Tuesday, January 26, 2016

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.

Friday, January 8, 2016

Canine Conflict

I just re-read a post from last February in which I wondered about the conflicts my GSD Prophet has with some of the other dogs he knows.  One of the antagonists I wrote about was a female Great Dane, about whom I recounted the following story:
I leashed Prophet and instructed him to follow me.  But the Dane was still off leash and bounding toward Prophet.  I was considering releasing him, but the attack never got serious enough.  She was snarling at Prophet and jumping at him, but still avoiding his mouth.  Prophet grabbed her jacket, but let go when I told him to.

Meanwhile, the owner was yelling and pursuing her dog.  When she got close I realized she was yelling at Prophet!  The gentleman I was with, whose little dog was watching with interest, chuckled and asked why she was giving orders to Prophet instead of her own dog, particularly since Prophet was on leash!
In reading this anew I noticed details that had slipped my memory and others that I hadn't paid sufficient attention to at the time.  At the time I concluded that it was too easy for me to see the other person's blindness to their dog's aggression and too hard for me to see my own and that I needed a professional consult.  And, in fact, I discussed the incident a week later with a dog behaviorist and asked about the possibility of some de-conditioning for the dogs.

Months went by before I was able to speak to the owner of the Great Dane.  When I finally saw her, we were in the parking lot of the park where we walk.  The Dane was in the woman's vehicle, barking furiously and hurling herself against the inside walls while Prophet listened curiously.  I asked about the possibility of joint training so that the dogs could pass each other in peace, but the woman cut me off.  No, she said, Prophet is a violent animal who should never be off his leash and who should never be outdoors without a muzzle.

I took a moment before responding to this.  Really, I couldn't think of any response that would not have instantly escalated the conflict between us, the people.  (I could think of plenty of those responses!)  My pause gave her an opportunity to continue.  What she remembered is how Prophet grabbed her dog (remember, a Great Dane, much bigger than him, and initiating the attack!) by the jacket (not the throat!) and how his teeth penetrated right through the jacket.  At that point I reminded her that her dog had run across the width of the park to engage Prophet.  She complained that it was her park, too, and that she liked to come in every day after dropping her children at school at 8:15.  Oh, okay.  I never have to be in this section of the park after 8:15.  She seemed surprised by the simplicity of this solution and I haven't seen her since, which is now about six months.

But I have seen the dog.  One morning in early December we dropped into another park because Prophet saw a puppy he likes.  They were chasing and wrestling for about fifteen minutes when a familiar-looking Great Dane come in.  I wasn't immediately certain that this was the same dog because she was with a man this time.  But as they got closer I recognized her.  Prophet cautiously walked over to say hello and then gently kissed her face.  The two dogs then interacted mainly with other dogs for about ten minutes.  When I noticed them giving each other some stink-eye (I don't know what triggered it) I asked Prophet to follow me and left.  No fighting, no biting, no barking.

I was really intrigued by the different behavior both dogs demonstrated when the male owner was present.  I don't know what to make of it.  Was he showing less fear of Prophet?  Does the Dane see less need to protect his male owner?  But there are other things to consider, too. In re-reading my post from last February I realized that I had forgotten that Prophet was on his leash when that incident occurred.  And while I remembered that the woman blamed Prophet, I forgot that she was yelling at him.  Does the leash exacerbate conflict?  And what am I remembering and forgetting in these stories?

While I am onto canine conflict there was also the fight with Riley in October.  Riley is a 90+ pound pit bull, which means he matches Prophet in size.  We used to see Riley every night closer to home with a group of dogs that meet after 9 pm when NYC leash laws go off in many of the parks.  Riley is two years younger than Prophet and when he was a pup they got along fine.  As he got older Riley didn't like deferring to Prophet and they had a couple of arguments while establishing a new modus vivendi.  Also, Riley got totally fixated on another dog his age named Sasha and the two mainly had time for one another.  I will acknowledge here that Riley showed signs of aggression toward dogs that were too bossy and toward dogs that demanded too much attention, but I liked Riley (and I liked his owners) and so I ignored it.

The night in question Prophet and I hadn't been in that park much for weeks.  We arrived before anybody else and as each new dog arrived, Prophet greeted them and then went back to his own business.  That night his "own business" consisted mostly of pulling up grass from between paving stones.  When Riley arrived the two dogs nodded.  Riley went to play with Sasha, but periodically gave Prophet some stink-eye.  I ignored this (my bad!) and continued socializing with the people.  After some time, and without any provocation that I can remember, Riley suddenly lunged at Prophet, growling and biting him.  Prophet tried wrestling Riley off and snarling at him.  He tried whimpering.  Meanwhile we were unsuccessfully attempting to separate the two dogs.  Riley had his jaws locked on and wouldn't let go.  Finally Prophet bit Riley and then we were able to get them apart.  I leashed Prophet and took him home.  We didn't return to that park at night for weeks.  Prophet needed a visit to the vet, but he seemed mainly to be recuperating from the aftereffects of a huge burst of adrenaline and was fine after a couple of days.

A few days later I discussed the fight with Riley's male own, who had not been there that night.  We opined that in Prophet's long absence, Riley had concluded that it was his park and that seeing Prophet walk around like he owned the place may have set him off.  But I was working with incomplete information.  What I only learned later was that Riley had assaulted a mostly harmless English Sheepdog named Paddington the night before and the completely harmless boxer Marshmallow the following night!  Paddington has a habit of trying to herd other dogs and has irritated Prophet, too, (though to the point of angry barking, not an assault.)  Marshmallow, however, is this goofy guy who just lives to play.  Moreover, it seems that Riley will now even ignore his friend Sasha in preference to playing with a tennis ball.

All that is second hand; it is what I heard.  Here is what I saw:  One day during the Christmas holiday Prophet began barking angrily inside the house.  I looked out the window to see what was setting him off and spotted Riley with his owner.  I walked out to say hello.  Riley's tongue was out in a big smile and his tail was going.  Prophet followed me out of the house, greeted Riley's owner, then turned away from Riley and walked back into the house.  Now Riley began a long sequence of barks of the "Play with me!" variety.  Prophet did not return these barks.  I called him to come out of the house, which he did.  But while Riley's tail kept wagging and he continued the "Play!" barks, Prophet just looked away and returned to the house.  Riley then lay down on the sidewalk and began crying pitifully.  Silence from inside.  I made my goodbyes and went back in myself.

When I sat down to write this I thought I was meditating on the relationship between our dogs' behaviors and us, on our dogs' relationships and ours.  As I finish it, I find that I am mainly just boasting about how much I like Prophet.  I really do.