Today, Dunning has become synonymous with historical racism for his negative portrayal of Reconstruction, and perhaps even more for the way his students—the so-called Dunning School—demonized northerners and Blacks while lionizing white southerners. In his own lifetime, however, Dunning was known as a pragmatist and a joker who cultivated a healthy skepticism of all historical accounts. Older historians like von Holst and Burgess may have felt the need, as Dunning once wrote, to be “tendenziös (I think that’s it) for affect on the rising generation; so that the citizens of the U.S. should not go to cutting one another’s throats again too soon.” But more than a generation since the Civil War, he believed that those considerations no longer applied. “We kids are living in the time of calm reflection,” as he cheerfully put it, “when ‘What’s the use?’ sums up the creed of all true philosophical historical students.”
This attitude was not just a pose. Later on, Dunning would become president of the American Historical Association. In his presidential address, called “Truth in History,” he provided the philosophical justification for his easygoing attitude of acceptance. Characteristically, he cared most about the jokes—“All the jokes caught on,” he told his wife after his talk—but he also made an important point about his pragmatic approach to history. He believed that it was not the historian’s job to congratulate himself for showing people in the past to have been mistaken, or to celebrate the supposed moral superiority of the present. Instead, the historian’s task was simply to uncover how people had lived and what beliefs had motivated their actions. “Whether these ideas were true or were false, according to the standards of any other period, has nothing to do with the matter,” Dunning declared. “That they were the ideas which underlay the activities of the men of this time, is all that concerns the work of the historian.” In other words, the historian should not care whether past practices and beliefs—the enslavement of human beings, say, or the theory of Black inferiority—were right or wrong. That was beside the point.
Dunning was generally regarded as the most intelligent man in any room—but he often wished to escape the room. He had been expelled from the first college he attended, Dartmouth, for participating in freshman pranks, but then graduated from Columbia with nearly perfect marks in every subject. “In my inmost heart,” he wrote in his journal during graduate school, “I think I should like to retire from this quest of learning, take a refined & congenial girl, & settle down in life.” It would help, he added, if the girl had “a little—only a little—money.”