← Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise
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- [00:04]
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In the introduction to this series, I mentioned that I didn't grow up learning much of anything about Reconstruction, but now I know I'm not unique in that respect. Most Americans don't spend much time thinking about this history either, and there's a reason for that.
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In the aftermath of Reconstruction, almost immediately you begin to get this regime of denunciation of what Reconstruction had been.
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Jelani Cobb is dean of the Columbia Journalism School, and he's also someone who's gotten very curious about what happened to the story Americans told themselves about this era, that it was all a big mistake.
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And so I would say between 1880 and 1920, you really see this ascend to reach a kind of peak fervor. It had almost become an ambient understanding.
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But why? Why did mainstream white Americans all start to agree that Reconstruction never should have happened? After all, white northerners led the Reconstruction efforts for years. The answer is that an ambitious group of academics were standing by to help America change its mind. At their head was a historian named William Dunning.
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In his time, there was no one more influential in historical circles in terms of shaping the way that the nation understood Reconstruction.
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More than anyone else, William Dunning would flip the original narrative of this era on its head. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and this is the Unfinished promise. Like Jelani Cobb now, Dunning also taught at Columbia University. He was a leading historian and one time president of the American Historical Society. Dunning argued that the progressive efforts of Reconstruction were a mistake. This argument would be so widely adopted that it became known, in a kind of shorthand, as the Dunning School. Dunning's argument made its way into history textbooks all over the country, spreading the idea that nothing good came out of the era after the Civil War.
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And the reasons for it had been that essentially the occupying forces of the federal government had imposed their will, a kind of regime of Negro supremacy upon the south as punishment for at the conclusion of the war and the corresponding election of African American men to political offices, and really significantly, the extension of the franchise to black male voters had been at the heart of the failure.
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The freedmen were not, and in the nature of the case could, could not for generations be on the same social, moral and intellectual plane with the whites. And this fact was recognized by constituting them a separate class in the civil order.
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You know, there's a kind of default presumption of black inferiority. If you kind of go through these arguments. These were men who were ignorant, venal, poorly prepared and ill equipped to carry out the functions of political representation. And as A consequence, the economy of the south stalled. The politics of the south stalled, and you had this moment of nearly universal malaise until we get to the heroic band of redeemers who take matters into their own hands and bring Reconstruction to an end.
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The deep dread of Negro domination impelled thousands of serious and respectable whites to look for some means of mitigation, if not complete salvation, in the methods of the secret societies. The explicit purpose of these organizations was to preserve the social and political ascendancy
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of the white race. What had been considered good became bad. And Jelani Cobb says that white people were ready, perhaps even relieved, to hear that it absolved them.
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People are looking for history, as often is the case, that can rationalize particular ideas or particular undertakings in the present. And so if you say that Reconstruction had been a failure, that it means that you have a rationale, whether moral or not. You have a rationale for completely removing black people from civic and political participation, certainly in the South. And you see, as you move in to the 20th century, things like Birth of a Nation, which is, you know, the first epic film in the history of American cinema which mythologizes this. And it is about the violent, bloody purge of black people from political participation in the south after Reconstruction. The old cliche, you know, was that the south lost the war but won the peace. Or for a time, you could say, the south lost the war but won the historiography.
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Historiography is the history of history. It's the study of how historical narratives have been written and. And revised over time. The Dunning School created a very influential version of the story of Reconstruction, and that version dominated the field for decades. But it started to crumble with a powerful book published in the 1930s, written by a black man, W.E.B. du Bois.
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As Malcolm says, in this episode, history is interpretation. History gets written, then rewritten, sometimes by scholars correcting the record, sometimes by committees deciding what a generation of kids will and won't learn. The version that makes it into the textbook isn't always the only story. It's the one that won out. That's the kind of thing Ground News was built for. It shows you how outlets across the spectrum tell the same story, so side by side, so you can spot the shading for yourself. Ground News gives each outlet a factuality rating so you know how much weight to give the source and shows you who owns it so you know what's behind it. The Nobel Peace center called it an excellent way to stay informed, avoid echo chambers and expand your worldview. So go to groundnews.com rz that's G R-O-U-N-N-E-W-S.com RGC For 40% off unlimited access, Vantage plan. Get it yourself or gift it to someone who'd rather know than not. Use my link groundnews.com RC so you get the discount and they know I sent you. If you're a fan of learning all sides of history, then Ground News is for you one more time. Groundnews.com RC we are in uncharted territory.
