Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History

by James W. Loewen

  Textbook portrayals of Lincoln before he became president concentrate on the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Textbooks devote much space to this series, as well they might. However, they never quote the blatant racism of Stephen A. Douglas. Instead, they leave his views of African Americans vague. Again, this downplays the key moral issue of the day.

  The next chapter will explain why these distortions took over in our textbooks and our culture.

  FOCUSED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  James Oliver Horton gave a lecture, “Slavery and the Coming of the Civil War: A Matter for Interpretation” (nps.gov/history/history/online_books/rthg/chap5.htm, 7/2008), to staff members of the National Park Service around 2001, when they faced the need to tell more than military history at Civil War battlefields.

  Loewen, “South Carolina Defines the Civil War in 1965,” 371–76 of Lies Across America (NYC: Simon & Schuster, 2000), explains why South Carolina would emphasize states’ rights when it put up its state memorial at Gettysburg. Like many other sources, the resulting monument tells more about when it was written (1965) than what it is about (1863).

  David Duncan Wallace, South Carolina: A Short History (Columbia: U of SC P, 1951), especially 527; William C. Davis, The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy (Lawrence: UP of KS, 1996), especially 177–82. Both are acclaimed Southern white historians.15

  CHAPTER 10

  The Nadir

  AN IMPORTANT ERA IN AMERICAN HISTORY goes unnamed and unknown, except in historical monographs read only by graduate students. I refer to the “Nadir of race relations,” which extended from 1890 to about 1940.1 We apply inconsequential labels to parts of this period—Gay Nineties, Roaring Twenties—but except for professional historians, most Americans don’t even learn the name of this much more important epoch.

  During this time, race relations worsened for Native Americans, African Americans, Chinese Americans, and Mexican Americans. Lynchings peaked. African Americans got thrown out of the Major Leagues, the Kentucky Derby, and broader job categories such as mail carrier. In the South, they lost the right to vote. The “sundown town” movement swept the North, resulting in thousands of communities that kept out African Americans (and sometimes Jewish, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, or Native Americans).

  This chapter teaches teachers about the Nadir so they can teach their students. Doing so is important. Indeed, the Nadir is so important that I suggest it should be one of the 30–50 topics that every U.S. history teacher is excited to include. Without knowledge of the Nadir, nonblack students are likely to wonder, “Why are African Americans taking so long to get over slavery? After all, slavery ended in 1863–65. That’s almost a century and a half ago!” Black students, too, may wonder, “Why are we taking so long to get over slavery? Is there something wrong with us?”

  CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE

  A good hook to get students thinking about the Nadir is to ask, Who was the first black baseball player in the Major Leagues? The answer is not Jackie Robinson. Moses Fleetwood Walker was probably first, back in 1884. Then the Nadir set in, and “organized baseball” (major and minor league) banned African Americans by the mid-1890s. Robinson is the first “after the Nadir,” or “in the modern era.” Just dropping the name Moses Fleetwood Walker intrigues students’ curiosity, and they themselves can discover what happened to black players.

  Then ask, “Who was the first jockey inducted into the Jockey Hall of Fame?” The answer, easy to find, is Isaac Murphy, who won the Kentucky Derby three times, in 1884, 1890, and 1891. Murphy was black. The last black jockey to win the Derby, Jimmy Winkfield, who won in both 1901 and 1902 and almost won the following year, is also in the Hall of Fame. One other African American jockey is in the Hall: Willie Simms, who raced between 1887 and 1901. As in baseball, although more gradually, horse racing closed to black jockeys as the Nadir set in. African Americans won 15 of the first 28 Kentucky Derbies, but after 1911, black jockeys were shut out.2 Not just unusual or elite jobs like baseball player or jockey became closed to black people. During the Nadir, in the North as well as the South, whites forced African Americans from skilled occupations like carpenter, government jobs like postal carriers, and even unpleasant manual labor, like steam locomotive fireman.3

  In addition, we shall see that the Nadir has two important legacies that still affect us today: distorted history and residential segregation. The three John Brown portraits in this book comprise an example of distorted history. Showing them to students can spark a discussion: What happened to this man after he died?

