In 1935, glimpsing the gains of the New Deal amid the wreckage of the Great Depression, W. E. B. Du Bois took stock of the last major attempt to use the power of the federal government to advance labor and democratic rights. His subject: the Reconstruction era, when former slaves were enfranchised, Southern schools and hospitals were built, and black workers and poor whites threatened not just the recently deposed planter class of the South but the rising industrialists of the North.

Forced to choose between allowing a potentially united working class and a new iteration of Southern tyranny, Northern capitalists opted for despotism. The remaining troops were summoned back North in the 1877 Great Compromise.

“They did not know,” Du Bois wrote in Black Reconstruction in America, “that when they let the dictatorship of labor be overthrown in the South, they surrendered the hope of democracy in America for all.”