Tom Cotton feels very strongly that 1619 project should not be used to teach kids.He has sponsored a bill that cuts funding to using the 1619 project to teach kids. Is an ulterior motive for Tom Cotton to not want anyone to learn the truth about slavery?

If we dig into records of slave ownership, we can see that Tom Cotton’s family owned slaves.

https://historicly.substack.com/p/tom-cottons-slave-owning-ancestors

Andrew Jackson has been no stranger to rough-and-tumble conflict. In his own time, he upended the established political order and helped spearhead the violent expansion of America’s borders. In ours, he has become a toxic figure for many, as even the Democratic Party he helped found has distanced itself from his legacy of slaveholding, Indian removal and populist demagogy.

Last week, Jackson cut a posthumously destructive path through another institution once centered on his legacy, when the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic was thrown into turmoil after a contentious scholarly panel about the man.

The panel, which was held via Zoom on July 17, featured discussion of a paper by Daniel Feller, the editor of the Andrew Jackson Papers. Titled “Andrew Jackson in the Age of Trump,” it set off a firestorm that led, within 72 hours, to the ouster of the group’s president, as well as the publication of open letters denouncing the talk and counterletters protesting the ouster. It also caused debate over whether the distinguished academic society was experiencing an overdue reckoning with racism or abandoning its commitment to robust scholarly debate in the face of a Twitter mob.

With Jackson and Mr. Trump, Mr. Feller was taking on two characters with few admirers in the often left-leaning historical profession. He began by recalling the day in 2017 when Mr. Trump visited the Hermitage, Jackson’s home in Nashville, before picking apart what he called the president’s distorted and self-serving efforts to wrap himself in the former president’s mantle.

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He also assailed journalists for what he said were misrepresentations of Jackson. But his most stinging words were reserved for his fellow historians, whom he accused of misreading the historical record, exaggerating his destructive policies toward Native Americans and generally painting a politically driven picture of Jackson as a “homicidal maniac” that was “untethered from reality.”

“Historical malpractice is indefensible, no matter how noble the cause it purportedly serves,” he declared.

Mr. Feller’s talk drew sharp challenges from some of the other panelists. But reaction exploded in the Zoom comments section and on social media, as viewers blasted his criticisms of female scholars (including one he suggested was “incompetent”), what some saw as corner-cutting in his reading of the historical record (including what some likened to genocide denial), and the all-white composition of the panel.

But things reached a boiling point in the last three minutes, when Mr. Feller, apparently repeating a misheard phrase uttered earlier by another panelist, referred to Jackson’s reputation for slaughter of “redcoats and redskins.” And tensions kept boiling as word of the talk spread.

 

 

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Twenty-four hours later, the society’s president, Douglas Egerton, issued a statement apologizing for the panel’s lack of diversity and calling the use of racial slurs unacceptable. But he also wrote that he didn’t want to “silence people he disagreed with.”

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But his statement itself, and that phrase in particular, drew strong condemnation from some members of the group, known as SHEAR. The next day, 13 members of the group’s advisory council posted a letter calling for Mr. Egerton’s resignation, which he offered. Three more public letters criticizing the talk or the society’s leadership followed, along with privately circulated counterblasts (including one in the style of an anonymous 18th-century pamphlet) charging the advisory council of violating the group’s constitution.

It was a tempest in a teapot, as multiple society members (few of whom were willing to say more than a few words on the record) put it in interviews. But it also echoed a broader upheaval happening at institutions across America in the wake of the protests inspired by the death of George Floyd.

To some historians, the fracas represented an embarrassing abandonment of scholarly prudence amid a social media stampede.

“The SHEAR debacle has little to do with history and a whole lot to do about politics,” John Fea, a historian at Messiah University and a former society member, wrote on his blog. “This is why many Americans,” he added, “don’t trust us and our scholarship.”

But to others, it represented part of a long-overdue racial reckoning within the white-dominated historical profession, with broader implications for how history gets written, and by whom.

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“What’s happening at SHEAR is not an interpretive disagreement over Andrew Jackson’s legacy,” said Seth Rockman, a historian at Brown who recently co-wrote a diversity report for the group, “but a broader struggle within a tight-knit scholarly community over how to produce an inclusive American history capable of rising to the challenges of 2020.”

The society, which has just over 600 members, was born of some of the tensions that have reshaped the historical profession, and the broader understanding of the American past, over the past few decades.

It was founded in 1977 to focus on the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Its founders were political historians who felt increasingly edged out of other associations by the rise of social history, with its emphasis on the experiences and perspectives of women, African-Americans and other groups marginalized from high politics.

It was a small, clubby group, whose early conferences, as one longtime member recalled, were “just 50 guys and a dog.” It was also a place where Jackson, and a sunny idea of the period as “the rise of American Democracy,” loomed large.

