Vol. 15 No.3 (March 2005), pp.221-224

The two reconstructions: The struggle for black enfranchisement, by Richard M. Valelly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 348pp. Cloth $58.00. ISBN: 0-226-84528-1. Paper $22.50. ISBN: 0-226-84530-3.

Reviewed by Emery G. Lee III, Department of Political Science, Case Western Reserve University.

Richard Valelly’s TWO RECONSTRUCTIONS recounts how African Americans in the southern United States were enfranchised during post-Civil War Reconstruction, subsequently disenfranchised, then re-enfranchised in the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s—the second reconstruction of the book’s title. In the Preface, Valelly frames these two reconstructions as an historical puzzle or mystery: “No other democracy . . . has ever enfranchised a large group, then disenfranchised it—and then reenfranchised it. Why did the first effort fail? Why has the second succeeded” (p.ix)?  The central argument of the book is that an “extended comparison” of these two reconstructions can shed light on the crucial role of institutions, especially political parties and the courts, in the historical development of the American political order. Specifically, Valelly argues that the first Reconstruction failed but the second succeeded because of the differing institutional contexts of the two events, and not primarily because of changing white racial attitudes, the economic resources of African Americans, or the changing international (i.e., Cold War) context.

What is particularly commendable about this book is the way in which its author weaves these alternative explanations into his institutional narrative. Valelly does not reject competing explanations. Rather, he assimilates them into his own well-constructed and comprehensive account. For example, the key institutional problem of the first Reconstruction, and the leading cause of its failure, Valelly tells us, was “crash party building.” The new biracial Republican coalition faced the daunting prospect of creating new party organizations in the southern states, “where the Republican Party had of course never existed” (p.17). In the second reconstruction, a different biracial coalition faced the less daunting task of merely wresting control of the southern Democratic Party from the white supremacists and their allies. It is not clear exactly why, in purely institutional terms, taking over control of an existing party is any less difficult than starting entirely from scratch. Indeed, the former seems less difficult in the abstract because it enables political entrepreneurs to evade opposition elements rather than take them head-on. The problem of the first Reconstruction’s biracial coalition was not purely institutional, however. The greatest obstacle to crash party building in the South was “the white-on-black violence that racked southern electoral politics” (p.91). Valelly does not ignore white supremacy and racial violence but instead subsumes it within his [*222] institutional narrative. Thus, he writes that this “political violence shattered families and communities and stunted the development of a robust associationalism in the South that could aid party-building” (p.92).

A major strength of this institutional analysis lies in the identification of incentives to political actors outside the South to recruit southern African Americans into the party system. Valelly observes that, as a regional party, the Reconstruction Republicans needed southern allies for much of the late nineteenth century; national Republican efforts to protect the southern biracial coalition were sometimes motivated by particular political needs, such as tariff legislation in 1881. The admission of predominantly white western states with Republican leanings throughout the second half of the century changed the incentives of the national party. Because it no longer needed a largely African American southern wing, the Republican Party “abandoned them in about 1898” (p.139). Before and during the second Reconstruction, another group of non-southern political actors sought “coalitional expansion” through assisting on-going efforts to enfranchise southern African Americans. In the 1960s the Kennedy administration and its allies “needed help from African Americans in order to achieve a major goal: manage U.S.-Soviet relations competently” (p.184). Thus, again, Valelly subsumes a potentially competing explanation for the success of the second reconstruction, the international context of the Cold War, into his overarching institutional account.

The chapters on the second reconstruction, detailing efforts of both the national Democratic Party and the civil rights movement in the South, are well-argued and well-documented. In perhaps the book’s most thought-provoking passage, Valelly suggests that the 1965 Voting Rights Act was not the historical inevitability that it may seem today. He writes that the Selma protest “that did so much to empower [President] Johnson to procure the act [possibly] came at the last possible moment. Race riots in August 1965 and public alarm about such organizations as the Black Panthers crystallized a long-building northern white backlash. . . . The Voting Rights Act would have been less likely after the spring and summer of 1965” (p.194). This remarkable passage illustrates this book’s greatest strength, namely, its willingness to interpret history without the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.

