William Dunning was the Columbia University professor credited with creating the academic school that established the scholarly attack on Radical Republican Reconstruction policies. Dunning is often mentioned in discussions about Reconstruction, without always being read by his critics and supporters.
For the 150th Anniversary of Reconstruction, I thought it would be good to open up an in-depth discussion of the Dunning School by examining the work of William Dunning and his most prominent acolytes. In this series of articles I want to begin the process by looking at William Dunning himself as well as his two books focusing on Reconstruction.
I will offer some biographical background on Dunning, some analysis of his place in creating the paradigm for the study of Reconstruction history, and his influence on his followers. I will also offer significant quotes from his two Reconstruction books.
I understand that some of you will question the value of any close examination of Dunning at all. The Dunning School reproduced attitudes on race that were damaging to millions of Americans and perhaps you think that it should be dealt with in silence. But I think that there is value in looking at pioneering historical research that set research agendas, and influenced popular perceptions of Reconstruction, for five decades. If you did not use a Dunning-influenced American history textbook, if your parents were educated in the United States they almost certainly did. I will take up the work of Dunning’s more prominent followers in other threads.
In this discussion, I relied heavily on the collection of essays contained in The Dunning School: Historians, Race and the Meaning of Reconstruction edited by John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery published by the University of Kentucky Press (2013). It provides essays on Dunning, his mentor, and seven of his students, as well as essays giving overviews of the Dunning School. In his preface to the book Eric Foner writes:
The term Dunning School is a shorthand for the interpretation of Reconstruction that dominated historical writing and public consciousness for much of the twentieth century. It takes its name from William A. Dunning, the Columbia University historian who early in the century supervised a group of graduate students who produced dissertations, subsequently published as books, narrating the history of Reconstruction in the various southern states. [John David Smith; J. Vincent Lowery (2013-10-17). The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction (Kindle Locations 54-57). The University Press of Kentucky. Kindle Edition.]
The Dunning School historians were not slipshod researchers, just racist interpreters of their evidence. Foner writes that the Dunning Scholars “pioneered in the use of primary sources” in the study of Reconstruction, in fact several of them created library collections of these sources that are still used today.
Foner continues:
Of course, the fundamental flaw in the Dunning School was the authors’ deep racism. (Haworth, not always included in accounts of the group because he studied the election of 1876, not a southern state, was an exception; he insisted that the South’s racial problems arose from white racism, not black incapacity.) As some of the essays make clear, the Dunning School’s racism cannot simply be bracketed, leaving the rest of their volumes intact, for racism shaped not only their interpretations of history but their research methods and use of historical evidence. (Id. Kindle Locations 78-82).
Foner offers an example:
William W. Davis pioneered in the use of oral history to study the Klan but interviewed only white Floridians— the experience of Klan victims was not worth investigating. (Id. Kindle Locations 82-83).
Although a negative image of Black Equality and Radical Republican Reconstruction was promulgated by the Democratic Party almost immediately after the Civil War ended, Foner says that the Dunningites did more than simply reflect the opinion of their times. There were alternate views of Reconstruction that the Dunning Scholars simply ignored. And the Dunning School books were not harmless academic tomes. Foner says that “the writings of the Dunning School did more than reflect prevailing prejudices— they strengthened and helped perpetuate them. They offered scholarly legitimacy to the disenfranchisement of southern blacks and to the Jim Crow system…” (Id. Kindle Locations 98-100). “Well into the twentieth century, as Francis B. Simkins pointed out in a remarkable paper at a historical conference in 1937, the alleged horrors of Reconstruction helped freeze the mind of the white South in bitter opposition to any change in the region’s racial system.”
If your teacher told you lies about Reconstruction, she learned them from William Dunning.
Now that we have established the importance of the Dunning School, we will look at Dunning himself in the next installment of this series.
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