Albion W. Tourgée's Forgotten Dystopia: How the South Conspired with Northern Monopolists to Win the Post-Civil-War Peace

Abstract

Abstract: Albion W. Tourgée wrote best-selling novels based on his days fighting the Klan and trying to reconstruct North Carolina. Recently his fiction and his role as Homer Plessy's lead attorney have received renewed attention. But the work to which he devoted most energy remains forgotten. Speaking directly to today's world of ongoing racial injustice and income inequality, "89 (1888) is told by the Grand Master of the Order of the Southern Cross. He and a northern monopolist based on J.D. Rockefeller conspire to bring about peaceful secession of the South and suppression of northern workers. After summarizing the book's elaborate dystopian plot, the essay details how Tourgée forged the often-forgotten historical events on which it is based into a novel that, better than any work of the time, warned the nation of the threat posed by what W.E.B. Du Bois called the "bargain between Big Business and the South."