In recent years, both the field and the society have diversified, intellectually and demographically, as great men and high politics have become less central. There has been an explosion of work on Native Americans and enslaved people, who are seen as crucially important in shaping American democracy. The recent issue of the society’s journal focuses on connections between the early Republic and Africa.

Mr. Feller was described by friends and critics (as well as some who described themselves as both) as an old-guard political historian known for blunt, aggressive questioning at conferences and a view of himself as the guardian of the true Jackson.

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In an interview, Mr. Feller, 69, a professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, said it wasn’t the historian’s job to defend or condemn. What he questioned, he said, was the insistence on seeing Jackson purely as someone “who just wanted to kill everybody,” as well as what he sees as a politicized approach to writing history.

“The point in the paper is not that Andrew Jackson is a good guy or a bad guy,” Mr. Feller, who called himself a lifelong Democrat, said. “But because both sides have identified him with Trump, for opposite reasons, we are now reading Jackson through the lens of Trump.”

And he was unapologetic about the panel, which he noted had been approved by the society’s programming committee and Mr. Egerton last fall, as one of 39 at a planned conference. (The others have been postponed until next summer.) The paper had been circulated weeks in advance, he said, adding that he had received no criticism before the panel.

As for his use of the phrase “redcoats and redskins,” he said it was a reference to a common phrase in older scholarship, and had “implied quotation marks” around it. “I have never volitionally used the word ‘redskin’ in my life, period,” he said.

But to some in the society, his arguments fell outside the bounds of acceptable scholarly discourse. In its letter, the advisory council — including the scholar who chaired the panel, Jessica Lepler — said the panel fell outside the society’s “ethical norms, academic standards and established procedures.”

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Amy Greenberg, a historian at Penn State and the society’s new president, seconded the notion. “I fully agree with that assessment,” she said in a terse response to emailed questions, adding: “I’m grateful to the many scholars who took the time to rightly critique a paper that does not represent either SHEAR’s values, or our standards of scholarship.”

(Mr. Egerton, the outgoing president, declined to comment.)

Other historians inside and outside SHEAR said that Mr. Feller’s dismissive attitude toward newer scholarship — and the fact that the scholars he attacked by name in his talk were all women — was deeply discouraging, and spoke to deeper problems at the society and in the field more broadly.

“I don’t really care about Jackson,” said Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, a historian at Smith College and society member, who said she did not watch the panel but was quickly flooded with messages about it. “But I do care about being inclusive. I do care about Indigenous scholars being left out. It’s just really offensive that happened.”

Professor Pryor won an award from the group several years ago for a paper about how African-Americans in the early 19th century claimed an infamous racial slur as a way of asserting themselves politically. The whole idea of the society, and writing history, she said, “is to generate new scholarship, to understand what we study — and where we are as a country — better.”

Mr. Feller’s paper was lively, she said. “But it wasn’t responsible and it wasn’t generative. And now people are talking about the group and not the talk.”

 

We're all dismissed as promoting "neo-Marxist propaganda". It really gets "them" that -- despite decades of trying -- they cannot get rid of Marx, citations to Marx, Marxist analysis, and homage to the great man himself. It's not just the realities of slavery; it's the approach we take to history that yanks their chains. It is Tom Cotton's ideas and themes that should not be used to teach kids.

Chapo and its imitators look lazier and more useless every day.

https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/the-reactionary-grift-of-the-dirtbag-left

Indian-Occupied Kashmir: Resistance in the Concentration Camp

On the first anniversary of the abolition of Kashmir’s constitutional autonomy by the Modi government

by Michael Pröbsting, 28 July 2020

https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/asia/indian-occupied-kashmir-resistance-in-the-concentration-camp/

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LARB presents an excerpt from Hollywood Hates Hitler! Jew-Baiting, Anti-Nazism, and the Senate Investigation into Warmongering in Motion Pictures (University Press of Mississippi, 2020).

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/when-the-us-government-went-after-anti-nazi-hollywood/

LRB, Vol. 42 No. 15 · 30 July 2020
Racist Litter
Randall Kennedy

The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution
by Eric Foner.
Norton, 288 pp., £18.99, October 2019, 978 0 393 65257 4

In​ may 1987, as part of the festivities marking the 200th anniversary of the United States constitution, Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to sit on the US Supreme Court, delivered a hugely controversial speech. Noting the quasi-religious reverence in which the framers of the constitution are held in America, Marshall expressed some scepticism about routine proclamations of their ‘wisdom, foresight and sense of justice’. The Founding Fathers, he pointed out, couldn’t have been so very enlightened and far-sighted: after all, the slavery they tolerated caused untold suffering, and ended in a civil war that claimed 600,000 lives. ‘While the Union survived the Civil War,’ he said, ‘the constitution did not. In its place arose a new, more promising basis for justice and equality.’ That new, more promising regime was Reconstruction, an array of reforms undertaken between 1863 and 1877 to refashion a fractured nation.