  Another way to show what the Nadir did to how Americans live, by race, is to introduce the Index of Dissimilarity (“D”). D provides the most useful single measure of the degree of residential segregation within a metropolitan area.4 When D = 0, integration is perfect: Every census tract has exactly the same racial composition as every other census tract. D of 100 represents complete apartheid: not one black in any white area, not one white in any black area. For values between 0 and 100, D tells the percentage of the smaller group—usually African Americans—that would have to move from disproportionately black areas to white areas to achieve a neutral distribution of both races.

  In 1860, the average Northern city had a D of 45.7—only moderately segregated. If 45.7% of the African Americans in an average city moved to predominantly white neighborhoods, the city would be perfectly integrated. Until the Nadir set in, African Americans shared neighborhoods with working-class whites. Even in middle-class neighborhoods a few black families lived. Neighborhoods were also integrated by social class. Affluent residents wanted to have labor nearby—someone to stoke the coal furnace at 6 a.m. to warm the house for the day—a maid, and maybe a gardener.

  During the Nadir of race relations, these patterns changed dramatically. Now maids and gardeners could take streetcars or buses to get to what were becoming white neighborhoods. Now having a black family on the block, even an affluent black family, reflected badly on whites’ status, implying they did not have the social power to keep out such “riffraff.” By 1940, cities averaged a D of 85. Twenty years later, the average D was an astonishing 88, close to total apartheid. Since 1968, segregation has slowly eased across much of the nation. By 2000, cities averaged 65, but many metropolitan areas still scored above 80, including Detroit and New York City.6

  Many people do not recognize this portrait of John Brown, taken in 1857.5 He looks like a middle-aged businessman. That’s because, when not engaged in a specific action against slavery or in defense of free settlers in Kansas, Brown was a middle-aged businessman. Students can compare this portrait with the illustrations of Brown presented in Chapter 3. John Brown went mad around 1890, as the portrait by John Steuart Curry shows. He was interred in 1859, of course. His madness was more ideological than psychological. After 1890, the United States became so racist that whites could not imagine that a sane white person might go south and ultimately give up his life on behalf of black rights.

  Also beginning in about 1890 and continuing to form until 1968, white Americans barred African Americans from thousands of towns across the United States, especially in the North. These are called “sundown towns,” because some of them posted signs that typically read, “Nigger, Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On You In [town name].” Some communities passed ordinances that barred African Americans after dark or kept them from owning or renting property. Still others used informal means, harassing and even killing African Americans who violated the rule. Some sundown towns kept out Jews, Chinese, Mexicans, Native Americans, and other groups.

  The idea that entire cities could keep out African Americans amazes many people. Students can do research to confirm or disconfirm possible sundown towns in their area. Some communities remain all white even today. So do some neighborhoods. Another legacy of the Nadir is the belief, still held by many people today, that an all-white neighborhood is reason for status, not shame.

  ONSET OF THE NADIR

  Having established the importance of the Nadir, let
us examine this period more closely. Some people mistakenly think that Republicans’ commitment to racial justice ended with the formal end of Reconstruction. This was the so-called Compromise of 1877 that made Rutherford B. Hayes president, “in exchange for” his promise to remove U.S. troops from the South. Although here is not the place to remedy the problem, this analysis is too simple. Hayes did care about black rights in the South, but he knew that if Republicans did not retain the presidency, then black rights would be doomed. Well after Hayes, during the “Fusion era,” from the end of Reconstruction to the 1890s, Republican administrations continued to show at least some concern for the rights of African Americans.

