Eric Foner reviews two new books on the understudied (not anymore, it seems) Colfax Massacre and the end of Reconstruction: Charles Lane’s The Day Freedom Died and LeAnna Keith’s The Colfax Massacre. And he likes both. Whereas I, having just started The Day Freedom Died (I didn’t even know The Colfax Massacre existed), can’t yet offer much insight into their quality. I can, though, say these books come hot enough on the heels of Nick Lemann’s Redemption (reviewed by me here, if you care) to suggest a trend: historians and journalists increasingly are blaming the failure of Reconstruction on white supremacists, as opposed to, say, the scandal-plagued Grant administration or the freed people themselves. This is, I think, very welcome news (more below). But I’m still not sure Foner’s right about this:
The work of historians, however, has largely failed to penetrate popular consciousness. Partly because of the persistence of old misconceptions, Reconstruction remains widely misunderstood. Popular views still owe more to such films as “Birth of a Nation” (which glorified the Klan as the savior of white civilization) and “Gone With the Wind” (which romanticized slavery and the Confederacy) than to modern scholarship.
I agree that “Reconstruction remains widely misunderstood.” But I think that, for people under the age of, um, let’s say, just for the sake of convenience, forty-five, Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation very likely aren’t the reason why. To be fair, though, it may be that Foner is suggesting that the odious view of history evinced by those films lingers, even though the movies themselves may no longer be popular. And if that’s the case, my response would be: sure, that’s likely true enough. But I’d probably follow up by suggesting that if you asked most people about Reconstruction, they’d have no idea where to find it on a map. Ignorance, in other words, is a more important reason that people misunderstand Reconstruction — have no idea what it was, in other words — than familiarity with films that are now three-quarters of a century old or more. Add to that, I suppose, popular distrust of government, fostered by The Club for Growth and its allies, and also the fact that Reconstruction gets overshadowed in most lesson plans by the war itself.
All of which is to say: the more books that detail the bad acts of white supremacists, complicating American notions of terrorism, the better. Still, I remain skeptical that the cultural artifacts that shape my understanding of the way the past used to be understood collectively, or Foner’s understanding of the same issue, now have much impact on popular perceptions of history. Put another way: does anybody, excluding PhD candidates in history or related disciplines, still watch Gone with the Wind or Birth of a Nation? And, more important, do those films still have cultural weight?
38 comments
March 22, 2008 at 2:17 pm
jim
Birth of a Nation, not so much anymore: film historians, maybe. But Gone with the Wind is still part of the culture. The book, too, not just the movie. Alice Randall wouldn’t have published The Wind Done Gone (this century, mind) if Gone with the Wind wasn’t still available to be reacted against.
March 22, 2008 at 2:19 pm
David Carlton
“a trend: historians and journalists increasingly are blaming the failure of Reconstruction on white supremacists, as opposed to, say, the scandal-plagued Grant administration or the freed people themselves.”
If this is “a trend,” it’s been trending most of my sixty years. Indeed, most of the heavy lifting of Reconstruction “revisionism” was done in the 1960s and eaarly 1970s. Apparently it’s not just the public who’s failed to notice.
BTW–*Birth of a Nation* hardly ever gets seen; it was viewed more often, I think, when I was an undergrad in the 1960s, but always by people capable of seeing through it. GWTW is a different matter, judging from my experience teaching southern history to southern students. But even those students, if they weren’t quite aware of the modern version of the Reconstruction narrative, show no resistance to it. I think you’re onto something with respect to popular ignorance of the history; but in the case of Reconstruction, I think it’s also due to a loss of salience. I grew up in the South during the last says of Jim Crow, and remember well how important the old “Tragic Era” narrative was to the defense of the segregationist order–both enforcing it on upcoming generations of young white southerners and bludgeoning northerners. It was a powerful narrative because it taught a powerful “lesson”–that white supremacy was deeply embedded in southern “folkways,” and that “outside intervention” always wound up mucking things up hopelessly. Well, in the end the narrative didn’t work; federal intervention came in a rush in the 1960s, and, far from mucking things up, even whites came grudgingly to admit that it made the South a much better place. With that, the old narrative lost its salience, even as the historians were systematically dismantling it
March 22, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Levi Stahl
What they said about Gone With the Wind and Birth of a Nation.
All I remember being about Reconstruction from grade and high school was stories of the depredations of carpetbaggers—and while I grew up in rural southern Illinois, it’s not like it was actually the South. I didn’t really even begin to understand the reality of Reconstruction until I was in my twenties–at which point so much of twentieth-century American history began to make a lot more sense.
