Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896 by Charles Postel (review)

In his most recent book, Beyond Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896, Charles Postel explores how the most important reform movements of the post–Civil War era—the Grange, the Woman' Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and the Knights of Labor (KOL)—sought to remake the United States into a more egalitarian nation. As part of this history, Postel briefly spotlights the southern travels of Oliver Kelley, one of the founders of the Grange; Frances Willard, the well-regarded president of the WCTU; and Terence Powderly, the grand master of the KOL. Kelley toured the South in 1866 at the behest of President Andrew Johnson, who had asked him to assess the state of southern agriculture. Fifteen years later, when Frances Willard announced that she planned to visit the South, President James Garfield invited her to the White House to discuss her upcoming venture. Just three years later, in 1885, Terence Powderly publicized that he too would be taking a southern tour in the hope of expanding the reach of the Knights of Labor.

After their southern sojourns, Kelley, Willard, and Powderly provided glowing accounts of the South and the possibilities of sectional reconciliation. According to Postel, all three leaders looked forward to a new nationalism untethered from the divisions that had so recently led to civil war. Equally important, all three believed that if they helped to spur sectional reconciliation, their respective organizations would be able to more effectively address the economic and gender inequalities that had marked the postwar period and create a more egalitarian, rational, just, and orderly society. This sectional reconciliation, however, would come with a high price tag: the exclusion of African Americans from the body politic and the dismantling of the hard-fought victories of the Civil War and Reconstruction era.

To lay out this history, one full of promise but ultimately marked by great tragedy, Postel provides overviews of the Grange, the WCTU, and the Knights of Labor. He profiles biographies of important leaders, highlights the origins of each organizations, and explores the evolution of ideas and organizing strategies. Considering the rich histories of these organizations, this represents a significant feat. Equally important, he asks readers to take seriously all three organizations' quest for equality, all the while knowing that each one would ultimately embrace or at least bow to the politics of white supremacy.

While readers will find much that is familiar about the Grange, the WCTU, and the KOL, by discussing these three organizations side by side, Postel is able to highlight commonalties and differences that might otherwise be overlooked. He describes how the Grange was the brainchild of Washington bureaucrats in the nation's capital and how from the very beginning they looked to the federal government for power and sought national solutions to the problems plaguing the nation's farmers. Similarly, Terence Powderly recognized the power of the federal government as a positive force for change. The Grange and KOL leaders developed similarly thoughtful critiques of monopoly capitalism as unjust, irrational, and chaotic. Rather than focus on the size of corporations, both organizations blamed the government for conferring "special privileges" on railroads and other corporations, privileges that they then used as weapons against the nation's farmers and workers. Both also envisioned a well-regulated economy, one in which the state and federal governments would use their powers to create not only a more level playing field, but a rational one.

While the Grange largely ignored African American farmers and showed little interest in organizing tenant farmers, sharecroppers, or farm laborers, Postel recounts how both the WCTU and the KOL sought to organize African Americans in the South. He highlights how the WCTU actively recruited southern African American women, especially when their husbands' votes could possibly sway the outcome of prohibition campaigns. Even more significantly, he describes how, by the late 1880s, the KOL had become "an organization of cotton pickers, sugarcane cutters, domestic servants, lumbermen, washerwomen, and...