Alright y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at AntiWar.com slash radio.
And the good news is, we got the phone line fixed, so from here on out, hopefully all that terrible crackling you've been hearing in the interviews will be taken care of.
And I'm very happy to welcome to the show our guest today, it's Jeff Riggenbach, he has the greatest voice in libertarianism.
Not even sure if there's a contest, I'm pretty sure there's not.
He is the author of In Praise of Decadence, is a member of the Organization of American Historians and a senior fellow of the Randolph-Bourne Institute, the parent organization of AntiWar.com.
His articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, USA Today, the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Times, Reason, Inquiry, and Liberty, among other publications, and he's got a new book out, it's called Why American History is Not What They Say, An Introduction to Revisionism, and we've been serializing some of these chapters at AntiWar.com and at LewRockwell.com.
At AntiWar.com we have American Wars, Both Hot and Cold Through Revisionist Eyes.
At LewRockwell.com, An Introduction to Revisionism, The Story of American Revisionism, and An Introduction to Revisionism, The New American History Wars.
Excellent stuff.
Welcome to the show, Jeff.
How are you, sir?
Oh, not too bad, Scott.
How are you?
Well, I'm doing great, and I just love this stuff.
I can't wait to get the whole book.
I've been devouring your articles here at AntiWar and LewRockwell.com about all this revisionist history.
Why don't we start with Beard and Barnes.
Who are Beard and Barnes?
Why do we need to know, Jeff?
Well, Charles Beard was, for many, many years, probably the leading American historian.
He was born in the 19th century, went to Columbia University, and got his Ph.
D. and became a professor.
But after about 15 years of that, he decided that he'd really rather write books and articles for magazines than go on being a teacher.
Beard was an unusually good writer, and he had the rare skill among academics of being able to write either for an academic audience in scholarly journals or for a popular audience in newspapers and magazines that were just aimed at intelligent general readers.
At Columbia, when he was a professor there, he got together with another of the professors at the Columbia Department of History, James Robinson, and started a movement called the New History.
Beard and Robinson believed that too often, American history was too confined in what it dealt with.
This will sound familiar, I think, to anybody who's ever been to school.
It tended to focus on battles, wars, politicians, elections, all of the sorts of things that in the world of history is known as political or diplomatic history, and it tended to neglect everything else.
Beard and Robinson felt that what we should do is study economics, we should study sociology, we should study the various social sciences and see what light they might be able to shed on what else was going on during all these years besides people being elected president and battles taking place.
In the early years of the 20th century, a student appeared there at Columbia.
He had a bachelor's degree in history from Syracuse.
He was from upstate New York, a farm boy.
He originally had gone to Syracuse thinking that he wanted to prepare himself to be a high school history teacher.
His name was Harry Elmer Barnes.
He wound up at Columbia as a graduate student and studied for his Ph.
D. under Beard, and he absorbed Beard's ideas about the use of the social sciences to expand the view of history.
There's a passage that I quote.
Barnes comments in one of his books, The great majority of historical works down to the present time, this is in 1926 after he got his Ph.
D. from Columbia and had gone out into the world, he says, The great majority of historical works down to the present time 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.
The vast majority of the writing on American history, he continued in this passage, has been concerned with its political and legal phases, and this, he argued, had been a mistake because, and again quoting from Barnes, Until 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, Kelly, Field, Bell, J.J.
Hill, Edison, Goodyear, and Henry Ford.
And until this is understood, Barnes said, there will be little hope of any serious approach to a vital grasp of the nature of the development of American society.
Now, this is still probably, this is a lot of background information, but it's still probably not clear why people today should know who Charles Beard and Harry Elmer Barnes are.
The answer is coming up very quickly, though.
During the period right after Barnes' graduation from Columbia with his Ph.
D., the United States government became involved in World War I.
Woodrow Wilson had been re-elected for his second term in office under the slogan that would keep the nation out of war.
And within a very short time after he was re-elected on that slogan, he led the nation right into the European conflict, which had been raging for four years at that point, from 1914.
At the time, both Beard and Barnes, they were supporters of Wilson.
They liked Wilson's politics generally, and they supported his view of a war to end war, a war to spread democracy and American standards and American ideals around the world.
But once the war had been fought and was over, and the archives of information began to become available in the defeated nations, the German archives in particular, and it started emerging what the actual diplomatic background of the lead-up to World War I had been and what the situation had been that led to American involvement, both Beard and Barnes gradually became convinced that World War I had been a fraud, that it had been foisted on the American people by the Wilson administration for reasons that had nothing to do with the official reasons, and that it was a mistake, that the U.S. had not only lost people and much money in fighting this war, but that by interfering in it, they had actually made the outcome worse than it might have been otherwise.
Barnes and Beard, in company with a number of other historians at the time, immediately undertook what I call in my book, and what was called at the time, a revisionist crusade.
They said, let's revise the historical record, let's take advantage of this information that we have uncovered in the German archives and revise what has been written down about U.S. involvement in World War I and make sure that we get the record straight, because we don't want the United States to involve itself in another worldwide conflict of this type.
