How three crises—Reconstruction, Watergate, and January 6th—revealed America’s fractured psyche and the peril of democracy shaped by perception rather than fact.
But the problem I have with the overall presentation of the reconstruction era is that it always focused on the south and whites who didn't want to grant black freedom and never on the north that didn't want to grant worker freedom. 1877, the year reconstruction ended, is the year the American civil war actually began. Yeah, they subdued the rioters...but that civil war continued and hasn't as of yet ended.
or it did end, is ending now.
The problem is we can use force and maintain control, or we can create solutions that are designed to fail without continuous force...civil rights legislation and court decisions required Ike and LBJ to send in troops.
Power of any kind over others becomes a struggle to control that power. Absalom my son! is the only history power can ever achieve...a continuous struggle.
After Bacon's rebellion, with way too few masters to control the workers, deliberate laws were established to separate them from ever unifying again to chase the masters all the way back to England.
In Africa and much of the colonized world, the majorities were able to unite and send the colonizers back to their own lands.
But too many inkblots of colonization were spilled over what had been many groups, or ethnicities, or tribes, or whatever term you like, that now had to be a country and the eur. still controlled the majority of the resources even upon departing. Corruption was the bribe and struggle for the power over the resources the different ethnicities still did not have and were still struggling to obtain.
Now you're a historian, and you know all of this better than I, but reconstruction didn't end (in my opinion) because of klannish tendencies in the south to take back control, but because northern industrialists saw a solid aristocratic need to reinstall the southern aristocracy to prevent the bleeding of scalawag-black government and local control of the land, roads, schools, c. into the north.
After the war there was nothing but laborer attempts in the north to share some of the power while many of those southern govts were reducing authority over others and giving more resources to more people. What if the coalition between blacks and whites reached into the north and workers (still primarily european) reached into their own bailiwick and they no longer controlled their own workers?
Frederick Douglas said there was a difference between chattel slavery and working for wages, but not much. The difference, he said, was freedom, but he never achieved that freedom until he became independent of all masters.
The post-Bacon legislatures in Maryland and Virginia created in the American psyche that the tribes in this nation were defined not between the workers and the masters but between blacks and whites.
But the white workers have nevertheless have not found their lives particularly appealing, and the Charlie Kirk's, c. are the absurdity of this dual psychological insight imposed on whites that they are better than black people but knowing they are not being treated very well.
Until unity can be established by directing the workers into a unified class then the kings of the corporatist elite and the candidates they give money to, chaos remains in the minds of citizens...and chaos in the minds creates chaos in the society and prevents stepping out of our four centuries + of defining our tribes by skin color.
Ken, thank you for your expansive insight about the Reconstruction era. I really appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts. Thank you.
What you have written hits right at the heart of the tension between emancipationist and reconciliationist narratives of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The reconciliationist story tells us the civil war was about preserving the Union and that Reconstruction failed mainly because of Southern resentment. But the emancipationist view, as historian David Blight lays out in his book from 2001, Race and Reunion, insists that the civil war was about transforming the Republic—replacing a slave society with a genuine, multiracial democracy.
And it was that deeper transformation—what W.E.B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction in America from 1935 described as not just racial equality, but economic redistribution and political empowerment—that was so threatening to both the North and the South, so much so that neither wanted it to survive.
By 1877, the turn away was complete. Troops withdrawn from the South were immediately used against striking railroad workers in the North during the Great Upheaval. The Northern power structure didn’t simply grow tired of racial justice. It actively chose to protect capital and suppress labor. Black political power in the South and white labor unrest in the North were increasingly seen as two sides of the same problem—-challenges to elite control.
But here’s where we deepen the analysis even further: this wasn’t just a post–Civil War failure. The ideological retrenchment that made this abandonment possible—-the deeply embedded racial worldview—-was built centuries earlier. This is beautifully laid out in David Brion Davis’s books, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture and his other book, Inhuman Bondage, especially Chapter 3, “The Origins of Anti-Black Racism.” Davis shows that anti-Blackness didn’t begin as a crude response to labor shortages or economic necessity. It developed slowly, out of early European ideas about civilization, savagery, religion, and human difference. His central thesis is that racism wasn’t simply a rationalization for slavery but was also a cause.
