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Jeremi Suri holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Global Leadership, History, and Public Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of four previous books: Henry Kissinger and the American Century, The Global Revolutions of 1968, Power and Protest, and American Foreign toon meer Relations since 1898. Professor Suri is a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, CNN.com, Salon, Wired, the Times Literary Supplement, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, and the International Herald Tribune. He blogs on global affairs at http://globalbrief.ca and his website is http://jeremisuri.net. toon minder

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Jeremi Suri, a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, believes that the study of history is vital to American education and to the public good. We must examine and rethink the choices our predecessors made if we are to make our society better. With that purpose in mind, he wrote Civil War by Other Means—America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy, published in October 2022. Inevitably it’s incomplete, but eloquent and a good read.

On January 6, 2021, a largely white, male mob attacked the U.S. Capitol. They were intent on preventing people "who were different from them—Black, Brown, Asian, female—“ from gaining power "even if elected by millions of votes” (3). In the troubled economy of the early 21st century, many white working class Americans feel left behind—and scorned by educated, "often nonwhite” (5) elites. Some “searched for a cause, and found it, as others had before, in the Confederacy—a rebellion of white people to protect themselves” (6). Professor Suri argues that the Confederacy and its symbols remain politically potent because the Confederates continued to fight “by other means.” The Union’s military victory of 1865 "was not followed by a sustained uprooting” (4) of the cause of white supremacy.

As a result, white supremacism has remained a driving force in American life. Suri writes with energy and eloquence, but concentrates on the Reconstruction era without covering major developments in race relations in subsequent decades. A future edition, creating a stronger through-line to the present, might include some later movements for multiracial democracy, such as the Fusion alliance of poor but progressive whites and African Americans and the ruthless suppression of that movement. A final chapter could address the curious but profound reversal of roles between Republicans and Democrats on civil rights, beginning during the New Deal and intensifying up to the present.

Suri appears to apply current ethical standards in judging nineteenth-century leaders, but in reality he gives them what they deserve. The pioneering oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury, for example, was a founder of the modern U.S. Navy and a successful diplomat (for the Confederacy). After receiving a pardon from President Andrew Johnson, he became president of the college that is now Virginia Tech. What counts for Suri, though, was that Maury served the French-installed Emperor Maximilian of Mexico as the brains behind a colony established by Confederate exiles, implementing a form of virtual slavery in Mexico (51-56) and trying to harm the Union years after Lee surrendered.

The excesses of Texan Confederates attract Suri’s particular interest. Led by several generals, thousands of Texans emigrated to Mexico where they served Maximilian and established a plantation colony employing former slaves. Suri tells of hard-liners like Alexander Watkins Terrell, who was successively a lawyer, a Confederate brigadier general, a spy for Maximilian, a Texas state senator, Grover Cleveland’s envoy to the Ottoman Empire, and a Texas state representative who pioneered voter-suppression laws. These men “sought to rebuild the Confederacy in Mexico and then bring it back to the American South” (58).

Of Texas, Suri writes that this former part of Mexico “became an independent country and then a state of the Union. When Texas voted to secede from the Union in 1861, it had come full circle—a settler community attached to bigger states . . . but also devoted to its independence. This ambivalence has carried forward into the twenty-first century” (51).

Suri focuses on the successive presidencies of Andrew Johnson, Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes, and James Garfield. He sums up Johnson as “obsessed with preserving a limited, white male democracy in the South“ (121). With impeachments fresh in readers’ minds, Suri describes salient points of Johnson's impeachment and his escaping conviction by a single vote.

Suri highlights Grant’s vigorous support for African Americans' economic advancement and voting rights, and his determination to protect them from racist violence. In Suri's telling, Grant’s strengths—supporting progressives in Mexico and hastening France’s abandonment of Maximilian, energizing the newly created Department of Justice, and enforcing the Ku Klux Klan Act—overshadow his failure to control corruption in the Republican Party. The Republicans were mutating from a party of white shopkeepers, craftsmen and farmers into the party of big business, ambitious to build railroads and develop the American West but lacking “the passion and the grit to take on the stubborn South” (190).

Foreshadowing today’s tensions, during Reconstruction “the convoluted American system of elections made national divisions worse, and it made the selection of a president arbitrary and contentious” (192). In 1876, President Grant was "concerned about . . .destroying or adding ballots to change the outcomes” (205). And the voting was followed by “a crowd of confusing, and often contradictory, lawsuits” (207).

