May 29, 2009
Mises Daily by Jeff Riggenbach
Ludwig von Mises Institute

This is the first of five parts and [This article is excerpted from Why American History Is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism, complete links to all resources at end of Part I]

The Birth of American Revisionism and the Rise of Harry Elmer Barnes

The six volumes of Gore Vidal's "American Chronicle" series, which depicts the history of the United States from the late 18th century to the mid-20th century, were originally published over a span of nearly thirty years, beginning in the early 1970s and ending at the very end of the 1990s.

During the '70s and early '80s, the first three books in the series - Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), and Lincoln (1984) made a brilliant critical and popular success. Burr was the fifth biggest fiction bestseller of 1973[1] ; it was so successful that three years later the Book of the Month Club acquired its sequel, 1876, "sight unseen" and before the manuscript had even been completed; and the club's gamble paid off handsomely, for, upon publication, "1876 quickly went to the top of the bestseller list."[2] In 1984, when the third volume in the series, Lincoln, was published, Vidal found that he was faced with another "huge bestseller," another "critical success, reinforced by ... immense sales."[3] Four years after its first publication, Lincoln was adapted as a made-for-TV movie. In the '90s all three of these novels were confirmed as modern classics by being reissued in Modern Library editions. The later volumes in the series - Empire (1987), Hollywood (1990), and The Golden Age (2000) - enjoyed less spectacular sales than the first three, but all the novels have sold briskly, and the entire "American Chronicle" enterprise has been a profitable one, both for Vidal and for his publishers and producers.

This is all the more remarkable when we remember that these books of Vidal's are more than a little subversive in character. This is not the familiar American history - the triumphant tale of a people fervently devoted to peace, prosperity, and individual liberty, a people whose hard work and boundless generosity had made their nation a beacon of hope to the entire world. No. This is another sort of American history altogether - a sad and somewhat cynical tale of betrayals by political leaders of all major parties, by means of which the liberal ideals on which this country was founded were gradually abandoned and replaced by precisely the sorts of illiberal ideals that America officially deplores. The tale told by Gore Vidal in his "American Chronicle" novels is a tale of how we became the people our Founding Fathers warned us (and attempted to protect us) against.

Partisans of the America-as-pure-and-virtuous-beacon-of-liberty-prosperity-and-peace mythology have attacked Vidal's novels, of course, but Vidal has made it quite clear in a couple of detailed replies to his critics (first published in the New York Review of Books) that he knows at least as much about the history of the periods he depicts in his novels as any of them do - PhD's and members of the professoriate though they may be.

Still, a reasonable question would seem to remain: is Vidal's version of American history the truth? Is it merely a fictional creation by a writer who has long devoted part of his professional career to political polemics - a fictional creation designed to justify the criticisms of US policy, especially US foreign policy, so frequently contained in those polemics? Or could one, if one chose to look, find published, credentialed historians whose work lends credibility to Vidal's vision? In a word, does Vidal's vision of American history rest on a solid foundation in historical scholarship? Or doesn't it?

The short answer to this question is that, yes, Vidal's vision of American history does rest on a solid foundation in historical scholarship. But there is also a long answer to the question, and it runs as follows: the historical scholarship that verifies Vidal's account of American history is scattered throughout the historical record of the last century and a half, but most of it is the product of one or more of the three closely interrelated "revisionist" movements that emerged in American historiography during those years. These three movements are the "New History," whose leading practitioners later came to be called "the Progressive historians"; the rebellion of the "New Left Historians" that began creating consternation within the historical profession during the 1960s and '70s; and the closely related revisionist movement established in the 1960s by a new group of libertarian historians - a movement which only now, nearly half a century later, is at last gaining the adherents and generating the excitement that have long eluded it.

Before describing these three "revisionist" movements in more detail, it would perhaps be advisable to define the term revisionism as it applies to the study of history. "Revisionism," according to Joseph R. Stromberg, "refers to any efforts to revise a faulty existing historical record or interpretation."[4] "The readjustment of historical writing to historical facts" is the succinct definition offered in 1953 by one of revisionism's most notorious practitioners, Harry Elmer Barnes.[5] Thirteen years later, he offered a slightly longer and more thoughtful definition: "the effort to revise the historical record in the light of a more complete collection of historical facts, a more calm political atmosphere, and a more objective attitude."[6] Even in his slightly longer and more thoughtful formulation, however, it is noteworthy that Barnes places great emphasis on the facts of the case. We need to revise the historical record when we have new facts.

