Fables of the Reconstruction

In “The Propaganda of History,” the final chapter of his monumental Black Reconstruction in America (1935), W. E. B. Du Bois cast a withering glare at the historiography of Reconstruction. Noting that there is “scarce a child in the street that cannot tell you that the whole effort was a hideous mistake and an unfortunate incident, based on ignorance, revenge and the perverse determination to attempt the impossible,” Du Bois attributed this childish knowledge to a propagandistic effort “to use history for our pleasure and amusement [and] for inflating our national ego.” This usage, he argued, meant sacrificing the “scientific” nature of history and leaving “no room for the real plot of the story.”

My presentation will focus on that plot qua plot—that is, as possessing distinctively literary properties.   Using a short story, J. W. De Forest’s “The Colored Member” (1872) as a touchstone, I hope to suggest some ways in which literary texts shaped intuitively grasped patterns of knowledge, consolidated particular character types, and conventionalized plot structures that eventually passed for historical truth.  In this sense, the common meaning of fable—as a didactic tale unconstrained by “facts”—subsumed the meaning of “fabula” in narratological theory (as the “reality” of a narrated world prior to its encoding in story form).  In tracing a particular strand of this conversion from story to history, I draw on David Hall’s argument that the world of print is highly selective—“a partial reflection of all that is thought and believed”—to suggest that the highly segregated domain of high-culture magazines also influenced the story of Reconstruction adapted by the Dunning school and lamented by Du Bois.