So, by the time of Bacon’s Rebellion, the white colonists already had a ready-made ideological toolkit for turning Africans into a permanent underclass. As Edmund Morgan showed in American Slavery, American Freedom, the post-Bacon laws in Virginia and Maryland codified that worldview into law by making “white” and “Black” into legal, social, and eventually psychological categories. Again, as Davis had laid out, the foundations had already been established centuries earlier. But, after Bacon, the goal was made explicit: break up the laboring class and prevent any future multiracial coalitions that might challenge elite control.
And, both structurally and symbolically, that divide worked, It created a sense of superiority among poor whites, even though they remained politically and economically powerless. W.E.B. Du Bois called it the “wage of whiteness.” And it’s what allows the system to persist: the illusion of privilege in exchange for loyalty to a hierarchy that ultimately exploits everyone at the bottom.
So when Reconstruction offered a glimpse of a different future, where freedpeople and white workers might build something together, that wasn’t just a political crisis. It was an existential threat to the very system of racial capitalism that had been established over centuries. That’s why it was crushed. Not just by white southern violence of the Klan and other white supremacist terrorists (though this was a huge factor), but by Congress, by the courts, by capital, and by the narratives of national reunion (reconciliationist and lost cause visions of the war).
So what we learn from Du Bois in Black Reconstruction in America is that Reconstruction was destroyed because if the emancipationist vision had been allowed to expand—if the South had become a model of democracy instead of a laboratory for racial and economic hierarchy—then the nation itself would have been remade. Black suffrage, public education, and equal protection under law were not narrow Southern experiments. They were the most radical testing ground of American democracy. Their success would have unsettled entrenched power not only in the former Confederacy but also in the North, where industrial capital feared labor insurgency and white voters resisted full racial equality. By getting rid of Reconstruction, white elites made sure that democracy would remain racially, economically, and geographically bounded.
I have DuBois’ complete works on a disc, but its over a thousand pages and I haven’t ever read through it all and need to find passages you referred to.
And thank you for supporting and enhancing on my conceptions. I do believe
“western'“ culture had certain enhanced conceptions of “superiorism” and I don’t know if Bacon would have betrayed those who aided him. And you are right that before the rebellion there was a distinction made in terminology if not in practice between slave and indentured. When serfdom ended, enslavement of English citizens became taboo,but they could impress, imprison, or indenture them and children could be sold into apprenticeships by parents (or acc. to Oliver Twist, by workhouses). They just couldn’t be called slaves.
So the legal codification of black inferiority was not something “out of the blue.”
But as you write it created a really false sense of superiority amongst poor whites, that enabled the racial divide to fester into a cancer. And of course the courts really never made the fourteenth amendment more than an overt amendment, with the weird singular voice of the first Justice Harlan who argued against any covert violations of fourteenth,and was the only voice white laborers had on the court during 19th cent.
But I was not really familiar with the emancipationist view and I must look into it because it sounds like what I have always said was the problem post-war between the states. It should never have been about freeing slaves, but freeing everyone from dominant overlords so I look forward to finding Blight’s book.
Zhana, I understand what you’re saying and it’s fair to say that the break-in wasn’t minor, especially seeing how it targeted the DNC during an election year and was politically motivated. That already makes it more than just some random burglary.
But the point I was getting at is that legally, at the time it happened, it was treated like a small-time crime. Nobody knew then that it was part of a bigger operation run out of the White House. The police didn’t arrest President Nixon’s people that night. They just picked up five guys in suits with wiretapping equipment. That’s what I mean by petty crime. It’s not that it wasn’t serious, but that it looked like something routine, almost forgettable, if you didn’t dig deeper.
The unfortunate thing, and the warning, is that something that looked so small ended up being the thread that unraveled a presidency. That’s why it matters how we see these things at the start, before the whole iceberg is visible. Critically look at these seemingly minor violations of norms or even laws because they often reveal the mindset behind them. A break-in isn’t just a break-in when it’s ordered from the top. It’s a signal that power is being misused, that norms are already being broken behind closed doors. If we ignore early warning signs as trivial, we teach powerful people that accountability only begins when the damage is too big to ignore. And by then, it’s usually too late. All our institutions are failing us. We’re on our own.
I imagine it's done, or attempted, by every campaign. Usually though not directed by the president personally.
Petty, in the sense of common. To spy the others' secrets, between govts, between corporations and between presidential candidates.
