What it meant

In the great national narrative, where will Obama's election really fit? Five historians answer.

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IF THERE'S A single word that has been used more than any other to describe last week's election, it is "historic." In a different year, this might be dismissed as the hyperbole that comes with the season, but this time the word is undeniably apt. The sense of history has been palpable. It was felt in the spontaneous street celebrations, in the way words faltered, in the keen conviction that a sprawling, modern nation had just achieved a measure of old-fashioned redemption.

But what place will the elevation of the senator from Illinois really be given in history? In 50 years, will the election of Barack Obama, the nation's first black president, be judged a pivot in the grand national narrative, or just a symbolic footnote?

Ideas put this question to five American historians. Their task was an act of imagination: to project themselves ahead to the middle of the century and gaze back, following the long threads of American politics and society; to report how the emotionally charged event might appear from a cool distance. One historian sees the vote as one of the country's great periodic political transitions, with parallels as far back as Thomas Jefferson's manhandling of the Federalists; another sees the moving culmination of the story of a former sharecropper, Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer. And another somberly forecasts that Obama's victory, feted last week as a turning point for African-Americans, will prove more a symbolic change than a real one.

History is never a single tale; all these visions may be correct, or none. They are best guesses, no more, no less, at the history we are living through right now.

America, reconfigured

By ERIC FONER

MOST PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS do not fundamentally alter the American political landscape. Even when the party in power changes, the basic assumptions governing policy generally remain the same. But in a few critical elections, the advent of a new president is a transformative moment that reshapes American public life for a generation or more.

Thomas Jefferson's victory in 1800 was a deathblow to the Federalist Party and its goal of wedding the young Republic to the interests of its financial and mercantile elite. The election of 1828 ushered in the era of Jacksonian democracy, which far outlived its namesake's eight years in office. Lincoln's election in 1860 marked the end of slaveholder control of the federal government. McKinley's in 1896 created a Republican majority that lasted (with an interruption by Woodrow Wilson) until the Great Depression. The political alignments and attitudes toward public policy brought into being by Franklin D. Roosevelt after his victory in 1932 persisted into the 1960s. And Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 opened an era of deregulation, deindustrialization, anti-unionism, and the militarization of foreign policy - norms that the three presidents who followed did little to change.

Future historians may well view Barack Obama's victory as another of these critical elections, the end of the age of Reagan and the beginning of something substantially new. This is not primarily because of his race, although in view of our tortured racial history the election of the first black president indeed represents a watershed. Nor does it arise from the decisive nature of his victory - Jefferson had an extremely narrow margin and Lincoln received only 40 percent of the popular vote. Some landslides, like Eisenhower's in 1952 and 1956, do not mark the advent of a fresh political paradigm. Obama's opportunity rests above all on the fact that his victory arises from a powerful popular desire for change after one of the most disastrous administrations in American history and the wreckage of the ideology that has guided American politics since 1980. Perhaps the end of Reaganism came two weeks ago when Alan Greenspan, the high priest of deregulation during his years as Federal Reserve chairman, admitted that market fundamentalism had failed.

With its widespread use of today's technology - the Internet, cellphones, text messages - and its massive mobilization of first-time voters, the 2008 campaign will be viewed by future historians as a 21st century prototype. In his personal ancestry, Obama embodies recent social changes that point the way to tomorrow's America - a nation where the old black-white template has given way to a reconfigured landscape of race.

Obama has the bad luck to come to power in the midst of an economic crisis. He has the good luck to do so in a country yearning for strong leadership and a renewed sense of political possibility. No president can perform miracles. But if, like his most successful predecessors, Obama seizes the occasion by striking out boldly, articulating forcefully a new philosophy of governing at home and relating to the rest of the world, we will add 2008 to the very short list of elections that have truly transformed American life.

Eric Foner is DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia University. His most recent book is "Our Lincoln," an edited collection of essays.

The first - and last? - black president

By STEVEN F. LAWSON

IT HAS TAKEN 43 years since passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which extended the right to vote to the majority of African-Americans, for a black candidate to become president of the United States. The significance of this achievement rises further when we remember that it has been nearly 90 years since women received the suffrage and that no woman has been elected president or even chosen by the two major parties to run.

Barack Obama's election confirms the faith that the civil rights movement placed in the power of the right to vote. In becoming commander in chief, Obama has inherited the legacy of countless civil rights warriors who risked their lives and many who lost theirs, to gain the right to vote, not as an empty symbol, but as a genuine tool for freedom and equality. He stands on the shoulders of John Lewis, Medgar Evers, Amzie Moore, Ella Baker, and Martin Luther King Jr., among many others.

