3. How the historical blackout operates

Today, this situation has been multiplied many fold. Historians and other social scientists veritably swarmed into the various wartime agencies after 1941, especially the Office of War Information and the Office of Strategic Services. They were intimately associated with the war effort and with the shaping of public opinion to conform to the thesis of the pure and limpid idealism and ethereal innocence of the United States and our exclusive devotion to selfdefense and world betterment through the sword. Hence, the opposition of historians and social scientists to truth about the responsibility for the second World War and its obvious results is many times greater than it was in the years following the close of the first World War. Since the war several corps of court historians have volunteered to work to continue the elaboration of official mythology. In addition, the State Department and the Army and Navy have a great swarm of historians dedicated to presenting history as their employers wish it to be written, and at the present time there is a new influx of American historians and social scientists into our "Ministry of Truth/'11 III. HOW THE HISTORICAL BLACKOUT OPERATES The methods followed by the various groups interested in blacking out the truth about world affairs since 1932 are numerous and ingenious, but, aside from subterranean persecution of individuals, they fall mainly into the following patterns or categories: (1) excluding scholars suspected of revisionist views from access to public documents which are freely opened to "court historians" and other apologists for the foreign policy of President Roosevelt; (2) intimil6 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE dating publishers of books and periodicals, so that even those who might wish to publish books and articles setting forth the revisionist point of view do not dare to do so; (3) ignoring or obscuring published material which embodies revisionist facts and arguments; and (4) smearing revisionist authors and their books.

1. DENYING ACCESS TO PUBLIC DOCUMENTS There is a determined effort to block those suspected of seeking the truth from having access to official documents, other than those which have become public property. The outstanding official and court historians, such as Samuel Eliot Morison, William L. Langer, Herbert Feis, and the like, are given free access to the official archives. Only such things as the most extreme top secrets, like the socalled Kent Documents and President Roosevelt's communications with King George VI, carefully guarded at Hyde Park, are denied to them. Otherwise, they have freedom of access to official documents and the important private diaries of leading public officials. Many of these important sources are, however, completely sealed off from any historian who is suspected of desiring to ascertain the full and unbiased truth with respect to American foreign policy since 1933. The man who is probably the outstanding scholarly authority on American diplomatic history found himself barred from many of the more important documents. Moreover, many of the notes which he had taken down from those documents he had been permitted to examine were later confiscated by State Department officials.

If the complete official documents would support the generally accepted views with respect to the causes and issues of the war, there would seem to be no reasonable objection to allowing any reputable historian to have free and unimpeded access to such materials. As Charles Austin Beard concisely stated the matter, "Official archives must be open to all citizens on equal terms, with special privileges for none; inquiries must be wide and deep as well as uncensored; and the competition of ideas in the forum of public opinion must be free from political interests or restraints/'12 REVISIONISM AND THE HISTORICAL BLACKOUT 1J The importance of freedom of the archives to writers of sound historical material has also been commented upon by the editor of the London Times Literary Supplement of April 18, 1952, in relation to the appearance of Professors William L. Langer and S. E. Gleason's The Struggle Against Isolation, 1937-1940, which was produced by the Rockefeller Foundation subsidy mentioned above: Once the principle is accepted that governments grant access to their archives to certain chosen historians and refuse it to others, it would be unrealistic to ignore the temptation that may arise in the future to let the choice fall on historians who are most likely to share the official view of the moment and to yield readily to discreet official promptings as to what is suitable, and what is unsuitable, for publication. When this happens, the last barrier on the road to "official history" will have fallen.

2. DIFFICULTIES IN PUBLISHING REVISIONIST MATERIALS Some might sense that there is a seeming inconsistency between the statement that there has been an attempt to black out Revisionism after the second World War and the undoubted fact that important revisionist books have appeared sooner and in greater number since the second World War than they did after 1918. This gratifying situation in no way contradicts what has been said above relative to the far more vigorous opposition to Revisionism since 1945. Nearly all publishers were happy to publish revisionist volumes after 1918, or at least after 1923. But not a single major publisher has issued a revisionist book since 1945; neither is there any evidence that one will do so for years to come. Had not Charles Austin Beard possessed a devoted friend in Eugene Davidson of the Yale University Press, and had not the firms of Henry Regnery and DevinAdair been in existence, it is very likely that not one revisionist book would have come from the press following V-J Day. For not only are historians who seek to establish the truth prevented from getting much of the material which they need, they also find it very difficult to secure the publication of books l8 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE embodying such of the truth as they have been able to assemble from the accessible documents.