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Staff writer Evan Osnos on the New Yorker Radio Hour.
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I think all of us right now are trying to make sense of an avalanche of news every day. And there aren't very many places where you can go and understand how something
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looks in the grand scope of history and context.
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That's what I come to the New Yorker for. I'm David Remnick, and each week my
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colleagues and I try to make sense
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of what's happening in this chaotic world.
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And I hope you'll join us for
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the New Yorker Radio Hour.
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So talk a little bit about Du Bois, who he was and why he's so crucial in the kind of battle against this interpretation of Reconstruction.
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He's a young, idealistic scholar and he was born during Reconstruction. He was born in 1868. Now he was born in Massachusetts, and so he wasn't in a state where Reconstruction was actually taking place. And he thinks that the race problem, you know, such as it is, can be resolved with empirical data. And he begins this series of studies. He wants to do a survey of the Negro in business and the Negro agricultural class. And he's looking for data to prove that these are rational, intelligent people who are capable of making decisions for themselves and but for the strictures of Jim Crow and deprivation, they will be as good an American as any other person could be. And he really devotes himself to this. And he knows about racism, he knows about white supremacy and so on. But when he has to confront this dynamic personally, it really changes something in him.
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A blood curdling crime.
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During his years as a professor in Atlanta University, a black man by the name of Sam Hose is lynched just outside of Atlanta.
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A posse is in pursuit of Sam Hose, the Negro who last night assassinated Alfred Cranford at his home near here and then assaulted the dead man's wife. And there now seems no chance for the Negro to escape.
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Sam Holles is captured. He is subjected to all the rituals of lynching. He is castrated publicly. His fingers are cut off and disseminated to men in the crowd as souvenirs. And a bottle of kerosene is dumped over his head. He's set on fire and riddled with bullets. Du Bois is in downtown Atlanta, and he is out about on his errands and comes to understand that Sam Hose's knuckles have found themselves on display in the window of a grocery shop. Du Bois stops and turns around and goes back home because he's shaken by this. But it's the beginning of a revelation for him. You know, it starts this epiphany that the problem he's trying to solve is not one that responds to statistics and data and dispassionate surveys of indexes and materials and so on.
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With all this came the strengthening and hardening of my own character. I emerged into full manhood with the ruins of some ideals about me, but with others planted above the stars at the same time.
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You know, he's thinking about himself and kind of what his mission in life will be. He's going to dedicate the rest of his life to assailing the edifice of white supremacy.
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I found myself suddenly the leader of a great wing of people fighting against another and greater wing.
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By the time he reaches the question of Reconstruction and he begins working on the volume that eventually becomes Black Reconstruction, he is the most, certainly the most eminent black scholar that's ever existed in the country up to that point. And so Reconstruction is really kind of his white whale.
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So Du Bois decides to take on the Dunning School and writes play Black Reconstruction, his opus. What's his argument in this book?
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1. He affords a great deal of agency to enslaved black people. Du Bois pulls these people into the story as actual actors. And Du Bois is not only saying that these people are actors in their own history and in the drama that's playing out with national consequences, he is saying that they are determinative of the direction that history ultimately takes. And in that regard, Du Bois is decades ahead of his contemporaries.
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Freedom came to America. Not as much has been said of what freedom meant to the freed of the sudden wave of glory that rose and burst above 4 million people and of the echoing shout that brought joy to 400,000 fellows of African blood in the North. Can we imagine this spectacular revolution? Not, of course, unless we think of these people as human beings.
