History as It Is Rewritten
Meyer, Howard N.
A public relations coup has inundated the U.S. with 350,000 copies of Admiral Morison's "legacy to his countrymen."* Included among the testimonials for this product are: "a delight to...
...but he is still "sour and angry," and "harsh and bitter in his hatred...
...The erasures and the retouchings of the anti-Negro myths that came into being as rationalizations for the overthrow of the first Reconstruction are not accompanied by a really new point of view...
...523] This Reconstruction stereotype, already generally accepted in 1890, was promoted by David W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation (1915...
...I propose to examine the Admiral's standing as a historian by comparing his book with the two-volume, fiveedition The Growth of the American Republic, which he wrote in collaboration with Henry Steele Commager...
...Frederick Douglass, mentioned three times in Morison/ Commager-1950, is now referred to only once, as a "writer" of unspecified subjects...
...New York: Oxford University Press, 1150 pp...
...Morison1965 asserts that "Southern Negroes as a whole cannot be described by sweeping generalizations...
...Thaddeus Stevens is not, as he was in Morison/ Commager-1950 "one of the most unpleasant characters in American history...
...with 350,000 copies of Admiral Morison's "legacy to his countrymen...
...this is not enough to erase the effect of the Morison/Commager-1950 reference to the "average childlike, improvident, humorous, prevaricating, and superstitious Negro...
...The bigot may find some comfort in the categorical statement, in Morison-1965, that the "confident expectation" of the abolitionists "that the Negro, once free, could compete on equal terms with white people" has been proved wrong...
...No leaders then arose to fire his sullen heart with courage and determination to resist...
...Arnold Rose recently wrote, in a brilliant essay on "Distortion in the History of American Race Relations," that white "historians allowed bigots to invent the history of race relations in the United States" and that such bigotry must be fought, not as a mere matter of abstract or academic justice but as an integral part of the Freedom movement, because "contemporary interpersonal and intergroup relations" are dominated by "what people believe to have occurred in the past" (Rose's italics...
...This is underlined by the suggestion that "the colored intellectual of the 1960s knows less about the plantation Negro of the 1840s than did many white masters of that era...
...it seems hopeless for a mere historian to deflate it...
...DuBois, to realize how much there is of American history that Samuel Eliot Morison has left to learn...
...And yet I fear that few white radicals are qualified to throw a stone at the Admiral: Christopher Lasch calls his 350-page book The New Radicalism in America 1889-1963, without so much as mentioning the author of Black Reconstruction, and the time in question covers precisely DuBois' working years...
...Morison/Commager's animadversion on Charles Sumner, "without personal knowledge of the Negroes he believed them no exception to the dogma of equality" (1950) was too great an affront to the Negro to survive in 1965: it is replaced by "with little personal knowledge of former slaves, he believed that they only wanted the vote to prove themselves worthy of sharing the duties and privileges of citizenship...
...Included among the testimonials for this product are: "a delight to read" (from Bruce Catton, himself a strong brand name...
...One does not have to know how many of the humblest dwellings in the South were decorated by at least one photograph, a picture of W.E.B...
...Max Lerner...
...Vol...
...And I propose to use one simple touchstone: what is his grasp of Negro history in the United States...
...Morison and Commager are illustrative of the point Rose makes: As for Sambo, whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears, there is some reason to believe that he suffered less than any other class in the South from its "peculiar institution...
...II p. 48] Somehow, without excavating any new manuscripts, Morison in 1965 has found new viewpoints which he offers without a blush: Abolition was an irresistible power in a world awakening to new concepts of humanity...
...Two glimpses into the 1950 (4th ed...
...They concluded that any Negro participation in politics was dangerous...
...In adding a few paragraphs about the dark decades between 1890-1920, era of mass lynching, the Admiral cannot resist erasing six decades of protest that escalated into revolution— In general, the Southern Negro submitted to his own abasement and accepted the degraded status that his former masters forced upon him...
...It is evoked in a phrase in Roy Wilkins' eulogy to DuBois on the day of the Great March of 1963: "his was the voice that for six decades has been calling us here...
...and "unquestionably + The Oxford History of the American People, by Samuel Eliot Morrison...
...It is an essential part of our history that most white historians wrote that way, as well as that they condemned the abolitionists for having "closed every avenue to emanicipation save civil war"—replaced in Morison1965 by "it is perfectly clear that slavery was too firmly rooted in Southern society to die otherwise than by violence...
...I p. 537] Yet the heritage of black reconstruction was an unfortunate one...
...After some reflection, I cannot find in that an improvement of substance...
...The role of the Negro as both leader and follower in the abolitionist movement is ignored...
...709] Reformed sinners are always welcome, but not with the unrepentant flourish of transferring their sins to the motion picture industry...
...12.50, the best general history of the United States ever written" (Johns Hopkins' distinguished David Donald...
...His fellows in the North did nothing to help him...
...And finally the readiness with which the colored people lent themselves to exploitation by unprincipled white men forfeited for the Negroes the respect of many Northerners and persuaded them that Negro participation in politics was a mistake...
...A public relations coup has inundated the U.S...
...Southerners drew from this experience certain conclusions which were more obvious than exact...
...Vol...
...I whooped with sheer joy at its style, wit, raciness, structure, narrative power...
...And the villains of the stereotyped story now blamed on The Birth of a Nation are villains still...
Vol. 13 • March 1966 • No. 2
