[122] Smith et al, The Dunning School, 85. The video A Contested History introduces students to the way the Reconstruction era has been remembered throughout the past 150 years. Also, some encyclopedias, including Encarta, no longer contain information on Dunning. Grant is not their idea of a model President, nor were the southern carpetbag governments worthy of their unqualified praise. The Republicans insisted that these officials and troops were essential to enable the negroes to vote and to have their votes counted. He supported the idea that the South had been ruined by Reconstruction. In July of 1870, when the law declaring Georgia entitled to representation in Congress was finally enacted, the process of reconstruction was, from the technical point of view, complete. This admission has been accompanied by expressions of sincere regret that illegal means were necessary, and by a general movement toward clothing with the forms of law the disfranchisement which has been made a fact without them. If, as one historian has suggested, Dunning viewed Reconstruction as "a mob run riot," the unruly crowd was biracial and bipartisan. But the moral effect of what was done was very great, and the evidence that the whole power of the national government could and would be exerted on the side of the blacks produced a salutary change in method among the whites. Smith, John David and J. Vincent Lowery, eds. This interpretation of Reconstruction placed it firmly in the category of historical blunder. Du Bois wrote Black Reconstruction in Americain 1935. Adam Fairclough, a British historian whose expertise includes Reconstruction, summarized the Dunningite themes: Beale's analysis combined an assumption of "racial egalitarianism and an insistence on the centrality of class". In the course of the process, the chief stress came to be laid on the endowment of the blacks with full political rights,—with the electoral franchise and eligibility to office. Finding it impossible to believe that blacks could ever be independent actors on the stage of history, with their own aspirations and motivations, Dunning, et al. It was named after Columbia University professor William Archibald Dunning (1857-1922), whose works and teachings in the early 20th century on Reconstruction were influential. The Dunning school still casts a shadow over America’s popular understanding of Reconstruction. These were at once devoted as remorselessly to the extinction of black preponderance as they had been before to the repression of the whites. During the dark and bloody period of reconstruction, the Dunning school emphasized the general interpretation with attitudes towards specific Reconstruction factors. He contended that freedmen had proved incapable of self-government and thus had made segregation necessary. This suggests at once the enormous advantage gained by securing control of the state government. The whites opposed to the process of the federal courts, supported by federal troops, no such undisguised resistance as had often been employed against state officers backed by a posse comitatus or a militia company of negroes. These different explanations have of course all been current at all times since reconstruction was completed, and have embodied different degrees of plausibility and truth in different places. [1] As a professor, he taught generations of scholars, many o… And because the conspiracy clause brought such offenses into the jurisdiction of the United States it was unconstitutional and void. [15], Historian Jean Edward Smith wrote that the Dunning School "despite every intention to be fair" wrote from a white supremacist perspective. For the efficient working of this method of suppression, it was indispensable, however, that the officers of election should be whites. Historian Kenneth M. Stampp was one of the leaders of the revisionist movement regarding reconstruction, which mounted a successful attack on Dunning's racially biased narrative. He contended that freedmen had proved incapable of self-government and thus had made segregation necessary. The result was the overthrow of black government in that state. When the Supreme Court of the United States was required to consider the new clause of Mississippi's constitution, it adopted the views of the convention on these points, and sustained the validity of the enactment. "Reconstruction was significant for expanding the authority and purpose of the federal government, which adopted policies that considered equal rights for all races in America." Thus the last vestige disappeared of the system through which the political equality of the blacks had received direct support from the national government. The historians in this group were strong devotees of the constitution and portrayed a strict constructionist attitude. But exploitation of the poverty, ignorance, credulity, and general childishness of the blacks was supplemented, on occasion, by deliberate and high-handed fraud. It was quickly demonstrated, however, that the time for this procedure had gone by. When the writers spoke of "the South" or "the people", they meant whites. The phrasing of the franchise clause may not have been actually determined with reference to this matter; but it is obvious that the application of the Fourteenth Amendment is, to say the least, not facilitated by the form used. Whether the Supreme Court of the United States will regard it as equally successful in screening its real purpose from judicial cognizance remains to be seen. The historian who gave his name to the Dunning School, a group of scholars who decried Reconstruction, explained his objections to the United States government’s effort to establish racial equality in the post-war South. On the contrary, its interpretation of Reconstruction as a tragic mistake inflicted upon a helpless South by a vindictive North held sway over both the public and scholarly realm for much of the twentieth century. As a consequence, no partisan legislation could be enacted. He claimed that some of the more progressive southern historians continued to propose "that their race must bar Negroes from social and economic equality." The response of the Democrats to the futile project of their adversaries was prompt and decisive. It was not, however, till 1882 that the bottom was taken wholly out of the Ku Klux Act. Two years of supremacy in those states which had been restored in 1868 had revealed unmistakable evidences of moral and political weakness in the governments. That the Ku Klux movement was to some extent the expression of a purpose not to submit to the political domination of the blacks is doubtless true. Explaining the success of the Dunning School, historian Peter Novick noted two forces—the need to reconcile the North and the South after the Civil War and the increase in racism as Social Darwinism appeared to back the concept with science—that contributed to a "racist historiographical consensus" around the turn of the 20th century on the "criminal outrages" of Reconstruction. The sympathies of the "Dunningite" historians lay with the white Southerners who resisted Congressional Reconstruction: whites who, organizing under the banner of the Conservative or Democratic Party, used legal opposition and extralegal violence to oust the Republicans from state power. Through the vigorous policy thus instituted by the national government the movement toward