As it is usually told, the story of the Civil War and Reconstruction is a morality tale, with the only changes being the identity of the good guys and bad guys. Reconstruction, for example, was long viewed as the nadir of national morality, with corrupt carpetbaggers manipulating gullible and unprepared recently freed blacks to produce nothing but fraud, waste, and abuse, a view popularized in the film “The Birth of A Nation” and then embodied in scholarship for over a generation. Beginning in the 1960s that traditional tale was reversed, with the Reconstruction governments in the South being a noble precursor of the modern civil rights movement, finally and fatally done in by Southern racism and Northern apathy. (Admission: I have engaged in a bit of moralizing on the subject as well, as I mentioned in a comment on this post of mine dealing with the Civil War.)
Now Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, has come out with a new book popularizing the current version of the morality tale. Bancroft Prize-winning Princeton historian Sean Wilentz gives the book a favorable review today, while noting (as a professional historian is almost bound to do when commenting on a work of history by a journalist) that it “simplifies too much.” Wilentz reveals, however, that professional historians are no more immune from morality tales than are journalists when he writes, in conclusion, that Lemann’s book
illuminates the often bloody fights over black voting rights that would recur for a century to come — and remain, even today, a source of partisan strife, albeit without paramilitary gunfire and with the party labels reversed.
The view that today’s Republican Party is engaged in various efforts to repress the black vote while the Democrats are nobly carrying on the work of the Reconstruction reformers is powerfully mythic, and it equals “The Birth of a Nation” both in its ability to entertain and in the accuracy of its analysis.
UPDATE [11 Sept.]
Morality tales, of course, did not end with Reconstruction. Now Princeton Prof. Wilentz, no doubt drawing on his professional expertise about Nineteenth Century America, has joined other equally professional, disinterested scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger and Eric Alterman (of CCNY and The Nation), to demand that ABC should “halt the [9/11 docudrama] broadcast and prevent misinforming Americans about their history.” [HatTip to the Chronicle of Higher Education blog.]
Perhaps these independent and high-minded scholars wrote a similar protest letter to the theaters, colleges, etc., that showed Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, but so far I haven’t been able to find it, even though there is no shortage of historians offering to set the public straight about what history has to say about our current misguided ways (see see here and here).
For those of you interested in more of Prof. Wilentz’s yeoman service protecting the public from bad history, etc, see here and here.
I’m sure Prof. Wilentz’s life would be oh so much easier if the American Historical Association would simply set up a Historical Review Board, with Wilentz as chairman but now with a staff of similarly qualified non-partisan experts, to pass on the appropriateness of various public policies as well as historical observations contained in the media. Perhaps he could even be given a stamp to wield, sort of like the seal of approval by the dental association that appears on toothpaste.
