Historians and Textbooks:
The “Story” of Reconstruction
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Chapter 1 Historians and Textbooks: The “Story” of Reconstruction8
n one of the most memorable scenes in movie history, Rhett Butler tells Scarlett O’Hara that he’s leaving her. When Scarlett asks what she will do, Rhett answers, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” It was the climax of Gone with the Wind, starring Clark Gable as Rhett and Vivian Leigh as Scarlett. The David O. Selznick film, based on a best-selling novel set in the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction, was the biggest picture of 1939.
The film’s success should have surprised no one. It had all the right ele- ments: strong-willed characters, tempestuous romance, a deathbed scene that left audiences in tears, and courageous people struggling to rebuild lives and fortunes destroyed by war. Yet Gone with the Wind also offered an enduring image of life in the Old South and of Reconstruction’s “dark days.” On the O’Hara plantation, “chivalrous” whites and their loyal ex-slaves confronted “cruel and vicious” Yankee carpetbaggers in cahoots with “traitorous” scala- wags. It was a theme that made sense to mostly white movie audiences in 1939. As early as 1915, D. W. Griffith’s silent film The Birth of a Nation had told the story of the Ku Klux Klan’s violent but “valiant” efforts to throw off “carpetbag” rule. Like Griffith’s tale, Gone with the Wind found a sympathetic audience because it reflected their racial prejudices. As historical drama, it also fit comfortably with what they had learned in school, specifically, with interpretations imparted from history textbooks.
As we shall see in this chapter, however, those interpretations would change over time. In this chapter, you can consider what some twentieth-century his- torians have taught Americans about Reconstruction. In the process, you will have the opportunity to see that these books do not always necessarily con- tain the same past and that they, like such powerful movies as The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, reflect the biases of their producers. When done, you can judge how well Gone with the Wind’s picture of Reconstruction corresponds with those presented in textbooks today.
S E T T I N G
Moviegoers in 1939 may have remembered producer David O. Selznick’s name splashed across the screen. Far fewer recalled the author of their American his- tory textbook. More likely than not it was David S. Muzzey, whose American History (1911) and History of the American People (1927) were bestsellers by the 1930s. Among the most enduring American history textbooks, these books probably taught several generations of Americans more about their nation’s past than any other book. If audiences had learned anything about Reconstruction before Gone with the Wind’s opening credits, it was probably Muzzey who had taught them.
Muzzey had plenty to say about Reconstruction, and in no uncertain terms. The Republican governments established under congressional Reconstruction
I
Copyright 2014 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial Review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Investigation 9
he judged to be “sorry affairs.” The government “of the negro [sic] and his unscrupulous carpetbagger and scalawag patrons was an orgy of extravagance, fraud, and disgusting incompetence.” Muzzey, a New Englander, was sympa- thetic to the efforts of Southerners to “redeem” their states from “negro [sic] and carpetbagger rule.” Although he called white Southerners’ use of vio- lence against black voters “exasperating,” their response was understandable. “Congress,” he asserted, “did [Southern states] an unpardonable injury by hastening to reconstruct them on the basis of negro [sic] suffrage.”1 In short, his view of Reconstruction was that of the white Redeemers themselves.
Muzzey, of course, did not invent this “Redeemer” view of Reconstruction. How, then, had he come to these conclusions? It is impossible to be certain about the intellectual influences on this Columbia University professor. Yet we do know that two other Columbia historians had already written sympathetically about the white South’s plight under congressional Reconstruction. Ex-confederate John W. Burgess was an advocate of “Nordic” racial supremacy and the “white man’s burden.” In Reconstruction and the Constitution (1902), he declared that blacks failed to subject “passion to reason.” Reconstruction thus put “barbarism in power over civilization.”2 William A. Dunning, a Northerner, agreed. His Reconstruction history was peopled with corrupt carpetbaggers and blacks pursuing “vicious” policies. White Southerners had little choice but to fight back. “All the forces [in the South] that made for civilization,” Dunning asserted, “were dominated by a mass of barbarous freedmen.”3
Burgess and Dunning played a crucial role in transmitting a Southern view of Reconstruction into classrooms nationwide. At Columbia they trained sev- eral generations of historians, who wrote more books and trained still other historians. By the time Gone with the Wind captivated many moviegoers, the struggle for the hearts and minds of high school and college students was already over. Although a few black historians dissented, most notably W. E. B. Du Bois, the South had triumphed in the historical battle over the the- ory of Reconstruction. Rather than a new view of the past, Gone with the Wind offered white audiences a reassuring version of the past that had been embed- ded in the popular mind for several decades. In 1939, Hollywood ensured that it would endure for several more. Only in the second half of the last century would historians seriously challenge the established view of this era with new interpretations that turned Dunning’s view on its head.
I N V E S T I G A T I O N
This chapter contains four selections from American history textbooks published in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The first was published in 1906 and the last in 2001. Your primary assignment is to determine how these accounts of Reconstruction differ from one another and which one is most accurate. As you read them, keep in mind the questions that the authors attempt to answer about Reconstruction. These questions, mostly unstated, are
Copyright 2014 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial Review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
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