Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of by Stephen Kantrowitz Books: Stephen Kantrowitz's Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (UNC Press) Mr. Carpenter, Ph.D., is working on a book about American demagoguery. He is a columnist for HNN. In focusing on ’s post-Reconstruction resurgence of white supremacy as a “political program,” Stephen Kantrowitz has performed a valuable service to modern historiography. While not ignoring cultural and socially structural influences on the “reconstruction” of white hegemony, he reintroduces the centrality of raw politics in the development of systematic, violent, and degrading change. The 1868-1876 intercession of “radical” Reconstruction had profoundly withered what was implicitly understood during Slavocracy’s rule: that white supremacy was an unquestioned fact of all facets of Southern life. If this once-implicit and legally enforced social construction was to be resurrected, it required explicit and forceful political leadership. “Historic prejudices” were insufficient by themselves, Kantrowitz argues. The savage repudiation of official attempts at racial equality “did not simply ‘rise up’” from the ashes of white Southerners’ hoary racism. It had to be fed and cultivated. In this setting “men of the leadership class forged political arguments and organizations that put white men’s expectations of mastery to work” (pp. 2-3). Foremost among them was “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman (1847-1918), South Carolina’s two-term governor and four-term U.S. senator from 1890 until his death. Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy explores through rich primary sources the decisive stages of this pioneering demagogue’s career: first as a political terrorist; then as a governor who openly condoned to control the state’s majority population; and ultimately as a national leader who exhorted the North to see the error of its more racially tolerant ways. For those who have read Francis Butler Simkins’ still- renowned 1944 Tillman biography, much may be familiar but exceedingly profitable reading nevertheless. For instance, Kantrowitz enhances Simkins’ observations on Tillman’s opposition to, and clever co-optation of, the third-party movement of Populism. Notwithstanding most modern historians’ defense of Populism’s economic and political egalitarianism as an achievable program, Tillman unmistakably comes across as the more astute and, unsurprisingly, realistic of the two. At least in cynical terms he was less averse to Populist proposals (he jumped on the free-silver bandwagon and eventually, though quietly, bowed to a “subtreasury” concept) than he was to dubious political judgment. In Tillman’s estimation Populist leaders had made a “fatal blunder . in organizing the third party too soon” and, even more egregiously, had bellied up to the bar of biracialism rather than concentrating on transregional white cooperation (p. 246). In doing so Populists alienated most white Southern Democrats and thus destroyed any hope of success. Tillman could forgive fellow whites many transgressions, but not that of a wasted political opportunity. The author also expands on past assessments of Tillman as a strutting and promise-filled reformer who produced practically nothing in the way of results. Despite his claim of working tirelessly on behalf of impoverished white farmers, Tillman’s idea of reform reduced to little more than a vague Jeffersonian concept of independent producerism. After all, real economic reforms might have benefited blacks as well as whites, and that was terrain he would not traverse. What’s more, he opposed on states’ rights’ grounds many proposed federal measures that would have aided aggrieved workers. Whether it was the nationalization of railroads in the interest of farmers or limitation of cotton-mill hours, Washington’s intervention into the search for improved living standards would have been an insidious infringement on states to manage their own socioeconomic affairs. How familiar that sounds today. Chiefly, however, as the book’s title suggests, Kantrowitz concentrates on Ben Tillman’s vision of methodically “reconstructing” whites’ undisputed supremacy, something lost during Congressional Reconstruction. In Tillman’s amended view, those deserving supremacy were white farmers, pure and simple. It was they who collectively toiled and produced, thus they who should collectively rule. Their whiteness, their status as family heads, their biological and moral superiority to lazy and sexually aggressive blacks all dictated they should reign politically, socially, and economically. To achieve this, white solidarity was of course critical. But with heroes and solidarity come villains and outsiders, and part of Tillman’s political genius was that in addition to blacks he presented his base with sharply defined ones: the Redeemer “aristocracy” and usurious merchants. He “redr[ew] the circle of legitimate political and economic authority to include the farmers and to exclude all who opposed their interests. Only certain white men were truly white and truly men” (p. 111). The old political aristocracy had forfeited its authority and any just claim to “whiteness” by trading favors for black votes; credit-dispersing merchants were illegitimate because of “their unproductive livelihoods.” The battle lines were drawn--and it was Tillman as martial architect. This rounds out Kantrowitz’s account of