It would, naturally, be assumed that the first book to give the full inside information on the attack at Pearl Harbor would have been an exciting publishing adventure and that the manuscript would have been eagerly sought after by any and all book-publishing firms. Such, however, was far from the facts. After canvassing the publishing opportunities, George Morgenstern found that the DevinAdair Company was the only one which had the courage to bring out his brilliant book, Pearl Harbor: the Story oi the Secret War, in 1947.13 Charles Austin Beard informed me that he was so convinced that none of his former commercial publishers would print his critical account of the Roosevelt foreign policy14 that he did not regard it as even worth while to inquire. He was fortunate enough to have a courageous friend who was head of one of the most important university presses in the country. The fourth important revisionist book to push its way through the blackout ramparts was William Henry Chamberlin's America's Second Crusade.15 The history of the publication difficulties in connection with the book showed that, in the publishing world, there was no more inclination in 1950 than there had been previously to welcome the truth with respect to President Roosevelt's foreign policy and the second World War.

Chamberlin is a distinguished author. He has written many important books and they have been published by leading publishing houses. But none of his former commercial publishers was interested in the manuscript, though it is probably the most timely and important work Chamberlin has written. The head of one large publishing house, himself a noted publicist, declared his deep personal interest in the book but stated that he did not feel it ethical to jeopardize the financial interests of his company through risking retaliation from the blackout contingent. Two university presses turned down the manuscript, though in each case the director attested to the great merit of the book. That it was finally brought out was due to the courage and public spirit of Henry Regnery, who has published more realistic books relative to the second REVISIONISM AND THE HISTORICAL BLACKOUT 19 World War than all other American publishers combined. Yet Chamberlin's work is neither sensational nor extreme. It is no more than an honest and actually restrained statement of the facts that every American citizen needs to have at hand if we are to avoid involvement in a devastating, fatal "third crusade."

A fifth revisionist book, Design for War, by an eminent New York attorney ancl expert on international law, Frederic R. Sanborn, appeared early in 1951. It was published by the DevinAdair Company which brought out Mr. Morgenstern's volume. The sixth and definitive revisionist volume, Professor Charles Callan TansnTs Back Door to War: The Roosevelt Foreign Policy, 1933-1941, was published by Regnery. Professor TansnTs previous publishers were not interested in the book. In a trenchant article on "A Case History in Book Publishing," in the American Quarterly, Winter, 1949, the distinguished university press editor, W. T. Couch, tells of the difficulties met with in inducing commercial publishers to print revisionist books, and he goes into detail about the problems encountered in securing a publisher for A. Frank Reel's courageous book, The Case of General Yamashita. As a matter of fact, only two small publishing houses in the United States—the Henry Regnery Company and the DevinAdair Company—have shown any consistent willingness to publish books which frankly aim to tell the truth with respect to the causes and issues of the second World War. Leading members of two of the largest publishing houses in the country have told me that, whatever their personal wishes in the circumstances, they would not feel it ethical to endanger their business and the property rights of their stockholders by publishing critical books relative to American foreign policy since 1933. And there is good reason for this hesitancy. The book clubs and the main sales outlets for books are controlled by powerful pressure groups which are opposed to truth on such matters. These outlets not only refuse to market critical books in this field but also threaten to boycott other books by those publishers who defy their blackout ultimatum.

When such critical books do get into the bookstores, the sales department frequently refuses to display or promote them. It re20 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE quired the personal intervention of the head of America's largest retail store to insure that one of the leading critical volumes was displayed upon the counter of the book department of the store. In the American Legion Monthly, February, 1951, Irene Kuhn revealed the efforts of many bookstores to discourage the buying of books critical of administration foreign policy. A striking example of how blackout pressures are able to discourage the sale of revisionist books is the experience at Macy's, in New York City, with the Chamberlin book. Macy's ordered fifty copies and returned forty as unsold. If the book could have been distributed on its merits, Macy's would certainly have sold several thousand copies. Not only are private sales discouraged, but equally so are sales to libraries. Mr. Regnery discovered that, six months after its publication, there was not one copy of the Chamberlin book in any of the forty-five branches of the New York City Public Library. Another sampling study of the situation in libraries throughout the country showed that the same situation prevailed in most of the nation's libraries, not only in respect to the Chamberlin book, but also in the case of other revisionist volumes like John T. Flynn's The Roosevelt Myth.16 Some of the reasons for this are explained by Oliver Carlson in an article on "Slanted Guide to Library Selections" in The Fieeman, January 14, 1952. As an example, the most influential librarian in the United States has described George Orwell's Nineteen EightyFour as "paranoia in literature."

The attempt to suppress or exclude revisionist materials from publication extends beyond the book-publishing trade. Whereas, in the late 1920's and early 1930's, all of the more important periodicals were eager to publish competent revisionist articles by reputable scholars, no leading American magazine will today bring out a frank revisionist article, no matter what the professional distinction of the author. Most of them, indeed, even refuse to review revisionist books. The Progressive has been the only American periodical which has, with fair consistency, kept its columns open to such material, and its circulation is very limited. While the periodicals are closed to neorevisionist materials, they are, of course, wide open and eager for anything which continues the wartime mythology. If the authors of such mythology REVISIONISM AND THE HISTORICAL BLACKOUT 21 did not feel reasonably assured that answers to their articles could not be published, it is unlikely that they would risk printing such amazing whitewash as that by General Sherman Miles on "Pearl Harbor in Retrospect/' in the Atlantic Monthly, July, 1948, and Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison's vehement attack on Charles Austin Beard in the August, 1948, issue of the same magazine.

Now, Admiral Morison is an able historian of nautical matters and a charming man personally. But his pretensions to anything like objectivity in weighing responsibility for the second World War can hardly be sustained. In his Foreword to Morison's Battle oi the Atlantic, the late James Forrestal let the cat out of the bag. He revealed that, as early as 1942, Morison had suggested to President Roosevelt that the right kind of history of naval operations during the war should be written, and modestly offered his "services" to do the job so as to reflect proper credit upon the administration. Roosevelt and Secretary Knox heartily agreed to this proposition and Morison was given a commission as captain in the Naval Reserve to write the official history of naval operations in the second World War. If Roosevelt and Knox were alive today, they would have no reason to regret their choice of an historian. But, as a "court historian'* and "hired man," however able, of Roosevelt and Knox, Admiral Morison's qualifications to take a bow to von Ranke and pass stern judgment on the work of Beard, whom no administration or party was ever able to buy, are not convincing. President Truman's announcement in the newspapers on January 14, 1951, indicated that Morison's services have been recognized and that he is apparently to be court-historian-in-chief during the opening phases of our official entry into the "Nineteen EightyFour" system.17 But Morison's various attacks on Beard were handled with appropriate severity by Professor Howard K. Beale in his address before the American Historical Association on December 28, 1952, published in the August, 1953, issue of the Pacific Historical Review.

Another example of the accessibility of our leading periodicals to antirevisionist materials was the publication of many articles smearing the reputation of Beard at the time of his death, some of the most bitter articles appearing in journals that had earlier re22 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE garded Beard as one of their most distinguished and highly welcome contributors. Equally illustrative of the tendency to welcome any defense of the traditional mythology and exclude contrary opinions was the publication of the somewhat irresponsible article by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., on "Roosevelt and His Detractors" in the June, 1950, issue of Harper's Magazine. It was, obviously, proper for the editor to publish this article, but not equally defensible was his inability to "find space" for the publication of an answer, even by one of the outstanding contributors to Harper's. Most of the professional historical magazines are as completely closed to the truth concerning the responsibility for and merits of the second World War, as are the popular periodicals. Likewise, the great majority of our newspapers are highly hostile to material questioning the traditional mythology about the causes and results of this war. The aversion of the New York Times to the truth about Pearl Harbor ten years later is dealt with below.18 3. IGNORING OR OBSCURING REVISIONIST BOOKS In case a revisionist book squeezes through the publishing blackout, almost invariably as a result of the courage of the two small publishing companies mentioned above, the blackout strategists are well prepared to circumvent the possibility of its gaining any wide circulation or popular acceptance. The most common procedure is to accord such books the silent treatment, namely, to refuse to review them at all. As one powerful pressure group has pointed out, this is the most effective way of nullifying the potential influence of any book. Even highly hostile and critical reviews attract attention to a book and may arouse controversy which will further publicize it. The silent treatment assures a still-birth to virtually any volume. The late Oswald Garrison Villard recounts his own personal experience with the silent-treatment strategy of editors today: "I myself rang up a magazine which some months previously had asked me to review a book for them and asked if they would accept another review from me. The answer was 'Yes, of course. What book had you in mind?' I replied, 'Morgenstern's Pearl Harbor/ REVISIONISM AND THE HISTORICAL BLACKOUT 23 " 'Oh, that's that new book attacking F.D.R. and the war, isn't it?' " 'Yes.' " 'Well, how do you stand on it?' " 'I believe, since his book is based on the records of the Pearl Harbor inquiry, he is right.' " 'Oh, we don't handle books of that type. It is against our policy to do so/ "

