| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Thomas Adams Upchurch. Legislating Racism: The Billion Dollar Congress and the Birth of Jim Crow. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 2004. Pp. xiv, 302. $40.00.
This important book analyzes one year in the U.S. Congress, a moment that author Thomas Adams Upchurch convincingly argues constituted a key missed opportunity in American race relations. From January 1890 through January 1891, the U.S. House and Senate debated a number of bills that, if passed, would have profoundly altered the status of African Americans. With the failure of these bills, it would be another seventy-five years before Congress acted in a meaningful way to protect the rights and well being of black citizens. Upchurch's title, slightly misleads, for he explains that it was the failure to legislate that allowed Jim Crow racism in the United States.	1
Upchurch examines the Fifty-first, "Billion Dollar" Congress of 1889–1891, so called for its promotion of big-money interests through the McKinley Tariff bill and other measures designed to enrich the already rich. Historians of America's Gilded Age have focused on the economic program of the Fifty-first Congress and failed to recognize that the most prolonged and heated debates concerned issues of race, rather than money. The Fifty-first Congress was in a remarkable position to push through the entire Republican legislative agenda, for the GOP controlled both houses of Congress and the White House for the first time since 1874.	. . .

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