  Three events late in 1890 prompt historians to date the onset of the Nadir precisely at that time. On November 1, 1890, a state convention in Mississippi passed a new constitution with clauses that effectively made it impossible for African Americans to vote or serve on juries. The key clause was that a prospective voter be able to give a “reasonable interpretation” of any clause in the state constitution. “Reasonable” would be left to the judgment of the registrar, invariably a white Democrat. Although not racist at face value, this clause was intended to eliminate black voting. As the president of the constitutional convention put it, “We came here to exclude the Negro. Nothing short of this will answer.”7 Although all this was in direct defiance of the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, the U.S. did nothing. Seeing this, all other Southern states, including even Oklahoma, followed suit by 1907.

  Second, on December 29, 1890, in what used to be called the Battle of Wounded Knee but is now known more accurately as the Wounded Knee Massacre, the U.S. Army opened fire on an encampment of Sioux or Dakota Indians at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Here Native Americans lost the last shards of their independent nationhood and sank into their Nadir period for certain.

  Third, throughout December and into January, Southern Democrats in the U.S. Senate filibustered to death a proposed federal elections bill. It was designed to give the federal government power to curb the “annual autumnal outbreaks”8 of violence during Southern elections. Democrats had defeated civil rights measures in the past, of course, and when they did, they tried to tar Republicans as “nigger lovers.” In past years, Republicans had responded that African Americans had a right to vote in peace. In 1891, however, made uncomfortable by the charge, Republicans replied by moving on to other issues. African Americans now found themselves without political allies for the first time since the Civil War.

  By the way, the onset of the Nadir provides a fine opportunity to contrast historical contingency with chronological ethnocentrism. The Nadir was hardly foreordained. The House had already passed the voting bill, and if the Senate had followed suit, Republican president Benjamin Harrison would have signed it into law. Armed with this new law, federal marshals and judges would have been more able to preserve black voting rights across the South. Then Republicans would have won more congressional and statewide elections. Certainly they would have been less defensive about having supported this measure, since it would have been a success, at least in the Congress. In short, Republicans would not have abandoned African Americans, at least not in 1891, and would have had a triumph to point to, rather than a defeat, in the 1892 election. Thus, the Nadir itself need not and might not have occurred. Things might have turned out quite differently.

  Writing after 1890, historians and sociologists treated the reimposition of white supremacy as “natural.” In his famous book Folkways, published in 1906, sociologist William Graham Sumner wrote,

  The mores of the South were those of slavery in full and satisfactory operation…. Emancipation in the South was produced by outside force against the mores of the whites there. The consequence has been forty years of economic, social, and political discord.9

  To Sumner, the disturbance of the racial hierarchy between 1864 and 1890 was the problem, not its reestablishment. Writing in 1964, historian John K. Bettersworth still echoed this thinking in his high school Mississippi history textbook:

  Slavery was gone, but the problem of the free former slaves was not…. Yet by 1875 the old political order had returned, and white and black people set about the task of getting along together in the “New South” as they had in the “Old.”10

  When historians and sociologists write as if the racial hierarchy set in 1890 (and to some degree in 1875) was natural, rather than something to be explained, this helps to maintain the status quo. Doing so implies that African Americans, not racism, were “the problem,” as Bettersworth put it. Such faulty analysis then became part of the Nadir itself, bolstering the ideology of racism, along with eugenics, Social Darwinism, and other intellectual currents of the time.

  HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

  Antiracist idealism had largely been spawned by the Civil War. During the war, the United States found itself fighting not only to hold the country together, but also to end slavery. As early as 1862, U.S. troops were going into battle singing “Battle Cry of Freedom” and “John Brown’s Body.” Cognitive dissonance, our old friend from Chapter 3, helps explain why. On the ground, the U.S. armed forces effectively ended or threatened slavery everywhere they went, especially everywhere they won. After Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, ending slavery became a formal goal of the United States. It is hard to risk one’s life doing a job that is ending slavery, without coming to the conclusion that ending slavery is a good thing. As racism was the ideological handmaiden of slavery, so antiracism was the ideological handmaiden of emancipation.