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He posits that Reconstruction had been a success, and he points to the development of public education. He points to the beginning of what we would call a social safety net that these governments create. But he also puts forth this idea that Reconstruction had been the theater in which these conflicts over capitalism had played out. And he sees the white working class and the small farmers and so on as essentially being manipulated by a powerful white bourgeois class.
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In the south, they forestalled the danger of a united Southern labor movement by appealing to the fear and hate of white labor and offering them alliance and leisure.
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And he sees the enslaved black population, what people would refer to consistently as slaves. Du Bois refers to them as workers and posits that they have a kind of class consciousness. And this is just.
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And labor, especially black labor, tried for light and land and leading the world laughed. It laughed north, it laughed west. But in the south, it roared with hysterical, angry, vengeful laughter.
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And it really betrays a certain level of Marxist influence that is directly connected to the fact that this is being written in the midst of the Great Depression.
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Tell me about the final chapter of the book, which is one of the most famous.
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The propaganda of History.
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The propaganda of history, yeah. What's he arguing there?
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So it's really fascinating because Du Bois walks through the history and really the historiography of Reconstruction, of who the types of people were who had written the history, what their personal investments had been, what their personal blind spots had been, and then talks cumulatively about, you know, there is very, well, a disaster that's associated with Reconstruction, but it's not the events of Reconstruction itself. It's the way that it has been rendered in history subsequently and what the impact of that has been. And he has this line, the Negro for a moment stood in the sun and then retreated back into darkness. And he's talking about, really, the possibility of there being multiracial democracy in the United States. And with the end of Reconstruction, that possibility is eclipsed.
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Du Bois book, Black Reconstruction, reads like a real trouncing of the Denning school. But Jelani Kopp reminded me that it didn't have a huge impact at the time. That came later.
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He writes the book in 1935. In 1939, World War II breaks out. Two years later, the United States enters the war. After the war, we immediately embark upon what comes to be known as the Cold War. And quite frankly, the very overtly leftist themes in Du Bois analysis of Reconstruction, not really politically palatable, that moment. And some of that really tainted the way the book itself was understood. And it took until the aftermath, really, of Du Bois death and the increasingly insurgent elements of the civil rights movement that ultimately becomes the Black Power movement for people to begin thinking seriously about what it is that Du Bois had been saying. And you know, decades later, a half century after Black Reconstruction first hit the bookshelves, you see his idea, in some nuanced, modified way, begin to take hold as the dominant interpretation of of what reconstruction had been.
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It took a while, but the ideas that Du Bois laid out in Black Reconstruction were were eventually taken up by a new generation of scholars. Jelani Cobb was one of them and so were several of his mentors especially the historian Eric Foner, who is now one of the most renowned scholars of Reconstruction and yet another academic based at Columbia. Foner's work is really the foundation for our current understanding of this era and its importance. But he told Jelani Cobb he owes a debt to past historians.
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You own a signed copy of Black reconstruction by W.E.B. du Bois?
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That is right. Well, there are two copies, actually. I have them here with me. One was an original from printing from 1935, and it was signed by Du Bois. If I can find this in the pages. To Yolanda and Du Bois. This is his daughter.
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And his daughter and grandchildren.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Remember how I mentioned that William Dunning's arguments against Reconstruction made their way into textbooks and classrooms? Eric Foner was in one of those classrooms. And even as a teenager, he found the textbook version of history suspect.
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Well, I was in high school in Long Beach, Long island, where I grew up, and my high school history teacher, Mrs. Bertha Berryman, she told the class, Reconstruction was a disaster. It was a failure. She said, the Reconstruction act of 1867, which gave the right to vote to African American men in the south for the first time, really was the worst law in all of American history. And I raised my hand And I said, Mrs. Berryman, I don't agree with you. I think the Alien and Sedition acts were worse. Mrs. Berryman said, look here, Eric, if you don't like the way I'm teaching, why don't you come in and teach the class next time about Reconstruction? So I did that with the help of my father. And at the end, Mrs. Berryman said, all right, class, you've heard me. You've heard Eric. We're gonna vote now on who's correct. And I didn't win the election, let's put it that way, but that, you know, what were we debating? We were debating whether Reconstruction was a pivotal moment in the history of American democracy.
