Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

A Palace that Will Fall upon Them: Reconstruction as a Problem of Occupation

2011; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/rah.2011.0005

1080-6628

Gregory P. Downs,

American History and Culture

A Palace that Will Fall upon Them:Reconstruction as a Problem of Occupation Gregory P. Downs (bio) Albion W. Tourgée . Bricks Without Straw: A Novel. Edited and with an introduction by Carolyn L. Karcher. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. xi + 450 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $84.95 (cloth); $23.95 (paper). In the final scene of Albion Tourgée's 1879 blockbuster A Fool's Errand, a white North Carolina Unionist delivers a private eulogy at the grave of carpetbagger Comfort Servosse, the aforementioned Fool. Servosse had the "grand idee" to "make this a free country accordin' to Northern notions," the Unionist tells his son, "but there wa'n't material enough to build of." Reconstruction collapsed not because of Southern white resistance or the corruption of carpetbag governments but because of the faulty planning of "the master workmen at the North, who would insist on the tale of bricks without furnishin' any straw."1 In October 1880, when Tourgée published his follow-up to A Fool's Errand, he returned to the image of bricks without straw for the new book's title and its governing metaphor. At the beginning of his novel, Tourgée extended the Exodus story, in which Pharaoh punished the Israelites for failing to meet their quota of bricks, even as he denied them the necessary materials. In Tourgée's version, Pharaoh's jester imagines these "ill-made" bricks in a slipshod palace that "will fall upon him and all his people that dwell therein" (pp. 81-83). The image of bricks without straw captured not only Tourgée's imagination but a great deal of his view of who and what was to blame for the limitations of Reconstruction. Put baldly, Reconstruction faltered because Northern Republicans, especially Radicals, issued high-sounding orders without providing the necessary materials. The problem lay not in their ideology or their racism but in their governance. They were not quite hypocrites; they were fools. In the process they made fools of those carpetbaggers and scalawags and freed-people who took their words seriously, and made seers of those—especially Southern white resisters—who ignored their words entirely. Duke University Press' reprint of Bricks Without Straw, beautifully edited by Carolyn L. Karcher, allows us not just to engage with an unjustly neglected classic but also to ask, in the spirit of Tourgée, broad, even iconoclastic, questions about Reconstruction historiography. In a sterling and scholarly, if at [End Page 118] times slightly overblown, introduction, Karcher places the book not merely at the center of Tourgée's oeuvre but of nineteenth-century American letters, as the "Uncle Tom's Cabin of Reconstruction" (p. 2). At odd moments—as when she praises Tourgée's "complex, fully rounded characters" (p. 1)—one may wonder whether Karcher's determination to rescue the novel clouds her ability to read it. On the whole, however, her introduction is a serious, significant work of scholarship and interpretation, one fit to stand alongside Otto H. Olsen's venerable Carpetbagger's Crusade: The Life of Albion Winegar Tourgée (1965); Mark Elliott's recent, prize-winning Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson (2006); and introductions to Mark Elliot and John David Smith, eds., Undaunted Radical (2010), and John Hope Franklin's A Fool's Errand (1961). The most surprising aspect of Bricks Without Straw is the quality of the writing. In the few months between A Fool's Errand and Bricks Without Straw, Tourgée matured in an unexpected, heartening way. While A Fool's Errand is often tedious, a model of telling instead of showing, Bricks Without Straw is, as Karcher rightly notes, a "more ambitious undertaking." Tourgée seemed suddenly to take pleasure in plot construction, something notably lacking in A Fool's Errand. Tourgée's "sophisticated narrative technique" wittily and at times artfully intertwines flashbacks, deploys dialect to "give voice to the voiceless," and concludes not with pat resolution but with "an experimental open ending that calls attention to the problems history has left unresolved" (p. 1). Tourgée's most impressive transformation is his...