Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the politics of race and of slavery danced around one another, colliding here, overlapping there, changing over time, always related but never quite identical. Before 1820 northern politics had a strong current of antislavery sentiment based on the principle that blacks and whites were equally entitled to the same fundamental rights. Between the two great antebellum sectional crises—that of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and of the Compromise of 1850—a more virulent proslavery racism prevailed. But with the Mexican American War, debates about slavery—and with it, antiracist politics—revived. The Republican electoral triumph of 1860 brought these two competing traditions into direct collision.
The antislavery radicalism of the Revolutionary years neither died nor dissipated in the 1790s. On the contrary, it was not until 1799 that New York passed a gradual emancipation law, followed five years later by New Jersey. Far from the bedraggled leftovers of a once formidable antislavery politics, the emancipations in New York and New Jersey were signal achievements of an antislavery coalition that became better organized and more ideologically coherent after 1790. Nor were these the only successes of early American antislavery politics. Throughout the North, gradual emancipation laws were reinforced by state and local statutes that weakened what remained of slavery. Slave trading was banned, fugitive slave catchers were thwarted, slave marriages were legalized, and slaves were permitted to own property. What was left of “slavery” had been transformed into something more closely approximating apprenticeship. Yet even those remaining “slaves” who fought for the United States during the War of 1812 were emancipated.
Despite increasingly stiff resistance from slaveholders, antislavery politics remained vital at the national level. The new federal government quickly readopted the Ordinance of 1787, banning the migration of slaves into the Northwest Territories. Long before the 1808 nationwide ban on the Atlantic slave trade went into effect, Congress prohibited slave trading in the southwestern territories and imposed stiff regulations that thwarted it in eastern seaports as well. Once the Atlantic trade itself was banned, Congress passed a series of increasingly aggressive enforcement laws culminating in the declaration of the trade as “piracy” in 1820.
Yet by then, slavery’s opponents looked back on the republic’s first 30 years and saw a series of defeats at the hands of a slaveholding class that had grown more, rather than less, powerful. Antislavery politicians had tried but failed to impose a tax on slave imports before 1808. Instead, as the deadline for closing the Atlantic slave trade approached, Georgia and South Carolina opened the floodgates and imported tens of thousands of African slaves into the United States. Northern congressmen had tried to restrict the migration of slaves into the southwestern territories but were again thwarted by an increasingly powerful and belligerent slaveholding bloc in Congress. Antislavery politicians likewise failed in their efforts to inhibit the growth of slavery in the territories acquired under the Louisiana Purchase. Indeed, so aggressive had proslavery forces become that in the immediate aftermath of the War of 1812 they made a serious effort to overturn the restriction on slave imports in the states that had been carved out of the northwestern territories. Opponents of the institution who had once hoped that the Revolution’s “contagion of liberty” would lead to the steady disappearance of the institution instead looked back a generation later and saw the opposite. A cotton boom had breathed new life into the slaveholding class, making the southern states the most economically and politically potent force in the new nation. Slavery was expanding far more rapidly than was freedom, and with it grew a new domestic slave trade that duplicated many of the horrors of the illegal Atlantic trade.
By 1820 slaveholders and their opponents had honed their arguments in a debate that was already 30 years old. Racial equality was always an issue in these early struggles over slavery, but it was assumed rather than highlighted. Antislavery politicians almost always insisted that blacks and whites were equally entitled to the universal rights promised in the Declaration of Independence and to the same privileges and immunities of citizenship guaranteed by the Constitution. Their commitment to gradualism rested on the environmentalist assumption that, although slavery had left its victims unprepared for immediate emancipation, blacks were ultimately equal to whites in their innate capacity to assume the responsibilities of citizenship. In that sense, antislavery politics was always fundamentally antiracist.
By contrast, slavery’s defenders insisted on the right of property in slaves and the right of slave states to be left alone by the federal government, but they also claimed that blacks alone, by virtue of their racial inferiority, were suitable for slavery. In this sense, the proslavery argument was intrinsically racist—not because racism led logically to the defense of slavery but because the defense of slavery led logically to the question of who should be enslaved. And the proslavery answer was always the same: Africans and their descendants.
But the logic of proslavery racism had a way of spilling beyond its initial purpose. If Africans and African Americans were racially destined for slavery, it followed that free blacks were destined for inferiority as well. In 1790 Congress passed a citizenship law restricting naturalization to whites. By the end of the eighteenth century, individual states began stripping free blacks of the right to vote. Tennessee did this in its 1799 constitution; Ohio disfranchised African Americans in 1803. In 1814 New York required blacks to prove their freedom before they could vote. But it was not until the disastrous defeat of antislavery politics in the Missouri Crisis that racism moved into the center of American politics. In 1821 both Missouri and New York paved the way for a generation of racially inflected politics in which slavery’s defenders used attacks on free blacks as a means of silencing antislavery lawmakers. In one state after another, constitutions were rewritten to grant all white men the right to vote while at the same time stripping black men of the same right or at least severely restricting it. In 1821 New York abolished property qualifications for voting and office holding for white men while simultaneously imposing a steep property qualification—lands valued at at least 
250—on black men. Some states banned black voting altogether. Missouri, meanwhile, led the way in discriminatory citizenship laws, declaring, in its 1821 constitution, that free blacks could not move into the state—thus depriving them of one of the basic privileges of citizenship, the right of mobility.
All across America, states and localities rushed to impose harsh and demeaning racial discriminations on free blacks. They banned racial intermarriage; they prohibited blacks from serving on juries; they used politics to depoliticize African Americans, excluding blacks from public office and severely restricting—if not outright banning—them from voting. In lockstep with the spread of legal inequality came an explosion of private discriminations. Black and white passengers were segregated from one another in streetcars, ferries, and railroad cars. Theaters relegated blacks to “nigger balconies.” Cemeteries separated black and white funeral plots. In this, at least, there were few regional distinctions, for racial segregation became the way of life for free blacks in the North as well as the South. For black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, racial discrimination represented “the spirit of slavery,” extending its influence beyond the borders of the slave states.
The Democratic Party was the primary vehicle for this ascendant racial politics. A coalition of northern plebeians and southern slaveholders, the Democratic Party unified its northern and southern wings under the banner of white supremacy. Even so, the impetus behind racial politics was essentially negative. It did not foreground racial politics so much as it made antislavery politics impossible. New York’s 1821 constitution is an example of this. Many African Americans had already been stripped of the vote by earlier statutes requiring blacks to prove their freedom before they could cast their ballots. There is evidence suggesting partisan motives for imposing a property qualification: New York Jeffersonians were internally divided, and they used racial demagoguery both to unify their own party and to wipe out the remnants of the Federalists. Martin Van Buren saw what was happening in his home state of New York and helped develop it into a nationwide strategy for uniting the northern and southern wings of an emerging Democratic Party.
It worked. Having used white supremacy to shut down the threat of antislavery politics that had loomed so large in the Missouri crisis, The Democracy (as the Democratic Party was then known) was free to focus on other issues. As a result, the most important political battles of the next generation were waged over who would gain and lose from economic development. Racial politics unified the party faithful by purging the system of the potentially disruptive impact of antislavery politics.
The colonization movement was yet another symptom of the relative weakening of antislavery politics. The idea itself was not new. As early as the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson suggested that the abolition of slavery had to be accompanied by systematic efforts to “colonize” freed blacks somewhere outside the United States. Blacks were so different from whites, so clearly inferior, Jefferson argued, that even though they were entitled to the same right to freedom as all other human beings, they could never live in America as the equals of whites. The idea achieved new prominence with the founding of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816, and from that moment until the Civil War, colonization remained a remarkably popular “solution” to the problem of slavery among political elites.
On the surface, the founding of the ACS seemed to reflect a broadening of the same sentiment that was sparking a revival of antislavery politics after the War of 1812. But antislavery leaders saw the emergence of colonization as a disastrous failure. Unlike the earliest abolitionists, colonizationists assumed that blacks could never be equal citizens in the United States. Thus the emergence of the ACS foreshadowed the triumph of racial politics. In theory, colonization could appeal to racism and antislavery sentiment at the same time. Its emergence, at the very moment that the struggle between proslavery and antislavery politicians was coming to a head, reflected the persistence of the dream of ridding the nation of slavery but also the ascendance of the dream of ridding the country of blacks.
A handful of prominent African Americans agreed that blacks and whites could never live together as equals and that the best solution was for blacks to emigrate to Sierra Leone, Liberia, or perhaps to the black republic of Haiti. But most black Americans objected to such proposals. Shortly after the founding of the ACS, 3,000 blacks in Philadelphia rallied to express their vehement opposition to colonization. They were only marginally more interested in voluntary emigration, despite the strenuous efforts by the government of Haiti and prominent black Americans like James Forten and Richard Allen to encourage emigration to the Caribbean island. Instead, most African Americans, born and raised in the United States, chose to remain and wage the struggle for equality in the land of their birth.
Opposition to colonization became the rallying cry among a new generation of black abolitionists. In 1827 they founded the nation’s first black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, which combined attacks on colonization with equally vehement denunciations of northern racism and southern slavery. As the journal’s editor warmed to the idea of colonization to Africa, Freedom’s Journal lost its appeal to African American readers and ceased publication in 1829. But over the next several decades, black newspapers appeared in cities all across the North. At the same time, blacks organized a series of conventions that, like the newspapers, openly protested the rising tide of racism in the North and the expansion of slavery in the South. Disfranchisement had wiped out much of the black electorate, but it did not put an end to black politics.
White militants like William Lloyd Garrison, inspired by their black predecessors, made opposition to colonization a keystone of a radical abolitionist movement that emerged in the late 1820s in the wake of the recent disastrous defeat of antislavery politics. And like the antislavery politics that it replaced, radical abolitionism was almost by definition antiracist—whatever the particular prejudices of individual reformers. By the 1830s, the racial climate had changed, however, and with it the salience of abolitionist antiracism. Just as the Democratic Party had fused racial inequality to the defense of slavery, many abolitionists now demanded racial equality along with the abolition of slavery. For obvious reasons, black abolitionists were especially inclined to link antislavery with the struggle for racial equality, but white radicals now agreed that the struggle against slavery in the South was indissolubly linked to the struggle against racial discrimination in the North. It was this racial egalitarianism, more than antislavery, that made radical abolitionism radical.
Thus, as politicians used race to squeeze antislavery out of the mainstream, the debate over slavery became more polarized than ever. Proslavery intellectuals helped inspire an “American school” of ethnography dedicated to developing scientific proofs of the innate inferiority of the African “race.” Meanwhile, radical abolitionists argued that the same principle of human equality that made slavery immoral made racial inequality illegitimate as well. By the 1830s, the politics of race were explicitly bound with the politics of slavery at every point along the ideological spectrum.
One of the goals of radical abolitionists was to force antislavery back onto the national political agenda. First they tried flooding the South with antislavery propaganda, but President Andrew Jackson shut them down by telling his postmaster general not to deliver such mail. More successful was the abolitionist effort to bombard Congress with petitions asking for the abolition of the slave trade, and then slavery, in Washington, D.C. This campaign precipitated the notorious “gag rule” whereby Congress automatically tabled all antislavery petitions in the hopes of thwarting any discussion of slavery in either the House of Representatives or the Senate. The debate over the gag rule erupted in 1835 and dragged on for nearly a decade. By the time the rule was abandoned, antislavery politics was coming back to life.
One reason for this was the revival of party competition in the 1830s, stimulated by opposition to President Jackson. This anti-Jackson, or Whig, party was, like the Democratic Party, national in its appeal. The prominence of Southerners in the Whig coalition thereby ensured that it would not be an antislavery party. Moreover, the Whigs’ “American System” assumed that slavery had a permanent place in a nationally integrated economy. Yet, like the Federalists of an earlier generation, the Whigs were more likely than the Democrats to attract those northern politicians who were opposed to slavery. The reemergence of party competition in the 1830s thus created more space for antislavery politicians to survive within the political mainstream than had been the case in the late 1820s. But Whig antislavery was weak and was channeled primarily into empty encomia to colonization. For antislavery politics to revive, pressure would have to be administered from outside the two-party system.
The revival began in 1840 with the launch of the Liberty Party, which picked up steam in the 1844 presidential election. The Liberty Party was a coalition of abolitionists committed to racial equality and pragmatists who hoped to revive antislavery politics by focusing primarily on the issue of slavery’s expansion. Thus, from the earliest moments of its revival, antislavery politics revealed an impulse to separate the issue of slavery from the issue of race. The potential of this strategy soon became clear. The war with Mexico gave antislavery politics a critical boost, leading to the formation of the Free Soil Party in 1848. With that, the focus of antislavery politics shifted away from both colonization as well as racial equality and toward halting the further expansion of slavery into the western territories. There was a racist argument for the notion of “free soil”: the claim that the western territories should be reserved for whites. But there was also an egalitarian argument, a conviction that the federal government should place its finger on the scales in favor of universal freedom, for blacks and whites alike, by preventing slavery from expanding beyond its present limits.
The collapse of the Whig Party in the wake of the Compromise of 1850 paved the way for the triumph of antislavery politics when it was replaced, in the northern states, by a new Republican Party committed to free soil ideals. The Republicans nominated their first presidential candidate in 1856 and went on to victory in 1860.
This second generation of antislavery politics was similar to its pre-1820 predecessor in important ways, but different as well—and one of the crucial differences had to do with its relationship to the politics of race. The first generation of antislavery politicians tended to assume that blacks and whites were equally entitled not merely to the presumption of freedom but to the same voting rights and the same privileges and immunities of citizenship as well. They could take this position, in part, because race was not yet a major theme in American politics. Politicians assumed rather than highlighted their disagreements over racial equality. A generation later, the situation was very different. Antislavery politicians in the 1840s and 1850s also assumed that blacks and whites were entitled to the same basic rights—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—something proslavery Democrats flatly denied. At the same time, however, Republicans in the 1850s denied that, in opposing slavery, they necessarily supported racial equality. This position opened the Republican Party to a wide spectrum of racial attitudes—from antislavery racists to radical egalitarians.
The most successful spokesman for this position was Abraham Lincoln. By the late 1850s, Lincoln repeatedly dismissed racial equality as a “false issue.” The great issue facing the nation was slavery not racial equality, he argued. White voters disagreed, not over the question of racial equality but over the question of slavery. And in any case, Lincoln added, questions of racial equality were matters to be handled by individual states and thus had no bearing on national political campaigns. Republicans in the Massachusetts legislature might support both racial equality and discrimination against immigrants, while Republicans in the Illinois legislature favored racial discrimination while supporting the rights of immigrants. In either case, Lincoln argued, racial and ethnic discriminations were state matters and had no bearing on the antislavery principles of the Republican Party nationwide.
This explicit separation of race from slavery understandably alienated many abolitionists, but it succeeded in releasing American politics from the stranglehold of proslavery racism. Thus without actually advocating racial equality, the Republican Party broke the back of racial politics by insisting that race and slavery were two different issues and that slavery was the only issue that mattered.
Nevertheless, just as the racist logic of proslavery politics—“the spirit of slavery”—was felt in the spread of laws discriminating against African Americans, the egalitarianism at the core of antislavery politics had the reverse effect. Despite the wide spectrum of opinion about racial equality among Republicans, party victories in the North resulted in the first sporadic reversals of the racial legal structure put in place a generation earlier. Massachusetts abolished segregated schools, for example. Republicans in the New York legislature put an equal suffrage amendment on the ballot in 1860. But it was not until the Republicans took control of Congress and the presidency that a nationwide rollback of the racial regime was begun.
This rollback was largely stimulated by the demands of the Civil War. Once emancipation became Union policy, white Northerners questioned: “What shall be done with the Negro?” The answer that emerged, tentatively at first, was a repudiation of more than a generation of racial politics. The Lincoln administration declared that free blacks were citizens and were equally entitled to the associated privileges and immunities. Republicans opened the U.S. Army to blacks for the first time since the 1790s. Shortly after the war ended, they passed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1866. Eventually, Republicans endorsed voting rights for the former slaves and enacted constitutional amendments against racial qualifications for voting that effectively abolished discriminatory voting laws in the northern as well as the southern states. With the triumph of antislavery politics, came a reversal—incomplete but nonetheless significant—of the racial politics of the proslavery Democracy.
See also abolitionism; slavery; voting.
FURTHER READING. Jonathan Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854, 2004; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War, 1970; Robert Pierce Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America, 2007; David N. Gellman, Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777–1827, 2006; John Craig Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West, 2007; Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic, 2006; James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics, 2007; Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 1969; Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837–1860, 1976; Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North, 1967.
JAMES OAKES
The politics of race went through more than one revolution during the seven decades after 1860. Consider three moments at the beginning, middle, and end of the period: In 1860 the prospect that the presidency would be occupied by a member of a political party committed merely to banning slavery from territories where it did not then exist was enough to provoke the Deep South into violent rebellion. On the eve of the Civil War, according to the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, people of African descent could never become American citizens and had “no rights which a white man was bound to respect.” Yet in September 1862, the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation signaled the end of more than two centuries of slavery in America. By the middle of the period, in 1895–96, African American rights that had expanded dramatically in the 1860s were contracting: South Carolina held a state constitutional convention openly aimed at disfranchising black men; Tuskegee Institute head Booker T. Washington publicly promised in the “Atlanta Compromise” that southern blacks would accept racial segregation; and the Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, announced that segregation was constitutional. In 1930 the first African American member of Congress from the North, Chicago’s Oscar De Priest, was elected to his second term in office; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) helped defeat the Supreme Court nomination of John J. Parker for his role in excluding blacks from the Republican Party in North Carolina; and NAACP-affiliated attorneys were litigating their second case in a successful 20-year legal campaign to outlaw the white primary.
Sudden advances, counterrevolutions, and periods of incremental change in both directions characterized this turbulent, contradictory, complex period. Race relations varied from time to time and place to place, and issues and institutional features of governments that had nothing inherently to do with race often determined racial policy outcomes. Racial politics can only be understood if it is not separated from other concerns, tensions, and actions.
Secession freed the Republican Party, and then the slaves. As long as southern whites threatened to break up the Union if Northerners moved against slavery, Republican policy was itself enslaved. Once secession was declared, southern slaveholders resigned from Congress, and Fort Sumter was fired upon, the Union inevitably became the enemy of slavery instead of its protector. After securing the border states militarily, the Republicans were free to ban the interstate slave trade, to authorize the federal government, for the first time, to hire African Americans to work for the national government, and to declare escaped slaves “contraband of war” instead of returning them to their owners as the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act required.
Slaves forced the issue, fleeing toward Union lines as soon as Union armies approached and demanding to work to feed themselves and to fight to restore a nation purified of its original sin of slavery. The longer the Civil War went on and the more white northern soldiers were killed or badly wounded, the less resistance there was to enrolling black soldiers. Once they began fighting for Union forces after the Emancipation Proclamation took permanent effect in January 1863, complete abolition was ensured. Approximately 180,000 African Americans served in the army and navy, about 12 percent of the total number of soldiers and sailors, and they died at the same ghastly rates as whites did. For Northerners, granting and preserving the rights of African Americans who had fought for the Union—especially protecting them from attacks by former secessionists—took on, for a time after the conclusion of the war, the character of a patriotic duty.
White Southerners, however, acted as though the Civil War had settled nothing except the impracticality of secession and the nominal abolition of slavery. After Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and the succession of his vice president, Tennessee Democrat Andrew Johnson, southern states passed “black codes” that denied African Americans the right to buy or lease real estate, sign yearly labor contracts, serve on juries, testify against whites in court, and vote. Blacks were excluded from public schools, black orphans were “apprenticed” to their former owners, and black “servants” were required to labor from sunup to sundown for their “masters.” White Southerners also demanded that a delegation of former Confederate officers and politicians be seated immediately in Congress.
But the Republicans who controlled Congress refused to admit the erstwhile rebels and took decisive control of Reconstruction. When Johnson vetoed a bill extending the Freedmen’s Bureau, which provided food to destitute Southerners of both races, supervised labor contracts, and started schools where ex-slaves could be educated and courts where their concerns could be adjudicated, Republicans in Congress overrode his action, as they did his veto of the 1866 Civil Rights Act. That act began to carry out the implications of the Thirteenth Amendment (ratified in 1865), which Republicans interpreted as doing much more than abolishing slavery. In their expansive interpretation, one resurrected by the U.S. Supreme Court a century later, the Thirteenth Amendment allowed Congress in the Civil Rights Act to outlaw racial discrimination, even in such private contracts as those for housing and admission to private schools, as “badges and incidents of slavery.” Seceding states were required to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment as a condition for their readmission to the Union. After enacting the Civil Rights Act, Republicans, over unanimous northern Democratic opposition in Congress, passed the Fourteenth Amendment, which even more securely constitutionalized civil rights, seeking explicitly to guarantee privileges and immunities, due process, and equal protection for all.
In the critical 1866 election campaign, Johnson demagogically lambasted Congress, northern Democrats endlessly race-baited, and white Southerners rioted in Memphis and New Orleans, killing 89 African Americans in full view of the national press. Northern voters reacted to Johnsonian and southern Democratic overreaching by giving the Republicans a landslide, which turned Reconstruction more radical. Ten southern states were placed under temporary military rule, forced to enfranchise African American men and to rewrite their constitutions, and readmitted to Congress only after ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment and much more liberal state constitutions. Because Johnson persisted in trying to subvert the antiracist settlement, he was impeached, almost convicted, and, for all intents and purposes, rendered innocuous.
The United States was the only large slaveholding society that quickly enfranchised freedmen, and the eagerness and skill with which they took to politics surprised and dismayed their former masters, who had expected docility and incompetence. Even in the face of Ku Klux Klan violence, African American voter turnout in the 1860s and 1870s often surpassed 80 percent. Buttressed by the presence of federal troops, by the Fifteenth Amendment, which mandated racially impartial suffrage nationally, and by official jobs for their supporters, the new southern governments launched statewide education systems, encouraged the building and rebuilding of railroads, passed civil rights laws, and protected the rights of laborers, renters, and small farmers. Even after the Reconstruction governments fell, African Americans continued to enjoy the rights to legally marry, worship as they wished, form private clubs, receive (usually inferior) educations at public expense, and, often, to patronize public accommodations such as restaurants, theaters, and railroads, on a nonsegregated basis—if they could afford to pay. Absolute segregation of public places in the South arrived only toward the turn of the century, and it was a matter of law, not of custom.
White southern Democrats fought back against the southern Republican governments with the most extensive peacetime violence in American history. The bloodiest were Louisiana Democrats who, according to a congressional investigation, killed 1,081 persons, mostly black, in the six months before the presidential election of 1868. But violence did not, by itself, doom Reconstruction or account for the ultimate nullification of the Fifteenth Amendment. Murder was most effective as a political tactic if it targeted key political leaders and exploded in the period just before a crucial election. Yet in nine of the dozen southern counties where the best-known violent incidents took place, African Americans somehow managed to poll nearly their full vote for the Republicans in the presidential election that succeeded the incident.
After northern voters reacted to the 1873 depression, bitter northern ethnoreligious conflicts, and widespread tales of corruption by electing a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives in 1874, congressional Republicans managed in their last few months in power to enact the 1875 Civil Rights Act, which mandated the integration of public accommodations, but they failed to pass a strong voter protection bill because Democrats filibustered against it in the House until it was too late for the Senate to act. Although the GOP rebounded to win the second closest presidential election in U.S. history in 1876, part of the price for settling disputes over the election outcome was an implicit promise to stop using the army to protect southern Republicans. Partisanship, economic and nonracial moral issues, and political strife between separate groups of a heterogeneous “white” society, as well as issues of race and Reconstruction per se, brought about what became known as the “Compromise of 1877,” which marked what historians traditionally viewed as the end of Reconstruction.
Yet, as is shown in figure 1, which charts the number of black members of Congress and the state legislatures elected from 1868 through 1900 from the 11 states that formed the Confederacy, blacks were not eliminated from politics after 1877. In fact, the number of African Americans elected to legislative office from the South was higher in 1882 than in any subsequent year until 1974, and from 1878 to 1890, the decline in black office holding was palpable, but gradual. Moreover, even where they could not elect black candidates, which was usually their first preference, blacks could often still vote for sympathetic whites. In 1880, three years after President Rutherford B. Hayes symbolically confined U.S. troops to their barracks in the South, an estimated two-thirds of the adult male African Americans were recorded as voting, and two-thirds of that group managed to have their votes recorded for Republican James A. Garfield, whom they had nearly all, no doubt, supported for president. The high black turnout in this election, which was greater than overall national participation a century later, was not atypical, nor did Democrats allow it only because presidential elections were less important to them than those closer to home. An average of six out of ten African Americans voted in the most heavily contested gubernatorial races in each of the 11 states during the 1880s, despite the fact that none of these elections took place on the same day that voters cast ballots for president. Of those blacks who voted, at least 60 percent supported the Republican, Greenback, or other anti-Democratic candidates in each state. Even in the 1890s, after several states had restricted suffrage by law, nearly half of the African American population is estimated to have voted in key gubernatorial contests, although the Populist-Democratic battles were sufficiently severe that Democrats pushed fraud to new levels.
