Carl N. Degler

Slavery and the Genesis of American Race Prejudice

Over a century ago, Tocqueville named slavery as the source of the American prejudice against the Negro. Contrary to the situation in antiquity, he remarked: “Among the moderns the abstract and transient fact of slavery is fatally united with the physical and permanent fact of color.” Furthermore, he wrote, though “slavery recedes” in some portions of the United States, “the prejudice to which it has given birth is immovable”. More modern observers of the American past have also stressed this causal connection between the institution of slavery and the color prejudice of Americans. Moreover, it is patent to anyone conversant with the nature of American slavery, particularly as it functioned in the nineteenth century, that the impress of bondage upon the character and future of the Negro in the United States has been both deep and enduring.

American Political Parties and the Rise of the City: An Interpretation

THE ending of Reconstruction in 1877 deprived both Republican and Democratic parties of the issues that had sustained their rivalry for half a century. As a result, in the presidential elections from 1876 to 1892, neither party won decisively; never before nor since has popular political inertia been so noticeable. More important, this indecision of the voters obscured the significant fact that the Republican party was popularly weak. For despite the preponderance of Republican presidents during these years, only James A. Garfield secured a popular plurality and his was the smallest in history. The partys weak popular base was even more evident in the congressional elections between 1874 and 1892 when the Democrats captured sizable majorities in the House of Representatives in eight out of ten Congresses.2 So serious was this popular weakness of the party that Republican Presidents from Rutherford B. Hayes to Benjamin Harrison, as both Vincent P. De Santis and Stanley P. Hirshson have shown, worked in a variety of ways to build up a stronger Republican party in the South, but with very limited success.3

Remaking American History

There is a double purpose in my title. First of all, it is intended to suggest what I think historians actually do-that is, remake the past, a subject about which I will have more to say later. The title is intended also to suggest what has happened to American history. For the theme of my talk is the changes that have occurred in American history over the last thirty-five years, that is, since the end of World War H. That date also happens to coincide with my own entrance into graduate study in American history at Columbia University. Thus what I have to say will inevitably have a personal flavor to it; yet, even without that personal connection to the period, I think all will agree that those years have indeed witnessed a rather profound reshaping of American history. Surely the most conspicuous remaking of the profession has been the alteration in the historians themselves. During the 1940s very few blacks were to be seen at historical conventions. This was true even though ever since the middle 1930s this organization and the American Historical Association, in order to enable black members of the associations to eat and sleep in the convention hotels, no longer met in any cities of the South, The Southern Historical Association, however, did not have that option if it was going to meet in its own region, for until the early 1960s there was no city in the South that would permit black and white members to eat together or to be housed in the same hotel. Women members never numbered more than a handful at any convention I attended in the 1950s or even in the early 1960s, although in earlier years each of the three major historical organizations in the country had elected at least one woman president. The primary force behind the shift from that situation to the healthy mixture of races and genders that we have today has been the alteration in the content of American history. I am not referring to changes in interpretations of the past, but to changes in the boundaries of the past, in the definition of what constitutes American history. When I began graduate school soon after leaving

Slavery in Brazil and the United States: An Essay in Comparative History

OVER twenty years ago Frank Tannenbaum made a comparison of slavery in the societies of the New World in which he argued that the differences in contemporary race relations between the United States and Latin America are to be traced to differences in the character of slavery in the two places. A decade later Stanley Elkins built a provocative book upon Tannenbaums conclusions. More recently, Arnold Sio and David Brion Davis entered strong demurrers to the Tannenbaum-Elkins conclusions by arguing that slavery as an institution was more similar than different throughout the societies of the New World. These and a number of other writings on the comparative history of slavery in the Western Hemisphere attest to a burgeoning scholarly interest. But throughout the debate one of the prominent difficulties has been the great breadth and diversity of the areas being compared. To make convincing comparisons among some two dozen societies presents obvious problems and is open to the dangers of superficiality. It is the intention here, therefore, to draw a much more restricted comparison, not because the large problem that Tannenbaum raised will finally be resolved by such a limited approach, but simply because two countries are more manageable as variables than two continents. It is also worth noting that Brazil and the United States have the advantage of being the two most important slave societies in the New World. Both had a long history of slavery-only Cuba and Brazil retained slavery longer than the United Statesand in both societies slavery occupied an important, if not actually a central, place in the economy.2

What Crisis, Jon?

At the outset, I need to confess that I was an anonymous referee for this piece when it was originally submitted to this journal a couple of years ago. At that time I recommended that it not be published without substantial revision because it omitted too much from the changing historiography of the sixties and seventies and was too uncritical of radical history. Even now, after revision, the article remains too celebratory of radical history to have a place in a scholarly journal; its proper niche is in a journal of opinion, where balance and critical judgment are not expected. Nevertheless, I welcome the editors invitation to comment on the larger question of the professions receptivity to new, or more precisely radical, ideas or interpretations. As I read Jon Wieners article, I found two different issues being discussed interchangeably. One is the reaction of the university system in the United States to radical historians. The other is the reaction of the historical profession as a whole, not simply some of its leaders, to radical history between 1958 and 1980. The first question concerns the treatment of certain individuals, particularly Eugene Genovese and Staughton Lynd, who were harassed or denied posts because of their political views, principally on issues of American foreign policy and almost exclusively because of their activities outside the classroom or research library. Lynd left the profession as a result; Genovese remains a major factor within it. But those cases, and others like them to which Wiener refers, constitute an important but different question from that which David Thelen has charged us to discuss: How have new or radical or nontraditional ideas or approaches been received by the profession, and do those past receptions suggest that we, as a profession, need to rethink or revise our reactions to dissenting or innovative conceptions? Wiener contends that before the radical historians came on the scene, Marxism and other radical approaches to the past were largely absent from the academy. Then, thanks to a transformation in the outlook of the profession in the course of the social dissent and cultural rebellions of the 1960s and early 1970s, radical history received a wide and largely welcome hearing from the profession. I have no quarrel with Wieners conclusion that changes in the general climate of ideas or values are at the root of significant changes in interpretive approaches to the past. I have lived through at least two such alterations, both of which have profoundly reshaped our conception of the past: the recognition of blacks and of

Starr on Slavery

Chester G. Starrs recent article in the Journal (March 1958), “An Overdose of Slavery,” does a fine job of showing that people other than slaves worked in antiquity, but it leaves hanging the crucial question regarding the place of slavery in the economy of the ancient world. Moreover, Starr enters a strong plea against comparing ancient and modern slavery. These two aspects of his paper I think merit some further comment.