Earlier revisionist histories relied on categories that would seem almost unrecognizable today. For progressive and New Deal historians, the defining conflict in American history was the common man versus the capitalist. In this version, slaveholders were usually heroic leaders of the common man’s rise in dignity and equality; Northern “reactionaries” like Alexander Hamilton were the villains opposed to democracy and equality. These historians disapproved of slavery itself, but they tended to view the South as an agrarian society in conflict with the industrial order that emerged in the North and came to dominate nationally during the Civil War. “The most striking products of [the Civil War],” the renowned historian Kenneth Stampp wrote, “were the shoddy aristocracy of the North and the ragged children of the South.”
This interpretation reflected the political context of the early 20th century, in which the Jim Crow South, by far the most impoverished region, was the stronghold of support for progressive economic politics. Historians in this tradition often sympathized with black Americans as part of the poor underclass but not with their distinctive history as an oppressed race. The New Deal era was about as far removed from the Civil War as we are from the Civil Rights era. Republicans then still boasted of emancipation as their own achievement, but these boasts increasingly rang hollow. Black Americans in the North followed their economic interests into the party that had been their worst enemies within living memory. The racial realignment that began well before the Civil Rights movement accelerated into a total transformation of national politics.
Historians’ sympathies have changed with the composition of the political coalition to which they overwhelmingly belong. Labor history was once the most fashionable subfield among American historians. Today, it scarcely exists. In the 1970s and 1980s, historians combined sympathies with the working-class white majorities with sympathies for racial and ethnic minorities oppressed by that same majority. The uneasy combination reflected the Democratic coalition of the same era. This balance of sympathies shifted with the composition of the two parties. And now here we are.
Trump’s intervention to restore “sanity and truth to American history” is sure to be less significant than the indirect influence of his earth-shaking career in American politics. His first term provoked a drastic escalation of a culture war that pitted the deplorable (white) common man against egalitarian elites and minorities. In their fury and horror, elite institutions adopted a racial reckoning to exorcise the nation of the evil impulses that produced Trump. The hope was delusional, but it had the advantage of placing Trump and his supporters alongside the most loathsome archetypes in our cultural memory, Bull Connor and Simon Legree.