March 22, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Douglas Anders
Gone With the Wind is still culturally relevant. Many people still watch it — I do, though I know it’s horrid history. Bad history, but still a stunning movie (revolting, but stunning).
About the “under forty-five” thing. I’m Forty, and my high school history teacher had his class read Gone With the Wind for extra credit (other than that, he was a good history teacher). Needless to say, the whole class was taught a version of GWTW-flavored Civil War history, so even those in his class were influanced by the book/film, even the ones who didn’t read the book.
(Thankfully, eventhough I was a Classisist, I hung out with American history grad students, so I got straigthened out)
March 22, 2008 at 4:58 pm
eric
GWTW has been re-released in theaters as recently as 1998. It’s a staple of the Stanford Theatre’s schedule, and I bet it’s quite generally seen on television. BoaN, not so much.
March 22, 2008 at 5:04 pm
Vance Maverick
Is there any silent movie that’s popular now? Chaplin, perhaps? I think BoaN is now mainly of film-historical interest, like Battleship Potemkin.
March 22, 2008 at 5:12 pm
eric
I teach the 1910s, and my undergrads generally know about BoaN as “that racist movie.” When I used a clip from GWTW (the burning of Atlanta) to talk about pre-WWII images of urban destruction, it was clear many of them had seen it.
March 22, 2008 at 5:22 pm
greg in ak
well how many people have seen band of brother’s, saving private ryan, and 439 other ww2 movies but couldn’t even come close to explaining what the Marshall Plan was? in fact i would bet many fictional dollars that a good chunk of people would say the Marshall Plan was that movie about the Marshall football team from a couple year ago.
Wars are more exciting and the , umm… let’s say, difficulties of rebuilding and democratizing war torn countries while coping with sectarian strife and vicious guerrilla warfare is less sexy.
I wonder if that has any current relevance.
March 22, 2008 at 5:38 pm
ari
In two weeks, I’ll ask my students in 17A, the first half of the US history survey here, if they’ve seen Gone with the Wind. I’ll report back with results, which seem sure, based on this thread, to undercut my argument in the post above.
March 22, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Rob_in_Hawaii
I have the deepest respect for Eric Foner. And his work, I’d argue, is still the jumping-off place for anyone trying to get a handle on the history of Reconstruction and its failure. But “Birth of a Nation” and “Gone with the Wind” as the main sources of popular views of the post-Civil War Era? Good grief, I was born during Truman’s presidency and even I regard both flicks as relics from some bygone era, something that one must actively seek out (i.e., BOAN) or come across on a rare showing on TCM (i.e., GWTW). I’d point out that whole generations of students and historians have come of age since either of these films held sway over the popular imagination. This is not my area of concentration, but I wonder what others think are today’s leading influences of Reconstruction on the popular imagination.
March 22, 2008 at 5:50 pm
ari
Except for Rob’s comment. He agrees with me. Which is why I like him so much and can’t abide the rest of you thugs.
March 22, 2008 at 5:55 pm
andrew
I have my doubts that many people today give Reconstruction much thought at all. Among those that do, there’s probably a split between the people Foner is talking about and the people influenced by the work of Foner and others before and after.
It seems like the period of years during which Reconstruction took place, when it is covered at all in US pop culture nowadays, is covered mostly in a western context, where the connection to Reconstruction (as traditionally defined to be about the South) isn’t clearly made.
March 22, 2008 at 6:06 pm
eric
It seems like the period of years during which Reconstruction took place, when it is covered at all in US pop culture nowadays, is covered mostly in a western context, where the connection to Reconstruction (as traditionally defined to be about the South) isn’t clearly made.
Shhh…. I’m writing that book….
March 22, 2008 at 6:08 pm
eric
He agrees with me
I think it’s possible that we’re all to some degree correct: that the only Reconstruction text anyone knows is GWTW, that they know it’s crazy old-fashioned, but that they don’t have much to put in its place.
Honestly, I don’t know why there isn’t a Hollywood blockbuster about the Reconstruction Act of 1867 and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.
March 22, 2008 at 6:10 pm
andrew
Shhh…. I’m writing that book….
Did I know that? I remember you mentioning that other one.
March 22, 2008 at 6:11 pm
charlieford
Re: where do people get their ideas about Reconstruction (and Lincoln, and the Civil War)? It shouldn’t be overlooked the strong role southern (often religious) textbooks and curricula play, especially among home-schoolers and (often religious) private schools. I had a (very bright) student last semester tell me she had learned that the slaves were so miserable being free, they came back to the plantations and begged to be re-enslaved. No joke.
