Inquiry Blog #2: Fatalism and Language in Reconstruction Education
Inquiry Blog Post #2: Who Killed Reconstruction?
One of the subtlest but most important parts of teaching history is coming to terms with how we bias students about certain subjects before we even start teaching content. Our framing and word choices can color students’ perceptions of a topic or period in profound ways; consider what a vast difference is effected by calling the Civil War the ‘War Between the States’ (let alone regionally popular choices about Northern aggression). Similarly, while a variety of lesson plans about ‘earned benefits’, ‘welfare’, ‘handouts’, or ‘government assistance’ might all be referring to exactly the same programs, but the language betrays how students should think about the programs before the lesson even gets going.
This problem is particularly apparent when it comes to the topic of Reconstruction in American 10th grade U.S. History classrooms. For many decades Reconstruction has often been framed by words and phrases like “mistake”, “failure”, “doomed”, and “tragedy”.[1] [2] Using these kinds of terms introduces students to a frame or mind in which the collapse of America’s first genuine attempt at multiracial democracy was somehow foreordained, destined to happen. It turns Reconstruction into a parable about the hubris of an overreaching idealism and robs students of a valuable opportunity to engage with its nuances, conflicts, and powers in a way that fosters deeper understanding. To quote the Wisconsin state social studies standards, if we expect students to be able to “analyze significant historical periods and their relationship to present issues and events”[3], then turning a crucial chapter of our nation into a flattened morality play about the hazards of too-rapid social reform is not going to help us achieve that goal.
That’s when we bother to devote adequate time to the topic at all. In my cooperating teacher’s classroom, the textbook delivers only a few pages of content on this period, and he and I discussed how the chronological model of teaching leaves Reconstruction crunched for time around Thanksgiving. The content students receive is often focused too closely only on the perspectives of white Northerners and elites; students are very likely to learn (and then, inevitably, forget) the names ‘Carl Schurz’ and ‘Rutherford B. Hayes’ but much less likely to get a deep dive into the thoughts and actions of freemen in Mississippi or poor Union whites in the South Carolina hill country. As always, one of the goals of any good history teacher must be to include the voices of typically marginalized groups and ensure that their stories are appropriately and productively woven into the broader lesson’s narratives and essential questions.
Videos like the one above can be very useful in getting a good deal of information out to students quickly and in a way that many students find engaging and entertaining. However, it’s important to pair these kinds of shallow-but-broad media with deeper dives into the primary source documents and narratives about Reconstruction. A document-based question can be a good way of achieving this aim — in particular, one which sets up the framing of this issue in a way that sidesteps the usual framing issues outlined above. This one is a particularly good example.
By framing this topic in a much more active way, students are encouraged to begin exploring cause-and-effect questions; not just ‘how did Reconstruction fail’ but ‘who wanted Reconstruction to fail, and why?’. Social studies is a discipline concerned with the actions and habits of human beings, and it’s incumbent upon us as teachers to keep students remembering that human agency was responsible for how history unfolded. We can help solidify this concept by, again, including voices different from those typically emphasized in the curriculum. Not only is it important to include, as noted above, the perspectives of marginalized groups from this time period, but also I think it’s critical to put names and faces to those forces which did choose to sabotage and eventually destroy the project of Reconstruction. The forces behind Reconstruction’s untimely demise are often presented to students as faceless Klansmen or nebulous “racists” or “Southern elites”. The message is brought home with much more force when they read Ben Tillman’s fulmination before the United States Senate that “We of the South have never recognized the right of the Negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.”
This framing also serves as a solid foundation for students to experiment with the counterfactual. Could things have unfolded differently? What conditions, people, or institutions would have to have changed for that to happen? In what ways? Too often we as teachers can fall into the trap of teaching history as a series of just-so stories, dismissing roads-not-taken as impossible or irrelevant. That’s a shame, because students should never view history as something outside of human control. To do so is to engender a sense of fatalism that’s completely contrary to almost all of our objectives as social studies teachers. Students should and must learn history in such a way that reminds them of their own agency, their own power, to shape the history that surrounds them and which will unfold around them as they grow up. If they come to see themselves as simple victims of predetermined forces, then something has gone terribly wrong.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Splendid-Failure-Postwar-Reconstruction-American/dp/1566637392
[2] https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Reconstruction-Failures-Webquest-KKK-Lynching-and-Colfax-Massacre-4348607
[3] SS.Hist3.a.h, https://dpi.wi.gov/sites/default/files/imce/standards/New%20pdfs/2018_WI_Social_Studies_Standards.pdf
