Summary
Part 3: Reclaiming America
Chapter 21: What is America?
The Founders did not believe some men were better than others, a sentiment reflected in the Declaration of Independence. This was a radical document that required intellectual daring. However, these men also owned slaves, so what do we make of that? Equality depended on inequality, which makes us wonder if this concept of American democracy was a sham. Is the 1776 Commission more accurate?
Richardson argues that this is not the only story of the United States: “the fundamental story of America is the constant struggle if all Americans, from all races, ethnicities, genders, and abilities, to make the belief that we are all created equal and have a right to have a say in democracy come true” (168). Ordinary Americans are the ones that really lived and fought for democracy.
Chapter 22: Declaring Independence
In this chapter Richardson details the reasons for the Revolutionary War and how regular colonists were active in creating community and promulgating resistance to British tyranny. They joined committees of correspondence and the Sons of Liberty, fought in the streets at the Boston Massacre, organized boycotts, threw tea into the harbor, and sent men they trusted to the two Continental Congresses, where those men drafted new state constitutions and debated Common Sense and eventually declared independence. That Declaration articulated natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all men.
John Adams would later say that the revolution wasn’t actually the fighting part, but what happened in the minds of the people years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.
Chapter 23: The Constitution
The Founders dedicated themselves to the nuts and bolts of forming a new government. The false start was the Articles of Confederation, which was more of a “league of friendship” between the states and not a strong central government. It could not protect rich or poor from landless mobs, as revealed in Shays’ Rebellion of 1786.
The Founders called together a new convention to revise the Articles but instead created an entirely new government. They implemented checks and balances among the three separated powers and limited states’ powers. They made the executive “midway between the rapid turnover of representatives and the slower turnover of senators” (182) and instituted an Electoral College wherein more informed people in the states could come together and help choose the president. They intended the system to adapt to new circumstances slowly.
The Constitution was ratified in 1788 but still was not completely done. A Bill of Rights was added in 1791 to limit the power of the federal government. Protections included free speech, freedom of the press, rights of the accused, no cruel and unusual punishment, and powers reserved to the people and to the states if not prohibited or given to another body.
This was a great experiment, but unfortunately the Founders did not anticipate political parties, which engaged individual voters and provided oversight but ultimately weakened the government. Partisanship happened almost immediately, and the first casualty was fair representation—48 states would eventually adopt a winner-take-all rule in the Electoral College. They also did not anticipate the drive to create new states to get more representation and the growth of cities.
The saving grace, however, was that they did provide for a process to amend the document.
Chapter 24: Expanding Democracy
Women, Black people, and Native Americans saw from the beginning that the new government should apply to them too but most certainly did not in practice. They commented fiercely on the discrepancies and hypocrisies, turning to the Declaration of Independence for the language and the grounds to challenge their marginalization.
Their efforts for equality came up against the efforts of poor white men to find inclusion in the system. The Constitution hadn’t really been clear about how these men would participate in the system, as the Framers expected people like themselves would be the ones running things and they hadn’t envisioned political parties. The system broke down fast and poor white men decided that, at least in the South, “true democracy” was located in the states, not the federal government. Leaders like Andrew Jackson “began to articulate a new language of democracy, based on ordinary men rather than in the traditional ruling class” (191).
Unfortunately, this vision was also based on keeping Black and Brown people as second-class citizens. It meant taking indigenous lands to spread slavery, silencing opponents and consolidating control in a minority of powerful men. They rewrote the nation’s history to claim that the Framers had made a government based on states' rights and white supremacy. The nation didn’t need to adhere to what the Declaration said; it could be one based on racial hierarchies and the conviction that some people were better than others and had the right to rule.
Chapter 25: Mudsills or Men
By 1860 Southerners were insisting that theirs was the superior political, economic, and social system. One senator stated that most men were like “mudsills,” which were driven in the ground to support houses above. In his analogy, most men were the ones who labored and produced capital for society’s leaders to use it to invest and improve. They used their putatively civilized and Christian worldview to take care of their dependents. They manipulated poor whites into supporting their agenda and focused on states’ rights as the ideal form of government. They claimed anyone not supporting them wanted to start a race war.
This view was taking over the country even though it was only held by a minority. As popular sovereignty took over in the West, meaning voters got to decide if there would be slavery or not, the implication became clear that slavery was going to expand nationally. The Supreme Court protected slavery as well.
At this moment, though, their opponents woke up. Northern men began to join to oppose slave power. They exposed Southern hypocrisies and warned of an oligarchy. While many didn’t necessarily support Black rights, they were committed to ending slavery’s expansion.
Abraham Lincoln took the view that America should not be based on white supremacy. He also said that it was not only a handful of white men that made the country progress; rather, ordinary people were key. They worked hard and innovated and should have equal protection from and equal access to the law. This was even an adjustment of the liberalism of the Founders, “which focused on protecting individual rights from an overreaching government” and was now claiming “that maintaining those rights required government action” (200).
The new Republican party gained support as they spoke of the dangers of giving up democracy to a white supremacist elite. They elected Lincoln and soon would go to war.
Chapter 26: Of the People, by the People, for the People
Lincoln stated that the government was supposed to allow all men equal access to resources so they could be economically secure. When the war started, the government implemented a national taxation plan and used tax policy to exercise control over state power. They gave men the ability to pay them by giving them access to resources, such as the Homestead Act of 1862’s western land and the Land-Grant College’s state universities, the Department of Agriculture's help to farmers, and the Pacific Railway Act’s construction of a railroad to the West.
