A History of Democracy, Revised

0:03Eric Foner:In the introduction to this series, I mentioned that I didn't grow up learning much of anything about Reconstruction. But now I know I'm not unique in that respect. Most Americans don't spend much time thinking about this history either, and there's a reason for that.

0:18Jelani Cobb:In the aftermath of Reconstruction, almost immediately, you begin to get this regime of denunciation of what Reconstruction had been.

0:30Eric Foner:Jelani Cobb is dean of the Columbia Journalism School, and he's also someone who's gotten very curious about what happened to the story Americans told themselves about this era, that it was all a big mistake. And so I would say between 1880 and 1920, you really see this ascend to reach a kind of peak fervor.

0:53Jelani Cobb:It had almost become an ambient understanding.

0:57Eric Foner:But why? Why did mainstream white Americans all start to agree that Reconstruction never should have happened? After all, white Northerners led the Reconstruction efforts for years. The answer is that an ambitious group of academics were standing by to help America change its mind. At their head was a historian named William Dunning.

1:21Jelani Cobb:In his time, there was no one more influential in historical circles in terms of shaping the way that the nation understood Reconstruction.

1:31Eric Foner:More than anyone else, William Dunning would flip the original narrative of this era on its head. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and this is Reconstruction, the Unfinished Promise.

1:53Eric Foner:Like Jelani Cobb now, Dunning also taught at Columbia University. He was a leading historian and one-time president of the American Historical Society. Dunning argued that the progressive efforts of Reconstruction were a mistake. This argument would be so widely adopted that it became known in a kind of shorthand as the Dunning School. Dunning's argument made its way into history textbooks all over the country, spreading the idea that nothing good came out of the era after the Civil War.

2:25Jelani Cobb:And the reasons for it had been that essentially the occupying forces of the federal government had imposed their will, a kind of regime of Negro supremacy, upon the South as punishment at the conclusion of the war. And, you know, the corresponding election of African-American men to political offices and really significantly the extension of the franchise to black male voters had been at the heart of the failure.

3:04W.E.B. Du Bois:The freed men were not and in the nature of the case could not for generations be on the same social, moral and intellectual plane with the whites. And this fact was recognized by constituting them a separate class in the civil order.

3:21Jelani Cobb:You know, there's a kind of default presumption of black inferiority. If you kind of go through these arguments, these are men who were ignorant, venal, poorly prepared, and ill-equipped to carry out the functions of political representation. And as a consequence, the economy of the South stalled, the politics of the South stalled, and you had this moment of nearly universal malaise until we get to the heroic band of redeemers who take matters into their own hands and bring Reconstruction to an end.

4:01W.E.B. Du Bois:The deep dread of Negro domination impelled thousands of serious and respectable whites to look for some means of mitigation, if not complete salvation, in the methods of the secret societies. The explicit purpose of these organizations was to preserve the social and political ascendancy of the white race.

4:27Eric Foner:What had been considered good became bad. And Jelani Cobb says that white people were ready, perhaps even relieved, to hear that. It absolved them.

4:40Jelani Cobb:People are looking for a history, as often is the case, that can rationalize particular ideas or particular undertakings in the present. And so if you say that Reconstruction had been a failure, then it means that you have a rationale, whether moral or not, you have a rationale for completely removing Black people from civic and political participation, certainly in the South. And you see, as you move in to the 20th century, things like Birth of a Nation, which is, you know, the first epic film in the history of American cinema, which mythologizes this. And it is about the violent, bloody purge of Black people from political participation in the South after Reconstruction.

5:30Jelani Cobb:The old cliché, you know, was that the South lost the war but won the peace. Or for a time, you could say the South lost the war but won the historiography.

5:42Eric Foner:Historiography is the history of history. It's the study of how historical narratives have been written and revised over time. The Dunning School created a very influential version of the story of Reconstruction, and that version dominated the field for decades. But it started to crumble with a powerful book published in the 1930s, written by a Black man, W.E.B. Du Bois.

6:14W.E.B. Du Bois:As Malcolm says in this episode, history is interpretation. History gets written, then rewritten, sometimes by scholars correcting the record, sometimes by committees deciding what a generation of kids will and won't learn. The version that makes it into the textbook isn't always the only story. It's the one that won out. That's the kind of thing Ground News was built for. It shows you how outlets across the spectrum tell the same story, side by side, so you can spot the shading for yourself. Ground News gives each outlet a factuality rating so you know how much weight to give the source and shows you who owns it so you know what's behind it.

6:57W.E.B. Du Bois:The Nobel Peace Center called it an excellent way to stay informed, avoid echo chambers, and expand your worldview. So go to groundnews.com slash RZ, that's G-R-O-U-N-D-N-E-W-S dot com slash RZ for 40 % off unlimited access vantage plan. Get it yourself or gift it to someone who'd rather know than not. Use my link, groundnews.com slash rc, so you get the discount and they know I sent you. If you're a fan of learning all sides of history, then Ground News is for you. One more time, groundnews.com slash rc.

