The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction

6. Ransack Roulhac and Racism: Joseph Grégoire de Roulhac Hamilton and Dunning’s Questions of Institution Building and Jim Crow

179 6 Ransack Roulhac and Racism Joseph Grégoire de Roulhac Hamilton and Dunning’s Questions of Institution Building and Jim Crow John Herbert Roper Sr. Joseph Grégoire de Roulhac Hamilton (1878–1961). Saying the name slowly produces a humor not inappropriate, almost like the old W. C. Fields routine in which the comedian with orotund vowels recited pretentious names of pretentious people. He liked to be called Roulhac, and the sycophantic intoned the maternal name with awe, the many critics with contempt. Too, photographs of Hamilton reveal a feminist’s nightmare of Patriarch, an African American’s nightmare of The Man, a Sixties Radical ’s nightmare of Authority. In his essay in this book, J. Vincent Lowery offers a seriocomic image of Hamilton so enraged over an issue of southern honor—that is to say, racist pride and prejudice—that he lost all control and threw a silly fit unworthy of the gentleman-scholar he usually modeled for others. Easily caricatured, self-documented as a white supremacist and a male chauvinist, in print in favor of many wrong causes, Hamilton has stood there prominently in his photographs, in his portraits, even with his name on a building housing the Departments of History, Political Science, and Sociology at the University of North Carolina. Those who studied in Chapel Hill in the 1960s and 1970s, many of them members of and scholars in the civil rights movement, found Hamilton to be everywhere in signs and symbols—and generally there in a bad 180 John Herbert Roper Sr. way. Yet Paul Green and C. Vann Woodward and J. Carlyle Sitterson and George Brown Tindall spoke of their admiration, respect, and personal fondness for Hamilton. In a similar vein Joel Williamson, beloved mentor of many revisionist and activist historians, knew Hamilton through the correspondence and the publications that he left.1 What to make of a racist character who may be the most problematical of all the students of William Archibald Dunning? In his proclamations and practices, he was in all ordinary senses and in any historical sense racist. In his institution building, especially of the magnificent archival depositories of the University of North Carolina, he was also racist, the effects of which lasted much longer than anything he ever said or wrote. Initially, and thereafter for long decades, the facilities he built were off-limits to African American scholars and researchers. Yet, in building his archival depository so well and in staffing it so intelligently, he—certainly without meaning to do so—established the very means—serious primary research work—that permitted later generations of more liberal, indeed plainly better, scholars to countermand his own worst offenses. Once Jim Crow was dismantled— and, in fact, before it was dismantled, thanks to some clever procedures of his staff—African American scholars could use the full fruits of his labors. Much of the best consciously revisionist work about slavery, Reconstruction , civil rights, race relations, and all aspects of southern social structures and functions is possible exactly because Hamilton established the Southern Historical Collection and filled it with dense and richly textured primary sources from all regions of the South. To start with, Hamilton is inexplicable—and useless to scholars of another era—without understanding the sprawling and oddly interlocked family in which he lived. Then, too, Hamilton is inexplicable—and useless to scholars of another era—without understanding his Old North State when the twentieth century was new. For still another, Hamilton is inexplicable —and even more useless to latter-day scholars—without understanding his University of North Carolina (UNC), especially in the days of presidents Edward Kidder Graham, Harry Woodburn Chase, and Frank Porter Graham. Finally, Hamilton is inexplicable—and even more useless to us—without understanding the pursuit of the muse Clio in his day. Especially for his interaction with family members and friends throughout the Carolinas and Alabama, there are “deep reciprocities” between what Hamilton actually lived and what he wrote about, between the personal Ransack Roulhac and Racism 181 biography and the professional history, and these deep reciprocities must be plumbed.2 The first two considerations, the family and North Carolina, are very much intertwined and must be taken up together. Hamilton’s family was noted for its size and scope, so different from today’s families, yet it was very much a type for a class of landowning extended families in the decades before the Civil...