both the centrality of politics in reconstructing white supremacy and one politician’s indispensable role as the mover and shaker. Tillman self-servingly portrayed agrarian “revolt” as a “fire . everywhere smouldering and ready to burst. I have only fanned it into flame.” Too many observers have relied on the similar foundation of “historic prejudices” to explain white Southerners’ late-nineteenth century reconstruction of supremacy, according to Kantrowitz’s study. “Such metaphors [as used by Tillman] are convenient for those who fail to see political movements as the products of human agency or for those who wish to make such efforts seem natural” (p. 125). Far from being “spontaneous,” the so-called farmer rebellion was largely a product of Tillman’s political organizational skill and talent for grass-roots mobilization. In addition to the titled subject are underlying themes of white “manliness” as indistinguishable from the code of white supremacy; of a conservative-Democratic racism virtually equal in virulence to Tillman’s; and a persistent quandary that arose from the latter’s internal contradictions. The first subtheme--manliness--seems to suffer in that the author includes both manly violence and “manly restraint” as components of a distinctly patriarchal white supremacy. Consequently he boxes the argument in by definition. Furthermore, Kantrowitz alludes to a black manliness of similar characteristics to white males (that is, it could be violent or restrained), and notes as well white women’s venomous racism-- both of which would appear to vitiate in argument any peculiar manliness within white supremacy’s reconstruction. The second recurrent thesis-- conservatives’ rough equivalence to Tillman when it came racist depravity--is perhaps open to debate, yet Kantrowitz presents evidence a tad one-sided. For this reviewer, at least, his third subtheme is the most intriguing. How did Tillman reconcile the lawlessness and envelope-pushing politics he himself had used to reestablish white control with his subsequent need as South Carolina’s chief executive and party boss to maintain state order, authority, and some semblance of official rectitude? For Kantrowitz, the irony of Tillman’s career was that in the literal end, he could not. Having witnessed over his objections the ascendancy of certain demagogues who were more “Tillmanite” than their eponymous model, Tillman concluded that the white masses he once encouraged had wasted their “democratic” opportunities. Rather than honing Jeffersonian republican virtues, they stooped to supporting the likes of a cursing, gambling, besotted, violence-instigating Cole Blease, Tillman’s one-time protégé. The once-noble white farmers now only made fools of themselves, Tillman lamented, by falling for the “wiles and tricks of demagogues.” Two years before his death he wrote, “I have come to doubt that the masses of the people have sense enough to govern themselves” (pp. 301-02). Coming from the virtual prototype of pernicious Southern demagoguery, his was no minor conversion. Ben Tillman & the Reconstruction of White Supremacy. Through the life of Benjamin Ryan Tillman (1847-1918), South Carolina's self-styled agrarian rebel, this book traces the history of white male supremacy and its discontents from the era of plantation slavery to the age of Jim Crow. As an anti-Reconstruction guerrilla, Democratic activist, South Carolina governor, and U.S. senator, Tillman offered a vision of reform that was proudly white supremacist. In the name of white male militance, productivity, and solidarity, he justified lynching and disfranchised most of his state's black voters. His arguments and accomplishments rested on the premise that only productive and virtuous white men should govern and that federal power could never be trusted. Over the course of his career, Tillman faced down opponents ranging from agrarian radicals to aristocratic conservatives, from woman suffragists to black Republicans. His vision and his voice shaped the understandings of millions and helped create the violent, repressive world of the Jim Crow South. Friend and foe alike--and generations of historians--interpreted Tillman's physical and rhetorical violence in defense of white supremacy as a matter of racial and gender instinct. This book instead reveals that Tillman's white supremacy was a political program and social argument whose legacies continue to shape American life. Who Was Ben Tillman, Whose Statues Appear All Over South Carolina? NPR's Ailsa Chang talks with Stephen Kantrowitz, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, about who Ben Tillman was and why his statues appear all over South Carolina. AILSA CHANG, HOST: Many of us pass statues in public places every day on the way to work, school, the grocery store. They become wallpaper, part of the scenery. But there are people behind each of those statues, monuments and plaques. And as we examine our painful, racist past in this country, it's worth examining those statues as well. That's what we're doing this week in a series of conversations. Today, Benjamin Ryan Tillman - a statue honoring Tillman went up at the South Carolina Statehouse in 1940. His name is also on a building at . He was a longtime senator from the state, serving from 1895 to 1918. He was governor before that. And he was an ardent racist who terrorized seeking the right to vote. University of Wisconsin-Madison history professor Stephen Kantrowitz