The failure of Reconstruction, therefore, occurred not because of the particular policies the Radical Republicans enacted, but because the south refused to comply with any policies without an occupying force to make them do it, and in the end the northern electorate lost the will to maintain that occupying force. Or, as Ayers puts it, “It was not that Reconstruction failed from some internal flaw. Rather, each success consumed political energy, and so did each loss. The Republicans constructed a remarkable machine at every level of government and society, but they ran out of electoral fuel to run the machine.”
Yeah, that sounds horribly accurate....and also horribly familiar, right now (thinking of Coates's We Were Eight Years in Power, which links Obama with Reconstruction).
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Date: 2019-10-29 05:03 pm (UTC)Yeah, that sounds horribly accurate....and also horribly familiar, right now (thinking of Coates's We Were Eight Years in Power, which links Obama with Reconstruction).