He is the culmination of the political aspirations of the civil rights movement. After the Civil War, Reconstruction policies provided civil and political rights for newly freed slaves. Although 16 black Southerners served in the US Congress during Reconstruction and hundreds more were elected to state and local offices in the South, black political power largely had been erased by 1900. The North had retreated from its support of African-Americans, and the Supreme Court upheld laws that disfranchised blacks and permitted their segregation. The maintenance of black political freedom stood little chance in a nation that, despite the end of slavery, still believed in the racial inferiority of African-Americans.

The nation's Second Reconstruction met with much greater success. Beginning in the 1940s, the civil rights movement transformed the social, political, and psychological landscapes that underpinned and reinforced racial inequality. As the United States proclaimed its fight for democracy and against tyranny during World War II and the Cold War, racism lost much of its respectability.

Yet the civil rights movement battled for more than the right to vote; it fought to end the economic legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. The fortunes of black Americans have improved since the heyday of the civil rights movement, especially those who have educated themselves into the middle class. But as Hurricane Katrina vividly showed, African-Americans still live in poverty disproportionate to their percentage in the population. There are more black men in prison than in college.

And, remember, Obama's triumph does not guarantee the election of another African-American any time soon. John F. Kennedy was the first Catholic to win election to the presidency in 1960 and remains the only Catholic president to date. In fact, unless Americans become racially blind, which has not happened through 500 years, it will become harder for African-Americans to win the White House again. Demography is working against them, as Hispanic-Americans have now become the nation's largest minority group.

Steven F. Lawson is a professor of history at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey, and author of "Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in America since 1941," 3d edition.

The end of the '60s

By THOMAS J. SUGRUE

ON ELECTION NIGHT, Barack Obama addressed nearly 200,000 supporters in Chicago's Grant Park - the place where, just 40 years earlier, antiwar protesters, hippies, yippies and black radicals clashed with police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Alternative visions of America had collided on Chicago's streets: dissent versus "America love it or leave it" patriotism, militancy versus law and order, sexual libertinism versus family values. Obama's Grant Park celebration - just like the election of 2008 - exorcized the ghosts of 1968, perhaps forever.

Campaigns in the 40-year period leading up to the election of Barack Obama hinged on the great question that Americans, both left and right, raised in the aftermath of the 1960s protests: "What side are you on?" Post-1960s politics fostered polarization: the "silent majority" versus raucous minorities, the Christian nation versus its libertine detractors, hard-working middle Americans versus welfare cheats, small-town gun owners versus latte-sipping urbanites, red states versus blue states. This year, John McCain attempted once again to turn the election into a plebiscite on the 1960s, from his first general election ad on the "Summer of Love," which contrasted McCain's military service and love of country with beaded and bearded protesters on the home front, to his campaign's attempt to brand Obama a socialist and pal of '60s fringe radicals like Bill Ayers of the Weathermen.

In 2008, however, the return to cultural warfare failed. Barack Obama distanced himself from the 1960s, reminding voters that he was but a child in Hawaii when America exploded in conflict. The activists who protested in the streets in the 1960s and the "silent majority" who railed against them are aging out. Their passions are mostly irrelevant to many younger people who grew up, like Obama, in the world that the 1960s made, a place where cultural differences were a source of pride, not conflict. Obama - and the voters who propelled him to victory (a majority of whom are his age or younger) - inhabit an ethnically and racially diverse America. Hippies and yippies are a thing of the past, but the values of sexual freedom and liberty have entered the mainstream; they even touched Sarah Palin's family.

Generation Obama has its own issues: global warming, worldwide epidemics, the threat of terrorism, and the collapse of the financial markets, to name a few. McCain's evocations of small-town values, of dissent and the silent majority and campus radicalism, left those problems unaddressed. Obama's rhetoric of unity - of common purpose and common cause - threw the dated politics of division and resentment into the dustbin of history. The cultural warriors, fighting over law and order, God, guns, and family values, will not be silent during the Obama administration, but they are increasingly relics of the past.

Thomas J. Sugrue's new book, "Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North," has just been published. He is Kahn professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

For blacks, what won't change

By JACQUELINE JONES

NOW THAT HALF a century has passed since the election of President Barack Obama, we can begin to place that watershed event into historical perspective.

Those of us who witnessed the turbulent campaign of '08 recall that, at the time, many pundits, scholars, and politicians argued that "racial progress" constituted the true significance of Obama's election. Certainly his success at the polls that year was a great symbolic victory; less than a century and a half earlier, the vast majority of Americans of African descent were enslaved, and as late as 1965, the vast majority of rural black Southerners were disenfranchised. Obama's election then was a triumph on two fronts: Many white Americans repudiated centuries of pervasive racial prejudice and discrimination to vote for a black man, and at the same time, President Obama represented the integration of blacks into the highest echelons of American elective office. The night of the election, Obama's supporters joyfully celebrated what many considered to be the elimination of racial barriers to black people's full participation in American political and social life.

