As a person who loves all things about history, it amazes me how much of what people are taught these days in classrooms is historically inaccurate. I try to read as much as I can to fill in some of the gaps of history that I might have missed during my school days.
Like most works of history, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America concludes with a bibliography listing primary and other sources consulted by the author. Most of the groupings are unexceptional. But Du Bois’s first and largest category comes as a shock to the modern reader: it consists of books by historians who believe African Americans to be sub-human and congenitally unfit for citizenship and the suffrage.
As part of his research, Du Bois scoured history textbooks to see what was being taught in American classrooms about Reconstruction, the era after the Civil War, when laws and the Constitution were rewritten in an attempt to make the United States, for the first time, an interracial democracy. Students learned that Reconstruction was the lowest point in the American saga, a time of corruption and misgovernment caused by granting the right to vote to black men. The violence perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan was an understandable response by white southerners to the horrors of Negro rule.
The heroes of this narrative were the self-styled white Redeemers who restored what they called home rule to the South, the villains northern abolitionists who irresponsibly set North against South, bringing on a needless civil war. Du Bois was well aware that what is said in history classrooms has an impact beyond the schoolhouse. The history of Reconstruction taught throughout the country proved that nonwhite peoples are congenitally incapable of intelligent self-government.
Now, nearly a century later, Donald Yacovone has published Teaching White Supremacy, which follows in Du Bois’s footsteps by tracing what textbooks over the course of our history have said about slavery, abolitionism, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and race relations more generally. Yacovone examined hundreds of texts held in the library of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, published from the early 19th century to the 1980s.
From the beginning, American education has served the needs of white supremacy. Well into the 20th century most textbooks said little about slavery or portrayed it as a mild institution that helped lift blacks into the realm of civilization. From generation to generation the books made no mention of blacks’ role in helping to shape the nation’s development. They ignored black participation in the crusade against slavery and the Civil War and portrayed Reconstruction as a disaster caused primarily by black incapacity. Many of these textbooks were produced by the nation’s leading publishing houses.
For those who have studied the evolution of American historical writing, Yacovone’s account will not be unfamiliar. It is well known that in the 19th century the concept of race, closely linked to pseudoscientific ideas about racial superiority and inferiority, was deeply embedded in American culture, including accounts of the nation’s past, and that for much of the 20th, white southerners, through United Daughters of the Confederacy and other organizations, successfully pressured publishers to produce textbooks that glorified the Lost Cause and condoned the nullification of the constitutional rights of black citizens. But there are surprises as well. Beginning in Reconstruction and stretching into the early 20th century, a number of textbooks adopted an emancipationist interpretation of the Civil War and its aftermath and pushed back strongly against racism.
Yacovone begins his narrative before the American Revolution. Even then, the idea was widespread that North America is the natural home of people defined as white. No less a personage than Benjamin Franklin suggested in 1751 that since the number of purely white people in the world was very small, Britain’s North American colonies ought to exclude all blacks and Tawneys, among whom he included the swarthy peoples of Europe, such as Spaniards, Italians, and, in an original touch, Swedes. This outlook was written into law in 1790 in the first Naturalization Act, which limited the right to become citizens to white immigrants.
History, closely tied to ideas about race, became part of the nation-building project. Nineteenth-century historians explained that the new nation’s destiny as what Jefferson called an empire of liberty arose from the innate characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon race, a construct whose definition depended on exclusion. History textbooks reflected this equation of American identity with whiteness. American history was the story of British settlement and westward expansion. The indigenous population, often referred to as savages, was little more than an obstacle to the fulfillment of the nation’s world-historical destiny of dominating the continent. As for the black presence, textbooks said almost nothing about it other than to suggest that the nation would be better off if, whether slave or free, blacks were colonized in Africa. Since textbooks ignored slavery, pupils at midcentury must have been hard-pressed to explain contemporary events like the Missouri Controversy, the Compromise of 1850, and the rise of the Republican Party.
Only a handful of textbooks condemned slavery or pointed out that it had existed in the North as well as the South.
Yacovone treats the reader to a litany of white supremacist quotations from prominent 19th-century writers including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Henry Adams - a kind of greatest (or worst) hits of American racism. But he devotes the most attention - an entire chapter - to a racist author and propagandist few scholars have ever heard of, John H. Van Evrie, a prolific writer and publisher who was firmly devoted to the idea that the United States should be the white man’s country.