In 1863 Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves then resident in jurisdictions involved in the rebellion against the federal government. Until this point, Lincoln had gone out of his way to make clear that in resorting to arms the federal government sought merely to suppress the uprising of the Confederacy, the 11 states that attempted to secede in 1861 in order to ensure the perpetuation of their ‘peculiar institution’: racial slavery. The leaders of the Confederacy, explicitly repudiating Thomas Jefferson’s declaration that ‘all men are created equal,’ had committed themselves to racial hierarchy. ‘Our new government ... rests,’ the Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, observed, ‘upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.’

Lincoln did not believe that the federal government had the authority to do anything about slavery in the states in ordinary circumstances. He maintained, however, that as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, he had the constitutional authority to free slaves as a war measure aimed at quelling rebellion. A sentimental glow surrounds the Emancipation Proclamation, but in fact, as the historian Richard Hofstadter once said, it possessed all the ‘moral grandeur of a bill of lading’. It contained no criticism of slavery and did not free all slaves; the legal status of at least 800,000 slaves was not affected. The proclamation did not free those held in bondage in the four slave states that remained loyal to the Union: Missouri, Delaware, Kentucky and Maryland. Nor did it free the slaves in certain Southern territories already under Union control. These rather large exemptions moved the Spectator to observe that the underlying principle of the Emancipation Proclamation was ‘not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States’. Still, the proclamation did free more than three million slaves, and many observers felt that it transformed the war for the Union into a war for the Union and freedom. When news of the proclamation arrived in South Carolina, slaves recited prayers and sang songs including ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee’.

The proclamation announced that freedmen would now be allowed to join the United States military. Many enlisted. By the end of the Civil War 180,000 had served – about a fifth of the country’s black male population aged between 18 and 45. In the Revolutionary War of 1775-83, when the 13 American colonies sought to secede from Britain, most African Americans who took up arms did so on behalf of King George III (having been promised emancipation for doing so). By contrast, in the Civil War, the overwhelming majority who took up arms fought for the United States (the Confederacy having stubbornly resisted proposals to arm slaves until the very eve of its collapse).

Although Lincoln planned to readmit the Confederate states into the Union quickly, on generous terms, he also seemed open to granting the vote to some black men – ‘the very intelligent and ... those who serve our cause as soldiers’. When the actor John Wilkes Booth heard that remark he warned: ‘That means nigger citizenship! Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.’ Three days later, on Good Friday, Booth made good on his threat, shooting Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC.

Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, was a fierce racist who militantly opposed giving African Americans an equal legal status to whites. He supported the ending of slavery but wanted blacks to be confined to a subordinate caste. That is one of the reasons Radicals in the Republican Party – Lincoln’s party – despised Johnson, who was a Democrat, and attempted to remove him from office by impeachment. Johnson survived – he escaped conviction by one vote – but the Republicans succeeded in enacting civil rights legislation despite his opposition. The Republicans also put the former Confederate states under military rule, stipulating that they would not be allowed to become self-governing and rejoin the Union until they permitted black men to participate in politics on the same basis as white men. The pariah states acceded, with remarkable results. ‘You never saw a people more excited on the subject of politics than are the negroes of the South,’ one planter observed. ‘They are perfectly wild.’ Blacks enrolled in organisations such as the Union League, which encouraged political education through speeches and debates. They petitioned local authorities; they attended Republican rallies and conventions; they voted and ran for office even in the face of violent opposition from resentful whites, who were appalled by the prospect of blacks, including former slaves, taking part in governance. Between 1870 and 1877, 16 blacks were elected to Congress, 18 to positions as state lieutenant governors, treasurers, secretaries of state or superintendents of education, and at least six hundred to state legislatures. Blacks never had decisive control over any state government, not even in Mississippi or South Carolina, where they constituted a majority of voters. But for a short period they wielded sufficient power in substantial parts of the South to insist on the establishment of public education, laws relatively favourable to workers, debtors and tenants, and prohibitions against various sorts of racial discrimination.

Reconstruction’s most durable and consequential achievements were three amendments to the federal constitution that remain in force today. The Thirteenth Amendment went beyond the Emancipation Proclamation by abolishing slavery throughout the United States (‘except as a punishment for crime’). The Fourteenth Amendment created a constitutional definition of citizenship, declaring that anyone born in the United States (under its jurisdiction) automatically becomes a citizen. That amendment, the wordiest in the constitution, also imposed a new set of duties on states, requiring them to refrain from abridging the privileges or immunities of citizens; from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; and from denying to any person the equal protection of the laws. The Fifteenth Amendment declares that the right of citizens to vote shall not be denied by the United States or by any state ‘on account of race, colour or previous condition of servitude’. Each of these amendments contained a provision authorising Congress to enforce it by ‘appropriate legislation’.

