Historian Michael Kazin has a very favorable review of Eric Foner’s new book The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution. There have been a lot of reviews of this book over the last two months and I will bring you a sampling of them. Most are written by historians, as is this one in The Nation, Foner’s home court. The reviews that I have read are all enthusiastic about this study of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and most of them use the review for a broader discussion of the issues raised in the book.
Since Foner recently retired from teaching at Columbia University, many of the reviews begin with a tribute to the great historian of Reconstruction and this review is no different. Here are the opening paragraphs:
Every great historian revises history in his or her own way. Eric Hobsbawm replaced narratives about the making of the modern world that focused relentlessly on the political games played by powerful men with a rich tapestry of social and economic history. Gerda Lerner explained how women defied patriarchal rule with everyday acts of resistance and public confrontations. W.E.B. Du Bois, John Hope Franklin, and Ira Berlin made it impossible to write US history without understanding the pivotal role of African Americans, enslaved and free.
For nearly half a century, Eric Foner has been challenging and overturning the benighted assertions made about the most studied and contentious period in US history. Nothing has been more important to the development of American society and politics than the Civil War and Reconstruction. Yet until the 1960s, most influential scholars conceived of the era as a sad departure from America’s grand march of progress toward political liberty and economic plenty. They claimed that the “war between the states” could have been avoided if sage voices of compromise had only been able to silence the hotheaded abolitionists and their secessionist counterparts. Their view of Reconstruction tended to be even more wrongheaded, rendering a decade of biracial democracy as an era dominated by vengeful Yankees who headed south to stir up racial antagonisms, echoing the pro–Ku Klux Klan narrative of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.
Kazin sees Foner’s new book as a continuation of his project, rooted in his own experiences:
The Second Founding, his new book about the trio of landmark constitutional amendments all ratified less than five years after Lee’s surrender, demonstrates his talent at unearthing insights about the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, in particular how Americans defined and acted on the ideals of freedom and democracy. It’s a slim volume that synthesizes the vast library of works devoted to Reconstruction. But he uses that rich scholarship to highlight the radicalism of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and how, over the past 150 years, clever and powerful conservatives have diligently sought to undermine their egalitarian promise. As Foner reminds us, the “key elements of the second founding, including birthright citizenship, equal protection of the laws, and the right to vote, remain highly contested…. Rights can be gained, and rights can be taken away.”
Charting the ironies of freedom won and lost during and after Reconstruction, Foner’s new book is also a guide to nearly all of his scholarship, which examines not only the rights and better living conditions gained through extended contests for power but also the ambiguous consequences of what were, as a rule, only partial victories. The sensibility that drives his work was likely born out of his experiences on the left and the frustrations of a period of American radicalism that helped do away with legal apartheid and spearheaded movements for gender equality and the protection of the environment but also failed to mount a serious challenge to the conservative tilt of both major parties.
This sensibility was also a family inheritance rooted in the experiences of his father, Jack Foner, and his uncle Philip Foner. Both men wrote important works on African American and labor history but, as sympathizers with communism, suffered from an early rehearsal of McCarthyism during World War II, when the New York State Legislature led an investigation that resulted in the loss of their jobs as professors at City College. Given this legacy, Eric Foner has always recognized that while most Americans viewed their nation as the “embodiment of freedom,” the contest to define and act on that idea “has been used to convey and claim legitimacy for all kinds of grievances and hopes, fears about the present and visions of the future.” He expresses these judgments in what another eminent historian, Christopher Lasch, called “plain style”: direct and vivid prose without a trace of specialized language, which anyone with a passing interest in the subject can read, learn from, and enjoy.
For those not familiar with Foner, the full review offers a recounting of the work of Foner over the last half-century and it deserves to be read in its entirety.
Kazin describes the sections of the book dealing with each amendment. Here is what he writes about the 14th:
Foner then turns to the even greater consequences of the 14th Amendment. He recounts how the Republicans who controlled Congress enacted it over the irate protests of President Andrew Johnson, a dedicated white supremacist who passionately opposed giving black people any rights besides the right not to be owned. Johnson’s partisan adversaries passed a series of acts that compelled any former Confederate state that wanted to elect people to Congress again to ratify the amendment, which included giving black men who lived within their borders the right to vote. The Republican majority added the guarantee of citizenship to any child born in the United States—an entitlement only a few countries bestow today.
But Foner pushes further in making clear how the expansive language of the amendment also allowed champions of the rising corporate order to institute “freedom” of a quite different kind. The first section of the amendment famously bars states from depriving “any person” of “life, liberty, or property” without “due process of law” and prohibits states from denying “the equal protection of the laws” to their residents. Because the drafters did not define “person,” Supreme Court majorities regularly used it to strike down laws enacted by Congress and state legislatures to regulate big business. In 2011, when Mitt Romney snapped at a heckler, “Corporations are people, my friend,” he was evoking that pro-capitalist doctrine of “personhood.”
Foner shrewdly points out that hardly any of the Republican-appointed justices who used the 14th Amendment as a cudgel against working- and middle-class interests had been among the corps of antislavery activists and politicians who conceived of the amendment and advocated its passage. But in the final decades of the 19th century, the GOP moved closer in spirit to the tycoon-loving body that nominated Mr. Bain Capital than the party led by the president who vowed that the Civil War would usher in a “new birth of freedom.”
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:
