Dunning School

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The Dunning School is a historiographical school of thought regarding the Reconstruction period of American history (1865–1877). It was named after Columbia University professor William Archibald Dunning who opposed allowing black people to vote or bear arms. Dunning's theory of Reconstruction contended that freedmen proved incapable of self-government and had themselves made segregation necessary. His views dominated history textbooks on the Reconstruction era until the 1960s.

In a series of state-by-state monographs, as well as large-scale histories, Dunning School historians contended that Reconstruction was badly handled after the Radical Republicans won the 1866 elections. They generally agreed with the policies of Abraham Lincoln and especially Andrew Johnson, and sharply condemned Ulysses Grant as corrupt. They saw the "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags" as corrupt, and believed the freedmen were unready for full participation in politics. John Hope Franklin, former president of the American Historical Association, said Dunning offered "no economic, geographic, or demographic data" "to support his sweeping generalization."[1]

Dunning opposed the exclusion of some ex-Confederates from voting and supported the Jim Crow view that African Americans should note vote.

Princeton University historian James M. McPherson wrote that while the accepted "facts" at the start of the 20th century "supported the prevalent belief in the mental inferiority of black people" and this "conservative interpretation dominated Civil War historiography for many years. Reconstruction became the historians' chief whipping boy; it was the 'nadir of national disgrace,' the 'most soul-sickening spectacle that Americans had ever been called upon to behold,' in the words of John W. Burgess of Columbia University.":

"Burgess's colleague William A. Dunning trained a generation of graduate students whose published dissertations reinforced their mentor's influential writings on Reconstruction. James Ford Rhodes spread the same message in his popular history of the Civil War era. Radical Reconstruction, said Rhodes, was an "uncivilized" scheme that "pandered to the ignorant negroes, the knavish white natives, and vulturous adventurers who flocked from the North." Negro suffrage produced an "agglomeration of incompetence and corruption at which the world stood aghast." Northerners all, Burgess, Dunning, and Rhodes, fashioned the southern white version of Reconstruction into a national consensus. No northerner could read this story of "injustice and misery," confessed Lyman Abbott in 1904, "without a profound sense of humiliation." ^[1] ^[2] ^[3].

The views of the Dunning School historians were contemporaneously opposed by African American authors of the period, such as John R. Lynch, one of the first African American members of the United States Congress, in his book The Facts of Reconstruction[2]. Also, in several articles, Lynch criticized the racial biases of the Dunning School historians who favored Jim Crow, which was the segregation of the races that replaced slavery after the attempts to introduce civil rights failed when Reconstruction ended.

The Dunning School historiography was vigorously criticized for racial discrimination by W.E.B. Du Bois in many articles beginning in 1919 in The Crisis and in his epic work, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935). Du Bois laid the groundwork for rejection of the race-based, pro-Confederate views of the Dunning School that favored replacing civil rights and voting rights that had been introduced during Reconstruction with the harsh policies of the Redeemers who represented ex-Confederate members of the Democratic Party who regained power in the South through the use of Ku Klux Klan violence including lynching. ^[4]

The last full-fledged member of the Dunning School was E. Merton Coulter who "framed his literary corpus to praise the Old South, glorify Confederate heroes, vilify northerners, and denigrate southern blacks."[3]

"No sooner was revisionism launched, however, than E. Merton Coulter insisted that 'no amount of revision can write away the grievous mistakes made in this abnormal period of American history.' He then declared that he had not attempted to do so, and with that he subscribed to virtually all of the views that had been set forth by the students of Dunning. And he added a few observations of his own, such as 'education soon lost its novelty for most of the Negroes'; they would 'spend their last piece of money for a drink of whisky'; and, being 'by nature highly emotional and excitable…, they carried their religious exercises to extreme lengths.'" [19. Coulter, The South during Reconstruction (Baton Rouge, 1947), xi, 86, 336.][4]

In the 1940s a different approach was pioneered by Howard K. Beale and C. Vann Woodward. As disciples of Charles A. Beard they focused on greed and economic causation and downplayed the centrality of corruption. By 1960 a new school of progressive historians joined Du Bois and Lynch in rejecting the Dunning interpretation of the post-Civil War era.

