review of these two main political science journals and the proceedings of APSA meetings up to and including 1910 yields no counters to these images of black inferiority, and just one sympathetic, extended treatment of Reconstruction and black voting rights.50 That sympathetic treatment was a 1905 address to the American Political Science Association by Albert Bushnell Hart. Hart, a German-educated Harvard historian who (like Dunning) would go on to serve as president of both the American Historical Association and the APSA, occupies an ambivalent position in Reconstruction historiography. He invoked the abolitionists as his spiritual “ancestors” and at Harvard mentored W. E. B. Du Bois, whom he invited to read a paper favorable to Reconstruction at the 1909 AHA conference.51 However, Hart also edited the series in which Wilson and Dunning’s scurrilous histories of Reconstruction appeared, and in a 1910 book he displayed a more settled belief in black inferiority (at least in the medium term) as well as what an approving APSR reviewer characterized as healthy “acceptance of the inevitable” with regard to the racial order in the post-Reconstruction south.52
Whatever his ambiguities, in 1905 Hart took an extreme minority position on Reconstruction, suggesting to listeners at the APSA that Reconstruction governments had been unfairly maligned. As Hart saw it, black suffrage during Reconstruction had been incomplete and brief and had ended via a “violent and irregular process,” leaving scholars with little real evidence as to “the capacity of the negro to exercise discretion in his vote.”53 Again, however, this position put Hart well outside the mainstream. When he delivered his paper to the APSA, he was paired with Baltimore Attorney General John Rose, whose talk on “Suffrage Conditions in the South: The Constitutional Point of View” was harshly critical of calls to enforce black voting rights; all three discussants at the panel took a similar stance.54 Rose’s address (without Hart’s) was published in the inaugural issue of the APSR under the more direct title, “Negro Suffrage: The Constitutional Point of View”; a sympathetic account of “Racial Distinctions in Southern Law” appeared alongside it.55 Clearly, these were not marginal issues—with only two other full-length pieces in that issue, exactly half of the articles in the APSR’s first issue were justifications of disenfranchisement and segregation. Moreover, aside from Hart’s cautious defense of Reconstruction, the journals and meetings featured no dissent from the proposition that sentimental ideas about equality or moralistic attachment to constitutional guarantees had no place in the scientific treatment of those issues, which was to be governed instead by pragmatic considerations and scientific dispassion.
Rose’s APSR article offers a particularly clear formulation of the pragmatic realpolitik that characterized this discussion. He acknowledged that political distinctions based on race were clearly unconstitutional and that measures such as literacy tests and “grandfather” clauses were nothing more than subterfuge. They were, nonetheless, necessary. Echoing Wilson’s faith in the wise conservatism of national opinion, Rose urged deference to prevailing norms, even when they conflicted with what Wilson had called the “literary” form of the law. The important point, to Rose’s mind, was that law that got ahead of the population was doomed to fail. As he put it,
St. Paul has said that all things that are lawful are not expedient…. Let those who believe that whether his skin be white, yellow, red, brown, or black, a man’s a man for a’ that, be of good cheer. Either they are right or wrong. If the latter they will some day be thankful that their brothers in the South have not been able to see with their eyes…. Those who do not share the present feelings and convictions of the overwhelming majority of the white people of the South must walk warily. At the best, they can do only a little to hasten the coming of the day they long for. They can do much to postpone it.56
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
