Content area
Full Text
How Whites Used Violence to Take Back Control of the South Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War by Nicholas Lemann (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 257 pages, $24.00)
reviewed by Milton Moskowitz
TOWARD THE END of 2006, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran convened a two-day conference in Tehran bringing together people who questioned whether the Holocaust had ever occurred. Ahmadinejad said the claim that 6 million Jews had been killed by the Nazis was a hoax perpetrated by the West to prop up Israel. One of the Holocaust deniers at the conference was David Duke, former head of the Ku Klux Klan in America, who said: "I think Israel is more afraid of this conference than of Iran having nuclear weapons."
The tactic is familiar. Politicians in power shape history to serve their own ends. So, just as children in Middle East countries are not going to read about Jews being gassed in concentration camps, schoolchildren in Turkey are not going to be told about the Turkish slaughter of nearly one million Armenians during World War I. A new book, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, by Taner Akcam (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt), is not likely to find its way into Istanbul bookstores. Nor are schoolchildren in Japan likely to be told about atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers during the rape of Nanking in 1937-38 when an estimated 300,000 Chinese people were killed.
We don't have to look beyond our own country to see how politicians distort history. For many decades the Reconstruction period that followed the Civil War was treated by American historians as a time when state and local governments in the South were corrupted by the elevation of uneducated, misguided former slaves to positions of power, aided by carpetbaggers from the North out to make a quick buck. A valuable corrective to that picture, Eric Foner's Forever Free, published in 2005, was reviewed recently in these pages.
Revisionist views of Reconstruction, contradicting previous accounts, have been appearing regularly in recent years, beginning with John Hope Franklin's book, Reconstruction After the Civil War, published in 1961. The bibliography in Forever Free lists 40 books published since 1964. Of course William E.B. Du Bois was the...