literally wrote the book on Tillman. It's called "Ben Tillman And The Reconstruction Of White Supremacy." STEPHEN KANTROWITZ: Thank you. Glad to be here. CHANG: OK. I just want to start at the beginning. Where did Ben Tillman grow up? What was his backstory? KANTROWITZ: Ben Tillman was born into a very wealthy slaveholding family in Edgefield, S.C. He was born in 1847, and that means that he turns 18 in 1865. So the world in which he's raised ends at the moment that he becomes a man, and he spends the rest of his life trying to reconstruct the kind of dominance that his class had always assumed it would have - economically, politically and in other ways - over African Americans in a world that doesn't have slavery in it anymore. And I think that, more than anything else, really captures who Ben Tillman was and what he tried to do. CHANG: And he goes on to act on these racist views he developed early on in life through a called the Red Shirts in South Carolina. Tell us who the Red Shirts were. KANTROWITZ: The Red Shirts were kind of Klansmen without the hoods who followed the Klan, which was put down by the federal government in the early 1870s as a kind of open anti-Reconstruction militia in South Carolina, a paramilitary organization of young white men and some Confederate officers whose purpose was to overthrow the state's Republican government and replace it with a white supremacist Democratic government. CHANG: And to be clear, the Red Shirts perpetrated several massacres of Black people, right? KANTROWITZ: They did indeed. Tillman is most famous for his participation in one called the Hamburg Massacre, which took place on July 4 in the river town of Hamburg, S.C., right across the river from Augusta. A African American unit of the state militia had refused to surrender their weapons to the paramilitary - to the Red Shirts. And the Red Shirts came to town, besieged them in their militia room, knocked down the wall with a cannon they brought over from Augusta and, when the men fled, fired on them, caught a bunch of them and then decided which of them to execute. And it's not clear what precisely Tillman's role was in that, but he bragged forever after about knowing that this moment had called for cold-blooded murder. And that's what they perpetrated. CHANG: And after his involvement in the Red Shirts, Tillman was later elected governor not in spite of those Red Shirt massacres, but potentially because of them, right? KANTROWITZ: Yes. Tillman rose to power on a slightly different agenda. He rose to power claiming to be the friend of what he called the farmers, by which he meant ordinary white men. I would argue that he was not actually the friend of ordinary white men, but he did imagine that the state's future had to reside only in the hands of white men and only in the hands of those white men who would forswear any political coalition with Black men. And that - as much as his overt white supremacy and his threats to murder Black people and his actual perhaps murder of Black people was key to Tillman's whole political program - not just white supremacy as anti-Blackness or murderous attacks on Black people, but also attacks on white people who would make political coalition with Black people. That's a really important part of what white supremacy was and is and how it functioned and functions. CHANG: Now, he was governor for four years in South Carolina. He left a major mark on the state. Tell us how. KANTROWITZ: The biggest single thing that Tillman did was sort of mastermind the creation of a new constitution for the state, the Constitution of 1895. He had already moved to the Senate by that point, but he was clearly in charge of that process and led the referendum that led to calling the Constitutional Convention in which they perpetrated massive fraud for the umpteenth time. The Constitution of 1895 is best known to us as a disfranchising constitution. It effectively stripped the vote from the overwhelming majority of Black South Carolinians. It also effectively stripped the vote from a huge number of poor white South Carolinians. And turnout plummeted after that constitution went into effect in 1895. And this, I think, is part and parcel of Tillman's whole program - is that most white men probably couldn't be trusted to do the right thing consistently and prevent Black people from returning to positions of political power. And therefore, they, too, needed to lose the vote for the greater good of white supremacy. CHANG: And how would you characterize Tillman's record as a senator after he left the governor's mansion? KANTROWITZ: Tillman made great hay off of his commitment to white supremacy as a senator and kind of gloried in the reputation he had as the wild, violent embodiment of the white supremacist South. He - it's hard to tell sometimes whether he was putting this on or doing it deliberately or whether it was just coming right out of him, but he would refer constantly to his pledge to lynch Black men who were accused of raping or attempting to rape white women. He would allude constantly to his participation in the Hamburg Massacre. He would essentially say to audiences around the country, white Southern men will not allow African Americans into positions of political power. And to the extent that you encourage them to or allow them to, you are going to provoke us to murderous violence, so don't do it. CHANG: So, obviously, you have spent a long time thinking about . How do you