| Review | Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive era, 4.4

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| Review | Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive era, 4.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Revisiting the Tragic Era and the Nadir: Interrogating Individual and Collective African-American Lives in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

ALEXANDER, ANN FIELD. Race Man: The Rise and Fall of the "Fighting Editor." Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002. xiv + 258 pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes, and index. $32.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8139-2116-3. FITZGERALD, MICHAEL W. Urban Emancipation: Popular Politics in Reconstruction Mobile, 1860–1890. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. xvi + 301 pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes, and index. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8071-2807-4.
Recent scholarship on African Americans in postbellum America has focused on providing more complex portraits of black life in the years between the end of slavery in 1865 and the beginning of the era of Jim Crow in 1896. Two dominant academic paradigms for studying this period continue to exert a great deal of influence on how historians conceptualize the social, political, and economic events of this period: the Tragic Era and the Nadir. Long debunked as a viable academic model, the Tragic Era paradigm originated in a milieu of sectional reconciliation and the foreclosure of black rights in the public sphere. Its basic components are well known to students of American and African-American history. This concept is closely related to the politics of redemption, a social and political process after the Civil War in which Democrats replaced Republican governments throughout the South, using extralegal measures such as intimidation, harassment, and outright murder to secure complete domination of the Southern political landscape. In the minds of Southern whites, this approach was justifiable to save the democratic process from carpetbaggers, Northern opportunists who came South after the Civil War to take advantage of the region, and scalawags, native-born Southerners who betrayed their birthright by assisting these Northern interlopers. Considered dupes in this process, blacks, incapable of carrying out the duties of government, engaged in a systematic pattern of mismanagement, fraud and destabilization of southern governments with the assistance of carpetbaggers and scalawags. Tired of the waste and fraud, so the legend goes, Southern whites took matters into their own hands and seized control of the government. Given academic respectability in the twilight of sectional reconciliation in the work of William Dunning and William Burgess, professors of history at Columbia University, the Tragic Era paradigm took on a life of its own. This academic interpretation reigned supreme in the profession for more than forty years.¹	1
The Nadir, like its academic counterpart, the Tragic Era, painted black life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in fairly dismal ways. The term Nadir, first used in historian Rayford Logan's Betrayal of the Negro, literally means "low rugged plateau." Logan's study is classic political history, a largely top-down approach that assesses race relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century through the lens of presidential administrations from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson, congressional enactments, Supreme Court decisions, and the media of the day including newspapers and magazines. Although a powerful indictment of the gulf between the nation's ideals and its practices, this paradigm fails to balance black agency with the constraints and boundaries of racism. While some may argue that much of our contemporary literature on the black experience tends toward agency as opposed to realistic assessments of oppression, the debate in the profession has centered on how to balance the two seemingly irreconcilable realities.²	2
Ann Alexander's Race Man and Michael Fitzgerald's Urban Emancipation engage the two paradigms previously discussed. They do so, however, in substantially different ways that render the narratives more effective in Alexander's case and less so in Fitzgerald's case. In doing so, both studies provide important insights into the intersections between African-American history and the shifting social, political, and economic realities of Gilded Age and Progressive Era America.	. . .

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