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

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

The stench of double standards often makes us think with our nostrils. In a 1997 New York Times op-ed, Foner called for nothing less than a rewriting of American history to demonstrate that there are things in the South more honorable than the Confederate flag. Specifically, he advocated histories of slave uprisings and of the 200,000 African-Americans, mainly freed slaves, who fought in the Union Army during the Civil War. (9) More recently, Foner has become an enthusiastic advocate of reparations for blacks whose ancestors suffered slavery. This advice, however-some of which bears merit, no doubt-comes from the same historian who earlier wondered why Russians would wish to know the untold story of those who fought in their own Civil War of 1918-20. Apparently, in Russia those who won, won; to quarrel with that inevitability is absurd. The enslaved, but not the defeated, may argue with the course of events. For Foner, the world of historical experience falls into two spheres: in America, the contingent strug gle for freedom; in Russia, a satisfaction with determinism. In the first case history is made or should be made to happen; in the second it simply is, with no revenge or reparations possible or necessary.

Historians on the Left tend to assume that the existence of slavery and the residues of racism contradict the idea of America as a country animated by Lockean liberalism. Thus, according to Foner, a "search for 'universal human values"' represents "another Gorbachev by-word, which seems oddly ahistorical, since it denies the significance of time and place in establishing moral standards." By relativizing moral standards, as did John C. Calhoun, one can defend slavery and Stalinism alike. What makes a value universal is that it transcends all particulars of time and place, and it was "universal human ideals" that came to be incorporated in the amendments to the Constitution as a result of the Civil War, amendments which, had they not been betrayed, would have granted black Americans citizenship and entitled them to all its rights, privileges and immunities. But Foner himself is the one who is "oddly ahistorical", a historian who assumes there can be freedom without opposition, liberty without property, justice without rights, revolution without representation.

"The Crimes of Communism"

THE POST-SIXTIES professoriate in history has not gone entirely unchallenged, especially since the end of the Cold War. But the challenge is posed not so much within the core institutions of academe, but on its "public intellectual" fringes. In the summer of 1994, Dissent published Eugene Genovese's provocative article, "The Crimes of Communism: What Did You Know and When Did You Know It?" The ironies were rich, for Dissent was first published by Irving Howe and Michael Harrington, whose political legacies reached back to The New International--a Trotskyist journal of the late 1930s and 1940s. The New York Trotskyists, who included the cerebral James Burnham and the legendary Max Shachtman, knew about the crimes of Stalin half a century before Genovese, a former communist, saw the light.