Teaching White Supremacy by Donald Yacovone

Author:Donald Yacovone [Yacovone, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

“Slaves at home, after the day’s work was over. Negroes always have been fond of singing and dancing; and the banjo has been a favorite musical instrument with them.” Hanson Booth, illustration from Fremont P. Wirth, The Development of America (1937), p. 352.

While few readers today recall Wirth’s books, the same can hardly be said of the works of two twentieth-century titans of the historical profession, Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager. Most students of American history from the 1930s to the 1970s in some way were touched by either one. Morison crafted some of the most influential studies of American colonial history ever written, including a biography of Columbus, a two-volume history of the European exploration of the New World, a maritime history of Massachusetts, an account of Puritan intellectual life, a biography of John Paul Jones, and a multivolume history of Harvard University, where he was the last professor to commute to work on horseback. He also compiled the fifteen-volume History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, published between 1947 and 1962. In all, he published more than two dozen titles and countless essays and pamphlets—a heroic achievement by any standard. For his part, Commager, who spent most of his career at Columbia University and Amherst College, published a similar number of books—and hundreds of essays and reviews—including documentary collections and historical studies, from a biography of the abolitionist Theodore Parker to a study of the Enlightenment in Europe and America and an intellectual history of the United States. While at Columbia, he also mentored graduate students who would become the country’s leading constitutional scholars.

In 1930 the two authors jointly published The Growth of the American Republic, a college-level textbook—sometimes used in high schools—that saw its fifth edition in 1962. In the 1950s, it still earned from $10,000 to $12,000 a year in royalties—perhaps equivalent to $100,000 in modern currency—making it one of the nation’s most successful schoolbooks ever. In its discussion of slavery, it referred to the contradiction of a people who claimed allegiance to “natural rights” yet also held slaves, but in other respects it did not differ from the most malignant discussions in legions of other texts. “As for Sambo, whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears,” they wrote, “there is some reason to believe that he suffered less than any class in the South from its ‘peculiar institution.’ The majority of slaves were adequately fed, well cared for, and apparently happy. Competent observers,” the two held, placing their considerable prestige behind their words, “reported that they performed less labor than the hired man of the northern states.” Relying on the account of slavery in Edward Channing’s 1921 U.S. history rather than on any of the more than two hundred published slave narratives, much less plantation records, Morison and Commager assured students that masters cared for their property and that the “faithful darky” repaid his owner with grateful loyalty. “Topsy and Tom Sawyer’s nigger Jim were nearer to

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