IM-1776 publishes Conundrum Cluster article!
Tennessee Johnson (1942) and a prototype pressure campaign
Happy Friday everyone, I’m just sipping coffee on the balcony of my carriage house and watching my older brother try in vain to wrangle some goats.
I just wanted to bring it to your attention to the fact that the esteemed Dr. Benjamin Braddock and the rest of the team over at the magazine IM-1776 have been kind enough to feature one of my articles in their upcoming issue.
The article, FDR’s Censorship Regime, covers the Office of War Information (OWI). The OWI was a short-lived agency created by President Roosevelt to consolidate several different New Deal propaganda offices under a single banner. Probably their biggest controversy was their handling of the movie “Tennessee Johnson” (1942), which dealt with the life of (unfairly maligned today) President Andrew Johnson and his handling of Reconstruction policy.
You can read the full article online here. Go check it, and the rest of the great work posted by IM-1776, out! If you want to see what all the fuss was about, you can watch Tennessee Johnson for free on Youtube.
“The Age of Hate: Andrew Johnson and the Radicals,” by George F. Milton, Jr., remains one of the best biographies of Johnson and histories of Reconstruction.
If Reconstruction had proceeded along Johnson’s terms, what’s ironic is that race relations in the South would have progressed much better. There would’ve been no KKK and no Jim Crow. The old ruling class was initially willing to reach an accommodation with the blacks that was more or less inconceivable after the humiliation of Radical Reconstruction.
Moreover, if the South had heeded the Johnsons, instead of the impetuous and imperious “Fire-Eaters,” there would’ve been no Civil War that revolutionized and consolidated the government, impoverished that part of the country for generations, and cost well over a half-million lives. Johnson supported “Southern rights” and scorned moralistic anti-slavery meddling, but he also understood that seceding over one presidential election was an overreaction, especially when the President faced an opposition Congress. Unionists in the Jacksonian tradition like Johnson, James L. Petigru, Sam Houston, and Richard K. Call are underrated in Southern history. I’d like to see more tributes to them.