Reconstruction was under attack from the outset. There was never a consensus on its legitimacy, and in the end it sank under the weight of racism, indifference, fatigue, administrative weakness, economic depression, the ebbing of idealism, and the toll exacted by terrorism, as its enemies resorted to rape, mutilation, beating and murder to intimidate blacks and their white allies. In 1870, when an African American called Andrew Flowers prevailed over a white candidate for the position of justice of the peace in Chattanooga, Tennessee, he received a whipping at the hands of white supremacists affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan. ‘They said they had nothing particular against me,’ he testified, ‘but they did not intend any nigger to hold office in the United States.’ That same year in Greene County, Alabama armed whites broke up a Republican campaign rally, killing four blacks and wounding 54 others. In 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana black Republicans and white Democrats both claimed the right to govern. When the whites prevailed in battle they massacred fifty blacks as they tried to surrender. The era was dense with such atrocities.

By 1877 every Southern state had been ‘redeemed’ – that is, was under the control of people who aimed to reimpose the norms of white supremacy. Enemies of Reconstruction removed blacks as a factor in politics and consigned them to a degraded position within a rigid pigmentocracy. The constitutional amendments survived untouched. But, at least with respect to racial matters, they were narrowly construed, if not ignored altogether. By 1900 Reconstruction had been demolished, an experiment almost wholly repudiated.

For the first half of the 20th century, many white historians, commentators and politicians portrayed Reconstruction as a calamity that stemmed from a mistaken attempt to elevate African Americans to civil and political equality. Its ‘crusade of hate and social equality’, Claude Bowers wrote in The Tragic Era (1929),

was playing havoc with a race naturally kindly and trustful. Throughout the [Civil] War, when [white] men were far away on the battlefields, and the women were alone on far plantations with slaves, hardly a woman was attacked. Then came the scum of Northern society, emissaries of the politicians, soldiers of fortune, and not a few degenerates, inflaming the negroes’ egotism, and soon the lustful assaults began. Rape is the foul daughter of Reconstruction.

Bowers’s sensational rendition mirrored the depiction of Reconstruction offered by leading academics such as William Dunning of Columbia University, who served as president of both the American Historical Association and the American Political Science Association. ‘The negro,’ Dunning wrote in Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865-77 (1907),

had no pride of race and no aspiration or ideals save to be like the whites. With civil rights and political power, not won, but almost forced upon him, he came gradually to understand and crave those more elusive privileges that constitute social equality. A more intimate association with the other race than that which business and politics involved was the end toward which the ambition of the blacks tended consciously or unconsciously to direct itself. The manifestations of this ambition were infinite in their diversity. It played a part in the demand for mixed schools, in the legislative prohibition of discrimination between the races in hotels and theatres, and even in the hideous crime against white womanhood which now assumed new meaning in the annals of outrage.

This pejorative interpretation of Reconstruction performed important ideological work. It justified keeping blacks in their place by painting a frightening picture of what had happened when they last had civic equality and participated in governance.

Racial liberals – including most black historians and, in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, a small number of white historians – stressed that democracy had been enlarged during Reconstruction, public schooling improved and labour rights strengthened. They refuted allegations that black politicians and their white ‘carpetbagger’ and ‘scalawag’ allies had been unusually corrupt and incompetent. They emphasised the illegality and immorality of the means used to topple Reconstruction. The outstanding effort was W.E.B. DuBois’s sweeping, Marxian revisionist account, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-80 (1935). Thirty years later, in 1965, the white historian Kenneth Stampp published The Era of Reconstruction: after that, most leading historians ceased to disparage Reconstruction. Stampp’s volume appeared the year the Voting Rights Act was passed, removing the most glaring racist impediments to suffrage. The increasing legitimacy of revisionist accounts of Reconstruction was reflected in and reinforced by the Civil Rights movement. When a federal court ruled in favour of black plaintiffs challenging racial segregation on buses in Birmingham, Alabama, a white supremacist judge, citing Bowers’s The Tragic Era, urged his colleagues to recall the lessons of Reconstruction, a ‘period which all Americans recall with sadness and shame’. By then, however, growing numbers of Americans were thinking of Reconstruction with a new respect.

In​ 1988 Eric Foner published Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-77, a grand narrative built on ground largely cleared of the racist litter left by previous scholars. It is a stupendous scholarly achievement: eloquent, accessible, punctiliously accurate, marvellously detailed, bristling with insight, conscious of broad economic, social and cultural forces, alert to personal quirks, and attentive to the ideas and activities of the actors – often women and racial minorities – historians often marginalise or ignore. For thirty years it has remained the leading work of Reconstruction historiography, despite ideological disputes and changes in methodological fashion.

