Anthony Gregory: Liberty and Revisionist History

7/31/2019 Anthony Gregory: Liberty and Revisionist History

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Liberty and Revisionist History

by Anthony Gregory

Why American History Is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism

by Jeff Riggenbach (Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009), 210 pages.

Historical revisionism often gets a bad rap. The term is typically used derisively to attack

historical accounts that are unconventional, usually with the implication that they are false. But

that is a grave misunderstanding of revisionism and the study of history in general. Indeed, it is

ideal for historians constantly to revise the dominant interpretation of history by looking at new

data or at previously established facts in a new critical light.

Discovering revisionist history is akin to finding a whole new world of thought. My own

first readings of historical works that might be called revisionist opened my eyes to an exciting

new tool of intellectual battle against statism it was up there with learning about libertarianism

for the first time, or realizing that economic science is a great way to reinforce our case for liberty.

Indeed, since the implicit case for the statist status quo relies heavily on conventional

interpretations of history taught in public schools that the U.S. government saved the world

from communism in the Cold War or brought America out of the Great Depression with the New

Deal the importance of rethinking historical myth is about as important as critically looking at

mainstream economics.

But as far as I know, until now no single book has been available to introduce readers to

the very concept of historical revisionism, much less to present a narrative of the major players in

revisionism and the general ideas often explored in such works. Jeff Riggenbachs new book, Why

American History Is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism, fills that void and does

a good deal more.

History and the historians

Riggenbach first presents us with a general discussion of the study of history, addressing

questions with which most lay readers, even most history buffs, have perhaps never directly


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wrestled. He dispenses with the false standard ofobjectivity, with which we are confronted in

most mainstream discussions of history, as well as journalism. We have all heard people tout

what history tells us about one thing or another, usually relating to a contemporary controversy.

A common assertion might read, History tells us we must be tough in our diplomacy, for Britains

passiveness toward Hitler in 1939 emboldened him and ushered in the Second World War.

But history is no objective oracle. Even when supported by established facts, it is

interpreted by historians people who must decide which facts to present in the first place.

Whats more, before the historian can select, center, marginalize, or arrange the facts, he or she

must first ascertain the facts, Riggenbach writes. And this is by no means as unproblematical a

matter as at first it might seem. Those facts are obtained through documentary evidence, which is

necessarily imperfect and always incomplete. These documents include

published and unpublished sources. The unpublished sources include the diaries,journals, and letters of individual persons; the records and correspondence of those

engaged in business enterprises; and the paperwork generated by government at all

its levels. The published sources include flyers, pamphlets, almanacs, catalogues,

newspapers, magazines, and books.

The newspaper is especially important to historians, Riggenbach notes, but newspapers

themselves are anything but perfect records of history. They capture only whatever the publishers

of the time found worthy of documenting, and journalistic incompetence complicates the

problem further.

In writing history, judgment is unavoidably exercised concerning what is worth including.

Cultural and social biases determine the narrative that is widely disseminated, especially in such

works as school textbooks. In America, the civic religion that upholds the U.S. government as a

devoted partisan of the same spirit of individual liberty that once moved its founders tends to

constrain the history taught in schools to the point where a lot that would be considered most

important, particularly from a libertarian viewpoint, is lost completely, and thus few textbook

readers are likely to learn much about

John Adamss Sedition Acts, Andrew Jacksons genocidal treatment of the

American Indians, Abraham Lincolns military conscription (to say nothing of his

suspension of habeas corpus and his imprisonment of newspaper editors who dared

to disagree with his prosecution of the Civil War), William McKinleys brutal

suppression of the independence movement in the Philippines after the Spanish-

American War, [or] Franklin Roosevelts order to round up American citizens of

Japanese ancestry and imprison them in concentration camps.


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Having dispensed with the myth of objective history, Riggenbach ventures to put historical

study in the context of the art of fiction. This might at first seem jarring to those who conceive of

history as something beyond mere storytelling, but

[it] was the tail end of the 19th Century before the calling of the historian had been

professionalized and academicized to such an extent that a majority of practitioners

in the field had come to hold the view of their discipline that we now take for

granted the historian as dispassionate seeker after truth, a scholar, much more

like an anthropologist or sociologist than a novelist or playwright.

Thus, the next five chapters are devoted to exploring the historical fiction of Kenneth

Roberts, John Dos Passos, and Gore Vidal, treating Vidals American Chronicles novels to a

thorough discussion. The lengthy discussion of those historical novelists, and especially Vidal, isjustified, as the reader discovers that Vidals work in particular presents a narrative of American

history that is both revisionist and unconventional, as well as more exciting and relevant than the

boring accounts we get in school. While it might not be advised that one heavily rely on such

novels as major sources in any sort of scholarly paper, they are most effective in leading their

readers to question the dominant and mythological history celebrated by most people and taught

in high schools. Libertarians in particular would find much to appreciate in Vidals critical

treatment of such sainted American heroes as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, his

nonhagiographic descriptions of Franklin Roosevelts New Deal government, his relatively

sympathetic portrayal of the often unfairly maligned Warren G. Harding, and his scathing

presentation of Anglophile Woodrow Wilson, who got America into war. One comes away from

these chapters on Vidal wishing to read the novelist, had he not already, and recognizing the

incredible compatibility of Vidals narrative with that of todays libertarian revisionists.

American revisionism as a distinct species of historical scholarship, however, is given

plenty of attention by Riggenbach, who tells the very important and yet ignored story of those

iconoclastic academics who warred against conventional wisdom and still stand out for their

intellectual courage. The biographical and historiographical discussion of Henry Elmer Barnes,

Charles Beard, James J. Martin, William Appleman Williams, and many others is alone worth theprice of Riggenbachs book several times over, for the tale of those great historians is crucial to

any deep appreciation of American historiography, and indeed, of libertarian scholarship in

particular.

The difficulties faced by modern revisionists particularly Charles Beard, who fell from

grace as the most celebrated of American historians to a fringe thinker banished from the halls of

scholarly respectability for his courageous criticisms of Roosevelt and his foreign policy are

similar to the travails endured by the early Austrian economists, men such as Ludwig von Mises


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and Murray Rothbard who most libertarians might say never got the mainstream recognition they

deserved. But the connection between historical revisionism and academic libertarian dissidents

hardly ends there.

Many libertarians are accustomed to see the Progressive Era and its intellectuals as the

source of all modern political evil. There is some truth to that generalization. But, ironic as it may

be, it was also from the intellectual atmosphere of Progressivism that some of the most anti-

establishment and even libertarian historical scholarship was born. The Progressive tradition in

history is associated with such men as Charles Beard, whose disciple James J. Martin became not

just one of the greatest of all libertarian historians, but one of the greatest American historians of

niche libertarian interest: his work on the individualist anarchists of the 19th century forever

shook the understanding of that intellectual movement, and later proved important in the

development of modern libertarian thought.

Meanwhile, as Riggenbach explains, the lineage of Henry Elmer Barnes, Progressivehistorian, through William Appleman Williams, New Left historian and respected contemporary

of Murray Rothbard, encapsulated a development in the intellectual transformation of the Old

Left into the 1960s New Left, a philosophical movement not without some substantial affinity to

and overlap with libertarianism. Never before, to my knowledge, has the story of American

revisionism itself been so cleanly and compellingly told, and never before has the relationship

between the New Left and modern libertarian intellectual movements been so clearly conveyed.

It is from that perspective that Riggenbach shows the compatibility of New Left critiques of

power, of centralism, of corporate statism, of the war machine, with those of libertarians. That

compatibility is is most apparent in the question of war, which Riggenbach addresses quite nicely

in part four of his book, dissecting the Civil War, the world wars, and the Cold War from both a

revisionist and a libertarian standpoint.

