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
III. Harry Elmer Barnes and James J. Martin: From Progressivism to Libertarianism
Williams, as has been seen, was a follower of Charles Beard. And at about the same time in the late 1940s when Williams entered the University of Wisconsin and began undergoing rigorous graduate training in history as that subject was understood by Charles Beard, another young historian, James J. Martin (1916–2004), was making the acquaintance of Beard's former student and fellow World War I and World War II revisionist, Harry Elmer Barnes. Martin was uncertain at this time whether he wanted to pursue a career as a revisionist historian, despite the fact that what might be called the seeds of revisionism had been sown in his mind and temperament early on. Even as late as 2002, when he was eighty-six years old and his career was long behind him, he told me, near the beginning of our first telephone conversation, that he didn't really regard himself as a revisionist. He was, he said, an "additionist" — the fellow who comes along after the historical accounts have been written and adds what's been (inadvertently or deliberately) left out. It was a good line — and quite accurate, too — but it seems likely to have been one of those clever lines that come to us sometimes like a bolt from the blue, ornamenting the conversation or the manuscript at hand but having no lasting life, no lasting influence. For, in all our subsequent conversations, Martin never repeated it or referred to it in any way. In those later talks, he always referred to himself and his intellectual comrades at arms as "revisionists," and never as anything else.
He himself had first been drawn to revisionism, he told me in March 2003 in a face-to-face conversation that took place over the course of an unsettled, forboding afternoon, while in his last year as an undergraduate history major at the University of New Hampshire. It was the weather that was unsettled and forboding that afternoon: the sky was the blue/grey of slate and the weatherman was forecasting a blizzard (by the time it hit, my wife and I had driven up the road a piece, as far as Denver, so it was there that we got snowed in for three days). But inside Martin's unpretentious suburban-style home the atmosphere was very different — warm, hospitable, with a bottomless pot of spaghetti and much good company. He had been born in 1916 (September 18, to be exact), he told me, "in New Brunswick, Canada. My father was an unschooled, Irish immigrant laborer, and my mother was a Maine school teacher. I don't know how those two ever hooked up. Looking back on it, I couldn't imagine two persons less likely to have hit it off — in terms of background, that is. I couldn't see how they ever made any sense out of it."
They didn't, for long. "Eventually, my father sold what he had going there in Canada and bought a farm in New Hampshire, just about in time to experience the total collapse of the agricultural price scene in 1921." At about that same time, Martin's mother took ill and died. He was five years old. For the next several years, he "ended up being passed around from one housekeeper to another" — and also, more importantly, from one Catholic school to another. "I spent eight years in Catholic schools. My father was not known to have ever been in a church of any kind. He despised all churches. But he thought that Catholic schools were better, so he put me in them." Then "I went to a Catholic high school in the '30s — two of them, in fact: one taught by Christian Brothers and the other taught by nuns. Looking back, I can see they weren't easy. They hit you with a lot of stuff. I had five years of Latin. Today, you prescribe Latin, you'd probably be shot in your tracks."
Rigorous though the educational program might have been, however, Martin was not inspired by it to pursue a life of scholarship. "I was a football player. I wasn't interested in books. I was a football player, and I had a high school reputation in New Hampshire." That high school reputation won him a scholarship to the University of New Hampshire, where he was no more scholarly than he'd ever been up to this time in his life. Then he got sick.
In June of '39 during the final exams, I came down with pneumonia. I was the only sick kid out of two thousand students. I was in the school hospital, Hood House, donated by a big dairy producer in Boston, H. P. Hood. I was the only patient in it. I kept the whole place open for weeks. I was on what they called the "danger list." That meant you weren't expected to live the rest of the week. I was on that list for seven weeks. Eventually they shipped me in an ambulance to the nearby city of Dover, which had a much bigger hospital, and I eventually got well there.
By the time it ended, however, the illness had taken a fearsome toll. "I lost 50 pounds. I lost all my hair. I had to go to bed at six o'clock every night for a year and a half." And even after he had got well, he wasn't really that well.
They couldn't use me in the war, you know. I remember one recruiting officer looked at my x-rays, and he said, "Go home." He said, "If we're invaded, we'll call you." That's how bad they thought I looked. I wasn't declared fit again until 1947.
There was, as a result, a sort of silver lining in that long period of convalescence.
