Dunning School - Criticism of The Dunning School (1950-2007)

Criticism of The Dunning School (1950-2007)

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. In putting his criticism in proper context, Stampp wrote:

Few revisionists would claim that the Dunning interpretation of reconstruction is a pure fabrication. They recognize the shabby aspects of the era: the corruption was real, the failures obvious, the tragedy undeniable. Grant is not their idea of a model President, nor were the southern carpetbag governments worthy of their unqualified praise. They understood that the radical Republicans were not all selfless patriots, and that southern white men were not all Negro-hating rebels. In short, they have not turned history on its head, but rather, they recognize that much of what Dunning’s disciples have said about reconstruction is true.

Stampp then noted that “Dunningites overlooked a great deal”, and revisionists rejected “the two-dimensional characters that Dunning’s disciples have painted.” Stampp asserted that even in accurately identifying the corruption of many state reconstruction governments, the Dunning School fell short. It engaged in “distortion by exaggeration, by a lack of perspective, by superficial analysis, and by overemphasis,” while ignoring “constructive accomplishments” and failing to acknowledge “men who transcended the greed” of the age.

Historian Jean Edward Smith wrote that the Dunning School “despite every intention to be fair” wrote from a white supremacist perspective. Smith stated, “ Blacks were depicted as inherently incapable of meaningful political participation while terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan were applauded for their efforts to restore the South's natural order.” Referring to “the racist rants of the Dunning school”, Smith noted that the influence of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s “consigned the Dunning school to the museum of historical artifacts.”

Writing in 2005, the influential Reconstruction historian Eric Foner analyzed the Dunning School as follows:

Their account of the era rested, as one member of the Dunning school put it, on the assumption of “negro incapacity.” 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. portrayed African Americans either as “children”, ignorant dupes manipulated by unscrupulous whites, or as savages, their primal passions unleashed by the end of slavery.

Describing the work of one of the last major historians associated with the Dunning School, E. Merton Coulter, Foner wrote in 1988:

The fact that blacks took part in government, wrote E. Merton Coulter in the last full-scale history of Reconstruction written entirely within the Dunning tradition, was a “diabolical” development, “to be remembered, shuddered at, and execrated.” Yet while these works abounded in horrified references to “negro rule” and “negro government”, blacks in fact played little role in the narratives. Their aspirations, if mentioned at all, were ridiculed, and their role in shaping the course of events during Reconstruction ignored. When the writers spoke of “the South” or “the people”, they meant whites. Blacks appeared either as passive victims of white manipulation or as an unthinking people whose “animal natures” threatened the stability of civilized society.”

Philip R. Muller, while acknowledging the widespread charges of racism against Dr. Dunning personally, lay much of the perception on Dunning’s “methodological weakness” in one particular work, Reconstruction, Political and Economic 1865-1877. Muller noted that “faulty ... generalizations” abounded.

They are not, however, chiefly characterized by their hostility toward ethnic groups. Dunning's antipathy in Reconstruction is generously heaped on all groups, regardless of race, color, creed, or sectional origins. If, as one historian has suggested, Dunning viewed Reconstruction as "a mob run riot," the unruly crowd was biracial and bipartisan. More important, the concentration of "evidence" in this single scantily researched volume suggested that Dunning's "racist" generalizations were more unexamined than "inflexible.

Some historians have suggested that historians sympathetic to the Neo-Confederate movement are influenced by the Dunning School's interpretation of history.