Left, Right, and libertarianism

Following that, Riggenbach treats the reader to a retelling of American political

movements throughout the history of the republic. He begins his discussion with a reorientation

of the political spectrum. Libertarians who think of themselves as creatures of the Right will be

challenged by Riggenbachs own dose of revisionism:

[A] brief look at the history of the relevant political terms Left and Right, liberal

and conservative will persuade us that libertarianism has absolutely nothing in

common with anything on the Right. For it is as the anarchist Murray Bookchin

said back in 1978: People who resist authority, who defend the rights of the

individual, who try in a period of increasing totalitarianism and centralization to

reclaim these rights this is the true left in the United States. Whether they are


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anarcho-communists, anarcho-syndicalists, or libertarians who believe in free

enterprise, I regard theirs as the real legacy of the left this is the true left in the

United States.

Riggenbach here echoes Rothbards interpretation of the political spectrum, as put forth in

the latters seminal essay Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty, published in 1964. Before

dismissing this formulation out of hand, it is worth looking at how it would color our

interpretation of our own history as Americans and our legacy as anti-statists. It sits comfortably

with our common understanding of true liberalism as the movement of individual liberty, and it

also adds logical context to the word conservative for, throughout most of history, champions

of liberty did not seek to conserve the status quo, so typically plagued by statism, militarism,

mercantilism, and power politics, but to uproot such ghastly traditions, to revolutionize society,

to move toward an ideal that never fully existed. Liberalism was corrupted by the early 1900s,

however, as statist progressivism and state socialism came to displace the libertarians on the Left.Drawing on such works as Arthur Ekirchs Decline of American Liberalism, Riggenbach tells the

story of how that corruption took place.

Riggenbachs Left-Right spectrum inspires his reconsideration of political dynamics

throughout U.S. history. If the Federalists were the first American conservatives, the Jeffersonians

were the first American liberals. The Whiskey Rebellion, squashed by President Washington and

despised by the conservative Federalists, was a libertarian rebellion, while John Adamss Alien

and Sedition Acts were thoroughly conservative in nature. To impose criminal penalties for

speech against government policies was to return to the oppressive practices of the ancien rgime

against which the liberals had led a rebellion only a few years before.

After 40 years out of power, the Federalist Party died and was replaced by the Whigs, a

new conservative party that began life as a faction within the Democratic-Republicans. The

Whigs were in turn replaced by the Republicans, who fielded their first candidate for the

presidency in 1856 and won their first presidential election with their second candidate,

Abraham Lincoln, who went on to implement the conservative Hamiltonian program of internal

improvements corporate welfare consolidation of national power, and war to conserve the

union. In the late 19th century, the Democrats were still, overall, the party of liberty and

liberalism. Democratic president Grover Cleveland

had made his reputation as an opponent ofgovernment corruption and special favors to big businesses, including tariffs and was, in office,

one of the most libertarian presidents the United States has ever had.

The Progressive movement, far from pushing a leftist agenda, was pushing a conservative

one. Drawing on such authorities as New Left historian Gabriel Kolko, author ofThe Triumph of

Conservatism, Riggenbach shows how the early 20th-century administrations of Teddy Roosevelt,

William Howard Taft, and William McKinley all represented the conservative projects of shoring


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up big business, protecting its market share, expanding the police state to enforce traditional

morality, and waging imperialist wars. Now both parties were both conservative and progressive.

By the turn of the 20th Century, liberals were no longer in control of the Democratic

party. And to the extent that certain liberals did still wield significant influence

within the party, they tended to be liberals of a more conservative persuasion,

which is to say, liberals who believed liberal goals could be attained through

conservative means.

The confusion has continued to this day. Herbert Hoover, far from being a do-nothing

conservative president, was an activistconservative president who started the New Deal, and

whose policies of easy credit had in fact been inherited from his immediate [Republican]

predecessors in the White House.

As for the

Old Right

that formed in resistance to Rooseveltswelfare-warfare state,

[They] were extending the doctrine ofliberalism.... The writers and intellectuals

who made up the most visible contingent of the Old Right were in no meaningful

sense on the Right at all. They were on the Left, where they had always been. They

were liberals.