Yet, as William Appleman Williams argued in 1973, "it is only rarely that the belated discovery of new documents revolutionizes some part of history." Accordingly, for Williams, "[t]he revisionist is one who sees basic facts in a different way and as interconnected in new relationships."[7] In 1967, Warren I. Cohen had seen the issue similarly, and had written, in the Preface to his book The American Revisionists that "the revisionist revises an existing interpretation of an event in history." On the other hand, Cohen had wondered aloud, later on in the selfsame sentence, whether the designation revisionist was really of any value to the student, "who realizes that every generation of historians tends to give new interpretations to the past."[8] Richard Hofstadter, a year later, echoed this theme in his book The Progressive Historians, writing of "that perennial battle we wage with our elders." As Hofstadter saw it, "If we are to have any new thoughts, if we are to have an intellectual identity of our own, we must make the effort to distinguish ourselves from those who preceded us, and perhaps pre-eminently from those to whom we once had the greatest indebtedness."[9]

Perhaps this is the reason Harry Elmer Barnes was able to report, when he sat down in the last decade of his life to write "Revisionism: A Key to Peace," that "revisionism dates from the beginnings of historical writing" and that "the first true historian" in Ancient Greece (Hecataeus of Miletus) "is known chiefly as a revisionist of traditional Greek tales about Hellenic origins." Barnes also noted that

[r]evisionism has been most frequently and effectively applied to correcting the historical record relative to wars because truth is always the first war casualty, the emotional disturbances and distortions in historical writing are greatest in wartime, and both the need and the material for correcting historical myths are most evident and profuse in connection with wars.

According to Barnes, writing in 1966, "[r]evisionism was applied to the American Revolution many years ago," and has been applied to every other war in which the US government had been involved since.[10]

Barnes, as has been seen, placed great emphasis on the importance of newly discovered facts as a justification for the revisionist's work. On occasion, however, he too stressed the importance of re-interpreting long-known facts. "By the close of the nineteenth century," he wrote in 1937 in his History of Historical Writing,

the student of history was in a condition not unlike that in which the physicist, chemist, or biologist would find himself if supplied with a vast number of notebooks containing carefully set down records of countless experiments and observations, but without any real attempt to interpret the significance of this mass of material or to derive from it scientific laws of general applicability.[11]

Such interpretation was necessary, Barnes believed, because without it history could never be useful. "The great majority of historical works down to the present time," he wrote in 1926,

have been filled with a mass of meaningless details with respect to the origins, succession, and changes of dynasties, or have dealt almost exclusively with battles, diplomatic intrigues, and personal anecdotes and episodes which have little or no significance in explaining how our present institutions and culture came about, in indicating their excellence and defects, or in aiding us to plan a better and more effective future.[12]

As an example of what he meant, Barnes turned to the history of his own nation. "The vast majority of the writing on American history," he wrote, "has been concerned with its political and legal phases." And this, he argued, had been a mistake. For

[u]ntil one understands that, however important Washington, Hamilton, John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Winfield Scott, Abraham Lincoln, U. S. Grant, James G. Blaine, Elihu Root, or Theodore Roosevelt may have been in American history, they have done less to shape its chief tendencies than such men as Franklin, Eli Whitney, Fulton, Morse, McCormick, Kelley, Field, Bell, J. J. Hill, Edison, Goodyear and Henry Ford, there will be little hope of any serious approach to a vital grasp of the nature of the development of American society.[13]

Barnes's list of the true shapers of American society implies a certain interest in the economy and in the influence of technology on economic progress. And this interest seems only fitting when we recall that Barnes had done his graduate work in history "at the prewar Columbia of Robinson and Beard."[14]

The "Robinson" to whom Peter Novick refers here is James Harvey Robinson (1863-1936), who taught at Columbia University from 1895 to 1919 and during those years founded, with Charles Austin Beard (1874-1948), what came to be known as the New History. Robinson was adamant that history should be of real utility to the living. "Our books," he wrote, "are like very bad memories which insist upon recalling facts that have no assignable relation to our needs, and this is the reason why the practical value of history has so long been obscured."[15] To remedy this situation, Robinson proposed that historians make more extensive use of the social sciences, particularly economics, sociology, and psychology, in their efforts to understand the past. Beard illustrated this approach to history in his scandalously successful 1913 book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, in which he defended the thesis that

the Framers had pursued their task less under the spell of the high ideals of 1776 than with their eyes trained on the main chance. Encouraging commerce and manufactures, protecting private property, establishing financial instruments essential for economic development - these were the issues that preoccupied those participating in the secret deliberations in Philadelphia - issues in which they themselves had a large personal stake.[16]

Barnes had a background in sociology as well as economics. Born in 1889 "on a farm near Auburn, in the Finger Lake district of central New York State," he "entered Syracuse University in the fall of 1909," equipped "with the aim of preparing himself to be a high-school history teacher."

When he graduated from Syracuse in 1913, he achieved all of the academic honors available for a history major: graduation summa cum laude at the top of his class, not only in Liberal Arts but in the University as a whole, first honors in history, and the annual Historical Essay Prize for his essay on Alexander Hamilton. After graduation he remained at Syracuse for two years as an instructor in sociology and economics.

Sociology and economics were, of course, disciplines that could introduce "new facts" into the historical record and thereby create a need for revisionism. In 1915, Barnes applied for admission to graduate study at Columbia. William Harrison Mace, the chairman of the history department at Syracuse, wrote to the Columbia Graduate Faculty that "Harry Elmer Barnes is probably the ablest student and most tireless worker the Department of History has ever graduated."[17]

In 1918, after three years immersion in the New History of Robinson and Beard (an outlook that his earlier interest in economics and sociology suggests came naturally to him), Barnes submitted his dissertation and was awarded his PhD. He was thus a member of what Peter Novick calls "the second-generation New Historians," but he was destined to become, along with Beard, one of the two best known members of the movement. Preserved Smith of the Cornell University history department called Barnes's History of Western Civilization (2 vols., 1935) "incontestably the masterpiece of the New History."[18] As late as 1968, the year of Barnes's death, when a group of his former students, former colleagues, and fellow scholars contributed to a festschrift in his honor, the resulting volume was entitled Harry Elmer Barnes, Learned Crusader: The New History in Action.