In The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution, Foner narrows his focus to the key legal transformations of the era. He argues that the Reconstruction Amendments ‘should not be seen simply as an alteration of an existing structure but as a ... “constitutional revolution” ... that created a fundamentally new document with a new definition of both the status of blacks and the rights of all Americans’. Much of American history has been shaped by struggles over these amendments and whether they should be seen as mere ‘alterations’ or as a fundamental remaking of the Founding Fathers’ handiwork. Conservatives tend to take the former view, liberals the latter. One reason this struggle has been so intense is that each side can adduce facts, ideas, sentiments and historical developments that support their position.

Foner supports the liberal position. He emphasises the gulf that separates life in America before the Reconstruction Amendments from life afterwards, particularly in its racial aspects. Before Reconstruction, the civil liberties enshrined in the constitution placed limits on the federal government, but not on individual states. The constitution aimed primarily to prevent the federal government encroaching on individual liberty, including the freedom to own slaves. With Reconstruction, reformers sought to empower the federal government to guarantee the rights afforded by the three new constitutional amendments, as well as the older rights some saw as being incorporated into the new regime. These older rights were contained in the first ten amendments to the constitution. Sometimes referred to as the Bill of Rights, these amendments, ratified in 1791, provided for (among other things) freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom to bear arms, a prohibition against quartering soldiers in homes, a right not to face unreasonable searches and seizures, and a right to speedy trial by an impartial jury.

Foner doesn’t embrace Thurgood Marshall’s claim that the Civil War extinguished the constitutional regime of 1787. That assertion – wishful thinking perhaps – goes too far. For good and for bad – mostly bad – the initial constitution displayed a striking resilience, inhibiting efforts to elevate former slaves, protect them against resentful whites, or undergird their new freedom with socio-economic support. Like Marshall, however, Foner does seek to alter the general view of the Reconstruction and increase its standing. The Founding Fathers – including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton – enjoy widespread, if superficial, public recognition. By comparison, key framers of the Reconstruction Amendments – James Ashley, Charles Sumner, Lyman Trumbull and Thaddeus Stevens – are obscure. Unfamiliar, too, are the origins and back stories of their constitutional handiwork, which Foner ably describes.

Throughout his career Foner has championed progressive radicalism in the American political tradition. In an open letter written in 2015, he chided Bernie Sanders for invoking foreign political models, suggesting that he look instead to American reformers such as Frederick Douglass, Abby Kelley, Eugene Debs and A. Philip Randolph. In The Second Founding, Foner returns to this theme, stressing the exceptional and innovative nature of the Reconstruction Amendments. The Thirteenth Amendment ordered emancipation without compensation and was the first occasion on which the constitution expanded the power of the federal government, creating ‘a new fundamental right to personal freedom, applicable to all persons in the United States regardless of race, gender, class or citizenship status’. Few countries, Foner observes, ‘and certainly none with as large a slave population, have experienced so radical a form of abolition’. The Fourteenth Amendment’s creation of birthright citizenship, he writes, represents ‘an eloquent statement about the nature of American society, a powerful force for assimilation ... and a repudiation of a long history of racism’.

Foner stresses the speed with which the constitutional amendments elevated four million black slaves from bondage to citizenship to formal equality with whites. But The Second Founding is far from a triumphalist celebration. The sobering tale it tells has at least three tragic aspects. The first has to do with the enmity that the Reconstruction Amendments encountered from the start. Even after the defeat of the Confederacy, opposition to emancipation, much of it fuelled by Negrophobia, was sufficiently strong to prevent congressional approval of the Thirteenth Amendment the first time it was considered. Railing against the proposed amendment, Representative Fernando Wood, the former mayor of New York City, warned that it ‘involves the extermination of the white men of the Southern states, and the forfeiture of all the land and other property belonging to them’. The former Confederate states (with the exception of Tennessee) at first refused to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. It would not have gained the approval of a sufficient number of states to become part of the constitution if the Republican Party hadn’t made ratification a prerequisite for a state’s regaining congressional representation.

The second tragic aspect has to do with the amendments’ deficiencies. Consider Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment which provides that, with certain exceptions, when the right to vote is denied to adult males the basis of that state’s congressional representation is to be reduced. Some reformers saw this as a double betrayal: it betrayed blacks by continuing to permit states to exercise racial disenfranchisement (albeit at the cost of suffering a potential reduction in representation), and it betrayed women by introducing gender into the text of the constitution for the first time. While Section 2 supposedly penalised states for excluding men from the franchise (with black men especially in mind), it expressly permitted states to exclude women with no penalty at all. ‘If that word “male” be inserted,’ Elizabeth Cady Stanton warned, ‘it will take us a century at least to get it out.’

These days, the Fourteenth Amendment tends to be unequivocally celebrated, with little or no awareness of its compromises. When it was drawn up, however, some reformers expressed keen disappointment. It ‘falls far short of my wishes’, Thaddeus Stevens said, ‘but ... I believe it is all that can be obtained in the present state of public opinion.’ Outraged by its failure to guarantee black male suffrage, the abolitionist Wendell Phillips denounced it as ‘a fatal and total surrender’, and urged states to withhold ratification. When it was voted on by the Massachusetts legislature, its two black members rejected ratification.

The Fifteenth Amendment bars states and the federal government from using race as a criterion for voting. But the version of the amendment ultimately approved was among the most restricted of the alternatives considered. One senator proposed an amendment that would have prohibited states from denying the right to vote to any adult male citizen who had not been convicted of crime or participation in rebellion. Another proposed an amendment specifying nationally uniform voting requirements. But as a result of the hostility to the prospect of unrestricted male suffrage, the framers of the amendment designed an exceedingly narrow instrument that could have been foreseen as likely to enable the disfranchisement of perceived ‘undesirables’, such as immigrants from China and Ireland. In 1870, with the abolition of slavery only five years in the past, it was evident that literacy, property and similar voting requirements could accomplish much the same ends as outright racial exclusion. Henry Adams observed mordantly that the Fifteenth Amendment was ‘more remarkable for what it does not than for what it does contain’. Complaining that the version of the amendment chosen was the ‘weakest’ considered, Senator Willard Warner argued that it was ‘unworthy of the great opportunity now presented to us’.

The third tragic aspect took a while to reveal itself. Racism encumbered the Reconstruction project from the outset, but after a brief interlude of egalitarian enthusiasm that yielded impressive advances, the always fragile commitment to racial justice embraced by the Reconstruction coalition weakened precipitously. The judiciary is the branch of government Foner finds most at fault. He notes ruefully that the Supreme Court constricted the potential reach of the Thirteenth Amendment: it addressed the problem of forced labour, but not the racially stigmatising policies that continued after slavery’s demise to mark blacks as a despised minority. The court dismissed as frivolous, for example, the argument that the racial exclusion of blacks from public places – trains, hotels, theatres etc – amounted to a badge or incidence of slavery that Congress should be empowered to prohibit through the Thirteenth Amendment.

The Fourteenth Amendment bars states from making or enforcing ‘any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States’ – a formulation that might have allowed the recognition of a broad array of individual rights. The court, however, interpreted this new provision crabbily, construing it as protecting only a narrow range of activities, such as running for federal office. The amendment provides that no state shall deny to any person ‘the equal protection of the laws’. The court insisted that this new prohibition banned racially discriminatory state action but not private action. When Congress enacted legislation to punish racial aggression by private parties, the court held that such laws went beyond the authority bestowed by the Fourteenth Amendment. The court struck down, for example, a federal law that prohibited the owners of hotels, theatres, restaurants and other ‘public accommodations’ from engaging in racial discrimination.

Then there was the question of what ‘equal protection of the laws’ entailed. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court upheld the validity of a Louisiana statute that required the separation of white and black train passengers. Opponents of the law argued that it was racially discriminatory and thus a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In lonely dissent, Justice John Marshall Harlan asked rhetorically: ‘What can more certainly arouse race hate, what more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between these races, than state enactments which, in fact, proceed on the ground that coloured citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens?’ The majority ruled, however, that the law in question was constitutionally inoffensive since it promised separate but equal accommodation for the races. If blacks felt insulted, the court declared, they were being oversensitive.

Similarly disappointing to proponents of racial justice was the Supreme Court’s early treatment of the Fifteenth Amendment. In Giles v. Harris (1903), plaintiffs claimed that the state of Alabama had participated in a conspiracy to disenfranchise African Americans. In an opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, the court concluded that even if the allegation was true, there was nothing it could appropriately do to redress the wrong. No wonder the Harvard Law Review published an article in 1910 entitled ‘Is the Fifteenth Amendment Void?’

Some of the ground lost in the long retreat from Reconstruction was regained during the ‘Second Reconstruction’ – the period roughly between 1950 and 1970 which saw an all-out challenge to white supremacism. Legislation was enacted to prohibit racial discrimination across swathes of social activity; racial disfranchisement was attacked by a series of increasingly aggressive laws; and the Supreme Court invalidated racial segregation imposed by government across the board, from schools (Brown v. Board of Education) to the marriage altar (Loving v. Virginia). ‘The country,’ Foner writes, ‘has come a long way toward filling the agenda of Reconstruction.’

