Eric Foner: Who Owns History?
Eric Foner's Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing
World (2002; paperback, 2003, Hill & Wang) is a collection
of scattered essays that in effect document his own history as a
historian. The roster:
- My Life as a Historian
- The Education of Richard Hofstadter
- American Freedom in a Global Age
- The Russians Write a New History
- "We Must Forget the Past": History in the New South Africa
- Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?
- Who Is an American
- Blacks and the U.S. Constitution
- Ken Burns and the Romance of Reunion
Foner was another historian I read during my c. 1970 binge -- his
first book, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (1970), on the
free soil movement's opposition to slavery, predating the founding
of the Republican Party and the Civil War -- but never got back to.
During that period I read a lot of history book, but more than that
I read meta-history: I read footnotes, bibliographies, interviews,
reviews, anything where a historian might step out from behind the
neutrally documented narrative and express an opinion about what it
all means. Looking at this book reminded me of that period, not
least because Foner, as a born and bred leftist, is conscious of
just how much the presence affects our interests, and therefore our
understanding of the past.
Given the nature of the book, the quotes are necessarily scattered.
On Richard Hofstadter, in Foner's introduction to a new edition of
Social Darwinism in American Thought; Foner had studied under
Hofstadter (pp. 40-41):
Hofstadter had abandoned [Charles] Beard's analysis of American
development, but he retained his mentor's iconoclastic, debunking
spirit. In Hofstadter's hands, Jefferson became a political chameleon,
Jackson an exponent of liberal capitalism, Lincoln a mythmaker, and
Roosevelt a pragmatic opportunist. And the domination of individualism
and capitalism in American life produced not a benign freedom from
"European ideological conflicts, but a form of intellectual and
political bankruptcy, an inability to think in original ways about the
modern world. If the book has a hero, it is abolitionist Wendell
Phillips, the only figure in The American Political Tradition
never to hold political office. As in Social Darwinism,
Hofstadter seemed to identify most of all with the engaged reformist
intellectual. It is indeed ironic that one of the most devastating
indictments of American political culture ever written should have
become the introduction to American history for two generations of
students. One scholar at the time even sought to develop an
alternative book of essays on America's greatest presidents precisely
in order to counteract the "confusion and disillusionment" he feared
Hofstadter was sowing among undergraduates.
From Foner's AHA presidential address in 2001, "American Freedom in
a Global Age" (pp. 50-51):
The year 1902 also witnessed a prediction with a somewhat different
emphasis, offered by W.T. Stead in a short volume with the arresting
title The Americanisation of the World: or, The Trend of the
Twentieth Century. Stead was a sensationalist English editor whose
previous writings included an exposé of London prostitution, Maiden
Tribute to Modern Babylon. Convinced that the United States was
emerging as "the greatest of world-powers," Stead proposed that it and
his homeland "merge" (by which he meant both political union and
individual intermarriages), so that the enervated British could have
their "exhausted exchequer" revived by an infusion of America's
"exuberant energies." But what was most striking about Stead's little
essay was that he located the essential source of American power less
in the realm of military or economic might than in the relentless
international spread of American culture -- art, music, journalism,
theater, even ideas about religion and gender relations. He foresaw a
future in which the United States would promote its values and
interests through an unending involvement in the affairs of other
nations.
More, later on (pp. 57-58):
Of course, the relationship between American freedom and the
outside world works both ways. "America," as myth and reality, has for
centuries played a part in how other peoples think about their own
societies. The United States has frequently been viewed from abroad as
the embodiment of one or another kind of freedom. European labor, in
the nineteenth century, identified this country as a land where
working men and women enjoyed freedoms not available in the Old
World. In the twentieth, younger generations throughout the world
selectively appropriated artifacts of American popular culture for
acts of cultural rebellion. Some foreign observers, to be sure, have
taken a rather jaundiced view of Americans' stress on their own
liberty. The "tyranny of the majority," Alexis de Tocqueville
commented, ruled the United States: "I know of no country, in which
there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion
as in America." A century and a half later, another French writer,
Jean Baudrillard, concluded his own tour of the United States with the
observation that if New York and Los Angeles now stood "at the center
of the world," it is a world defined not so much by freedom as by
"wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and metal hygiene,
poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence."
In the same essay (p. 73):
At the height of the cold war, in his brilliant and sardonic survey
of American political thought, The Liberal Tradition in
America, Louis Hartz observed that the internationalism of the
postwar era seemed in some ways to go hand in hand with
self-absorption and insularity. Despite its deepened worldwide
involvement, the United States was becoming more isolated
intellectually from other cultures. Prevailing ideas of freedom in the
United States, Hartz noted, had become so rigid and narrow that
Americans could no longer appreciate definitions of freedom, common in
other countries, related to social justice and economic equality, "and
hence are baffled by their use."
Foner's conclusion to "Why Is There No Socialism in America?"
(p. 145):
Perhaps, because mass politics, mass culture, and mass consumption
came to America before they came to Europe, American socialists were
the first to face the dilemma of how to define socialist politics in a
capitalist democracy. Perhaps, in the dissipation of class ideologies,
Europe is now catching up with a historical process already
experienced in the United States. Perhaps future expressions of
radicalism in Europe will embody less a traditional socialist ideology
than an "American" appeal to libertarian and moral values and
resistance to disabilities based upon race and gender. Or perhaps a
continuing world economic crisis will propel politics both in western
Europe and in America down a more class-oriented path. Only time will
tell whether the United States has been behind Europe in the
development of socialism, or ahead of it in socialism's decline.
From "Blacks and the Constitution" (pp. 179-180):
At the most basic level, the Civil Rights Act [of 1866] aimed to
overturn the Dred Scott decision and to invalidate the South's
recently enacted Black Codes, which severely limited the freedmen's
economic prospects and standing before the law. The first statutory
definition of freedom under the Thirteenth Amendment, the act's
listing of specific rights focused on those central to the
Republicans' free labor ideology -- the rights to choose one's
employment, to enforce payment of wages, and to compete on equal terms
for advancement in the economic marketplace. But beyond these,
Republicans also rejected the entire idea of legal distinctions among
citizens based on race, and the act invalidated many discriminatory
laws on the Northern statute book as well as the Southern. The
underlying assumption -- that the federal government possessed the
power to define and protect citizens' rights -- was a striking
departure in American law. Indeed, declared President Andrew Johnson,
who vetoed the bill only to see it reenacted by Congress, federal
protection of blacks' civil rights and the broad conception of
national power that lay behind it violated "all our experience as a
people." Moreover, Johnson went on, clothing blacks with the
privileges of citizenship discriminated against whites -- "the
distinction of race and color is by the bill made to operate in favor
of the colored and against the white race."
After reading this, I ordered a copy of Foner's The Story of
American Freedom (1998). Should prove interesting.
posted 2007-07-08
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