Figure 1. Black Members of Congress and State Legislatures
Five principal tactics were used to reduce and, finally, to eliminate black political strength—no single one sufficient by itself, but all working together and, roughly, following a predictable sequence: violence, fraud, structural discrimination, statutory suffrage restriction, and constitutional disfranchisement. Corresponding to these tactics were four approximate stages in the attack on black voting rights after Reconstruction: the Klan stage, in which fraud and violence predominated; the dilution stage, characterized by structural legal changes; the disfranchisement stage, where the last legal underpinnings of the real “Solid South” were put into place; and the lily white stage, the aim of which was to crush any elevation of blacks above the distinctly secondary political status into which the disfranchisement measures had forced them, and to reduce—from very slim to none—any chances of African Americans being elected or appointed to office or exercising any political muscle whatsoever.
Violence was not only a dangerous weapon for a conservative establishment to use, for it invited retaliation from desperate victims, but it was also less effective than fraud perpetrated by election officials and their superiors. Southern election fraud in the late nineteenth century, as often a matter of boasting in the South as it was a matter of outrage in the North, far surpassed voting fraud at any other time or place in American history. For instance, Louisiana senator and former governor Samuel D. McEnery stated in 1898 that his state’s 1882 election law “was intended to make it the duty of the governor to treat the law as a formality and count in the Democrats.” William A. Anderson, author of the 1894 election law in Virginia, admitted that elections under his law were “crimes against popular government and treason against liberty.” A delegate to the 1901 Alabama constitutional convention reported that “any time it was necessary the black belt could put in ten, fifteen, twenty or thirty thousand Negro votes.” A leader of the 1890 Mississippi constitutional convention declared that “it is no secret that there has not been a full vote and a fair count in Mississippi since 1875,” which was the last election until 1967 in which African Americans voted at all freely in the state. Like violence, fraud was most potent if ramped up during crucial elections—for instance, referenda on ratifying discriminatory amendments to state constitutions, as in Alabama in 1901, where, according to the official returns, nearly 90 percent of those in counties with black populations of at least 70 percent supported a new constitution whose advertised purpose was black disfranchisement.
Supplementing fraud were structural changes in election laws, such as gerrymandering election district boundaries; drawing election districts with very different population sizes; switching from district to at-large elections, which made it more difficult to elect members of groups that formed a majority in a part of a city, but only a minority in the whole city; abolishing local elections entirely; annexation or deannexation of territory to add white or subtract black areas from a jurisdiction; requiring officeholders to post bonds too high to meet for anyone who lacked wealthy friends; shifting or consolidating polling places to confuse voters or require them to travel many miles to the polls; and impeaching Republican or other anti-Democratic officials, often on transparently specious grounds. All these measures cut black and Republican office holding at the local, state, and national levels without actually disfranchising voters.
Other laws did reduce individual voting: poll taxes, which in some states had to be paid for every year after a person reached 21 years of age before one could vote, discouraged the poor of both races from voting, but especially the generally poorer blacks. Registration laws could be devised to prune the electorate by compelling registration months before every election, especially at a central location during working hours; demanding copiously detailed information, which sometimes had to be vouched for by witnesses, before a voter could register; allowing registration boards sufficient discretion to enable them to pad or unfairly purge the rolls; disproportionate representation for the Democrats on such boards; requiring voters unaccustomed to keeping records to produce registration certificates at voting places; or permitting widespread challenges to voters at the polls. The then infamous South Carolina “eight-box” law of 1882 required election officials to shift separate ballot boxes for each of eight offices around during the voting to make it impossible for a literate friend to put an illiterate’s tickets in the correct order before he entered the polling place, and prohibited anyone but state election officers, all but one or two of whom seem to have been Democrats, from assisting unlettered voters. After 1888, when states began to require ballots to be supplied only by governments, secret ballot laws, employed in eight southern and many northern states with the intent and effect of disfranchising illiterates, could be designed to be so long and complex as to disfranchise all but the well educated and those whom the election officials chose to help.
Along with violence, fraud, and structural measures, such laws reduced Republican and inhibited Populist representation enough to create legislative majorities in favor of state constitutional disfranchisement. Conventions or referenda then wrote into more permanent form poll taxes and literacy or property tests for registration, often with temporary exemption clauses to allow illiterate (white) voters to register if they could demonstrate to a registrar’s satisfaction that they understood parts of the Constitution or laws when they were read to them, or if their ancestors could have voted before 1867 (before southern blacks were enfranchised), or if they or their ancestors had served in the military (including, of course, the Confederate States Army). These were referred to as the “grandfather” and “fighting grandfather” clauses. Constitutional disfranchisement effectively moved fraud one step back, delegating it to registration officials instead of those at the polls. It also reduced widespread unfavorable publicity about white southern election cheating, which had invited national intervention, such as the Lodge Elections Bill of 1890, defeated only by another Senate filibuster, and made legal attacks on white election supremacy more difficult to mount.
The Solid South created by disfranchisement laws—effectively outlawing political party competition, almost entirely excluding southern African Americans from political participation, proudly starving governmental services for poor people—lasted for a half century. Did whites in other regions of the country allow this system to be constructed and maintained because they lost interest in equality during and after the 1870s or increasingly drew a hard white line that treated all people of European origins as identical and all of African origins as naturally inferior, to be excluded from civil society? Or did Reconstructionists, thwarted by the structural peculiarities of the governmental system and adverse judicial decisions, turn north, shifting their focus from national to state governments, lowering their sights, but pursuing the same goal of racial equality closer to home?
Northern laws and litigation on racial discrimination in public accommodations and schools suggest that Reconstruction was not so much abandoned as redirected. After the Supreme Court overturned the 1875 national Civil Rights Act in 1883, most of the northern legislatures that had not earlier passed state public accommodations laws quickly did so. Thereafter, equal access to northern trains, streetcars, restaurants, and places of amusement was largely a matter of right, although the legalities were not always observed. In fact, even in the South until the turn of the nineteenth century, streetcars and many railroads were not rigidly segregated. Moves by states, cities, or private companies to require segregation on streetcars were resisted by black boycotts, sometimes lasting for many months, in more than 25 southern cities.
It took a longer time for every nonsouthern state except Indiana with a black population of 1 percent or more to pass laws requiring most or all public schools to stop restricting the admissions of African Americans. From Massachusetts in 1855, to California in 1880, to New York in 1901, blacks and their white allies fought for equal status by petitioning school boards, filing legal cases, and pressing state legislatures for laws granting every child access to what were then known as “common schools.” African Americans contested and won more cases on racial discrimination in public education in the decade of the 1880s, after the nominal end of Reconstruction, than in any other decade before the 1940s. In fact, they filed nearly 100 such cases in 20 states and the District of Columbia in the nineteenth century and prevailed in a majority of them. Nineteenth-century arguments and tactics before school boards and legislatures prefigured those of the twentieth-century civil rights movement, just as the doctrines and rhetoric in some of the legal opinions in the nineteenth-century school cases paralleled those a century later.
If agitation for those rights—in the North, at least—did not cease after 1876, and northern public opinion, as indexed by legislative action, continued to support black rights, why did the legal disfranchisement of southern African Americans succeed? There were three reasons: partisanship, the filibuster, and adverse decisions by the Supreme Court. First, since African Americans remained almost unanimously committed to the Republican Party—the party of Lincoln, emancipation, and Reconstruction—until well after disfranchisement, northern Democrats opposed any efforts to guarantee southern blacks the right to register, vote, and have their votes counted as cast. If southern blacks could vote freely, the fortunes of the Democratic Party nationally were likely to be permanently depressed. Accordingly, not a single Democratic member of Congress voted for any civil or voting rights measure from 1865 through 1900. That this pattern was motivated by partisanship, and not merely by racial animosity, is shown by the fact that an appreciable number of Democrats in northern state legislatures supported school integration and public accommodations bills, especially during the 1880s.
Rabid Democratic partisanship was especially on display in the bitter struggles over the national election bills in 1875 and 1890, when they relentlessly talked to death measures to protect individuals while voting, as well as to oversee registration, voting, and vote counting. Guarding the fundamental right to vote from violence, intimidation, and fraud amounted—the Democrats and much of the nation’s press shrieked—to “force bills.” Largely to counter these filibustering tactics, Republicans in the House changed the body’s rules in 1889–90 to end unlimited debate, and these “Reed Rules,” named for House Speaker Thomas B. Reed, not only facilitated the passage of the Lodge Elections Bill in that branch of the national legislature but also fundamentally changed the nature of the House forever. Never again would a minority of the House be able to block the chamber’s business until the majority gave up and dropped a bill or severely compromised it. Yet the Senate, during that same congressional session, failed to adopt a proposal by Senator Nelson W. Aldrich that was similar to the Reed Rules. Democrats filibustered the Lodge Bill for 33 days, the longest filibuster in history up to that time, and the bill was finally set aside by a single vote. Since the Senate has not yet followed the House’s lead on antifilibuster rules, every civil rights or voting rights proposal through the 1960s had to face the prospect or reality of having to break a filibuster to pass the Senate. As a consequence, between 1875 and 1957, not a single civil rights bill passed in Congress.
How different the history of race and politics in America might have been if both chambers in 1875 or 1890 or even later had adopted antifilibuster rules. If the “Force Bill” of 1875 had passed in time to protect voters from violence, intimidation, and fraud in the 1876 elections, and to prevent the overthrow of state authority, which were the objects of the bill, Hayes would easily have been elected president, Republicans would have continued to control many Deep South governments, and the decisions of southern white voters and leaders to abandon the Republicans as a lost, dangerous cause might well have been reversed. Republican rule in the Deep South would have begun to seem normal, and the developmental sequence of violence, fraud, structural changes, legislative disfranchisement, and constitutional disfranchisement would have been interrupted near the beginning.
Even if the less far-reaching Lodge Bill of 1890 had passed, which would have required breaking the Senate filibuster, southern African Americans would have been able to register more freely and have their votes more nearly counted as cast. If states had nonetheless passed disfranchisement measures, the effects of those laws would have been diminished because federal observers would have been available to restrain local registrars from applying racially separate and unequal standards to prospective voters. And if a serious southern Republican vote had persisted, national Republicans would have had an incentive to follow up the Lodge Bill with other, more comprehensive voting rights laws. Instead of a downward cycle leading to the practically complete disfranchisement of southern blacks by 1910, there might well have been an upward cycle, with less fraud, less structural discrimination, and fewer and more fairly administered restrictions on suffrage. The antilynching bills of the 1920s and 1930s and the anti–poll tax bills of the 1940s would have passed, and there would have been major efforts to extend northern integration laws nationally long before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. No revolutions in sentiment, interest, or cultural mores were required for those policy revolutions to occur—just a change in the operations of Congress to allow majority rule.
Of course, such laws might have been derailed by the Supreme Court, the least democratic of the national government’s three branches, designed with life tenure to ensure the greatest possible independence from the pressures of partisan politics or public opinion. In a confusing and often contradictory line of cases, the Supreme Court, during this period, wavered in protecting or allowing Congress to protect African American political rights. In opinions in U.S. v. Reese and U.S. v. Cruikshank that were delayed from 1874 to 1876, while the debate on the “force bill” was taking place, Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, President Grant’s seventh choice for the position, ruled provisions of the 1870–72 Enforcement Acts unconstitutional or largely unenforceable. Ignoring the Fourteenth Amendment, which does not mention race and which was repeatedly invoked during congressional debates as a basis for the Enforcement Acts, Waite declared that the only constitutional justification for the acts was the Fifteenth Amendment, and that either the acts or the indictments pursuant to them were insufficiently direct in their references to race to satisfy the Fifteenth Amendment.
Thus, in Reese, the refusal of a Lexington, Kentucky, tax collector to accept payment of the poll tax from an African American did not, according to the Court, infect with a racial purpose the actions of election officials who disfranchised him for failure to show a poll tax receipt. And in Cruikshank, Louisianians who perpetrated the largest racial mass murder in American history (the Colfax Riot of 1873), went free because Waite split off the beginning sections of the act, which explicitly mentioned race, from the later sections, which only indirectly referred to race.
As a consequence of these two decisions, the existing federal voting rights enforcement machinery was severely weakened. Nothing in the decisions themselves, however, prevented Congress from passing new laws that made the connection between racial discrimination and the protection of voting rights more explicit, and later Court decisions viewed the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection and due process clauses more expansively, allowing Congress to guard the fundamental rights of citizens where the states did not.
As with the receptiveness of northern legislatures and courts to antisegregation appeals during the decade after the supposed end of Reconstruction, Supreme Court decisions of the 1880s seemed to invite a renewed movement for racial reform. In Ex parte Siebold (1880), Ex parte Clarke (1880), and Ex parte Yarbrough (1884), the high court interpreted Congress’s plenary power under Article I, Section IV to regulate the “times, places and manner of holding elections” to Congress broadly enough to allow it to guarantee peaceable assembly and restrict fraud and violence. These decisions inspired Republicans to frame the 1890 Lodge Bill without fear that it would be declared unconstitutional. Moreover, in the 1880 jury exclusion case of Strauder v. West Virginia and the 1886 Chinese laundry case of Yick Wo v. Hopkins, the Supreme Court struck down racially discriminatory laws not related to voting in such expansive language as to suggest that the justices had not entirely forgotten the original purposes of the Reconstruction Amendments, after all. Despite the Court’s narrow construction of the powers of the federal government in The Civil Rights Cases (1883), the other, more moderate decisions allowed some scope for national action to protect minority rights if Republicans took firm control of the government again, as they did in 1889 for the first time since 1875.
After the failure of the Lodge Bill, however, the Supreme Court shifted direction again. In Williams v. Mississippi in 1898, the Court denied disfranchised blacks a remedy by very strictly construing its earlier decision in Yick Wo. Counsel for the Chinese laundryman had shown that a San Francisco ordinance was adopted with both the intent and effect of discriminating against Chinese. While Henry Williams’s African American lawyer, Cornelius J. Jones, quoted extensively from the Mississippi disfranchising convention of 1890 to demonstrate its racist intent, he apparently took the exclusion of blacks from the Greenville voter, and, therefore, jury rolls to be proof enough of the state constitution’s discriminatory impact. The Court’s crabbed reading of Yick Wo cost Williams, convicted of murder by an all-white jury, his life. Yet when Wilford H. Smith, an African American lawyer representing disfranchised Alabama blacks in Giles v. Harris (1903), presented extensive evidence of the new state constitution’s discriminatory effects, as well as its intent, the Court, in a decision written by the “liberal” Oliver Wendell Holmes, declared that the judiciary could do nothing, because suffrage was a “political question.”
After southern blacks were safely disfranchised, the Court reversed itself again, entirely ignoring Williams and Giles when ruling in Guinn and Beal v. U.S. (1915) that the Oklahoma grandfather clause was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Edward Douglass White, a former member of the “conservative” faction of the Democratic Party in Louisiana, which had opposed the grandfather clause in that state’s constitutional convention in 1898, did not endanger white supremacy directly in Guinn, because eliminating the escape clause for Oklahoma whites would not thereby actually allow any African Americans to vote. Once William Howard Taft, whose presidential administration had originally brought the Guinn case, became chief justice in 1921, the Court went further, ruling the Texas white primary unconstitutional as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment in Nixon v. Herndon (1927), in the first of several NAACP challenges to the discriminatory practice. When Texas repealed its explicit racially restrictive policy in law and delegated the setting of primary participation standards to the State Democratic Executive Committee, the Supreme Court struck down that subterfuge, too, in Nixon v. Condon (1932).
The Court, many of whose appointees over the period were Democrats or Republicans chosen without racial policies foremost in mind, failed to protect African American political rights when they needed protection most. But they allowed some scope for potential congressional action, and toward the end of the period, were beginning to move toward unraveling the web of laws and rules that kept southern blacks powerless. Had Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, the father of antislavery constitutionalism, lived as long as his two predecessors instead of dying when more than 20 years younger than John Marshall and Roger Brooke Taney, or had the brilliant radical Republicans Roscoe Conkling and George Franklin Edmunds (both members of the Thirty-Ninth Congress that had passed the major Reconstruction measures) not turned down appointments to the Court, the course of race and politics during the era might have been very different.
While institutional rules and interests made national action to bring about racial equality in politics difficult after 1875, the American system of federalism allowed for some antidiscriminatory legislation and some growth in African American political power at the state level outside of the South. Although the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson—the first southern-born president elected since the antebellum period—segregated national government employees for the first time and publicly endorsed the major racist propaganda film in American history, The Birth of a Nation, other nonsouthern Democrats began to compete for black votes at the local and state levels by offering jobs, candidate opportunities, and favorable policies, an opening that would finally begin to pay off for the party during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
African American political opportunity in the North was both facilitated and inhibited by demographic trends. As racial conditions in the South deteriorated, many ambitious black Americans moved north, providing a core of leadership for potential movements similar to the core of northern blacks who had moved south during Reconstruction. The northward migration of talent began before, and proceeded during, the “Great Migration” of the era of World War I and the 1920s, when the inhibition of emigration from Europe and the mushrooming of war industries fostered the relocation of perhaps a million and a half African Americans from the South to the North and to western cities. The white backlash against the massive increase of black populations in many cities sometimes turned violent and nearly always sparked increased discrimination against African Americans in schools, jobs, and, especially, housing. But the corresponding black backlash against the rise in discrimination fed black activism, led by the NAACP, which had been founded after riots in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908. African Americans’ growth in numbers and their forced concentration in ghettoes in states where they could vote and organize freely meant that the black side in the continuing conflicts would be potent. The legal legacy of Reconstruction, the constitutional amendments and the egalitarian northern state laws and state and national judicial decisions, and the memory of Reconstruction political activism (very different and much stronger in the black than in the white community), provided a foundation for racial equality in politics that was manifestly much stronger than in 1860, a launching pad for the many civil rights movements to come.
See also voting.
FURTHER READING. Sarah A. Binder, Minority Rights, Majority Rule: Partisanship and the Development of Congress, 1997; Thomas J. Brown, Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States, 2006; Eric Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction, 2006; Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration, 2006; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, 1998; Philip A. Klinkner, with Rogers M. Smith, The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America, 1999; J. Morgan Kousser, Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction, 1999; Idem, “ ‘The Onward March of Right Principles’: State Legislative Action on Racial Discrimination in Schools in Nineteenth-Century America,” Historical Methods 35 (Fall 2002), 177–204; Eric Schickler and Gregory Wawro, Filibuster: Obstruction and Lawmaking in the U.S. Senate, 2007; Thomas Adams Up-church, Legislating Racism: The Billion Dollar Congress and the Birth of Jim Crow, 2004.
J. MORGAN KOUSSER
Barack Obama’s 2008 election as president of the United States was a singular moment in African American history, comparable to the arrival of the first African slaves in colonial Virginia, the founding of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Philadelphia in 1793, Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. More directly, it represents the culmination of 75 years of political history during which rising levels of African American support for the Democratic Party and the accompanying shift of defenders of the racial status quo from the Democratic to the Republican Party remade the American political landscape.
It was during the Depression of the 1930s that black voters first began to migrate from the “party of Lincoln” to the Democratic Party. From the Civil War through the 1920s, region, race, and ethnicity had marked the divide between the two major political parties. The Republicans were the party of white native-stock Northerners and those African Americans, primarily in the North, who were able to exercise their right to vote, while the Democrats were the party of the white South and of “white ethnics” (Catholic and Jewish immigrants of European descent and their descendants) in the industrial North.
The growing influence of urban political machines within the national Democratic Party, and the increasing influence of “white ethnic” voters and politicians within those machines, was the one countervailing trend to racialism in post–World War I politics. By 1930, 56.2 percent of the U.S. population lived in urban areas. This trend culminated in the Democrats’ nomination of Alfred E. Smith, the Irish Catholic governor of New York, as the party’s standard-bearer in the 1928 presidential election, an achievement as momentous in its time as Obama’s nomination was in 2008. But while Smith’s nomination portended the increasing integration of European immigrant communities into the mainstream of American politics, his defeat in the face of widespread anti-Catholic prejudice demonstrated the continuing power of nativism in the country’s politics.
Four years later, another Democratic governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt, swept to victory over the incumbent Republican president, Herbert Hoover. Coming three years into the most severe economic depression in U.S. history and after 12 years of Republican rule in Washington, Roosevelt’s victory was in one sense unremarkable. The Democratic Party remained, as it had been under Al Smith, an alliance of northern urban political machines and southern segregationists. What made Roosevelt’s victory possible was the growing disaffection from the Republicans of native-stock middle-class and working-class voters in the Northeast, the Midwest, and California. One group of traditional Republican voters not drawn to Roosevelt’s call for a “New Deal” for American families were African American voters. Black voters in most major cities voted for Hoover in 1932 by margins of more than two to one.
However, the New Deal quickly reorganized the racial and ethnic divisions within American politics in three significant ways. First, the Roosevelt administration’s policies built for the Democrats an unassailable base among lower- and middle-income voters outside the South. Galvanized by Roosevelt’s promise of government assistance to those most affected by the collapse of American industrial economy, working-class voters who had previously divided their votes between the two major parties along ethnic and religious lines flocked to the Democratic Party. In 1936 Roosevelt swept to reelection with nearly 61 percent of the vote.
As significant to shifts in working-class views on race, nation, and identity was the rapid growth in union membership in the 1930s, particularly following the founding of the Committee on Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935 as an industrial alternative to the craft unions in the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The impact of the CIO’s organizing drive on race relations within the working class was contradictory. On the one hand, the effort to organize every worker in a factory irrespective of differences of job, skill, race, ethnicity, or religion cast class unity—rather than hierarchies of race, religion, or ethnicity—as the key to advancing workers’ interests in a capitalist economy. And, in fact, the CIO organized many minority and women workers whom the AFL had ignored. Yet, central to the CIO’s appeal was also the labor organization’s representation of the ideal American worker as white and male. The result was a working-class nationalism that for the first time fully included white Catholic and Jewish workers, while implicitly suggesting that minority and women workers were marginal to the cause of labor.
Second, the New Deal solidified the alliance between the southern and northern wings of the Democratic Party. To win the support of southern Democrats, however, Roosevelt had to assure white Southerners that New Deal programs would be administered in ways that would not disrupt race relations in the region. Most important, the Roosevelt administration allowed state and local officials to control the implementation of most New Deal programs. For example, the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration both operated segregated employment projects in the South. Most devastating to the interests of African American workers was the Roosevelt administration’s decision in 1935 to accede to the demands of key southern congressional leaders to exclude farm and domestic workers from the provisions of the Social Security Act. As a result, 65 percent of black workers were excluded from Social Security’s unemployment and retirement provisions.
Nor were the New Deal’s racial inequities limited to the South. The New Deal policies with perhaps the longest-lasting disparate racial impact came in the area of housing. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was established in 1934 to rescue the private housing industry by providing mortgage guarantees to lenders willing to provide long-term mortgages to home buyers. As criteria for these mortgages, the FHA adopted standards from the real estate industry that favored white neighborhoods over integrated and predominately minority areas, suburban communities over urban neighborhoods, and owner-occupied single-family homes over multifamily structures and rental properties. The full import of this policy would not be evident until after World War II. New Deal housing programs would, in effect, subsidize the postwar boom in all-white suburbs while steering private housing investment away from the middle- and working-class urban neighborhoods that became the only housing option for ever-increasing numbers of southern black migrants.
Despite the racial inequities built into the New Deal, the third and final component of the New Deal coalition was in place by the end of the 1930s. In 1936 Roosevelt won more than 60 percent of the black vote in every major city except Chicago. Roosevelt’s popularity with black voters was the product of two distinct aspects of his first two terms in office. First, large numbers of African Americans became, for the first time, recipients of government assistance. To be included among the beneficiaries of Roosevelt’s New Deal was both a matter of survival in those hungry years and thrilling to a people so long treated as undeserving of the rights and privileges of American citizenship.
Second, and as important to black voters as these substantive benefits of the New Deal, was the symbolic value of Roosevelt’s appointment of an unprecedented number of African Americans to high positions in his administration. While it would be another 30 years before an African American would be elevated to a position in the cabinet, Roosevelt’s so-called “Negro Cabinet”—made up of well-educated professionals appointed to the position of “Adviser for Negro Affairs” in the various agencies of the federal government—was a source of tremendous pride to black voters. These voters were also deeply impressed by Eleanor Roosevelt’s determined and very visible commitment to racial equality. The most dramatic emblem of the first lady’s commitment came in 1939 when she publicly resigned her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution after the nativist and elitist women’s patriotic organization refused to allow Marian Anderson, the African American opera singer, to perform in the organization’s Constitution Hall in Washington. Mrs. Roosevelt instead arranged for Anderson to perform at the Lincoln Memorial for a national radio audience, a concert that became the high-water mark of African American inclusion in the New Deal.
