Words Worth Remembering: W. E. B. Du Bois and Honest History
Since history is human, and since humans are inherently imperfect creatures, it is not rare or unexpected to find humans wanting to distort the past to fit their worldview, to further their interests, and to help them make sense of what they may think is a perverted present age.
To these people, the past is not the land of what once was, complete with all its folly and wisdom, success and failure, goodness and badness, but a place to extract certain things and discard other things, to exploit it for their benefit. History becomes a supremely dishonest endeavor, favoring feeling over fact.
In no area has this proven truer than with the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction, a period encompassing not just the war or its immediate aftermath, but the entire narrative arc of the American eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the reverberations well into the twentieth and twenty-first.
Southern sympathizers like Virginia’s Edward Alfred Pollard were quick to repaint the causes of the Confederacy into something that displayed a thoroughly righteous people fighting for independence, not slavery.
Pollard’s book The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates, published in 1866, became a bestseller in the South. It portrayed the rebellion as noble, slavery as a minimal cause, and even defeat as a great moral victory. Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens later contributed to these myths, erecting a version of history that simply did not exist.
Reconstruction, too, received this revisionism. For decades, it was taught in mainstream academia that Reconstruction was a failure of “Negro rule,” “black supremacy,” and anti-white oppression. Emerson David Fite spoke for this lot—the Dunning School—when he concluded that “Foolish laws were passed by the black law-makers, the public money was wasted terribly and thousands of dollars were stolen straight,” all while “self-respecting Southerners chafed under the horrible regime.”
And so the histories were told for decades. Not until Kenneth Stampp’s The Era of Reconstruction (1965) and Eric Foner’s Reconstruction (1988) did the popular narrative of Reconstruction as “The Tragic Era,” “The Age of Hate,” and “The Dreadful Decade” crumble under the weight of historical facts.
Writing in 1935, before the tides began to turn, W. E. B. Du Bois pushed back against the prevailing view of Reconstruction. In doing so, he struck at the heart of history’s greatest fruit yet greatest problem: revision.
The student of the Dunning School, he wrote, graduated all his schooling “without any idea of the part the black race has played in America; of the tremendous moral problem of abolition; of the cause and meaning of the Civil War and the relation which Reconstruction had to democratic government and the labor movement today.”
The impact of this distorted history has lived on to this day; one cannot visit a former Confederate state without seeing the stars and bars waved, monuments erected to Confederate memory, and literature, universities, and statespeople dedicated to preserving a whitewashed history—not just of the Civil War and Reconstruction, but of America as a tale of unblemished righteousness.
“If history is going to be scientific,” Du Bois wrote, “if the record of human action is going to be set down with that accuracy and faithfulness of detail which will allow its uses as a measuring rod and guidepost for the future of nations, there must be set some standards of ethics in research and interpretation.”
He continued, “If, on the other hand, we are going to use history for our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our national ego, and giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment, then we must give up the idea of history either as a science or as an art using the results of science, and admit frankly that we are using a version of historic fact in order to influence and educate the new generation along the way we wish.”
Du Bois wondered “if any permanent benefit comes to the world through such action,” adding, “Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightening wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all of this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?”
Today, the assault on honest history continues. The president has suggested that we focus too much on “how bad slavery was,” and “nothing about success, nothing about brightness, nothing about the future.” To him, history is a painting of the ideal, not the real. It is what we want to read, see, and hear, and not what is there.
It is a well-documented fact that his most vocal supporters are people who have openly questioned such historical facts as the causes of the Civil War, American slavery and discrimination, the evil of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, the greatness of Winston Churchill, the genocide of the Holocaust, the moon landing, Soviet aggression, the Civil Rights Movement, Putin’s Russia, and countless other painfully, critically documented happenings.
History simply happened. Yes, it’s complex, but that’s because it’s imperfectly human. And it’s necessary precisely because it’s imperfectly human.
Reading history is not necessarily a pleasurable experience: it can crush our worldview, shake our souls, and disturb our minds. We come face-to-face with who we are, not who we wish we were. It’s painful.
History is the wise teacher who tells it like it is, painfully honest with the intent to mold us into people capable of knowing and recognizing truth. It ought to serve no other purpose but to teach us about ourselves and inform our decisions.
By the pain of history comes the peace of wisdom. And when done right, that wisdom informs our souls, our souls inform our actions, and our actions pour out onto the pages that people will read and find less painful in some not-too-distant future where our pursuit of honest history led to a better future.