1876

It would take some time for the view of American national identity presented at the Centennial Exposition in 1876 to become common sense, if at all. The wounds of the Civil War had to heal or be forgotten or narrated in a broader story about Reunion and Redemption. The system of Jim Crow did not emerge full blown out of the heads of Southern elites once the corrupt Compromise of 1877 removed the last Union troops from the region. It took some time. But what is clear, at least to me, is that on the one hundredth anniversary of the nation, Americans groped for a sense of themselves against the backdrop of a searing drama that involved white people and the “Negroes” they created. The burning moral question about the humanity of “Negroes” and what to do with them was set aside or, at least, framed by lies about who they were and, by extension, with lies about who white Americans imagined themselves to be. Lies that would become “a kind of superior truth” that served as a ballast for America, U.S.A. Real people could not intrude or interrupt the fantasy. To do so was to threaten a sense of national identity as fragile as a butterfly’s wing.

Black people would have to bear the brunt of it all. Indiscriminate killing. Racial proscription. Declarations of white supremacy as the source of civilized living that denied where the heart of darkness truly resided. A host of assumptions about who we were and what we could become shadowed our steps and anchored a certain understanding of white America. History, it was said, corroborated it all. Rationalizations corrupted the soul of a nation. And if we dared to step out from under the caricatures and lies, all hell would break loose like a spinning top that has suddenly lost its balance. In the end, a terrible evasion of American experience sat at the heart of the nation’s self-conception. All of which required, demanded really, a willful blindness, a thinness of imagination, and a state of innocence that made America, U.S.A monstrous. By one count, as the century came to a close, 53,000 Black people were killed because of it all. The historian, Eric Foner, summarizes it this way:

What remains certain is that Reconstruction failed, and that for blacks its failure was a disaster whose magnitude cannot be obscured by the genuine accomplishments that did endure. For the nation as a whole, the collapse of Reconstruction was a tragedy that deeply affected the course of its future development. If racism contributed to the undoing of Reconstruction, by the same token Reconstruction’s demise and the emergence of blacks as a disenfranchised class of dependent laborers greatly facilitated racism’s further spread, until by the early twentieth century it had become deeply embedded in the nation’s culture and politics than at any time since the beginning of the antislavery crusade and perhaps in our entire history.

On the one hundredth anniversary of the country, as Reconstruction struggled with its last breaths, an idea of white America began to emerge as one of the lasting features of “the second founding,” an idea that would obliterate any pretense to live up to the power of the declaration that all people are created equal.

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