seemed tragic. It invited them to doubt their own capability, since their race
had “messed up” in its one appearance on American history’s center stage. It
also invited them to conclude that it is only right that whites be always in
control. Yet my students had merely learned what their textbooks had taught
them. Like almost all Americans who finished high school before the 1970s,
they had encountered the Confederate myth of Reconstruction in their American
history classes. I, too, learned it from my college history textbook. John F.
Kennedy and his ghostwriter retold it in their portrait of L.Q.C. Lamar in
Profiles in Courage, which won the Pulitzer Prize.
Compared to the 1960s, today’s textbooks have vastly improved their
treatments of Reconstruction. All but four of the eighteen textbooks I surveyed
paint a very different picture of Reconstruction from Gone With the Wind.^63
No longer do histories claim that federal troops controlled Southern society for
a decade or more. Now they point out that military rule ended by 1868 in all
but three states. No longer do they say that allowing African American men to
vote set loose an orgy of looting and corruption. The 1961 edition of Triumph
of the American Nation condemned Republican rule in the South: “Many of the
‘carpetbag’ governments were inefficient, wasteful, and corrupt.” In stark
contrast, the 1986 edition explains that “The southern reconstruction
legislatures started many needed and long overdue public improvements...
strengthened public education... spread the tax burden more equitably...
[and] introduced overdue reforms in local government and the judicial
system.” Among the newest textbooks, only Boorstin and Kelley still calls
Congressional Reconstruction a “vindictive act that turned the states into
conquered provinces.”
Like their treatment of slavery, most textbooks’ new view of Reconstruction
represents a sea change, past due, much closer to what the original sources for
the period reveal, and much less dominated by white supremacy. The
improvements have continued since the first edition of Lies appeared in 1995.
Textbooks of the 1980s and early 1990s inadvertently still took a white
supremacist viewpoint. Their rhetoric made African Americans rather than
whites the “problem” and assumed that the major issue of Reconstruction was
how to integrate African Americans into the system, economically and
politically. “Slavery was over,” said The American Way. “But the South was
ruined and the Blacks had to be brought into a working society.” Blacks were
already working, of course. One wonders what the author thinks they had been