Suri recommends that 21st-century Americans replace the Electoral College with a national popular vote (264–266 and 290). His narrative makes clear, however, that in 19th-century elections there was so much corrupt administration, intimidation and cheating that an accurate national popular vote total would have been impossible to determine.

Unmentioned: Beginning with the New Deal, Democrats gradually embraced a modern version of Reconstruction Republicans' inclusive, multiracial democracy. Truman integrated the U.S. armed forces. Lyndon Johnson pushed civil rights and voting rights bills through Congress. Johnson’s Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 put an end to racial quotas. As for the Republicans, their support for corporate interests arguably hampered achievement of “liberty and justice for all” for over a century—and then, with McCarthyism, the John Birch Society, Goldwater, Schlafly, Reagan, Gingrich, the Tea Party, Palin, Trump, MAGA, and the Supreme Court, they moved ever more rightward.
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Gemarkeerd
HerbThomas | 1 andere bespreking | Jan 30, 2023 |
In Civil War by Other Means: America's Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy Jeremi Suri offers a detailed history of the period just after the Civil War and illustrates how the missed opportunity then has plagued the nation ever since.

A lot of what is in here isn't so much new as it is presented in a cohesive narrative with a focus on what was done to either try to build a better democracy or, conversely, keep a grossly dysfunctional democracy. As is painfully obvious today, the dysfunctionality has been winning the day.

While some things, whether we knew the details or not, won't surprise us, it is some of the facts we have overlooked that shed a great deal of light. For instance, many people either didn't know or had forgotten that the Republican party of Lincoln was also a response by whites to what they perceived to be a threat to their way of life. They weren't so much anti-slavery as they were anti-slaveowners. So in the aftermath of the Civil War, it wasn't such a big shift for them to become just as openly racist as the old Confederates. A hundred and fifty years later and it is even more evident that the differences were never as great as some have believed.

We never even started out living up to the ideals put on paper. So it isn't much of a surprise that even when new legislation is enacted that is supposed to improve democracy it is circumvented by those who feel threatened, who see life as a zero-sum game. From slavery to Jim Crow to white supremacist paramilitary units called police, there has been little de facto change, and we are perilously close to losing anything that resembles a democracy thanks to our inability over many generations to live up to ideals we spout but don't live.

This is an accessible book that is well-researched and has substantial notes for anyone wanting to do more research. The roots of our current problems long pre-date the Civil War, but this was the ideal chance to make things right, and we didn't. If you want to understand what exactly we failed to do and why, this is the book for you.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
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½
 
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pomo58 | 1 andere bespreking | Jul 15, 2022 |
This was an understandable overview of some of the main American nation-building efforts. Ranging from the actual Founding to Afghanistan and Iraq, this book never gets too deep into the specifics of events. Rather, it focuses around the idea of the "American nation-building creed." From my understanding, it is the idea that America believes it will be better off and that the entire world will be better off if areas were formed into self-governing, democratic nation-states. It furthermore focuses on why some efforts had some level of success (education, getting to know people) and why some were colossal failures (rigid dogma, avoiding dealing with viable leaders).
The chapter about the Marshall Plan (and Herbert Hoover) and Vietnam were my favorite.
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mbeaty91 | Sep 9, 2020 |
Henry Kissinger ist sicherlich eine der vergleichsweise schillernden Figuren des 20. Jahrhunderts. Seine Herkunft, frühe Prägung und schließlich sein bemerkenswerter Aufstieg in den durch den Kalten Krieg geprägten USA rechtfertigen mehr als eine ausführliche Würdigung.
Doch genau dies bleibt der Autor weitestgehend schuldig. Zwar bemüht er sich um die Einbettung Kissinger´s Wirkens in die Umstände der jeweiligen Zeit, aber anstatt hier den tatsächlichen Konnex zu suchen, bleibt er einerseits einer vergleichsweise oberflächlichen Beschreibung der politischen Lage verhaftet, während er gleichzeitig Kissinger´s Leistungen maßlos überzeichnet, ohne dabei vor eklatanten Widersprüchen zurückzuschrecken.
Eine vertane Gelegenheit.
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ThomasK | Oct 19, 2010 |

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