Our Divided Political Heart (10 page)

No discussion of revisionism is complete without a bow to the work of revisionists on the left end of the historical profession during the 1960s and 1970s. Their objective was summarized by the evocative title of a collection of their essays published in 1968,
Towards a New Past
. The editor of the volume, Barton Bernstein, pioneered the view of the New Deal as
largely a conservative achievement. Similarly, Gabriel Kolko argued in
The Triumph of Conservatism
that the Progressive Era reforms, far from being particularly progressive or radical, were pushed by “
important business leaders
” who realized “that only the national government could rationalize the economy.” The effect of the period’s reforms was to “
preserve the basic social and economic relations
essential to a capitalist society.”
William Appleman Williams
and
Gar Alperovitz offered important books debunking aspects
of American foreign policy, in Alperovitz’s case challenging the stated reasons behind the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. Herbert Gutman pioneered
new approaches to the history of both slavery and the American working class
, while Howard Zinn spent a
long lifetime captivating students with his bottom-up approach
to the writing of the American story. As the historian Jill Lepore noted in the
New Yorker
, Zinn “
introduced a whole lot of people who hadn’t thought about it
before to the idea that history has a point of view.”

The revisionists provoked a new generation of historians to focus far more than their elders had on the role of race, class, and gender in our story. Because of their work, Jacksonian democracy’s achievements and its vision of equality among white men came to be measured against its grave moral failures on slavery and its brutal policies against Native Americans. Visionary radicals—Tom Paine, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Eugene Debs, W. E. B. Du Bois—were read back into the American narrative.

Critics of the New Left historians certainly had a point when they argued that their accounts of the past were heavily influenced by their political preoccupations in the present. “
New Left academics
,” wrote the historian John Patrick Diggins, “would write about the American past with a romantic determination to find there what they could never find in the American present outside their own enclaves: moral community, feminine consciousness, and a radical working class.” But there was also a refreshing candor among the left’s revisionists about their political objectives. “
I am less interested in eighteenth-century radicalism than in twentieth-century radicalism
,” Staughton Lynd, one of the pioneers of dissenting history, wrote in his
Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism.
“The characteristic
concepts of the existential radicalism of today have a long and honorable history. Acquaintance with that history may help in sharpening intellectual tools for the work of tomorrow.”

But it was not only the scholars on the left in the 1960s who embarked on the quest for a new past. Their work simply made explicit a revisionist temper that, to one degree or another, motivates
all
historians, often inspired by their engagement with the problems of their day. “All of my books have been, in a certain sense, topical in their inspiration,” said Hofstadter, a revisionist in his own time, later revised by others. “
That is to say, I have always begun with a concern with some present reality
.”

It is easy enough to understand that all historians start from
somewhere
—they write at a given time in a given place, and have moral, political, religious, and ethical commitments. They are inevitably affected by the currents of their era, even if they struggle heroically to free their accounts from bias and distortion. And what they write, in turn, affects how others view not only the past but also the present and the future.

But in certain areas, the politics of history is especially raw and contentious. Nowhere is this more obvious than in how historians have dealt with our nation’s long struggle with race, and no aspect of our story has undergone a more thoroughgoing revision and counter-revision than our view of what happened during Reconstruction in the South after the Civil War. I turn briefly to that history because it may be the very best example of why I believe the word “struggle” is appropriate to how we have continually grappled with our past. It is also important to our own time, when some on the right are eager to downplay the role of race in our national story, and the role of slavery in our Civil War.

The bold effort by the radical Republicans to transform the South’s aristocratic, planter-dominated society into a more egalitarian and democratic order was, from the outset, a brave, visionary, and imaginative project. It was also destined to run into vicious opposition from those whose power was challenged.

Reconstruction took place at a moment of widespread corruption in
American politics, so it’s not surprising that this corruption affected the Reconstruction governments. And the political interests of the new Republican Party were as tied up in the power struggles around Reconstruction as were those of the Democrats, then allied with the old white southern elites. But at the heart of the argument over Reconstruction, from the beginning and ever since, was the moral and political question of whether southern blacks would be offered rights genuinely equal to those of whites. Would African Americans be empowered to shape the decisions that determined their fate as individuals and as a community? Or would they be denied the basic rights of citizenship and treated as an inferior group?

“
The answer to the all-important question of what kinds of lives black people might live
in the South,” wrote Nicholas Lemann in
Redemption
, “depended on the freed slaves’ organizing abilities and on the reliability of their voting rights. From these, governmental power—and then schools and jobs and justice—would flow.” For an extended period during Reconstruction, black people enjoyed these rights. But over time, as Lemann observed, the forces of white supremacy triumphed through “
an organized, if unofficial, military effort
to take away by terrorist violence the black political rights that were now part of the Constitution.” It’s strange to our ears now, but the whites who overthrew the Reconstruction governments, imposed a color line, and stripped African Americans of their rights were known, proudly, as “Redeemers.”

