Radicals felt that it was not enough to give Blacks the same rights as Whites,”
so they “managed to pass the Fourteenth Amendment”—but that amendment
gave blacks exactly the same rights as whites! In all, American Way’s treatment
is amateurish. Even sparser is the coverage in Discovering American History,
an inquiry text: it devotes just two pages to all of Congressional
Reconstruction, and most of that space is used to reprint the texts of the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Discovering American History is the
only text to avoid the terms carpetbagger and scalawag, but then again it
avoids Reconstruction almost entirely.
64 Perhaps Bauer was influenced by Margaret Mitchell’s portrait of African
Americans who lazed about as soon as slavery ended and white supervision
relaxed. Writings and recollections by newly freed people offer no support for
this portrait, however. See Escott, Slavery Remembered, which offers valuable
information about Reconstruction remembered. See also studies of individual
locales and statewide analyses, such as Roberta Sue Alexander, North
Carolina Faces the Freedmen (Durham: Duke University Press, 1985).
65 George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1984), 1.
66 Morgan Kousser, “The Voting Rights Act and the Two Reconstructions”
(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, October 19, 1990); DuBois, Black
Reconstruction, 681.
67 Eric Foner, Reconstruction (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), as
reviewed by C. Vann Woodward in “Unfinished Business,” New York Review
of Books, 5/12/1988, referring to statistics gathered by Albion W. Tourgée. See
also Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen.
68 Gen. O. O. Howard quoted in Robert Moore, Reconstruction: The Promise
and Betrayal of Democracy (New York: CIBC, 1983), 17.
69 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964
[1944]), lxxv-lxxvi.
70 Rayford W. Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro (New York: Macmillan,
1970 [1954]). See also Foner, Reconstruction, 604.
71 FitzGerald, America Revised, 157.
72 In Minority Education and Caste (New York: Academic Press, 1978),
anthropologist John Ogbu uses stigma to explain why members of oppressed