Even as a majority of African American voters switched allegiance to the Democratic Party during the 1930s, it would be another decade before the party would formally commit itself to a civil rights agenda. During the 1940s, African American activists and their allies codified the “civil rights” strategy of achieving racial equality through legislation and judicial rulings that guaranteed government protection of individual rights. Three factors enabled civil rights activists to make much more significant demands on the administrations of Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman during the 1940s. First was the rapid growth in the African American population in the North as wartime labor shortages and growth in defense industry employment reinvigorated black migration from the South following the lull of the Depression years. In this decade, the black population living outside the South grew by 65 percent, to a total of 12.8 million people. Second, the rise of Nazism in Europe discredited theories of racial supremacy within the United States, particularly among liberal elites within the Democratic Party. Third, and most important, were the efforts of civil rights advocates to take advantage of the wartime social and political context to pressure the federal government and the Democratic Party to more directly address structures of racial discrimination within American society.
What one black newspaper would call the “Double-V” campaign (victory over fascism abroad and victory over racism at home) began when A. Philip Randolph, president of the all-black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, called for a black-only march on Washington, D.C., in June 1941 to demand the desegregation of the armed forces and equal treatment for black workers in the nation’s defense industries. Concerned that such a march would undercut popular support for his efforts to aid the European allies, Roosevelt convinced Randolph to call off the march in return for an executive order banning racial discrimination in defense employment. The resulting President’s Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) became the focus of the activists’ wartime efforts to improve employment opportunities for African American workers. In 1944, for example, the FEPC ordered the Philadelphia Transit Company to promote eight black maintenance workers to the position of trolley conductor. When the company’s white workers responded with a wildcat strike that shut down the transit system, the secretary of the Navy had to order troops into Philadelphia to run the trolleys.
It was during the 1940s that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) transformed itself from a primarily middle-class and northern organization into a truly national and mass-based one. Membership in the NAACP during the war grew from 54,000 to more than 500,000. Particularly significant was the growth of the organization’s membership in the South during these years. The NAACP’s southern chapters served as a training ground for a generation of local leaders who went on to play crucial roles in the civil rights mobilizations of the 1950s and 1960s, including Modjeska Simmons and Septima Clark in South Carolina, E. D. Nixon and Rosa Parks in Alabama, and Medgar Evers and Amzie Moore in Mississippi.
Also crucial to the increase in southern civil rights activism was the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Smith v. Allwright (1944), which outlawed the Democratic Party’s use of all-white primary elections across the South. As Charles Payne has argued, the decision spurred black southern voter registration, particularly in urban areas. The percentage of southern blacks registered to vote grew from less than 5 percent in 1940 to 12 percent in 1947 and 20 percent in 1952. Black voters in Atlanta and other cities were able to use their increased voting power to play a moderating influence in certain local elections.
It was, however, developments in the North during the 1940s that provided the NAACP with new opportunities to pursue its civil rights agenda in the political arena. In 1948 Henry Moon, the NAACP’s public relations director, published Balance of Power: The Negro Vote, in which he argued that black voters in the urban North now held the balance of power between the two political parties in national elections and that for the first time since Reconstruction African American voters had the ability to demand significant civil rights reforms in return for their votes. Clark Clifford, President Truman’s chief political advisor, reached a similar conclusion as he look forward to the 1948 presidential election. Clifford concluded that unlike Roosevelt’s four campaigns, southern support for the Democratic candidate would not be sufficient in 1948, but that an effective appeal to northern African American voters could return Truman to the presidency even if he lost some southern votes in the process.
To win northern black votes, however, Truman would have to fend off a challenge from Henry Wallace, his predecessor as Roosevelt’s vice president and the candidate of the left-wing Progressive Party. Truman thus appointed a blue-ribbon commission in 1946 to study civil rights issues. The President’s Committee on Civil Rights issued its report, titled To Secure These Rights, in 1947. The report laid out an agenda of actions that all three branches of the federal government should take to protect the rights of the nation’s racial minorities. While the report’s recommendations had little chance of being adopted by Congress, they did form the basis for Truman’s groundbreaking appeal for the votes of northern blacks. Most dramatically, and in response to threats from A. Phillip Randolph to organize a civil disobedience campaign against the Selective Service system, Truman issued Executive Order 9981 on February 2, 1948, mandating the desegregation of the armed forces. The results of the 1948 election proved both Moon and Clifford to have been right. South Carolina Democratic governor Strom Thurmond won four Deep South states as the candidate of the States’ Rights Democratic Party. But in the North, African American voters largely rejected Henry Wallace’s candidacy and provided the margin of victory for Truman’s upset defeat of the Republican nominee, Thomas E. Dewey.
With southern Democrats effectively blocking federal civil rights legislation, northern civil rights activists turned their focus to passing civil rights legislation at the state and local level. Between 1945 and 1964, 28 states passed Fair Employment Practices (FEP) laws. But as important as these legislative victories were, they could not mask the fact that racial discrimination remained pervasive in the North. Thus, the northern FEP laws did little to change the informal hiring policies and exclusionary union practices that kept African American workers locked out of many white- and blue-collar occupations. And while the Supreme Court declared in 1948 that racial covenants were unenforceable in court, the suburban housing boom remained closed to African Americans as federal mortgage guarantors, housing developers, and white home buyers continued to favor white-only communities. Civil rights activists also faced increasing political opposition from other elements of the New Deal coalition to their efforts to address persistent racial inequities in northern communities. In the 1949 mayoral election in Detroit, for example, Albert Cobo, a conservative Republican, defeated the United Auto Workers–endorsed candidate on a platform of opposition to the building of public housing projects in white neighborhoods. As historians Arnold Hirsch and Thomas Sugrue have shown, black families seeking to move into all-white neighborhoods in cities like Chicago and Detroit were often greeted with racial violence.
Historians continue to debate the impact of the cold war on the civil rights movement. Manning Marable and Martha Biondi have argued that the stigmatization of left-wing politics during the period of McCarthyism greatly hampered civil rights efforts in part because of the prominence of left-wing figures like Paul Robeson among advocates of civil rights, in part because defenders of racial segregation were able to use the charge of communism to discredit all advocates of racial equality, and in part because organizations like the NAACP became extremely cautious politically in order to distance themselves from radicalism. In contrast, Mary Dudziak has argued that the cold war helped civil rights activists to advance their cause because of the pressure it placed on the nation’s political leaders to demonstrate to the emerging nations of the third world that capitalist democracies were better able to deliver on the promise of racial equality than was the Soviet bloc.
Perhaps more detrimental to the cause of civil rights during the 1950s than cold war anxieties about the threat of internal subversion was the widespread belief among political leaders that the nation had entered a period of political consensus. The notion of consensus politics was rooted in two beliefs—first, that the country had solved most of its domestic problems, and second, that internal political unity was required to defeat the Communist threat. In this view, whatever social inequities remained in American society (among which most advocates of consensus politics would have included racial issues) would gradually disappear as the capitalist economy continued to grow, while efforts to speed the process of social change (through, for example, aggressive efforts to implement civil rights reforms) would only divide the country and weaken its resolve in the struggle against communism. As a result, the 1950s were characterized both by historic civil rights achievements rooted in an idealistic view of the United States as the world’s foremost defender of individual liberty and equal rights under law and by the failure of government officials to fulfill the promise of those achievements for fear of the reaction of the white majority. Thus, the Supreme Court ruled in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case that school segregation is unconstitutional. But with southern Democrats promising “massive resistance” to the Brown decision, President Dwight Eisenhower refused to vigorously enforce the decision. Moreover, the Supreme Court ruled just one year later that school desegregation should take place with “all deliberate speed,” thus opening the door to two decades of southern efforts to sustain dual school systems. In a similar fashion, the U.S. Congress passed its first major piece of civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, just days before Eisenhower was forced to send federal troops to enforce a federal court order requiring the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. By the time of its passage, however, the enforcement provisions of the act, which sought to increase the number of African American voters in the South, had been so watered down that leading southern Democratic senators declared its passage a victory for their side.
Thirty-two years after Al Smith lost his bid to become the first Catholic president of the United States, John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election. Twice during the campaign, Kennedy felt it necessary to give speeches declaring his commitment to the separation of church and state. What was not in question, however, was Kennedy’s status as a white American. In contrast to previous generations of European Catholic immigrants and their descendants who were seen as racially distinct from native-stock white Americans, Kennedy, like his contemporaries Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio, became a symbol of the quintessential American experience in a nation of immigrants.
African American voters again played a crucial role in the 1960 presidential election. Nine months earlier, the student sit-in movement to protest segregated lunch counters had spread rapidly across the South. That fall, civil rights protest became an issue in the presidential campaign when Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested for leading a sit-in in Atlanta and was subsequently sentenced to four months in a south Georgia prison camp. Nixon refused to intervene, hoping to gain the votes of white Southerners upset by the civil rights plank in Democratic Party platform. Kennedy, in contrast, placed a call to King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, to express his concern. Within days, Kennedy campaign officials had successfully petitioned Georgia officials for King’s release. On the Sunday before the election, the Kennedy campaign distributed a flyer to black churches across the nation announcing the endorsement of King’s father, Martin Luther King Sr. In one of the closest presidential campaigns in American history, black votes provided the margin of victory for Kennedy in a number of northern states.
Civil rights issues were not a priority for Kennedy when he entered the White House in 1961. Rather, his central focus was on foreign policy. Within months, however, the efforts of civil rights protesters—particularly the interracial teams of “freedom riders” who sought to ride interstate buses across the South—would force Kennedy to address the question of southern race relations. In an effort to defuse the sense of crisis generated by nonviolent protest, the Kennedy administration initially sought to encourage civil rights activists to shift their focus to voter registration on the theory that a growing black electorate in the South would lead the region’s politicians to moderate their positions on racial issues.
In June 1963, however, as nonviolent protest campaigns continued to roil southern cities and as voter registration drives in the rural South were met with racist violence, Kennedy submitted to Congress civil rights legislation banning segregated public accommodations and employment discrimination. Support for the Kennedy civil rights bill was a central feature of the August 1963 March on Washington, even as activists affiliated with the student wing of the movement pressed unsuccessfully for the march to explicitly criticize the president for failing to do enough to protect civil rights workers in the South from racist violence.
Still, little progress had been made on the civil rights bill by the time of Kennedy’s tragic assassination in November 1963. It would take a Southerner, Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Johnson, to overcome southern opposition and steer the civil rights bill through Congress. During his 23 years in Congress, including six as Senate majority leader, Johnson had been an ardent New Dealer and, for a Southerner, a moderate on civil rights issues. Now he pledged “to take the dead man’s program and turn it into a martyr’s cause.” On June 11, 1964, the Senate voted for the first time to end a southern Senate filibuster against a civil rights bill and, on July 1, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law.
The act was only part of Johnson’s agenda of social and political reform, however. In his first State of the Union address in January 1964, Johnson called for the most prosperous nation in the world to wage “a war on poverty.” Then, in May, he pledged to use the nation’s material wealth to build a “Great Society” based on “an abundance and liberty for all . . . an end to poverty and racial injustice . . . [and] the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.” Johnson’s vision of the Great Society was rooted in two seemingly contradictory views of American society—the first of a great country ready to use its wealth to help those with the least, the second of a nation flawed by racism but willing to confront its failings in pursuit of justice for all. Johnson promoted the war on poverty and the Great Society both as efforts to provide assistance to the poor of all races and as essential to fulfilling the call of the civil rights movement to end racial injustice.
In the short run, Johnson would parlay these twin imperatives into a remarkable streak of legislative and political victories. In the summer of 1964, Congress passed the Economic Opportunity Act—the centerpiece of Johnson’s antipoverty initiative—which would provide nearly 3 billion in government funds for local antipoverty programs over the next three years. That fall, not only did Johnson win a landslide victory over his Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, but the Democrats swept to the party’s largest majorities in both the House and the Senate in the post–World War II period. This majority enabled Johnson to push a legislative agenda through Congress over the next two years that rivaled the reforms of the New Deal. Most significant was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which established for the first time, federal oversight over the voter rolls in the ten southern states that had historically denied the vote to African Americans. Educational programs were enacted for low-income children, including the preschool program Head Start; Medicare and Medicaid, health insurance programs for the elderly and the poor; immigration reform; mass transit programs; and consumer safety and environmental safety legislation.
By the fall of 1966, there were signs of declining support for Johnson’s reform agenda. Civil rights protests, urban race riots, and rising urban crime rates combined to weaken white support for the president’s agenda of racial reform and poverty reduction, while the growing cost of the Vietnam War and rising inflation strengthened the voices of conservative critics of taxes and government spending. Republicans picked up 50 seats in the 1966 congressional elections, effectively bringing a halt to Johnson’s Great Society agenda and setting the stage for the resurgence of Republicans in national elections.
Historians have tended to see the 1960s as the moment when the national Democratic Party committed itself fully to the cause of civil rights, the Republican Party began to capture the allegiance of white southern voters, and the New Deal coalition of white southern, black, and northern white working-class voters began to collapse. This analysis must be qualified in three ways. First, racial issues in the urban North had begun to lead middle- and low-income white voters to abandon the Democrats in local elections as early the late 1940s. Second, Republicans had begun in the 1950s to pursue a strategy of capturing the votes of white southern Democrats rather than seeking to compete with the Democrats for the votes of African Americans and other supporters of civil rights.
Third, the most important factor in the shift of white voters toward the Republican Party, in the South and in the industrial states of the Northeast and the Midwest, was only tangentially related to the civil rights reforms of the 1960s. Rather, Republican candidates in presidential and congressional elections benefited from the growing importance of white suburban voters, relative to both northern urban and southern rural voters, within the American electorate. By the late 1960s, suburban voters—many of them the children of New Dealers—were increasingly hostile to the perceived cost (in taxes) of government programs designed to address racial and economic equality as well as to any efforts by the federal government and courts to force local communities to adopt policies (in areas like zoning and public schooling) designed to lessen racial segregation in the North. Suburban voters were also attracted to Republican calls for lower taxes and for a vigilantly anti-Communist foreign policy.
The splintering of the New Deal coalition was most evident in the 1968 presidential election. While Richard Nixon received only about 500,000 more votes than his Democratic opponent, Hubert Humphrey, he won the Electoral College by more than 100 votes. Humphrey’s defeat was in part the result of the loss of support for Democrats among white southern voters. Nixon swept the Upper South, South Carolina, and Florida for a total of 65 electoral votes, while Alabama’s Democratic governor George Wallace, running as a third-party candidate, won five Deep South states and a total of 45 electoral votes. However, the Democratic standard-bearer might still have won the election had Wallace not cut severely into his support among white northern working-class voters who felt abandoned by the Democratic Party’s civil rights policies. The Alabama governor campaigned extensively in the North, drawing large crowds to campaign rallies during which he received appreciative applause for his attacks on elitist liberals for insisting that poor whites integrate their schools even as those liberals sent their own children to exclusive private schools. In six northern states, the Wallace vote more than doubled Nixon’s margin of victory over Humphrey.
These fissures within the New Deal coalition did not immediately add up to Republican dominance of American politics. Nixon won the 1968 election with only 43.4 percent of the vote. Moreover, Democrats remained in firm control of both houses of Congress despite Nixon’s landslide reelection in 1972. Not until 1994 would Republicans win majorities in both houses of Congress. Throughout this period, Democrats remained competitive in southern congressional elections, particularly when they campaigned on New Deal–style populist economics that appealed to middle- and lower-income white as well as black voters.
Nixon’s victory in the 1968 presidential campaign began a streak in which Republicans won seven of the next ten presidential elections. While largely conceding the more formal aspects of the civil rights revolution—a “color-blind” legal system, school desegregation, equal access to public accommodations—Republicans proved adept at using racial codes to promote key aspects of their conservative policy agenda to white voters across the economic spectrum. Racial coding was most pronounced in Republican efforts to stigmatize liberal policies in the areas of school desegregation, welfare, affirmative action, and immigration.
Nixon most effectively used racial codes to express sympathy for white anxieties about court-ordered school desegregation plans. In his 1968 campaign, Nixon won broad support in upper-income suburban districts across the South by affirming his support both for the Supreme Court’s Brown decision and for local control over public schooling. He thus managed to distance himself simultaneously from southern segregationists like Wallace and from civil rights activists and federal judges who were advocates of what he called “forced integration.” Over the next decade, the Supreme Court would uphold a series of federal court rulings that required the use of mandatory busing schemes to achieve school integration in both southern and northern urban school districts. In all of these cases, the courts found that a constellation of government policies—from the gerrymandering of school boundaries to housing and zoning policies designed to maintain residential segregation—had served to perpetuate school segregation despite the Court’s ruling in the Brown case. And yet, each case gave conservative politicians from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Boston the opportunity to position themselves as defenders of legitimate white working-class interests—explicitly, of the right to keep their children in neighborhood schools and implicitly, of the right to keep those schools exclusively white.
Racial coding was equally effective for Republicans on the issue of welfare. Central to the conservative attack on excesses of the Great Society programs of the 1960s was the argument that the growth in government assistance to the poor constituted little more than a transfer of income from “hardworking” taxpayers to African American and Latino beneficiaries deemed too lazy to work. The majority of welfare recipients were, of course, white. Moreover, antipoverty programs contributed to a 50 percent decline in the poverty rate in the United States between 1960 and 1980. While books like conservative sociologist Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (1984) argued that income assistance programs promoted dependency on government by providing a disincentive to work, conservative opposition to welfare focused less on policy debates than on stories of welfare recipients as “cheats” and “frauds.” Anecdotal narratives of Cadillac-driving “welfare queens” who used multiple aliases to collect excessive benefits were central to Ronald Reagan’s emergence as a leader of the conservative movement during the 1970s. While he rarely referred to specific individuals, Reagan’s references to neighborhoods like Chicago’s South Side invariably marked welfare cheaters as African American.
Opposition to welfare remained a central feature of Republican appeals to white lower- and middle-income voters into the 1990s. In an effort to inoculate his candidacy against charges of liberal elitism, Democrat Bill Clinton built his 1992 presidential campaign around a pledge “to end welfare as we know it.” Still, opposition to welfare remained at the top of the Republicans’ 1994 “Contract with America,” the manifesto on which Republican congressional leaders based their successful campaign to wrest control from the Democrats of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. In 1996 the Republican Congress passed and President Clinton signed a reform bill that transformed welfare from an entitlement meant to serve everyone who qualified for aid into a time-limited program with stringent requirements and a five-year cap on benefits.
Also central to the Republican critique of the racial excesses of liberalism was affirmative action. The origins of affirmative action lay in the response of civil rights activists and liberal government officials to the failure of antidiscrimination laws to substantively desegregate local labor markets. Private-sector employers found that a minimal adjustment in their hiring procedures—and, in some cases the employment of a token few minority employees—quickly brought them into compliance with fair employment laws. Debate over whether employers could and should be required to take action to increase their employment of minority workers bore fruit in March 1961, when President Kennedy issued an executive order requiring federal agencies and contractors to take “affirmative action” to remove racially discriminatory barriers to employment.
Over the next decade, federal officials responded to increasingly militant civil rights protests against continued discrimination in private-sector hiring, particularly in the construction trades, with a series of policy experiments designed to establish affirmative action’s parameters and procedures. In 1969 a federal court upheld the constitutionality of the Philadelphia Plan in the building trades, and the Nixon administration extended its requirements to all federal contracts worth more than 50,000. Women were added to the affirmative action requirements in 1971, and many state and local governments adopted similar plans.
President Nixon seems to have decided to support affirmative action both in hopes of winning support from the black business and professional classes and as part of a strategy to promote divisions between the labor (that is, white working class) and black wings of the Democratic Party.
Opposition to affirmative action would not become a central feature of Republican appeals for white working- and middle-class votes until Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. Reagan and the emergent conservative wing of the Republican Party argued that affirmative action constituted reverse discrimination against whites, particularly those from lower- and middle-income communities, and thus violated the civil rights movement’s commitment to building a colorblind society. The most dramatic instance of the Republicans’ use of affirmative action to draw working-class white votes came in the U.S. Senate election in North Carolina in 1990, when Senator Jesse Helms used a last-minute television ad (in which the viewer saw only the hands and flannel sleeves of a white worker opening a letter informing him that the job he “needed” had been given to a “minority”) to win a come-from-behind victory over Harvey Gantt, his African American opponent.
In the legal arena, the charge of reverse discrimination was advanced, with some success, in the name of whites who claimed to have been denied educational or economic opportunity on the basis of their race—most prominently Allen Bakke, Jennifer Gratz, and Barbara Grutter, the plaintiffs in the 1977 and 2005 Supreme Court cases that defined how universities can and cannot use affirmative action procedures in admissions. Within the political realm, many of the leading opponents of affirmative action were black and Latino conservatives. Figures like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, economists Thomas Sowell and Glen Loury, Republican activist Linda Chavez, and political essayists Shelby Steele and Richard Rodriguez argued that affirmative action violated Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for people to be judged according to the content of their character and not the color of their skin, and that it reinforced the view that racial minorities were incapable of competing on equal terms with whites. In 1995 Ward Connerly, a University of California trustee and Republican Party activist, emerged as the most prominent black opponent of affirmative action when he led a successful referendum campaign in California to ban the use of racial and gender preferences in all state government programs and contracts. Over the next decade, Connerly would lead similarly successful campaigns in Washington, Florida, Michigan, and Nebraska.
Black and Latino conservatives did not limit their political activism and advocacy to affirmative action, offering free market, self-help, and faith-based policy prescriptions on issues from poverty and the rising number of female-headed single-parent households to failing schools and insufficient economic investment in the inner cities. While Republican efforts to increase the party’s share of the black and Latino vote produced only minimal results, advocates of self-help, entrepreneurship, and traditional religious and social values enjoyed growing influence in black and Latino communities in the post–New Deal era.
Bilingual education provides another example of the ways in which racial politics infused conservative efforts to discredit federally funded domestic programs. In 1968 Congress passed the Bilingual Education Act, which provided the first federal funding for bilingual education programs. But it was not until the early 1970s that federal education officials began to require that school districts provide bilingual educational programming to non-English speakers as a mechanism for promoting both immigrant educational achievement and ethnic and racial pride.
In the ensuing decades, the debate over bilingual education has proceeded on two separate, if overlapping, tracks. While educators debate whether bilingual transitional or monolingual immersion programs are the best mechanism for enabling immigrant children to simultaneously learn English and keep up with their English-speaking classmates, conservative activists, led in the 1980s by Reagan administration Secretary of Education William Bennett, have criticized bilingual education for promoting ethnic pride and multicultural identities over assimilation into American society. A direct result of the furor of bilingual education was the emergence of the “English-only” movement, which won passage of legislation declaring English to be the sole official language of the United States in 26 states between 1984 and 2007.
By the early 1990s, English-only campaigns were largely superseded by a broader conservative backlash against immigration, particularly that from Mexico and Central and South America. The policy agenda of anti-immigration activism has been to prevent undocumented immigrants from entering the country and to deny government services to those already in the United States. For example, California’s Proposition 187, enacted with 59 percent of the vote in 1994, would have denied social services, public health care, and public education to undocumented immigrants had it not been overturned in the courts. But while anti-immigration groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform have long denied any racial motivation to their agenda, popular animus against Latino immigrants, whether legal or undocumented, has driven much of the demand for immigration reform over the last two decades. Latino immigrants are accused of being fundamentally different from previous generations of immigrants, of failing to learn English and assimilate into “American culture,” and of taking jobs from American workers. In 2004, for example, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington published “The Hispanic Challenge,” an extended essay later developed into a book, in which he argued that “Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclaves—from Los Angeles to Miami—and rejecting the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream.”
Within the Republican Party, however, opinion was split over whether to pursue an anti-immigration agenda or to campaign for Latino votes. One the one hand, California governor Pete Wilson was a strong supporter of Proposition 187, and the 1994 Contract with America promised to disqualify even legal immigrants from public assistance programs. Other Republicans argued that the party should make it a priority to reach out to upwardly mobile and socially conservative Latinos in states like Florida and Texas. For example, the Nixon administration’s initial support for bilingual education emerged from a desire to appeal to Latino voters. And Nixon did in fact double his share of the Latino vote to about 33 percent between 1968 and 1972. Similarly, support from Latino voters and a moderate position on immigration issues were instrumental in George W. Bush’s emergence as a national political leader during his years as governor of Texas as well as to his narrow victories in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.
