Eric Foner and the Dunning School

You ever wonder how history makes it into the textbooks? If you’re like me a child of the ’60s I'll bet you never realized that the story you learned in high school of one of the most important eras in American history was the handiwork of one questionable academician and his cronies, called collectively the Dunning School.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say on the subject:

[The Dunning School] was named after Columbia University professor William Archibald Dunning (1857-1922), whose works and teachings in the early 20th century on Reconstruction were influential. He supported the idea that the South had been ruined by Reconstruction. He contended that freedmen had proved incapable of self-government and thus had made segregation necessary. Dunning believed that allowing blacks to vote and hold office had been “a serious error”. As a professor, he taught generations of scholars, many of whom expanded his views of the evils of Reconstruction. The Dunning School and similar historians dominated the version of Reconstruction-era history in textbooks into the 1960s. Their generalized adoption of deprecatory terms such as scalawags for southern-white Republicans and carpetbaggers for northerners who worked and settled in the South, have persisted in historical works.

To challenge an idea so dearly embedded in the public school (and university) syllabus required monumental focus, but Eric Foner possessed two crucial qualities that Dunning lacked: A scholar’s disinterest and a scholar’s imagination. He wasn’t the first to challenge the Dunning theory of Reconstruction—that honor would go to historians like John Hope Franklin, Kenneth Stamp and Howard Beale (whose name was adroitly appropriated by Paddy Chayefsky for his anti-hero in Network). But he was the first to be able to re-imagine the Reconstruction and skillfully narrate it to a general audience.

Foner thought outside the box. He carefully considered the personal narratives of those who lived in the South during Reconstruction, particularly the narratives of “illiterate” blacks. He respected the narrative of numbers—in this case, the facts and figures which demonstrated the failure of the plantation economy in terms of the history of labor.

In short, rather than expound a theory and cutting his facts to fit, he considered every element and let the story shine through.

Which is not a bad rule of thumb for any writer.

There are a couple of quotes from Foner I’ll pass along here. Ponder them as you will:

“In a global age, the forever-unfinished story of American freedom must become a conversation with the entire world, not a complacent monologue with ourselves.”

And a less locally particular, more general almost Zen-like declaration:

“Events are only inevitable after they happen.”

Which is the most optimistic thing I’ve ever heard from the mouth of a scholar.

Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877‎ by Eric Foner (HarperCollins, 2002)

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