March 22, 2008 at 6:17 pm
andrew
Honestly, I don’t know why there isn’t a Hollywood blockbuster about the Reconstruction Act of 1867 and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.
Seriously. It could sell a lot of tickets.
March 22, 2008 at 6:18 pm
ari
Honestly, I don’t know why there isn’t a Hollywood blockbuster about the Reconstruction Act of 1867 and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.
I don’t know if you were kidding here. But doesn’t it seem odd that there’s been no recent effort to mythologize the tragedy of Reconstruction in a Hollywood, or, perhaps more likely, an independent, film? All the elements are there: the death of Lincoln, the roots of modern race relations, etc. Come to think of it, why hasn’t someone remade Birth of a Nation, putting a modern spin on the original? I’m not saying any of the above would be good, just that it seems odd that nobody has even tried.
March 22, 2008 at 6:45 pm
charlieford
“But doesn’t it seem odd that there’s been no recent effort to mythologize the tragedy of Reconstruction in a Hollywood, or, perhaps more likely, an independent, film?” I used to begin my Reconstruction lecture by pointing out that while there’s dozens of films about the Civil War, we have hardly any since “Gone” about Reconstruction. I think it’s too hard to bring into line with larger American mythologies, as well as with Hollywood’s usual obsessions. Too complicated, too depressing, too discomfiting.
March 22, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Daniel Buck
Gone With the Wind, I’m afraid, topped a February 2008 Harris poll as America’s favorite movie. And now there’s the musical, opening in of all places London in April. TCM is doing a documentary about the making of the musical.
This from http://www.playbill.com
=======================
In a press statement, Alan Musa (TCM VP and Channel Manager) said, “‘Gone with the Wind’ continues to be one of TCM’s most popular films and the stage production further emphasizes its appeal to audiences today. We are thrilled to have this unique opportunity to give our viewers an insight into such a major production.”
========================
I had the misfortunate to see GWTW years ago, in of all places — second use of that phrase this evening — Miramar, Argentina. I thought the movie a dreadful bore. My fellow Americans disagree.
Dan
March 22, 2008 at 7:19 pm
eric
I don’t know if you were kidding here
Not. I just got out my copy of Screenplay. I’m goin’ to Hollywood, baby.
March 22, 2008 at 7:39 pm
ari
Okay, Dan’s comment seems to be the final nail in the coffin: I was wrong about GWTW (shakes head, thrusts hands in pockets, stomps off).
Eric, you’ll need a personal valet, right?
March 22, 2008 at 8:05 pm
gck
Come to think of it, why hasn’t someone remade Birth of a Nation, putting a modern spin on the original. I’m not saying any of the above would be good, just that it seems odd that nobody has even tried.
DJ Spooky tried, a few years ago. It got some attention, but I don’t know if I’d call it a blockbuster.
I screened Birth of a Nation regularly, when I used to teach, and it still works. That is to say, it still works like Griffith wanted it to. Even — perhaps especially — on those (undergraduate or otherwise) who believe they are capable of “seeing through it” — to steal David Carlton’s nice phrase.
When in the final act Griffith cuts increasingly quickly between the endangered white women, their racially–mixed tormentors, and the Klan “riding to the rescue,” he builds up a narrative tension that reaches even jaded students who openly laugh at the rest of the film’s blackface racism and campy melodrama.
By the time the last woman is saved and the tension released, Griffith has us where he wants us, whether or not we want to be there. We’ve identified who are the good guys and the bad guys, and that’s enough. Usually, it worked so well that the biggest laughs came afterwards, in the scenes — not so comic — of masked riders disenfranchising “Black Republicans” at gunpoint come the next election.
Aside from the laughs, I could see this in the faces and body language of my students as I watched them watch the end of the film. And in their dismay when I pointed out this effect to them after the lights went on — that if they had wanted those women to be “saved,” Griffith had succeeded in getting them to root for the Klan.
March 22, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Chad
I’m pretty much in agreement with Ari on this. Put simply, there is no such thing as a “popular consciousness” for Reconstruction. The problem isn’t that Americans have a misguided view of Reconstruction–they just don’t know what it was.
I would also be really surprised if you asked someone “What was Reconstruction like?” and they started spouting off D.W. Griffth’s or Victor Fleming, et al accounts of it. Now, on the other hand, ask someone “What was the Wild West like?” and you will probably get quite a few people drawing upon movies. Why? Because there’s an actual Western movie genre, and it’s been popular for the last 50 years of American cinema.