Despite conservative gains since the 1960s, the final decades of the twentieth century were also marked by the unprecedented growth in the number of African American and Latino elected officials. By 2000 the combined total of black and Latino elected officials at all levels of governments exceeded 13,000. The majority of these politicians of color were elected to office in the “black belt” regions of the rural South and in California and Texas, the two states with the largest Latino populations.
It was in the nation’s big cities, however, that black and Latino politicians were most visible. From 1967, when Carl Stokes and Richard Hatcher became the first African Americans elected mayor of major cities (Cleveland, Ohio, and Gary, Indiana, respectively) to Antonio Villaraigosa’s election as the first Latino mayor of modern-day Los Angeles in 2005, urban politicians of color have sought to use election to public office as a mechanism for addressing the continued economic and social underdevelopment of minority communities in the United States. It was, in fact, this vision of black urban governance—particularly as practiced by Chicago’s first and so far only African American mayor, Harold Washington—that first attracted Barack Obama to electoral politics. In the 1960s and 1970s, this strategy of winning control over city government was rooted in a view of the federal government as a willing and essential ally in efforts to revive the nation’s urban economies. But even as the national political culture grew more conservative and the fulcrum of political power shifted from cities to the suburbs, many politicians of color maintained their vision of elective office as a mechanism for the collective uplift of their communities.
See also civil rights.
FURTHER READING. Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City, 2003; William Chafe, Unfinished Journey: America since World War II, 6th ed., 2006; Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia, 2006; Gareth Davies, See Government Grow: Education Politics from Johnson to Reagan, 2007; Angela Dillard, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Now? Multicultural Conservatism in America, 2002; Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, 2002; Glenda Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950, 2008; Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960, 1983; Alton Hornsby, Black Power in Dixie: A Political History of African-Americans in Atlanta, 2009; Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, 2005; Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America, 2006; Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South, 2006; Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace, 2008; Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945–2006, 3rd ed., 2007; Henry Moon, Balance of Power: The Negro Vote, Reprint, 1977; Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980, 10th anniversary ed., 1994; Charles M. Payne, “ ‘The Whole United States Is Southern!’: Brown v. Board and the Mystification of Race,” Journal of American History 91 (June 2004), 83–91; Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, 1998; Idem, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North, 2008; Nancy J. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR, 1983.
MATTHEW J. COUNTRYMAN
The term radicalism comes from the Latin word radix, meaning “root.” Radicalism seeks to locate the root causes of social injustice and extirpate them, to overturn existing social structures and replace them with forms more conducive to equality, cooperation, dignity, inclusion, and freedom. An amorphous concept, radicalism denotes a disposition, an emancipatory and egalitarian élan, rather than a precise program. Although radicalism has sometimes been taken to denote “extremism” and therefore to include a political right that propounds order and hierarchy, the far right, which aims to reconstitute privileges rather than uproot them, is better designated as reactionary. Radicalism is also distinct from gradualism or liberalism, although that stops neither radicals from seeking reforms nor vigorous reformers from styling themselves “radical liberals.”
Radicalism is innately controversial. Its admirers value its creativity, courage, and adherence to principle, while opponents view it as rash, impractical, and fanatical. Radicalism is further characterized by a willingness to employ tactics outside approved channels. Although radicals rarely consider themselves beholden to existing law or authority, the association of radicalism with violence and destruction is not entirely warranted, since radicals have primarily engaged in peaceful protest, suasion, and civil disobedience.
Radicals typically scrutinize everyday life with the intention of transforming self and culture as much as state and society. No one philosophy, however, defines radicalism. What counts as “radical” changes over time, and radicals differ in visions, priorities, and strategies. Affection for American democracy has motivated many radicals, such as the poet Walt Whitman, who heard America singing yet wrote at the end of his life, “I am as radical now as ever.” Other radicals have spoken from a position of profound alienation from their country. Radicalism has served as a catalyst, dramatizing problems, disrupting routines, and introducing preposterous notions that in time come to seem commonsensical. Many radical propositions, however, have gone down to defeat, and America has frequently vilified its radicals. Radicalism, in short, has existed both at the center and at the margins of American political life.
Although Native American resistance to European settlement might be viewed as the origin of American radicalism, uprisings motivated by defense of tradition, such as Pontiac’s pan-Indian rebellion of 1763, could just as readily be classified as ardent conservatism. Colonial radicals, moreover, rarely extended solidarity to Indian resistance. Nathaniel Bacon’s Virginia Colony uprising of 1676 united poor white farmers, indentured servants, free blacks, and slaves in attacking indigenous tribes before turning on wealthy planters and burning Jamestown to the ground.
The Puritans, Quakers, and other religious nonconformists who populated the English colonies were radicals by the norms of the countries they left behind. They, in turn, produced their own antinomian heretics, such as Roger Williams, advocate of separation of church and state, and Anne Hutchinson, who challenged clerical authority. The Protestant emphasis on individual conscience and morality would inform much of the subsequent history of American radicalism—as would rationalist challenges to authoritarian religion.
With the coming of the American Revolution, Crispus Attucks, Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, the Sons of Liberty, and “mobs” protesting the Stamp Act, Sugar Act, and other parliamentary measures were radicals, pushing events past a mere imperial-colonial adjustment toward separation and a republic based on consent of the governed. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776) lambasted monarchy, aristocracy, and hereditary rule itself, giving voice to a transatlantic radicalism of cordwainers, tailors, coopers, and other skilled artisans suspicious of decadent, parasitical classes. The Declaration of Independence’s pronouncement that “all men are created equal” and endowed with “certain inalienable rights” was decidedly radical for its day, as was Thomas Jefferson’s aphorism, “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
This political culture of egalitarianism and libertarianism generated some revolutionary aftereffects, such as the uprising of indebted Massachusetts farmers led by Daniel Shays in 1786. Fearful that a headstrong democracy would threaten property rights, the Constitutional Convention in 1787 created an elite Senate, executive, and judiciary to check the popular House. Set aside was the unicameral legislature preferred by Paine, who had departed for England and France, where he would defend the French Revolution. Anti-Federalist dissent compelled passage of a constitutional Bill of Rights, but Pennsylvania’s Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 showed lingering qualms about federal legitimacy.
By the early nineteenth century, artisanal radicalism took on new qualities as apprentices and journeymen began to worry over the “aristocratical” designs of their masters, who were fast becoming capitalist employers. This producer radicalism, fed by fear of “wages slavery,” informed calls by the Working Man’s Party of 1829–32 for free public education and restriction of the working day to ten hours. Thomas Skid-more’s The Rights of Man to Property (1829) called for “a General Division of property,” a sign that radicals would increasingly aspire to equality of condition.
America was the seedbed of world socialism in the early nineteenth century, its vast expanses of land making utopian experimentation affordable. The first agrarian colonies sought spiritual perfection, from the Shakers in upstate New York to the German Pietists at Amana, Iowa. These were followed by secular acolytes of the British industrialist Robert Owen and French philosopher Charles Fourier. The colony Frances Wright established in 1826 at Nashoba, Tennessee, sought to prove emancipation from slavery viable, but its interracial sexuality scandalized polite society, as would the “complex marriage” of John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida community. Utopian colonies often sundered apart or attracted drones. Robert Dale Owen, though a dedicated socialist, described New Harmony, Indiana, as “a heterogeneous collection of radicals, enthusiastic devotees of principle, honest latitudinarians and lazy theorists, with a sprinkling of unprincipled sharpers thrown in.”
The antebellum period was effervescent with evangelical revival and moral reform causes such as temperance, phrenology, and penal reform. George Henry Evans and Horace Greeley advocated a radical measure—free land—that reached fruition in the Homestead Act of 1862. The paramount property question of the hour, however, was slavery. Radicals were first to demand the immediate end of slavery rather than gradual emancipation. Driven by conviction, and sometimes attacked physically, they set out to shock a nation into action. In An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829), the Bostonian free black David Walker called upon slaves to rise up, violently if necessary, a path taken independently by Virginia slave Nat Turner in 1831.
Abolitionism fostered further radicalisms. As Sojourner Truth and other female antislavery orators defied prejudices against women speaking in public, relations between men and women became issues for radical reconsideration. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and others joined at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 to draft a Declaration of Sentiments calling for equal rights for women to property ownership, education, and suffrage on the grounds that “all men and women are created equal.” Similarly, Henry David Thoreau’s discourse on civil disobedience, a cornerstone of radical pacifist thought, arose from his tax resistance to the Mexican-American War of 1846–48, which was widely seen as a war for slavery’s expansion.
Alarmed that a “slave power” extended to the federal level, abolitionists worried for the soul of the republic. Enraged by the Constitution’s tacit sanction of slavery, William Lloyd Garrison burned copies of it in public. In 1852 Frederick Douglass asked, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” Douglass declined to join John Brown’s 1859 armory seizure at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, but the failed insurrection portended the coming Civil War. Only the carnage of Blue and Gray, combined with a massive slave exodus, made possible the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, transforming the Constitution and ending slavery.
Radical republicanism, utopianism, agrarianism, and producerism remained vibrant through the Gilded Age, present in one manner or another in Tennessee Claflin and Victoria Woodhull’s free love-advocating Weekly, a mélange of currency reform proposals, the cooperative ventures of the Knights of Labor, Edward Bellamy’s millenarian novel Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888), the single-tax on land advocated by Henry George, and 1890s farmer populism directed at monopolistic railroads and banks. Some anarchists proposed to spark worker revolt by violent provocation, but such incidents as the Haymarket affair of 1886 and the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 instead brought opprobrium and repression, enhancing the appeal of alternative radical approaches premised on mass action.
As industrial militancy reached its pinnacle between the 1870s and 1940s, radicals increasingly looked to working-class self-activity to achieve the socialization of production. At first this view was mainly limited to German-American immigrant circles, even though Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published articles in English in the New York Tribune between 1852 and 1861. Marxist theory acquired wider credence in the late nineteenth century, as mass socialist parties flourished in Europe and economic downturns and strike waves lent plausibility to the prospect that the world’s workers would overthrow a crisis-prone capitalism. By the early twentieth century, Marxism was the lingua franca of the American Left, and anarcho-syndicalism, revolutionary socialism, and communism reached their respective heights.
Anarcho-syndicalism sought a stateless society and eschewed electoral politics, but differed from individualist anarchism by emphasizing revolution at the point of production. In a preamble written by Daniel De Leon, a Marxist, the largely anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or “Wobblies,” founded in 1905, called for “abolition of the wage system.” The IWW’s 1912 “Bread and Roses” textile strike of mostly Jewish and Italian women at Lawrence, Massachusetts, enthused Greenwich Village radicals such as Max Eastman, Randolph Bourne, and John Reed writing in The Masses, a freewheeling magazine that supported Margaret Sanger when she distributed literature about contraception in violation of the 1873 Comstock Act.
The Socialist Party was supported by millions at the polls from its founding in 1901 until 1920. Its standard-bearer, Eugene V. Debs, received 6 percent of the vote for president and more than 1,200 Socialists were elected to office, from Oklahoma to Ohio, in 1912. New York Representative Meyer London, one of two Socialists elected to Congress, advocated in his first address to the House in 1915 “an inheritance tax that would make it impossible for unfit men by the mere accident of birth to inherit millions of dollars in wealth and power.” Socialist pressure could prompt reform, as when the depiction of Chicago meatpacking in Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle (1906) compelled signing of the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act by President Theodore Roosevelt.
Economic determinism led many Socialists to ignore or accommodate racist lynching and segregation. It was Socialists Mary White Ovington and William English Walling, however, who helped create the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909. Black radicals responded variously to rising racism. Ida B. Wells advocated armed self-defense and exodus from the South, Marcus Garvey espoused black nationalism, and trade unionist A. Philip Randolph sought class solidarity. Even as blacks were disfranchised, the provocative tactics of woman suffragists, including radical hunger-striker Alice Paul, helped win ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.
Socialists and Wobblies alike opposed World War I and were consequently battered by wartime repression and the “Red Scare” of 1919. Emma Goldman and other immigrant radicals were deported, Debs imprisoned. “The notion that a radical is one who hates his country,” countered H. L. Mencken in 1924, “is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched.”
The 1929 stock market crash and Great Depression brought a resurgence of labor and the left. Dynamism shifted to the Communist Party, emulators of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union. Communist Party members led demonstrations by the unemployed, helped organize basic industry, and challenged racism, inspiring numerous Americans to join or work closely with them, including Woody Guthrie, Representative Vito Marcantonio, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Paul Robeson. However, the Communist Party’s authoritarian structure and zig-zagging political line, corresponding to every shift of Soviet foreign policy under Joseph Stalin, led others to criticize communism as a bureaucratic phenomenon. Small bands of dissenting radicals, from A. J. Muste’s American Workers Party to Leon Trotsky’s followers, argued that socialism required not merely state ownership but workers’ control, which the Stalinist dictatorship had destroyed. This anti-Stalinist left, including Norman Thomas’s Socialist Party and Dwight Macdonald’s Politics, joined with radical pacifist conscientious objectors to World War II, including Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker, in criticizing racial segregation in the military and use of the atomic bomb. Such alternative perspectives found little traction, however. During the Popular Front of 1935–39 and World War II, liberals and Communists marched arm-in-arm against fascism, interrupted only by such inconvenient events as the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939.
“Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism,” Earl Browder declared during the Popular Front. Conservative southern Democrats and Republicans demurred, branding Communists “un-American” subversives. Red-baiting escalated in the postwar period, as the cold war began. The last gasp of the Popular Front came in former Democratic vice president Henry Wallace’s 1948 Progressive Party campaign, which was hounded by charges of Communist influence. Security oaths and congressional investigations purged hundreds of Communists and other radicals from unions, government, Hollywood, and universities. Severely bruised, the American Communist Party limped along until 1956, when most of its remaining members quit in disillusionment after Nikita Khrushchev confirmed Stalin’s record of mass murder, and the Soviet Union invaded Hungary, suppressing the attempt to reform communism in that country.
The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56 signaled a rebirth of movement activity and an opening for radicalism. By 1960 a youthful New Left with dreams of “participatory democracy” was stirring in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The new radicals conceived of politics in moral and existential terms, typified by Mario Savio’s call during Berkeley’s 1964 Free Speech Movement to “put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus.”
Issues of race and war pitted the New Left against the liberal Democratic establishment. Sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and marches were met by brutal segregationist response, tarnishing the image of the United States abroad and compelling passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Vietnam War generated an equally powerful crisis. SDS called the first antiwar demonstration in Washington in 1965, and by decade’s end, huge mobilizations were mounted, complemented by radical G.I. resistance. Radical pacifism revived, espoused by the likes of David Dellinger and Catholic priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan, although many other radicals opposed the war out of opposition to empire rather than all instances of violence. War and race intertwined as Martin Luther King Jr. challenged Chicago residential segregation, opposed the Vietnam War as a diversion from the needs of the poor at home, and was assassinated in 1968 while supporting Memphis garbage strikers, setting off riots nationwide.
By 1968 the revolutionary enthusiasm was contagious. Vietnam’s Tet Offensive set off worldwide upheavals, East and West, from Prague to Paris to Mexico City. Emulating Malcolm X and third world guerrillas, Stokely Carmichael, the Black Panther Party, and other Black Power militants advocated armed struggle and cultural pride. Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, as “Yippies,” fused radical politics with the counterculture’s sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Women liberationists objected to the 1968 Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey, as a “degrading mindless-boob-girlie symbol,” putting the spotlight on a movement that would assert reproductive rights and challenge male chauvinism in the home, workplace, and culture. Street fighting between New York City police and Stonewall Inn patrons produced the Gay Liberation Front in 1969. The cultural revolution in race, gender, and sexual norms unleashed by the 1960s radicalization would produce far-reaching and unfolding changes in American consciousness across the next several decades.
As a coherent political movement, however, the New Left did not endure. As radicals moved from protest to resistance to revolution, some decided to “Bring the War Home” by planting bombs. Confrontation could dramatize injustice, as when the American Indian Movement occupied Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington in 1972, but one-upmanship and factional prejudice took hold as radicals misjudged the moment. One reason for New Left unreality was its distance from the American working class. C. Wright Mills and Herbert Marcuse dismissed labor for its quiescence. To many young radicals, labor unions evoked “corporate liberal” compromise or the musty Old Left, if not racist whites. By 1970 the New Left realized that students alone could not remake the world, but the belated turn to the working class too often took the form of sterile Maoist posturing, despite sounder rank-and-file projects initiated by proponents of “socialism from below.”
By the mid-1970s, the New Left had disintegrated. As national politics turned rightward and labor declined, New Left themes lived on in 1980s directaction groups like the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and Earth First! Laments about a fragmentary “identity politics” became commonplace, although left-of-center electoral coalitions still could succeed, as when Vermont sent socialist independent Bernie Sanders to Congress in 1990 and the Senate in 2006. The Soviet bloc’s demise in 1989–91 fostered a general presumption that socialism was discredited, but the 1994 Zapatista rebellion in Mexico inspired new forms of anticapitalist opposition to corporate globalization. These culminated in the 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization and the millions of votes cast in 2000 for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, critic of the Democratic and Republican parties as a “corporate duopoly.”
Radical opposition to empire revived in the years following September 11, 2001, in youthful opposition to the Iraq War. Species consciousness nearly rivaled class consciousness in radical circles, as antisystemic criticism of global warming generated reconsiderations of industrial society itself. American radicalism, though much reduced in strength from its early twentieth-century apex, continued its search to identify the fundamental causes of social injustice and irrationality and to find ways to root them out.
See also abolitionism; anarchism; communism; pacifism; populism; socialism.
FURTHER READING. Stanley Aronowitz, The Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism, 1996; Seweryn Bialer, ed., Radicalism in the Contemporary Age, 3 vols., 1977; Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Harvey J. Kaye, eds., The American Radical, 1994; Harvey Goldberg, ed., American Radicals: Some Problems and Personalities, 1957; Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, 2002; Sidney Lens, Radicalism in America, 1966; Staughton Lynd, The Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, 1968; Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John McMillian, eds., The Radical Reader, 2003; Lillian Symes and Travers Clement, Rebel America: The Story of Social Revolt in the United States, 1934; Alfred E. Young, ed., Dissent: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, 1968.
CHRISTOPHER PHELPS
Reconstruction, once defined as the period immediately following the Civil War, is now generally understood as an interlocking web of political, social, and economic transformations that followed the wartime destruction of slavery and lasted until the withdrawal of federal military support for the last Republican state governments in the former Confederacy in 1877. Among the most important political developments were the virtual revolution in southern life, the consolidation of national citizenship, and the forces that arose to limit those projects.
Wartime Reconstruction of the South began as officials and slaves in the Union-occupied slave states wrestled with the messy end of slavery. Emancipation had emerged from the crucible of war, and many Americans (President Lincoln included) believed that ex-slaves, on the whole, did not merit political citizenship. But the Emancipation Proclamation, the mass enlistment of black troops, and the success of free-labor experiments—such as the collective farm at Davis Bend, Mississippi, and the coastal lands General William T. Sherman allocated under Special Field Order No. 15—gave freed people’s claims to citizenship greater weight.
Freed people began to make these claims during the war and its immediate aftermath. They held political meetings in cities and contraband camps across the occupied South. They challenged employers in hearings before agents of the newly established federal Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (the Freedmen’s Bureau). Whether through local initiatives or, later, under the aegis of the Union Leagues, previously disparate social groups began to come together: ex-slaves’ formerly clandestine political culture and the restricted organizational life of antebellum free black people met with the political and economic ambitions of northern missionaries, entrepreneurs, and activists (people known by their contemporary enemies and later detractors as “carpetbaggers”), as well as with the hopes and fears of some southern whites (similarly dubbed “scalawags”). Meanwhile, several states under Union occupation held wartime elections and established new governments; of these, only Tennessee’s would achieve lasting recognition.
With the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865, slavery came to a final, formal end even in the Union slave states of Kentucky and Delaware. To Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, this change seemed sufficient. He appointed provisional governors, and with his approval, southern electorates forged new governments; for a time, it seemed the former slave states would be reconstructed on the basis of white male citizenship. In the winter of 1865–66, these southern state governments began to pass laws, known as “black codes,” that severely limited freed people’s freedom of mobility and were designed to force them into low-wage agricultural labor. Johnson pardoned leading former Confederates, and he vetoed both the Civil Rights Act—passed by Congress in 1866 to overturn the black codes—and a bill reauthorizing the Freedmen’s Bureau. In a step emblematic of this version of Reconstruction, the newly re-formed legislature of Georgia elected former Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens to the U.S. Senate.
Congressional Republicans, who controlled more than two-thirds of each house, pushed back: they refused to seat congressional delegates from most ex-Confederate states, they passed the Civil Rights and Freedmen’s Bureau Bills over Johnson’s veto, and in the spring of 1867 they rejected Johnson’s program of Reconstruction in toto, establishing a new framework for readmission. The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided ten of the eleven Confederate states, all but Tennessee, into five military districts and set guidelines for their readmission that effectively enfranchised black men. Federal officials registered black and white men over 21 for the election of delegates to new constitutional conventions; those conventions wrote constitutions that included the principle of manhood suffrage. The new southern electorates created under the Reconstruction Acts helped elect Johnson’s successor, former Union commanding general Ulysses S. Grant, in 1868. President Johnson’s resistance to the acts—particularly his removal of federal officials supportive of Congress’s purposes—led Congress to pass the Tenure of Office Act and to impeach Johnson for its violation, though he was not convicted and removed from office. In an effort to safeguard the principles of the Civil Rights Act, Republican legislators also passed a somewhat altered version of that law as a new constitutional amendment and made the ratification of that amendment a precondition for the readmission of the states now under military rule.
Radical Reconstruction transformed the U.S. Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment (ratified in 1868) established that national citizenship belonged to all persons born within the United States, without regard to race or prior status; that this citizenship conveyed certain rights, including the “equal protection of the laws” and certain unspecified “privileges and immunities”; that states could not interpose their own limitations or qualifications; and that states would lose representation in Congress to the extent that they denied voting rights to their adult male population. In other words, it made national citizenship paramount—at least in theory. The Fifteenth Amendment (passed in 1869, ratified in 1870) extended the principle of race-neutral suffrage by prohibiting—rather than simply penalizing—disfranchisement on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Together with various federal enforcement acts, the Fifteenth Amendment sought to ensure that the most essential expression of political citizenship—the right to vote—would not be abridged on account of race.
The southern Republican coalition that took shape in 1867 and 1868 brought new voices into southern political life. Freed people’s collective mobilization for new constitutional conventions brought hundreds of thousands of men to vote for the first time in 1867; it also mobilized black women, who—though denied the franchise—attended meetings, voiced political opinions, and sometimes insisted that men take women’s wishes into account when voting. The freed people’s political goals included basic liberal freedoms: their desire to reconstitute their families, move freely, seek the protection of the law, secure an education, and be secure in their property. But the southern Republican coalition brought together a variety of competing and divergent interests. White Southerners who had owned few or no slaves did not necessarily support universal public education, which would inevitably be funded by taxes on land; they often balked at the idea that people just freed from slavery should sit on juries, hold local offices, or determine the outcome of elections. Northern emigrants and antebellum free people of color, whose experiences and interests often were quite different than those of ex-slaves, played disproportionately large roles in the party leadership.
Most seriously, freed people and their northern Republican allies had somewhat different visions for the postbellum economy. Republicans had begun by seeking to guarantee the end of slavery and the creation of loyal governments committed to free labor in the ex-Confederate states; with these steps they became participants in a political revolution, sometimes dubbed Radical Reconstruction, that would transform nearly 4 million slaves into citizens with political, economic, and civil rights. Congressional “radicalism” mainly took the form of economic liberalism: since the early days of the federal wartime occupation, most federal policies and philanthropic activities had sought to transform the freed people into agricultural wage laborers. In the capital-poor world of the postwar South, this effectively meant labor on annual contracts, with supplies advanced but most wages deferred until after the harvest. But freed people’s political, social, and economic visions were not limited to the orthodoxies of contractual wage labor. They sought ownership of land, not perpetual employment under contracts. They wanted the freedom to deploy labor flexibly within households and, when possible, limited women’s participation in the market for agricultural labor. These tensions shaped Republican policies and offered fracture points for those who saw advantages in splitting the coalition. Democrats, who attracted few black voters, early on sought to identify the Republican Party as the representative only of black and northern interests. Their 1868 platform accused Republicans of seeking to “secure negro supremacy.”
In states where the antebellum slave population had constituted a majority—South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi—freed people and antebellum free people of color demanded and finally obtained meaningful roles in state and local government. The states’ new constitutions removed property restrictions and apportionment by wealth, created free common schools for all children, and enacted property legislation for married women. The systematic redistribution of ex-slaveholders’ land had failed to win wide support in Congress, but South Carolina created a land commission to purchase and sell small plots, boosting black landholding there well above the low regional average.
