The Lies Professor Dunning taught Northam, Clinton, and Me


 

We hope for our best judgment when it is necessary to judge the ignorant, the flawed, and those who have done wrong. Not all ignorance is willful. Not all evil is done by evil people.

The man was about to board the flight from Los Angeles to Greenville, Mississippi when he heard the news. Senator Robert Kennedy, brother of President John F. Kennedy, strong civil rights advocate, candidate for President, had been shot and killed.

The passenger nodded to the stranger next to him and exchanged pleasantries as he sat. The Southern accent told him he had found a regional compatriot. Two good old boys could while away the travel time on the way home.

“Well, we got that son-of-a-bitch, didn’t we?” he said.

“Who are you talking about?”

Well, at least his new travel companion had a sense of humor. He smiled at the pretend ignorance. “You know damn well who I’m talking about.”

The man smashed him right in the mouth. It is not much remembered today, but at the time it might have become the punch heard round the world. Or it might have had it not been overshadowed by the assassination itself.

The gleeful passenger did not suspect that his new Southern friend had just had dinner with Kennedy and his family the night before.

In fact, Hodding Carter did not share the segregationist sentiments that still prevailed in much of America. As a journalist, he had won a Pulitzer Prize for editorials in a Mississippi newspaper, scathing opinion pieces that went against the grain of much of the surrounding community. He wrote against the Munich agreement that gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler in return for promises of peace. He campaigned against the treatment of Japanese Americans after World War II.

Most of all, he fought against segregation. When the Mississippi legislature voted to condemn him as a liar, he responded that if the accusation was true, it would qualify him to be a Mississippi legislator.

I generally do not attack strangers on planes. The closest I remember was a brief confrontation with a loudmouth in a supermarket line in Maryland as we heard about the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. The ass was hoping aloud that the President would die. He got silent and I backed off.

I seriously doubt I was near anything like a violent state. I do hold to a principle of following the law, but it was probably more physical caution. I was once in love with a young lady who speculated about whether I would rescue her from a shark, as in Jaws. She finally decided that I would be the first man to run on water.

I sometimes think about Hodding Carter when I reflect on judging books by covers: One reason I’m careful about talking politics while riding with strangers.

Another reason is my own background. The overwhelming prejudice surrounding my learning years was more homophobic than racist. But there was enough racism, particularly in education.

I thought about Hodding Carter, and the ability to overcome youthful indoctrination, when I read about uninformed comments about history uttered by beleaguered Virginia Governor Ralph Northam.

We are now at the 400-year anniversary — just 90 miles from here in 1619. The first indentured servants from Africa landed on our shores…

Governor Ralph Northam, on CBS This Morning, February 11, 2019

It was reminiscent of the trouble Hillary Clinton got into a few years before when she talked about Abraham Lincoln.

I don’t know what our country might have been like had he not been murdered. But I’d bet that it might have been a little less rancorous, a little more forgiving and tolerant. That might possibly have brought people back together more quickly.

But instead, you know, we had Reconstruction. We had the re-instigation of segregation and Jim Crow. We had people
in the South feeling totally discouraged and defiant. So, I really do believe he could have very well put us on a different path.

Hillary Clinton, CNN, January 25, 2016

Most folks my age were taught about the post-civil war era in a way that was remarkably slanted. Reconstruction was a vindictive attempt by Radical Republicans to punish the South. Lincoln wanted to bring us together, and he would have had he lived. But unreasoning hatred of Southerners prevailed for a time. We were graded on historical vocabulary by whether we could provide the correct meaning to words and phrases like Radical Republican, scalawag, carpetbagger, waving the bloody shirt, and more.

The falsehoods went to the nation’s founding. We were told about the logical reasons for the establishment of the electoral college in choosing our President. The founders did not want a “tyranny of the majority.” They wanted voters to choose the wisest of their fellow citizens, who would then carefully consider the wisest choice for Chief Executive. The Senate, and those two extra votes for every state, were to provide balance between large states and small states. All quite reasonable. All very wrong.

We were never told that the issue of small vs. large states was only introduced once during the Constitutional Convention, was hooted down, and was never brought up again. We never read that arguments against “tyranny of the majority” only applied to the Bill of Rights and were never talked about during arguments about selection of the President. We did not learn the truth: that the system for choosing the leader of the nation was all about preserving slavery by giving more weight to Southern slave owners.

The miseducation went back to the beginning of slavery in America, although I don’t recall hearing that indentured servants and slaves were identical. In my classroom, the words were not used interchangeably, but slavery was presented as a permanent, sort of evolved, form of indentured servitude.

So whose fault were the falsehoods that we, as youngsters, were taught?

Textbooks are usually simple explanations of prevailing scholarly views. They do not involve original research. They really can’t.

Textbooks present history in clear language. Historians interpret research, providing a bridge between raw facts and the history that flows from those facts. Historical researchers look for original documentation.

In the winding path toward the schools of my youth, much of the content of my textbooks came from original research done in the late 1800s and early 1900s by Professor William Archibald Dunning and his loyal band of scholarly students. Being human, these poor souls were influenced by the overwhelming national fatigue with all things relating to the Civil War. Most Northern whites were tired of equal rights. Southern whites, in general, were angry about the prospect of racial equality before the law. Historians shared the common human experience of accepting the unchallenged views of those around them.

Those views ended up in scholarly papers. They were then accepted by lessor known historians. They later dominated history textbooks through most of the twentieth century. Those interpretations eventually became entrenched in the brains of folks my age, and even kids a bit younger: like Hillary Clinton and Ralph Northam.

