The Retreats of Reconstruction: Race, Leisure, and the Politics of Segregation at the New Jersey Shore, 1865–1920 by David Goldberg (review)

David Goldberg's The Retreats from Reconstruction: Race, Leisure, and the Politics of Segregation at the New Jersey Shore, 1865–1920 continues the historiographical trend that expands our understanding of Reconstruction and the Civil War's consequences beyond the plantation South. In this case, Goldberg examines the politics of race and segregation in the resort communities of Asbury Park and Atlantic City, New Jersey. He argues that over the last decade of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth century, consumption and consumer freedom replaced the free labor political economy of the Civil War era at the Jersey shore. Subsequent clashes between working-class African Americans, middle-class white tourists, and white business elites prompted the implementation of Jim Crow segregation there by 1920.

Early shore promoters hailed their community as a free-labor paradise where workers could rest secure in their upward social mobility. Of course, their comfort depended on African American seasonal workers, which bred conflict in the 1870s and 1880s. Asbury Park founder James A. Bradley claimed that any form of segregation in his resort town reflected visitors' social preferences rather than racial discrimination. Goldberg argues, however, that white exclusivity was precarious through the first decades after the Civil War. Common law tradition required businesses to remain mindful of the public's welfare; such traditions and lingering free labor ideals created space for African Americans to challenge segregation on the grounds of equal opportunity and the dignity of labor.

In 1893, local business leaders supplanted free labor's thrift, restraint, and obedience with the market, consumption, and property rights. White elites embraced visitors' aggregate spending power to structure the shore's leisure spaces. Under this revised social view, property owners' rights to determine the use of and access to their property trumped labor's right to integrated spaces. By 1920, Goldberg concludes, the pursuit of profit and property reigned supreme at the Jersey shore. African American leaders assisted this transition by pushing for municipal reform aimed at public health and by working to promote black businesses. Such efforts undermined earlier attempts to integrate leisure spaces and established a consumer culture at the Jersey shore that emphasized commercial development.

Retreats from Reconstruction attempts to do a lot in 131 pages. It could have done more. First, it needed more maps. Since the book is rooted in two shore communities, Asbury Park and Atlantic City, a map showing their relative places within the state would have been helpful. Second, this book lacks the sort of larger context typical of community studies. While the author depicts the Jersey shore as a unique mixture of leisure seekers, he also recognizes the important roles played by local groups. But he never firmly establishes the local communities' place within the state, North, or country. New Jersey had a long and complicated history with race and slavery, dating back to the colonial period. Furthermore, the state's gradual abolitionist policy rendered many black New Jerseyans still slaves in all but name by the Civil War. How did the shore fit within this larger history? What impact did this history have on the shore's development?

These questions gain greater significance due to the author's use of the term "Reconstruction." It is not within the scope of a review to try to settle arguments over terminology, but readers will likely debate Goldberg's definition of "Reconstruction" as both the long battle over African Americans' civil rights and a "process by which Americans continued to negotiate critical questions about the rights of consumers and producers in a unique social space where traditional distinctions between work and play were in flux" (5). The author connects reconstruction to a long-range assessment of the free labor ideology, race, and political economy, which challenges definitions of reconstruction...