Republican black men—freeborn and freed Southerners, as well as Northerners—served southern constituencies at every level, from justice of the peace to U.S. senator. In Mississippi, Hiram Revels, a minister, was elected to fill the Senate seat vacated by Jefferson Davis in 1861, 1 of 16 black men who would ultimately serve in Congress during the era. With the exception of South Carolina’s lower house, the new legislatures had white majorities. Republican leaders divided over economic policies and along axes of race, region, antebellum status, and wealth. Numerous fractures developed, with some Republicans making coalitions with opposition factions, often called Conservatives. In these states, Republican coalitions that included significant numbers of whites governed until the mid-1870s, against considerable opposition in the forms of vigilante violence and of real or feigned outrage at the corruption that marked so much of the period’s politics across lines of region and party.
In states where whites made up larger percentages of the population, ex-slaves played smaller roles in the Republican Party then did northern- and southern-born whites. Governments in these states passed civil rights bills and supported black male suffrage and public schools, sometimes (as in Florida) building them from the ground up; they also invested heavily (and often corruptly) in railroads. In many states Democrats or Conservatives gained legislative majorities early, and in a few states Reconstruction as a state policy virtually ended before it began. In 1868 white conservatives in Georgia moved rapidly to expel black representatives from the state legislature. Though they reversed course when their action caused Congress to refuse to seat the state’s delegation, Democrats took control of the state after the 1870 elections. By then they also controlled North Carolina’s legislature and one house of Alabama’s. Virginia’s Republicans fractured from the start, allowing Conservatives to triumph in 1869 and bring the Commonwealth back into the Union without ever having a Republican government.
But state-level Reconstruction was not the beginning and end of the story. Power at the local level—especially in black-majority constituencies in white-majority states—could also matter enormously. For freed people, local voting rights and jury service meant being able to withstand the worst abuses of their opponents. Where they continued to exercise these rights, black men or those sympathetic to their interests might oversee contractual or criminal disputes; people who had been defrauded, assaulted, or raped could hope for equal justice. White Democrats sometimes took aim at these areas, for example, by gerrymandering black voters into a small number of districts or by stripping black-majority cities of their right to self-government.
Paramilitary violence played a significant role in Reconstruction politics, mainly to the advantage of Republicans’ foes. The Ku Klux Klan, formed in Tennessee in the winter of 1865–66, was the most famous and widespread organization to take up arms against the Republican Party and freed people’s political activity. Similar paramilitary forces of former Confederates and their younger male relations organized across the region, terrorizing Republican voters, organizers, and officeholders, seeking to paralyze black constituencies and to discourage whites from allying with blacks. The Klan had its own oath-bound hierarchy, but it functioned fundamentally in the interest of the reconstituted state Democratic parties, holding down Republican turnout through intimidation and murder, seizing effective control of local courts and law enforcement, and making Democratic victories possible even in areas with substantial black populations.
Serious Klan violence during the 1868 election campaign helped provide the impetus for the Fifteenth Amendment; it also led to a series of federal laws designed to protect voting rights. Efforts to counter the Klan by legal means were generally ineffective, but more forceful responses carried their own risks. North Carolina governor William Holden organized a militia to put down Klan activity in the election of 1870 and was impeached for his pains, effectively ending Reconstruction in the state. Republican government in Arkansas and Texas fought the Klan effectively for a time with forces of black and white men. Federal anti-Klan activity peaked in 1871 with the reoccupation of part of South Carolina and the trials of hundreds of Klansmen under new anti-Klan laws. White supremacist terror diminished in the short run but resumed in earnest after the 1872 election.
In the states still under Republican government after 1872, white supremacist paramilitaries sought to polarize state politics and drive a wedge between black Republicans and their white allies by provoking racialized military conflict with state militias, which by this point consisted mainly of all-black units. In these contests, black militiamen were generally overmatched, and governors often chose to withdraw their forces, fearing a massacre. Well-publicized battles between black militiamen and white paramilitaries between 1873 and 1876 (e.g., in Hamburg and Ellenton, South Carolina, and Colfax and New Orleans, Louisiana) helped fracture politics along racial lines and make democratic governance virtually impossible. Federal intervention on behalf of Republican elected officials and militiamen protected some individuals but did not deter paramilitary violence; such intervention, especially in removing Democratic contestants from the Louisiana legislature in 1874, also supported Democratic charges that Reconstruction was little more than federal “bayonet rule.”
The recapture of state governments by Democrats changed the terms of political conflict: black agricultural and domestic laborers, now politically all but powerless, could no longer demand laws that protected their interests. Instead, various groups of whites battled over lien, railroad, and homestead exemption laws based on differences of economic or sectional interest; ex-slaves could no longer participate actively in these contests. Supporters of these counterrevolutions lauded the “redemption” of their states from “radical and negro misrule.” The destruction of Reconstruction’s local legacies proceeded unevenly, leaving some islands of comparative black freedom and autonomy even in states now governed by white Democrats. Despite decades of Democratic gerrymandering, intermittent paramilitary activity, discriminatory registration laws, and constitutional changes, some of these areas continued to elect black officeholders and convention delegates until the end of the nineteenth century. White Republicanism survived in some upland areas and remained important in counties and localities but played a major part in state politics only when dissident whites (sometimes allying themselves with blacks) mounted third-party insurgencies in the 1880s and 1890s.
After 1870 few Northerners made the defense of black citizenship rights a priority. Northern Republicans rhetorically celebrated the victory over slavery and the enfranchisement of black men, and a handful of white-majority northern constituencies elected black men to office. Northern white supremacy took various forms, from white laborers’ fears of an influx of southern freed people to the scientific racism promoted by leading scholars. Most white Northerners had persistently rejected calls for abolition before the war, and even after 1865, white popular majorities in state after northern state rejected referenda calling for black male suffrage, though there were only about 250,000 nonwhite citizens in the non-slaveholding states in 1860.
Many Republicans believed that, rather than making expensive and expansive federal commitments in the South, the country needed to subsidize the conquest and settlement of the West. Secession made possible a flood of Republican legislation in 1862, including legislation to fund transcontinental railroads and homesteads on the federal domain. Between 1867 and 1871, as railroad building and homesteading continued, the U.S. government signed a series of treaties establishing large Indian territories in the trans-Mississippi West. But railroad workers, settlers, and miners continued to encroach on the remaining Indian lands, and conflict between Indians and the U.S. military escalated. By the mid-1870s U.S. forces defeated most Plains tribes, who were forced to accept treaties granting them smaller reservations. The Fourteenth Amendment’s exclusion of “Indians not taxed” from its protections left them without legal recourse.
The wartime development of a new national banking system facilitated the growth of ever-larger enterprises, but, in the 1870s, Republicans abandoned the flexible currency of the war years in favor of the demonetization of silver and a commitment to return to the gold standard by decade’s end. The postwar years witnessed a rush of speculative investment, especially in railroads, virtually unimpeded by federal regulation or oversight, and corruption became widespread at every level of government and in every region. This, together with opposition to Grant’s efforts to annex Santo Domingo, helped precipitate an unsuccessful Liberal Republican Party challenge to Grant’s reelection in 1872. Corruption—notably the Crédit Mobilier scandal, which implicated many high officials in railroad construction fraud—also led to business failures, a financial panic, and a profound economic depression that began in 1873. During the depression years Republican hard-money policies inspired the rise of alternative economic visions and the Labor Reform Party and the Greenback Party. As economic struggles weakened Republican dominance, Democrats gained control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1874, further weakening the ability of Republican radicals to promote southern Reconstruction.
The Supreme Court played an important role in undoing Reconstruction’s political revolution. In the Slaughter-House Cases (1873), the Court upheld a state-chartered butchering monopoly in New Orleans against the claims of other butchers, ruling 5 to 4 that the rights of national citizenship, as defined by the amended federal constitution, extended only to a few specific protections, including the right to peaceable assembly, protection on the high seas and abroad, and access to navigable waterways. Similarly narrow rulings in U.S. v. Reese (1875) and U.S. v. Cruikshank (1875), cases emerging from violence against southern Republicans, held that the right to vote was a state not a federal matter and that the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws granted protection only against state governments’ violations; against other individual and collective violations of those principles, the Court held, the federal government was powerless. The last legislative act of congressional Reconstruction—the Civil Rights Act of 1875—sought to reenlarge the now minimal inventory of citizenship rights by prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race on juries and in railroads, theaters, hotels, and (in its early versions) schools. The final project of Charles Sumner, longtime antislavery senator from Massachusetts, the act passed only after his death and in a truncated form. The Supreme Court in 1883 struck down this law as well.
Only a handful of states enacted full or partial suffrage for women during Reconstruction; political citizenship remained closely tied to military service and male household authority. Advocates of women’s voting rights had hoped their movement would succeed alongside the movement to enfranchise black men, but they were dismayed by the inclusion of the word “male” in the Fourteenth Amendment and were dealt a grievous blow by the omission of “sex” from the excluded categories of discrimination in the Fifteenth Amendment. During the election of 1872, many women, including Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, and black Republicans in the South, challenged their exclusion at the polls by casting or seeking to cast ballots; Anthony was among those arrested for those actions. In one resulting case, Minor v. Happersett (1874), the Supreme Court ruled that though women were indeed citizens, voting was a state matter and not among the “privileges and immunities” of national citizens.
Reconstruction as a federal project ended following the contested national election of 1876. Democratic factions in South Carolina and Louisiana, determined to seize power, provoked violent conflicts with black officeholders and state militias that essentially militarized state politics; these states’ elections were marred by extensive violence and fraud. Nationally, Democratic presidential candidate Samuel Tilden won a popular majority and seemed poised to defeat Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the Electoral College, but Republicans claimed victory in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida, which together would give them a narrow electoral majority. With the election results in these states subject to bitter dispute, a deadlock ensued. Throughout the winter and early spring, Washington powerbrokers sought to hammer out a compromise and select a president, while rival governments claimed legitimacy in Columbia and New Orleans. A convoluted agreement finally developed, under which the Republicans gained the presidency and Democrats won the remaining southern state governments, a bargain lubricated with levee and railroad subsidies as well as pledges not to prosecute violators of election laws. In April 1877, after Hayes’s inauguration, the federal government withdrew its forces, Republican governments crumbled, and Reconstruction as a federal policy came to an end.
Reconstruction’s political legacies took many forms. In some parts of the South, black and white Republicans continued to exert political power through and even beyond the end of the century, sometimes making alliances with Populists and other third-party challengers to Democratic rule. Meanwhile, fables of Reconstruction as a period of “radical and negro misrule” became an article of faith among southern Democrats and many other white Americans, ultimately mutating into a tale of black men’s sexual designs on white women (as depicted in D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation). During and especially after World War II, however, black Southerners and northern allies vigorously challenged their political and civil disabilities, and the Supreme Court slowly reversed its earlier course and began to apply the Reconstruction amendments in ways that supported African American political and civil rights. This period is therefore sometimes called the Second Reconstruction.
See also Civil War and Reconstruction; Confederacy; race and politics, 1860–1933; slavery; South since 1877; voting.
FURTHER READING. Richard F. Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877, 1991; Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African-American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture 7 (Fall 1994), 107–46; W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880, 1935, reprint, 1998; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, 1988; Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration, 2003.
STEPHEN KANTROWITZ
Enduring and valued traditions of American regulation predate the constitutional republic launched in 1789. They include the governance of markets and firms and their advertising and manufacturing practices; of individuals, their expression, their sexuality, and other features of their daily behavior; of families, their homes and property, and their consumption patterns; of land, air, and water and their use and conservation. These patterns are not fully consensual but have been contested thoroughly, not mainly over whether there should be more or less regulation, but over which form regulation should take and who should do the regulating. All this contestation aside, regulation is as deeply rooted within the fabric of American government as liberty itself. Indeed, Americans have long viewed regulation the way that Alexander Hamilton did in the Federalist Papers and his early financial writings—as protective of liberty. It is only recently in U.S. political history that regulation has been interpreted as an intrusion into a separate, private sphere.
“Regulation” in twenty-first-century politics often connotes the rule of a marketplace, the rule of the state over purely economic activity. Yet for much of American history, and in ways that continue into the present, this reading narrows what was a much broader phenomenon. The distinction between “economic regulation,” “social regulation,” and “moral regulation” was one that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans would have been hard pressed to identify. Like the hues in a child’s watercolor painting, the moral, the social, the financial, the spiritual, the private, the public, and the communal realms bled into one another.
The marketplaces of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America were literally made by state regulation and government rules. The price system, standards and minimal expectations of quality and security, and the structure of exchange were created and fashioned by government action. It was government laws, not exogenous market conventions, that required prices to be visibly published for perusal by the citizen (this requirement remains, invisibly but significantly, in state and local laws governing numerous transactions today). Governments elaborated standards of construction for business, of packaging for products, of licenses for entry into health and medicine, of hair cutting, of machine repair, and of numerous other occupations. Market clerks and government auctioneers—themselves employed by state and local authorities—presided over market activity. In creating and sustaining marketplaces, these public institutions served multiple purposes; they were “common carriers” of the varied aims of the public. Market-constituting regulation stemmed from the common-law philosophy of a “well-regulated” society, incorporating values of fairness, of consumer protection, of the transparency of the marketplace. These concerns echoed centuries of accumulated tradition and philosophy and reflected longstanding republican traditions of popular sovereignty, particularly in their focus on “the people’s welfare” as the “highest law” of the land (Salus populi extrema lex).
Strong restrictions on property and its uses were a central feature of early American regulation. Fire safety regulations constrained the store of gunpowder, the piling of wood, and the construction of new homes. Until the 1870s, these regulations were virtually immune to judicial challenge, and even then they persisted through many legal disputes well into the twentieth century. In their public safety and public health regulations, cities and counties prohibited standing water, compelled the removal of dead animals, and enjoined citizens from burning all manner of objects on their private property.
Another stable theme of early American regulation lay in the fusion of moral regulation and economic regulation. Decades before and after the temperance movements of the 1800s, state and local governments achieved a vast regulation of alcohol: its production, sale, distribution, and consumption. These laws governed public morality even as they deeply shaped the congeries of markets that composed the alcoholic beverage industry.
The moral basis of economic regulation also emerged in the symbolic logic of “adulteration.” The idea of adulterated commodities held that a product’s misrepresentation in the marketplace was a matter not simply of economic fraud but of moral and spiritual corruption. Adulteration linked nineteenth-century product regulation to the governance of alcohol, of gambling and lotteries, and of pornography and sexuality. Notions of adulteration as a form of corruption (and not simply a failure of market information) were central to state pure food laws and, later, laws regulating the manufacture and dispensation of medicines. Concerns about adulteration also drove and shaped the evolution of occupational licensing; not only products but also services and labor could be immorally represented. Under these laws, local and state governments hired more inspectors and built administrative bodies for regulating everything from steamboats to meatpacking facilities to proprietary medicine firms.
The main constraint on American regulation lay in federalism. Capacities for regulation developed largely in states and localities and much less in the national government. This disjuncture flowed partially from the commerce clause of Article I, Section IV of the U.S. Constitution; federal regulation was often justified on the basis that the national state could uniquely govern patterns of commerce among the states. The primary exceptions to national regulatory weakness rested in areas where the American state had developed administrative capacity. In the national postal system, Americans were already accustomed to the regulation of markets whose products coursed by the million through that system. When Victorian reformers led by postal official Anthony Comstock turned their attention to the regulation of vice and morals, they achieved the Comstock Law of 1872 and the Anti-Lottery Acts of 1890 and 1895. These statutes and their enforcement projected the power of national government into the everyday sexuality of millions of women and men, and the latter brought an end to the most profitable gambling concern of the nineteenth century: the Louisiana Lottery Company. They also changed the structure of the regulatory state; newly emboldened postal inspectors launched a massive postal fraud campaign, which issued over 20,000 fraud orders from 1910 to 1924. Postal regulators averaged 3,500 arrests and 2,000 convictions annually by the 1920s, with targets ranging from Texas oil companies to patent medicine outfits.
With the Meat Inspection Act of 1885, the U.S. Department of Agriculture began to acquire vast authority over the nation’s livestock farms, stockyards, slaughterhouses, and meat-processing plants; the agency hired thousands of inspectors, creating the largest regulatory apparatus outside of the postal system.
Robust patterns of economic activity had always crossed state boundaries, but the size and rapidity of interstate commerce grew substantially in the nineteenth century, aided by federal policy itself—the postal system, land grants to railroads, the forcible opening of cheap land by the U.S. Army. The coming of a new industrial age (and with it, a growing concentration of capital and political power in fewer and fewer firms) meant that market developments outran the capacity of states and localities to monitor and govern them. The emblematic case came in railroads. Midwestern and western state legislatures passed a number of strong statutes regulating railroad pricing and safety in the 1870s and 1880s. The federal government followed in 1887 by creating a hybrid (and characteristically American) form of regulatory institution: the independent regulatory commission. The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) was governed not by a single individual but by a min-legislature, a five-person commission with voting and staggered terms. The ICC’s powers grew slowly, often in contest with the federal courts, which were not eager to relinquish their regulatory powers to “expert commissions.” Yet with a series of statutes culminating in the National Transportation Act of 1920, the ICC assumed plenary authority (involving issues of pricing, safety, planning, and cost structure) over rail and truck transport in the United States.
The independent commission found expression in other modes of regulation as well, most notably in the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914. The FTC’s primary architect was Louis Brandeis, often called the “patron saint” of the American regulatory tradition. Along with the Department of Justice, the FTC was responsible for regulating large corporations. In the republican political tradition and in the “fair trade” and pro-competition vision of Brandeis, antitrust and corporate regulation served explicitly political purposes: to combat the concentration of economic and hence political and social power within large, unaccountable, and ungovernable organizations. As the American antitrust regime entered the New Deal, policy became less politically focused and more economically driven, captivated by the concept of “consumer surplus” and its maximization.
Other federal regulations of the Progressive and New Deal Eras also arrived in commission form. These include the Federal Power Commission (1920), today the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC); the Federal Radio Commission (1927), renamed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1934; the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) (1934); the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) (1935); the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) (1946), now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) (1975); and the now-defunct Civil Aeronautics Board (1938).
In these and other realms, federal and state regulators cooperated as often as they battled for turf. Comstock’s anti-vice crusades depended heavily on the willing support and subsidy given by state and local law enforcement officials, and the vice-suppression societies of major American cities. State regulators formed associations among themselves for the exchange of information, for professional fraternity, and for the making of model statutes. Two of the most notable of these adventures in “cooperative federalism” were the National Association of Railroad and Utility Commissioners (NARUC) and the National Association of Food and Drug Officials. These bodies sponsored model laws that were pivotal in shaping twentieth-century regulation and that served as templates for legislative activity at the federal level.
The institution-building impulse of the Progressive and New Deal Eras marked a significant expansion of the regulatory state at the national level. Yet slowly, and profoundly, it continued a transformation of ideals in American regulation. Increasingly, in the ideology, law, and administration of American governance, the object of policy was less the people’s welfare than consumer welfare. Regulation was meant less to protect the American as citizen and more to protect the American as consumer. This language had its roots in nineteenth-century jurisprudence and political economy, and it slowly engendered a policy world characterized by rights-based claims, individually focused analysis, and welfare-maximizing goals.
The Progressive-New Deal legacy is colossal. The federal government experimented with industrial licensure in the National Recovery Act. It counseled an expansion of trade practices and advertising by the Federal Trade Commission. It continued and bolstered Progressive Era programs of conservation in forestry, natural resources, and land management. The Agricultural Adjustment Acts of 1933 and 1938 created extensive patterns of regulation over agriculture, many of which persist to this day. The Glass-Steagall legislation separated commercial banking from investment banking and created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). For every regulation observed, countless other, more radical and more conservative ideas were floated.
Twentieth-century regulation was characterized by institutions and ideals that flowed from multiple traditions of philosophy, ideology, law, and policy administration. Republican regulation of the “well-ordered society” was displaced by “liberal” regulation (what political philosopher Michael Sandel has called “the procedural republic”) as analysis and justification purely in terms of costs and benefits have taken over. This is one of the crucial shifts in regulation in America in the twentieth century; its primary concern with Americans as consumers and not citizens. Independent regulatory commissions were created alongside regulatory bodies in large executive departments. Regulators combined statistical and economic tools with older patterns of legal analysis and enforcement.
Yet the republican face of early American regulation has not died out. Moral claims about regulation still echo in twenty-first-century politics, not least because American political elites and regulators are still responsive to them. The regulation of telecommunications has been concerned with concentration of ownership, minority representation, and the advancement and standardization of technology, but it has persistently returned to issues of indecency in broadcast radio and television. Antitrust and trade regulation have been motivated not merely by issues of efficiency but also of fairness.
Another forceful metaphor of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American regulation—one that harkens back to the symbolic logic of adulteration in the late 1880s and early 1900s—is protection. Even the mantra of “consumer protection” legislation—from labor and health rules, the governance of consumer products, environmental policy—implied that there were values other than rights and efficiency that were being served by the American regulatory regime. Indeed, the protection metaphor was transformed and recycled in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, precisely at the time that American citizenship became defined ever more upon the principles of consumption and leisure. Cold war America saw new initiatives in environmental protection, most notably the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that same year. The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 created the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which regulates workplace safety in a complex web of overlapping relationships and jurisdictions with state labor safety agencies. The Consumer Products Safety Commission was created in 1972, empowered with the authority to recall products.
The 1960s and 1970s also witnessed growing patterns of regulation by the rule making of federal agencies, even though the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946 was supposed to have constrained such practices. Scholars began to size up American regulation by tallying the number of pages published in each year’s Federal Register. Where formal rule making through administrative procedures has become cumbersome for agencies, they have shifted to issuing guidance documents that are not binding but nonetheless have a powerful shaping influence on behavior. Federal regulatory agencies have also become adept at using advisory committees composed of outside experts in order to gather information and to gain legitimacy for their policies.
The closing of the twentieth century was marked by a reimagining of regulation and a campaign for deregulation. Three forces—the growing political power of business, the emergence of policy and academic critiques focusing on the self-corrective power of the marketplace, and the broad distrust of government among American citizens—fueled the rollback of regulation. All sectors of regulation were affected—especially in airlines, where President Jimmy Carter joined with congressional Democrats and his appointee Alfred Kahn to eliminate federal price regulation, eventually terminating the Civil Aeronautics Board. Antitrust regulation was increasingly constrained by the notion that monopolistic markets might still be “contestable”; hence monopolies might limit their pricing out of the possibility that a presently invisible firm might enter the marketplace. The 1990s witnessed the deregulation of transportation (including the elimination of the ICC in 1995) and of telecommunications (1995), and a more moderate deregulation of health and pharmaceuticals. A new law in 1999 repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, allowing investment banks and commercial service banks to consolidate operations. New agency rules were subject to cost-benefit analysis, a practice centered in the president’s Office of Management and Budget. In this conservative political age, the national government became the restrainer, not the enabler, of state and local governance.
The governance of medical products constitutes the one sphere of regulation for which American institutions have served as an exemplar of strength and a global model. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), empowered in the New Deal legislation of 1938 and again in 1962 following the thalidomide tragedy, has created institutions, procedures, and scientific and technical concepts that have been copied worldwide. It is a small agency with a remarkably big power: the authority to veto the marketability of any new drug product, medical device, or vaccine. Its regulation of pharmaceuticals has powerfully structured the global clinical research industry, cleaving modern medical research into four distinct phases of experiment. Its regulation of “safety” and “efficacy” has literally defined the terms on which medical and pharmaceutical innovation operates worldwide.
In reality, the experiment of American government writ large is one of regulation—the regulation of racial relations, of sexuality, of the poor, of firearms and other weapons, of labor relations, of personal space. Yet the republican past, while faded, still lives with us. In the wake of numerous corporate accounting scandals in the early twenty-first century, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which regulates corporate accounting on a template not merely of rights and efficiency but of “responsibility.” The mortgage-lending crisis of 2007 and 2008 has led to calls for similar regulation of the lending industries. These and other regulatory initiatives have been introduced not for efficiency reasons, but out of senses of abuse, consumer protection, and the like. And with the financial and global economic crises of 2008 and 2009, new regulatory visions and organizations are being created. The language of regulation—the terms used to justify it, attack it, implement it, constrain it—is revealing and marks the enduring legacy of American regulation as well as its most contested transformations.
See also consumers and politics; economy and politics; health and illness; Prohibition and temperance; transportation and politics.
FURTHER READING. Daniel Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928; Sally Clarke, Regulation and the Revolution in United States Farm Productivity, 1994; Martha Derthick and Paul J. Quirk, The Politics of Deregulation, 1985; Ellis W. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence, 1995; Marc Law, “The Origins of State Pure Food Regulation,” Journal of Economic History 63 (December 2003), 1103–30; Thomas McCraw, Prophets of Regulation, 1984; William Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth–Century America, 1996; Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920, 1982.
