Reconstruction and Understanding the History of America

Last night at the televised town hall for Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton triggered a small Twitter storm by completing mistelling the story of Reconstruction after the Civil War.  She said of Abraham Lincoln: 

I don't know what our country might have been like had he not been murdered, but I bet that it might have been a little less rancor, a little more forgiving and tolerant than might possibly have brought people back together more quickly. But instead, you know, we had Reconstruction, we had the reigns of segregation and Jim Crow. We had people in the South feeling totally discouraged and defiant. So, I really do believe he could have very well put us on a different path.

For anybody who has studied this history in the last forty years it should be shocking to hear an educated person confuse the period generally called Reconstruction (roughly 1867-1877) with the period after, sometimes called Restoration by its apologists.  Reconstruction was a period when the franchise was extended to Southern men, black and white.  It is the period when Southern states began public education and built hospitals and railroads.  It held out the promise of democracy and constitutional law after centuries of slavery.  What followed was a wave of Ku Klux Klan terror, including untold numbers of assassinations of candidates for public office in order to restore (hence, Restoration) the rule of the former slave owners.  The "accomplishments" of this period were disfranchisement of African-American voters; debt peonage, sharecropping and convict labor; segregation of public facilities (that's right, there was no segregation before the Civil War); attacks on public schools for everybody, but especially African Americans; and the de facto legalization of white-supremacist terror in the form of lynchings.  

The most charitable tweet about Hillary's truly-monstrous view of Reconstruction as rancorous and discouraging to the South (read "white South" here) was that it was a product of the time when Hillary attended school: "Have to think that was her mid-century education on Lincoln and Reconstruction popping up. Amazing how durable that can be." That is a story worth exploring.

In the early twentieth century a professor of US History at Columbia University, William Archibald Dunning, began writing about Reconstruction. His starting point was that giving the right to vote to African Americans was at best unwise and probably criminal, because they represented a race incapable of governing themselves. Everything in his work stands on this racist assumption. He and his PhD students came to be known as the Dunning School and produced a body of work exploring the details of the Reconstruction period in every former-Confederate state. This is not "inside baseball" as Eric Foner explains: 

The traditional or Dunning School of Reconstruction was not just an interpretation of history. It was part of the edifice of the Jim Crow System. It was an explanation for and justification of taking the right to vote away from black people on the grounds that they completely abused it during Reconstruction. It was a justification for the white South resisting outside efforts in changing race relations because of the worry of having another Reconstruction.

This view was taught in high school and elementary classrooms and textbook well into the last decades of the twentieth century.  For all I know it is still being taught, because teachers have such a strong tendency to repeat what they learned.

Somebody reading this blog post is probably already dismissing it as "revisionist" history, and it was, at least it was in the sixties and seventies... "revisionist" in the sense of revising a wrong, false, view of the past rooted in racist assumption instead of fact.  Already in 1935, W.E.B. DuBois -- the brilliant sociologist, historian, civil rights activist and editor -- published the monumental Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880.  While this 750-page work contained much that was new, the most striking thing about it is how heavily DuBois was able to rely on the work of the Dunning School.  All he had to do was reread their work with one changed assumption: that African Americans are human beings!  Suddenly, a completely different light is shed on the tremendous achievements of the Southern governments that included Black voters and elected officials.  Suddenly, the Klan terror looks less like "redemption" (the word both the Klan and the Dunning school used) and more like the heinous and immense crime against humanity that it so clearly was.

In its time, Black Reconstruction received short shrift.  It did not affect the dominance of the Dunning school.  It wasn't until much later that his work was read again.  Interestingly, this reversal involves Columbia again.  During the height of the Red Scare of the 1950's, James P. Shenton, decided to ask his seminar class to read DuBois's book.  This was a challenge for two reasons: the book was long out of print and DuBois's anti-nuclear activism had led the Justice Department to treat him as an enemy agent.  He was charged for failing to register as a representative of a foreign state.  The case was dismissed by the judge when defense attorney Vito Marcantonio said that Albert Einstein would be appearing as a witness for DuBois.  Nevertheless, the State Department withheld his passport from him for eight years.  Even daring to assign his work to a class was a suspect act.  Retired Columbia College Dean Harry Carman supported Shenton in this, though, and actually invited DuBois to sit in on the seminar while they discussed his work.

Professor James Shenton was not a prolific writer but he was a nurturer of great historians.  Among his PhD students were Eric Foner, Sean Wilentz, David Rothman, Roy Rosenzweig, Steve Ross, Robert Fogelson and Thomas Sugrue.  Most important in this connection is Columbia Professor Eric Foner, whose Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, was considered groundbreaking when it came out in 1988.  It is the standard for all historians today, as well as the basis for most textbooks. His conclusions are not dramatically different from those of DuBois.  Like DuBois, he saw the end of Reconstruction as a tragedy for American democracy.  Foner wrote in the NY Times book review last year, 

Citizenship, rights, democracy — as long as these remain contested, so will the necessity of an accurate understanding of Reconstruction. More than most historical subjects, how we think about this era truly matters, for it forces us to think about what kind of society we wish America to be.

How did all this escape the attention of Hillary Clinton?  Because the stories we tell ourselves about our history and the development of America are tenacious.  They have a very strong hold on us.  I remember the reviews of Foner's Reconstruction when it came out in 1988.  They were not merely favorable; they described this book as being totally seismic in the way it reversed conventional thinking.  I read the book itself with surprise, though: what was so new about it?  I couldn't really see.

Until I got to the chapter about Reconstruction and Native Americans.  Then it wasn't just the ideas that seemed familiar; it was the actual words.  It was so curious that I immediately skipped to the footnotes and discovered... my own work.  The source was the journal version of my Master's essay.  And then it all became clear: I was a product of the same intellectual milieu that had produced Foner's work.  I had even contributed to it.  James Shenton was my graduate advisor, too.  Eric had been my academic advisor when I was a sophomore in college.  Of course a 1988 synthesis of 25-odd years of scholarly work was familiar to me because I had been a part of it.

This experience highlighted the other side, too.  I shouldn't be surprised to find myself familiar with Foner's work, but I also shouldn't be surprised by the lack of familiarity shown by other people.  And this is especially true for this particular work, about Reconstruction.  The Dunning view (Hillary Clinton's view) was a bulwark of white supremacy throughout the twentieth century.  We have not finished -- by any measure -- overturning white supremacy.  Therefore, we still have to oppose, challenge and defeat its intellectual base.  Hillary Clinton's ignorance should be denounced and mocked.  But it is far from a surprise.