Foner​ qualifies this upbeat appraisal, however, with a list of significant dissatisfactions. The ‘latent power’ of the Thirteenth Amendment, he points out, ‘has almost never been invoked as a weapon against the racism that formed so powerful an element of American slavery’, and the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise has ‘never truly been fulfilled’. To make things worse, wrong-headed rulings have made it increasingly difficult for racial minorities to obtain fairness. ‘When it comes to racial justice,’ Foner writes, ‘the court has lately proved more sympathetic to white plaintiffs complaining of reverse discrimination because of affirmative action policies than to blacks seeking assistance in overcoming the legacies of centuries of slavery and Jim Crow.’ Most distressing of all, to his mind, is the perilous position of the Fifteenth Amendment: ‘To this day the right to vote remains the subject of bitter disputation.’ The most disturbing recent episode was Shelby County v. Holder (2013), in which the Supreme Court eviscerated a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that tamped down voter suppression schemes. Since then, such schemes have spread alarmingly. Acting strictly along party lines in states it controls, the Republican Party – which has increasingly become the white man’s party – enacts legislation that makes it more difficult for certain sectors of the population to register to vote. Asserting that such laws are required to stem fraud (a claim that has been repeatedly discredited), the Republicans impose new requirements that invariably and invidiously disqualify racial minorities in disproportionate numbers. They also reduce early voting, eliminate state-supported voter registration drives, and systematically purge people from registration lists for spurious reasons. Reflecting on Shelby County, Foner complains that when conservative jurists discuss the allocation of authority between central and state government, ‘they almost always concentrate on the ideas of 18th-century framers, ignoring those of the architects of Reconstruction.’

The Second Founding exhibits the sterling qualities we have come to expect in Foner’s scholarship, particularly the careful, nuanced judgments. Resisting the overwrought pessimism currently fashionable in some parts of the left, he highlights a remarkable episode in which progressive change erupted unexpectedly. Who could have imagined in 1860 that within a decade an African American would replace the defeated president of the Confederacy as the representative of Mississippi in the Senate? But Foner also insists on recognising the strong pull of racism in American affairs. ‘Rights can be gained,’ he observes, ‘and rights can be taken away. A century and a half after the end of slavery, the project of equal citizenship remains unfinished.’

WASHINGTON — The Education Department’s civil rights chief has for 40 years labored to enforce civil rights protections in the nation’s schools and universities, but few in the position have attracted as much attention as Kenneth L. Marcus, who will leave the post this week after two years marked by dissension, disputes — and significant accomplishments.

Mr. Marcus, who came to the job as a fierce champion for Israel and a critic of anti-Zionist movements on college campuses, is credited with overseeing the completion of sexual misconduct rules and expanding civil rights for Jewish students amid rising anti-Semitism. In announcing his departure, he said he had restored the office’s status “as a neutral, impartial civil rights law enforcement agency that faithfully executes the laws as written and in full, no more and no less.”

But in recent months, two separate complaints that have been filed accuse Mr. Marcus of abusing his authority by forcing through cases that furthered his personal and political agenda. In January, a former lawyer in the Office for Civil Rights said Mr. Marcus forced employees to investigate a policy that allowed transgender athletes in Connecticut to compete on female sports teams, even though the lawyers questioned the merits of the case.

In another complaint filed in May with the department’s inspector general, nine civil rights groups said Mr. Marcus gave preferential treatment to a conservative Zionist group with close personal ties to him when he reopened a settled anti-Semitism case against Rutgers University.

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More broadly, Mr. Marcus was accused of using the office to fulfill a longstanding goal of recognizing Jewish students as a protected class under civil rights laws, while undermining policies that shielded other minority populations from discrimination. He publicly boasted that one of his first acts in office was rescinding Obama-era guidelines on how schools could use affirmative action to increase diversity in their programs.

And last fall, he moved to eliminate critical categories of civil rights data that the federal government collects from schools, like preschool enrollment by race, while proposing to broaden categories that he has long held interest in, like religious harassment.

“What we saw with Ken Marcus was a misuse of the office to further marginalize marginalized people,” said Liz King, the program director for education at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which joined dozens of groups in opposing Mr. Marcus’s confirmation.

“It is clear that he was never neutral,” Ms. King added. “Ken Marcus’s civil rights agenda was always his own, and students paid dearly for his time in office.”

Mr. Marcus, who was confirmed to lead the office in June 2018, is perhaps best known for resurrecting a complaint against Rutgers University, in which he unilaterally adopted a disputed definition of anti-Semitism that includes opposition to the state of Israel and asserted the department’s right to treat Judaism as a national origin. His decision to reopen the complaint, which had been dismissed by the Obama administration, caused an uproar among Palestinian rights and higher education groups, which had long fought Mr. Marcus’s efforts to squelch student calls for boycotting, divesting from and imposing sanctions on Israel.

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The Rutgers case emboldened Mr. Marcus to push similar investigations into national origin at other high-profile universities, including whether Jewish students were discriminated against in admissions processes. His efforts were widely seen as the groundwork for an executive order to combat anti-Semitism on college campuses.

