III. American History According to Eric Foner

Altogether, then, it seems fair to say that Zinn's very successful People's History of the United States conveys much the same vision of American diplomatic history that one finds in Gore Vidal's American Chronicle novels and the works of the revisionist historians. Nor is Zinn's text the only current text that does this to one extent or another. Consider, as a case in point, Give Me Liberty! An American History by Eric Foner, published by W. W. Norton and Company in 2005.

Foner (born 1943) was a classic red diaper baby. "Shortly before I was born," he writes, in an autobiographical essay included in his book Who Owns History?,

my father, Jack D. Foner, and uncle, Philip S. Foner, both historians at City College in New York, were among some sixty faculty members dismissed from teaching positions at the City University after informers named them as members of the Communist party at hearings of the state legislature's notorious Rapp-Coudert Committee, a precursor of McCarthyism.

The Rapp-Coudert Committee had been established a year earlier to investigate "subversive activities" in New York public schools, colleges, and universities. On the same day his father and his uncle lost their jobs, another uncle, Moe Foner, who worked in the CONY registrar's office, lost his. Still another uncle, Henry Foner, a New York City high school teacher, was questioned by the committee but allowed to keep his job. "A few years later," Eric Foner tells us in Who Owns History?, "my mother was forced to resign from her job as a high school art teacher. During my childhood and for many years afterward, my parents were blacklisted and unable to teach."⁴³⁸

Eric Foner earned both his B.A. and his Ph.D. in history during the 1960s at that hotbead of revisionism, where Charles Beard had taught and Harry Elmer Barnes had studied, Columbia University. His first book, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War, was published in 1970. He went on to publish many more books and articles and to hold down the presidencies of both the Organization of American Historians (1993-1994) and the American Historical Association (2000). Peter Novick sees Foner as one of the "New Left historians," but as part of "the second wave" of that movement. The sensibility of the first wave "had been shaped in the fifties," while the second, in which Foner was "prominent," was characterized by "a countercultural sensibility." Moreover, the members of this second wave "were more likely than those in the previous group to have an activist orientation."⁴³⁹

As we have seen, the New Left Historians of the first wave looked on the U.S. Civil War as a sectional conflict with principally economic origins and not as a holy war against the moral evil of slavery. They tended to view Abraham Lincoln as a power-lusting tyrant, bent more on creating an invincible, centralized American State than on freeing slaves. Foner begs to differ. "The attack on Fort Sumter," he writes, "crystal-ised in Northern minds the direct conflict between freedom and slavery that abolitionists had insisted upon for decades. The war, as Frederick Douglass recognized as early as 1862, merged 'the cause of the slaves and the cause of the country.'" Nor was Lincoln's conduct of the war overly high-handed. Foner acknowledges that an "intense new nationalism made criticism of the war effort—or of the policies of the Lincoln administration—seem to Republicans equivalent to treason." He acknowledges that during the war years "[a]rbitrary arrests numbered in the thousands. They included opposition newspaper editors, Democratic politicians, individuals who discouraged enlistment in the army, and ordinary civilians like the Chicago man briefly imprisoned for calling the president a 'damned fool.'" He acknowledges that Lincoln "twice suspended the writ [of habeas corpus] throughout the entire Union for those accused of 'disloyal activities.'" He acknowledges that Lincoln had Clement Vallandigham, a Democratic Ohio Congressman "known for his blistering antiwar speeches," brought up on charges of treason before a military court, and, following his "conviction," had him deported to the Confederacy. Yet Foner concludes that "Lincoln was not a despot. Most of those arrested were quickly released, the Democratic press continued to flourish, and contested elections were held throughout the war."⁴⁴⁰

