[As I’ve done for each of the last few years, this week I’ll start 2024 by AmericanStudying a few anniversaries for the new year. Leading up to a special post on the 200th anniversary of a frustratingly familiar election.]
On extending our
concept of historical turning points, but also resisting ideas of
inevitability.
I’ve written both
here and elsewhere
about our tendency to focus too much on presidents to narrate our eras and
histories, and there’s a corollary and complementary trend (one I’m as frequently
guilty of as anyone, to be clear) of focusing on presidential elections as
singular and key historical moments and turning points. A particularly clear
case in point would be the hugely contested and controversial presidential
election of 1876, the eventual results of which, as I’ve
written before in this space, seem to have directly produced one of the
most significant turning points in the nation’s history: newly elected
President Rutherford B. Hayes’s 1877 decision to end
Federal Reconstruction throughout the South. Whether Hayes did so as a
direct result of a “crooked
bargain” to secure the presidency remains a point of contention among
historians and perhaps always will; but even if he did not, there’s no doubt
that ending Reconstruction was one of his first actions as president, and thus that
this particular moment reinforces the broader narrative that it is presidential
elections which especially represent and contribute to historical turning
points.
But while it was
Hayes who made that particular 1877 call to end Federal Reconstruction, there
was of course a long, complex series of moments and events that led up to that
tragic decision. Any such list would have to include many of Andrew
Johnson’s white supremacist actions as president and many of the racist
laws and racially motivated massacres
with which the white South so thoroughly resisted Reconstruction. But alongside
such longstanding historical trends we could also locate the contested and
influential 1874 midterm
elections as a direct predecessor to 1876’s electoral result. Due in part
to those broader Reconstruction-era trends (which among other things greatly
limited African American voting throughout the South), and in part to a number
of other factors (the Panic
of 1873, the Grant Administration’s many
prominent scandals), Congressional Republicans lost 93 seats and their
majority in the House of Representatives (the second-largest swing in House
history), with Southern Democrats in particular dominating the elections at
every level. Congressional Republicans’ abilities to work with Grant and help
advance Reconstruction’s goals were severely curtailed, and the stage was set
for 1876’s contested results and their tragic aftermaths.
Or was it?
Another historical move we tend to make a bit too quickly (and again, I’m just
as guilty of this as anyone) is to read back from what we know happened into
prior events that can thus seem to foreshadow those future trends. Certainly
it’s fair and important to think about the relationship between different
moments and events, and it seems clear that the 1874 election results reflected
some shifting regional, national, and political realities that continued to
influence subsequent events such as (especially) the 1876 presidential
election. But of course a great deal can happen over the two years between
national elections, and it would be both inaccurate and highly dangerous to
suggest that 1874 led in any direct way to 1876. Highly dangerous, that is,
because it might lead to inaction or apathy in the aftermath of a midterm
election that doesn’t go as we hope, rather than a renewed commitment to the
battle ahead of the next elections (and everything else still to come). We can
and should learn from historical moments, but should never treat them as
necessarily or inevitably predictive of what follows.
Next
anniversary tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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