  Moreover, especially in the western theater and then on Sherman’s march through Georgia and up through the Carolinas, white soldiers found themselves relying upon black civilians for food and water, knowledge of the terrain, information about the Confederates, and support services like doing laundry and digging fortifications. Black soldiers soon entered the picture as well. Beginning in May 1863, at Port Hudson, Louisiana, they showed that they would fight at least as well as white soldiers. After that battle, a New York soldier wrote home:

  They charged and re-charged and didn’t know what retreat meant. They lost in their two regiments some 400 men as near as I can learn. This settles the question about niggers not fighting well. They, on the contrary, make splendid soldiers and are as good fighting men as any we have.11

  The antiracism of this quotation, magnified by a million other reports home, led directly to the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. In 1866, Congress declared that “citizens of every race and color … shall have the same right … to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property.” When President Andrew Johnson and the Democrats tried to win the 1866 congressional elections by attacking Republicans for such measures, the result was a historic landslide for the Republicans.

  UNDERLYING CAUSES OF THE NADIR OF RACE RELATIONS

  What prompted the erosion of this antiracist majority? What caused race relations to deteriorate so badly after 1890? Of course, many white Northerners—especially Democrats—had never been persuaded that white supremacy was wrong. Moreover, by 1890, memories of the war had dimmed. Only one American in three was old enough even to have been alive when it started. Millions more had immigrated to the United States after the war’s end and had played no role in it. The sheer passage of time took its toll on antiracist idealism. In addition, three underlying causes explain why racism triumphed at the end of 1890. I call these “the three I’s.”

  First came the continuing Plains Indian Wars. Whites discovered gold on Indian land in Colorado, Dakota Territory, and elsewhere. If they had done so on white-owned land, or black-owned land (after the 14th Amendment passed in 1868), they would have had to talk with the owners—paid them, licensed it, made some deal. Not so on American Indian land. They just moved in and took it, and when the Ute or Dakota Indians attacked them, the army was called out to put down the Indians. To maintain that all people should enjoy equal rights without regard to race—except
Native Americans—is not easy. As William Graham Sumner famously observed, “The mores tend toward consistency.” If it is OK to take Indians’ land because they aren’t white, why isn’t it OK to deny rights to African Americans, who aren’t white, either?

  Second, immigrants posed a continuing problem for Republican antiracists. The issue first surfaced in the West. There, white miners and fishers were competing with Chinese immigrants and hating them for it. Republicans tried to stand up for the immigrants’ rights, but whites rioted and forced Chinese from jobs, neighborhoods, and entire towns in the 1870s. Republicans, who had controlled all three of California’s congressional seats in 1870, barely held on to one of (now) four by 1874. So party leaders distanced themselves from Chinese rights. Again, if it is OK to take Chinese Americans’ jobs because they aren’t white, why isn’t it OK to deny rights to African Americans, who aren’t white either?

  In the East, Republicans faced an immigrant problem that was both different and the same. Try as they might, they could not seem to win many votes from among the new immigrants from Italy, Poland, Russia, and other countries who were rapidly becoming naturalized citizens. There were two reasons for this. First, the Republicans were beginning to flirt with prohibition. You do not win the Italian American vote by coming out against wine, nor the Polish American vote by coming out against beer. Second, the Democrats’ continued white supremacy appealed to new European immigrants who were competing with African Americans for jobs at the wharves, in the kitchens, on the railroads, and in the mines. Some Republicans converted to a more racist position to win these white ethnic votes. Others, including the Henry Cabot Lodge, the Massachusetts congressman who had sponsored the 1890 elections bill, grew disgusted with “ethnic Americans” and helped found the Immigration Restriction League. Again, if it is OK to keep out Southern and Eastern Europeans because they are considered inferior to WASPs, why isn’t it OK to deny rights to African Americans, also considered inferior?12