Yet we now know that race was only a secondary story line as we gauge the larger meaning of Obama's successful campaign. Indeed, although virtually all historians today agree that the election was a transformative one in the context of presidential politics, they disagree about the broader causes of that transformation. Some argue it was the political and economic crises in the fall of 2008 that ushered in a 21st century Democratic majority. Others point to the mobilization of millions of young activists who engaged in old-fashioned, pound-the-pavement neighborhood organizing while armed with sophisticated electronic technologies. Either way, it's clear now that "race" had little to do with it.

Virtually any Democrat who had survived the grueling primary process would have won the presidency in the fall of 2008.

Indeed, while the symbolism of Obama's election was powerful, his success at the polls failed to change in any dramatic way the legacy of slavery borne by the nation's impoverished and thus most vulnerable African-Americans. In 2007, one-quarter of all blacks lived in poverty; the national poverty rate was 10 percent. Blacks represented a disproportionate number of all workers who lacked formal education and job skills, and thus they were among the workers hardest hit by widespread layoffs during the deep recession that began in the fall of 2008. Charitable giving plummeted, forcing drastic cuts in food pantries and homeless shelters. Depressed housing prices and large numbers of home foreclosures led to decreased property-tax revenue, which caused states and municipalities to slash spending for public education, housing, and transportation.

In time-honored fashion, many Americans searched for scapegoats to blame as the long era of freewheeling spending came to an abrupt halt; and in the years after 2008, those scapegoats were likely to be African-Americans and undocumented immigrants. In hindsight we know that contemporary observers who celebrated Obama's victory as a new era in American "race relations" were sadly mistaken.

Jacqueline Jones teaches American history at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author, most recently, of "Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War."

The story that Fannie Lou started

By JOHN DITTMER

FIFTY YEARS FROM now historians will look back on the election of 2008 as a watershed. Transcending the issue of his race, Barack Obama assembled a new progressive coalition, galvanized by the young and minorities, that successfully challenged the conservative consensus that had defined American political life for more than a quarter century.

Future historians will also conclude that the election was, in some sense, the end of a story that began in the summer of 1964, when a group calling itself the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) challenged the legitimacy of the state's all-white, segregationist delegation at the party's national convention in Atlantic City. Blacks in the Deep South had been denied the franchise for nearly 100 years. In Mississippi, the black electorate had been limited to about 5 percent of its potential. The MFDP, made up of sharecroppers, maids, and small-business owners, laid out its case in Atlantic City, presenting evidence that blacks were being assaulted, jailed, even killed for attempting to register to vote.

The dramatic high point was the testimony of Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer. A former sharecropper with a sixth-grade education, she had been fired from her job as timekeeper on a plantation after she had tried to register. Mrs. Hamer described her brutal beating by police officers in the small town of Winona, and then concluded, "If the Freedom Party is not seated now, I question America."

The Freedom Democratic Party did not win its challenge. Lyndon Johnson believed he needed the support of Southern segregationists to win the election, and proposed a compromise that would seat only two of the MFDP delegates. Once again it was Mrs. Hamer who stated the case for rejecting the offer: "We didn't come all this way up here for no two seats," she said, "'cause all of us is tired."

The MFDP challenge did, however, open up the Democratic Party. After the 1964 convention, Democratic leaders pledged to end discrimination in all party matters. The Freedom Democrats also raised the issue of disfranchisement when they issued a formal challenge to the seating of the state's all-white congressional delegation. This dramatic action, together with the Selma campaign led by Martin Luther King, pushed Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That law had far-reaching consequences, some of them unintended. As hundreds of thousands of newly enfranchised Southern blacks registered as Democrats, Southern whites switched their party allegiances, ushering in four decades of Republican ascendancy, both in the South and in the nation.

The 2008 election - with Democratic wins in Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida - may well have marked the beginning of the end of that era.

A month ago, at a conference I attended, a reporter asked a veteran of the civil rights movement about Obama. "I never dreamed," he replied, "this could happen in my lifetime." Having experienced white supremacy at its most virulent, this activist had no illusion that the election of a black man would solve the race problem. Still, he was amazed at the distance that had been traveled.

On Election Day, men and women who had once fought for the right to vote stood in line for hours to elect a black president. At the Obama victory rally, when asked to explain the tears running down his cheek, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said he was thinking of all the martyrs who had given their lives to make the moment possible. Television footage from across the country showed people crying and hugging each other, evoking images of the spontaneous celebrations at the end of World War II. A new day seemed to be dawning. Once again America was leading by example, giving hope to all who believe in the possibilities of democracy.

John Dittmer is professor emeritus of history at DePauw University and author of "Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi."