| Even as Reconstruction was happening, the supporters and opponents of the economic, social, and political restructuring of the American South attempted to control the ways in which those processes would be described and subsequently remembered. When former Confederate general Wade Hampton led the campaign that brought Reconstruction to an end in South Carolina, he became the greatest hero of the state's white population. From his position in the U.S. Senate, he actively contributed to the emergence of a white supremacist narrative of the history of Reconstruction, and after his death, white South Carolinians commemorated him and this social memory of Reconstruction. Beyond celebrations of individual leaders, however, everyday South Carolinians turned their experience of Reconstruction into memory and passed those memories along to subsequent generations in both written and oral form. These oral traditions about Reconstruction became the foundation of competing social memories of the period which would be elaborated in a variety of cultural modes and used for many political purposes in the decades to follow. Once the experience of Reconstruction had been transformed into social memory of Reconstruction according to certain patterns, it became available for use in a variety of cultural forms. As new generations grew up who had not experienced Reconstruction and as those who had aged and passed from the scene, it became important to insure that the various social memories of Reconstruction were perpetuated and passed along to the next generation. At the same time, changes at the national level created a new audience for a distinctively southern white supremacist narrative of Reconstruction, and many versions of this narrative were disseminated to the rest of the nation and adopted as a national, not merely a sectional, story. The emergence of the American historical profession coincided with this dissemination of a white supremacist narrative of Reconstruction, but it was the oppositional history pioneered by African American historians that eventually began to revise the historical consensus on Reconstruction. As the culture of the South modernized along with the rest of the country, cultural representations of Reconstruction in fiction and the new medium of film were employed to justify emerging social practices of Jim Crow. Social memories of Reconstruction emerged from the private sphere into the public sphere in a variety of celebrations and representations, the nature of which shifted according to contemporary debates over changes in public life. Politics in the South shifted as a result of the New Deal, so politicians' use of Reconstruction rhetoric shifted as well. African American participation in politics and the burgeoning labor movement of the 1930s and 1940s brought a renewed emphasis on the emancipatory legacy of Reconstruction, a radical new reinterpretation of the period that was stifled by the beginning of the Cold War. |
