Black Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois and the New (Marxist) Historiography
What follows is the paper I gave this past weekend at the ninth annual meeting of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History in Dallas. I received excellent comments from our chair, Amy Wood, and from several audience members–comments that have made me rethink some of my argument. But I publish here without editing in the hopes that I receive more comments.
"To decipher Donald Trump’s election, several gobsmacked liberal journalists have been reading about Reconstruction. They seem to think the era of Reconstruction, when tangible racial progress was realized only to be wrecked by white revanchists, speaks to the present. MSNBC pundit Chris Hayes has declared that books about Reconstruction are “all of what I’m reading.” Slate’s Jamelle Bouie, to make sense of Trump’s racist and nativist appeals, has blogged his way through W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1935 magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America. This is not the first time that Black Reconstruction has been put to good use. It won’t be the last.
Black Reconstruction in America is the definitive revisionist text in African American history and, arguably, American history more broadly. Black Reconstruction revises history in several ways. Most obviously, the book overturned the notoriously racist Dunning School. In his effort to transform how people thought about the Civil War and Reconstruction—in telling his story “as though Negroes were ordinary human beings”—Du Bois ran headlong into a legion of white historians who worked in lockstep with Columbia University historian William Archibald Dunning and his followers, including Woodrow Wilson. The Dunning School argued that Reconstruction was the most calamitous and corrupt period in the nation’s history because imperialistic Radical Republicans empowered riotous, sub-human blacks to rule over the respectable white South. This racist interpretation, popularized by The Birth of a Nation, the 1915 silent film that rekindled the Ku Klux Klan, functioned as a rationale for stripping southern blacks of citizenship.
Black Reconstruction was revisionist not only for reversing the Dunning School premise that Reconstruction was ruinous—Du Bois believed it had advanced American democracy unlike anything else—but also in its assumption that blacks had agency. Du Bois argued that black slaves emancipated themselves during the Civil War by resisting work on Confederate plantations and by swamping approaching Union lines. This theory of black agency became the historical discipline’s conventional wisdom by the latter decades of the twentieth century, one more demonstration of the fact that Black Reconstruction casts an enormous shadow over American historiography.
Yet another equally important if less discussed aspect of Du Bois’s classic revisionist account is his Marxist exploration of the relationship between capitalism, slavery, and emancipation. In Black Reconstruction, which Du Bois wrote while running a Capital seminar for his graduate students, Du Bois contended that black emancipation was “one of the most extraordinary experiments of Marxism that the world, before the Russian Revolution, had seen.” Such a view was grounded in a Marxist theory of capitalism in relation to slavery. “Black labor,” Du Bois wrote, “became the foundation not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale…” Du Bois was well versed in what Marx had written about slavery: “Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. . . ."
Comments
Post a Comment