I grew up with textbooks that mostly engaged the Johnson impeachment as colorful novelty, the only time that provision ever came up

You know what media property’s due for a reboot? Birth of A Nation.

Griffiths’ movie came out in 1915, The Clansman (and the rest of Dixon’s Klan trilogy) in the 1900s, so it’s all public domain up for grabs. Maybe I should do it.

In honesty I’ve never seen/read either. The summaries I’ve read make them sound pretty damn silly, but it’s easy to make things sound silly in summary. Anyway, you don’t have to be deathly faithful to the original plot, maybe take a few touchpoints and a few character names, and tell a tale of Reconstruction and Redemption. It’s an interesting time that we don’t have many popular representations of.

I certainly don’t think a modern version would end “and then the noble Ku Klux Klan triumphed over vile mongrelization, restored the proper order of things, and they all lived happily ever after”, but it would pretty much HAVE To end “and then Southern Redeemers, including the Ku Klux Klan, did in fact defeat Republican coalitions and establish a white regime”.

See, back when, every Black History month, George Washington Carver came up, the takeaway message was basically

1) Man that guy liked peanuts
or, at furthest
2) Black guys can do peanut science with the best of them

But the really interesting thing about Carver as a historical figure was that for a while there, it was conceivable that a black professor could be the public face of a government program in the American South. Because slavery didn’t transition directly into Jim Crow, there were three steps forward under Reconstruction, and then two back to the “nadir of American race relations”.

(The other interesting thing Carver stands in for in history was that with the shift from the plantation system to sharecropping, crop rotation with nitrogen-fixation crops became pretty imperative, so building a market for peanuts was important. An oft-overlooked advantage to slave labor was that the agricultural economy could exhaust the land and shift towards the frontier with its labor force and labor relations intact. The plantation system relied on taking soil super-rich from aeons of floods and no intensive cultivation and applying a ton of labor to extract the hell out of it. And in contrast, the extension of feudal agriculture to Eastern Europe was slow, for lack of population, and involved offering substantial incentives and concessions to fugitive peasants. Later on the region featured the rankest serfdom, but that’s a whole other worm cannery.)

Every work of fiction is of its time, though, and there’s plenty of modern resonance to be found in the Reconstruction era.

For one, nation-building. The idea that America would invade and occupy countries to rebuild them in accordance with American values… I mean, America invaded and occupied America once to rebuild it in accordance with American values. And failed. In the same way. Not because its armies were defeated in the field, but because local elites, with patience and paramilitary violence, rebuilt their position; and with a combination of weariness, expense, and electoral shifts, Washington eventually shrugged, said “good enough”, cut a deal, and turned to other priorities.

And I mean, America might not have converted the South, but it did keep control. And I expect Iraq and Afghanistan to stay in the American sphere of influence for at least a good generation or two. I suppose there are stronger competing powers in their region, that’s a difference. An independent CSA miiiight have aligned with the British Empire, but it’s not like reconstructed Florida was going to become a puppet state of the Cuban landowners (um). Though I guess Texas and the desert states weren’t firmly distinguished from Mexico until after WWI with the Border War, arguably Operation Wetback in the ‘50s.

(That’s why I don’t dismiss the Arizona anti-reconquistadors as cranks. The notion that after a relatively short period of hegemony, a major population shift could lead to irredentist conflict is… well-precedented, actually.)

So, there’s some lessons about humility in foreign policy. But really, there’s no way to read the history of Reconstruction as a modern liberal parable. (Actually I hear The Traitor, the follow-up to The Clansman, depicts the Klan degenerating into causeless violence and banditry, but ends with an optimistic message of peace and reconciliation through personal openness of the heart and mind. Among the white race, of course. Don’t be silly.) To the extent there’s inspiration to be drawn there, it’s reactionary inspiration. Just because previously subjugated groups have been making advances for a few decades doesn’t mean the worm can’t turn and they can’t be repressed. And heck, even if whites become a numerical minority, with solidarity, cleverness, and a dash of violence, it’s possible to set up a system that leaves them in absolute control.

And let’s not pretend that’d be a message without contemporary relevance or appeal.

Not to say you couldn’t find role models if your politics run the other way. There were carpetbaggers who were activisty true believers in racial equality. There were scalawags who put class before race, solidarity-wise. There were freedmen who, though uneducated and inexperienced in power, took to the democratic project in earnest, with high hopes. (And there were the incompetent and the corrupt and the obnoxious. Always and everywhere.) And in any competent retelling, they’d show up, and be taken seriously, maybe be viewpoint characters for parts. They’d just lose, in the end.