<i>Teaching White Supremacy: America's Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity</i> . By Donald Yacovone

Donald Yacovone surveys the historical writing that shaped the minds of young Americans from the early 19th century to the present day, focusing on U.S. history textbooks in particular. Yacovone argues that educational writers and publishers didn't simply present the past in ways that elevated representations of white Americans over others. Rather, he finds that for much of our nation's history, these books, which were the educational building blocks for generations of young Americans, explicitly “crafted whiteness as a national inheritance,” framing white supremacy as necessary for “the social construction of American life” and the preservation of the nation's “democratic institutions and values” (xiv).Yacovone introduces the reader to a remarkable array of texts. Focusing on introductory, intermediate, and advanced-level schoolbooks, Yacovone analyzes them alongside the work on which these textbooks drew, including the writings of racial theorists, social commentators, politicians, poets, eugenicists, and the work of professional historians. He shows that history textbooks functioned as a kind of cultural mortar for the citizenry by teaching a broadly consistent narrative about the nation's past to each successive generation. Never static, this narrative remained deeply imbricated with ongoing processes of political and cultural change.At the same time, however, Yacovone shows how key aspects of this narrative remained consistent. He finds that for most of the period he surveys, people of African descent rarely made an appearance in the country's schoolbooks. When they did, textbooks “presented Blacks as a foreign, repellent element, an unwanted presence, a necessary evil, or a threat,” and a persistent problem for the nation to solve (xx). Although there were some exceptions to this rule, slavery was usually characterized as a civilizing institution for people of African descent that benefited the entire nation. By the beginning of the 20th century, “the standard interpretation” of slavery, Reconstruction, and the Civil War, Yacovone finds, characterized abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison as “fevered fanatic[s]” who instigated an “entirely unnecessary” war on the south (190–196). In this telling, Reconstruction was a period of corruption and plunder of the south by northern carpetbaggers who manipulated former slaves who, by virtue of their race, lacked the capacity for freedom. The Reconstruction-era enfranchisement of Black men, meanwhile, was characterized as a crime against the south while the Ku Klux Klan's violence against African Americans was framed as a heroic campaign to restore the natural order. Together, Yacovone argues, these representations of the past served as a powerful cautionary tale for the nation's youth, one that underscored the necessity of white political rule for current and future generations of Americans.While historians have long assessed the role that the professional historians like those of the Dunning School and novelists like Thomas Dixon, Jr., played in the popularization of these representations of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, Yacovone wants to impress upon the reader the north's culpability in the creation of these ideas. With this in mind, Yacovone argues that northern authors, editors, and publishing houses played an outsized role in the dissemination of works of history, placing them in the service of arguments for white rule. Thus, throughout Teaching White Supremacy, northern print culture and intellectuals from places like Massachusetts, Maine, Illinois, and California all take center stage.Yacovone begins in the early 19th century, showing how an array of northern writers and publishers—particularly those in New York City's newspaper industry—routinely expressed rhetoric that either explicitly argued for white superiority or effectively endorsed ideas about Black inferiority. Some of the figures discussed, such as Daniel Webster, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Charles and Mary Beard, will be familiar to most readers. But other figures will not be. Of particular note is Yacovone's discussion of writer and publisher John H. Van Evrie. Yacovone describes Van Evrie as “the nation's first professional racist,” someone who “worked tirelessly to permanently bind white supremacy to the nation's democratic ethos” (40). Yacovone asserts that Van Evrie's reach was extraordinary, saying that “without exaggeration, virtually any American who read a newspaper from 1858 to 1879 likely had seen one of his publications, a review of his work, or an advertisement” for his many publications (47). As Yacovone puts it, it was both Van Evrie's insistence that southern slavery was benign and his impassioned argument that Black subjugation was necessary for white democracy that shaped democratic party politics in New York and Ohio. Yacovone finds that Van Evrie's discourse influenced key architects of the “Lost Cause” mythology like Edward A. Pollard. Characterizing Van Evrie “as the ideological spindle on which the pre-and post-Civil War eras swirled,” Yacovone analyzes the ways that 20th-century eugenicists like Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant built upon and modernized Van Evrie's white supremacist political discourse. He finds that “subsequent popular histories and schoolbooks at all grade levels, with few exceptions, continually reaffirmed” this scientific racism “in classrooms across the United States” until the middle of the 20th century (236–237).Despite the prevalence of these narratives, Yacovone demonstrates there was also a persistent Emancipationist intellectual counternarrative waiting in the wings. Immediately after the Civil War, abolitionists like Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote history books that promoted an emancipationist interpretation of the past. In subsequent decades, Black American scholars offered vigorous rebuttals to the dominant scholarly narrative, with scholars like W.E.B. DuBois, Carter G. Woodson, and John Hope Franklin publishing work that not only told the story of slavery in all its complexity, but framed Reconstruction as a missed opportunity for the expansion of democracy rather than a misguided experiment or act of revenge against an innocent South. In their hands, people of African descent were agents of history, rather than problems to be dealt with, suppressed, or otherwise ignored. In the context of World War II, the Cold War and the civil rights movement, their meticulous scholarship provided a basis upon which new generations of American historians challenged and reframed the white supremacist narratives favored by previous generations. At the same time, however, narratives of white supremacy have remained stubbornly persistent. In a sobering epilogue, Yacovone shows that the old narratives popularized during the 19th and early 20th centuries continue to circulate today. For example, contemporary “schoolbooks by evangelical publishers” address the origins of slavery and antebellum slavery with a “description differs little from that of the 1950s” (315).There is so much to admire in this book. It is meticulously researched and comprehensive in its scope. Ultimately, Teaching White Supremacy tells a riveting story about the dissemination of some of the United States’ most persistent and troubling ideas about race, nation, and belonging. In the process, Yacovone reminds us that those who craft the most popular narratives about the nation's history play an essential role in defining the contours of American culture.