The Henry Regnery Company of Chicago has been more courageous and prolific in the publication of substantial revisionist books than any other concern here or abroad.19 It has brought out such important books as Leonard von Muralt's From Versailles to Potsdam; Hans Rothfels' The German Opposition to Hitler; Victor Gollancz's In Darkest Germany; Freda Utley's The High Cost of Vengeance; Montgomery Belgion's Victor's Justice; Lord Hankey's Politics: Trials and Errors; William Henry Chamberlin's America's Second Crusade; and Charles Callan Tansill's Back Door to War. Mr. Regnery has shown me a careful survey of the treatment accorded these books by our leading newspapers and periodicals. Some have not been reviewed at all; most of them were reviewed sparingly. Almost invariably, when they have been noticed, they have been attacked with great ferocity and uniform unfairness. The obscuring of the neorevisionist material may further be illustrated by the space and position assigned to the reviews of Beard's American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932-1940, and Morgenstern's Pearl Harbor in the American Historical Review and in other leading newspapers and periodicals.

Despite the revolutionary nature and vast importance of the Beard book, it was given only a page in the American Historical Review, but, amusingly enough, the reviewer used the brief space at his disposal to praise the book. This was not allowed to happen again. Though Morgenstern's book was perhaps the most important single volume published in the field of American history in the year 1947, it was relegated to a book note in the American Historical Review and was roundly smeared. Of all the book-reviewing columnists in New York City papers, 24 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE only one reviewed Morgenstern's book and he smeared it. The Saturday Review of Literature ignored it completely and so did most of the other leading periodicals. Though many infinitely less important books, from the standpoint of timeliness and intrinsic merit of content, received frontpage positions therein, neither the Morgenstern book nor the Beard volume was given this place in the Sunday book-review sections of the New York Times or Herald Tribune. Had these books ardently defended the Roosevelt legend, they would assuredly have been assigned frontpage positions. As Oswald Villard remarked of the Beard volume: "Had it been a warm approval of F.D.R. and his war methods, I will wager whatever press standing I have that it would have been featured on the first pages of the Herald Tribune 'Books' and the Times literary section and received unbounded praise from Walter Millis, Allan Nevins, and other similar axemen."

Mr. Villard's prophecy was vindicated after his death. When the supreme effort to salvage the reputation of Roosevelt and his foreign policy appeared in W. L. Langer and S. E. Gleason's Challenge to Isolation, 10.-yj-10.40, it was promptly placed on the front page of the Herald Tribune Book Review of January 20, 1952, and praised in lavish fashion. Beard's book on President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941, was so challenging that it could not be ignored. But it did not gain frontpage position in either the New York Times or the Herald Tribune. Though reviewed in a number of newspapers and periodicals, the majority of the reviewers sought to discredit the book rather than to examine its facts and arguments in a spirit of fairness and integrity. Chamberlin's America's Second Crusade was nowhere near as widely reviewed as the significance of the content of the book merited, irrespective of whether or not one agreed with all of the author's conclusions. It was the first comprehensive and critical appraisal of the nature and results of the most momentous project in which the United States was ever involved, politically, economically, or militarily. Hence, it merited careful and extended examination by every newspaper and periodical in the land. But it was reviewed in only a fraction of the leading newspapers, while most REVISIONISM AND THE HISTORICAL BLACKOUT 25 of the important periodicals, including the American Historical Review, ignored it entirely. In the 1920's periodicals like the New Republic and the Nation would have reviewed a book of this type lyrically and at great length, and, in all probability, have published special articles and editorials praising it warmly. Most reviews which the Chamberlin book received were of the smearing variety. The New York Times and Herald Tribune both reviewed the book in hostile fashion, gave it very brief reviews, and placed these in an obscure position.

Frederic R. Sanborn's able and devastating Design for War received about the same treatment as the Chamberlin volume. It was ignored by the great majority of the newspapers and by virtually all the important periodicals. The New York Times reviewed the book rather promptly, if not conspicuously, but handed it over to their leading academic hatchet man, Samuel Flagg Bemis. Though prodded by Sanborn, the Herald Tribune delayed the review from March to August and then assigned it to Gordon A. Craig, a leading antirevisionist among the historians frequently employed by the Times and Herald Tribune in attacking books critical of Roosevelt foreign policy. Sanbom's book was not reviewed at all by Time, Newsweek, the New Yorker, the Nation, the New Republic, Harper's, the Atlantic Monthly, or the Saturday Review of Literature, though Sanborn wrote letters of inquiry to all of them. Correspondence with the Saturday Review of Literature from April to the end of September failed to produce a review. If a comparable book had appeared at any time between 1923 and 1935, there is every reason to believe that the Nation and New Republic, for example, would have hailed it with near-hysterical joy and given excessive space to praising and promoting it. The American Historical Review did not review or even notice the Sanborn volume.

So far as can be ascertained at the time these lines are revised [December, 1952], Charles Callan TansnTs Back Door to War was treated by the press in essentially the same manner as it had handled the Chamberlin and Sanborn volumes, although it is the definitive revisionist contribution and deserves as much consideration as Sidney B. Fay's Origins of the World War received in 1928.

26 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE It received slightly more attention than did Chamberlin and Sanborn in the newspapers, perhaps because a determined effort was made to get the book in the hands of the editor of every important newspaper in the country. The majority of the newspaper reviews were of a smearing nature. As one example of such a review by an interventionist newspaper we may cite the following from the San Francisco Chronicle of July 27, 1952: "To bring forth a very small mouse, Professor Tansill has labored mountainously to assemble this helter-skelter collection of facts, documents and hearsay about America's prewar foreign policy. . . . This book is not history. It is awkward special pleading." The author of the review hid behind the initials "M. S." The book failed to make the front page of either the New York Times Book Review or of the New York Herald Tribune Book Review. It was reviewed on page 3 of the former (May 11, 1952) and on page 10 of the latter (June 1, 1952), rather briefly in both cases. Even so, Dexter Perkins, who reviewed the book for the Times, had to request twice the space originally assigned. Among the important periodicals only the Freeman, the Saturday Review of Literature, and the Nation reviewed the book, the latter two rather belatedly. Time, Newsweek, the Atlantic, and Harper's gave the volume the "silent treatment," ignoring it entirely. The editor of the New Republic treated the book to an almost obscene smear.

In the 1920's all of these periodicals (which were then in existence) would have reviewed the book promptly and at length, and it would have evoked almost frenzied ecstasy on the part of the Nation and New Republic. The jaundiced and biased attitude of periodicals in reviewing or ignoring such books as these was well revealed at the time of the appearance of the ardently pro-Roosevelt masterpiece by W. L. Langer and S. E. Gleason, Challenge to Isolation, 1937-1940. In this instance virtually all of the magazines which had ignored the books by Morgenstern, Chamberlin, Sanborn, and Tansill immediately rushed into print with prominent and lyrical reviews of the Langer-Gleason volume. Among all the editors of professional journals in the historical and social science field, only Professor Howard W. Odum, editor of Social Forces, has been willing to REVISIONISM AND THE HISTORICAL BLACKOUT 27 open his publication to full and fair reviewing of revisionist volumes.

One of the most impressive examples of the ignoring and obscuring of the writings of men critical of our foreign policy since 1937 is presented by the case of Francis Neilson. Mr. Neilson is a distinguished publicist and he served as a member of Parliament before he came to the United States. He was the principal "angel" of the original Freeman and, like John T. Flynn, was once a darling of American liberals who were, in those days, revisionists and antiinterventionists. Mr. Neilson's How Diplomats Make War (1915) was the first revisionist volume to be published on the first World War, and it is still read with respect. When Mr. Neilson opposed our interventionism after 1937, his erstwhile liberal friends fell away from him. Being a man of means, he was able to publish his gigantic five-volume work, The Tragedy of Europe, privately. It was scarcely noticed in any review, though it was praised by no less a personage than President Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago. In 1950 Mr. Neilson published, again privately, a condensation of the more vital portions of his larger work, entitling it The Makers of War. The book contains a great amount of valuable revisionist material not embodied in any other revisionist volume on the second World War.

But, Mr. Neilson assured me personally, it has never been reviewed at all. 4. SMEARING REVISIONIST BOOKS When, rather rarely and for one reason or another, a newspaper or a periodical decides actually to review a revisionist book rather than to accord it the silent treatment, it has available a large supply of hatchet men who can be relied upon to attack and smear revisionist volumes and to eulogize the work of court historians and others who seek to perpetuate the traditional mythology.20 For example, the New York Times has its own staff of such hatchet men, among them Otto D. Tolischus, Charles Poore, Orville Prescott, Karl Schriftgiesser, Drew Middleton, and others. When these do not suffice, it can call upon academicians of similar inclination, 28 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE such as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Allan Nevins, Henry Steele Commager, Gordon A. Craig, Samuel Flagg Bemis, Dexter Perkins, and others. The Herald Tribune has Walter Millis, August Heckscher, and their associates on its staff, and also turns to such academicians as those mentioned above, whose gifts and talents are not limited to the Times.

The smearing device used almost universally in discrediting neorevisionist books is a carry-over of the propaganda strategy perfected by Charles Michelson in political technique, and extended by Joseph Goebbels, John Roy Carlson, and others, namely, seeking to destroy the reputation of an opponent by associating him, however unfairly, with some odious quality, attitude, policy, or personality, even though this may have nothing to do with the vital facts in the situation. It is only a complex and skillful application of the old adage about "giving a dog a bad name/' This is an easy and facile procedure, for it all too often effectively disposes of an opponent without involving the onerous responsibility of facing the facts.21 The "blackout boys" have even implied that the effort to tell the truth about responsibility for the second World War is downright wicked. Samuel Flagg Bemis declares that such an excursion into intellectual integrity is "serious, unfortunate, deplorable/'22 Inasmuch as the Morgenstern book was the first to shake the foundations of the interventionist wartime propaganda and because Morgenstern is not a professional historian of longtime standing, his work was greeted with an avalanche of smears. Virtually the only fair reviews of the Morgenstern volume were those by Edwin M. Borchard, George A. Lundberg, Harry Paxton Howard, and Admiral H. E. Yarnell. There was rarely any effort whatever to wrestle with the vast array of facts and documentary evidence which, both Beard and Admiral Yarnell maintained, bore out all of Morgenstern's essential statements and conclusions. Rather, he was greeted with an almost unrelieved volley of smears.

Some reviewers rested content with pointing out that Morgenstern is a young man and, hence, cannot be supposed to know much, even though the New York Times handed over to Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., a younger man, the responsibility for reviewing REVISIONISM AND THE HISTORICAL BLACKOUT 29 Beard's great book on President Roosevelt and the Coming oi the War, 1941. Another reviewer asserted that all that needed to be said to refute and silence the book was to point out that Morgenstern is employed by the Chicago Tribune. Others stressed the fact that he is only an amateur, dabbling with documents, without the training afforded by the graduate historical seminar, though Morgenstern was an honor student of history at the University of Chicago. It was apparent to unbiased readers that most of the professors who reviewed his book departed entirely from any seminar canons of research and criticism which they may have earlier mastered. Morgenstern surely worked and wrote in closer conformity to von Ranke's exhortations than his professorial reviewers.

Other reviewers sought to dispose of the Morgenstern book by stating that it was "bitterly partisan," was composed in a state of "blind anger," or written with "unusual asperity/' though it is actually the fact that Morgenstern is far less bitter, angry, or blind than his reviewers. Indeed, the tone of his book is more one of urbane satire than of indignation. Few books of this type have been freer of any taint of wrath and fury. The attitude of such reviewers is a good example of what the psychologists call the mechanism of "projection." The reviewers attributed to Morgenstern the "blind anger" that they themselves felt when compelled to face the truth. In reviewing the book for the Infantry Journal, May, 1947, Harvey A. DeWeerd declared that it was "the most flagrant example of slanted history" that had come to his attention "in recent years," but he failed to make it clear that the uniqueness in the slanting of Morgenstern's book was that it was "slanted" toward the truth, something which was, and still is, quite unusual in historical writing on this theme. Probably the most complete smearing of the Morgenstern book was performed by Walter Millis in the Herald Tribune Book Review (February 9, 1947), though, with all the extensive space at his disposal, he made no serious effort to come to grips with the facts in the situation. He merely elaborated the smear in the caption: "Twisting the Pearl Harbor Story: A Documented Brief for a Highly Biased, Bitter, Cynical View."

