HISTORIANS WHO TAUGHT RACISM
After the Civil War, there was a chance to alter the course of racism in America. For a brief period, the idea of restructuring southern society by granting to the freed Negroes legal rights equal to whites prevailed in Washington. Along with the 13th Amendment that freed the slaves, the 14th Amendment demanded “equal protection,” due process, and equal access to all “privileges and immunities” of citizenship. The 15th Amendment guaranteed the right to vote regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
In many southern states, black majorities or pluralities elected blacks to local, state and even federal offices. Coalitions of blacks and enlightened whites began to work together to try to solve the problems of reconstruction after the war’s devastation. For the first time in the south, public schools were educating black children and freed slaves, who had been forbidden by racial laws to learn to read and write. Northern abolitionists came south to teach in schools. The freedman’s bureau, that Lincoln had first proposed, helped black families to reunify after slave owners had sold spouses and children for profits.
President Grant sent federal troops to chase down the KKK and succeeded in diminishing its grip, reducing voter intimidation, acts of terror and murder.
Congress passed a Civil Rights Act in 1875 that provided for enforcement of equal rights for blacks, including equal access to public accommodations, transportation, and jury panels.
But the political pendulum slowed and began to reverse. The northern public turned its attention toward the economy. The industrial age and its hopes and fears now occupied the stage. The “radical” Republicans who had pushed for black equality now gave way to so-called “liberal” Republicans who wanted business to prevail. The concept of laissez-faire dominated political theory. Allow private enterprise to thrive without governmental interference and allow the states to settle their own problems as well.
Democrats attained majorities in the Congress for the first time in many years. In the presidential election of 1878, both candidates promised to end reconstruction, meaning removing federal support for civil rights. The Reconstruction Era was over.
Between 1878 and @1900, southern whites regained power, suppressed black voting, removed all blacks from any political office, and instituted Jim Crow laws that reduced blacks to a permanent subservient underclass. When the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson, gave the wink to “separate but equal” education and accommodations, it held until 1954.
De facto segregation took hold out of the south as well. Northern and midwestern cities bulged with the “great migration” of blacks seeking jobs in the revolution that was transforming America into the greatest industrial power in the history of the world. Harlem in New York was one ghetto that was repeated in every city as housing restrictions limited movement.
To justify these actions, myths were created. The antebellum south was re-imagined as a society of gentility and honor, grace and high Christian culture. Slaves were depicted as illiterate, childlike subhumans who needed protection by white overseers, with occasional harsh punishment as children deserved. The Civil War was re-cast as the War Between the States, an effort by the Northern states to impose their values on the Southern states — that is, a fight for suppression of state’s rights. The war was lost — according to this legend — not because the South was in the wrong, but merely because of the iron boot of raw Northern power.
The myth of the nobility of “The Lost Cause” was a forerunner of the similar self-deception that afflicted Germany after World War I.
By the start of the 20th Century, the era was ripe for academic consideration. The generation that had fought the war was aging. There was enormous amount of documentation to draw from: diaries, memoirs, the Congressional Record. The old warriors and witnesses were willing to be interviewed and give recollections, rationales, and excuses, all colored by the passage of time.
As it happened, academia was ready with new ideas and tools. A new generation of historians were training in Europe, preparing themselves for the task. They had the chance to set the record straight — to shatter the myths and resurrect the hopes of civil rights and race relations for that and future generations.
They didn’t do that. Instead, they perpetuated the lies and insured that the myths of white supremacy and negative racial stereotypes would be entrenched in American society — from presidents to textbooks to politics to popular culture — up until our own day, more than a century later.
The most influential of these historians was named William Archibald Dunning. He was a professor of history at Columbia University in New York. He wrote a meticulously documented treatise that argued that the Reconstruction Era’s granting of power to Negroes was, in his words, a tragic blunder. The Negro race was not capable of competent governing, and the exclusion of whites who were superior in intelligence, education and experience, led to corruption and the delay in the re-integration of the southern states into the economy of the nation.
Dunning became mentor to a generation of historians. His research methods, which used primary sources — including interviews with living witnesses — was novel and exciting to academics who heretofore had spent their lives in libraries, poring over musty documents. He was able to support his ideas with first-hand evidence by those who had witnessed the events.
His methods became the standard for all serious historians and his students became influential in universities throughout the country as they attained positions on faculties, published, and taught succeeding generations of scholars.
These historians became known as “The Dunning School,” not just because of their methods, but particularly in their examination of the era encompassing the Civil War, Reconstruction, and entrenchment of Jim Crow laws.
Their reporting was so powerful that their influence went beyond academia. Dunning and other historians were called to testify as experts before Congressional committees considering voting laws and other acts involving civil rights for Negroes. The Supreme Court quoted their works in decisions such as Plessy v. Ferguson that ratified the flawed notion of “separate but equal” in schools and accommodations.
Maybe even worse, they provided the intellectual support for the acceptance of white supremacy and Negro incapacity that pervades our culture.
They wanted to apply scientific reasoning to their study of politics; hence, the new academic field they pioneered: Political Science. The irony was that the academics who applied rigorous methodology to their papers began with fundamental flaws. But in being “scientific” they stumbled into a tragic blunder of their own. They attached themselves to the powerful misguided theory of “Social Darwinism.”
The lesson they derived from Darwin’s work was that of “survival of the fittest.” This notion justified the rigid class and racial power structure that put English speaking white protestant males at the top and reduced dark-skinned peoples to the bottom rung. They deduced that if man descended from apes, then Africans were closer to apes than fair-haired white people of Northern European ancestry.