Wow, so there's a lot to cover there, but this really was the era between the world wars, this is really the heyday of revisionism, right?
I seem to remember something about the American Historical Association, or one of those anyway, if that wasn't exactly it, being created kind of by the power elite to try to counteract the kind of revisionism that took place after World War I, to make sure such a thing wouldn't happen again after World War II.
Certainly there was a backlash of that sort.
Barnes, in his later writings, makes constant references to what he calls, and now I've just led up to the phrase in my sentence and it's disappeared from my mind, court historians.
And what he meant by that, since we don't have courts here, we don't have kings, was historians that are beholden to the government.
The government is funding their research, the government is giving them special access to documents, and it's understood that in return, their historical accounts will favor the government's official view of what took place.
And of course, historians of this type did dislike the wave of revisionism that Beard and Barnes launched after World War I, and during the period between the wars, it did become extremely successful.
It generally won over much of academic opinion and most of popular opinion.
A lot of historians would tell you, even those who don't accept the revisionist view, that it was the success of the revisionists that mainly stood in the way of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's desire to get the United States involved in World War II.
So many people had been persuaded by Beard and Barnes and their colleagues that World War I had been a mistake, that they were reluctant to become involved in another conflict of the same sort.
Well, and in the large sense, people use revisionism as a slur.
They go, oh, that's revisionist history, which seems to have as the kind of unsaid premise that everybody always gets it right the first time.
We know that.
And yet, from a Rothbardian, Bill Hicksian point of view, all governments are liars and murderers.
There's really no reason to believe that anything that any administration in American history has ever said is true.
I remember just going to community college two, three, maybe four years after the Waco massacre, and there it was in my history book that a bunch of Charles Manson-type cult members had murdered themselves.
And, you know, I knew that wasn't true at the time, but it was certainly the official story of the day, and it is now the official story of the history of America.
I think that's absolutely correct.
And so really, that's what we have to do.
We have to go back.
We have to revise our entire history to even make any sense of it at all.
Otherwise, we're going to walk around talking about George Washington never told a lie, and Abraham Lincoln was a saint from the heaven that came to save America, and I guess Wilson and Roosevelt and Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, the rest of them were all a bunch of heroes, just like they said at the time.
Absolutely.
The importance of this stuff, this revisionist history, ultimately is that...
Well, let me back up here for a second and sort of change the subject for just a moment to something which seems unrelated.
One of the topics that I have long been interested in, and I intend to write a book on it in the near future, is the issue of the war on drugs and the phenomenon generally of illegal drugs.
How did they become illegal?
How long have they been involved in human society?
How much is known about them?
And what is the story of their becoming illegal and their coming to be what we, who are living today, are used to, which is the government has outlawed a range of psychoactive drugs, and it is constantly fighting against the manufacture and sale of these drugs within the United States.
How did this situation come to be?
Well, in the course of investigating that, what I've discovered is something like what you just said, referring to Rothbard, that for at least a hundred years, the citizens of the United States have been systematically lied to by various levels of government, especially the federal government of the United States, but not only the federal government of the United States.
They have been hornswoggled.
They have been built.
They have been led to believe that all sorts of things are true about these drugs that simply are not true.
It isn't even a matter of things that are a matter of opinion.
It isn't a matter of where the emphasis is placed.
They are bald-faced lies.
Much the same can be said of other areas outside the war on drugs, and one of those areas certainly is the history of the armed conflicts that the United States has been involved in.
Until people become aware of revisionist history, they tend to accept whatever superficial treatment of these topics they heard in the public schools as all that can be said about the subject, and they don't ever realize the extent to which actual malignity, actual bad intentions, have been present at the very highest levels of their government over the years, over the decades, and the extent to which they need to reassess their entire set of feelings about this institution.
Well, there's really no greater example than that, is there, than the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
I said to a friend in a conversation just last night, Jeff, that if you came from another country somewhere and you'd never heard anyone say that he was the greatest president ever, and someone just explained that he, in defiance of all tradition before him, ran for presidency and won four times, that he spent more money than all the American governments before him combined, that he presided over the longest economic catastrophe in American history, and then got this country into the worst war in the history of mankind, you might suspect that this guy was a really lousy president, and yet somehow everybody loves him, and the answer that I got back in the argument was, yeah, but everybody loves him.
So how do you explain that?
They've been hornswoggled.
And that really is the way we grow up, though, is to understand that, well, you know, even where they go off the Constitution, the New Deal, they usually say, yeah, so it's a little bit of a post-constitutional age here, but that's what the people wanted.
That's what democracy is all about, and the fact that the people of the democracy have continued to ratify these changes and re-elect these people just goes to show that that's what they've wanted all along.
I mean, that's my fifth, sixth-grade understanding of the democratic process in America that I used to hold that I think that most Americans are still pretty much subject to.
I think it's true.
One of the things I'm currently working on is an audio version of Ludwig von Mises' Human Action for the Mises Institute, and I've been recording it, and in the process of recording it, I've been rereading it and remembering the extent to which Mises constantly stresses this.
