Civil War Historiography

The Story of American Revisionism

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



II. Charles A. Beard and William Appleman Williams: From Progressivism to the New Left

Beard was a fearsome talent to be deployed on behalf of the revisionist cause. A native of Indiana, Beard had studied at DePauw University, Oxford University, and Columbia. He had taught at Columbia for thirteen years, then resigned to become "an independent scholar and commentator on events of the day."

Over the course of his career, Beard published forty-two volumes of history and political science and coauthored another thirty-five. His masterful overview of U.S. history, The Rise of American Civilization, written with his wife, Mary R. Beard, became a bestseller and Book-of-the-Month Club selection. His histories alone sold 11.3 million copies during his lifetime. Beard's articles and reviews — numbering in the hundreds — appeared in virtually all the leading scholarly and general-circulation journals of his day.

Altogether, "[t]hrough the first half of the twentieth century, Charles A. Beard … was by common agreement the most influential historian in America."[24]

With such intellectual firepower as Beard could muster, combined with that of his precocious and fabulously productive former student Barnes, anyone would expect that their case for World War I revisionism would have resoundingly carried the day. And, indeed, according to some accounts, it did. James J. Martin writes, for example, that the revisionist campaign "during the two decades prior to the outbreak of the Second World War" was "a success by almost any standard." For "in the main, the field was carried by Revisionism, its position being adopted generally throughout the country by the majority of the nation's most influential journalists and publicists. A very large part of the academic world as well accepted its general conclusions of divided war responsibility." Moreover, "the stubborn unwillingness shown by an immense majority of Americans to become totally immersed in the [following] war until the Japanese attack on Hawaii on December 7, 1941, was due in large part to popularized revisionist lessons, disseminated between 1924 and 1937."[25] Similarly, Cohen refers to the revisionists' battle for the minds and hearts of the American people during the interwar years as "[t]he battle won in the 1920's and 1930's by men like Harry Elmer Barnes, Charles Beard, C. Hartley Grattan, Walter Millis, and Charles Tansill."[26]

Barnes himself was never so certain that the battle had been won. "At the outset," he wrote,

American revisionist writing was somewhat precarious. Professor Fay was not in peril, personally, for he wrote in a scholarly journal which the public missed or ignored. But when I began to deal with the subject in media read by at least the upper intellectual level of the "men on the street," it was a different matter. I recall giving a lecture in Trenton, New Jersey, in the early days of revisionism and being threatened bodily by fanatics who were present.

"Gradually," Barnes acknowledged, "the temper of the country changed, but at first it was caused more by resentment against our former allies than by the impact of revisionist writings."[27]

Like Beard, Barnes put much energy during the 1930s into an attempt to persuade the American public of the dangerous folly (as he saw it) of becoming involved in yet another world war. When, late in the '20s, Barnes was given an opportunity to place this message before a much larger audience than he could ever command from the front of a college classroom or the pages of an intellectual weekly, he jumped at it. As Marguerite Fisher tells the story, "In 1929, during a sabbatical leave of absence" from his job at Smith, "Barnes went to New York to experiment for a year as an editorial writer, columnist, and book reviewer with the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain … then a powerful and liberal newspaper chain." The experiment was deemed a success, by both Barnes and his new employer, and was continued for another four years. In 1934, "he left the general organization of Scripps-Howard" and "was then taken on as a columnist, editorial writer and book reviewer for the World-Telegram, the New York City Scripps-Howard newspaper and the most important one in the chain. … Barnes finally left the World Telegram in May, 1940," determined to do as Beard had done and carve out a career for himself as a freelance intellectual — writing books, contributing to magazines and newspapers, and taking the occasional appointment as a visiting lecturer at such colleges or universities as might be interested in his services.[28]

"His departure" from the World-Telegram, according to Fisher, "was hastened by the controversy aroused by his anti-interventionist editorials, columns, and book reviews."[29] It was perhaps inevitable, then, that he would next turn his revisionist attention to the very Second World War that he had tried so valiantly but failed so miserably to keep the United States out of. After all, that was what his old professor, Charles Beard, had done. As Bacevich puts it, Beard

closed out his career by denouncing as fraudulent the text most crucial to sustaining the myth of the reluctant superpower: the orthodox account of U.S. entry into World War II. In two scathing volumes — American Foreign Policy in the Making (1946) and President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 (1948) — Beard accused Franklin Roosevelt of outright deception in his conduct of foreign affairs.

