William Archibald Dunning

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William Archibald Dunning (1857-1922) was an American historian who founded the Dunning School of Reconstruction historiography at Columbia University, where he had graduated in 1881. Between 1886 and 1903 he taught history at Columbia, and was named a professor in 1904.[1] Born in Plainfield, N. J., Dunning was among the founders of the American Historical Association and AHA president in 1913.

Contents 1 Historical influence 2 Two Calls to Rewrite Reconstruction History Without Racial Bias 3 Books by Dunning 4 References

[edit] Historical influence

The interpretation of post-Civil War Reconstruction in the United States that Dunning and his students propounded was the dominant theory taught in American schools for the first half of the 20th century. His views were disputed by W.E. B. Du Bois beginning in 1901, and were criticized by progressive historian Howard Beale in the 1940s, condemned by John Hope Franklin in a number of his books, including, Militant South and Reconstruction: after the Civil War. The viewpoint of Dunning and his followers was warmly sympathetic to former slave owners who had led some southern states to secede from the United States. Followers of the Dunning School of historians opposed participation in government by African Americans, and they argued that the people freed from slavery were inferior and should not vote.

"Dunning admits that "The legislation of the reorganized governments, under cover of police regulations and vagrancy laws, had enacted severe discriminations against the freedmen in all the common civil rights." ^[1]

In Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois characterized Dunning's Reconstruction, Political and Economic as a "standard, anti-Negro" text. Du Bois also wrote that Dunning believed "the Negro to be sub-human and congenitally unfitted for citizenship and the suffrage." ^[2]

Dunning and his followers also condemned white Southerners who did not stand with the Confederacy during the Civil War and who joined the Republican Party after the war. Former Confederate leaders referred to the largest group of white Southern Republicans who did not identify with the goals of former plantation owners as Scalawags. They also referred to Northern whites who moved to the southern part of the United States after the war as Carpetbaggers. Both were derisive terms that Dunning and his followers popularized.

Reconstruction's mythic case of characters includes the "carpetbaggers", whom southern whites portrayed as greedy interlopers exploiting the South; the "scalawags", who were traitorous southern whites collaborating with the Yankees; the freedmen, who were sometimes seen as violent and depraved in the myth but mostly seemed ignorant and lost; and the former Confederates, who were the heroes of the story, all honorable, decent people with the South's best interests in mind.[McCrary, Peyton, "The Reconstruction Myth" in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture]

Southern Democrats were willing to use any means necessary to end Republican control of their states, including political violence. Initially through secret organziations such as the Ku Klux Klan and later more openly, as with Wade Hampton's "Red Shirts" in South Carolina, the Democrats resorted to beatings, assassinations, and armed bands of horsemen at the polls to "redeem" the South from "Negro rule." They justified these extreme methods on the grounds the Reconstruction threatened the fundamental stability of their society: economic control by "the better sort", the social elevation of all whites, and the protection of white women from sexual aggression by blacks were at stake....William A. Dunning's Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865-1877(1907) was the best example of a series of historical monographs portraying white suffering in the era."[McCrary, Peyton, "The Reconstruction Myth" in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture]

Our contemporary understanding of the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson traces back to the early twentieth century,

when Columbia University's William Dunning lent academic respectability to a popular version of Reconstruction history pioneered by segregationist Southern Democrats and slavery apologists. Dunning wrote from the point of view of the defeated South and painted the Radical Republicans as villains. His interpretation served the ideological purposes of a majority-white country eager to put the divisions of the nineteenth century behind it, and it thus came to saturate public memory until the very dawn of the civil rights era. Indeed, its indirect influence is visible even in John F. Kennedy's book Profiles in Courage, which admired... Edmund G. Ross, the Kansas Republican senator who cast the vote that acquitted Johnson.[Joshua Zeitz The New Republic, 18 January 1999, pp. 13-15]

[edit] Two Calls to Rewrite Reconstruction History Without Racial Bias

Twentieth century historians called for the rewriting of Reconstruction history without the racial bias evidenced in Dunning school textbooks.

"Almost forty years ago Howard K. Beale, writing in the American Historical Review, [Beale, "On Rewriting Reconstruction History," 807–27] called for a treatment of the Reconstruction era that would not be marred by bitter sectional feelings, personal vendettas, or racial animosities," said John Hope Franklin in his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1979. ^[3]

In recalling Franklin's reiteration of Beale's call to rewrite Reconstruction history without humiliating African Americans, David Levering Lewis, Professor of History at New York University, wrote [2] that Columbia University historian Eric Foner did just that in his prize-winning book published in 1988. Lewis said that "(with Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America' serving as model) Foner did in fact "consummate within the decade" the call by John Hope Franklin to research and write the history of Reconstruction without the angry racism that had characterized books by followers of Archibald Dunning. The history that corrects and revises Dunning's pro-Jim Crow propaganda is Foner's much-acclaimed Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.

In stark contrast to the Dunning School historians who ridiculed the viewpoint of African Americans, Foner told the story of Reconstruction with the newly freed people as its central characters.

[edit] Books by Dunning

• History of Political Theories, Ancient and Mediœval (3 vol., 1902–20)
• Reconstruction—Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction (1898, rev. ed. 1904)
• History of Political Theories from Luther to Montesquieu (1905)
• Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865–1877 (1907)
• Carl Schurz's Political Career, 1869-1906, with Frederic Bancroft (1908)
• Paying for Alaska (1912)
• The British Empire and the United States (1914)

[edit] References

• Beale, Howard K.American Historical Review. "On Rewriting Reconstruction History," 807–27.

• Du Bois, W.E.B.|W.E.B. Du Bois. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (Touchstone: 1992 reissue) p. 179-180.

• Foner, Foner|Eric Foner. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.

1988.

• Lewis, David Levering|David Levering Lewis [3]

• Franklin, John Hope|John Hope Franklin. "Mirror for Americans: A Century of Reconstruction History" presidential address, American Historical Association. 1979.[4]

• McCrary, Peyton. "The Reconstruction Myth" in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (University of North Carolina Press: 1989) McCrary, a historian with the United States Department of Justice taught at the University of Minnesota, Vanderbilt, and the University of South Alabama for 20 years.

• Zeitz, Joshua. The New Republic, 18 January 1999, pp. 13-15.