Jeremi Suri
Auteur van Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente
Over de Auteur
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
Werken van Jeremi Suri
Sustainable Security: Rethinking American National Security Strategy (2016) — Redacteur — 2 exemplaren
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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.… (meer)