The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (review)

The question examined by Valelly's The Two Reconstructions is why the enfranchisement of African Americans in the 1960s succeeded, while the earlier attempt after the Civil War failed. A glib but not implausible answer would be that the United States could not afford to fail twice in the attempt to practice the democracy that it preaches. Certainly, the wider social and cultural context in which the later attempt was made had changed so fundamentally from the first that any explanation would have to start by examining how much more favorable the overall circumstances were.

But Valelly takes an approach more appropriate to a political scientist, focusing his attention on those political and legal institutions that first could grant the suffrage, then sustain and stabilize it, and finally give it legal sanction. Since this institutionalizing process begins at the national level, the book systematically analyzes each enfranchisement attempt from this perspective in great detail.

According to Valelly's model, each enfranchisement initiative began when a national political party or presidential administration faced an electoral threat that could be countered only by forging a winning coalition through the mobilization of existing black voters, or the creation of new ones. Hence, the "coalition of 1867–68" was created by the Republican majority in Congress that was threatened by President Andrew Johnson's efforts at party realignment. A century later, the initiative emerged in two stages, first with the Truman administration's "coalition of 1848" and then the Kennedy "coalition of 1961–65." Although the Republicans' creation of an African American constituency in 1867/68 can be readily explained as stemming from the party's dire need to prevent the Democrats from winning the South, the assertion of a similar imperative in 1948 and from 1961 to 1965 is contestable. Besides, how could the new black voters anticipated by the Kennedy administration be generated quickly enough to take care of a supposedly pressing electoral crisis in 1964? Surely, there are other reasons why the Truman and Kennedy/Johnson administrations embarked on initiatives toward black voting and civil rights.

Nevertheless, after these coalition-creating initiatives were taken, the viability of the new voting group was determined, so Valelly argues, by the quality of the "party-building" and "jurisprudence-building" that ensued. In the post-Civil War case, because the support from the northern Republican Party and the federal courts was inadequate, it failed to stabilize the Republican Party in the South. Accordingly, it collapsed under pressure from the Democrats, and the black vote was ultimately eliminated by disfranchisement around 1900.

By contrast, the second enfranchisement of blacks fared much better. Despite much opposition (though not as lethal or as unrelenting as in the 1870s), this later party-building operation succeeded because it did not begin anew as in the 1860s but was grafted onto an existing southern party structure, albeit a one-party system. The courts, particularly the U.S. Supreme Court, moved quickly to recognize black voting rights and uphold the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its subsequent extensions, as did the national Democratic and Republican parties. Unlike the earlier sequence of the 1870s, when the Court and Democrats from both the North and the South were unfriendly from the outset, this time the endorsement was fast and easy.

Based on an impressive knowledge of the historical and political-science literature about these two episodes, The Two Reconstructions is an insightful and always interesting comparative study. Yet, by restricting his scope to political and legal institutions—important as they may be—the author limits his ability to explain the second enfranchisement's success. All the same, historians and political scientists will be challenged by this provocative book, which, for the first time, provides a systematic comparison of two historically significant initiatives, which had similar objectives but vastly different outcomes.