The scholarly academics proceeded from the assumption that blacks were of inferior intellectual capacity. They denied that this was a matter of prejudice; instead, they “proved” it by statistics that showed clearly how few blacks had attained high intellectual standing compared to whites. These scholars failed to acknowledge the obvious fact that their reasoning was false: blacks were denied places in higher education, and so were unable to achieve the status that would, in scholarly minds, qualify as intellectual achievement.
Another reason for their flawed conclusions lies in their educational foundation.
Some were born in the south and had been weaned on tales of the Lost Cause. For e.g., James Wilford Garner – born Mississippi, studied under Dunning, became a respected professor of Political Science at U. of Pennsylvania and U. of Illiinois. All but one was white. W.E.B. Dubois was a Dunning student. His researches and writing refuting much of the Dunning conclusions about the incapacity of Negroes to govern.
A bigger blunder was who Dunning and several of his students learned their methods from. Dunning was the first to study in Germany under Heinrich Gotthard Freiherr von Treitschke. Many American scholars followed to study under the pioneer of political science and modern history research.
Although a skillful researcher, von Treitschke was also an extreme German nationalist, a virulent anti-Semite, who believed in supremacy of the Aryan race.
Treitschke argued for a strong military, colonial domination of weaker races, even genocide of “inferior peoples,” specifically Africans and those of African ancestry.
Historian Eric Foner points out the most egregious mistake the Dunning historians made. While they prided themselves on their method of using primary sources, they did not interview blacks from the period, only whites. Whites pictured themselves as victims, told lurid tales of excesses by freed blacks. They justified and minimized the role of white terror groups such as the Klan. The scholars swallowed their stories with glee.
Thomas Dixon, Jr. was born in 1864 in North Carolina. His family were slave owners and founding members of the KKK. He hated the Radical Republicans and Reconstruction. Dixon was Scots / English on father’s side and German on mother’s side. German roots were ideological, too. German Aryan racial theories were deep in his heritage.
He dedicated his life to preaching, teaching, and writing novels, plays and screenplays that argued passionately for white supremacy and against the idea of black civil rights.
Dixon attended Johns Hopkins U., met and became lifelong friends with another student, Woodrow Wilson, a Virginian also raised with the romantic mythology of the Lost Cause.
In 1905, Dixon’s novel, “The Clansman,” was published. He adapted it for the stage, and with D.W. Griffith, co-wrote the scenario for the movie, now titled, “The Birth of a Nation” (1915).
Wilson screened it in the White House and was quoted as giving it high praise. “Like writing history with lightning.”
Except it was more like writing history with a poison pen. It was full of malicious distortions intended to inflame passions against Reconstruction. It had black Union soldiers raping white girls. It depicted black voters as illiterate. It showed black state representatives and congressmen as watermelon eating, barefoot, and corrupt. It represented the KKK as knights who rode to defend and avenge white women and families that were victimized by freed blacks, Northern carpetbaggers, and Southern turncoat scalawags.
The novel and play had been controversial and stimulated objections by blacks and supporters of Reconstruction. The movie was far more powerful. D. W. Griffith used all of his genius as a film maker to co-write, produce and direct the epic. His skill assured that it had enormous emotional punch.
It inspired protests by black activists wherever it played. But it also inspired a revival of the Klan, not just in the defeated South, but now all throughout the United States. By the 1920’s, the KKK was so strong that it was able to march on Washington D. C. in full regalia.
The stereotype of the illiterate Negro was fixed in popular culture. The most popular radio show of the 20’s and early 30’s was “Amos & Andy,” performed by two white actors. Blackface performances were common. Jewish performers Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson, the “Mammy Singer,” became stars by performing in blackface.
Negroes in films were invariably portrayed as servants. Many, such as Lincoln Perry (Stepin Fetchit) and Mantan Morelan (“feet don’t fail me now”) played characters who were laughed at as lazy, shiftless, unreliable cowards.
“Gone With The Wind” was the most popular novel of the late 1930’s and the movie in 1939 was a sensation. It carried on the myth of the elegant southern way of life lost in the war to vicious Union soldiers. By depicting the heroism of the women who had been victimized by the North in the war and by northerners after the war, and by reinforcing the stereotype of Negro incompetence (Butterfly McQueen), it extended racist ideology all the way through World War II and beyond.
The solid white Democratic Party power in the south carried into the federal government. Because there was virtually a one-party system in the southern states, reelection was assured in The House and Senate. The seniority system assured these lawmakers committee chairs of strategic committees: Judiciary, Armed Services, Ways and Means, etc. They blocked any attempts at civil rights legislation. FDR, needing the southern votes to carry forward his New Deal, acquiesced to white opposition, even negating laws to end lynching.
The armed forces had always been attractive to southern whites, and by the 30’s, southern officers dominated all branches at command levels. Racial integration of the services was out of the question.
The State Department was another branch of the federal government that was attractive to southern gentlemen. As a result, the State Department was racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, and against immigration from any but Scandanavian, Germanic, W.A.S.P. populated countries. It was a bastion of isolationists.
The institutions that were responsible for maintaining the virtual apartheid system that was firmly in place included the religious establishments—almost all denominations segregated congregations—as well as politics and popular entertainment.
Central to the system was a theoretical justification. That was provided by academic scholars who saw themselves as a new breed of social scientists. They applied scientific method to their social theories that included thorough data collection and analysis, with a goal of coming to rigid, objective conclusions that were supported by evidence.
Their pretentions to scholarship and scientific methods did inestimable damage to American society and we live with the consequences today.
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