In The Retreats of Reconstruction, David E. Goldberg has penned a slim but dense history of the politics of segregation in the booming New Jersey beach towns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book represents a creative attempt to move beyond the consolidation of “whiteness” as the main explanation for the emergence of Jim Crow in the post-Reconstruction North. As Goldberg writes, “whiteness alone did not make segregation at the Jersey shore. Rather, ideas about race and recreation were bound up in local debates about markets and conflicting interpretations about the rights and health of consumers” (2). In this analysis, it was the slow emergence of a modern consumer economy, and the related cultural and political debates about the meanings of mass consumption, that shaped the specific boundaries and practices of Jim Crow in this particular historical context.
Goldberg's choice of the Jersey shore as a historical laboratory for exploring the connections between segregation and consumer culture is a wise one. Beach towns like Atlantic City and Asbury Park were built from scratch as sites of middle-class mass consumption in the decades after the Civil War; their economies were overwhelmingly reliant on direct consumer spending on luxury goods right from their founding moments. They also presented a unique set of opportunities and challenges for African Americans, because they were spaces of both work and leisure for black residents who staffed their hotels, restaurants, and bathhouses. As such, they confounded the sharp distinction that nineteenth-century theories of political economy drew between productive labour and decadent consumption. Black workers and vacationers found themselves at the centre of this site of contestation, which bound up the question of their integration into or segregation from the white community with questions about the rights of travellers, consumers, property owners, and health seekers at a moment of deep structural economic change.
Goldberg's five chapters are arranged roughly chronologically, focussing on the decades from 1880 to 1920. In the 1880s, black workers were relatively aggressive in demanding integrated access to public leisure spaces, and the local white leadership class had not yet developed effective justifications for excluding them. Even though white vacationers pushed for segregated beaches and boardwalks, African Americans were able to keep segregation relatively informal and loosely enforced through a combination of labour action, consumer advocacy, and appeals to common-law protections of travellers’ rights to access accommodation. By the 1890s, however, white leaders had become more skilled at “recast[ing] the segregation debate as being about political economy instead of race” (57). They took advantage of legal ambiguities in common law and cultural ambivalence about consumer rights to argue that businessmen's right to maximize profitability by choosing their own customer base trumped consumers’ right to equal access to the marketplace. This argument was increasingly successful by the turn of the twentieth century, which enabled white residents of the Jersey shore to construct a largely extralegal system of Jim Crow that allowed them to duck charges of overt racial animus. This section of Goldberg's account is marked by a particularly fine analysis of the use of racially coded language in the justification of Jim Crow, particularly around white attempts to evade charges of prejudice.
By the turn of the twentieth century, the success of white arguments for segregation led to a significant shift in black leaders’ strategy. Rather than advocate for integrated consumption of leisure and entertainment, they encouraged black workers and vacationers to consume their entertainment from black entrepreneurs in segregated business districts. Goldberg paints this new emphasis on intraracial consumption as the product of an elite interracial consensus among property owners and leisure entrepreneurs, through which black business owners provided tacit support for semiformal segregation in return for white support for separate black commercial entertainment districts. This consensus was constantly contested, by civil rights activists, by white vacationers, and by competing political machines, but it endured through the middle decades of the twentieth century, when a new era of divestment at the Jersey shore scrambled its existing consumer economy.
The Retreats of Reconstruction’s undoubted strength is the scope and ambition of its argument. It represents a creative attempt to connect the burgeoning literatures of leisure and tourism with those of northern Jim Crow, the race politics of reconstruction, and capitalism and the politics of consumption. Unfortunately, packaging an analysis this grand into just 131 pages of prose means that the book is more often suggestive than exhaustive. Goldberg's ambition and pace leave him little time for building a historical narrative or for exploring individual historical actors. More significantly, it means that he relies on his theoretical vocabulary to do a lot of heavy lifting for his argument; the terms “consumer” and “consumption,” in particular, serve as analytical talismans so frequently that their meanings tend to become slippery. Nevertheless, Goldberg's ambitious book is valuable for the way that it shows that the “policy and culture” of segregation at the Jersey shore was, “like the fluctuations of the market system itself … disorderly and rarely settled” (128).