Petty,in the sense of moral, you are free to think it is not moral. I imagine Dr. Glasco was referring to petty in the sense of common. She is free to correct me if I misrepresent her.
it would take til eternity to reply
But the problem I have with the overall presentation of the reconstruction era is that it always focused on the south and whites who didn't want to grant black freedom and never on the north that didn't want to grant worker freedom. 1877, the year reconstruction ended, is the year the American civil war actually began. Yeah, they subdued the rioters...but that civil war continued and hasn't as of yet ended.
or it did end, is ending now.
The problem is we can use force and maintain control, or we can create solutions that are designed to fail without continuous force...civil rights legislation and court decisions required Ike and LBJ to send in troops.
Power of any kind over others becomes a struggle to control that power. Absalom my son! is the only history power can ever achieve...a continuous struggle.
After Bacon's rebellion, with way too few masters to control the workers, deliberate laws were established to separate them from ever unifying again to chase the masters all the way back to England.
In Africa and much of the colonized world, the majorities were able to unite and send the colonizers back to their own lands.
But too many inkblots of colonization were spilled over what had been many groups, or ethnicities, or tribes, or whatever term you like, that now had to be a country and the eur. still controlled the majority of the resources even upon departing. Corruption was the bribe and struggle for the power over the resources the different ethnicities still did not have and were still struggling to obtain.
Now you're a historian, and you know all of this better than I, but reconstruction didn't end (in my opinion) because of klannish tendencies in the south to take back control, but because northern industrialists saw a solid aristocratic need to reinstall the southern aristocracy to prevent the bleeding of scalawag-black government and local control of the land, roads, schools, c. into the north.
After the war there was nothing but laborer attempts in the north to share some of the power while many of those southern govts were reducing authority over others and giving more resources to more people. What if the coalition between blacks and whites reached into the north and workers (still primarily european) reached into their own bailiwick and they no longer controlled their own workers?
Frederick Douglas said there was a difference between chattel slavery and working for wages, but not much. The difference, he said, was freedom, but he never achieved that freedom until he became independent of all masters.
The post-Bacon legislatures in Maryland and Virginia created in the American psyche that the tribes in this nation were defined not between the workers and the masters but between blacks and whites.
But the white workers have nevertheless have not found their lives particularly appealing, and the Charlie Kirk's, c. are the absurdity of this dual psychological insight imposed on whites that they are better than black people but knowing they are not being treated very well.
Until unity can be established by directing the workers into a unified class then the kings of the corporatist elite and the candidates they give money to, chaos remains in the minds of citizens...and chaos in the minds creates chaos in the society and prevents stepping out of our four centuries + of defining our tribes by skin color.
Ken, thank you for your expansive insight about the Reconstruction era. I really appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts. Thank you.
What you have written hits right at the heart of the tension between emancipationist and reconciliationist narratives of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The reconciliationist story tells us the civil war was about preserving the Union and that Reconstruction failed mainly because of Southern resentment. But the emancipationist view, as historian David Blight lays out in his book from 2001, Race and Reunion, insists that the civil war was about transforming the Republic—replacing a slave society with a genuine, multiracial democracy.
And it was that deeper transformation—what W.E.B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction in America from 1935 described as not just racial equality, but economic redistribution and political empowerment—that was so threatening to both the North and the South, so much so that neither wanted it to survive.
By 1877, the turn away was complete. Troops withdrawn from the South were immediately used against striking railroad workers in the North during the Great Upheaval. The Northern power structure didn’t simply grow tired of racial justice. It actively chose to protect capital and suppress labor. Black political power in the South and white labor unrest in the North were increasingly seen as two sides of the same problem—-challenges to elite control.
But here’s where we deepen the analysis even further: this wasn’t just a post–Civil War failure. The ideological retrenchment that made this abandonment possible—-the deeply embedded racial worldview—-was built centuries earlier. This is beautifully laid out in David Brion Davis’s books, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture and his other book, Inhuman Bondage, especially Chapter 3, “The Origins of Anti-Black Racism.” Davis shows that anti-Blackness didn’t begin as a crude response to labor shortages or economic necessity. It developed slowly, out of early European ideas about civilization, savagery, religion, and human difference. His central thesis is that racism wasn’t simply a rationalization for slavery but was also a cause.
So, by the time of Bacon’s Rebellion, the white colonists already had a ready-made ideological toolkit for turning Africans into a permanent underclass. As Edmund Morgan showed in American Slavery, American Freedom, the post-Bacon laws in Virginia and Maryland codified that worldview into law by making “white” and “Black” into legal, social, and eventually psychological categories. Again, as Davis had laid out, the foundations had already been established centuries earlier. But, after Bacon, the goal was made explicit: break up the laboring class and prevent any future multiracial coalitions that might challenge elite control.
And, both structurally and symbolically, that divide worked, It created a sense of superiority among poor whites, even though they remained politically and economically powerless. W.E.B. Du Bois called it the “wage of whiteness.” And it’s what allows the system to persist: the illusion of privilege in exchange for loyalty to a hierarchy that ultimately exploits everyone at the bottom.
So when Reconstruction offered a glimpse of a different future, where freedpeople and white workers might build something together, that wasn’t just a political crisis. It was an existential threat to the very system of racial capitalism that had been established over centuries. That’s why it was crushed. Not just by white southern violence of the Klan and other white supremacist terrorists (though this was a huge factor), but by Congress, by the courts, by capital, and by the narratives of national reunion (reconciliationist and lost cause visions of the war).
So what we learn from Du Bois in Black Reconstruction in America is that Reconstruction was destroyed because if the emancipationist vision had been allowed to expand—if the South had become a model of democracy instead of a laboratory for racial and economic hierarchy—then the nation itself would have been remade. Black suffrage, public education, and equal protection under law were not narrow Southern experiments. They were the most radical testing ground of American democracy. Their success would have unsettled entrenched power not only in the former Confederacy but also in the North, where industrial capital feared labor insurgency and white voters resisted full racial equality. By getting rid of Reconstruction, white elites made sure that democracy would remain racially, economically, and geographically bounded.
thank you for your kind and detailed response.
I have DuBois’ complete works on a disc, but its over a thousand pages and I haven’t ever read through it all and need to find passages you referred to.
And thank you for supporting and enhancing on my conceptions. I do believe
“western'“ culture had certain enhanced conceptions of “superiorism” and I don’t know if Bacon would have betrayed those who aided him. And you are right that before the rebellion there was a distinction made in terminology if not in practice between slave and indentured. When serfdom ended, enslavement of English citizens became taboo,but they could impress, imprison, or indenture them and children could be sold into apprenticeships by parents (or acc. to Oliver Twist, by workhouses). They just couldn’t be called slaves.
So the legal codification of black inferiority was not something “out of the blue.”
But as you write it created a really false sense of superiority amongst poor whites, that enabled the racial divide to fester into a cancer. And of course the courts really never made the fourteenth amendment more than an overt amendment, with the weird singular voice of the first Justice Harlan who argued against any covert violations of fourteenth,and was the only voice white laborers had on the court during 19th cent.
But I was not really familiar with the emancipationist view and I must look into it because it sounds like what I have always said was the problem post-war between the states. It should never have been about freeing slaves, but freeing everyone from dominant overlords so I look forward to finding Blight’s book.
Gotta disagree with you on one point: Watergate - breakng into the HQ of the Democratic National Convention - could never be a "petty crime".
Zhana, I understand what you’re saying and it’s fair to say that the break-in wasn’t minor, especially seeing how it targeted the DNC during an election year and was politically motivated. That already makes it more than just some random burglary.
But the point I was getting at is that legally, at the time it happened, it was treated like a small-time crime. Nobody knew then that it was part of a bigger operation run out of the White House. The police didn’t arrest President Nixon’s people that night. They just picked up five guys in suits with wiretapping equipment. That’s what I mean by petty crime. It’s not that it wasn’t serious, but that it looked like something routine, almost forgettable, if you didn’t dig deeper.
The unfortunate thing, and the warning, is that something that looked so small ended up being the thread that unraveled a presidency. That’s why it matters how we see these things at the start, before the whole iceberg is visible. Critically look at these seemingly minor violations of norms or even laws because they often reveal the mindset behind them. A break-in isn’t just a break-in when it’s ordered from the top. It’s a signal that power is being misused, that norms are already being broken behind closed doors. If we ignore early warning signs as trivial, we teach powerful people that accountability only begins when the damage is too big to ignore. And by then, it’s usually too late. All our institutions are failing us. We’re on our own.
I imagine it's done, or attempted, by every campaign. Usually though not directed by the president personally.
Petty, in the sense of common. To spy the others' secrets, between govts, between corporations and between presidential candidates.
Petty,in the sense of moral, you are free to think it is not moral. I imagine Dr. Glasco was referring to petty in the sense of common. She is free to correct me if I misrepresent her.
Exactly, Ken.