I had been in an ROTC regiment at the University of New Hampshire which was in the advance wave of the invasion of Casablanca in November 1942, and I would have been in that for damned sure, and the beach was littered with guys who got killed that I played football with. I told myself, "Well, you lucky bastard, you lost your football career, but you survived the war."
The loss of the football career was, nevertheless, a difficult cross for Martin to bear. "I was a psychological wreck. Everything I had lived for I couldn't do anymore." Then, "to do something, I learned all about books, and then started reading, and became a historian."
Of course, it wasn't quite that simple. Up to the time of his illness, Martin had changed majors frequently; his focus wasn't on graduating, but on taking classes that interested him and playing football. Now "I looked back on it. I said, 'Well, you're going to be here forever if you don't figure out what the hell you're going to major in. You're going to be here that long just to get enough credits to graduate.' So I looked over my record, and I had more good credits in history than anything, so that's the direction I went." He had the credits in history because "I liked history, and I was good at it, and I got good grades. I could remember. I had a good memory." So he majored in history. And by the time he was in his long-postponed senior year and getting ready to graduate, he had begun to notice that "people were neglecting this, and that, and the other thing. The establishment was ignoring things. That had something to do with my getting into revisionism."
For example,
I remember running across the first American-Korean War. It wasn't in 1950. It was in June 1871. The Far East American fleet of five ships landed four hundred marines, who tackled a whole bunch of Koreans in a fortress at the mouth of the Han River and killed six hundred of them in one day. There were a lot of big battles that didn't have six hundred dead in them. Yet I had never heard a word about it.
I remember the first time I ran across the big story about all the Americans that deserted the trenches in World War I. A whole bunch of them just walked off. There were so many, the military police cooperated with the French to create two big camps to put them in when they rounded them up. They were never tried. They were never shot. I first read about it going through The New York Times in microfilm looking for something else, and there was a big spread on this story over a period of about four months. There was a congressional investigation planned but it was abandoned, and I gather these guys figured, "Look, this will cause more trouble than it will solve. Let's just forget about it." And as a result, this episode has disappeared from the history books.
Nor was this all. There was more.
I didn't know the United States had a poison gas factory in World War I, an immense factory in Aberdeen, Maryland. It's northeast of Baltimore. It outproduced Germany, Russia, Italy, France, and Austria combined — and England, too.
By now, Martin was in Tucson, doing graduate work at the University of Arizona.
How I happened to go to Arizona from New Hampshire? The main reason was they had a summer semester in Tucson. You could get a whole semester's work in one summer. Usually you could only get half that, and that was the main reason I went there. Also, just to get a change of climate.
The experience proved frustrating, however, because of what Martin called
the deportation of the young teachers. The young professors were taking commissions in the Navy to escape getting drafted into the Army, and I exhausted their resources in one semester. The courses I needed for my master's degree were taught by men who weren't there anymore. They were on leave. And no school fired anybody who took a Navy commission like that. They all returned there as a rule.
So Martin dropped out.
I came back home and took a job teaching at a New Hampshire high school, and then started fishing around for another school, and wrote letters to various places. And I got a favorable response from Michigan after they saw my grades from Arizona. I transferred some of them and went there three summers to get a master's degree.
By now Martin had come upon a few more of those inconvenient facts that tended to be neglected or ignored by most historians.
One subject I got interested in that I was going to write about, and I took a lot of notes on, was how much of the Civil War was fought by boys, twelve-year-olds, thirteen-year-olds, fourteen-year-olds. I found a piece by a nurse. She was so shaken by what had happened to her that she couldn't write about it for thirty-five years. She was on a floor where every kid died of gangrene after having an arm or a leg lopped off — twelve-year-olds, thirteen-year-olds, fourteen-year-olds. The Union Army was loaded with children. I'm sure the same was true in the South too. Big farm kids who passed themselves off as two, three years older. A lot of this we know because, after the war, when Congress passed the pension bill, I think in 1882, covering the Union veterans, they had to verify the birth dates of the surviving veterans to qualify them. And there was a whole operation run by a general, a Union general, that verified these birth dates and as a result of that, we know a great deal about the extreme youth of a whole bunch of people who qualified for pensions though they were just boys during their term of service. Gettysburg was fought mainly by boys. Now it's reenacted by forty-year-old drunks.
Martin had also come upon interesting evidence of "who made the big bucks out of" the US Civil War.