More recently, contemporary historians, such as Eric Foner David W. Blight, Michael Les Benedict, James McPherson, John Hope Franklin, and Steven Hahn reject the Dunning School notion that Reconstruction was inherently corrupt, or at least any more so than any other period in American history. They argue that Reconstruction had many positive elements, beginning with the enfranchisement of African-Americans, both free men and former slaves, and in the introduction of public schools in the South where they had not previously existed. Franklin, for example, points to the founding of historically black universities, such as Howard and Fisk, as two major successes of Reconstruction. Contemporary historians praise the Radical Republicans and the Freedmen for introducing literacy and public transit to areas of the rural South were it had not previously existed. And, they are critical of the Dunning School of historians for leaving the viewpoint of African Americans out of their textbooks and for favoring Jim Crow laws that kept African Americans in an inferior conditions far into the twentieth century.

1 Representative Dunning School scholars
2 Primary Source in Opposition to Race Bias of Dunning School
- 2.1 References
3 External links

[edit] Representative Dunning School scholars

Bowers, Claude The Tragic Era (1929), a best-selling book that has also been called propaganda. It argues that white southerners who had held power in the Old South lost power to blacks and their Northern allies, that federal courts in the South were established as military districts after the Civil War, and that black people were pawns of Reconstructionists, e.g. "Most of the negroes now enlisted in clubs, and drilled to believe their freedom depended on Republican or Radical Rule."

Davis, W.W. The Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida (1913).
de R. Hamilton, J.G. Reconstruction in North Carolina (1914).
Fleming, W.L. Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama (1905). Emma Lou Thornbrough, editor of Black Reconstructionists in History [Prentice-Hall: 1972] writes that Fleming "was one of the most distinguished members of the Dunning school of historians. His volume is a good example of the way white historians of the early twentieth century looked at Black Reconstructionists." Fleming assumes "Negro inferiority and (it was) his conviction that blacks were gullible, ignorant dupes of unscrupulous whites." [pp. 128–129]
Garner, J.W. Reconstruction in Mississippi (1901).
Ramsdell, C.W. Reconstruction in Texas (1910).
Reynolds, J. S.. Reconstruction in South Carolina, 1865–1877 (1905).
Staples, Thomas. Reconstruction in Arkansas, 1862-1874 (1923).
Thompson, C.Mildred. Reconstruction in Georgia (1915).

[edit] Primary Source in Opposition to Race Bias of Dunning School

Lynch, John R. The Facts of Reconstruction. (New York: 1913) Full text online, courtesy of Project Gutenberg EBook

[edit] References

Blight, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2000) a history of the Dunning group, the major school of thought taught in schools and colleges in the United States in 20th century. Blight, a progressive historian, describes the retreat from equality for African Americans that the Dunning School represents.
Coulter, E. Merton. The South During Reconstruction, 1865–1877 (1947).
Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880. African-American contemporary of Archibald Dunning who vigorously criticized the racial bias of Dunning's school of historiography both in this book and in articles in The Crisis, the periodical of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).
Dunning, William Archibald. Reconstruction: Political & Economic, 1865–1877 (1905).
"The Undoing of Reconstruction," by William A. Dunning (1901)
The Sequel of Appomattox, A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States by Walter Lynwood Fleming, (1918) full text of short overview.
Fleming, Walter L. ed. Documentary History of Reconstruction: Political, Military, Social, Religious, Educational, and Industrial (1906).
Lynch, John R. The Facts of Reconstruction. (New York: 1913)
on Dunning
Muller, Philip R. "Look Back Without Anger: A Reappraisal of William A. Dunning". Journal of American History 1974 61(2): 325–338. Online at JSTOR at most colleges.
Smith, John David. Slavery, Race and American History: Historical Conflict, Trends, and Methods, 1866–1953 (1999)