The courts, especially the Supreme Court, play a largely secondary role in this historical and institutional narrative. That role will be familiar to judicial scholars. The election statutes and constitutional amendments that party builders generated had to be interpreted in the courts, with the first Supreme Court test determining, to a great extent, how successful these efforts ultimately would be. Valelly’s basic jurisprudential point is that a Court majority in the 1870s “declined to actively protect black electoral inclusion” (p.119) but that majorities of the Warren and Burger Courts took “a stance quite different” (p.203) during the second reconstruction. In this account focused on coalition-building, the Court’s role is largely limited to determining which coalition—the biracial coalition or its all-white counterpart—it will favor. These initial signals from the Court either facilitate [*223] party-building or foster conditions on the ground hostile to the biracial coalition.

Although the emphasis of the book is on party-building, Valelly provides an interesting discussion of what he calls “Reconstruction constitutionalism” (p.105) in Chapter 5. The key jurisprudential problem for the biracial coalition in the South was legal uncertainty regarding the federal government’s power to protect voting rights. Given Southern white resistance to African American suffrage, the biracial coalition’s only hope for success rested on a broad reading of that power. In the wake of the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, Congress enacted the Enforcement Act of May 31, 1870, and the Ku Klux Klan Act of March 28, 1871. In the end, court challenges to the constitutionality of these statutes were largely successful, in turn undermining the prospects of the biracial coalition in the South. The issue in the cases was whether voting rights were national rights, which could be protected by the federal government, or rights created by action of state law. Valelly very briefly discusses the effect of the Slaughter-house Cases (1873), with their rejection of a broad reading of national rights under the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment, on the question of voting rights. He then considers the major test cases involving the Enforcement Acts, Us v. Reese (1876) and Us v. Cruikshank (1876). The discussion of the cases is underdeveloped and not completely satisfying; this reader, at least, would have liked much more elaboration on these (and other) civil rights cases. But Valelly’s basic point is that the Waite Court left Reconstruction constitutionalism in an ambiguous condition, which greatly undermined the biracial coalition’s position. That point is ably made.

One additional significant criticism of the book’s approach is warranted. In the first chapter, Valelly states that he will “systematically compar[e] the two reconstructions as if they were two independent cases” (p.7). From a jurisprudential standpoint, however, this is a non-starter. It may be possible, for methodological purposes, to study the party coalitions of the 1950s and 1960s and those of the 1870s as independent cases. But the constitutional and statutory decisions of the mid-twentieth century simply cannot be understood in isolation from those of the 1860s and 1870s. After all, the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment is still limited by the Slaughter-house Cases, 130 years later. The best that can be said for Valelly’s decision to treat the time periods as independent cases is that he tends to ignore it when appropriate, most notably on legal issues. For example, in discussing civil rights legislation enacted in the District of Columbia in the 1870s, he notes that “it was the basis of the final desegregation of District restaurants” eighty years later (p.74). Valelly also discusses how Attorney General Frank Murphy tasked Department of Justice lawyers with “an exhaustive study” of civil rights statutes passed pursuant to the post-Civil War amendments, an effort that led to landmark Supreme Court decisions such as Us v. Classic (1941). The second reconstruction was clearly limited by failure of the first, even when the Court bit the bullet and overruled precedents from the earlier period, as the Warren Court did in Brown v. Board of Education [*224] (1954) with Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

In sum, THE TWO RECONSTRUCTIONS makes a valuable contribution to the literature on American political development and the Reconstruction era that should be of some interest to judicial scholars, especially those interested in supplementing their knowledge of the non-judicial aspects of the first Reconstruction.

CASE REFERENCES:

BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

PLESSY v. FERGUSON, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).

SLAUGHTER-HOUSE CASES, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36 (1873).

UNITED STATES v. CLASSIC, 313 U.S. 299 (1941).

UNITED STATES v. CRUIKSHANK, 92 U.S. 542 (1876).

UNITED STATES v. REESE, 92 U.S. 214 (1876).

*************************************************************

© Copyright 2005 by the author, Emery G. Lee III.