Foner describes with passion how African-Americans hungered for their own plots of land and for the animals and tools with which they could work the earth in the new spirit of freedom, but he seems entirely insouciant when it comes to such issues in Russia. The Soviet Union pioneered, as Max Nomad put it, "a new form of slavery for the working class" and, one might add, an old form of tyranny for the masses, who were denied political rights by the Bolsheviks just as they had been denied the citizen's right to participate in government by the czars. Foner describes the "violence" and "terror" from which African-Americans suffered in Reconstruction America, but such policies go unmentioned in his accounts of Soviet Russia. If Reconstruction was an "unfinished revolution" because it denied blacks economic opportunities and political freedoms, can the Bolshevik Revolution ever have been described in a positive light when it denied the Russian people the same thing?

The stench of double standards often makes us think with our nostrils. In a 1997 New York Times op-ed, Foner called for nothing less than a rewriting of American history to demonstrate that there are things in the South more honorable than the Confederate flag. Specifically, he advocated histories of slave uprisings and of the 200,000 African-Americans, mainly freed slaves, who fought in the Union Army during the Civil War. More recently, Foner has become an enthusiastic advocate of reparations for blacks whose ancestors suffered slavery. This advice, however--some of which bears merit, no doubt--comes from the same historian who earlier wondered why Russians would wish to know the untold story of those who fought in their own Civil War of 1918-20. Apparently, in Russia those who won, won; to quarrel with that inevitability is absurd. The enslaved, but not the defeated, may argue with the course of events. For Foner, the world of historical experience falls into two spheres: in America, the contingent struggle for freedom; in Russia, a satisfaction with determinism. In the first case history is made or should be made to happen; in the second it simply is, with no revenge or reparations possible or necessary.

Historians on the Left tend to assume that the existence of slavery and the residues of racism contradict the idea of America as a country animated by Lockean liberalism. Thus, according to Foner, a "search for 'universal human values'" represents "another Gorbachev by-word, which seems oddly ahistorical, since it denies the significance of time and place in establishing moral standards." By relativizing moral standards, as did John C. Calhoun, one can defend slavery and Stalinism alike. What makes a value universal is that it transcends all particulars of time and place, and it was "universal human ideals" that came to be incorporated in the amendments to the Constitution as a result of the Civil War, amendments which, had they not been betrayed, would have granted black Americans citizenship and entitled them to all its rights, privileges and immunities. But Foner himself is the one who is "oddly ahistorical", a historian who assumes there can be freedom without opposition, liberty without property, justice without rights, revolution without representation.

"The Crimes of Communism"

The post-Sixties professoriate in history has not gone entirely unchallenged, especially since the end of the Cold War. But the challenge is posed not so much within the core institutions of academe, but on its "public intellectual" fringes. In the summer of 1994, Dissent published Eugene Genovese's provocative article, "The Crimes of Communism: What Did You Know and When Did You Know It?" The ironies were rich, for Dissent was first published by Irving Howe and Michael Harrington, whose political legacies reached back to The New International--a Trotskyist journal of the late 1930s and 1940s. The New York Trotskyists, who included the cerebral James Burnham and the legendary Max Shachtman, knew about the crimes of Stalin half a century before Genovese, a former communist, saw the light.

Foner's response to Genovese's interrogating query is revealing. Foner insisted that a "balanced reassessment" of the history of communism will show that the "silence in the face of unspeakable crimes" came from an understanding of the "communists' contribution to some of the country's most important struggles for social betterment." To Foner, Stalinism is not and never was the problem; the greater danger is the anti-Stalinist, particularly one who, like Genovese, has reconverted to Catholicism:

"The political stance with which Genovese proposes to replace socialism is not presented in anything resembling a coherent manner, but it can be inferred from his random remarks. Human nature is immutable, hierarchy inevitable, equality impossible, the desire for personal autonomy pernicious, socialism equivalent to tyranny, religion the foundation of morality (somehow, religious believers are not held culpable for the Inquisition or the millions killed in wars of religious intolerance). Although Genovese, for reasons difficult to understand from his article, refers to himself as part of the left, his current outlook has far more in common with a long tradition of elitist antiliberalism, including Tory romanticism and Old South criticism of capitalism in the nineteenth century, and with various expressions of right-wing ideology in the twentieth. The principles he enumerates offer no guidance whatever to those desiring to rethink the history of socialism while retaining a commitment to social change. Had they prevailed throughout American history, there would have been no antislavery movement, no feminism, labor movement, or civil rights struggle."

Think again. If abolitionism, the cause of American labor, feminism and the civil rights movement had to wait for socialism before making their respective moves in the course of American history, they would still be waiting for Lefty to come through the door. Whatever success these causes have had in America is due to the Constitution and to a flexible rights-based political culture ultimately working within that Constitution. It is due to procedural liberalism, not social radicalism; to the New Deal and not the "New Man." It is due, as well--and this fact goes far too often unappreciated--to a productive economy that puts successive strivings for economic justice within reach, if not realization. It is also absurd to claim, as did some respondents to the Dissent symposium, that the American Communist Party was always in the forefront of causes such as racial equality and feminism. Ever since the 1930s, the CP made sure the class question always came before the race question; as to modern women, they finally made their move by breaking with the "chauvinistic" Students for a Democratic Society--in the early 1970s.

Foner also mischaracterized Genovese. His "elitist antiliberalism" is not of recent vintage but was much in presence when he was a full-blooded communist. I once dined with Gene and his wife Betsy at Stanford in the late 1960s. I was feebly trying to express sympathy toward the counterculture rocking loudly nearby on the streets of San Francisco, expressing a view that the hippies and "flower children" were something new under the sun, when suddenly there came a mailed fist upon the table and a deep voice growled: "Stalin would have known what to do with these types!"

The truth is that radical pro-communists and conservative anti-communists share a common scorn for liberalism. In his 1999 book, The Story of American Freedom, and in his aha presidential address, "American Freedom in a Global Age", Foner is not so much scornful as reticent, or perhaps reluctant, to equate freedom with liberalism. He is certainly hesitant to give up his life-long delusions about communism, or to acknowledge that in an established liberal political culture such as America enjoys, radicalism must rethink its premises. Thus he implies that the Cold War was due to the threat Soviet Russia posed to America's political culture: "Whatever Moscow stood for was by definition the opposite of freedom--and not merely one-party rule, suppression of free expression, and the like, but public housing, universal health insurance, full employment and other claims that required strong and persistent government intervention in the economy." The Cold War, he said, resulted from "McCarthyism at home", which "propelled liberal thinkers toward a wholesale repudiation of mass politics. In its place emerged a pragmatic, managerial liberalism meant to protect democratic institutions against the excesses of the popular will." That the Soviet Union threatened the United States because it represented the American "popular will" and enjoyed a full welfare state, and "not merely" because of its denial of freedom, is a belief that can only be held in the American academy--certainly not anywhere in Russia or eastern Europe.

"The Exclusionary Dimensions of American Freedom"?

Freedom is a curious subject for an historian more comfortable writing about slavery. "American freedom", Foner declares in The Story of American Freedom, "was born in revolution." Surely this is a stretch. The Declaration of Independence did not claim to give birth to freedom; rather, its author protested that the pre-existing freedoms and rights of the colonists had been abused by the mother country. And such "natural rights", the Founders believed, endowed to the human species prior to political organizations, had been carried over from England, where freedom itself was not so much a result of radical rebellion as the slow growth of institutions. But Thomas Paine, a hero of Foner's and the subject of one of his books, rushed off to Paris with the storming of the Bastille, hailing both the American and the French revolutions as radically innovative and transformative.