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Foner went on to become a professor of American history. When he started digging into reconstruction, it was 40 years after DU Bois had published his history. Foner was operating after the Civil Rights movement a very different time. Much more archival material was available to him.
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You can open up the whole story of Reconstruction and really look at it afresh, because the ultimate aim of supporting Jim Crow is no longer relevant.
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Like other historians of this era, Foner quickly found that the best sources were letters and primary documents. Many of them had been untouched for decades. It was a historian's dream.
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I spent a semester as a visiting professor in the History department at the University of South Carolina. And being a kind of nerdy historian, the first thing I did was not go out to see a basketball game or something, but to go to the archives, the state archives.
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The result of Foner's research would eventually become his 1988 book, America's Unfinished Revolution.
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I rented a car and just drove around from archive to archive. Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, you name it. I spoke to the archivist, Wilma Waits, I remember her well. And she said, you know, you might just want to look at these boxes of the governor's papers. Letters received by the governor. And I said, well, that sounds kind of interesting. I had no idea what would be in there, but I said, well, how many such boxes are there? She said, 121.
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Oh, my God.
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And that's what I said. Oh, boy. Bring me box number one. Nobody had looked at them at all. I'm there opening up a box, and you can't even get the papers back in because it was so squeezed in there. But it was astonishing because this was about as grassroots as you can get. Letters by Klansmen, letters by victims of the Klan, letters by people trying to get an education for their children, letters. Just about everything, day to day life just spread out on the page.
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That's astounding.
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It wasn't anymore about Congress and amendments. It was so revealing. A guy writes to the governor of South Carolina around 1870. I want somebody to bring me justice. He then names a white man. He says, he came to my fence. This guy had a little piece of love, and he ordered my child to open the door to the fence. Now he has no right to order my child to do anything. You know, suddenly he's a free guy now who's no longer thinking like a slave, you know, but it's like just a little index of the changes that were going on in the relationships of people, black people, white people, with each other. And what's interesting is they really felt that for the first time in history, the government of South Carolina might actually listen to what some black guy said. So it was this very rich local detail that I think distinguished my book from many other books on Reconstruction.
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And it really becomes the cornerstone of the understanding of Reconstruction as an actually vital, important, and significant part of American political and social history.
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Historians do tend to argue a lot. I think Oscar Wilde actually said, our only obligation to history is to rewrite it. That's. That's our job is to rewrite the history. Some people think that it's, you know, there's Something fishy about historians challenging previous interpretations. Isn't it always the same? You have the same documents, the same figures and people, and that's the history. But history is interpretation.
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History is interpretation. That's why it feels so charged and why we keep coming back and trying to make better sense of major hinge points in history like Reconstruction. William Dunning assumed the inferiority of black people. W.E.B. du Bois made them the protagonists of their own history. Eric Foner brought new archival material to the historical conversation. What emerged from his research and from the historical record turned out to be much closer to what Du Bois had argued long ago. Foner told the New York Times after his book was published, one of my main themes is that blacks themselves helped to set the agenda for Reconstruction. So, you know, we've been thinking and revisiting this era in American politics now repeatedly, over the last 150 years. Are we done, or is this gonna go on forever?
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No, I mean, I think there's, like, the idea that, you know, is history, as they call it, argument without end? And I don't think it necessarily is. But the problem is that we have not resolved the questions that Reconstruction was responding to. And so, consequently, Reconstruction remains relevant and shockingly close to the surface in our national park politics now. And I think that's what we've always been arguing about. Who is included in America? You know, who does America belong to?
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That question, who does America belong to? Will escape the containment of newspapers and books. It will permeate through all of American culture in the 20th century, from movies to radio to animated cartoons.
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It is a terrible movie.
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They blew most of the special effects budget on blackface.
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So for our final chapter, we listen in as a comedian and a film critic, try to make sense of the cultural fallout of Reconstruction.