If Reconstruction is to have a “popular consciousness,” it first needs to be popular.
March 23, 2008 at 3:46 am
The Constructivist
GWTW is HUGE in Japan. This is based on my wife and in-laws’ female relatives being in love with it. So someone oughtta check me on that. Not sure of the political repercussions, as my wife reports being fascinated by Scarlet’s hair and dresses in the movie, and playing Scarlet with her sister as kids. She thinks the translation of the novel into Japanese improves on the original, which she was disappointed by when she finally read it. I’ve have thought the movie would have been hugely popular both during and after the American occupation and reconstruction of Japan, but I’m too lazy to get up and find my Dower books (oh, wait, they’re in the office, so I have an excuse).
In the U.S., Foner isn’t alone. Check out Patricia Williams’s The Rooster’s Egg for how GWTW-derived fantasies dominated right-wing fantasies in the 1990s.
Wonder how this all would skew along gender lines, but we’ll never know until this comment thread becomes less of a boys’ club!
March 23, 2008 at 3:55 am
The Constructivist
Because our “Cabin Fever” conversation go Beloved on my brain, I’ll just note here that if anyone’s paying attention when they come to the novel through Oprah, they’ll have noticed it’s a Reconstruction novel. (Probably the best of the historical novels on the period, though people have been trying for decades now to read the end of Huck Finn as a commentary on Reconstruction, rather fruitfully IMHO, and Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition deserves a mention.) I say this because nobody reads novels any more, of course, so they can’t possibly have influenced anyone’s views of Reconstruction.
March 23, 2008 at 5:56 am
John Emerson
GWTW is the classic date movie for women who want their guys to be more romantic and courtly, sort of like Judy Garland in Oz for gay men. It’s not really a question of how often people see it, it’s iconic and part of the mental geography now.
[Deleted paragraph about the way even leftists affect aristocratic tastes and styles these days].
Probably all the way to the end of the sixties many or most English and history departments were dominated a Southern point of view. It’s bittersweet for me to read about left PC controlling the English departments, because when I graduated from a Northern university in 1980 the Confederate point of view was still very well represented. (Billy Budd had it coming to him; “Benito Cereno” is not about slavery; “Heart of Darkness” is not about colonialism; the Civil War was not about slavery; the abolitionists were murderous fanatics who forced the nice Southerners to fight.)
I don’t think that the direct effect of BOAN and GWTW should be exaggerated, but there was a lot of spinoff and residual effects, and no strong countervailing picture. I don’t ever remember seeing Confederate and the anti-Reconstructionists ca. 1880 portrayed as villains, and the general portrayal of the KKK is as an out-of-control mob of trash, rather than as an organized group of respectable citizens enforcing the status quo ante. (A friend of mine who moved to northern Florida around 1960 gradually learned that one of his father’s very prosperous new friends had been the local leader of the lynch mobs.)
Even recently I infuriated some quite nice people by saying that maybe William Quantrill and Nathan Bedford Forrest are more accurate representatives of Southern Culture than all the nice courtly guys.
The anti-reconstruction coalition was pretty durable politically (only in 1948 did it start to crack a little) and it seems to have penetrated pretty deep into the academic culture.)
March 23, 2008 at 6:06 am
Vance Maverick
I say this because nobody reads novels any more, of course, so they can’t possibly have influenced anyone’s views of Reconstruction.
This follows if we’re speaking only of direct influence, of course. In principle, at least, a novel or silent movie can influence people who don’t read or see it, even generations later. But showing this would take some work.
March 23, 2008 at 6:12 am
John Emerson
Incidentally, Menard’s “Metaphysical Club” describes Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s transformation from an abolitionist militant to a realist who despised moralistic politics. “The Education of Henry Adams” shows a similar trajectory. The Civil War seems to have had a profoundly disillusioning effect on a lot of people, except for Confederate sympathizers.
March 23, 2008 at 7:02 am
Cala
“And a mule? Gee!”
Ari’s theory seems to be holding up for Birth of A Nation. And I’m not sure it doesn’t hold up for Gone With the Wind. As a film, it romanticizes the South, but in a very vague look-at-the-pretty-dresses-o-ashley kind of way. It’s not that the movies replaced or overrode our understanding of Reconstruction.
It’s that it’s not something we’ve generally bothered to learn about. My freshman history class in high school* was very good, and we spent a ton of time on the Civil War and what lead up to it. Then it was over, and we covered the next thirty years or so in a week. I can tell you about Kansas and Uncle Tom and Gettysburg, but most of what I remember about Reconstruction is that it didn’t happen the way the good guys envisioned because of politics.