DANIEL CARPENTER
To see how breathtaking the changes were in the relationship between religion and politics from the nation’s founding to 1865 and how easily American Protestants, the dominant religious group, accommodated them, one only need consider the way American Presbyterians did a quick about-face on the duties of the civil magistrate. In 1787 the Synod of New York and Philadelphia, then the highest body in the American Presbyterian Church, appointed a committee to prepare a revised edition of the Westminster Confession of Faith and Larger and Shorter Catechisms for the proposed establishment of the General Assembly and its constitution. This revision rejected the understanding of the civil magistrate’s duties to maintain and protect the “true” religion that was common throughout the Protestant world during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and enshrined in the original documents of the Westminster Assembly. In so doing, American Presbyterians modified their understanding of church and state in ways that at the time fellow Presbyterians in Scotland, Canada, Northern Ireland, and Australia would have found objectionable and perhaps even a betrayal of the genius of Calvinism. In fact, when English Parliament convened the Westminster Assembly during the Civil War of the 1640s, only Anabaptists and other radicals could have countenanced the kind of arrangement affirmed in the American revisions.
The case of American Presbyterians reversing the patterns of 15 centuries of church-state relations in the West is one example of the surprising ways that Protestants in the new nation reconciled themselves to what appeared to be a secular national government. As revolutionary as the new relationship between church and state was from a European perspective, it became palatable to Protestants in the United States for a variety of reasons. On the one hand, American framers were not hostile to but supported Christianity, at least of a generic kind. At the same time, Protestant leaders adopted the ideology of independence in ways that gave the American experiment redemptive significance. On the other hand, church leaders would eventually learn that by severing ties to the state faith they could be even more influential than when regulated by the state. Indeed, the American Revolution unleashed religious motivations for political activism in ways barely imaginable in the late eighteenth century. But by the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when the United States began to experience greater religious diversity and conflict, the benefits of religious activism for the American republic looked much less obvious than they appeared during the heady days of the 1770s.
One of the Presbyterian ministers who had a hand in revising the Westminster Confession was also the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. John Witherspoon, the president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), was a well-respected Presbyterian pastor who also trained graduates who would support the revolutionary cause. During his tenure at the college, only 5 of its 355 graduates would remain loyal to the British crown. This earned Witherspoon’s school the nickname “seminary of sedition.” His educational labors as well as his service as a member of the Continental Congress made him one of the colonies’ leading patriots.
Witherspoon’s service to the revolution went beyond teaching and politics to enlisting Christianity for the cause of independence. One sermon in particular, “The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men,” demonstrated the convergence of Protestant theology and revolutionary politics that allowed for such a harmonious relationship between America’s believers and the nation’s framers. Witherspoon delivered this sermon on Friday, May 17, 1776, a day of prayer called by Congress. In this oration, published the next month in Philadelphia during the meetings of the Continental Congress, Witherspoon articulated one of the chief themes that aligned Christianity and Enlightenment political thought: the sacred cause of liberty. He believed that the cause of America was one predicated on justice and liberty, and that it conformed to the truth about human nature. It also showed that religious and civil liberty were inextricably linked. Both the temporal and the eternal happiness of Americans depended on their gaining independence from England. In fact, religion prospered the most in those nations that enjoyed political liberty and justice.
Witherspoon’s logic not only typified a large swath of Protestant colonists but also reflected a similar attitude toward religion even among America’s less than orthodox founders. When he deduced that the most zealous advocates of liberty were also the ones who were most active in promoting true religion, Witherspoon was asserting, in Christian idiom, the classical republican view that tied the prospects of liberty to the virtue of citizens. This Christian republicanism, according to Mark A. Noll, featured two ideas. First was the fear of the abuse of illegitimate power and second was an almost millennial belief in the benefits of liberty. For Protestants like Witherspoon—and the Revolution found its greatest clerical support from Calvinists in the Presbyterian and Congregationalist denominations—the best form of government was one that best preserved freedom, which would, in turn, nurture human flourishing. The flip side of this view was that any form of tyranny would be abusive both for persons and society. The critical contrasts in Christian republicanism, consequently, were virtue versus corruption, and liberty versus slavery. Protestants like Witherspoon conceded that liberty could also be abused. But this was why religion was all the more essential to a republican form of government. Virtue promoted freedom, and vice produced tyranny and social disorder. For the Protestants who supported the cause of freedom, religion was the only way to guarantee the kind of virtue on which freedom depended.
Christian republicanism was not only the logic of Protestant colonists, however. The American framers also believed that liberty required a virtuous citizenry and that virtue generally stemmed from religion. Thomas Jefferson was no favorite of many Calvinists who supported his Federalist opponents, but even he did not hesitate to affirm the new nation’s need for religion, such as in his 1801 inaugural address as president. There he declared, “Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own federal and republican principles. . . . enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them including honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overriding Providence, which by all its dispensation proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter.”
Jefferson’s faith in providence was a far cry from orthodox Protestantism. But it was not explicitly hostile to Christianity, especially with the qualifications supplied by clergy like Witherspoon. Jefferson himself maintained “a more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen” than the teachings of Jesus. Similar affirmations of faith came from Jefferson’s political opponents, such as John Adams, who was not much more orthodox in his Christian affirmation than the Virginian. In 1813 Adams wrote to Jefferson that “The general principles, on which the Fathers achieved independence, were . . . the general Principles of Christianity, in which all these Sects were United. . . .” The basis for Adams’s positive assessment of Christianity drew directly on the fusion of Protestant and republican thought; religion and virtue supplied the only true foundation for a republican form of government and political liberty.
To be sure, these appeals to Christianity by American statesmen not known for their doctrinal precision should not be read, as American Protestants have sometimes interpreted them, as an indication of U.S. Christian origins. Nor is it clear that Protestants like Witherspoon were theologically within their rights to endorse the Revolution on Christian or Protestant grounds. But the lure of Christian republicanism to both the orthodox and heterodox patriots is significant for understanding why the American Revolution avoided an anticlerical or antireligious thrust. The widespread claim that republicanism and liberty depended upon virtue, and its corollary that tyranny was fundamentally incompatible with virtue, provided all the leverage believers and skeptics needed to find a place for religion in the new republic. As long as that connection existed, the orthodox could look on the skeptical as friendly to the churches and believers; and at the same time, as long as believers promoted virtue—as opposed to dogma—as the necessary ingredient for liberty’s success, the skeptical among the framers could regard the churches and their members as benevolent partners in the enterprise of founding a free and well-ordered republic.
Religious complications to the American founding emerged almost as soon as George Washington secured the terms of peace from Lord Cornwall at Yorktown. In the debates leading up to the Constitution, Protestants did not worry that the federal government required no religious tests for office or refused to establish Christianity as the state’s religion. The federal government’s powers were so restricted that the Constitution’s lack of religious provisions were thoroughly in keeping with the expectation that state governments would oversee the lion’s share of general welfare within their borders. Furthermore, the framers regarded the maintenance of established churches at the state level as an appropriate outworking of the relations between state and federal sovereignty. Even so, older fears of the Church of England gaining a foothold through the creation of an American bishop, which had contributed to some churches’ support for independence from Great Britain, led Protestants eventually to question the wisdom of ecclesiastical establishments also at the state level. Consequently, while Protestants may not have objected to a federal Constitution free from religious tests, some were less than content with religious regulations within their own states.
The processes by which established churches in Virginia and Massachusetts lost their privileged status are instructive for understanding how the logic that informed federal developments could trickle down to the local level. In Virginia, revivalist Protestantism and Enlightenment political theory combined to undermine the Episcopal establishment inherited from the colonial era. Revivalist dissatisfaction with church-state patterns in Virginia went back to the Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century, when itinerant evangelists had been imprisoned for upsetting the social order because of their ministry outside the bounds of the Episcopal order. What is more, all ministers not in the Episcopal Church were required to assent to 34 of the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles in order to lead worship legally. Even then, only Episcopal priests were allowed to perform marriages. At the same time, citizens were taxed by local vestries to pay for the services of the Episcopal churches. Dissenters, of course, relied on the generosity of their own congregations.
The arguments against preferential treatment for Episcopalians took two forms. On the one hand, dissenting Protestants deduced that by incorporating a particular denomination the state had usurped Christ’s own rule within the church. For instance, Virginia Presbyterians adopted a resolution in 1776 that called on the legislature to overturn all religious establishments, and to abolish taxes that violated liberty of conscience. Disestablishment would properly define the true relationship between civil and ecclesiastic authority. It would also do justice to Christ’s own status as the sole legislator and governor of the church. Baptists argued in a similar vein and urged the Virginia assembly to recognize that because Christ’s kingdom was not of this world it could not properly be regulated by the state. Baptists also argued that favoring one denomination above all others was unjust and at odds with Virginia’s bill of rights.
On the other hand, the language of rights echoed a less Christian and more libertarian argument about freedom of thought. The Virginia Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom (1786), written by Jefferson, appealed to the politics of liberty even if it also claimed to know the mind of the Creator. This bill, which proved influential on debates leading to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, asserted the principle of freedom of thought and disdained any attempt to coerce beliefs or ideas by legislation or state power. In fact, to bind anyone’s conscience was a violation of the law of nature as well as the law of liberty. Although the language of the Virginia legislation clearly appealed to dissenting Protestants when it insisted that God did not intend to propagate Christianity by state coercion, its appeal to human reason was different from Baptist and Presbyterian arguments for religious freedom. In the latter case, revivalist Protestants were more likely to claim the sincerity of faith or the religion of the heart than freedom of thought on behalf of religious freedom and ecclesiastical disestablishment. Even so, the logic of revivalism and the Enlightenment combined in Virginia to place religious faith in the category of freedom of thought and expression. Those who advocated either a rational religion or a zealous Protestantism joined hands to conclude that the civil magistrate had no appropriate power to intrude into the arena of privately held beliefs and opinions.
Disestablishment of the Congregationalist churches in Massachusetts, the state-church system that lasted the longest of any—until 1833—stemmed less from the logic of freedom of expression than from internal conflicts within the churches themselves. The state’s constitution of 1779 did provide for religious freedom but also, in Article III, empowered towns to raise taxes in support of teachers of religion—in other words, pastors—who would produce the instruction necessary for a religious and virtuous citizenry. This provision allowed the Congregationalist churches to continue to receive state support because of the preponderance of Congregationalists in the state.
But the Congregationalist churches encountered a double threat from opposite sides of the Protestant spectrum that threatened their established position. Baptists voiced objections to a system that forced them to pay taxes to support Congregationalist ministers. Like their counterparts in Virginia, New England Baptists were also supporters of revivalism and, in some cases, had run afoul of the established order by conducting religious services without legal permission. On the other side of the spectrum were liberal Congregationalists, the forerunners of Unitarianism, who continued to receive state support despite objections from Trinitarian Congregationalists, who believed the legislature should fund only orthodox faith. (The division between the two parties became so great when Unitarians in 1805 took control of theological instruction at Harvard University that orthodox rivals in 1808 founded Andover Seminary to counter the spread of false teaching from Cambridge.)
These two sets of circumstances—a dissenting group of Protestants who objected to a state church and a theological rift within the established church itself—generated a series of court cases during the 1820s and forced Massachusetts to abandon tax support for the standing Congregationalist order. Even so, Massachusetts absorbed disestablishment with relative ease by relying on the public school system, created by school reformer Horace Mann, to provide the religious instruction that the state needed.
Disestablishment could have been a threat to Protestantism in the United States had the sort of anti-clericalism experienced in France accompanied the American form of separating church and state. But because political leaders typically couched disestablishment in the language of neutrality to all Protestant denominations, the process of disentangling church and state proved to be a tremendous boon to spiritual vitality in the United States (and continues to account for the ironic combination of America’s secular political order and its unprecedented levels of religious observance among western societies). By weaning the church from the financial nurture of the state, church leaders needed to draw support directly from the faithful. This environment gave an advantage to the most entrepreneurial of denominations in the new competition for adherents and financial support. In particular, Methodists and Baptists, who had already learned to exist without state aid, benefitted indirectly from religious disestablishment because of skills honed in the work of itinerancy and promoting revivals. In fact, disestablishment was a boon to revivalistic Protestantism.
Of course, revivalism was not new to America. The First Great Awakening (1740s), led by the revivalist George Whitefield with support from the likes of Jonathan Edwards and Gilbert Tennent, had already popularized the practice of itinerancy—that is, the traveling evangelist who preaches anywhere, including fields, town markets, and meeting houses without regard for church etiquette or legal sanctions. For Methodists and Baptists, however, the practice of conducting revivals and recruiting new members was not the exception but the rule. Indeed, the zeal for holiness and conversion that Methodist and Baptist forms of Protestantism encouraged sprang directly from the logic of conversion and the subsequent demand for holy living. In contrast to formal and apparently stuffy clergy trained in universities and colleges, revivalism opened the ministry to a host of lay itinerants adept at speaking the language of people well outside the influence of the older and established churches. In turn, these itinerants also provided the building blocks of a denominational structure that emerged in the early nineteenth century for Methodists and Baptists with loosely established networks and associations. These institutional forms gave a collective identity to populist denominations that stretched from the eastern seaboard to the expanding western frontier both in the North and the South.
Membership statistics from the era underscore the capacity of revivalism to adapt and thrive in the new circumstances of disestablishment. The most aggressively revivalist denominations grew the fastest, leaving the older and more established ones behind. Congregationalists and Presbyterians at the time of the American Revolution, for example, constituted approximately 40 percent of religious adherents in the United States (20 and 19 percent, respectively), while Baptists (17 percent) and Methodists (3 percent) were only half the size of the Calvinist denominations at the time of the Declaration of Independence. But after the war for independence and the new church-state order took form, Methodists and Baptists outpaced their Protestant competitors. In 1850 Methodists were the largest denomination, at 34 percent of American Protestants, and Baptists were the next largest American Protestant church with a membership of 20 percent of the Protestant whole. In contrast, by 1850 Congregationalists had fallen to 4 percent, and Presbyterians to 12 percent. The reasons for the growth among Methodists and Baptists and the decline of Calvinistic denominations are numerous. But the dynamic of disestablishment combined with the innovation and expansionist impulses of revivalism were crucial to the change in fortunes of these denominations. The success of Methodists and Baptists also demonstrated an unintended consequence of separating church and state—namely, that without the support and especially the oversight of government, churches could flourish in ways previously unimaginable.
Even if the Congregationalist and Presbyterian religions suffered in popularity during the antebellum period, they made up for numerical inferiority with associational superiority. After 1820, the United States was awash in a sea of voluntary societies that further complicated the relationship between religion and politics. Not only did disestablishment create a religious vacuum that revivalist-inspired Protestants filled with amazing efforts to plant churches on the expanding western frontier, but the lack of political and social structures in the new nation created an opening for religiously inspired political activism. Protestants in the Northeast, especially New England Congregationalists, responded with a vast array of voluntary associations designed to Christianize the new nation in a variety of ways. Most of these organizations received support and inspiration from the religious zeal of the Second Great Awakening, a series of revivals during the 1820s and 1830s whose principal agent was Charles Grandison Finney. These revivals and the reforms they animated gave the new society a semblance of order. They were not simply a religious but also a social response to unsettled and expanding conditions. In effect, the voluntary associations of the Second Great Awakening, also known as the Benevolent Empire, became the mechanism for civilizing life on the frontier with the “proper” ways of the East.
Some of these voluntary associations were more explicitly religious than social or political. For instance, Congregationalists, with help from northern Presbyterians, established organizations for the inexpensive production and distribution of religious materials such as Bibles and tracts. Other associations provided means for the education of clergy and for supporting the establishment of new churches in the Northwest Territory. But religious voluntary societies encouraged a widespread perception of the United States as a republic that conformed to Christian ideals. This conviction led to a number of humanitarian efforts to reform prisons, hospitals, establish schools, and train teachers for schools. A desire for a wholesome, well-ordered, and devout society also prompted revivalistic Protestants to insert themselves into the political process.
Sometimes the religious zeal of revivalistic Protestants had a direct influence on public policy and the electoral process. Some Protestant social crusades were of a limited duration and particular to a specific region of the country. Some started and gained momentum in the antebellum era only to see their greatest influence in a later period. And some substantially changed the face of party politics. In each case, the Protestant political muscle showed that disestablishment could lead to entanglements of religion and politics far thornier than the architects of separating church and state had ever contemplated.
In the category of Protestant political reforms that were limited to a specific time and place stand both the Sabbatarian-inspired opposition to Sunday mails and the Anti-Mason movement. Opposition to post offices staying open on Sundays surfaced as early as 1809, when Hugh Wylie, the postmaster of Washington, Pennsylvania, and an elder in the Presbyterian Church, was disciplined by his church for keeping the post office open on the day of Christian worship. The U.S. postmaster general, Gideon Granger, responded, in 1810, by orchestrating legislation that required all of the nation’s 2,300 post offices to remain open for business seven days a week. The issue of Sunday mails resurfaced at the time of the Second Great Awakening when Protestants formed the General Union for the Promotion of the Christian Sabbath, which launched a petition campaign to persuade Congress to repeal the 1810 Postal Act, in addition to calling for a boycott of all businesses that operated on Sundays. The effort generated over 900 petitions. But the arguments, many of which appealed to the nation’s Christian origins, failed to change federal law. The chairman of the Senate Committee on the Post Office and Post Roads, Richard M. Johnson, argued persuasively against the petitions, and post offices continued to remain open on Sundays throughout the nineteenth century.
Anti-Masonry also emerged from Protestant objections to church members belonging to secret societies and from widespread fears of conspiracy that such secrecy encouraged. In the minds of many Protestants, secret societies were pagan in origin, smacked of Roman Catholic hierarchy, and undermined true religion. In 1826 the cover-up of the murder of a defector from the Masonic Order led to the creation of America’s first powerful third party. Anti-Masons called on American voters to drive Masons out of elected office. For them, Freemasonry was a privileged elite that lacked accountability to the nation’s republican institutions. Their antagonistic platform was hardly a stable foundation for a successful party. Even so, the Anti-Masonic Party ran its own candidate for president in 1832, William Wirt, and proved disruptive to the National Republican Party’s fortunes in the North.
Eventually the populism of Anti-Masonry would find an outlet in the Whig Party’s opposition to Andrew Jackson’s apparent disregard for legal and constitutional norms. For Whigs, Jackson’s expropriation of Indian land violated a proper Christian regard for existing treaties, and his banking policies constituted a swindling of the American republic by disregarding the obligations of contracts.
In contrast to these brief and focused episodes of partisan politics inspired by Protestant devotion, temperance was a social reform that began during the middle decades of the nineteenth century and would not succeed on a national level until the early twentieth century. Again, the reasons drew heavily on Protestant understandings of self-control and biblical commands against drunkenness. The organizational spirit of the Second Great Awakening generated numerous voluntary associations with active local societies, large membership, and many tracts and journals. During the 1840s, an argument for moderation and against drunkenness turned into a brief for total abstinence as the only solution to the nation’s lack of temperance. New associations emerged that reflected this shift in rationale: the Independent Order of Good Templars, the Sons of Temperance, the Templars of Honor and Temperance and, after the Civil War, the Anti-Saloon League, and the Prohibition Party.
Demand for abstinence led to the first legislation to ban the sale and distribution of alcohol. In 1851 Maine took the lead in passing laws to ban the sale of alcohol except for medicinal and manufacturing purposes. By 1855, 12 states had passed similar measures. Prohibition proved to be a divisive issue and spawned a number of independent parties and political candidates at the state level, especially in Ohio and New York but also in Delaware and Maryland. Neither Whigs nor Democrats were skillful enough to shepherd evangelical temperance demands for party gains. In fact, evangelical dissatisfaction with both Whigs and Democrats over temperance fueled the appeal in the 1850s of the American Party.
As volatile as temperance, Anti-Masonry, and Sabbatarianism were for American politics during the antebellum era, antislavery and anti-Catholicism proved that the separation of church and state was incapable of adjudicating the demands of either religious-inspired reforms or Protestant-based defenses of a republican order. The radical antislavery movement emerged among revivalist Protestants during the 1830s, citing slavery as the gravest example of the young nation’s compromise with sin. Charles Finney, the greatest revivalist of the era, spoke out vociferously against slavery and added vigor to an emerging abolitionist movement. But the demands for immediate emancipation proved divisive among even those who opposed slavery. Some abolitionists split from the American Colonization Society in 1838 and then the American Anti-Slavery Society a few years later. Voluntary societies were not the only casualties; Methodists and Baptists split along sectional lines in 1844 over demands to condemn slavery.
With its failure to unite Protestants, the antislavery movement found other political outlets that stemmed more from rising sectionalism than from moral rectitude. Free-soil spokespersons and Northerners opposed to the expansion of slavery in the West became prominent allies of the movement. In turn, third parties emerged that sapped the electoral strength of both the Whigs and the Democrats. The Liberty Party significantly hurt the Whigs by attracting enough votes to prevent the election of Henry Clay in 1844. The Democrats were not immune from antislavery attempts, at least in the North. The Free Soil Party upended the Democrats in 1848 and pointed forward to the emergence of the Republican Party.
If Protestants lost the chance to rally around the antislavery cause in the pursuit of righteous politics, the increasing presence of Roman Catholics in the United States gave them another opportunity for unity. But anti-Catholicism, which turned primarily on older arguments about the affinity between Protestantism and republicanism, further unraveled the two-party system dominated by Whigs and Democrats. Protestant hostility was steeped in religious disputes and wars going back to the English Civil War of the 1640s and Whig hostility to the Stuart monarchy fueled antagonism to Roman Catholicism. During the 1830s and 1840s, anti-Catholicism became politically explicit as white American Protestants reacted to economic uncertainty and political upheaval.
In 1845 the founding of the Order of the Star Spangled Banner tapped these hostilities. Originally a secret society whose aim was to prevent immigrants and Roman Catholics from holding elected office, this association eventually blossomed into the Know-Nothing Party, nicknamed for its response to questions about the party and efforts to maintain its secrecy. Between 1854 and 1855, the party was one of the fastest growing in the United States, and it tapped voters in both the North and the South. By 1856 it had adopted the name the American Party and had sapped enough of the Whig Party’s support for many to think the American Party’s presidential nominee, Millard Fillmore, might have a chance in the general election. But again the issue of bringing slavery into the territories could not prevent the American Party from splitting, with many of its northern members deserting to the Republican Party.
Although evangelicals faulted the American Party for its initial secrecy and intolerance of foreign-born Americans, anti-Catholicism was an important piece of a religiously inspired defense of republicanism. In fact, Roman Catholicism shared qualities with slavery and alcohol that it made anti-Catholicism a plausible prejudice for those committed to antislavery and temperance. Native Protestants easily associated drinking with Roman Catholics because the cultures from which many of the new immigrants came—those of Ireland and Germany—encouraged the consumption of alcohol, not to mention that Rome had never countenanced a policy of abstinence. Protestants also noted resemblances between slavery and Roman Catholicism because of the latter’s hierarchical system of church government and the obedience that Rome demanded (at least on paper) of church members. Protestantism was considered the most republican form of Christianity while Rome stood for thralldom and dependence.
The net effect of religion on America’s Second Party System was to show the inadequacies of the arrangement if not to unravel it all together. Religious-based reforms inspired new parties during the three decades before the Civil War that often wooed away voters from the Whigs and Democrats. In addition, the moral dilemma of slavery caused splits within the established parties along regional lines. In 1852 Whigs, Democrats, and the Free Soil Party each supported their own candidates in the presidential election. In 1856 the third party to run alongside Whigs and Democrats was the Republican Party. And in 1860, four candidates ran for the presidency—two Democrats (northern and southern), one Constitutional Union, and one Republican. By 1860 the Whigs no longer existed and the Democrats were seriously divided. Economic and political circumstances would have made the longevity of the Whig-Democrat system unlikely. But religion added significantly to the political instability that the parties and their candidates tried to negotiate.
In the years between the Declaration of Independence and the outbreak of the Civil War, the United States emerged as a formally secular political order that was informally one of the most religious societies in the West. Although apparently in fundamental tension, secular politics and religious zeal turned out to be almost directly proportional. The disestablishment of Christianity, what some have called de-Christianization, was actually immensely useful for the popularity of religion in the United States. And yet, the religious fervor that Americans displayed between 1776 and 1865 did not prove as advantageous for America’s political leaders. At times, faith could perform remarkable assistance in American public life. But it also proved especially difficult to govern and invariably competed with the major political parties for Americans’ allegiance. Ironically, by conceding that religion is a private matter that government should not coerce, America’s founders also established conditions that allowed religion to be even more politically potent than it was in those states where the churches were still established.
