Last week, in a post on Truth Social, Donald Trump took the Smithsonian’s museums to task for emphasizing “how bad slavery was.” The White House staff followed up on August 21 with a statement titled “President Trump Is Right About the Smithsonian,” flagging several objectionable exhibits, including one, weirdly, on Anthony Fauci.
Trump is in eminent company. For nearly a century, between the 1860s and the 1950s, defenders of slavery succeeded in creating a dominant narrative in the nation’s textbooks, trying to show that slavery wasn’t so bad and that the real outrage was the abbreviated period of Reconstruction.
The whitewashing of slavery began as early as 1867, with publication of a book by Edward Pollard, titled The Lost Cause. In this account, slavery was mostly a benign system that uplifted Blacks; plantation owners were typically kindly. This echoed a century of antebellum Southern propaganda. Pollard contended that the Civil War was not really about slavery; it was a war over states’ rights.
As public education systems became more widespread in the South after the Civil War, states of the former Confederacy set standards to ensure that textbooks for public schools would portray a sympathetic view. These laws influenced Northern publishers. Meanwhile, some prominent Northern scholars embraced the Lost Cause view. The most notable of these was William Archibald Dunning of Columbia University.
-- Robert Kuttner, "How Bad Slavery Was: Donald Trump joins a long line of apologists for America’s peculiar institution." (THE AMERICAN PROSPECT).
