Eric Foner on the politics of history
The historian Eric Foner from a talk at Swarthmore in 2013:
One other point, and this I think is important to anybody here who is studying in a history class, you will have heard about this, not necessarily, but reconstruction is a prime example of what we call the politics of history. I’m not just talking about a historian is a Democrat or a Republican or something like that, I’m talking about the way historical interpretation both reflects and helps to shape the politics of the present, the time that is the historian is writing in.
For many, many years, certainly into the, well past the middle of the 20th century, what we call the old or standard view of reconstruction dominated historical writing and textbooks and popular thinking. In a nutshell, in a very brief summary, that view saw reconstruction after the Civil War as the lowest point. The low point in the whole saga of American democracy. According to this point of view, which is not taught in schools anymore I don’t think, but is still widely accepted by people who were educated maybe a generation ago, President Lincoln, at the end of the Civil War, just before he was assassinated, wanted to bring the defeated South back into the Union in a lenient and quick manner.
He was assassinated, his policy was continued allegedly by his success, Andrew Johnson. Johnson was thwarted in his effort to reunite the nation by some of the villains of the piece, the radical Republicans in Congress. Either because of his hatred for the South or from another point of view, the desire to fasten the grip of Northern capitalism on the South. These radicals took over Congress, overturned Johnson’s policy, and instituted what we call radical reconstruction based on black suffrage, based on giving black men the right to vote.
Because black people, according to this view, are inherently incapable of intelligently exercising political rights, there followed an orgy of corruption and misgovernment in the South. Presided over by carpet baggers, that is Northerners who went down to the South to reap the spoils of office, and scalawags, who were white Southerners who cooperated with these governments.
Blacks, although it was called black reconstruction before Dubois, they really were not actors, they were more manipulated by others. They were more childlike, and these whites manipulated them in order to get into power. Eventually, groups like the Ku Klux Klan decided enough was enough and overthrew these governments and restored what was politely called home rule, or what we should really call white supremacy, in the Southern states.
What are the politics of this view? This interpretation had an amazing longevity. Historians make their living overturning what previous historians have done. That’s our job, we’re always trying to prove the guy who came before us as wrong. To remain the accepted view of a period of American history for 50 or 70 years, is unheard of. There’s no other era of American history where the same view was dominant in 1900 as in 1960, let’s say.
Impossible. This was true of reconstruction. Why? Because this view of reconstruction was congruent with the racial system of the United States in the Jim Crow era, until the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. Because what were the lessons of that old view? One, it was a mistake to give black men the right to vote. Reconstruction proved that black men are not capable of voting because they misused the vote. Therefore, any effort to give African Americans back their right to vote, which was taken away around 1900, would just lead to another reconstruction. The alleged horrors of reconstruction were always invoked when efforts were made to expand or restore political democracy, that is to say, in the South.
The history is not taught that way any more. Foner is one of the major figures in that change.
I remember this–I certainly don’t remember the teaching being explicitly racist, but I clearly remember having to know the definition of ‘carpetbagger’ and ‘scalawag’ for the test in grade school.
Oh, it’s still taught that way. Maybe not at any grownup university’s history department, but all over the ex-confederate states and the square states.
guest – yep, same here. When I first read Foner, decades ago – I remember feeling a kind of bristle of recognition and horror – “Oh yes, that’s exactly how we were taught it. Fuuuuuuuck.”
guest,
It’s interesting how those terms have survived to remain insults today. “Scalawag” isn’t used all that often, I suppose — it’s rather an old-timey insult, something that Mr. Burns has probably said on The Simpsons — but “carpetbagger” remains in use when referencing politicians who move to new constituencies.
That’s an interesting thing for American culture to denigrate. Generally, American culture accepts, even reveres, people who packed up and moved somewhere new to pursue opportunity. We don’t have a nasty term for the pioneers who settled the West. Even “49ers” or other gold rush terms are neutral at worst. But as usual in America, race trumps everything, and any Northerner who moved to the South and didn’t adopt the Lost Cause was to be viewed with contempt.
I took American History in high school. What I mainly remember about reconstruction is that the subject had been kind of hollowed out. The teacher gave us the word, and must have spent at least a few days talking about it, but I never found out what reconstruction *was*. It was like they somehow talked around it without ever addressing it head-on.
The only substantive fact that I recall is that in the aftermath of the Civil War a bunch of Northerners went south to makes money in the chaos. That seemed unremarkable to me then, and it seems unremarkable to me now (cf. Iraq war)
It wasn’t until many years later that I learned that whites retook power across the south by overthrowing the state governments, and the Feds stood by while they did this. That certainly wasn’t taught in my school.
Steven,
That’s my recollection of 11th Grade U.S. History, too. I think the entire last third of the 19th century got blasted through in a week. “Ok, so the Civil War was over, and there was Reconstruction to bring the rebel states back in the Union, and they passed some constitutional amendments banning slavery and such. Uh, and the Ulysses Grant turned out to be a better general than he was a president. Some weird stuff happened with the election of 1878. And that’s pretty much it.” I don’t think it was part of any ideological agenda, I think it’s just that the course was set up to spend a lot of time on the founding and Revolution, then the long lead-up to the inevitable Civil War, and then it’s like oh shit we’ve only got another month to cover the last hundred-plus years including two world wars and a depression and maybe the sixties if we dare.
It’s not necessary to have an ideological agenda to get the whole thing drastically wrong though. Ideological assumptions or blinders will do the job just as well. People took “Gone With the Wind” – both novel and movie – seriously for years without having the faintest idea that it had a white supremacist story at its core. No doubt generations of teachers taught Reconstruction from those drastically wrong textbooks without having an agenda, but the mistakes were deeply ideological. The people who carried out Redemption had ideology enough for all of them. (Redemption was the fancy label for the reimposition of slavery in all but name.)
Agreed. The other thing that happens is that a particular area gets branded as Too Controversial, and so educators — especially below college level — just shy away from it as much as possible. Think of all the public schools that have tried to just mumble their way through biology without using the word “evolution” if they can help it, because the godbotherers will freak out if they do, but on the other hand they’ll get sued if they try to throw the creationists a bone.
You can kind of understand why teachers would want to take the easy way out. I write about the ‘long eighteenth century’ in England, which as every historian knows is the best century. Years ago I was having dinner with some people at an academic conference and asked why in the UK the long eighteenth century, which is crucial for understanding the political and economic structures in place today, is virtually ignored in the national curriculum (my first-year university history students had the Tudors, the American Civil War, the Russian Revolution, and World War II, and that’s about it–I remember one young man had the Nazis for history four years in a row) and someone said ‘we can’t teach the long eighteenth century because that’s when Britain did bad things.’ How are we going to engage a class, particularly a multicultural class, in critical thinking about slavery, colonialism, and the exploitation of industrialisation? I heard the curator of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich speak once about the exhibit they hosted about slavery, and he described a lot of complaints from Black parents whose children were coming home upset, and with awkward questions.
Good grief. How can one learn anything about history at all if one flinches away from those times We did bad things?
I totally agree–particularly THOSE bad things, which continue to have profound effects on how we live our lives–but I can see most teachers thinking it’s above their pay grade to cope with the fallout.