And boy, there were immense fortunes made out of that. There was an economist named White who used to write about this in the immediate years right after the war, '66, '67, '68, '69. He wrote a series of articles dealing with some of the people who made big dough. You know, the stock markets got so busy they had to have two sessions. They had to have both a downtown and an uptown stock market — the New York Stock Exchange. And of course, the people who sold gold to the government made a real killing. There were a number of multi-millionaires and billionaires. All the post-Civil War fortunes had their origins in supplying the Northern armies. Actually there's a succession of economists, historical economists, in the post-Civil War period who keep bringing this subject up all the way down into the administration of Benjamin Harrison. They were still confronting the people who made the money. But by that time, everybody had decided to forget all about that. We were all heroes. We were all giants.
Then there was the inconvenient information Martin had turned up regarding
how eager the young men of the nation were to join the army in 1917. Over a million young men dodged the draft. The army never found a one of them. Of course, they didn't have any machinery to look for them. The majority took isolated work on farms, other places where they weren't concentrated, and the army authorities never found a damned one of them, as near as I can figure out. And the gang they did round up — God, horrible pieces, terrible examples, of humanity. The intelligence tests they administered, in particular. I think the whole bunch combined, Black and White together, ranked moron. A lot of soldiers made money in the first war if they could write. The great majority could not write a letter home, so a lot of guys made a few bucks on the side writing letters home for A, B, C, D, and E, whoever couldn't write. They charged them a small sum, but they had so much business that they didn't have to charge them much. A great many letters written home were not by the writers, were not by the authors. Somebody else wrote for them.
Perhaps most fascinating of all there was the vast treasure trove of neglected lore Martin had begun unearthing about an amazing human dynamo named Benjamin R. Tucker (1854–1939) — journalist, editor, printer, publisher, and bookseller. The progeny of Quakers, Unitarians, and Abolitionists, Tucker was suckled on radicalism and deflowered while still a youth by early feminist radical Victoria Woodhull. An ardent exponent of freedom in all its forms — free love, freethought, and, of course, the political freedom of the individual — Tucker sought to eliminate marriage, God, and the State. He founded and edited Liberty, in its day (1881–1908) the largest-circulation anarchist periodical in the world. He gathered around him an extraordinary group of writers and intellectuals and became the spearhead for what probably should be regarded, from our vantage in time, as the first, almost entirely forgotten, libertarian movement. Tucker commissioned and published (and, in some cases, personally created) the original English translations of Proudhon's What Is Property?, Bakunin's God and the State, Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?, Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata, and Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own. He brought out American editions of works by Oscar Wilde, Herbert Spencer, Emile Zola, John Henry Mackay, and many others. He studied and helped to popularize the work of earlier American individualists who had come to reject the State — Josiah Warren, Stephen Pearl Andrews, Lysander Spooner — thereby establishing the first serious claim to a genuinely libertarian tradition in American intellectual history. And all of this had been neglected, ignored, utterly forgotten. Martin decided to go for a PhD and do his dissertation in one of the "neglected" fields once vigorously championed by James Harvey Robinson: intellectual history. Published as a book in 1953 under the title Men Against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827–1908, Martin's dissertation galvanized scholarly interest in uniquely American libertarian traditions and remains today, more than half a century after its original publication, a standard work in the field.[47]
It was while he was finishing up his work on this dissertation that Martin received a mailing from the noted historian and polemicist Harry Elmer Barnes. Barnes had written to graduate students and faculty in history departments all over the United States, advertising a new pamphlet he had just written and self-published: Revisionism and the Historical Blackout. Martin ordered a copy and, once he'd read it, wrote to Barnes commenting on it. Barnes wrote back. Before long, the two men were corresponding regularly, sometimes as often as four times a week, and Martin had become a frequent guest in Barnes's home, first in Cooperstown, New York, then in Malibu, California.
Reading Revisionism and the Historical Blackout that fateful year in the late 1940s seems to have had a powerful effect on James J. Martin. His dissertation on the American individualist anarchists was the last book he ever wrote on intellectual history. After reading Barnes, making his acquaintance, and becoming his close friend and protégé, he turned his attention instead to what had long preoccupied Barnes: the two major wars of the first half of the 20th century. Martin's second book, published in 1963, was a mammoth two-volume study of American Liberalism and World Politics, 1931–1941: Liberalism's Press and Spokesmen on the Road Back to War Between Mukden and Pearl Harbor. His third, Revisionist Viewpoints: Essays in a Dissident Historical Tradition (1971), focused entirely on issues relating to the two world wars. His fourth, The Saga of Hog Island and Other Essays in Inconvenient History (1977), did the same. His fifth, Beyond Pearl Harbor: Essays on Some Historical Consequences of the Crisis in the Pacific in 1941 (1981), bears a title that speaks for itself. So does 1984's The Man Who Invented "Genocide": The Public Career and Consequences of Raphael Lemkin, the 20th-Century Polish academic and bureaucrat who coined the term that has become so ubiquitous in the years since. And so does An American Adventure in Bookburning: In the Style of 1918 (1988).