the resumption of control by the whites in the South met with a marked though temporary check.The number of convictions obtained under the Ku Klux Act was not large, and President Grant resorted in but a single instance—that of certain counties in South Carolina, in the autumn of 1871—to the extraordinary powers conferred upon him. Du Bois as the fairest work of the Dunning school, depicted Reconstruction as "unwise" and black politicians as liabilities to Southern administrations. Between 1872 and 1876 the Republican party split in each of the states in which it still retained control, and the fusion of one faction with the Democrats gave rise to disputed elections, general disorder, and appeals by the radical Republicans to the President for aid in suppressing domestic violence. Which of the following statements best reflects the Dunning School interpretation of Reconstruction? Identify statements that reflect the three schools of thought on the Reconstruction presented in this tutorial. This decision finally disposed of the theory that the failure of a state to protect the negroes in their equal rights could be regarded as a positive denial of such rights, and hence could justify the United States in interfering. This school emphasized the questionable practices of Reconstruction leaders and celebrated the rise of the South's old guard The Dunning interpretation of Reconstruction brought censure from the African-American community and the small cohort of black historians. Not even the relative quiet and order that followed the triumph of the whites in these states were recognized as justifying the new regime. It was upon the support of the federal troops that the whole existence of the remaining black governments in the South came gradually to depend. [13], Stampp then noted that "Dunningites overlooked a great deal", and revisionists rejected "the two-dimensional characters that Dunning's disciples have painted. The statute books of the states, especially of those in which negro rule had lasted the longest, abounded in provisions for partisan—that is, race—advantage. Eleven years earlier, Mr. Blaine, writing of the possibility of disfranchisement by educational and property tests, declared: “But no Southern state will do this, and for two reasons: first, they will in no event consent to a reduction of representative strength; and, second, they could not make any disfranchisement of the negro that would not at the same time disfranchise an immense number of whites.” How sadly Mr. Blaine misconceived the spirit and underrated the ingenuity of the Southerners Mississippi made clear to everybody. The Dunning school, named for the Columbia University professor William Archibald Dunning, has not always been held in such low esteem. 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. In the meantime, a process had been instituted in the Southern states that has given the most distinctive character to the last period in the undoing of reconstruction. Some historians have suggested that historians sympathetic to the Neo-Confederate movement are influenced by the Dunning School's interpretation of history. In the same year, in the case of United States v. Reese, two sections of the Enforcement Act of 1870 were declared unconstitutional, as involving the exercise by the United States of powers in excess of those granted by the Fifteenth Amendment. Each of the states which had seceded from the Union had been made over" by the creation of a new political people, in which the freedmen constituted an important element, and the organization of a new government, in the working of which the participation of the blacks on equal terms with the whites was put under substantial guarantees. This work refutes the Dunning School of historiography that rolled out of Columbia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But with all the guarantees that the source of every evil was removed, it became obvious enough that the results were not what had been expected. Because of these opportunities the resort to bulldozing and other violence steadily decreased. Instead of competing with its rival for the black vote, the stronger faction, headed by Mr. Tillman, promptly took the ground that South Carolina must have a “white man’s government,” and put into effect the new Mississippi plan. To the forces making for the resumption of white government in the South was thus opposed that same apparently irresistible power which had originally overthrown it. The battle over the memory of Reconstruction has in many ways mirrored the political, social, and economic struggles of each subsequent era of American history. [8] Historian John Hope Franklin wrote of Coulter: 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." Or if an untraceable rumor that trouble was impending over the blacks was followed by the mysterious appearance of bodies of horsemen on the roads at midnight, firing guns and yelling at nobody in particular, votes again were lost, but no crime or misdemeanor could be brought home to any one. It has been said above that indictments under these acts had been many, but convictions few. But the patronage in the hands of the administration party under these laws was enormous. This was not regarded by the most thoughtful Republicans as a very judicious piece of legislation; but it was perceived that, with the Democrats about to control the House of Representatives, there was not likely to be a further opportunity for action in aid of the blacks, and so the act was permitted to go through and take its chances of good. For him, the Dunning School of Reconstruction (which argued that it was a tragic era for white Southerners, only “redeemed” by the electoral results of 1876 and the concurrent paramilitary campaign against the Black Republican vote in the South) was not necessarily incorrect: “Few revisionists would claim that the Dunning interpretation of reconstruction is a pure fabrication.” Summarily, then, it may be said that the second period in the undoing of reconstruction ends with the political equality of the negroes still recognized in law, though not in fact, and with the Republican party, for all practical purposes, extinct in the South. At its core, the Dunning school of thought is a period of racist history which affected historical interpretation and methodologies. At the acme of the development undoubtedly stood the tissue ballot. The traditional or Dunning School of Reconstruction was not just an interpretation of history. While William Dunning is often discussed in Reconstruction Era Studies, he is little read today except by academic historians and Neo-Confederates. So some one's eyes were solemnly bandaged, and he was set to drawing out ballots, on the theory that he could not distinguish those of one party from those of the other. But it may fairly be said that in each of the three periods into which the undoing of reconstruction falls one particular view has been dominant and characteristic. In the first period, that of the Ku Klux and the Mississippi plan, it was generally maintained by the whites that the black vote was not suppressed, and that there was no political motive behind the disturbances that occurred. Moreover, by revision of the constitutions and by sweeping modifications of the laws, many strongholds of the old regime were destroyed. . 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