The Story of American Freedom
by Eric Foner
Norton. 422 pp. $27.95

History in recent years has become a minimalist enterprise. Although large interpretative takes on the meaning of it all are hardly unknown, in the postmodernist academy they have for the most part given way to ever more rarefied inquiries into ever more restricted slices of the past. Where perspective is everything, and perspectives can be infinitely multiplied, the idea is not easily entertained that there might be something called, say, “the American experience,” or that generalizations might usefully be made about it. Anyone contemplating such an exercise risks immediate suspicion that he (or, of course, she) is, as they say, “privileging” a hegemonic narrative that by definition marginalizes the voices of the non-privileged.

How is it, then, that so impeccably credentialed a person of the Left as Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia University and a member of the Nation editorial board, can hope to get away with so hegemonic-seeming a project as The Story of American Freedom? He does so by joining to a mostly old-fashioned progressive treatment of his subject the requisite obeisance to contemporary academic idols.

Thus, Foner modishly informs us in his introduction that the title of his book “is meant to be ambiguous or ironic (one might even call it post-modern).” A “story,” after all, “is both a history of actual events and an invention.” So also with the meaning of the word “freedom,” a “protean” concept that “overspills the scholar’s carefully constructed boundaries.” If, in probing the ambiguities of his subject, Foner focuses on categories of “race, gender, and class,” this is not, he hastens to assure us, “as a fashionable mantra” but because (and now the postmodernist meets the progressive) “non-whites, women, and laborers experienced firsthand the paradox that one person’s freedom has frequently been linked to another’s servitude.”

Here we come upon Foner’s major theme. While often invoked to justify the status quo, freedom, he writes, has also served more hopefully as a “protest ideal,” exposing “the contradictions between what America claims to be and what it actually is.” In his exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) survey of the various meanings—political, economic, personal, moral—that Americans have attached to freedom from the Revolution until today, there can be no doubt that Foner himself clearly prefers eras of protest and reform to their conservative counterparts.

Eliciting his particular enthusiasm are two such moments. The first is exemplified by the Communist-inspired Popular Front of the late 1930’s, a movement that united the Left from New Deal Democrats to the Communist party:

In this broad left-wing culture, social and economic radicalism, not support for the status quo, defined true Americanism; ethnic and racial diversity was the glory of American society; and “the American way of life” meant unionism and social citizenship, not the unbridled pursuit of wealth.

Foner is similarly excited by the galvanizing effect the early civil-rights activists had on the Left in the 1960’s:

[T]he courage of thousands of ordinary men and women . . . who risked physical and economic retribution to lay claim to freedom inspired a host of other challenges to the status quo, including a mostly white student movement known as the “New Left,” the “second wave” of feminism, and claims by other dispossessed minorities. Together, they restored to freedom the critical edge often lost in cold-war triumphalism, making it once again the rallying cry of the dispossessed.

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The dismissive reference to “cold-war triumphalism” indicates the negative pole of Foner’s attachments. The Story of Freedom is not, it is important to note, simply history as a left-wing morality play. Foner is a serious and energetic scholar, and, if he tarries over history’s victims, he does not entirely ignore, or merely denigrate, its beneficiaries. For example, though he worries that, in the 1950’s (as through much of the century), Americans became beguiled by “a consumer definition of freedom,” he also concedes that in that decade “virtually all Americans reaped the rewards of an era of unprecedented expansion and rising living standards.”

Still, Foner’s attempt to do justice to the complexities of his subject cannot hide the fact that he has little patience for conservatives in general, and for anti-Communists in particular. “The tiny Communist party,” he writes in exoneration of radical activists of the 1950’s, “hardly posed a threat to American security and many of the victims of the Red Scare had little or nothing to do with Communism,” being guilty of “nothing more than holding unpopular beliefs.” Such insouciance suggests, at best, a lack of familiarity with recent treatments of the subject, including even so fervently anti-anti-Communist a tome as Ellen Schrecker’s Many Are the Crimes.¹

When he gets to the presidency of Ronald Reagan, Foner loses all semblance of objectivity. “Like most conservatives,” he writes, Reagan “exempted the economy from his abhorrence of self-interested behavior and his demand for moral action, making the unremitting pursuit of profit the sole arbiter of right and wrong.” As the President’s policies “inspired a speculative frenzy that enriched architects of corporate takeovers, plungers in the stock market, and sellers of ‘junk bonds,’ ” the poor reaped only “plant closings, job losses, and devastated communities.” In the final sentence of the book, Foner expresses the wan hope that “the better angels of our nature” will recall Americans to nobler visions of freedom than the callous Social Darwinism that is the Reagan legacy.

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In the end, Foner’s problem is that he is unsympathetic to the type of freedom that the majority of Americans embrace. Freedom comes in many versions, but from the Revolution onward its dominant form in this country has been “freedom from”: from the threat of overweening government, from intrusive public regulation of private economic activity, from interference by virtually any external agent in the definition and pursuit of one’s preferred manner of life. “Don’t tread on me” is, for better and for worse, the distinctively American way of freedom.

Foner, by contrast, prefers a more expansive version of freedom, one that encompasses “freedom to” as well as “freedom from,” or, to adapt Isaiah Berlin’s terms, positive as well as negative freedom. Foner speaks glowingly of “freedom as economic security, freedom as active participation in democratic governance, freedom as social justice for those long disadvantaged.” Where most Americans, most of the time, have looked askance at government as an enemy of freedom, Foner admires those periods—the Civil War and Reconstruction, the New Deal, the liberationist 1960’s—when activist governments in pursuit of grand and sometimes coercive visions presented themselves as freedom’s ally.

But those more statist moments have been the exception, not the rule. Foner himself ruefully notes that most Americans, when asked to choose between freedom and equality, opt for freedom, and by percentages far higher than anywhere else in the industrialized world. Given that fact, it is not surprising that The Story of American Freedom has so equivocal a tone and ends on so dyspeptic a note.

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¹ See my review of this book in the June 1998 COMMENTARY.

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