Defunct Newspapers Journals TV channels Websites Other Congressional caucuses Economics Gun rights Identity politics Nativist Religion Watchdog groups Youth/student groups Miscellaneous Other The Dunning School viewpoint favored conservative elements in the South (the Redeemers, plantation owners and former Confederates) and disparaged Radical Republicans who favored civil rights for former slaves.
And it was only after the Civil Rights revolution swept away the racist underpinnings of that old view—i.e., that black people are incapable of taking part in American democracy—that you could get a new view of Reconstruction widely accepted.
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.
[5] Novick provided examples of the style of the Dunning School approach when he wrote: James Ford Rhodes, citing [Louis] 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."
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."
Du Bois as the fairest work of the Dunning school, depicted Reconstruction as "unwise" and Black politicians as liabilities to Southern administrations.
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."
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.
Blacks appeared either as passive victims of white manipulation or as an unthinking people whose "animal natures" threatened the stability of civilized society.
[14] 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.
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.
[17] Historian Jean Edward Smith wrote that the Dunning School "despite every intention to be fair...shaped their monographs to support prevailing attitudes of white supremacy".
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."
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.