Gordon A. Craig, of Princeton, reviewing the book in the New York Times, February 9, 1947, rested content with stating that the 30 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE book was no more than anti-Roosevelt "mythology" and completely "unbelievable," though he adduced no relevant evidence in support of these assertions. One of the most remarkable attacks on the book was made by a onetime ardent revisionist historian, Oron J. Hale, in the Annals of the American Academy, July, 1947. After first assailing the book with the charge of bitter partisanship and asserting that the author made only a fake "parade" of the "externals of scholarship/' Hale sought manfully but futilely to find serious errors in Morgenstern's materials. He then concluded that all or most of the statements in the book were true but that the book as a whole was a "great untruth." This reverses the usual line of the current apologists for the Roosevelt foreign policy, like Thomas A. Bailey and Arthur M.

Schlesinger, Jr., who now agree that most of Roosevelt's public statements thereupon were untrue but that his program as a whole was a great truth which exemplified the desirable procedure of the "good officer"—the conscientious public servant. The fact that Morgenstern is an editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune and that the Tribune has opened its columns to revisionist writings has encouraged the Smearbund to seek to identify Revisionism and all revisionist writers with the Tribune. Even Beard's books were charged with being dominated by the Tribune policy. Only recently a reviewer in the New Yorker linked Beard and the Tribune and referred to the "Charles Austin BeardChicago Tribune" view of war origins. Max Lerner wrote that "the man who once mercilessly flayed Hearst became the darling of McCormick." No phase of the smear campaign could well be more preposterous. Aside from being willing to accept the truth relative to Roosevelt foreign policy, Beard and the Tribune had little in common. The American Civil Liberties Union once warmly praised Colonel McCormick for his valiant battle against the Minnesota press gag law. There was no attempt, then, to link the Civil Liberties Union with the total editorial policy of the Tribune. Roger Baldwin was not portrayed as a tool of Colonel McCormick, nor was there any hint of a Civil Liberties Union-McCormick axis.

Those who write in behalf of freedom of the press can always gain REVISIONISM AND THE HISTORICAL BLACKOUT 31 access to the columns of the Chicago Tribune, but there is no thought in such cases of linking them with the total editorial policy of the Tiibune. Due to the fact that Beard was a trained and venerable scholar and, hence, obviously not a juvenile amateur in using historical documents, that he had a world-wide reputation as one of the most eminent and productive historians and political scientists the United States has ever produced, that he had served as president of the American Political Science Association and of the American Historical Association, and that he was awarded, in 1948, the Gold Medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters for the best historical work of the preceding decade, it required more than usual gall and trepidation to apply the smear technique to Beard and his two splendid books on American foreign policy.

Yet Beard did not escape unscathed, though his facts and objectivity cannot be validly challenged. As Louis Martin Sears pointed out in the American Historical Review: "The volume under review is said to give annoyance to the followers of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. If that be true, their faith is scarcely founded upon a rock, for no more objective treatment could readily be conceived. The author nowhere injects a personal opinion/'23 Any testimonials as to Beard's historical prowess are, invariably, a red flag to the Smearbund bull. Only this consideration makes such things as Lewis Mumford's resignation from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, because of the award of the abovementioned medal to Beard, or Harry D. Gideonse's explosion in the New Leader,24 at all explicable. The difficulty of attacking Beard relative to his status as an historian diverted most of the smearing of him into the allegation that his work is invalidated and unreliable because he was an "isolationist." The absurdity of this charge is obvious. Beard did, from 1937 onward, courageously and sanely warn against the manner in which the Roosevelt policies were deliberately leading us into a foreign war against the will of the overwhelming mass of the American people in what was supposed to be a democratic system of government. Beard's stand may not have been wise, though the facts today overwhelmingly prove its soundness, but such an attitude 32 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE has nothing whatever to do with any literal isolationism unless one defines internationalism as chronic meddling abroad and unwavering support of our entry into any extant foreign war.

