Dunning School - About

About

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. He supported the idea that the South had been ruined by Reconstruction. He contended that freedmen had proved incapable of self-government and thus had made segregation necessary. Dunning believed that allowing blacks to vote and hold office had been "a serious error". As a professor, he taught generations of scholars, many of whom expanded his views of the evils of Reconstruction. The Dunning School and similar historians dominated the version of Reconstruction-era history in textbooks into the 1960s. Their generalized adoption of deprecatory terms such as scalawags for southern white Republicans and carpetbaggers for northerners who worked and settled in the South, have persisted in historical works.

Explaining the success of the Dunning School, historian Peter Novick noted the 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. Novick provided examples of the style of the Dunning School approach when he wrote:

James Ford Rhodes, citing Agassiz, said that “what the whole country has only learned through years of costly and bitter experience was known to this leader of scientific thought before we ventured on the policy of trying to make negroes intelligent by legislative acts.”John W. Burgess wrote that “a black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself succeeded in subjecting passion to reason.” For William A. Dunning, blacks “had no pride of race and no aspiration or ideals save to be like whites.” Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer quoted approvingly the southern observation that Yankees didn’t understand the subject because they “had never seen a nigger except Fred Douglass.” Blacks were “as credulous as children, which in intellect they in many ways resembled.”

While he did not study with Dunning or at Columbia University, the southern historian E. Merton Coulter represented some typical views. According to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, he "framed his literary corpus to praise the Old South, glorify Confederate heroes, vilify northerners, and denigrate southern blacks." He taught at the University of Georgia for six decades, founded the Southern Historical Association, and edited the Georgia Historical Quarterly for 50 years, so had many avenues of influence. 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." 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."

Even James Wilford Garner's Reconstruction in Mississippi, regarded by W. E. B. Du Bois as the fairest work of the Dunning school, depicted Reconstruction as "unwise" and black politicians as liabilities to Southern administrations.

In the 1940s Howard K. Beale began to define a different approach. Beale's analysis combined an assumption of "racial egalitarianism and an insistence on the centrality of class". He claimed that some of the more progressive southern historians continued to propose "that their race must bar Negroes from social and economic equality." Beale indicated other southern historians' making more positive contributions were "southern liberals" such as C. Vann Woodward and Francis Simkins.