Susan B. Tuchman, the director of the Center for Law and Justice at the Zionist Organization of America, which filed the Rutgers complaint, said Mr. Marcus raised awareness that colleges were not effectively responding to harassment of Jewish students.

“Mr. Marcus let publicly funded schools know that they could no longer justify Israel-bashing that was a mask for Jew hatred,” Ms. Tuchman said.

The complaint to the inspector general requested an investigation into whether Mr. Marcus had broken the office’s protocol by personally overseeing the Rutgers complaint, saying he had violated his “obligation of impartiality.” In 2012, Mr. Marcus wrote an “open letter” to the president of Rutgers criticizing the university’s response to claims of anti-Semitism. The complaint included data that showed that as civil rights chief, Mr. Marcus bypassed more than 400 older appeals to embrace the Zionist Organization of America’s.

Zoha Khalili, a staff lawyer of Palestine Legal, one of the groups that filed the complaint, said the matter should still be investigated, though Mr. Marcus is leaving. The groups said his decision led to a “a growing influx” of “investigations targeting advocacy and scholarship on Palestinian rights.”

“We have a long road ahead to undo the damage that he and the rest of the administration have done,” she said.

Andrew Getraer, the executive director of Rutgers Hillel, said not much came of the investigation.

“Symbolically, it was worthwhile to finally have the department acknowledge what had been done,” he said. “But it was an announcement, and then it faded away.”

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Mr. Marcus was applauded by some civil liberties groups for the completion of rules for how schools and colleges should respond to sexual misconduct under Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination. Those rules bolstered the rights of accused students and narrowed liability for schools.

“Ken Marcus has been one of the only bright spots for me in this administration, as a conservative,” said Linda Chavez, who oversees the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative research group.

But a former lawyer in the civil rights office said Mr. Marcus also used the civil rights law to further the Trump administration’s rollback of transgender rights.

The lawyer, Dwayne Bensing, filed a whistle-blower complaint with the Office of Special Counsel outlining how Mr. Marcus pressured his employees to rush a complaint filed last June by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian conservative group. The group claimed that Connecticut policy allowing transgender athletes to compete on female sports teams amounted to sex discrimination against women.

Last August, when the alliance announced that the Education Department had opened the complaint, Mr. Bensing said he investigated how such a complex case had been established so quickly.

Mr. Bensing said lawyers questioned whether the department had jurisdiction because Title IX protected students from being treated differently on the basis of their sex, while transgender athletes and other girls were being treated the same. He said when he saw an email trail with Mr. Marcus’s name in it, he was alarmed.

“The entire case processing manual went out the window, and Ken Marcus’s fingerprints were all over it,” Mr. Bensing said in an interview.

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That August, two days before the department notified the Alliance Defending Freedom that its complaint would be investigated, a civil rights enforcement director told staff members they “must have a draft for Ken’s review tomorrow,” according to emails reviewed by The New York Times.

A staff lawyer complied with an order to send a letter to the group on Aug. 7 notifying them the case had been opened, but said her team would “appreciate a discussion about the legal theory and, much simpler, the time frame/scope of the investigation.” On Aug. 8, after the letter was issued, the enforcement director ordered members of the team to start drafting a request for data, saying they would “talk in the future about the precise legal framework to apply.”

After Mr. Bensing revealed the correspondence to The Washington Blade, Mr. Marcus ordered an investigation of the disclosures. Mr. Bensing confessed, and said he faced retaliation and left the department in January. His whistle-blower complaint, first reported by HuffPost, was dismissed. In May, the department ruled that policies in Connecticut that allow transgender students to participate in athletics based on gender identity violate federal civil rights law.

“They just interpreted the law the way they wanted to, and more than that, they used those interpretations to attack people,” Mr. Bensing said. “As a former civil servant, my fear is that this administration, and Ken Marcus in particular, has tarnished the reputation of our government so much that no one is ever going to have any faith in how our federal government interprets our civil rights protections ever again.”

Mr. Marcus declined to discuss the complaints against him, but Education Department officials defended his handling of the Rutgers and Connecticut cases against what they called “recycled claims” by organizations opposed to Mr. Marcus’s “longstanding work to fight anti-Semitism.”

Other matters “relate to ongoing enforcement matters on which we cannot comment,” the department said in a statement, continuing, “We would note that all of the claims amount to criticism that Assistant Secretary Marcus has been overly vigorous in his opposition to various forms of discrimination.”

The department said that Mr. Marcus’s resignation was not connected to the complaints.

On July 9, Mr. Marcus said on Twitter that he was returning to private life. The next day, the Louis D. Brandeis Center, the Jewish civil rights group he oversaw before joining the administration, announced that he would return as chairman of its board on Aug. 1.

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Andrew Coates