Somehow all the very same sorts of repressive and unconstitutional behavior became much more objectionable half a century later, however, when they were being committed by Democratic politicians in the Wilson administration. "More than any other individual," Foner reminds us, "Woodrow Wilson articulated [...] the conviction that [...] greater worldwide freedom would follow inevitably from increased American investment and trade abroad. Frequently during the twentieth century, this conviction would serve as a mask for American power and self-interest." And the masquerade began early on in the century. "American involvement in World War I," Foner writes,

provided the first great test of Wilson's belief that American power could "make the world safe for democracy." Most Progressives embraced the country's participation in the war, believing that the United States could help to spread Progressive values throughout the world. But rather than bringing Progressivism to other peoples, the war destroyed it at home. The government quickly came to view critics of American involvement not simply as citizens with a different set of opinions, but as enemies of the very ideas of democracy and freedom. As a result, the war produced one of the most sweeping repressions of the right to dissent in all of American history.⁴⁴¹

A few pages on, and the superlatives are applied without further recourse to such sickly, wishy-washy phrases as "one of the most." A few pages on, and it's a flat out certainty that "the war inaugurated the most intense repression of civil liberties the nation has ever known." Look at the case of Eugene Debs: sentenced to ten years in prison in 1918 at the age of 63 for the "crime" of speaking out publicly against the war. Even "[a]fter the war's end, Wilson rejected the advice of his attorney general that he commute Debs's sentence. [...] It was left to Wilson's successor, [Republican] Warren G. Harding, to release Debs from prison in 1921."⁴⁴²

The moral of the story seems clear. It is an intolerable affront to constitutional principles if a spokesman for a self-evidently righteous cause like keeping America out of a World War is silenced by government; it is no big deal if a spokesman for a self-evidently evil cause like protecting slave owners from getting their just desserts is silenced by government. Eugene V. Debs is a martyr to the cause of American freedom; Clement Vallandigham—well, it's too bad that he wasn't among those who were "quickly released"—most of those who were arrested were quickly released, you know, and just because one slips through the net here and there doesn't make Lincoln a despot. Freedom of speech, maybe the whole First Amendment, is for the politically correct, not the politically incorrect.

Still, Foner's treatment of World War I, for all its apparent hypocrisy, is quite comparable to the treatments of the same subject written by members of the first wave of New Left historians. "[T]hose who believed that the United States must prepare for possible entry into the war," he writes,

included longtime advocates of a stronger military establishment, like Theodore Roosevelt, and businessmen with close economic ties to Britain, the country's leading trading partner and the recipient of over 2 billion dollars in wartime loans from American banks. Wilson himself had strong pro-British sympathies and viewed Germany as "the natural foe of liberty."⁴⁴³

And, once America was in the war for these less-than-idealistic rea-sons—a chance to build up national military power, a chance to guarantee the financial gambles various big financiers and big corporations had made in enabling England's war effort—it quickly became apparent that the conflict, bloody and long as it was, would not advance any worthwhile ideals anywhere else in the world, but would only undermine American freedom here at home. Foner's treatment of American involvement in World War I is yet another instance of the historical vision of Gore Vidal's American Chronicle novels and the American revisionist historians making its way into major, mainstream textbooks.

Foner's treatment of American involvement in World War II, like his treatment of the U.S. Civil War, is another kettle of fish altogether. Where Vidal and the revisionists argue that Franklin Roosevelt deliberately maneuvered the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor so he'd have a publicly acceptable reason for entering the war—something he'd been scheming for years to find a way to do—Foner assures his readers that "Pearl Harbor was a complete and devastating surprise" and that though "conspiracy theories abound suggesting that FDR knew of the attack and did nothing to prevent it so as to bring the United States into the war," the fact is that "[n]o credible evidence supports this charge."⁴⁴⁴

Vidal and the revisionists are relentless in their condemnation of President Harry S. Truman's decision to drop atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. They portray this decision as having been not only utterly unnecessary to end the war but also motivated in truth by a desire to impress Joseph Stalin with the reality of American power. Foner tries to straddle the fence, briefly describing the arguments for and against Truman's decision, without taking any position on the issue himself—and without even mentioning the all-important Stalin connection.