7:40Eric Foner:We are in uncharted territory. Staff writer Evan Osnos on the New Yorker Radio Hour. I think all of us right now are trying to make sense of an avalanche of news every day. And there aren't very many places where you can go and understand how something looks in the grand scope of history and context. That's what I come to The New Yorker for.

8:00Jelani Cobb:I'm David Remnick, and each week my colleagues and I try to make sense of what's happening in this chaotic world.

8:05Eric Foner:And I hope you'll join us for The New Yorker Radio Hour. So talk a little bit about Du Bois, but who he was and why he's so crucial in the kind of battle against this interpretation of Reconstruction.

8:20Jelani Cobb:He's a young, idealistic scholar. And he was born during Reconstruction. He was born in 1868. Now, he was born in Massachusetts, and so he wasn't in a state where Reconstruction was actually taking place. And he thinks that the race problem, such as it is, can be resolved with empirical data. And he begins this series of studies. He wants to do a survey of the Negro in business and the Negro agricultural class. And he's looking for data to prove that these are rational, intelligent people who are capable of making decisions for themselves. And but for the strictures of Jim Crow and deprivation, they will be as good an American as any other person could be.

9:18Jelani Cobb:And he really devotes himself to this. And he knows about racism. He knows about, you know, white supremacy and so on. But when he has to confront this dynamic personally, it really changes something in him.

9:34Eric Foner:A blood-curdling crime.

9:37Jelani Cobb:During his years as a professor in Atlanta University, a black man by the name of Sam Hose is lynched just outside of Atlanta.

9:47Eric Foner:A posse is in pursuit of Sam Hose, the Negro who last night assassinated Alfred Cranford at his home near here and then assaulted the dead man's wife. And there now seems no chance for the Negro to escape.

10:01Jelani Cobb:Sam Hose is captured. He is subjected to all the rituals of lynching. He is castrated publicly. His fingers are cut off and disseminated to men in the crowd as souvenirs. And a bottle of kerosene is dumped over his head. He's set on fire and riddled with bullets. Du Bois is in downtown Atlanta, and he is out about on his errands and comes to understand that Sam Hose's knuckles have found themselves on display in the window of a grocery shop. Du Bois stops and turns around and goes back home because he's shaken by this. But it's the beginning of revelation for him. You know, it starts this epiphany that the problem he's trying to solve is not one that responds to statistics and data and dispassionate surveys of, you know, indexes and materials and so on.

11:31Eric Foner:With all this came the strengthening and hardening of my own character. I emerged into full manhood with the ruins of some ideals about me, but with others planted above the stars.

11:46Jelani Cobb:At the same time, you know, he's thinking about himself and kind of what his mission in life will be. He's going to dedicate the rest of his life to assailing the edifice of white supremacy.

12:01Eric Foner:I found myself suddenly the leader of a great wing of people fighting against another and greater wing.

12:10Jelani Cobb:By the time he reaches the question of Reconstruction and he begins working on the volume that eventually becomes Black Reconstruction, he is the most, certainly the most eminent Black scholar that's ever existed in the country. up to that point. And so Reconstruction is really kind of his white whale.

12:34Eric Foner:So Du Bois decides to take on the Dunning School and writes Black Reconstruction, his opus. What's his argument in this book?

12:45Jelani Cobb:One, he affords a great deal of agency to enslaved Black people. Du Bois pulls these people into the story as actual actors. And Du Bois is not only saying that these people are actors in their own history and in the drama that's playing out with national consequences. He is saying that they are determinative of the direction that history ultimately takes. And in that regard, Du Bois is decades ahead of his contemporaries.

13:20Eric Foner:Freedom came to America. Not as much has been said of what freedom meant to the freed. of the sudden wave of glory that rose and burst above four million people, and of the echoing shout that brought joy to 400 ,000 fellows of African blood in the North. Can we imagine this spectacular revolution? Not, of course, unless we think of these people as human beings.

13:51Jelani Cobb:He posits that Reconstruction had been a success, and he points to the development of public education. He points to the beginning of what we would call a social safety net, you know, that these governments create. But he also puts forth this idea that Reconstruction had been the theater in which these conflicts over capitalism had played out. And he sees the white working class and the small farmers and so on as essentially being manipulated by a powerful white bourgeois class in the South.

14:37Eric Foner:They forestalled the danger of a united Southern labor movement by appealing to the fear and hate of white labor and offering them alliance and leisure.

14:47Jelani Cobb:And he sees the enslaved Black population, what people would refer to consistently as slaves, Du Bois refers to them as workers and posits that they have a kind of class consciousness. And this is just... And labor, especially Black labor,

15:10Eric Foner:cried for light and land and leading. The world laughed. It laughed north. It laughed west. But in the South, it roared with hysterical, angry, vengeful laughter.

15:26Jelani Cobb:And it really betrays a certain level of Marxist influence that is directly connected to the fact that this is being written in the midst of the Great Depression.

15:36Eric Foner:Tell me about the final chapter of the book, which is one of the most famous. The propaganda of history. Propaganda of history, yeah.