Barnes "spent 1919-1920 as one of the original staff of the New School for Social Research," and spent a few years thereafter at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, first as an associate professor of European history, then as Professor of the History of Thought and Culture. Later, "[i]n 1923, Barnes left Clark to go to Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts as Professor of Historical Sociology. In addition to his regular position at Smith, he taught at Amherst for two years at the request of Dwight Morrow, who asked him to teach an introductory social science course known as 'Social and Economic Institutions.'"[19]

Meanwhile, he was writing voluminously on a freelance basis for both the scholarly and the popular press - for the American Journal of Sociology, the Political Science Quarterly, and the American Historical Review; for The Nation, the New Republic, and the American Mercury. And sometime in 1921, he found the subject for which he would ultimately become most famous: the origins and significance of World War I. During that war, as a graduate student in history at Columbia and a budding part-time journalist and polemicist, he had been loud in his support of US involvement in the conflict. As William L. Neumann notes,

Like many young men of his time he was a partisan of Woodrow Wilson. Like many of his older Columbia colleagues, notably ... Charles A. Beard, he favored American entry into the European war before April of 1917. For his hometown New York newspaper, the Port Byron Chronicle, he wrote a long pro-intervention article in the winter of 1916-1917 which he later recalled as being "as ferocious in content, policy, and language as anything contributed by any sane person at the time." He also contributed to the pamphleteering work of the National Security League, the National Board for Historical Service, the American Defence Society, and several other propaganda agencies favorable to American entry into the European War.[20]

Then, in 1920 and 1921, Barnes read a series of articles in the American Historical Review by Sidney B. Fay of Smith College entitled "New Light on the Origins of the World War." Only a short time before, as Warren I. Cohen describes it,

the opening of the Russian archives was followed by the opening of the archives of the defeated Central Powers. Numerous historians sat down to years of laborious research. The publicists and historians of lesser patience took a quick look and began writing. Almost all concluded what every intelligent American had known all along: that the Germans had not been one hundred per cent "evil," nor France and her allies one hundred per cent "good." But the "revisionist" interpretation often went further, to the extent of shifting primary responsibility for the origins of the war from the Central to the Allied Powers - and, ultimately, condemning American intervention.[21]

Fay was one of the less patient historians; he had taken a quick look and had begun writing. Barnes took a somewhat slower look at the new evidence, but within three years he was not only a convert to Fay's revisionism but also its chief apologist in the popular press. An article under Barnes's byline on "Assessing the Blame for the World War" appeared in the May 1924 issue of Current History. It was followed a year later by a series of twelve shorter articles on the same subject in the Christian Century. The last of these Christian Century pieces had no sooner appeared (in the issue for December 17, 1925) than Barnes was busily at work revising and expanding the series for publication as a book: "[B]y June of 1926, the first edition of The Genesis of the World War was in the hands of reviewers, seven hundred and fifty pages long and selling for four dollars." Two years later, in 1928, Barnes "collected many of the controversial reviews of the first edition of the Genesis, his own rejoinders, some of his earlier articles, and an American Mercury article by C. Hartley Grattan" into a second book on World War I, In Quest of Truth and Justice.[22]

If Barnes took a slower and closer look than Sidney Fay at the new evidence about the war that became available after the Armistice, Charles Beard, Barnes's old professor at Columbia, took an even longer time than Barnes did to change his view of the Wilson administration's "war to end war." But change it he did, in the end. By 1930 Beard had become firmly convinced "that U.S. entry into the war had been a mistake and that Wilson's peddling of the elixir of internationalism had been tantamount to fraud." He had, moreover, become convinced that US wartime policies had been

self-serving, reflecting an eagerness to cash in on Europe's misfortune. A phony neutrality permitted a massive trade in arms with the Allies, propped up by American loans. The result at home was large profits for bankers and arms merchants and a general economic boom, sustainable only so long as the slaughter on the western front continued. By 1917 those policies culminated in intervention at the behest of Wall Street tycoons who would face ruin if Great Britain and France lost the war.

Now Beard enthusiastically joined his former student in attempting to sell World War I revisionism to the American public. As Andrew Bacevich notes, "Beard could wield his pen as 'either shillelagh or stiletto' and was equally adept at writing for academics, policy professionals or the general public." And now that his mind was made up, he held nothing back. "Throughout the 1930s Beard devoted his formidable talents to averting" a recurrence of the disaster he now believed had taken place in 1917 and 1918. "In a torrent of books, pamphlets, and articles, he warned against being dragged into problems that were Asia's or Europe's, but not America's. He labored furiously to alert his fellow citizens to the folly - and the danger - of reviving Woodrow Wilson's project."[23]

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