Cartoon: Not Everyone Loves a Parade, by Mark Wahlgren Summers

[This article is crossposted from UNCPressCivilWar150.com.]

We’re excited to share the latest in a series of political cartoons from historian and illustrator Mark Wahlgren Summers, author of The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction.

On Thursdays, we feature a new cartoon—hand drawn by Summers—that offers a creative, satirical spin on Reconstruction history. Each cartoon is accompanied by brief commentary from the author/illustrator to help put things into context.  

In today’s cartoon, Summers highlights Reconstruction-era government spending in Louisiana. (Click image for full size.)

“Not Everyone Loves a Parade.” Louisiana’s first Republican governor, the flamboyant Henry Clay Warmoth was unable to rein in a free-spending legislature, one of the most corrupt anywhere south of New York. Not all the spending was stealing; money to aid railroad construction and special privileges given to northern corporations that might link New Orleans with Mobile, Texas, and the North could have freed the Pelican State from the cash-crop economy, in which freedpeople’s opportunities were limited—if it had worked. It didn’t, at least not soon enough. Warmoth’s successor, Republican governor William Pitt Kellogg, came into office with a nearly bankrupt treasury and the onerous job of cutting back on the programs on which Republicans’ Gospel of Prosperity depended. He also got the blame for an economy turned sour. Even without those conditions, Kellogg would have faced serious trouble from the white-line resurgence that was out to overthrow a biracial political system. As it was, his government was doomed virtually from the start.

Mark Wahlgren Summers is professor of history at the University of Kentucky. He is author of The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction, A Dangerous Stir: Fear, Paranoia, and the Making of Reconstruction, and many other books.