feel about all these monuments to this man? KANTROWITZ: It's always struck me as bizarre, honestly, in the same way that monuments to Robert E. Lee or to the Confederacy generally have struck me as bizarre - that people who so perfectly represent values antithetical to the ones that the claims to stand for can be celebrated in public in a way that monuments and other, you know, civic representations do. So honestly, it's just been a kind of incredulity. But I think as you said at the beginning, we grow up with these things as wallpaper. And it takes us time and attention and energy to learn to see them as something other than wallpaper and to see past the respectability and the bronze and the rest and to actually understand that they're human stories being told. CHANG: Yeah. Stephen Kantrowitz is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Thank you very much for helping us understand who this man was. KANTROWITZ: It's my pleasure. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Copyright © 2020 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record. Books: Stephen Kantrowitz's Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (UNC Press) Mr. Carpenter, Ph.D., is working on a book about American demagoguery. He is a columnist for HNN. In focusing on South Carolina’s post-Reconstruction resurgence of white supremacy as a “political program,” Stephen Kantrowitz has performed a valuable service to modern historiography. While not ignoring cultural and socially structural influences on the “reconstruction” of white hegemony, he reintroduces the centrality of raw politics in the development of systematic, violent, and degrading change. The 1868-1876 intercession of “radical” Reconstruction had profoundly withered what was implicitly understood during Slavocracy’s rule: that white supremacy was an unquestioned fact of all facets of Southern life. If this once-implicit and legally enforced social construction was to be resurrected, it required explicit and forceful political leadership. “Historic prejudices” were insufficient by themselves, Kantrowitz argues. The savage repudiation of official attempts at racial equality “did not simply ‘rise up’” from the ashes of white Southerners’ hoary racism. It had to be fed and cultivated. In this setting “men of the leadership class forged political arguments and organizations that put white men’s expectations of mastery to work” (pp. 2-3). Foremost among them was “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman (1847-1918), South Carolina’s two-term governor and four-term U.S. senator from 1890 until his death. Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy explores through rich primary sources the decisive stages of this pioneering demagogue’s career: first as a political terrorist; then as a governor who openly condoned lynching to control the state’s majority population; and ultimately as a national leader who exhorted the North to see the error of its more racially tolerant ways. For those who have read Francis Butler Simkins’ still- renowned 1944 Tillman biography, much may be familiar but exceedingly profitable reading nevertheless. For instance, Kantrowitz enhances Simkins’ observations on Tillman’s opposition to, and clever co-optation of, the third-party movement of Populism. Notwithstanding most modern historians’ defense of Populism’s economic and political egalitarianism as an achievable program, Tillman unmistakably comes across as the more astute and, unsurprisingly, realistic of the two. At least in cynical terms he was less averse to Populist proposals (he jumped on the free-silver bandwagon and eventually, though quietly, bowed to a “subtreasury” concept) than he was to dubious political judgment. In Tillman’s estimation Populist leaders had made a “fatal blunder . in organizing the third party too soon” and, even more egregiously, had bellied up to the bar of biracialism rather than concentrating on transregional white cooperation (p. 246). In doing so Populists alienated most white Southern Democrats and thus destroyed any hope of success. Tillman could forgive fellow whites many transgressions, but not that of a wasted political opportunity. The author also expands on past assessments of Tillman as a strutting and promise-filled reformer who produced practically nothing in the way of results. Despite his claim of working tirelessly on behalf of impoverished white farmers, Tillman’s idea of reform reduced to little more than a vague Jeffersonian concept of independent producerism. After all, real economic reforms might have benefited blacks as well as whites, and that was terrain he would not traverse. What’s more, he opposed on states’ rights’ grounds many proposed federal measures that would have aided aggrieved workers. Whether it was the nationalization of railroads in the interest of farmers or limitation of cotton-mill hours, Washington’s intervention into the search for improved living standards would have been an insidious infringement on states to manage their own socioeconomic affairs. How familiar that sounds today. Chiefly, however, as the book’s title suggests, Kantrowitz concentrates on Ben Tillman’s vision of methodically “reconstructing” whites’ undisputed supremacy, something lost during Congressional Reconstruction. In Tillman’s amended view, those deserving supremacy were white farmers, pure and simple. It was they who collectively toiled and produced, thus they who should collectively rule. Their whiteness, their status as family heads, their biological and moral superiority to lazy and sexually aggressive blacks all dictated they should reign politically, socially, and economically. To achieve this, white solidarity was of course critical. But with heroes and solidarity come villains and outsiders, and part of Tillman’s political genius was that in addition to blacks he presented his base with sharply defined ones: the Redeemer “aristocracy” and usurious merchants. He “redr[ew] the circle of legitimate political and economic authority to include the farmers and to exclude all who opposed their interests. Only certain white men were truly white and truly men” (p. 111). The old political aristocracy had forfeited its authority and any just claim to “whiteness” by trading favors for black votes; credit-dispersing merchants were illegitimate because of “their unproductive livelihoods.” The battle lines were drawn--and it was Tillman as martial architect. This rounds out Kantrowitz’s account of both the centrality of politics in reconstructing white supremacy and one politician’s indispensable role as the mover and shaker. Tillman self-servingly portrayed agrarian “revolt” as a “fire . everywhere smouldering and ready to burst. I have only fanned it into flame.” Too many observers have relied on the similar foundation of “historic prejudices” to explain white Southerners’ late-nineteenth century reconstruction of supremacy, according to Kantrowitz’s study. “Such metaphors [as used by Tillman] are convenient for those who fail to see political movements as the products of human agency or for those who wish to make such efforts seem natural” (p. 125). Far from being “spontaneous,” the so-called farmer rebellion was largely a product of Tillman’s political organizational skill and talent for grass-roots mobilization. In addition to the titled subject are underlying themes of white “manliness” as indistinguishable from the code of white supremacy; of a conservative-Democratic racism virtually equal in virulence to Tillman’s; and a persistent quandary that arose from the latter’s internal contradictions. The first subtheme--manliness--seems to suffer in that the author includes both manly violence and “manly restraint” as components of a distinctly patriarchal white supremacy. Consequently he boxes the argument in by definition. Furthermore, Kantrowitz alludes to a black manliness of similar characteristics to white males (that is, it could be violent or restrained), and notes as well white women’s venomous racism-- both of which would appear to vitiate in argument any peculiar manliness within white supremacy’s reconstruction. The second recurrent thesis-- conservatives’ rough equivalence to Tillman when it came racist depravity--is perhaps open to debate, yet Kantrowitz presents evidence a tad one-sided. For this reviewer, at least, his third subtheme is the most intriguing. How did Tillman reconcile the lawlessness and envelope-pushing politics he himself had used to reestablish white control with his subsequent need as South Carolina’s chief executive and party boss to maintain state order, authority, and some semblance of official rectitude? For Kantrowitz, the irony of Tillman’s career was that in the literal end, he could not. Having witnessed over his objections the ascendancy of certain demagogues who were more “Tillmanite” than their eponymous model, Tillman concluded that the white masses he once encouraged had wasted their “democratic” opportunities. Rather than honing Jeffersonian republican virtues, they stooped to supporting the likes of a cursing, gambling, besotted, violence-instigating Cole Blease, Tillman’s one-time protégé. The once-noble white farmers now only made fools of themselves, Tillman lamented, by falling for the “wiles and tricks of demagogues.” Two years before his death he wrote, “I have come to doubt that the masses of the people have sense enough to govern themselves” (pp. 301-02). Coming from the virtual prototype of pernicious Southern demagoguery, his was no minor conversion. Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy. Through the life of Benjamin Ryan Tillman (1847-1918), South Carolina's self-styled agrarian rebel, this book traces the history of white male supremacy and its discontents from the era of plantation slavery to the age of Jim Crow. As an anti-Reconstruction guerrilla, Democratic activist, South Carolina governor, and U.S. senator, Tillman offered a vision of reform that was proudly white supremacist. In the name of white male militance, productivity, and solidarity, he justified lynching and disfranchised most of his state's black voters. His arguments and accomplishments rested on the premise that only productive and virtuous white men should govern and that federal power could never be trusted. Over the course of his career, Tillman faced down opponents ranging from agrarian radicals to aristocratic conservatives, from woman suffragists to black Republicans. His vision and his voice shaped the understandings of millions and helped create the violent, repressive world of the Jim Crow South. Friend and foe alike--and generations of historians--interpreted Tillman's physical and rhetorical violence in defense of white supremacy as a matter of racial and gender instinct. This book instead reveals that Tillman's white supremacy was a political program and social argument whose legacies continue to shape American life.