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address articulated the birth of a new nation that would not have human enslavement. The 13th amendment officially ended slavery; it was also the first time an amendment increased the federal government’s power (in its line about Congress enforcing it with appropriate legislation). The reworking of liberalism was now saying that the federal government had to be active, had to protect individuals by giving them equal access to resources and equality before the law.
After the war ended, Northern leaders assumed that Southerners would embrace their new government and its vision. However, this was not to be the case. Lincoln was assassinated and the new president, Andrew Johnson, was a virulent white supremacist. He let the former Confederate states off easy and made no fuss when they began passing state laws to push Blacks back into slavery-like conditions.
The Radical Republicans in Congress stepped in. They passed the 14th amendment, which granted citizenship to people born in America, and said the federal government could protect individuals even if their state legislatures were passing discriminatory laws. They also created the Department of Justice, its first job being to take down the KKK. They also passed the 15th amendment to protect the right to vote.
Overall, the Civil War and Reconstruction were America’s “second attempt at creating a nation based on the Declaration of Independence” (209).
Chapter 27: America Renewed
It seemed like it just might work—that the United States could become a multicultural and multigendered democracy. Women amplified their calls for suffrage and Black men sought the right to vote. But the Supreme Court in Minor v. Happersett said that while women were citizens, citizenship did not necessarily convey the right to vote. White supremacists took this ruling to heart as well, conceiving of many ways to keep Black men from voting.
Women, Black and Brown people, and poor people were trying to embrace the characteristics of the American dream as the Republicans had articulated it during the war, and, Richardson claims, they "increasingly defined that dream for white people” (213).
Education was one of the key goals of the dream, particularly for Black people and women. Once education became more available, economic stability was possible. And then the next stage of the vision was “for them to take part in the cultural and scientific advancement of the nation. There, too, formerly excluded Americans shone” (215). They disproved white supremacists’ assumptions about their inferiority and rejected the view that the best the country had to offer was white men.
They also called attention to the nation’s failings, sometimes battling the government, suing for their rights, forming organizations to combat injustice, and publicizing hypocrisies and shortcomings. Labor unions formed in the late 19th century, which forged connections between the old world of rural communities and the new world of urban industry.
People of color and women were not losing sight of the Declaration of Independence’s vision of democracy. Though this was an era of violent repression, these Americans kept the vision alive and suggested a way forward.
Analysis
In the third and final section of the book, Richardson goes back in time to tell the story of American democracy as embodied by marginalized Americans, such as people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ people. She is countering the story told by some Americans, particularly Trump and his supporters, that, scholar Kim Phillips Fein writes in The Nation, “presents the country as irredeemably tainted by its past, a sordid history of racism, slavery, and violent conquest.” Richardson “contends that this is only part of the story and that the ‘fundamental principles’ of the nation have tended toward egalitarianism; often, however, it has been up to marginalized groups—women, Indigenous people, and especially Black Americans—to remind the rest of the country of its creed.”
Richardson herself expatiates on her view of American history and this goal of the text: “Now, at the same time, there is also the critique of American history in the present that says, ‘We've never had a democracy. And because of the sexism and racism that has been built into our country from the beginning, American democracy has never really been viable and we need to try a different approach to society.’ And I disagree with that. I actually think that is problematic as well. And one of the points I was trying to make in the book was that American democracy has certainly never achieved the promise that it laid out in the very beginning, but, it has continually broadened and it is continually broadened because of the efforts of marginalized individuals and marginalized groups.”
This section is ultimately the most important, Richardson explains several times, because it helps point the way forward. In an interview she called herself an “idealist” and a “historian who believes ideas change the world,” meaning “the answer for me is that we have to reconceive what democracy means and what our history means. And in order to do that, let’s take a much more comprehensive look at our history. You see that it includes great men, like Jefferson, but it’s also always in conversation with marginalized Americans, who keep the idea of equality before the law front and center and continually push the envelope of liberal democracy. That changes our understanding of our history and our future, because it does in fact argue for a multicultural country. It argues that democracy is constantly under construction, as opposed to being perfect back in the past before marginalized people began to have ideas about their own equality.”
Beginning with the overthrow of British rule in the Revolutionary War, Richardson explains how even though many of the colonists were supportive of the monarchy, they eventually came to support the popular calls for independence. The Constitution saw Black people as property, but the Founders allowed for amendments. In the antebellum era enslavers maintained a high degree of power, but they were also a numerical minority and had to behave undemocratically to maintain that power. The Civil War and Reconstruction represented a new birth of freedom and instituted birthright citizenship. In the late 19th century, labor unions, farmers, and suffragists took up the democratic mantle. In the early 20th, Black people formed the NAACP, suffragists continued their calls for the right to vote, and, eventually, the New Deal brought together the liberal consensus.
Though she ultimately appreciates the book, Fein offers a critique of Richardson's history of the people pressing for “radical change” who are “portrayed as being, on some level, mainstream all along,” noting that some core groups, such as the International Workers of the World, radical feminists, radical gay and lesbian activists, and the antiwar movement, are barely mentioned, if at all. She also suggests that Richardson “seems to elide some of the divisions among those seeking to keep the United States true to its founding principles. Hasn’t there always been more disagreement between radicals and reformers over democratic ideals and egalitarian politics than the account of American democracy strangled by an undemocratic elite might suggest?”