Riggenbach also has an answer to two most celebrated examples of supposed pro-freedom

Republican politicians of the post-war era, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. New Left radical

Karl Hess, speechwriter for Goldwater, had, in Riggenbachs words, seen Goldwater as a liberal, a

man of the Left, incongruously attached to a political party with which, ideologically, he had

nothing in common. He was an anomaly, which might explain why the GOP and most

conservatives failed to come through for him. Reagan, on the other hand, was indeed a

conservative, one who expanded Californias government in all directions as governor and who,

as president, increased federal spending by fifty-three percent, added a quarter of a million new

civilian government employees, escalated the War on Drugs, created the drug czars office, and

lowered the value of your 1980 dollar to seventy-three cents.

After putting forth his somewhat unconventional way of looking at liberalism,

libertarianism, and conservatism, Riggenbach returns to the study of history as a discipline,

examining a handful of modern books on American history and determining that, once again,

libertarian historians have more in common with their leftist colleagues than their conservative

ones. He finds a number of similarities between popular leftist historian Howard Zinns narrative

and that of the revisionists of the last century: Like Vidal and the revisionists, Zinn regards

Lincoln as having been something of a tyrant ... sees Woodrow Wilson as having led the United


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States into another useless, destructive war; questions the common narrative of World War II;

and looks upon Harry Trumans decision to drop the new atomic bomb on a pair of Japanese

cities in 1945 as both unnecessary and inexcusable.

Riggenbach then shows how much Tom Woods, author of the supposedly conservative

blockbuster The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, has in common with the leftist

interpretations of Zinn, the revisionists, and Gore Vidal. As with all of them, Woods is convinced

that the United States had no business involving itself in World War I, and has similarly critical

things to say about Lincolns and Roosevelts wars as well. Riggenbach concludes that Woodss

work, in light of our discussion of Left and Right in the preceding chapter is obviously not

conservative in any meaningful sense at all.... Woodss positions are solidly liberal. This is in

contrast to the true conservatives Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, whose book on American

history is filled with apologia for Americas past wars, only lamenting, for example, that

Woodrow Wilson was too slow to involve the United States

in World War I.Riggenbachs own revisionist take on Left and Right is important even if one is inclined to

disagree, and the rest of his book discussing the meaning of history, the essence of revisionism,

the neglected story of the American revisionists, the relationships between these different

scholars, the history of American wars and statism has plenty in it to make the book worth

reading regardless of what one thinks of his conclusions in the second half and final chapters.

Personally, if I were to nitpick the book, I would say the discussion of Left and Right

perhaps glosses over a few important nuances in the possible differences between two forms of

statism, in order to maintain a linear political spectrum that might not be worth maintaining. For

example, Riggenbach is clear about the failures of the Jeffersonians to adhere to liberalism

consistently, but he perhaps neglects the ways that the very leftistnature of the Jeffersonians

encouraged a different kind of statism than that of the Hamiltonians a statism that was

decisively more mild in some areas, but worse in others. Brian Patrick Mitchells Eight Ways to

Run the Country, which uses a two-dimensional model, is still my favorite book on the political

spectrum.

However, that nitpick is not meant to detract from my hearty and enthusiastic

endorsement of this book. In fact, such criticisms, far from dismissing the essence of what

Riggenbach teaches us, are in the same spirit. Just as Riggenbach, a hardcore Rothbardian, iswilling to critique his hero Rothbard often from a standpoint he might have inherited from

Rothbard to begin with I believe Riggenbach has given us a valuable intellectual framework,

has thrown down the gauntlet, and has provided a standard by which to look at scholarship

critically. This is an Introduction, after all, and ofRevisionism to boot. I find my only criticisms of

his book are in the spirit of free intellectual inquiry and revisionism the very Beardian-

Rothbardian-Riggenbachian tradition that this book has served to establish. It is about time a book

like this has come to exist, and I am most grateful Riggenbach has written it.


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Anthony Gregory is a research analyst at the Independent Institute, a policy adviser for the Future

of Freedom Foundation, and a columnist atLewRockwell.com. Anthony's website is

AnthonyGregory.com.

This article was originally published in the July 2010 edition ofFreedom Daily.

Anthony Gregory: Liberty and Revisionist History

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