FURTHER READING. John C. Abbott and Russell H. Conwell, Lives of the Presidents of the United States of America, 1882; Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Antebellum Politics, 1993; Thomas J. Curry, The First Freedoms: Church and State in America to the Passage of the First Amendment, 1986; C. C. Goen, Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denominational Schisms and the Coming of the Civil War, 1985; Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, 1999; Philip Hamburger, The Separation of Church and State, 2002; Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, 1989; Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of American Whigs, 1973; Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790, 1982; Curtis D. Johnson, Redeeming America: Evangelicals and the Road to the Civil War, 1993; Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case against Religious Correctness, 1997; William G. McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1630–1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State, 2 vols., 1971; Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, 2002; Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War, revised ed., 1980.
D. G. HART
Religious institutions were among the most influential forces shaping American culture and society from 1865 to 1945. Every major religious group experienced tremendous growth in numbers and institutional might in this period even as Protestantism, the largest and most influential religious group in 1864, lost its prominence in the public arena after 1920.
By the beginning of the Civil War, the power of religion in America was perhaps best expressed in its theological and political ideals and its cultural influence rather than its actual numerical dominance. Only about 25 percent of Americans were members of religious institutions at the time of the Civil War, and the majority of those belonged to Protestant institutions. Nevertheless, most Americans—Protestants, Catholics, and those belonging to smaller groups like Jews, spiritualists, and others—adhered to a fairly uniform set of assumptions. Beyond a simple belief in God, most assumed God was a personal being involved in the intricacies of human life who intended that humans adhere to moral certainties that were easily discerned through revelation or common sense, and that life as a member of a family, community, and nation connected to God’s providence. Moreover, even though only about one-fourth of Americans were formal members of religious institutions, far more attended local congregations, read religious literature, attended schools that promoted religious belief, or were conversant in biblical or Christian theological ideas. Even Native Americans, who practiced non-European religions, interacted with Christianity in degrees ranging from conversion to syncretism to rejection.
If religious Americans of European origin held to these general theological assumptions, most also believed America—and, most important, its Republican or Democratic political ideals and institutions—marked the highest stage of God’s providential development of human beings. For religious Americans—in the North or the South; slave or free; Protestant, Catholic, Jew, theosophist, or do-it-yourselfer—the lineaments of religious belief, philosophy, political and economic activity, family, and community were almost seamless. To be religious was to be American; to be American was to be religious.
As those who believed God’s providence established the United States as a “city on a hill,” religious Americans were also aware of the difficulties in discerning and then living up to that providential plan. Seen most clearly in the antebellum dispute over slavery but also in the anti-Catholicism (among Protestants), anti-Mormonism, and temperance movements, as well as other causes that enlisted the debate and activity of religious Americans, commitments to common sense–based certainty and patriotic millennialism drove Christians into conflict that ranged from anti-Catholic violence to the Civil War itself.
By 1865, then, Americans still held to these essential theological and political ideals but faced both the consequences of having pushed those ideals to bloodshed as well as the need to address an emerging American landscape that would look increasingly different from the one in 1860. Specifically, religious Americans addressed and adapted themselves and their institutions to the most important historical trends of this period: migrations of people westward within America, and immigration into America from overseas; urbanization; industrialization; war and the emergence of America as a world power; and new patterns of thought such as pragmatism, theological liberalism/modernism, and evolution.
Shaping such connections among religion, politics, and society between 1865 and 1945 was the striking and unprecedented numerical growth among religious groups in America, which was marked by growing institutional predominance with centralization and professionalization, increasing diversity in terms of new religious belief, ethnicity, and schisms within older religious groups, and new theological, philosophical, and social ideas emerging from the engagement with urbanization and new intellectual patterns. Because of such growth in real numbers and influence, if it was not the case before the Civil War, it became increasingly the case afterward that America was, if not a “Christian nation,” then certainly a nation of believers.
In 1865 the majority of American churchgoers remained affiliated with Protestant denominations, and this remained true up to 1945, as these denominations grew at extraordinary rates. Methodists, the largest Protestant denomination in 1860 with about 2 million members, grew to about 5.5 million members in 1900 and then to just under 12 million in 1950. Baptists grew from 1 million to 4.5 million to 15 million in that same period, passing Methodists as the largest Protestant denomination. Other Protestant denominations such as the Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Disciples of Christ grew in similar scale.
At the same time, however, non-Protestant or groups on the fringes of Protestantism grew in like manner, challenging Protestant hegemony. Roman Catholics, for example, became the largest single Christian religious body in the nation before the Civil War, with just under 5 million adherents. Catholic numbers exploded due to post–Civil War immigration to approximately 10 million by 1900 and well over 20 million by 1950. Likewise, Holiness and Pentecostal denominations (Church of God in Christ, Church of God–Cleveland Tennessee, Church of the Nazarene, Assemblies of God, and others) emerged at the turn of the century; drawing on older traditions of moral certitude, a belief in the human perfection, and the experience of religious ecstasy, along with speaking in tongues and healing, they forged a movement that by the end of the twentieth century was probably the most pervasive and dynamic Christian body worldwide, claiming 100 million and possibly as high as 500 million adherents. This movement would provide the backbone of the religious right of the late twentieth century. Like Pentecostals, Eastern Orthodoxy (primarily Russian and Greek), the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and eastern religions (especially Buddhism and Confucianism), grew between 1865 and 1945, but did so especially after 1945.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also saw the emergence of spiritualist and adventist groups. Though these groups were often rooted in antebellum patterns of thought, groups such as the Christian Science movement of Mary Baker Eddy, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Theosophical Society of Madame H. P. Blavatsky, Mesmerism, and other mind cures or loosely Christian adventists prospered in the twentieth century and, in some cases, especially overseas. Sometimes, as in the case of Christian Science and its Christian Science Monitor, these groups exerted a political and social influence beyond their actual number of adherents.
American Judaism also prospered and grew in this period. Before the 1890s, most American Jews were of German origin and clustered in cities such as Cincinnati, Ohio, or Charleston, South Carolina. These were often Reform Jews who mitigated the strictures of the Torah according to American cultural, political, and social customs. Immigration from Eastern Europe, and especially Russia, brought the number of Jews in the United States to nearly 1 million by 1900, and then to about 5 million by 1950. These Eastern European Jews saw immigration as a means to exercise their religious practices freely; hence, many of these immigrants established conservative or orthodox synagogues as they sought initially to be faithful Jews rather than assimilated Americans.
Finally, Native American religious belief systems declined in the number of adherents throughout the second half of the nineteenth century through Christian missionary activity, persecution, and privatization of Native American lands under the 1887 Dawes Severalty Act or syncretism with or conversion to Christianity. One prominent example of such syncretism was the Ghost Dance movement of the Plains Indians, which, as taught by the Piute prophet Wovoka, merged Christian patterns of millennialism with traditional Native American religious beliefs, teaching that participation in a series of rituals (the Ghost Dance) would hasten a millennial world as well as happiness in the here and now. The movement was suppressed by the 1890s, most infamously at the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. Native American religion experienced revival, however, under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which not only restored tribal lands and governance but encouraged the practice of traditional religions.
As noted, the swell of immigration that lasted from the 1870s to the 1920s from China (until the Exclusion Act of 1882), Japan, and Europe led to tremendous growth among certain groups—Roman Catholics, Jews, and Lutherans especially. But immigration had other consequences as well, for as many immigrants connected ethnicity to religion, some religious groups experienced fragmentation along ethnic lines. For example, Swedes, Norwegians, and other immigrants from Scandinavia established their own Lutheran bodies, while Catholics from Poland, Portugal, Austria, Italy, Germany, Bohemia, and elsewhere solidified their own parish identities and regularly fought with the established Irish leadership for control; one extreme example was the establishment of the Polish National Catholic Church in 1904. Jewish immigration also led to fragmentation as Jewish synagogues aligned themselves along three lines: Reform (generally Americanized Jews from previous immigrations), Conservative, and Orthodox (the latter two made up largely of immigrants arriving after 1890).
Another way that ethnicity connected to religion was in the way some Protestants connected Roman Catholicism (and, later in the early twentieth century, Judaism) to ethnicity in periodic outbreaks of nativism. As far back as the Puritan era, many Protestants had opposed, sometimes with violence, Catholics on theological and—especially in the antebellum period—political grounds, arguing that Catholic allegiance to the Papacy threatened the basis of American Democracy. After the Civil War, this theological or political anti-Catholicism—most often expressed in struggles over public funding for Catholic education—combined with fears of urbanization and xenophobia in the form of nativism. Nativists, many of whom were explicitly Protestant, blamed immigrants—especially Catholic and Jewish immigrants—for the vices of cities, local political corruption (bossism), radical political ideas, and a perceived shift in America away from its Protestant culture. Nativist activity was especially prominent in the 1890s and 1920s and expressed institutionally through the American Protective Association (APA) in the late nineteenth century and the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.
As all these religious groups grew in number they also organized themselves along the lines of the emerging corporate culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, borrowing the language and concepts of centralization and efficiency to create some of the most prominent and powerful institutions in the country. Protestant denominations, Roman Catholic dioceses, Spiritualists, Buddhists, and even Native Americans (who formed the Native American Church in 1918 to legally protect the use of peyote) centralized the governance of their own institutions, professionalized their clerical ranks, established colleges, graduate schools, and seminaries or divinity schools, and funneled money into clerical pensions and especially missionary activities at home and abroad and to social services. Much of this centralization took place within denominational structures already in place; Protestant denominations, Mormons, Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others funded missionaries, especially to China and Asia in the twentieth century; Roman Catholics founded the Catholic Foreign Missionary Society in 1911 in Maryknoll, New York, which focused on Central and South America. Catholics also established the National Catholic Welfare Conference (originating in 1917 as the National Catholic War Council), which, under Monsignor John A. Ryan, voiced the needs of the poor among Catholics. Missionary activities, especially in China, the Philippines, and Central and South America, dovetailed in friendly or hostile ways with growing American military and commercial interests abroad.
Along with denominational initiatives, organizations such as the Federal Council of Churches (1908) and the Synagogue Council (1926) established organizational ties across institutions. More important, though, organizations outside denominational and church institutions also organized with great efficiency and impact. Rooted in the volunteer societies of the antebellum period, national religious groups formed to address specific problems or to engage in missionary work. Some of the most prominent were the Young Men’s (and Women’s) Christian Associations (YMCA and YWCA), which strove to protect young men and women from the vices of city life; the Student Volunteer Movement, founded by John R. Mott, which sent young college graduates overseas as missionaries; the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) led by Frances Willard; the Knights of Columbus, which provided mutual aid for Roman Catholics; the Salvation Army, from England; the Catholic Worker movement (1933) of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, countless rural and urban holiness, Pentecostal, and apostolic groups that preached the Gospel in farming communities or storefront churches and also provided assistance to the poor; and the organizations, conferences, and schools that grew up around the most prominent independent preachers of the period such as Dwight L. Moody and Billy Sunday. These groups and personalities often competed with denominations in terms of loyalty and impact.
Even though the memberships of most religious bodies included more women than men, those that were extensions of denominations and churches, as well as most independent organizations, retained an almost completely male leadership and clergy. There were exceptions to this such as Christian Science and some holiness/Pentecostal groups. Women often organized or held prominent roles in organizations and missionary endeavors existing alongside these churches; the WCTU or Catholic Worker movement are prominent examples. The early twentieth century saw some movement toward ordination of women among Protestants, but most movement in this direction occurred after 1945. The Catholic Sisters, however, were at the heart of Catholic educational life and benevolence.
At the turn of the century, much of the activity of these and other institutions focused on alleviating the “social problem”—meaning urban poverty, political corruption (especially at the local level), and labor unrest. While in the antebellum period, volunteer societies had addressed issues like abolition and temperance, between the 1880s and the end of World War I, Protestants and many Catholics adopted what has come to be called the Social Gospel (though at the time religious leaders used the name “Applied Christianity”).
For religious Americans, the “social problem,” which came to prominence with Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1891) and Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879), involved urban poverty and its attendant vices, which were often associated with Catholic or Jewish immigrants. For this reason, some Social Gospel advocates were implicitly or explicitly nativist or promoted Anglo-Saxon superiority (Josiah Strong and his Our Country [1885], for example).
Often, too, the social problem was connected to the specter of “class warfare,” the assumption being that if economic conditions in American cities fell to the point of “European conditions,” America would find itself in a war between the middle class and the politically radicalized “masses.” To stay the advance of such a class war, many religious Americans turned to older forms of benevolence—assisting the poor, fighting alcohol consumption, and so on. Those who adopted the Social Gospel, however, employed the new social science of sociology; social scientific theories of education, liberal, or modernist theology; and forms of social evolution—in short, progressivism—to forge a systemic approach to urban poverty, education, and work. Social Gospel advocates like Walter Rauschenbusch, Washington Gladden, and Richard T. Ely wanted clerics trained in the social sciences to use political and educational means to alter systems of vice, oppression, and urban corruption in order to end the social problem. In their minds, such political and otherwise practical endeavors would introduce the Kingdom of God—a new social and political system based on love and justice—to the world. This movement was especially prominent in cities outside the South and in Protestant divinity schools.
Even though Protestants were more visible in organizing activities associated with the Social Gospel, Catholics, too, engaged in such thought, often with a more radical edge. Based on the criticism of capitalism and call for social justice in Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical letter Rerum Novarum (Of New Things), which was restated in 1931 when Pope Pius XI issued Quadragesimo Anno (In the Fortieth Year), groups like the Catholic Worker movement put social action in place that was in some ways more radical that Protestants. The Catholic Worker movement associated with radical political and intellectual movements and explicitly challenged a belief in capitalism.
After World War I, as intellectuals gradually dismissed many of the progressive ideals touting human progress and perfectibility through education and reform, the ideals of the Social Gospel gave way in seminaries, universities, and divinity schools, at least among Protestants, to the theological “Neo-Orthodoxy” of the 1930s and 1940s. This Neo-Orthodoxy, which drew on the thinking of Swiss Theologian Karl Barth and Americans Reinhold Niebuhr and H. Richard Niebuhr, professed little confidence in human perfection, stressing instead, and in different ways, the transcendent gap between God (or philosophical ideals) and the mire of the human condition.
The growth and centralization of institutional life also brought about fragmentation and schism among Protestants just as pressures from immigration brought schism to American Judaism and Catholicism. In the late nineteenth century, many Protestants, especially in the Upper South and Midwest, drew on the same fears about centralization and hierarchy that had earlier produced groups like the Disciples of Christ and Primitive Baptists. Many rural practitioners worried that the new institutions favored leaders from larger urban churches, while others worried that centralized plans for setting amounts and distributing missionary funds were inherently antidemocratic. Often these concerns coupled with theological emphases on holiness, antimissionary Calvinism, or religious ecstasy to produce a number of separatist groups that formed their own denominations. Already mentioned are the holiness and Pentecostal groups, black and white, that formed with these emphases; other important Protestant groups included Landmark Baptists and the Churches of Christ, which split from the Disciples of Christ. Similar struggles in ethnic churches pitted those who wished to retain Old World languages and theological emphases against those who more openly embraced the English language and American intellectual and political ideals. Such tensions were especially strong among certain Lutherans and Dutch Calvinists. Catholics, too, struggled between allegiance to the worldwide church with it Eurocentric emphases, practices, and ideals, and allegiance to American ideals such as congregational autonomy and the separation of church and state. This struggle in America often paralleled European struggles between liberal and ultramontane leaders and theologians. Supporters of Ultramontane Catholicism, drawing on Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (1864), generally condemned political liberalism and the separation of church and state.
The major Protestant denominations in the North (Presbyterians, Methodists, remained separated as northern and southern bodies until 1983 and 1939, respectively) experienced schism most acutely in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy that extended roughly from the Presbyterian heresy trial of Charles A. Briggs in 1892 to the Scopes Trial of 1925. Other denominations, because they were decentralized (such as the Lutherans) or more uniform theologically (as with southern denominations and Roman Catholics), avoided this schism over the control of denominations.
The fundamentalist-modernist controversy involved some elements of the concerns over centralization but focused more on theological and intellectual innovations that were sweeping the nation and on who would control denominational machinery—in particular, the governance of overseas missionaries and the divinity schools and seminaries.
Theological modernism emerged out of Europe—especially Germany—as well as from Unitarian and theologically experimental institutions of higher education in the United States. It challenged a number of traditional assumptions about the origins and content of the Old and New Testaments and especially the relationship of theology to science and philosophy. Higher criticism of the Bible challenged traditions of authorship and dating in biblical documents along with the historical verifiability of biblical events and persons. For many, higher criticism of the Bible undercut the claims of authority that Christians believed it held. Other thinkers challenged theological claims of Christian exclusivity in light of increasing knowledge of world religions. And the introductions of Darwinism, philosophical positivism, historicism, ethical pragmatism, and the ideas of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and others challenged traditional views concerning the unity of theology, philosophy, and science. Unlike the challenges to religion itself from science, skeptics, or atheists, modernist theology attempted to adapt modern thought and criticism to the basic tenets of Christianity in order to save it by modernizing it. Modernist thinkers also generally adopted social scientific views about human nature and society consistent with the Social Gospel. The impact of modernism was strongest in northern and mid-western denominations. Southern Protestants were more uniformly resistant to modernism, while the Roman Catholic hierarchy also resisted it.
As theological modernists became increasingly vocal and gained leadership in northern Protestant denominations, traditionalists began to challenge them. The first challenge to gain widespread notoriety was the trial of Charles A. Briggs in 1892. Briggs, a northern Presbyterian and professor of biblical literature at New York’s Union Seminary, was tried and acquitted of heresy by the Presbytery of New York for accepting certain tenets of higher criticism. At the same time, conservatives attempted to wrest control of missionary activities, fearing that modernists saw missions as an extension of the Social Gospel and therefore a program for social service rather than for preaching the gospel.
As the opponents to modernism coalesced, their leaders became known as “fundamentalists,” so named for a series of books called The Fundamentals, published from 1910 to 1917 and edited by A. C. Dixon and R. A. Torrey. Although conservatives, led by figures such as Dixon, Torrey, and J. Gresham Machen of Princeton Seminary eventually lost control over their denominations (many left to form their own), fundamentalism became a larger cultural and religious movement by the early 1920s. It fought not only theological modernism but the Social Gospel, Bolshevism, and—especially—evolution, all of which, taken together, were seen as leading to atheism and the destruction of American society. Along with being theologically conservative, many in the movement also expressed a belief in divine healing and holiness as well as dispensational premillennialism, which taught that the world would continue to get worse as Satan ruled the present dispensation of time; only when God removed Christians from the world would Jesus return, redeem the earth, and establish the millennium through direct intervention. This belief system ran counter to the earlier nineteenth-century postmillennialism that expected human beings to work with God in perfecting the earth and establishing the millennium—a belief that had prompted countless nineteenth-century reform movements, including abolitionism.
This stage of the fundamentalist movement peaked at the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in which William Jennings Bryan battled Clarence Darrow over John T. Scopes’s right to teach evolution in the schools. Bryan, arguing for the prosecution against Scopes, won the legal battle in Dayton, but fundamentalists lost the war for American culture, as media personalities such as H. L. Mencken and Reverend Henry Emerson Fosdick cast fundamentalists as rural yokels attempting to point Americans in a backward direction. Fundamentalist Protestants continued, however, to prosper, establishing radio ministries, Bible colleges, missionary endeavors, publications, and other institutions. Their numbers grew and their institutions strengthened throughout the middle of the twentieth century, even though their public voice was restricted largely to radio preaching. They were poised, however, to reappear with Billy Graham in the 1950s and later with conservative political movements.
Much of what characterized white religious activity also characterized that of African-American Christianity, but with some important exceptions. In the North, free blacks had formed their own denominations in the antebellum period, mostly in cities like Philadelphia and New York. The two most important were the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) churches, both of which experienced growth rates similar to other religious groups between 1865 and 1945.
Southern black religion developed in the crucible of slavery, so although the southern blacks shared certain beliefs with whites and northern blacks—conversion, baptism, and in some cases ecstatic worship—the historical context of slavery meant many shared beliefs took on profoundly different meanings. Furthermore, in the South, the black church became the central social and political institution for the developing African American community and culture.
Although introduced to Christianity by whites, slaves quickly made it their own as they developed the “secret institution”—secret meetings held in “brush harbors” beyond white control. These secret meetings provided sanctuary as slaves developed their own rituals and beliefs, selected their own leaders, and found release through religious ecstasy. Slaves also synthesized Christianity in varying degrees with African and Caribbean religious beliefs.
After 1865, African Americans quickly established churches free, as much as possible, from white control. Black Baptists, who developed into the largest body of black Christians, formed their own state conventions immediately after the Civil War, though they continued to utilize help from southern and northern whites (and eventually formed the National Baptist Convention). Black missionaries from the AME and AMEZ churches established congregations throughout the South, while southern whites helped draw some blacks into their own separate, white-controlled denominations such as the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. Catholic Parishes in the South typically followed this latter pattern.
As with white denominations in this period, such growth involved conflict that almost always had racial overtones. The two primary axes of conflict were between urban, middle-class blacks and rural blacks on the one hand, and conflict between blacks and northern and southern whites on the other. Many middle-class urban African Americans who attempted to earn cultural, social, and political equality through “respectability” produced increasing class tensions in the late nineteenth century within and among different churches as they saw poor, uneducated, and often rural blacks with their ecstatic worship and uneducated preachers as a hindrance to racial uplift. These class-related tensions fueled both intradenominational (localists versus denominational centralizers) and interdenominational warfare—especially between the more middle-class AME/AMEZ churches and the more rural Baptists. In terms of black/white tensions, blacks often needed northern whites’ resources but resented white control and paternalism. Also, southern whites offered blacks land, money, and education, but such benevolence was not only coupled with paternalism but white supremacy.
African American churches also became enclaves against the subtle or overt horrors of postbellum racism as they continued to nurture black leadership and to provide relief, mutual aid, and secondary and higher education. At the same time, the church functioned as the primary public sphere for black men and women in southern society through education, preaching, and moral reform designed to gain equality with whites. Black women were often at the forefront of these endeavors. Especially before the imposition of legal vote restriction and Jim Crow in the 1890s, for black men, and especially black preachers, the church provided the primary base for political involvement and mobilization aimed at securing suffrage and civil equality. Like white Protestants, blacks coupled their conceptions of spiritual freedom and equality with republican notions of individual and social freedom and American millennialism. This would become evident in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
By the turn of the century, black Baptists and various other independent congregations practiced a Pentecostal style of worship and ecstasy. Many African Americans also accepted the practices of healing, the second blessing, and the Baptism of the Holy Spirit common to Pentecostalism. By the middle of the twentieth century, black Pentecostal groups were the second largest group of black Christians behind the Baptists.
Through the twentieth century, even as white Protestant churches and denominations grew in number and strengthened denominational infrastructures, and influenced ideas, social patterns, laws (Prohibition), and the like, Protestantism also experienced an increasing alienation from and lack of influence in the public arenas it had dominated in the nineteenth century. It would be hard to call this phenomenon “secularization” in light of the institutional and numerical growth among not just Protestants but religious groups generally in this period. But in the realm of politics, arts, literature, and higher education, Protestant leaders gave way to other, often nonreligious ones. Partly because of the general cultural and intellectual assault on progressivism and the Social Gospel, partly as fallout from the Scopes trial, and partly from new models and criteria for professional achievement and celebrity, by the 1920s, Protestant ministers and theologians disappeared from state dinners and no longer oversaw large reform movements. They yielded to figures like Walter Lippmann, thinkers like John Dewey, and popular novelists regarding the moral instruction of the public, and turned public education over to teachers trained under Dewey’s educational ideas and secular leaders in institutions of higher education (exceptions would include Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, and by the 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.). All the while, Protestants shared the American public stage with Catholics, Jews, and village atheists like Mencken and Darrow. Ironically, even as Protestants, Catholics, and religious Americans in general experienced tremendous growth numerically and institutionally between 1865 and 1945, Protestants, who in 1860 held pervasive cultural and social sway over the nation, saw their influence decline.
FURTHER READING. Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion, 2007; Joel Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism, 1997; Jay Dolan, The American Catholic Experience, 1992; Edwin Scott Gaustad and Philip L. Barlow, eds., New Historical Atlas of Religion in America, 2001; Robert T. Handy, A Christian America, 1971; Paul Harvey, Freedom’s Coming, 2005; William R. Hutchison, Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900–1960, 1989; George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 1980; Martin Marty, Modern American Religion, 3 vols., 1986; John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History, 2003; Grant Wacker, Heaven Below, 2001; Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion, 1988.
JOE CREECH
The United States in the second half of the twentieth century was, paradoxically, both very secular and very religious. Like most other industrialized democracies, it conducted its daily business in a pragmatic and down-to-earth way. At the same time, however, most of its citizens believed that an omnipotent God was watching over them. While the church membership rate in Western Europe had dwindled to just 4 or 5 percent, in the United States it was still over 50 percent. American religion and politics, meanwhile, were linked in complex ways, even though the First Amendment to the Constitution specified their separation.
