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

5. The Steel Frame of Walter Lynwood Fleming

157 5 The Steel Frame of Walter Lynwood Fleming Michael W. Fitzgerald It was a professional experience with which present-day authors might feel an uneasy sympathy. Walter Fleming, at age thirty-one, had just published his first and most significant work, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama (1905). The liberal journal of opinion the Nation found the book worthy of an extended review, which would have seemed promising news save that the editor was Oswald Garrison Villard. The grandson of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and himself a future founder of the NAACP, Villard branded the work a piece of southern propaganda. Proslavery assumptions and regional defensiveness provided “the steel frame” of Fleming’s analysis. The editor termed the approach incredible because it assumed that only conservative white Southerners could understand black people, slave or free. Villard conceded Fleming’s industriousness, but in barbed fashion: “No possible field of information which he has desired to acquire seems to have been left unexplored.” Villard even likened Fleming’s biased practice of history to an efficient guillotine. All northern testimony was disregarded, unless it backed the southern version of events, in which case it was summarily accepted. After all this, Villard scornfully concluded, “And yet there are people who deny that history is a science!”1 Faced with a damaging critique, the fledgling historian apparently tried to cushion the blow. Fleming had written to Villard, assuring him of his relative political moderation, but the editor’s response suggested that contemporary developments would fuel his irate commentary. “I wish the Southern people could awake to a realization of the injury being done them by the abuse of the Negro by conscienceless politicians of the Tillman and Vardaman stripe,” Villard wrote.2 In view of what was happening in turnof -the-century Alabama, when disfranchisement and even peonage were in 158 Michael W. Fitzgerald the news, Fleming needn’t have bothered with denials, because the work had obvious contemporary overtones. Disfranchisement was the “longfinished work of necessity,” the culmination of white resistance to Reconstruction , and Fleming ended the book with an appendix demonstrating its effect. Fleming expressed no misgivings, save that he doubted that the new 1901 disfranchisement constitution had permanently eliminated all black influence.3 Small wonder that the author Myrta Lockett Avery counseled a nervous Fleming, “Of course the ‘Nation’ will roast you! There will not be a cinder left.”4 Though Villard’s critique was unusually pointed, it was not the only muted commentary Fleming’s work received. In 1905 the Dunning School’s scholarly predominance was not that pervasive in public discourse, at least not in its more uninhibited formulations. One academic reviewer scorned the personal tone of Fleming’s book: Reconstruction had not been “fully completed in his own case.”5 The New York Times review, by the historian William E. Dodd, agreed with the emerging Dunning School’s approach, and he was impressed with the industrious research of Fleming’s eighthundred -page work. Still, Fleming was “not unpartisan in his judgments, however accurate his statement of fact.” The Times headlined the review “An Alabamian’s View of the Contest,” an observation that reflected an undertone of much of the commentary.6 William A. Dunning privately wrote that Fleming had gone a bit far, and he commented in print on Fleming ’s masses of evidence as having a “marked southern bias in their interpretation ,” surely not the kind of statement one desires from a mentor.7 The public commentary was so sharp that Fleming received sympathy letters from white Southerners with similar views. Lockett helpfully suggested that the hostile reviews would help gain attention for the book and increase its sales.8 Another correspondent added that anything about African Americans was a red flag to Villard and his associates. Still, he concluded, “That fellow Dodd’s article in the N.Y. Times is more reprehensible for he is a Southerner!”9 The bruising reception of Fleming’s first book initiated the pattern of a lifetime. Given northern predominance in the national press, regional tensions remained professionally salient, which encouraged the defensive tone of his writing. And as critics frequently suggested, his own personal background fueled his historical scholarship, though in more subtle ways than generally depicted. Walter L. Fleming was born in Brundidge, in Pike County, in April 1874, the very year of Reconstruction’s overthrow The Steel Frame of Walter Lynwood Fleming 159 in Alabama...