As the GOP undermines Black political rights in the present, some right-wing intellectuals are rationalizing Black disenfranchisement in the past. EricLevitz writes
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Andrews’s condemnation of contemporary U.S. historiography is almost refreshing for its forthrightness. Unlike some of her ideological bedfellows, Andrews is not trying to veil her wildly reactionary understanding of American racial history behind more respectable concerns; no ill-defined abstractions like “critical race theory” shroud her apologia for white Southern redemption. Yet Andrews is only candid in relative terms.
By contrast, the Dunning School — the dominant school of thought on Reconstruction for most of the 20th century and the one that Andrews implicitly champions — attributes postbellum corruption to Black enfranchisement specifically. In this view, the formerly enslaved simply were not prepared for the rigors of self-government. As voters, freed Blacks’ ignorance left them vulnerable to the depredations of demagogues; as legislators, their lack of civic virtue lent itself to corruption.
Nevertheless, Andrews never spells out her affirmative case for that “more gradual path.” She catalogues Reconstruction’s sins and failures but does not weigh them against those of Jim Crow rule. She laments the South Carolina legislature’s outsize furniture budget but does not explain why she believes this was a greater affront to republican government than Black disenfranchisement.
The South’s relative poverty, persistent into the present day, is not an artifact of Northern tyranny or any other external menace. Rather, it is largely the byproduct of a planter elite that forbade the region from modernizing during the first decades of the industrial revolution. Antebellum Southern elites opposed state and federal investment in education, infrastructure, and agricultural improvement, depriving the region of human and physical capital.
Andrews’s second charge against today’s Reconstruction historiography — that it is rooted less in established facts than in communist propaganda — is scarcely worth dignifying with a counterargument. For one thing, while Foner and Du Bois do indeed belong to the Marxist tradition, there are many, many prominent “revisionist” historians who aren’t fellow travelers.
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