Memory / Vignette

White Supremacy in the Academy: The 1913 Meeting of the American Historical Association

The historical interpretations crafted by the men of the Dunning School might now be largely discredited and discarded. But their legacies remain.

by Bradley D. Proctor via The Activist History Review on December 6, 2019

...on oysters, turtle soup, beef tenderloin, and partridges. They drank champagne and smoked cigars. Undoubtedly they shared stories of an Old South, one that they thought had been threatened by black citizenship during Reconstruction but had been redeemed by its reversal and made solid by Jim Crow.

We now group these men and their ideas in the so-called Dunning School—named after their advisor and mentor. In the early twentieth century, they wrote the most influential histories of the aftermath of the Civil War. They also founded archives, expanded history courses at prestigious universities, and professionalized the writing and teaching of historical methods. And the history they wrote supported the white supremacy of Jim Crow, telling stories that Reconstruction governments were corrupt, that racist violence was necessary to reverse what they claimed was oppressive federal occupation, and that African Americans were undeserving of political rights.

This meeting of the AHA occurred at the height of Lost Cause commemoration and a national reconciliation between North and South. The summer of 1913 had seen a famous Civil War veterans’ reunion for the 50th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg, where veterans in blue and grey shook each other’s hands in renewed national brotherhood. This reconciliation came at the expense of the political rights of African Americans. In erasing the role of slavery from the causes and course of the Civil War, the national reconciliation of the Lost Cause served as cultural cover for Jim Crow segregation, disfranchisement, and racist violence.

Recent historians have compiled excellent studies of the Lost Cause in popular culture and public commemoration. David Blight began his monumental work Race and Reunion with the 1913 Gettysburg reunion and the speech of former historian and President Woodrow Wilson.^[1] Historians have also dismantled the historical arguments of the Dunning School. Virtually every academic work on Reconstruction still begins its historiographical analysis by recounting the errors of the Dunning School. Still, historians have taken less seriously the fact that the Dunning School existed beyond bad ideas to be discounted in literature reviews. These scholars professionalized methodologies and built academic institutions still essential to the study of history today. They did so not only to place the Lost Cause at the center of American history, but also to defend contemporaneous Jim Crow. This is a history with which we must reckon.