For, according to Beard, "even as he was promising to keep the country out of the war, Roosevelt was conniving to maneuver the United States into it."[30]

Barnes agreed entirely with Beard's analysis. And "[j]ust as in March, 1922, Barnes had demanded that the current interpretations of the causes of World War I be revised, so now, at the end of 1947, he made a similar demand with regard to World War II, only to find that the difficulties in the way of getting any truth published about the responsibility for World War II were all but insuperable." Still, by 1953 Barnes was able to find a publisher for his most ambitious revisionist project on the second great war. This was a nearly seven-hundred-page collection of essays by diverse hands, "dedicated to the late Charles Austin Beard who had suggested its title, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. The specific content of the book was then illuminated by its subtitle, A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Its Aftermath."[31]

Barnes continued to work out the details of his revisionist account of World War II for the rest of his life. But he knew by 1953, even in the hour of his greatest triumph (successfully getting Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace into print), that his cause was a lost one. He wrote, from that time on, in the interest of recording the truth, as he saw it, as an end in itself. He held out no hope for the sort of victory in the court of public opinion that his earlier World War I revisionism had enjoyed. "However much we may recoil from the prospect," he wrote in 1953 in the opening chapter of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace,

there seems a strong probability that we are now entering the twilight of historical science. … History has been an intellectual casualty in both World Wars, and there is much doubt that it can be rehabilitated during the second half of the century. Indeed, there is every prospect that it will become more and more an instrument and adjunct of official propaganda — a supine instrument of our "Ministry of Truth."[32]

Little did Barnes realize — little could he have realized — that all was not lost. For only a year before, the seed of an entirely new revisionist movement had been planted by a much younger but comparably prolific and polemical historian named William Appleman Williams, a movement that would shortly enjoy the kind of currency and influence which Barnes's own early works had enjoyed back in the 1920s and '30s. Williams (1921–1990) grew up in a small town in Iowa, won an appointment to the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, and served aboard a US Navy ship during the last year of the great war that was to bring Harry Elmer Barnes so much sorrow. "In 1947," Andrew J. Bacevich notes, "Williams left the Navy to study history at the University of Wisconsin, an institution famous, among other things, for its 'notorious loyalty' to the teachings of Charles Beard."[33] Paul Buhle and Edward Rice-Maximin, from whom Bacevich drew the phrase "notorious loyalty" in the passage just quoted, go even farther in their 1995 biography of Williams, paraphrasing an unnamed "graduate alumnus" as saying that in those days "[a]ll a Wisconsin history student had to do for preliminary examinations … was to read Beard carefully."[34] Peter Novick writes of the University of Wisconsin history department that it "was dedicated to the defense of Beard's reputation, and, with some qualifications, of his teachings."[35] At Madison "Williams earned a doctorate in US diplomatic history. His first book, American-Russian Relations, 1781–1947, published in 1952, implicitly questioned orthodox views of the Cold War's origins, much as Beard had questioned the conventional wisdom about American entry into World War II."[36]

