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Will the Losers Again Be Later to Win? [1]

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Date: 2023-02-18  

It is often said that history is a story told by the winners. Yet, stunningly, by a few decades after the Civil War and for well over a half century thereafter, it came to be the losers’ stories of “a land of Cavaliers and cotton fields,” moonlight and magnolias, kindly masters and happy slaves, a glorious “Lost Cause,” and a horrible period of “Black Reconstruction” that were widely accepted as accurate history.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the nation was reunited on the basis of a tacit armistice in which the South accepted that the Union is indissoluble and much of the rest of the white country accepted the southern belief in the innate inferiority of people of African ancestry. That acceptance was facilitated by the popularity of the pseudoscience of social Darwinism and a fabricated story that Reconstruction, rather than the largely successful progressive period that it was, had been a monstrous time of rule by ignorant black people.

This inverted history had an enormous impact on the lives of at least three generations of Americans that, though diminished, continues down to the present. The most consequential telling of it is D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film, Birth of a Nation. The movie represents enslavers as benevolent caretakers for a lower lifeform. The enslaved are shown singing and dancing during the “two-hour interval given for dinner.” Reconstruction is painted as a time in which the “natural order” of white superiority was turned upside down. Griffith presents a frightening picture of “crazed negroes,” with the necessary restraints of slavery removed, making “helpless whites” their “victims.” As for “Restoration,” one of the title cards in the silent movie depicts the restoring of white man’s rule as a glorious event and describes it as “the former enemies of North and South are united again in common defence of their Aryan birthright.”

The view of nineteenth-century Reconstruction as a period of terrifying “black domination,” and “Redemption” as the reaffirmation of the United States as “a white man’s country” was prevalent across the nation from the 1890s into the early 1960s. During that long period, this interpretation, pushed by followers of early twentieth-century Columbia University historian William Dunning, was routinely taught in schools. It was also reflected in popular culture, notably in Margaret Mitchell’s hugely successful 1936 novel, Gone with the Wind, and its 1939 film adaptation.

As Professor Gates explains in his new essay (and an earlier one in 2019, “The ‘Lost Cause’ that Built Jim Crow”), the inversion of history—the Big Lie about enslavement and those who benefited from or suffered under it, the Enslavers’ Rebellion, Reconstruction, and “Redemption” (the reinstatement of white power) involved an all-out effort to replace factual history with a myth. The most influential person in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century war against truth was the “historian general of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Mildred Lewis Rutherford.”

By 1920, Ms. Rutherford had produced A Measuring Rod to Test Text Books, and Reference Books in Schools, Colleges and Libraries, to be used for exactly the purposes Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and many other politicians of the Party-formerly-known-as-Republican are again doing today: replace truthful history with boldfaced lies (an example from another of her writings: “the negroes [sic.]of the South were never called slaves” and they were “well-fed, well-clothed and well-housed”) and determine which books to ban and which historical events must not be brought to the attention of students.

The Cold War mentality made the whitewashing of American history more complete. When I was in grade school and high school in New Jersey in the 1950s and early 60s, US history textbooks indicated that the United States was always in the right, nothing bad had ever happened—well, there had been slavery, it was briefly mentioned, but then we got rid of that and after slavery ended, black people (apart from Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver) had apparently vanished from American history.

“A Shadow Stretched Across Our History for a Hundred Years,” read a New York Times Book Review headline in September 1964. That shadow, cast by the acceptance of the losers’ false history, which continued its pernicious effects through the Jim Crow era of segrega­tion, was finally being lifted. It was during the Long 1964 that newer scholarship presenting a very different view of Reconstruction—and some older but largely ignored scholarship, notably W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1936 Black Reconstruction—was brought to a wider public attention. Even more important in overturning the whitewashed history that had held sway for so long was the impact of the civil rights move­ment in awakening many Americans, particularly the young, to the fact that they had been spoon-fed a distorted version of the nation’s past.

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Those who seek to turn us back appreciate that control over how the past is perceived goes a long way toward gaining control over the present and future, and today they are once again engaged in an all-out effort to misrepresent the American past.

Calls to “Make America Great Again” and “Take Back America” mean to take America back in two senses: back from those who are not white or not male and back to the time when straight white males were in charge. It should not have been surprising that, as part of this overall quest to effect a second restoration of white man’s rule, those who want to regress proposed to restore the ignorance of American history that had pre­vailed before 1964. The sociopolitical heirs of the 1865 losers are again attempting to rewrite the American past of the nineteenth century as a lie—and they are doing the same with the recent past, most notably by rewriting the January 6 Insurrection as a lie.

In October 2020, Donald Trump announced that he would create a 1776 Commission to combat “anti-American historical revisionism” and promote “patriotic education.” “Patriotic education” is what authoritarian regimes engage in.

Gov. DeSantis is far from alone. States under right-wing control are now competing with one another to ban books and enact the most restrictive laws on what may and may not be taught in their schools, especially about racism.

The Republican-controlled Texas state legislature enacted a law in 2021 specifying exactly what should—and should not—be taught to students about their nation’s past. Excluded were the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibits the federal government and states from denying or abridging the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” the 1965 Voting Rights Act, “the history of Native Americans,” and documents on the separation of church and state, and the women’s, Chicano, and labor movements. Existing standards calling for teaching about the ways in which white supremacy, slavery, eugenics, and the Ku Klux Klan are “morally wrong” were removed.

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“Rutherford wished for nothing less than the power to summon the apparatus of the state to impose her strictures on our country’s narrative about the history of race and racism,” Professor Gates notes. “Mr. DeSantis has that power and has shown his willingness to use it. And it is against this misguided display of power that those of us who cherish the freedom of inquiry at the heart of our country’s educational ideal must take a stand.”

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