The Left's Lion. - Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World - book review

National Review, July 1, 2002 by Ronald Radosh

Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World, by Eric Foner (Hill and Wang, 256 pp., $24)

Eric Foner of Columbia University is one of our nation's most acclaimed historians. A past president of both the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, he is best known as the author of pioneering revisionist studies of Reconstruction and of Republican ideology before the Civil War, as well as other books on ideology and politics in the Civil War era. He is also one of the foremost exponents of what has become known as "radical history": the euphemism of choice for Marxist and neo-Marxist historians who seek to overturn the old mainstream political history. Indeed, so devoted is Foner to this aim that he even criticizes his first book, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (1970) -- a solid work of scholarship and history that justly gave him a major reputation -- as "a curiously old- fashioned book" because it lacked the orientation of the so-called "new histories." These new works focus not on political narrative and ideology, but on the intersecting links of "gender," "class," and "race": the codewords of the new politically correct postmodern, Marxist, and feminist historians.

Now, in this collection of new and old essays, Foner seeks to use his expertise and position to enter the fray as a public historian, one who seeks to use what he has learned about our past to influence the present political and cultural debates. His goal, as he puts it in his preface, is to help show that "it is no longer possible to treat American history as an unalloyed saga of national progress toward liberty and equality." He is deeply concerned that a history of "celebration is widespread," one that emphasizes America's glory and ignores its actual divisions and conflicts. On the other hand, he is heartened by some recent developments: All the attention to the Civil War has led many to see the central role of slavery in that conflict; displays of the Confederate flag in the South have led to boycotts, state referendums, and demonstrations; and "the movement for reparations for slavery [has] gained increasing support among politicians and intellectuals." (That this last item has also sparked serious opposition -- to cite, as one example, John McWhorter's lengthy and brilliant analysis of its fallacies in The New Republic -- Foner neglects to mention.)

Foner seeks in this collection to deal with the relationship of the historian to the world in which he lives, and he acknowledges that "the context within which a historian lives and writes affects [his] choice of subject and approach to the past." He therefore begins the collection with a new essay he titles "My Life as a Historian," in which he seeks to put his own work in the context of his political and personal life. The essay is, indeed, revealing, but perhaps not in the way Foner hoped. He begins with a little anecdote he obviously thinks is cute, but which fully exposes the mindset from which he approaches his intellectual task. He writes that a friend "who grew up in Communist Hungary" once remarked to him: "I was raised in a country where we understood that most of what the government says is untrue." And Foner replied: "That's funny . . . I grew up in the same country." We know, therefore, that in Foner's eyes, the United States is as unfree and oppressive as the totalitarian regimes foisted upon Eastern Europe by Stalin at the end of World War II.

Foner, as he reveals, was a bona fide red-diaper baby. His father, he relates, lost his job teaching history at City College of New York after a state legislative committee held hearings about the influence of Communists in higher education. (He does not mention that the hearings coincided with the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, when Foner's father was touting the party line that FDR and Britain -- not Hitler and the Nazis -- were the real enemy.) Ironically, the historian hired to replace him was none other than the young Richard Hofstadter, who, years later, became Foner's mentor at Columbia University's graduate school, and whose position at Columbia Foner now holds.

It is fitting, therefore, that Foner's most interesting and worthwhile essay is about Hofstadter as historian and intellectual. He disagrees with Hofstadter's intellectual approach, since Hofstadter started as a Marxist and ended his career distrustful of the masses; Hofstadter, moreover, came to personify the consensus school of scholarship, which saw Americans as united in their basic assumptions. This is a view fundamentally antipathetic to Foner; he concludes, nevertheless, that Hofstadter's writings "stand as a model of what historical scholarship at its finest can aspire to achieve." Hofstadter became disillusioned with American Communists early on; but what endeared him to his young protege was that, like Foner himself, he still "hate[d] capitalism," continued an "intellectual engagement with radicalism," and espoused an "intellectual approach [that] was framed by Marxism." Just as he criticizes his own early work, however, Foner faults Hofstadter for also writing history that now appears "dated," since it too failed to be "cognizant of the many groups that make up American society." Moreover, Hofstadter thought that Social Darwinism's time had passed; but Foner argues that those who oppose government intervention in the economy -- "today's conservatives," who combine an ideology of laissez- faire individualism with militarism and racism -- are modern Social Darwinists. But Foner is pleased that at least Hofstadter did not become one of the "New York intellectuals" -- who, he says, "made a career of anti-Communism," joined groups like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, or became uncritical apologists "for the Cold War."