Playing the “what
might have been” game is always fraught, but I think it’s fair to say that the
rise of neo-Confederate, white supremacist national narratives over
the last few decades of the 19th century (and well
into the 20th century) would have gone very differently had this
1876 abandonment not taken place. There are a variety of lessons we can take
away from those histories for our current moment, but I suppose the most overt
has to be: political power should never be attained at the expense of our most
vulnerable communities and fellow Americans. Winning elections is clearly an important
political goal, literally never more so than here in 2020—but both the effort
to do so and the victory itself have to be accompanied by continued, indeed
amplified, battles on behalf of those vulnerable communities. If this moment is
going to become a true turning point, a genuine step toward the more perfect
union that was
all too briefly imagined and then abandoned during Reconstruction, an
electoral victory (necessary as it is) will have to be an integral part of that
larger and more crucial progress.
Next election
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other pivotal elections you’d highlight?
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