were told, with cruel malice, that the land they had formerly cultivated as slaves was to be given them. Accepting it seriously, some had actually taken possession and planted corn and cotton. Never have American public men in responsible positions, directing the destiny of the Nation, been so brutal, hypocritical, and corrupt. The Constitution was treated as a doormat on which politicians and army officers wiped their feet after wading in the muck. But for the suggestions of soldiers and agitators, the former masters and slaves might easily have effected a social readjustment to their mutual benefit, but this was not the game intended. The negroes must be turned against their former masters; it was destiny perhaps that the carpetbagger should be served. Left to themselves, the negros would have turned for leadership to the native whites, who understood them best.... Imperative, then, that they be taught to hate. Freedom — it meant idleness, and gathering in noisy groups in the streets.... Freedom meant throwing aside all marital obligations, deserting wives and taking new ones, and in an indulgence in sexual promiscuity that soon took its toll in the victims of consumption and venereal disease.... Jubilant, and happy, the negro...was in no mood to discuss work. The Tragic Era was a regular selection of the Literary Guild book club, and went through 13 printings before it was reissued in paperback. It has never gone out of print. It is "perhaps the single most widely read history of Reconstruction and therefore a work of considerable influence." According to Lynch, however, those intellectual leaders who chose Bowers' book for the Literary Guild, "who have assumed the task of educating the tastes of cultivated readers, prefer books in the field of history that have high literary quality. They must of course, understand the desirability of unbiased accounts, balanced narratives, and presentations of truth for its own sake, but evidently these seemingly indispensable qualities of historical writing have been considered as secondary." More than any other major historian, Mr. Bowers defended President Andrew Johnson, held today to be one of America's worst presidents, calling his impeachment "a farce". He also endorsed the self-described "Redeemers" who restored white government and disenfranchised blacks in the states of the former Confederacy. In short, Bower's Tragic Era was very much in the spirit of The Birth of a Nation and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. "Bowers had