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[Ya-ta Boy]

The following is from Edward L. Ayers's essay 'Exporting Reconstruction' from �What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History (2005)

(p 158-166)

[O]ur own Reconstruction may be more useful as a guide to what to expect elsewhere in the world than any other reconstruction in which the United States has engaged. The size and complex geography of the South, the prominent role of race, the armed strength of an unrepentant foe, the appeal to religion, the ability of opponents to control local loyalties and structures of power, and the popular appeal of narratives of opposition to overwhelming outside force make America�s Reconstruction an all too fitting test bed for other reconstructions the nation might undertake. Americans might take a number of lessons from our own history as we look out upon a world we are tempted to remake.

Reconstructions, first of all, tend to follow wars and partake of all the dislocation, confusion, and corruption of war, inevitably finding war�s burdens a heavy load to carry. Defeated people�s memories collapse the suffering of war into the suffering of the reconstruction that follows�

Second, reconstruction often creates among the reconstructed people a coherence, identity, and solidarity they did not possess before. Rooting out problems creates new problems, new opponents, new combinations, and new identities�

Third, reconstructions foster steadfast and violent defenders of the old order. A quest for purity, for return, for the respect of the fallen fathers animates conterreconstructions. When things go wrong, the opponents of reconstruction can always claim that things were better under the old regime and find some who agree�

Fourth, reconstructions demand a disruption of the standing economic order yet bring an immediate need for the cooperation of those who prospered most in the old order. Powerful families tend to remain powerful families. The leaders of reconstructions often make deals with unsavory people when success comes to seem more important than purity.

Fifth, economic reconstruction is an unavoidable part of any social reconstruction, but quarantining greed and the appearance of greed is hard. Reconstructor nations can easily seem to be carpetbagger nations�

Sixth, in order to be reconstructed, people need to be perceived as needing to be reconstructed. Accordingly, they are often attributed with pathologies, ingrained limitations, and flawed heritages. Conflicts of interest and power tend to be imagined as problems of race, religion, or civilization. When the objects of reconstruction refuse to be thoroughly reconstructed, they appear incapable or unworthy of being reconstructed�

Seventh, the clock is always ticking. Reconstructions are a race between change and reaction; they cannot last long before they seem another form of oppression. Because they are hard for both the occupying force and the place they occupy, reconstructions must make their changes quickly or they are not likely to make them at all even though the deep change implied by the very word �reconstruction� inevitably takes a long time to instill�

Eighth, reconstructions often go further and in different directions from those which their creators intended. Reconstructions unleash irreconcilable goals and aspirations among different actors, differences buried, obscured, and mediated during normal times�

Ninth, freedom is a mercurial ideal. Those involved in Reconstruction spoke of freedom, but they all meant different things by that word�

Finally, and perhaps most important, reconstructions can fall victim to their own ideals�Conflating every dream of social reconstitution�prosperity, justice, and equality�was dangerous enough by itself. But when economic self-interest on the part of the conquerors combined with cultural arrogance toward black and white Southerners alike, the entire edifice of Reconstruction threatened to topple of its own weight�

The righteous invocation of justice, history, and progress on behalf of a purpose that is also a struggle for power is dangerous. It can create a self-righteous terror in opposition that believes itself to be on the side of God, of race, and of history. Conflict can be escalated morally as well as militarily. It was no accident that the Ku Klux Klan clothed itself in the garb of militant Christianity�

A hard paradox lies at the heart of all reconstructions: The reconstructor must transform a society in its own image without appearing selfish or self-righteous. Our nation tends to wrap its actions in the highest language of freedom, in universal appeals to timeless ideals, but to outside observers those words seem a flimsy covering for mere aggrandizement and global positioning. In the process, the idealistic words are more than tarnished; they are seen as lies. America appears as the thing it least wants to be, a carpetbagger nation�

Any effort at reconstruction, our nation�s history shows us, must be implemented not only with determination and might but also with humility and self-knowledge. Those traits come naturally if we pay due respect to the hardest parts of our own history, if we allow ourselves to understand that Americans too have known defeat, loss, and failure on their own soil. In our Reconstruction, Americans played out all the roles of reconstruction anywhere. We were the agents of revolution and its opponents, its beneficiaries and its victims. Reconstruction, looked at in the full light of history, offers one of our best opportunities to see ourselves more clearly.

[Ya-ta Boy]

Ayers is professor of history at the University of Virginia and his most recent book, "In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863 won the Bancroft Prize in 2004. He is also known for spending a decade putting the Valley of the Shadow Project online. It's a website with original sources from Augusta County, Virginia and Franklin County, Pennsylvania.

Kuros would like the title essay. It agrees with him. Ayers says there were many causes, but slavery was somehow (Lincoln's word) behind each one.

I particularly enjoyed reading the essay I quoted above. I've never focused much on Reconstruction history. It just didn't appeal to me as much as other topics in history. I was startled when I started reading the essay to see Ayers apply Reconstruction history to our other experiences with it in the Philippines, Japan etc and then Iraq. That connection just hadn't occured to me.

Anyway, I thought his lessons to be learned were useful. This is when history is most useful--when an expert in a particular field extracts the lessons and summarizes them for the general public.

[Kuros]

That's interesting. The reconstruction of Iraq was an old hobby-horse of mine in 2004-2005. Mith recommended Embracing Defeat on this board once, and I couldn't help think of the stark contrast with the morass of Iraq. Also interesting is a history of South Korea's reconstruction by the US, which was somewhat of a more muddled success than Japan's (Hint: if you wonder why there's so much anti-American sentiment in Korea, it goes beyond mere pro-Nork-naivete).

Hrmm, what mistakes were made in our Reconstruction that we're repeating again in Iraq?

[Ya-ta Boy]

Mistakes? Probably only #7, not moving fast enough before the reaction set in. Machiavelli said much the same when a new prince seizes power--make all the changes at once and be done with it because people dislike the unstable feeling of changes brought about gradually. Or something like that.

The relevancy of Ayers, IMO, is not that mistakes were made but that expectations going in were so far off the mark. #1, 2, 3, 4, 5 seem to speak to this. Had the gov't consulted historians of past reconstructions on what to expect (the South, the Philippines, Japan etc.), they might have made better plans and had more success.

After all, the whole point of history is to learn from the past. This is most of all a failing of professional historians. They get so swept up in their academic competition, their endless debates over historical minutae, their political agendas, that they forget to communicate their conclusions to the general public.