Van Evrie’s books included White Supremacy and Negro Subordination, and he popularized the term “master race,” which originated before the Civil War in the writings of pro-slavery ideologues. In Yacovone’s view, Van Evrie was the father of white supremacy. Whether he deserves this label is open to question, given how widespread in 19th-century cultural and intellectual life was the notion that mankind can be divided into distinct races, each with inborn capacities and characteristics, and that races exist on a hierarchy of innate ability, with whites at the top and blacks at the bottom. In fact, Van Evrie’s version of white supremacy was somewhat eccentric. He strongly defended slavery but refused to use the word, deeming it an inaccurate description of the black condition. He opposed the colonization movement on the grounds that the economy could not survive without black labor, and his notion of separate black and white creations offended believers in the literal truth of the Bible, including in the South.
The Union’s triumph in the Civil War and the abolition of slavery posed an immense challenge to traditional narratives of American history. Textbooks written in the 1870s, along with revised editions of pre-war works, now placed slavery at the center of the American story. They traced the conflict over slavery to the nation’s beginnings and depicted the emergence of militant abolitionism as a turning point. Antislavery radicals such as William Lloyd Garrison, previously ignored or seen as dangerous fanatics, were now depicted as men and women of high moral principle. These books assimilated the end of slavery into the preexisting narrative of national progress, as a step toward fulfilling the American mission of being a beacon of liberty for mankind.
The postwar decades also witnessed the first textbooks aimed at a black readership, designed to be used in southern schools established by Freedmen’s Bureau and the biracial Reconstruction governments. They emphasized blacks’ contributions to American history, particularly their service in the wartime Union army. A School History of the Negro Race in America, from 1619 to 1890 by Edward A. Johnson, a lawyer and teacher born a slave, devoted an entire chapter to Frederick Douglass, whom pre-war textbooks had ignored. Most remarkable, perhaps, was The Nation: The Foundations of Civil Order and Political Life in the United States, by Elisha Mulford, a Yale graduate who later studied in Germany. Whether because of the advent of Reconstruction or not, Mulford explicitly repudiated the identification of the United States with white persons. The nation, he wrote, should rest on the rights of man, not the rights of a race, and should embrace all those who lived within its borders.
Yacovone chides previous scholars for jumping over these post–Civil War history textbooks. But, as he is well aware, a backlash eventually set in, with emancipationist works superseded by the reconciliationist account of the Civil War, which minimized the horrors of slavery and celebrated the Lost Cause. A combination of developments contributed to this marked regression in classroom education - the acquisition of an overseas empire in the Spanish-American War; the consolidation, with the North’s acquiescence, of the Jim Crow system in the South; and the spread of racist ideologies including Social Darwinism and eugenics. Meanwhile, advocates of the Lost Cause pressed southern boards of education not to assign textbooks that portrayed the Old South in unflattering terms, and northern publishers revised their textbooks accordingly.
By the 1920s and for decades afterward, textbooks depicted slavery in ways indistinguishable from the views of John C. Calhoun. Almost universally, they portrayed it as a benign institution, an idea reinforced by pictures of happy slaves dancing to banjo music on pre-war southern plantations. A best-selling textbook, The Growth of the American Republic by Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, two of the country’s leading historians, declared that there was much to be said for slavery as a transitional status between barbarism and civilization. Notoriously, the book’s discussion of the overall impact of the institution on its victims began.
White supremacy, often assumed rather than elaborated in 19th-century textbooks, now became explicit. Lothrop Stoddard, a leading eugenicist best known for his 1920 book, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, also published a history textbook, Re-Forging America. In it he confidently proclaimed, “Nothing is more certain than that the Fathers of the Republic intended America to be a ‘white man’s country.’” Thomas Maitland Marshall went even further. On the first page of his 1930 textbook, American History, he defined history: “The Story of the White Man.”
The most successful textbook of the first half of the 20th century was written by David Muzzey, a professor at Columbia University. It faithfully repeated the arguments of what came to be called the Dunning School that condemned Reconstruction as a disaster brought about by granting black men the right to vote. Muzzey’s book was widely used into the 1960s. The Dunning School and the textbooks that replicated its portrait of Reconstruction offered white students an easy explanation for blacks’ unequal status. They had been given a chance to progress during Reconstruction. They had abused the opportunity and could hardly complain if the more capable whites surpassed them in wealth and political power. It is not surprising, given what was being taught in American schools in the 1920s.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Columbia’s anthropology department was home to Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Franz Boas, whose writings demolished the idea that races have inborn, permanently fixed capabilities. But next door, scholars in the history and political science departments continued to disseminate white-supremacist narratives. Harvard comes out somewhat better. Unlike Dunning, Edward Channing and Albert Bushnell Hart were willing to train black scholars, including Du Bois himself and Carter G. Woodson, founder in 1916 of the Journal of Negro History, where black scholars began the laborious task of challenging prevailing accounts of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Woodson’s textbook The Negro in Our History was widely used in black colleges but ignored in mainstream institutions. Hart rejected the pro-Confederate revision of Civil War history and praised Thaddeus Stevens and other Radical Republicans. Even he, however, echoed the Dunning account when it came to Reconstruction.