Here is how historian Eric Foner describes what came from Professor Dunning’s research:

President Abraham Lincoln, according to this interpretation, at the end of the Civil War wanted to bring the defeated South back into the Union in a quick, lenient, forgiving manner. After his assassination, his policy was continued by his successor, Andrew Johnson, but Johnson was thwarted, according to this view, by the villains of the piece, the radical Republicans, in Congress, motivated either — depending on which book you read — either by a vindictive hatred of the South or the desire to fasten the grip of Northern capitalism upon the South or simply the desire to keep the Republican Party in power.

The notion that equal rights were considered by these vengeful radicals, or even that they should have been considered, was not something our teachers wanted us to worry about. Our textbooks reflected that.

Whatever their motivation, they overthrew Johnson’s lenient plan and imposed black suffrage, black male suffrage, the right to vote for black men in the defeated South. According to this view, black people were just incapable of exercising democratic rights intelligently; they should not be part of political democracy. And what happened was an orgy of corruption and misgovernment presided over by carpetbaggers, that is Northerners who came down to reap the spoils of office, scalawags, as they were called, white southerners who abandoned their race and cooperated with blacks, and the African Americans themselves.

Professor Eric Foner, at Historical Studies Conference, US National Archives, 2015

I first began questioning all that, I think, because of a coincidence that happened when I was about 20 years old. I was visiting my grandmother and I happened to leaf through the Reader’s Digest. It was, and is today, a remarkably conservative little magazine with combinations of humor, history, and articles reflecting contemporary right-of-center thought.

One article seemed a little out of place. It was entitled The best white friend black Americans ever had — Thaddeus Stevens. Kind of gives you an idea what it was about. I had an interest in history and I began a bit of reading on my own.

About the same time, historians began questioning commonly accepted wisdom about race and its place in history. Going back to primary research, they found an amazing amount of misinformation in the work of Professor Dunning dating from the 1890s, and the work of his students, his followers, and the textbooks decades later from which I was taught, which Hillary Clinton studied, and from which Ralph Northam learned.

I was not a stellar student, either in High School, or in college. It was random interest and a coincidental stumbling over an article that sparked my curiosity. I eventually became irate about what I had been taught. I still am. But there was no particular virtue involved in that accidental glance.

I don’t place my resentment at the door of classmates. Even as adults, conducting their own busy lives, my fellow students could not be expected to question all they were taught by dedicated teachers. I think we can see Secretary Clinton and Governor Northam as victims of an American educational system that too easily accepted the flawed research of Professor William Dunning and the destructive scholarship that followed.

Before we condemn young Mr. Northam for the thoughtless racism of his mid-twenties, perhaps we can draw a lesson from the life of the guy who punched out a fellow airline passenger. We might consider whether Governor Northam has followed a similar trajectory as Hodding Carter.

The friend of Bobby Kennedy, the journalistic warrior fighting for justice, the writer who took risks to stand against segregation, had a different start when he was a young adult.

During his own college years, he had a reputation as a combative, outspoken white supremacist. He was not passive, thoughtless or casual about it. He was pretty much an in-your-face racist.

He changed.

I’m thinking about that before I decide to throw my first stone.

Not all people change. But some of us do.

One thought on “The Lies Professor Dunning taught Northam, Clinton, and Me”

  1. ”Not all people change. But some of us do.”

    And there is the simple difference between the Right and Left, between conservative and progressive. Just as Obama’s views on gay marriage evolved, so do the views of all open minded people evolve with new information and experiences.

    I’m not from the South, but the far opposite. The “Great White North” doesn’t describe only Canada. Apart from those of native heritage, some being close relatives, there were virtually no racial minorities in the local population. There were gays and lesbians, but they lived double lives. It wasn’t until I went to college, when I actually met black people and openly gay individuals, that my understanding was able to evolve. (That must have been part of that “commie agenda” in higher education we hear so much about these days.)

    Another example of how people can change their views is when an issue impacts a family member. Even Dick Cheney moderated his views somewhat when his daughter came out.

    I was a perfect little pre-authoritarian personality as a child and adolescent. I wanted to be a Marine, especially an aviator. My older brothers both joined the Army. One went to Vietnam. This changed everything. Seeing the anguished look on my mother’s face in front of the TV news taught me something no military history book or tale of valor in combat could.

    I learned to ask important questions, like, “Why?” Why should my brother die so the Vietnamese people could live under a dictatorship of our choosing?

    That did it. I violated the first tenet of authoritarianism, questioning leaders. Soon I was asking why on many other issues. All of a sudden I spent more time learning music than shooting wildlife. I read Orwell’s “1984” and Huxley’s “Brave New World” and “Island”.

    I learned LBJ lied, then Nixon lied to keep the war going. Then the latter lied to cover his crimes.

    I shed my ill-fitting conservative militarist skin for good. “Give Peace a Chance” became a moral message that made better sense.

    I was reborn. I left my childish authoritarian ways behind.

    Now I see it in so many Americans. They never evolved. They never asked questions, or read books that addressed the questions.

    And yes, they can be good people, and are capable of kindness toward others. What they cannot see is the evil they wittingly, or unwittingly, support in the agenda of the far Right.

    Only a personal evolution of consciousness and conscience can open their eyes. Smarter, more humane, conservatives have realized how far Right propaganda and ideology have put Trump in the White House.

    As for the rest, if Trump doesn’t prompt them to question the far Right agenda, nothing will.

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