No doubt many of you have heard about and have bemoaned the requirement imposed by Ron DeSantis and his collaborators on the Florida Department of Education that middle school students learn about the benefits of slavery to the slaves. Lest you imagine that this is merely an expression of the anti-intellectualism of the Trump Republican Party, I thought I would simply lay before you a passage drawn from an early edition of one of the most important college American history textbooks of the 20th century, by those two great establishment historians Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager. In The Growth of the American Republic these distinguished authors write the following:
“If we overlook the original sin of the slave trade, there
was much to be said for slavery as a transitional status between barbarism and civilization.
The negro learned his master’s language, and accepted in some degree his moral
and religious standards. In return he contributed much besides his labor -
music and humor for instance - to American civilization.”
Morison was one of the great figures of the Harvard History
Department. Commager taught it NYU and
Columbia and I knew him during his last years as a distinguished professor at
Amherst College.
12 comments:
Didn't Marx say some nice things about British colonialism in India?
The quotation shows, among other things, that the notion of Africa as "barbaric" still had a hold in some quarters: hence the reference to slavery as "transitional" between barbarism and civilization. African languages and culture are assumed to be "barbaric" whereas the English language and Christianity are assumed to be "civilized."
The only part of the quote that is not completely offensive and absurd by today's standards is the very last sentence. And yet the last sentence reveals the passage's internal contradictions. For if African culture was assumed to be "barbaric," then how could the music and humor that ultimately derived from it have made a contribution to "American civilization"?
The first sentence of the last paragraph is a kind of template for the most grotesque sentiments expressible: 'If we overlook the original sin of genocide, there was much to be said for returning cultivated land to its wild state', etc.--Along with music and humor, 'the negro' 'contributed' to 'American civilization' an incomparable sense of stylistic self-fashioning (as C. L. R. James noted near the end of his life with regard to Kid Creole and the Coconuts), dance, clothing, a distinctively modern kind of resilience, and much else. As Albert Murray put it in The Omni-Americans, every white person wishes they were black on Saturday night.--I wonder whether DeSantis & Co. have thought of the inevitable effects of teachers droning on about the benefits of slavery to middle-schoolers who, if nothing else, come to school armed with sophisticated bullshit detectors. And could it have been lost on even a clueless Harvard professor that 'The negro learned his master's language' invites Caliban's retort?
Professor Wolff --
This is a great reference to be aware of. Was this from their "Growth of the American Republic" or "A Concise History of the American Republic" (or both)?
-- Jim
Sometimes I am "lost in translation" especially when it comes to ironic remarks. I suppose in the case of the two historians this was an ironic comment.
DeSantis... what can one say. The amount of ratinality in the world is apparently very limited, while irrationality seems to have inexhaustible resources to draw upon.
A.K.
It was not an ironic remark at all. That's the point. Historians do not, as a rule, make ironic remarks in this kind of textbook. The edition quoted probably - I'm guessing -- dates from around the 1940s or early 1950s.
The book was first published in 1930, then re-edited many times.
I believe it was the text we used when I was a high school senior and it was quite liberal, pro-New Deal.
That's why I made the comment about Marx on British imperialism above. Attitudes change radically and what was considered kosher for progressive thinkers in 1964, when I was a senior in high school, is now out of bounds.
It's a bit unfair to judge Commager and Morison by the standards of 2023 as it would be to judge Marx by them.
A while ago reading one of Bertand Russell's non-philosophical books I noticed that he referred to Africans as "savages". Today no one vaguely progressive would do that, but let's us recall that Russell was a pioneering progressive and democratic socialist.
I was a high school senior roughly a decade after S. Wallerstein, and had a different U.S. history textbook -- it had about 5 authors, one of whom was John Morton Blum iirc, and Schlesinger Jr. might have been on it too.
If the Morison & Commager was first published in 1930, it would be interesting to know when they changed that language. Presumably by 1964 the language had been altered. Indeed I would be surprised if the language in question survived in the text much beyond 1950. My guess is that RPW discusses this in his 'Autobiography of an Ex-White Man'.
Here's the Wikipedia page for Commager. In the section entitled "criticism", you can see
how the book was criticized for its treatment of slavery and then revised.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Steele_Commager
I've now read that section, which says that Morison "reluctantly" agreed to some changes (though not the removal of references to "Sambo") by 1950. So my guess on the dating of the revisions was just about right -- though it's not rocket science, for sure. But the textbook in its original versions apparently followed the Ulrich Phillips line on slavery and Dunning on its aftermath, with Morison as the author mainly responsible.
If you think that Morison/Commager was bad, here are a couple of links to some of the history textbooks used in the 1950s in Virginia public schools. The principal author of some of these, Francis Simkins, had a PhD in history from Columbia. Among the publishers of these weighty tracts were Scribner’s and McGraw-Hill. I hope that the picture of the plantation owner (or maybe he was just the recruiting agent) greeting just-off-the-boat “workers” is accessible. The text doesn’t say this, but I think the sentiment was that the “workers” didn’t have to worry about lions anymore.
https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/the-virginia-history-and-textbook-commission/
and: https://encyclopediavirginia.org/how-the-negroes-lived-under-slavery/
The passage brings to mind that famous line, "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?"
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