Even a dictatorship cannot fly in the face of public opinion.
It has to have public opinion on its side.
So what those people who were defending Roosevelt were telling you is exactly correct.
That is what the people wanted.
The question is, would they have wanted it if they had been better informed?
My working hypothesis in writing a book on revisionist history, or in writing any of my books, is if people really understood this issue, whatever it is, revisionist history or something else, they might have a different point of view.
They might not support the kinds of things that we deplore.
You know, when you talk about Mises, this is why I think revisionist history is so important to libertarians.
I mean, I guess, I think you said, and I don't know if this changed, but Beard and Barnes were both progressives, liberals of some description or another, but their view coincides so well with the libertarian view, because of the kind of misium axum, right, of everyone is an individual, and man acts to guarantee what he thinks is his own best interest.
And if that's your view of the world, that's your beginning preset to human action, as he called it, then it's almost impossible to view history as nothing but a bunch of decisions by presidents.
I think that's why you bring up Howard Zinn and his people's history of the United States.
It's an entirely different point of view that brings up some of those people at least that were in that paragraph you read from Barnes there about the people who weren't politicians, but who really did make American society to a far greater degree than the politicians ever did.
Yes, absolutely.
That's what it's all about, is the individualist view.
And so now, I guess, correct me then, or set me straight about Barnes and Beard.
Did they, and I'm sorry I get them in chronological order backwards sometimes here, but were they always liberal progressive types, or they became more kind of old brightest after the World War, or how'd that work out exactly?
As far as I know, they remained what were known as progressives in the sense of Woodrow Wilson progressives, Theodore Roosevelt progressives, throughout their life.
Of course, during the course of their lives, some changes took place in the way political terms are used in the United States.
The Roosevelt administration, Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he ran for president in 1932, ran on a platform which was, at that time, a fairly typical, standard Democratic Party platform.
It called for reduced taxes, a reduced role for government, reduced regulation of business, all the kinds of things that today people tend to think of as conservative.
But in fact, those were the values of what is known as classical liberals, and they were the values of the Democratic Party for the most part all the way up through the 1920s into the early 1930s.
Of course, once Roosevelt was elected, he turned around on a dime, and immediately began enacting programs which flew in the face of this platform that he had just run on.
He started basically behaving like Woodrow Wilson.
The kinds of policies that Wilson, and later Roosevelt, and for that matter, the earlier Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, before Wilson, the kinds of policies that they pursued were traditionally Republican policies.
They were traditionally conservative policies.
In fact, Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican and was regarded as a conservative.
But by the time we get to Franklin D. Roosevelt, and very largely through his influence, these kinds of policies are now known as liberal policies, and conservatives are upholding the views that used to be upheld by the liberals.
So the fact that this took place tends to confuse the way we look at men like Beard and Barnes, and the way we assess their politics.
There is at least one book written by Ronald Radosh, the historian from City University of New York, in which he refers to Beard and Barnes as old right figures.
But of course, they were never on the right, really.
They were exponents of what was, at the time that they were expounding it, regarded as left-wing or liberal reforms.
They tended to be pacifistic.
They felt that the United States should butt out of conflicts that erupted abroad, that it should confine itself to within its borders, defend its borders against invasion, but otherwise focus its attention on solving problems within the United States.
Now, of course, the solutions that they proposed were by no means libertarian, but they shared the libertarian view of U.S. foreign policy.
Yeah, well, and that's something that's always kind of fun for me, is trying to trace the different strands of liberalism and conservatism and progressivism and what they all mean.
I guess a lot of people who were classical liberals, ended up, after World War II especially, just kind of lumped in on the right, because at that point, liberals were even more conservative in terms of their statism than the conservatives were.
They were, I guess, more radical.
I'm not sure.
Those things kind of go together, too, right?
The liberals in power, using conservative statist means, were actually more radical with their use of that power.
So a bunch of classical liberals ended up, by default, hanging out with Russell Kirk and stuff.
Yes, and they came to be called conservatives and men of the right, and many of them accepted that.
There were writers like John T. Flynn, who you'll always see listed as a member of the old right.
He never called himself anything his entire life long but a liberal, because as far as he was concerned, it was a liberal view that he was upholding.
Right.
Well, very interesting stuff.
I'm sorry we're up against the time wall here.
There's no time for me to ask you about the Civil War or the Cold War or any of these things, but I can, again, recommend these great articles.
We're serializing this excellent book.
The book is Why American History Is Not What They Say, An Introduction to Revisionism, by Jeff Riggenbach.
There's been, I think, three or four of them run at LewRockwell.com.
You can just Google Lew Rockwell and Riggenbach, and you'll find it.
There's at least one of them at AntiWar.com, American Wars, Both Hot and Cold, Through Revisionist Eyes, which you ought to be able to find at Original.
AntiWar.com, slash Riggenbach.
I want to thank you very much for your time on the show today.
Maybe I can have you back after I've actually read the whole book, and we can get into some of the revisionist views of these wars and things like that, Jeff.
Let's do it.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for your time on the show today.
My pleasure.