No aspirant to high political office could be indifferent to religious questions, and every school board in the country had to wrestle with the problem of what religious symbols and activities they should allow on their campuses without displeasing the Supreme Court. The evangelist Billy Graham befriended every president between Harry Truman and George W. Bush, and all of them valued his goodwill. As recently as 2007, the governor of Georgia held a meeting on the steps of his state capitol, during a drought, to beseech God for rain.
European sociologists early in the twentieth century predicted a continuous process of secularization for industrial societies, and the experience of most nations vindicated them. Why was the United States such an exception? Numerous theories were offered at the time. One was that the United States had such a diverse population, drawn from so many immigrant groups (voluntary and unfree), that religion was used to hold on to the vestiges of an older identity. Rural Italian immigrants, for example, had to turn themselves into urban industrial workers when they came to America and had to learn English, but they could still be Roman Catholics. A second theory was that a highly mobile population sought a proxy form of community and found it by joining churches as they moved from one city to the next. A third was that church-state separation, which denied state support to any church, forced religious leaders to act like businessmen, seeking out “customers” and making sure they offered a “product” to the liking of their clients; otherwise they would not get paid. A fourth, often advanced during an upsurge in religiosity in the 1950s, was that the fear of annihilation in a nuclear war was so intense that it drove anxious men and women back to churches and synagogues for reassurance. All these theories could find empirical support; together they went far to explain the anomalous American situation.
Many Americans perceived the cold war as a conflict of both political and religious significance, in which the United States, champion of religion, confronted “godless communism.” Emphasizing that America stood not just for democratic capitalism but also for religious freedom was a way of sharpening and clarifying the face-off. Among the organizations advocating militant anti-Communist policies in the 1950s was the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, whose leader, Fred Schwartz, regarded communism as a substitute religion, a horrible parody of Christianity. President Dwight Eisenhower inspired some observers and amused others by declaring that America itself made no sense without “a deeply held religious faith—and I don’t care what it is!” This was a way of affirming a point that was later made more formally by sociologist Robert Bellah: that America has a civil religion in addition to its citizens’ many particular religions. Eisenhower also authorized the inclusion of the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and the stamping of “In God We Trust” on currency.
The fact that America’s defense policy was based on nuclear deterrence added an apocalyptic dimension to the cold war. A nuclear war could do the kind of world-shattering damage that until then only God had been able to accomplish—and that he had promised Noah he would never do again after the great flood. Nuclear weapons themselves occasioned an anguished religious debate. Twenty-two Protestant theologians from the Federal Council of Churches declared that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was “morally indefensible.” The editors of the Catholic World agreed, adding that America had “struck the most powerful blow ever delivered against Christian civilization and the moral law.” The hardheaded neo-orthodox theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, a man highly respected among foreign policy makers, wrote in The Irony of American History (1952) that America had created for itself an intolerable paradox. Posing as the defender of Christian civilization, it was able to make good on the commitment only by threatening to use a weapon so fearsome, and so indiscriminate, that it would make a mockery of its users’ claim that they believed in a righteous and loving God.
The cold war standoff persisted through the 1950s as the United States underwent dynamic changes. None was more significant than the civil rights movement, whose activist phase began in late 1955 with the Montgomery bus boycott. Energized by the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Montgomery Improvement Association persuaded African Americans not to ride the city’s segregated buses until the company changed its seating policy. Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister, took command of the boycott and guided it to victory after nearly 13 months. A native of Atlanta whose father was also a prominent minister, King developed a superb preaching style. Boycott meetings in Montgomery were closely akin to religious revivals; hymn singing and his passionate sermons strengthened the boycotters’ sense of unity and determination to persist.
King went on to become a leader of the nationwide civil rights movement, which succeeded in prompting Congress, over the next decade, to abolish all legally enforced racial segregation and to guarantee the vote to African Americans for the first time since Reconstruction. He had the knack of linking immediate circumstances in the South to transcendent questions of religious significance, a skill demonstrated in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963), which compared his work to that of Jesus and St. Paul in the early Christian communities. It is no coincidence that King and nearly all the other early civil rights movement leaders (Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, Jesse Jackson, and others) were clergymen. Ministers enjoyed high status in the segregated African American community and often brokered agreements between whites and blacks. King, moreover, knew how to appeal to whites as well as blacks in a language drenched in biblical imagery—both races honored the scriptures. The fact that he was also able to achieve a high level of nonviolence gave his group, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the moral high ground, and worked effectively on the consciences of white voters.
The success of the civil rights movement was to have profound consequences not just for African Americans but also for the two main political parties. The Democrats’ electoral base had long been the white Solid South, but as southern blacks began to vote Democrat after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, growing numbers of southern whites began to switch their allegiance to the Republican Party. Party politics was also changed in 1960 by the election of a Roman Catholic, John F. Kennedy, to the presidency. The only other Catholic to run for the presidency up to that time, Al Smith, had been soundly beaten in the election of 1928, partly because southern whites, most of them evangelical Christians, had refused to vote for a Catholic. Anti-Catholicism had a long history in America by 1960, some of it lowbrow bigotry, symbolized by episodes of anti-Catholic rioting in nineteenth-century cities. It could also be refined and well read, however, as Paul Blanshard’s best-selling American Freedom and Catholic Power (1949) bore witness. Blanshard, whose book was favorably reviewed in all the mainstream media, argued that Catholics’ loyalty to an absolute monarch, the pope, overrode their loyalty to the nation, making them dubious citizens. He even suggested that Catholics, like Communists, were an internal fifth column, threatening the future of the republic. Kennedy, in the run-up to the 1960 election, appeared before a meeting of evangelical Protestant ministers in Houston and denied having divided loyalties. He later joked to advisors that it was unreasonable for Blanshard and others to suspect him of disloyalty because he was such a bad Catholic!
During the Kennedy administration, the Supreme Court, under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, who was already controversial because of the Brown decision, issued its findings in several church-state cases: Engel v. Vitale (1962), Murray v. Curlett (1963), and School District of Abington Township v. Schempp (1963). The Court ruled that collective prayers in public school classrooms, then widespread, were a violation of the First Amendment. So, too, were Bible reading and recitation of the Ten Commandments. The cases had been brought by an alliance of Unitarians, Jews, and atheists, who wanted to strengthen the wall of separation between church and state. Most other religious groups protested against this breach of American tradition, with some arguing that it would give comfort to the Communists and diminish the religious dimensions of the cold war. Numerous draft constitutional amendments appeared before Congress in the following years, trying to reinstate school prayer, but none won the necessary two-thirds majority. At almost the same time (1961), however, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Abraham Braunfeld, who claimed his free exercise of religion was abridged by the state of Pennsylvania. An orthodox Jew, Braunfeld closed his furniture store on Saturdays, but the state’s Sunday closing laws forbade him to open it then, putting him at an unfair business disadvantage. The Court ruled against him, decreeing that Sunday closing laws served a compelling secular interest, even if their origin could be found in a religious practice.
In the following decades, however, the trend in church-state cases was toward an increasingly emphatic dissociation. In 1983 the Supreme Court even considered a case, Lynch v. Donnelly, involving government-owned illuminated Christmas displays—it decided to permit them if nonreligious items like candy canes, Santa Claus, and red-nosed reindeer were there, but to object if the exhibit comprised only a Christian crèche.
Soon after President Kennedy’s death, the American escalation in Vietnam began. In the early days of American involvement, a Catholic doctor, Tom Dooley, who had served there in the 1950s, regarded the war as a battle between Christian South Vietnam and the Communist North; at first Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York and the American Catholic hierarchy agreed. Doubts about the “domino theory,” however, along with the lack of a clear military objective and unease about the viability and integrity of the South Vietnamese ally, led to antiwar protests. Religious observers from many different traditions began to think of the war as power politics at its dirtiest—sacrificing Vietnam and its people because the risk of fighting the cold war in Europe was too great. Roger LaPorte, a young Catholic activist, set fire to himself on the steps of the United Nations in 1965 to protest the war. An interfaith organization, Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam (founded in 1966), agreed to put aside its members’ religious differences in its campaign to end the war. It organized protests and sent a delegation to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, led by Rabbi Abraham Heschel, William Sloane Coffin (Protestant), and Daniel Berrigan (Catholic).
Berrigan, a Jesuit priest, also led a group of religious antiwar activists in invasions of two Selective Service offices in the Baltimore area. They poured blood over draft files in the first and set fire to files in the second with homemade napalm, then stood waiting to be arrested, explaining to local journalists the symbolic significance of their actions. Berrigan was convicted but went underground rather than to prison. For a year he was the romantic hero of the religious resistance, showing up unexpectedly to preach in different churches, then disappearing again before the police or FBI could arrest him.
Vietnam also raised anew question of religious conscientious objectors (COs). During World War II the judiciary had permitted members of the historic peace churches, Quakers, Mennonites, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, to register as COs and to perform alternative service rather than enter the army. This rule persisted, but now, large numbers of draftees from other traditions also claimed that their consciences forbade them from serving in Vietnam. Such objectors found the Supreme Court partially sympathetic to their point of view in a 1970 decision that permitted objections based on “a deeply held and coherent ethical system,” even if it had no explicit religious element. On the other hand, the Court added in a case the following year, CO status would not be granted to protesters against only some wars: it had to be all or nothing.
Another conflict, the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors, had a very different effect on American religious history. It galvanized American Jews into a renewed sense of pride, identity, and concern for their community. Jews, only about 3 percent of the American population in 1945—most of them children or grandchildren of immigrants—had been preoccupied with assimilation, often trying to minimize the distinctive elements of their way of life. Except among a handful of Orthodox communities, mainly in the New York area, Jews tended to blend in rather than stand out in the 1950s and early 1960s. Many opted to join Conservative synagogues, to keep kosher tradition at home but not elsewhere, not to wear distinctive garments like the kippah in public, and at times even to placate their fretful children in December by celebrating Christmas. Intermarriage rates between Christians and Jews rose steadily.
Three trends changed this trajectory toward assimilation. First was Israel, which since its creation in 1948 had to fight for its existence. Israel’s leaders hoped that well-to-do American Jews would migrate there, bringing their wealth, education, and skills. Most declined to do so, but they did lobby on behalf of Israel, made sure its point of view was well represented in Congress, and sent financial contributions. Second was the rediscovery of the Holocaust. Many Jews’ first instinct had been to forget about it—very little literature discussed it in the 1950s—but after Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) it became a central issue in American Jewish education and self-definition; her book was followed by a flood of Holocaust-related literature. Third was the Six-Day War itself, which, though it ended victoriously for Israel, showed that Jews still faced terrifying enemies eager to annihilate them. In the aftermath, contributions to Israel and American Jews’ decision to migrate there rose sharply. Modern Orthodoxy began to develop in the late 1960s and 1970s, a form of Judaism that permitted full engagement in American life without compromising religious distinctiveness and observance. Ensuring American Jews’ support, meanwhile, remained a high priority among Israeli politicians. It led to a controversy, which continues to the present, over whether “the Jewish lobby” is a disproportionately powerful element in American political life and whether it prompts the American government to act in ways that are more beneficial to Israel than to the United States itself.
The 1960s witnessed great social turbulence and a rapid shift in public mores, many of which had religious and political implications. The women’s movement, for example, lobbied for the abolition of gender discrimination in employment and raised a variety of questions under the previously unfamiliar category of “sexual politics.”
One was the issue of abortion, which has convulsed American religious and political life ever since. The Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade (1973) that women could legally obtain abortions in the first trimester of a pregnancy and, with some restrictions, in later stages of pregnancy. The decision overturned laws in all 50 states. It delighted feminists who had been working for revision of restrictive abortion laws, in line with their belief that women should have the right to choose whether or not to give birth. But it horrified those believers who considered an unborn fetus to be a human being and who saw the ruling, in effect, as authorizing the killing of children. Subsequent decisions of the Court, notably Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), upheld the Roe precedent but had the effect of embittering political and judicial life; advocates of each side found it difficult to sympathize with the other.
The first antiabortion activists were Catholics. Some lobbied for legal restrictions or a constitutional amendment; others undertook direct action, picketing abortion clinics and trying to persuade pregnant women to carry their babies to term, offering them and their babies material and psychological support. In the 1980s, the movement became more radical; Randall Terry’s Operation Rescue brought large numbers of “pro-life” evangelical Protestants into direct activism side by side with Catholics, a combination that would have been unlikely prior the 1960s. Operation Rescue worked across denominational lines and tried to get large numbers of its members arrested at the Democratic convention of 1988 in Atlanta, packing the jails as a symbolic way of bringing attention to the issue. In the 1990s a trio of the most extreme activists, Michael Griffin, Paul Hill, and Shelley Shannon, assassinated abortion providers in the firm belief that God authorized this drastic step. The effect of their attacks was almost certainly counterproductive, horrifying not only most American citizens but also the majority of religious pro-lifers, who were explicitly dedicated to the sanctity of life.
This turn to activism bore witness to an important trend in the 1970s, the return of evangelicals and fundamentalists to active politics. Ever since the Scopes trial of 1925, most fundamentalists (Protestants who thought of the Bible as literally true and accurate, the direct and dependable word of God) had withdrawn from public life. Many of them were dispensational premillennialists, believers that the second coming of Jesus was very close and that it was more important to turn to Jesus individually than to work on transforming society. In the 1970s, dismayed by sexual permissiveness, unfamiliar new roles for women, legal abortion, and what seemed like the breakdown of the family, they began to return to political life, joining Christian lobbies like Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. Their theorist was the theologian Francis Schaeffer, who urged them to contest what he thought of as the growing power of evil in the world. They were also goaded into action by what was, to them, the disappointing presidency of Jimmy Carter: A born-again evangelical Christian, Carter should have been solidly behind their program but in practice seemed too willing to accept the orthodoxy of the Democratic Party on gender and family questions. He was also an advocate of détente with the Soviet Union, despite its persecution of Russian Christians and Jews.
The New Religious Right drew the lion’s share of media attention in the late 1970s and early 1980s, not least because it contributed to the defeat of Carter and the election of an outspoken conservative, Ronald Reagan. It would be quite wrong, however, to imagine that religion was, as a whole, a conservative force in American life. Religious feminists had begun to transform gender roles inside churches and synagogues, while religious anti-Vietnam activists could be found, a few years later, working in poverty programs and in the “sanctuary” movement, helping Nicaraguan and Salvadoran refugees in the Southwest, or working in the environmental movement. Stewardship of God’s creation was, in the view of many Christians, a religious imperative.
This way of looking at nature also prompted a renewed assessment of nuclear weapons. They remained in the 1980s, as in the 1950s, the basis of America’s defense policy, but a growing religious antinuclear movement considered them utterly incompatible with civilization and common decency. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote a pastoral letter on the issue, “The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response” (1983), condemning the targeting of Soviet cities and coming close to opposing any policy that condoned the use of nuclear weapons. Once a dependable bloc of anti-Communists, the bishops were now staking out new territory, openly critical of their government. Many of the Protestant churches wrote comparable letters. One Methodist bishop, John Warman of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, signed his denomination’s letter and told a journalist: “You cannot boil seven million human beings in their own juices and then speak of Christian love. It would be far better for us to trust the God of the Resurrection and suffer death than to use such a weapon.”
Other Christians dissented sharply; Michael Novak, a lay Catholic and political conservative, wrote “Moral Clarity in the Nuclear Age” (1983), a book-length answer to the bishops that filled an entire special issue of National Review. Invoking the tradition of “just war theory,” as had the bishops, he argued that nuclear weapons were actually instruments of peace. Paradoxically, the government used them by not firing them, merely threatening to do so, and in this way assured the maximum of deterrence with the minimum of destruction.
Everyone can be grateful that the cold war ended without an exchange of nuclear missiles. The Soviet empire in Eastern Europe began to unravel in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, Germany was reunified, and in 1991 Soviet communism itself came to a peaceful end.
Several individuals who played prominent roles in this world-changing sequence of events became political-religious celebrities in America. One was Lech Walesa, the Gdansk dockyard worker whose Solidarity movement created a new center of legitimacy inside Communist Poland in the 1980s and made him a luminous figure to human rights activists. The Catholic faith had the same kind of function for Solidarity as evangelical Christianity had had in the American civil rights movement, binding members together and empowering them to resist unjust power. A second individual who became prominent in America was Karol Wojtyla, who in 1978 was elevated to the papacy and chose the name Pope John Paul II. Also Polish, and the former archbishop of Krakow, Wojtyla’s life and work demonstrated that Christianity, even when persecuted, could outlast communism. His visits to America drew vast crowds of Catholics and non-Catholics alike.
Several other religious figures also played symbolically important roles in movements to resist political oppression. One was the Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Russian Orthodox exile in America from 1975, who gave the commencement address at Harvard in 1978; another was the Anglican South African bishop Desmond Tutu, a leading antiapartheid activist. A third was the Dalai Lama, religious leader of the Tibetan community in exile, who embodied Buddhist resistance to the Chinese conquest of Tibet. All were revered in America and helped discredit the regimes against which they campaigned.
By 1990 historians and sociologists were observing seismic shifts in American religious life. First was the steady decline in membership and influence of “mainstream” Protestant churches. Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, and Lutherans, who had once dominated the religious landscape, faced dwindling congregations, whereas the Assemblies of God, Disciples of Christ, Southern Baptists, and independent Christian churches enjoyed rapid increases. These growing congregations, many under the leadership of charismatic evangelical leaders, imposed tough rules on their members, expecting them to tithe (give a tenth of their pretax income to the church) and follow exacting codes of personal conduct. They provided foot soldiers for the Moral Majority and for its successor, the Christian Coalition, and campaigned hard for seats on school boards, city councils, and state assemblies.
A second shift was the increasing politicization of religious life. The sharpest divisions had once been between denominations, but now separation was deepest between the religious left and the religious right, often with representatives of both points of view in the same denomination. Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow charted this shift in his influential book The Restructuring of American Religion (1988).
Denominational conferences squabbled over theological and doctrinal questions, and over whether to regard scripture as inerrant. The wider public felt the effect of these disputes in renewed attacks on the teaching of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Evangelicals on school boards argued that school science curricula should include “Creation science,” an approach to human origins that was consonant with the creation narrative in Genesis. They were aware, however, that the Supreme Court would reject that approach if they made its religious provenance explicit. Proponents therefore claimed that they were indeed advancing a genuine science, rather than a religious point of view in religious dress. The Institute for Creation Research in San Diego backed up this claim. Their antagonists, an alliance of nonfundamentalist Christians, Jews, and academic scientists, countered that creation science was a bogus form of special pleading, and that the evolutionary hypothesis alone could explain the nature of life on Earth. Several southern states passed laws in the 1980s that were hospitable to creationists, only to see them rejected by the courts on First Amendment grounds. Evangelical activists on school boards also tried to stop sex education classes or else convert them into advocacy seminars on sexual abstention.
At the same time, independent Christian schools thrived as places where evangelical teachings on creation and sexuality could be central to the curriculum. In southern states, many of these schools were attractive to white parents who disparaged the effects of public school desegregation.
A more radical alternative was homeschooling. The homeschooling movement had begun among advocates of the 1960s counterculture, who protested the repressive and conformist nature of public education. Ironically, it was overtaken by Christian home-schoolers who thought public education was too secular, undisciplined, ideologically biased against religion, and tended to expose students to excessive peer pressure. Homeschool organizations lobbied successfully for state laws entitling them to educate their children at home so long as they met basic standards of literacy and numeracy.
These developments bore witness to the continuing energy and diversity of American religious life. So did the growth of new religions, hundreds of which had sprung up throughout American history. Many lasted only a few years, but a few, like the Mormons, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the Nation of Islam, struck a resonant chord among citizens and became permanent parts of the religious landscape. The sharp divisions in American national life during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s prompted the creation of a new crop of religions, a few of which had political implications. Some put such psychological pressure on their members that anxious relatives sought government prevention or regulation of what they perceived as brainwashing. Other groups demanded the handing over not just of a tenth but of all a member’s property. Some sheltered illegal sexual practices.
Two dramatic incidents illustrated these dangers. The first was the fate of the People’s Temple, under the leadership of Jim Jones. It began as a Christian Pentecostal church in Indianapolis and was the city’s first fully racially integrated congregation. The church moved to rural California in 1964, when Jones became convinced that nuclear war was imminent. Then it became involved in San Francisco politics when Jones’s preaching proved effective at reforming drug addicts. Finally, Jones, under investigation for financial and sexual irregularities and convinced that he was the target of government persecution, moved the People’s Temple to a settlement that became known as Jonestown, in Guyana, South America. The parents of some members asked a California congressman, Leo Ryan, to investigate the church, and his arrival at Jonestown in November 1978 triggered a horrific finale. A group of Jones’s men ambushed and killed Ryan, then the whole community—900 men, women, and children—drank cyanide-poisoned Kool-Aid in a mass suicide ritual, something they had practiced in the foregoing months.
The second incident involved the Branch Davidians, a splinter group from the Seventh-Day Adventists, which was led by charismatic preacher David Koresh. Koresh, like Jones, had sexual relationships with a variety of the group’s members. When rumors surfaced in 1993 that his partners included children, the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms raided the compound in Waco, Texas. The group fought back, FBI armored cars rolled in, and the two sides exchanged gunfire and tear gas for several days. The entire compound eventually caught fire and burned to the ground, killing 103 people, including at least 17 children. Public reaction was sharply divided; to some citizens drastic action against cults was necessary. Others saw the government’s heavy-handedness as disgraceful and disproportionate. This second view gained credibility when it later emerged that Timothy McVeigh—who two years later blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City—had been convinced by the Waco affair that the federal government was at war with ordinary citizens.
Increasing religious diversity included not just new sects and cults but also the arrival in America of larger numbers of non-Judeo-Christian peoples than ever before. The Immigration Reform Act of 1965 abolished racial and geographical discrimination in immigrants’ point of origin and opened the way for large-scale immigration from Africa and Asia. America’s wealth and political stability, along with First Amendment protection to all religions, made it an extremely desirable destination. Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim communities grew in many cities, while scholars hurried to study them and to widen the ideal of American inclusiveness. For many of these immigrants from societies where restriction and intolerance were the norm, America was a pleasant surprise. Some American Muslims took the view that the United States was the ideal place in which to practice Islam. The international situation, however, tended to work against this easy accommodation. Surges of anti-Islamic prejudice coincided with such events as the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis (1978–80), the first Gulf War (1990–91), and the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon (2001). After the latter event, politicians, led by President George W. Bush, took the view that the United States would protect all forms of religious practice, Islam included, but would make unceasing war on militarized forms of Islamic fundamentalism.
Balancing the two imperatives specified in the First Amendment—free exercise and no establishment—has never been easy, as a new scandal made clear at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Journalistic investigations uncovered widespread sexual abuse of children and teenagers by Catholic priests, and evidence showed that it had been going on for a long time. Church authorities had earlier reacted to reports of predatory priests not by turning them over to the law—which would cause scandal and discredit—but by reassigning them to new parishes with a promise of reform. The reform rarely worked, and abuse recurred. The Catholic Church was sued successfully by victims and their families, and it sustained catastrophic losses and was forced to sell assets to cover the cost of judgments against it. The scandal raised the possibility that religious freedom had provided cover for misconduct, and that closer scrutiny would have prevented it, just as closer scrutiny of cults could have prevented the tragedies of Jonestown and Waco. The cost of scrutiny would also be high, however, both financially and in the erosion of civil liberties.
The scandal in the Catholic Church bore witness to the inextricable mixing of religion and politics in American life. As the twenty-first century began, the United States remained the most religiously diverse nation in the world, and the most religiously active among the Western industrial democracies. Its hospitality to religions of all kinds, and the prosperity of these groups, took visible form in the shape of beautiful new churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques. America maintained a high degree of religious freedom, offered tax exemption to all alike, and tried to ensure that all enjoyed free exercise. It was reasonable to anticipate that this state of affairs would persist.
FURTHER READING. Patrick Allitt, Religion in America since 1945: A History, 2003; Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96 (Winter 1967), 1–21; Walter Capps, The New Religious Right: Piety, Patriotism, and Politics, 1990; David Chidester, Salvation and Suicide: An Interpretation of Jim Jones, the People’s Temple, and Jonestown, 1988; Richard W. Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography, 1987; Marvin Frankel, Faith and Freedom: Religious Liberty in America, 1994; David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1988; Francine DuPlessix Gray, Divine Disobedience: Profiles in Catholic Radicalism, 1970; Martin Marty, Modern American Religion, Volume 3: Under God, Indivisible, 1941–1960, 1996; James Risen and Judy Thomas, Wrath of Angels: The American Abortion War, 1998; Mark Silk, Spiritual Politics: Religion and America since World War II, 1988; James Tabor, Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America, 1995; Jack Wertheimer, A People Divided: Judaism in Contemporary America, 1993; Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II, 1988.
PATRICK ALLITT
