V. The Libertarian Historians and Their Colleagues on the New Left

As Martin saw it, he and Barnes "were fighting a rear-guard action against a crowd of imperialists and world meddlers." And they'd lost that rear-guard action. But Martin's lead as a revisionist was taken up by several younger men who shared both his individualistic and anarchistic views and his admiration for Barnes and Beard. Chief among these was Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995), an economist who had earned his Ph.D. at Columbia and nursed a strong secondary interest in history (strong enough to carry him through a number of purely historical works, including a four-volume narrative of America from colonization in the 17^th Century to the end of the revolution in 1784). There were also Leonard P. Liggio, Ralph Raico, and Ronald Hamowy, all born in the early-to-mid 1930s and destined to pursue academic careers in history; and four members of the Baby Boom generation—Robert Higgs (a borderline boomer, born in 1944), Joseph Stromberg, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, and Thomas J. DiLorenzo.

Since both the New Left historians and the libertarian historians derived from Beard and Barnes, it might be expected that their scholarly and polemical paths would cross—that they would know of each other and, perhaps, even collaborate on projects of mutual interest and benefit. And so, in fact, it was. Referring to Williams's pioneering Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959), Buhle and Rice-Maximin note that "[t]he year of the publication of Tragedy saw the appearance of Studies on the Left, the first of the U.S. 'new left' publications, engineered principally by Williams devotees."¹⁸⁹ Novick calls Studies on the Left "the first, and in many ways the most important, organized vehicle for the new historiographical left."¹⁹⁰ In the summer of 1966, Rothbard contributed a review of The Poverty of Abundance by A. U. Romasco to Studies on the Left. A few years later, he was invited by Studies on the Left editors James Weinstein and David Eakins to revise and expand his review for inclusion in an anthology they were putting together. "The Hoover Myth" duly appeared in a volume entitled For a New America: Essays in History and Politics from Studies on the Left, 1959-1967, edited by Weinstein and Eakins, which was published in 1970 by Random House.

Meanwhile, Ronald Radosh had contributed an article on "America's Entry into World War II" to Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought, which was edited by Rothbard. He also collaborated with Leonard Liggio on an article on "Henry A. Wallace and the Open Door," which appeared in 1971 in an anthology called Cold War Critics. The following year, in 1972, Radosh and Rothbard co-edited a book, A New History of Leviathan, which included an Introduction by William Apple-man Williams and an essay on "American Foreign Policy and National-Security Management" by Leonard Liggio. In 1975, Radosh published Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism, including essays on Senator Robert A. Taft, John T. Flynn, Oswald Garrison Villard, Lawrence Dennis, and Charles A. Beard. Since Radosh acknowledges that "Beard was part of the old Progressive tradition," that he "believed that the Depression would continue and worsen" because the Democrats "would not deal effectively with it by radical measures, such as nationalization of the banks." and that the status Beard desired for the United States was that of (quoting fellow historian Samuel Eliot Morison) "a socialized, collectivist state in isolation," it may seem somewhat difficult to make out in just what sense Radosh believes Beard can be reasonably described as a "conservative."¹⁹¹ (This is an issue to which I will return in Chapter Five.) But no matter. Prophets on the Right is dedicated to William Appleman Williams, and its Acknowledgments section begins with the following sentence: "I am particularly indebted to those two stalwarts of the libertarian Old Right, Leonard P. Liggio and Murray N. Rothbard." Three years later, in the summer of 1978, Eric Foner, whom Novick describes as "[p]rominent in the second wave" of New Left Historians (just as he describes Barnes as a "second-generation New Historian"), contributed the lead bibliographic essay to the then-current issue of Literature of Liberty, a scholarly journal edited by Liggio: a discussion of "Radical Individualism in America: Revolution to Civil War."¹⁹²

Though the lessons they drew from history differed, as did their policy prescriptions, the New Left Historians, the Libertarian Historians, and the New Historians (or Progressive Historians) all agreed fundamentally on what it was that had actually happened in those periods of American history to which they had all devoted study—and, moreover, about which aspects of what had happened were significant. Charles Beard argued, for example, that large corporations worked for a system of centralized federal regulation of their own businesses, late in the 19^th Century, because they considered such a system preferable to the existing "anarchy" of different state regulations.¹⁹³ In 1963, in The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916, Gabriel Kolko, one of the most prolific and influential of the many proteges of William Appleman Williams, argued that, "contrary to the consensus of historians, it was not the existence of monopoly that caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it." According to Kolko, "many key businessmen" at the turn of the 20^th Century "articulated a conscious policy favoring the intervention of the national government into the economy," in an effort to put their smaller competitors out of business and create a monopoly-like power for themselves.¹⁹⁴ Or, as libertarian journalist and editor Roy A. Childs, Jr. put it in 1971 in his essay "Big Business and the Rise of American Statism," a "trend in the last three decades of the nineteenth century [...] towards growing competition in the United States" led "various big businessmen in different fields" to lobby "the state to regulate the economy on their behalf."¹⁹⁵In fact, one can assemble the revisionist works of the New Historians, the New Left Historians, and the Libertarian Historians into a coherent narrative of American history from the Revolution through the early days of the Cold War. In effect, this is precisely what Gore Vidal has done, in his American Chronicle novels. This is not to say that Vidal has been directly influenced by all the historians mentioned in this chapter—though he definitely has been directly influenced by some of them. In a January 1998 interview with the online magazine Salon, for example, he called William Appleman Williams "our greatest historian."¹⁹⁶ He wrote in the Afterword to The Golden Age of "our preeminent historian, Charles A. Beard" and of "furtive signs of a revival among younger academics of the realist historians—anti-ideologues like Richard Hofstadter and William Appleman Williams."¹⁹⁷ In his short essay "Japanese Intentions in the Second World War" (originally written as a pair of letters to the editor of the Times Literary Supplement in December 2000), Vidal recommends "the latest, if not last, word on the subject" of Harry Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan: "The Decision to Use the Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth by Gar Alperovitz."¹⁹⁸ And the title Vidal chose for the small paperback compilation of topical essays he published in 2002, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace—a phrase taken from Charles Beard which had been used previously as the title for another collection of essays on U.S. foreign policy edited by Harry Elmer Barnes—may perhaps be said to speak for itself. "One of the interesting things about Vidal's little book, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace," James J. Martin told me that winter afternoon in Colorado Springs, "is that he didn't realize that the revisionists had used the same title fifty years before he did." But, like the revisionists, he saw its appropriateness.¹⁹⁹

In the chapter that follows, I discuss three representative cases in which Vidal's version of American history differs from the version most Americans encounter in school, comparing Vidal's version with the writings of the American revisionist historians whose research bears it out.