Stephen Kantrowitz > Quotes

“But wealth based on slavery came at a price, for neither law nor custom could transform people into things.”
― Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy

“Republican tax and land policies infuriated and terrified wealthy families like the Tillmans, who correctly understood them as efforts to split large plantations into small freeholds for poor families and to collect revenue to finance social services that would primarily benefit the freedpeople.”
― Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy

“The generation of Republican challenge had passed and, with it, the days of Democratic mass mobilization.”
― Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy

“The disease of equality must be denied its pedagogical vectors: black education must be strictly limited, and Northern philanthropists must be made to understand the catastrophe they were inviting.”
― Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy

“In South Carolina, as throughout the South, no Populist coalition could succeed even momentarily unless it could draw on both black and white support.”
― Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy

“Because South Carolina lacked a coherent white belt—elsewhere a counterweight to planter power—the state’s political institutions did not democratize as fully as those of other Southern states.”
― Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy

“generations of Americans came to see white-supremacist violence not as a tactic but as a fact of social life, almost a force of nature.”
― Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy

“black education posed a clear and present danger to white supremacy.”
― Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy

“in South Carolina, slaveholding was becoming a normal or perhaps even normative part of adult white manhood.”
― Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy

“White Populists struggled, mostly without success, to reconcile their economic analyses with their historic and daily experiences of white manhood.”
― Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy

“Believing that the “land, labor, and lives of the colored races” were “by common consent . . . articles of free trade among Caucasians everywhere,” George Tillman warned that black independence spelled the end of white civilization.”
― Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy

“The most important negative reference for white manhood was a vision of black manhood that bore slavery’s discursive double load of indolent incapacity and insurrectionary intent.”
― Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy

“Public education was separate, unequal, and inadequate.”
― Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy

“Although widely distributed slaveholding retarded formal democracy, it encouraged an unusual degree of social consensus among white men.”
― Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy

“Tillman’s argument against the Fifteenth Amendment reformulated the early-nineteenth-century Southern doctrines of nullification and interposition and solidified the foundation for the twentieth-century language of states’ rights.”
― Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy

“His analysis nourished a nascent political culture in which, to paraphrase his own lament, white men used the words “states’ rights” as a synonym for “white supremacy.”
― Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy

“Like many white suffrage activists around the nation, these women rooted their arguments in elitist or white-supremacist principles.”
― Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy

“He declared at an 1886 meeting that “when you educate a negro you educate a candidate for the penitentiary or spoil a good field hand.”
― Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy

“as much as a matter of color or sex. The debates that followed explored the limits of white supremacy as a coherent program.”
― Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy