Killing Reconstruction American Exceptionalism And The...

Killing Reconstruction; American Exceptionalism and The North’s Rise to Power Pulitzer Prize holding biographer of president Woodrow Wilson’s biography, Scott Berg, described the future foreign policy of southern diplomats and federalists such as Wilson, to have been formed by the trauma experienced during the course of The Civil War. The Confederate south was left in a state of constant ruin, with infrastructure and the economy in recession, morale and dignity torn, and in a racial transgression crisis. The presidential election in 1876, was meant to solidify the desired theme of political, economic, and social unity and sustainability in the United States, a supposedly liberated state with respect to the Constitution and legislative†¦show more content†¦An analysis composed by Heather Cox Richardson, Harvard Graduate and professor of history at Boston College, speculates the key reason for deserted Southern reconstruction and integration of black Americans in to the politico-economic order was rooted in the North’s fear of anarchic/Communist ideology enlightening African American workers if industry was established in the south. The events involving foreign affairs and socialist revolutions, primarily in France with the creation of a workers collective, was disconcerting to the industrial corporate sector in the north, whose lobbying and executive precedence was vast but not in favor of the majority of middle class workers*(Independent Document 2). Thus, these fears of Union rule translated into the propagating of the media, sensationalizing the harms of African American integration into the political order, especially in the legislative branch of the federal government, as compromising capitalist industry and implementing state sponsored Communism. Likewise to the previous contention, the 19th century media can be a primary indicator of the cultivated fear implemented through social conditioning. An issue of The New York Times in 1871 described Parisian