The scholars who wrote the history of Reconstruction from the turn of the last century into the 1920s saw the foes of Reconstruction just that way in accounts offered when the nation’s inclinations had turned conservative (one could also fairly say racist) on matters of civil rights. Works by James Ford Rhodes, William Dunning, John W. Burgess, and their students painted Reconstruction as a disastrous interlude. They described the Reconstruction governments as dominated by corrupt “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags” and accused them of imposing misrule on the South, partly by granting power to “ignorant” freed slaves. Southern whites who used violence and fraud at the polls to overthrow the Reconstruction governments were defended, not condemned. Burgess called Reconstruction “
the most soul-sickening spectacle that Americans
had ever been called upon to behold.” Rhodes called the work of the Radical Republicans “repressive” and
“uncivilized” and cast them as politicians who “pandered to the ignorant negroes, the knavish white natives and the vulturous adventurers who flocked from the North.” Bear in mind that Dunning, Burgess, and other scholars who worked in that tradition were broadly respected figures who did extensive new research on the era about which they wrote. The center for much of this revisionist work was Columbia University, well known then and since for providing the nation with many of its most distinguished historians. Their accounts became the conventional wisdom of American history—and they were still affecting the presentation of the period in the American history textbooks I first encountered in elementary school in the 1950s and early 1960s. These approaches to Reconstruction, in turn, reinforced racial attitudes that undergirded southern segregation.

As Kenneth M. Stampp argued in
The Era of Reconstruction
, his 1965 volume that played an enormous role in overturning the Dunning interpretation, social trends in the North after the Civil War prepared the way for this negative view of the Radical Republicans. A reaction against the wave of southern European immigration popularized the invocation among the native-born of “cruel racial stereotypes” against the newcomers. These turned out to match rather closely the racial stereotypes that were common in the South. “
In due time
,” Stampp observed, “those who repeated these stereotypes awoke to the realization that what they were saying was not really very original—that, as a matter of fact, these generalizations were
precisely
the ones southern white men had been making about Negroes for years.” As a result, Stampp noted archly, “
the old middle classes of the North
looked with new understanding upon the problems of the beleaguered white men of the South.”

The “
vogue of social Darwinism
,” the view that the fittest survived and that government help for the underprivileged, including blacks, only disturbed a “natural” process, “encouraged the belief that a solution to the race problem could only evolve slowly as the Negroes gradually improved themselves.” This squared with the era’s popular sentiments that Anglo-Saxons “were superior to other peoples, especially when it came to politics.” Stampp noted the publication in 1916 of
The Passing of the Great Race
, which asserted—again, in words jarring in our time—that the Civil War had destroyed “
great numbers of the best breeding stock on both sides
.”
If the war had not occurred, the author asserted, descendants of those men “would have populated the Western States instead of the racial nondescripts who are now flocking there.” In a climate that could produce a phrase such as “
racial nondescripts
,” it is not surprising that a historian such as Rhodes would conclude: “No large policy in our country has ever been so conspicuous a failure as that of forcing universal negro suffrage upon the South.”
A powerful dissent
from this view was lodged by the civil rights leader and scholar W. E. B. Du Bois in his 1935 work
Black Reconstruction in America
, but it would take years for the historical profession to catch up with Du Bois.

It was against a history rooted in racism that the post–World War II revisionists did their work. At the dawn of the civil rights era, a group of talented historians—among them Stampp, James McPherson, John Hope Franklin, Eric McKitrick, and Howard K. Beale—set out to rehabilitate the exertions of the Radical Republicans. They reminded Americans of the achievements of the Reconstruction governments in building schools, developing the southern economy, successfully enfranchising African Americans, and enacting the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. As Stampp argued, these great egalitarian amendments “could have been adopted only under the conditions of radical reconstruction” and they “
make the blunders of that era, tragic though they were, dwindle into insignificance
.” And against the view that white politicians had foisted the vote on African Americans for partisan Republican purposes, the revisionists demonstrated that African Americans had been the authors of their own fate and major architects of the successes of the era. As Stampp wrote, “
Suffrage was not something thrust upon an indifferent mass
of Negroes. Their leaders had demanded it from the start.”

Building on the work of the original revisionists and going beyond it, Eric Foner offered his monumental 1988 history,
Reconstruction
. It is likely to stand as the authoritative account of the era for many years—even if Foner would be the first to assert that all historical accounts, including his own, should be open to revision. Foner’s ambition was to “
combine the Dunning School’s aspiration
to a broad interpretive framework with the findings and concerns of recent scholarship.”
Reconstruction
was notable in many respects, particularly in the emphasis it placed on the role of African
Americans as leading actors in the South’s post–Civil War political drama. “
Rather than passive victims of the actions of others
or simply a ‘problem’ confronting white society,” Foner wrote, “blacks were active agents in the making of Reconstruction.”

Foner also emphasized how southern society was “remodeled” in the Reconstruction period and “
how the status of white planters, merchants, and yeomen, and their relations
with one another, changed over time.” He stressed that while racism was “pervasive,” a significant number of southern whites were “
willing to link their political fortunes with those of blacks
” and that northern Republicans, for a time, came “to associate the fate of former slaves with their party’s raison d’être.”

To read Foner is to realize that the 1960s civil rights movement did not emerge from nowhere. It reflected the memory of an earlier time when racial justice was an inspiring ideal, informing social reforms that were at once practical and far-reaching. As Foner notes, what emerged from the Civil War and Reconstruction was “
a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and a new set of purposes
, including an unprecedented commitment to the ideal of a national citizenship whose equal rights belonged to all Americans regardless of race.” This was the national state Martin Luther King Jr. coaxed into action and Lyndon B. Johnson mobilized when he embarked upon the Second Reconstruction in the 1960s.

The transformation of the history of Reconstruction was in itself an important part of our nation’s political history. It helped open the way for the demands of African Americans who sought nothing more than the rights they had once, if briefly, enjoyed. The civil rights movement, in turn, inspired historians to revisit the old accounts of Reconstruction that had been distorted by racism. This interaction between politics and history created both a more accurate history
and
a political climate more hospitable to racial justice.