In short, the influence of Barnes seems to have transformed an intellectual historian interested in 19th-Century America into a World War I and World War II revisionist on the pattern of Barnes himself. There was one important difference, however. Barnes was an early 20th-Century "progressive." He believed that government had a positive, valuable role to play in "correcting" the "market failures" and other "deficiencies" of "capitalism." He supported the domestic programs of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, objecting only to his foreign policy. Martin, by contrast, was a libertarian — an individualist anarchist whose most important intellectual influences where political philosophy was concerned were Benjamin R. Tucker and Max Stirner (1806–1856), the German philosopher whose magnum opus, Der Einzige und Sein Eigenthum (1845), Tucker had published in its first English-language edition (The Ego and Its Own) in 1907. Barnes practiced revisionism in order to advance his views on war and peace, in order to make the world a better, safer place to live in. Martin, on the other hand, was never much of a do-gooder, much less a world-saver. As he explained to a panel of interviewers from Reason magazine late in 1975, "my interest in [revisionism] is not necessarily activated by ideological considerations. It's more of a technical interest in getting the record straight." He had never, he said at that time, been much concerned with
doing good or bringing about a set of better social conditions, an improvement in the race or any long-range programs of that sort. My friend Harry Elmer Barnes was very much so motivated. But I was nowhere nearly as involved in his objectives as I was in his work. We often worked for totally different reasons at the same thing. I have no compulsions to save the world or save the human race.[48]
Still, it seems evident that if Martin ever harbored any hopes about the effect his writings might have on his readers, what he hoped for was very different from what Barnes hoped for. Barnes wanted to steer American government away from what he regarded as wasteful and destructive policies. Martin, if he wanted anything other than just to get the record straight, wanted to steer American society away from government. Barnes sought to publicize the truth about the world wars in order to convince his fellow Americans that their government should use the resources it was wasting on unnecessary and destructive foreign conflicts to make improvements at home, improvements like ending poverty and stamping out crime. Martin sought to publicize the truth about the world wars in order to get the record straight — and perhaps to convince his fellow Americans that it was dangerous and foolhardy to trust any group of men, even if they called themselves "the government," with the kind of power you need to commit destruction and carnage on that sort of worldwide scale.
Martin was awarded his PhD by the University of Michigan in 1949. He began writing his books and embarked on a series of teaching assignments. Northern Illinois University was on his itinerary, as were San Francisco State College and Deep Springs College in the Southern California desert, the school Newsweek once described as "the most isolated, obscure, and selective college in the entire U.S."[49] He ended up in Larkspur, Colorado at Rampart College, an institution founded and run by the legendary libertarian journalist, broadcaster, author, editor, and teacher Robert LeFevre (1911–1986). LeFevre had founded what he originally called the Freedom School in 1957, building the campus part time with a crew of volunteers and a few paid workers while he labored full time as the editorial page editor of the daily Gazette-Telegraph in nearby Colorado Springs. At first, once the physical plant was ready for use, he conducted only summer sessions, employing a roster of part-time lecturers that included such prominent libertarian intellectuals as "Rose Wilder Lane, Milton Friedman, F. A. Harper, Frank Chodorov, Leonard Read, Gordon Tullock, G. Warren Nutter, Bruno Leoni, James J. Martin, and even Ludwig von Mises."[50] But the Freedom School prospered, attracting new funding and a steady stream of students. LeFevre decided it might be possible to quit his full-time job and devote his entire energy to this educational project. In 1965, he renamed the school Rampart College, launched a quarterly journal, and began hiring full-time faculty for his planned expansion into a regular, four-year, degree-granting liberal arts college.
This story, excerpted from “Why American History Is Not What They Say” by Jeff Riggenbach, will be posted in 5 individual posts, courtesy of the Mises Institute and their Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States license.