Yacovone deserves thanks for undertaking the task of reading through all these textbooks. Unfortunately, he does not really subject the idea of white supremacy to careful examination. He fails to make clear what exactly it means, whom it benefits, and how it may have changed over time. Despite his having demonstrated otherwise in his account of emancipationist post–Civil War textbooks, too often white supremacy appears as a timeless set of beliefs and practices that defines the entire society. As a result, the distinction between slavery and freedom sometimes fades into the background. They become simply different manifestations of an ideology equally dominant in the North and South. Indeed, a number of times Yacovone asserts that racism was more extreme and more deeply rooted in the pre–Civil War North than the slave South, where, he claims, without elaborating, white supremacy had a patchwork quality, and blacks enjoyed more freedom than in the nominally free states. Not only does this make it difficult to explain why the Civil War took place, but it ignores the fact that while blacks in the antebellum North faced numerous forms of discrimination, unlike in the South they had white allies, whose struggles to improve their condition laid the foundation for the legislation and constitutional amendments of Reconstruction.
After the end of slavery, Yacovone claims, nothing about white perceptions of black inferiority changed. Abolition, he writes, only increased the North’s desire to erect walls of racial segregation. This makes it hard to understand the spate of state laws enacted in the North in the 1880s banning racial discrimination in public accommodations. As an analytical tool, moreover, the idea of a timeless white supremacy ignores differences of power within white America.
Focusing on a few pages in sprawling books, moreover, can obscure broader questions of interpretation. Writing a textbook is an exercise in selection. One cannot cover everything. What is included depends on the book’s overall interpretive approach. Charles and Mary Beard, in a textbook written in the 1920s, pretty much ignored the abolitionist movement, reflecting not only racism, certainly present in their book, but also the Beardian understanding of history as a series of struggles between economic classes, with political ideologies being essentially masks for economic self-interest. In this view, the Civil War was a struggle for national power between southern planters and the industrial bourgeoisie of the North.
Scholars of the 1950s disparaged the abolitionists not only because of racism but as part of the then dominant consensus interpretation of the nation’s history, which emphasized areas of broad agreement among Americans rather than moments of internal strife.
In the past two generations, historical scholarship on slavery, antislavery, and Reconstruction has undergone a profound transformation. Most historians today see slavery as fundamental to American economic and political development, the antislavery movement as an admirable part of American society, and Reconstruction as a flawed but idealistic effort to build an egalitarian society on the ashes of slavery. A host of new sources, many of them making available the perspective of African Americans, has appeared. Readers of Teaching White Supremacy are likely to wonder how fully these sources and new interpretations are reflected in current textbooks, yet Yacovone says next to nothing about those published in the past 30 or 40 years, including those in use today. This is a missed opportunity.
Lately, as is well known, the teaching of history has become - not for the first time - a terrain of conflict in the ongoing culture wars. Numerous states have enacted laws or regulations banning the teaching of divisive concepts, with the histories of slavery and racism at the top of the list. Charges - almost entirely imaginary - proliferate that teachers are seeking to make white students feel guilty for our racial past and indoctrinate the young with critical race theory, an obscure methodology mostly encountered in law schools and graduate departments. In some states teachers are breaking the law if they talk seriously about racism. It is easy to scoff at these measures. But they pose a serious threat to academic freedom. Nietzsche once distinguished between three kinds of history - antiquarian, monumental, and critical. There have always been those who wish to impose the monumental approach on the nation’s classrooms.
Perhaps an equally significant problem with history education today is that there is simply not enough of it. In the past two decades, state after state, spurred by the growing emphasis on Science Technology Economics and Math subjects and the No Child Left Behind policy of linking school funding to test scores in English and mathematics, has significantly reduced how much history is taught at all levels of public education.
Ideas have consequences.
Neither the historical profession nor the publishing industry has fully acknowledged its decades-long complicity in disseminating the poisonous idea that black Americans are unfit for participation in American democracy.
Meanwhile, people are still teaching history, and many are teaching it well.
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