 Hi, Professor Gerald Friedman, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts. And we have to say to continue our discussion of the historiography of slavery, changing interpretations of American slavery by American historians. Last time we finished with Oryk Phillips, the most important historian of the first half of the 20th century, well into the later part of the 20th century. But as late as the mid-1970s, Phillips' classic, American Negro Slavery, the book where he argues that slavery was good, the best system yet devised to educate a primitive peoples in the way of civilization, that book was still being used in American history courses in the University of Texas, the University of Alabama, the University of Mississippi. If you wonder about some of the political leadership we have coming from the South, white Southerners, it may help a little bit if you understand that they were brought up on Phillips on the idea that blacks are innately inferior and born to be slaves. Indeed slavery was good because it protects them. Now this view, which justified slavery, justifies segregation, Jim Crow and white rule, justifies white racism, justifies the Ku Klux Klan. This view came up for challenge in the 1940s and 50s after World War II, where the United States fought against an openly racist political regime, Nazi Germany. War II, you could say, Nazi Germany and fascist Japan. After having defeated the Nazis and tried many of their leaders for crimes against humanity, including the slaughter of millions of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, etc., the American soldiers who came back and the American ideologues and intellectuals who would criticize Germany came back to a country that was committed to segregation and racism. That didn't go very well. So soon after World War II, we began to roll back institutional racism in the United States. 1947, desegregation of baseball in America's national pastime, 1954, Brown versus Board of Education, capping a series of Supreme Court decisions undermining the judicial foundations of segregation and Jim Crow. At the same time, historians began to write, to reinterpret slavery and he is one of the trends that we want to talk about. In particular, Kenneth Stam's book, The Peculiar Institution, published in 1955 to a scathing critical review in the American Historical Review. Stam's book became the Bible of the civil rights generation, carried on those buses carrying freedom riders throughout the South. Stam's book argued that slavery was bad. Blacks are equal to whites. Slavery put them down unfairly. Slaves fought back by undermining the production process and being unproductive workers. Slave owners made a profit off the slaves. They were able to profit off the slaves labor despite the low productivity of Southern slave labor because they fed the slaves so poorly and treated them so badly. That's the book that became the Bible of the civil rights generation and was, Kenneth Stam himself was one of the intellectual godfathers of the civil rights movement. Widely revered and respected. The second trend in historiography in the 1950s and 60s was the rise of economic history or cleometrics. The application of new statistical techniques and economic theory to understanding history. Cleometricians were young, brash, arrogant, proud of themselves, proud of their tools, masters of computers, comfortable with statistical tests. We're talking about t-statistics, chi-squared distributions, etc. And they looked down on historians who didn't understand statistics, didn't understand economic history. You put these together, economics and statistics, you get cleometrics and you get Robert Fogel and Stanley Engelman's book, Time on the Cross. This was one of the most widely read and reviewed books in American history. Published in 1974, front page news in the New York Times. Fogel and Engelman went on the Today Show. They received, their book received not just one but two reviews in the New York Review of Books. The first favorable, the second critical. Their book was based on serious quantitative analysis of thousands of slave plantations, tens of thousands of slaves. And it is a bizarre book. Two books were written attacking it, Reckoning with Slavery by other cleometricians and Slavery in the Numbers Game by Herbert Gutman. The book sold very well. Time on the Cross sold over 250,000 copies within two years. It reports dramatic findings. Books written in this tone of excitement and drama. We found these things. We didn't want to find them but we did. We found that slave labor was productive. We found that slaves were, slave labor was profitable. We found the slave owners were making money off the slaves and there's no sign that slavery was going to die out on its own. I mean these are exciting dramatic findings and the ones I just gave you all have been pretty well supported. Slave labor was profitable. A very high rate of return. That I think is nowadays received wisdom. It's accepted. Everybody in the stands. Phillips was wrong. The slave owners were in it to make a profit and they made big profits. They got rich off the labor of the black slaves. Slave labor was productive. That is pretty well accepted nowadays. Slave labor was more productive than free labor. 35% or so more productive. The exact number doesn't even really matter. The slaves were productive. What does that mean? Fogel and Angamon get confused at that point. They go to great lengths to try to argue the bizarre claim contrary to Stamp who they criticize viciously. There's a hundred page essay in the second volume of Tom and the Cross critical of Stamp's methodology. Fogel and Angamon aren't criticizing Stamp because they are pro-slavery or pro-segregation. Now Fogel and Angamon were both lefty liberals. Fogel had been the head of the Youth Division of the Communist Party of the United States. Angamon is a good traditional Jewish liberal from Brooklyn. No. They were trying to advance that claim that Cleometrix is a better way of doing history. So they took on one of the most important historical works of the 1950s and 60s as an example of how traditional history is bad. That's not how people saw it. What they saw is Fogel and Angamon arguing slavery is productive contrary to Stamp. Slaves are fairly well treated contrary to Stamp. And Fogel and Angamon don't like Stamp. They conclude that Fogel and Angamon are on the side of the slave owners. Not an unreasonable conclusion if you're part of the double negative. And Fogel and Angamon walked right into that one because they themselves go on in the book. Any fair-minded reading of Tom and the Cross will conclude that Fogel and Angamon are arguing that slaves worked hard because they were given positive incentives to work hard. They were given rewards and they worked hard in response to those rewards. They de-emphasize whippings. They go to great lengths to argue that the slaves were well treated. The families are not separated by sales. They were fed well, housed better than urban workers in New York City. Kind of bad standard. My grandfather lived in a little hovel. It's like on the lower east side. So, yeah. But that's the point. Fogel and Angamon go to great lengths and kind of twist the data around. They argue slaves weren't whipped a lot by counting the number of whippings and dividing it by the number of slaves and saying, see, the average slave was only whipped 0.7 times per year. Well, you have a plantation of 150 slaves. You're getting one whipping every two or three days. Which number is more relevant? Actually, I think a Fair-Monded Observer would conclude the second. Worse, the Fair-Monded Observer would ask, why would you want to interpret every bit of evidence to show that the slaves were well treated? Unless your point is that the slaves worked hard because they were well treated. A point that Fogel and Angamon insist they weren't making, except that's why any Fair-Monded Observer will read the book. We'll conclude that. Fogel wrote another book after Time on the Cross without consent of contract where he comes right out and says slaves worked hard because they were whipped a lot. Fine. That book came out big thud. Nobody, you know, it was reviewed and hardly anybody ever mentions it. I don't require it for this course because it's a boring book. It says what we all know. Time on the Cross is more exciting because it's wrong. Thank you. Have a good day. Bye-bye.