The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction ed. by John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery (review)

The Dunning school still casts a shadow over America’s popular understanding of Reconstruction. Throughout the twentieth century, students heard of the victimized white southerner, a vindictive federal government and of malicious Republicans in African American controlled state legislatures. With a helpful forward by Eric Foner, John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery have edited a volume of essays investigating the historiographical impact of the Dunning School, recasting its influence on the “scientific” historical methodologies of the early twentieth century and providing historical context for a fuller understanding of Dunning’s, and that of his cadre of students’ perspectives on race. Ultimately, consistent with the explanation of C. Vann Woodward, the position of the Dunning school merely reflected attitudes already prevalent and universally accepted by a national and “regional white consensus” (7). Therefore, rather than creating new racial attitudes through myths of Reconstruction, the Dunning school was simply responsible for lending them credibility.

The first two chapters set the stage for the subsequent eight by examining John Burgess and William Dunning. Shepherd McKinley describes Burgess’s work at Columbia and training in German “scientific” scholarship. Called the godfather of the Dunning school, Burgess lifted “American higher education above the realm of the amateur and toward standards of the modern and professional” (57). James Humphreys’s chapter on Dunning likewise casts him as a giant in the emerging fields of American history and political science. Humphreys’s more balanced piece clearly displays the admiration Dunning’s students had for their “genial, lovable” but “droll” advisor while also presenting Dunning, the scholar, through his personal papers and writings (93). However, both Humphreys and McKinley note that revisionists would later criticize the racism embedded in their “scientific” methodologies. Humphreys leaves us with a call to a “biographer who will treat him [Dunning] fairly, eschewing the polemical tone that has too often characterized historians’ analyses of his and his students’ scholarship” (98).

W. Bland Whitley’s essay is on James Garner, perhaps one of the scholars from the Dunning school with the clearest dissonance. Described as balanced, Garner’s work Reconstruction in Mississippi displayed a “measured tone” and “willingness to present different sides of particular issues,” which was uncharacteristic of the Dunningites (112). The heroes of his work were Mississippi Whigs, who became opponents of secession and committed to Reconstruction. John David Smith’s article places U. B. Phillips as the Dunningite whose work dominated slavery scholarship until 1956. According to Smith, Phillips’s model for his own work on antebellum slavery was the “the Southerner’s unwillingness to live as political and social equals with blacks,” which was a central theme of Dunning’s Reconstruction work. Michael Fitzgerald’s article on Fleming posits him as “pro-Klan historian” whose dismissal by revisionists is fair but caused historians to miss out on Fleming’s helpful analysis of Alabama’s Reconstruction government whose “emphasis on long-standing class and regional divisions within white society” remain important (173).

John Roper Sr. portrays Joseph Grégoire de Roulhac Hamilton as a historian whose research methods, knowledge of Reconstruction in North Carolina and passion for archival documentation were beyond question. However, Roper asserts that Hamilton’s scholarship was firmly representative of the racism of his era and that he came to Dunning with those notions firmly established. J. Vincent Lowery describes Paul Haworth as the peripheral figure of the Dunning school largely because of his dissenting racial attitudes. A Quaker and a progressive, Haworth differed on interpretations of African Americans during Reconstruction and in so doing anticipated “the later revisionists” (222). In stark contrast, Fred Bailey’s chapter on Charles Ramsdell displays him as the corrupted “scientific historian” whose attempts at objectivity could not separate him “from the zeitgeist that enveloped his world and that corroded his supposed objectivity” (250).

Paul Ortiz argues that William Davis and...