I don’t think historical research is losing out to the movies. I think it’s losing because no one’s taught it outside of historians.
*Yes, I realize the rest of you all took college history classes, but I work with what I got.
March 23, 2008 at 7:55 am
Dave Snyder
I agree with many of the upstream posters that GWTW remains very much a part of popular consciousness.
I regularly screen BoaN for my undergraduates, a sizeable chunk of whom have already seen the film in other classes. I suspect this is true at a great number of colleges and universities, so people know about the film. These screenings (gck’s fascinating and terrifying observations notwithstanding) are generally offered in a critical mode, however, and so I’m not sure that this BoaN consciousness is what Foner had in mind.
All that said, I believe Foner’s point should not be taken denotatively, but in a connotative sense. That is, popular views of Reconstruction, to the extent that there are any, generally revolve around notions of “Dixie,” a mythology embodied most dramatically, and fixed as cultural iconography, in these two films. Dixie romance still whitewashes the better part of white supremacy terrorism (I just had a recent undergrad, not at all unrepresentative I’d say, attempt morally to equate the KKK with the Black Panthers.)
I’d also add, pace Peter Novick’s early chapters in his “That Noble Dream,” that generations of Amerian historians contributed a fair amount to the enduring mythology of Dixie.
Love the blog, and the learned commentators chillin’ around the place . . .
March 23, 2008 at 9:12 am
The Constructivist
Speaking of Reconstruction novels nobody reads, I would argue that Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (not to mention his short story cycle Go Down, Moses) bears about the same relation to GWTW as Melville’s “Benito Cereno” bears to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, if I didn’t have The Sound and the Fury on the brain today. So Morrison has some serious competition in the “most influential Reconstruction novel” (including the “country” sections of Ellison’s Invisible Man), but I still vote for Beloved. Just imagine if someone made it into a Roots-esque mini-series, say on HBO, to erase the memory of a film that left far too much out!
Oh, and to pick up where the “Cabin Fever” commentary leaves off, one measure of how important the very plantation romancin’/KKK romanticizin’ Dixie whistlers viewed UTC is how often it was satirized on the minstrel stage in the late 19th C and how many late 19th C white supremacist novels tried to rewrite it.
March 23, 2008 at 9:13 am
Larry Cebula
I think the source of the misunderstanding of Reconstruction is the misunderstanding of the Civil War.
The neo-Confederates and their fellow travelers are so very active and vigilant, pushing their interpretation of the Civil War as being about anything but slavery. Look at the internet boom in (imaginary) black Confederates. Look at the way that nearly every Civil War historic site avoid analyzing the causes of the war, introducing thereby a pro-Confederate bias. Look at the way all of us were trained to say “the South” when what we really mean is white southerners, or more specifically, the planter class. Example: “Southerners feared abolition.” Frederick Douglass would beg to differ with that statement.
The other wrong thing that most people learn about the Civil War is that it settled the status of blacks in the South. Lincoln freed the slaves and they all lived happily ever after. It isn’t so much that people know the wrong things about Reconstruction, it is that they know nothing at all about it.
March 23, 2008 at 10:15 am
silbey
The Civil War seems to have had a profoundly disillusioning effect on a lot of people
620,000 dead will have that effect.
Look at the way all of us were trained to say “the South” when what we really mean is white southerners, or more specifically, the planter class
That’s a deeply insightful remark.
March 23, 2008 at 10:40 am
John Emerson
Re: the planter class. Lind’s “Made in Texas” argues that George W. Bush is the ideological heir of the unreconstructed planters of East Texas, who were more Southern than Western. Perhaps an uneducated, disenfranchised, impoverished, demoralized, politically passive working class is the wave of the future.
March 24, 2008 at 4:58 am
The Commander Guy
Here is a C-Span Interview of Lemann. Watch this, then go read Redemption.
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/library/index.php?main_page=product_video_info&products_id=195090-1&highlight=nicholas%lemann
March 24, 2008 at 8:05 am
Episode VI: Return of the Links « Blurred Productions
[...] A very great piece on the historical memory of Reconstruction at the Edge of the American West. Honestly, I don’t think we could have this feature without linking to something by either Eric or Ari. [...]
April 24, 2008 at 10:31 pm
“The Surrender Complete” « The Edge of the American West
[...] the spring of 1873, for example, more than 100 African-Americans had been killed in the notorious Colfax Massacre, followed by countless other episodes in which African-Americans had been beaten or killed by the [...]