But Williams's questioning of the conventional wisdom would not remain implicit for long. By 1959, when the first edition of his most influential book, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, appeared, he was clearly articulating, with considerable polemical vigor, the views that would characterize the rest of his long career. American foreign policy in the 20th century, according to Williams, had been based on the Open Door Policy first enunciated by John Hay, secretary to President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State to Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. The problem, Williams argued, was that the Open Door Policy had evolved "from a utopian idea into an ideology," and the gist of that ideology was "the firm conviction, even dogmatic belief, that America's domestic well-being depends upon … sustained, ever-increasing overseas economic expansion."[37] This expansion could only be assured if the United States could be assured that the doors of all nations would be open to her goods, her culture, her social and political ideals, even her military. In Williams's view, "[o]f all the twentieth-century American presidents, only Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized the dangers inherent in such an approach."[38] But Roosevelt's successor in the White House, Harry S. Truman, "was … an enthusiastic and militant advocate of America's supremacy in the world. He seemed, indeed, to react, think, and act as an almost classic personification of the entire Open Door Policy."[39] Unsurprisingly, Truman "and his advisors pursued ends that made the Cold War inevitable."[40]

"After a series of short teaching appointments elsewhere," Bacevich writes, "Williams returned to Wisconsin in 1957 and quickly established himself in the front rank of American historians." Over the next eleven years he also "became the founding father and abiding inspiration of the 'Wisconsin School' of revisionist history that examined the underside of US foreign policy and found there an American variant of imperialism."[41] This Wisconsin School of revisionist history also came to be known by another name, because so many of its leading figures were perceived as members of the New Left. As Novick puts it,

The new, left-oriented historians who became visible within the profession during the 1960s came to be capitalized, reified, and often tacitly homogenized as "New Left historians." This was a largely empty and misleading designation, lumping together individuals of the most diverse orientation, and often, innocently or maliciously, associating them with the most extreme wing of the student movement. … In fact, although there were some dissident historians who had ties to the student and youth insurgency which was labeled "New Left," at least as many either had no connection with the movement, or viewed it with a jaundiced eye.[42]

One of those who might well be counted as viewing the New Left movement "with a jaundiced eye," in fact, was Williams himself. As Joseph R. Stromberg writes, "Even in the turbulent 'sixties,'" Williams "was critical of New Left excesses. He would have hated the present university climate of political correctness."[43] This assertion is echoed by Henry W. Berger in his "Introduction" to A William Appleman Williams Reader. Berger writes:

Late in the 1960s, in the midst of frustrated opposition to the Vietnam War and increased domestic upheavals, Williams became disenchanted with many in the New Left, protesting a number of their actions which he believed contradicted and damaged efforts to change American society and the nature of United States relations with the world. He especially deplored "random nonsocial violence" as self-defeating and was disturbed when members of the New Left "tried to impose [their] consciousness on the rest of society through what [they] considered "vanguard" actions in a crisis situation.[44]

According to Bacevich, Williams's disenchantment with the New Left began even earlier. "Though an avowed man of the left," Bacevich writes, "by the mid-1960s Williams found himself increasingly out of sympathy with the political views of the Vietnam-era student radicals, among whom he had achieved the status of icon. He considered the antics of the counterculture to be childish and self-indulgent. He found the sexual revolution to be repugnant."[45]

onetheless, for better or for worse, the revisionist historians of the 1960s and '70s who were followers of William Appleman Williams have come to be called the New Left Historians. And there can be no doubt that it was Williams to whom they looked as the creator and leader of their movement. Several of the most prominent among them — Walter LaFeber, Gabriel Kolko, Ronald Radosh — did their graduate work in history under Williams at Wisconsin. Others, like Gar Alperovitz, earned their undergraduate degrees in history at Wisconsin during Williams's time there. As Robert James Maddox has written,

[b]y far the most influential American revisionist interpreter of the origins of the Cold War has been William Appleman Williams. … It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that much of the existing revisionist, or "New Left," literature on the subject amounts to little more than extended footnotes on interpretations Williams first put forward.[46]

This story, excerpted from "Why American History Is Not What They Say" by Jeff Riggenbach, appears courtesy of the Mises Institute's Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States license.

(courtesy: Classic-liberal com)