Fate and freedom in history: the two worlds of Eric Foner

National Interest, The, Fall, 2002 by John Patrick Diggins

Ideals, conventions, even truth itself, are continually changing things so that the milk of one generation may be the poison of the next. ...When a generation succeeds...in handing down all of its discoveries and none of its delusions, its children shall inherit the earth.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1924

Give a professor a false thesis in early life, and he will teach it till he dies. He has no way of correcting it.

John Jay Chapman, 1900

CAN THE "milk" of one generation become the "poison" of the next? Only if it goes stale and asks to be drunk as fresh. The generation of the Sixties started out with its "discoveries" about the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the deficiencies of America in general. From that dramatic moment, when ideals clashed hard against reality, the generation proceeded to its analysis of the causes of things, and as the Sixties New Left evolved into the Academic Left, it began to hand down to a subsequent generation its delusions about the meaning of America and the nature of history, delusions for which there seems to be no means of correction.

We can divide post-World War II American historical scholarship into two categories: pre-Sixties and post-Sixties. An essentially liberal anti-communist out-look that characterized the field for two decades from the late 1940s through the late 1960s was superseded by a post-Sixties revisionism that subjected America to scrutiny while turning to a stance of anti-anti-communism. The Vietnam fiasco gave us that, and it is not hard to see why the older view came under stress and strain. What is hard to understand is why the post-Sixties anti-anti-communist outlook in the academy has itself not been affected by the end of the Cold War, and particularly by the way it ended. The post-Sixties school remains dominant now in its fourth decade, and there are scant signs of a subsequent school of thought arising to replace its take on things political and cultural. No doubt a future generation will impose its own delusions onto history, but for now, the staying power of the post-Sixties school defies both Charles Darwin and Andy Warhol: Its thinking seems helpless to adapt to change, and it refuses to relinquish its 15 minutes of fame.

A common impression, however, would have us believe the opposite: that the conservative 1950s complacently rested its case on a consensus that resisted change, while the radical 1960s uncovered the deeper reality of conflict and demanded profound changes everywhere in American life. But if the 1950s stood for the status quo, why did that generation prove incapable of sustaining it in the academy? Conversely, if the 1960s generation stood for change, why does our present academic Left resist all change in its own views and hold to interpretations of history that history itself has left behind?

There is an embarrassing disparity between the political character of America and the activist historians who interpret it. On the one hand, every opinion poll indicates that Americans hold values that are conservative on economic issues and somewhat liberal on cultural matters, and that poor people believe in the American dream far more than the intellectuals who deride it. On the other hand, many historians, especially labor and social historians, remain convinced that the poor have a higher consciousness by virtue of their sufferings, and that history "from the bottom up" will challenge capitalism and deliver us to one or another form of progressive socialism. Such thinking, as Oscar Wilde once noted, confuses Marx with Jesus: "There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else. That is the misery of being poor."

The persistence of the post-Sixties school of historiography in misinterpreting America is unique in the annals of American intellectual history. When previous generations of radicals--the Lyrical Left of New York's Greenwich Village in the pre-World War I years, the Old Left of the depression years--saw that history had failed to fulfill their expectations, most members reconsidered their misplaced hopes for a better world and sought new interpretations of America's consensual social order. In the postwar era, that effort started as early as 1950 with Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination. Trilling advised scholars to reconsider the mantra of social realism. It concluded in 1960 with Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology, which demonstrated why Marxism must make room for Weber and Tocqueville. But the post-Sixties academic perspective identifies truth with tenacity and mistakes reiteration for reflection. When history failed to conform to its dreams, many of its members went on to graduate school and became, among other things, professors of history. Within a decade the generation of Sixties radicals progressed from political error to professorial tenure.

The most impassioned defense of post-Sixties historical scholarship is Lawrence Levine's The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History, published in 1997. Past president of the Organization of American Historians and winner of a MacArthur Prize, Levine responds to growing criticism of multiculturalism in higher education by listing the ways in which campuses are now more receptive to their increasingly complex ethnic and minority population. An obvious retort to Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, Levine argues that all of American historiography is a study in generational revisionism, and that historians should not imagine that there was ever some mythical age in which the problem of change did not exist. Fair enough. But the irony is that Levine does not apply this insight to the post-Sixties school he seeks to defend. We have been waiting now for close to a half century for the post-Sixties professoriate to express the "opening of the American mind" by opening itself to new int erpretations, and to revise its own heralded revisions. We wait in vain.