Any attempt to brand Beard as a literal isolationist is, of course, completely preposterous. Few men have had a wider international perspective or experience. In his early academic days he helped to found Ruskin College, Oxford. He had travelled, advised, and been held in high esteem from Tokyo to Belgrade. The irresponsibility of this form of smearing Beard is well illustrated by the innuendo of Samuel Eliot Morison and Perry Miller that Beard was an ignorant isolationist with an archaic and naive view of world affairs because he was deaf and lived on a farm with his cows, thus implying that he had shut himself off from the world and human associations and did not know what was going on about him. That such charges were utterly without foundation is well known to anybody with any knowledge whatever of Beard and his mode of life and must have been known to be untrue by Admiral Morison and Professor Miller, themselves.

Beard provided himself with a most efficient hearing instrument which enabled him to carry on personal conversations with the utmost facility. He probably enjoyed wider personal contact with scholars and publicists than any other American historian down to the day of his death. He was visited at his suburban home constantly by a stream of prominent academic and scholarly admirers. He travelled widely and spent his winters in North Carolina. His deafness did not affect his personal relations or scholarly interests and activities in the slightest. His mode of life, at the most, only gave him the occasional quiet and detachment needed to digest and interpret the mass of information which came to him as a result of his wide reading and his extensive personal contacts with American and foreign scholars, both young and old. His dairy farm was located some twenty miles from his home. I was present a few years ago at a conference on foreign affairs attended by about forty leading savants. Most of them wrung their hands about the sorry state of the world today, but only two or three were frank and candid enough to discern and admit that the majority of the conditions which they were so dolorously deploring REVISIONISM AND THE HISTORICAL BLACKOUT 33 stemmed directly from the foreign policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, from his Chicago Bridge speech of October, 1937, to the Yalta Conference of early 1945. Beard was assailed for his "isolationism"

and "cultural lag" by both the chairman and the chief participant for no earthly reason save that he opposed the policies which had led to the chaos over which the conference was holding the coroner's inquest—but with no intention of declaring it a homicide or seeking the culprit. They vented their spleen on a man who had advised against risking the ambuscade which led to the murder. It is both vicious and silly to brand a person an "isolationist" merely because he opposed our entry into the second World War. Personally, I opposed our entry with all the energy and power at my command—just as vigorously as did Beard. But it also happens that I wrote one of the longest chapters in the first important book ever published in behalf of the League of Nations and that I have ever since supported any move or policy which seemed to me likely to promote international good will and world peace. Sane internationalism is one thing; it is something quite different to support our entry into a war likely to ruin civilization mainly to promote the political prospects of a domestic leader, however colorful and popular, to satisfy the neurotic compulsions of special interests and pressure groups, and to pull the chestnuts of foreign nations out of the fire.

The whole issue of "isolationism" and the epithet "isolationist" has been a very effective phase of the smearing technique invented and applied by interventionists between 1937 and Pearl Harbor, and so naively exposed and betrayed by Walter Johnson in his book, The Battle Against Isolation.25 The absurd character of the whole process of smearing by the method of alleging "isolationism" has been devastatingly revealed by George A. Lundberg in his article on "Semantics in International Relations" in the American Perspective.26 Senator Taft put the matter in a nutshell when he asserted that to call any responsible person an isolationist today is nothing less than idiocy—one might add, malicious idiocy. The only man of any intellectual importance who ever believed in isolationism was a German economist, Johann Heinrich von Thiinen (1783-1850), author of The Isolated State (1826), and 34 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE he espoused the idea only to provide the basis for formulating economic abstractions. In short, isolationism is no more than a semantic smear fiction invented by globaloney addicts.

Governor Adlai E. Stevenson, of Illinois, is reported to have said in a commencement address in June, 1952, that "Isolationism has not lost all of its emotional appeal, but it has lost its intellectual respectability." Unless one is willing to lapse completely into "Nineteen EightyFour" doublethink, it would seem that exactly the opposite is the truth. From Woodrow Wilson's war address on April 6, 1917, to President Truman's denunciation of cuts in the 1952 European aid allotment, interventionism has rested entirely on propaganda and emotional appeals. It has never been able to stand for a moment on the ground of empiricism, logic, and fact. If results are any test of the validity of a position, no program in human history has had less confirmation and vindication than has the intervention of the United States in foreign quarrels. On the other hand, isolationism, which means no more than international sanity and the avoidance of national suicide, has never been able to appeal to war excitement, the propaganda of fear, and other emotional fictions. It has always been compelled to rely upon reason and sanity. It may be that emotionalism is a better guide for public policy than rationality, but to claim that interventionism and globaloney can claim priority in respect to rationality is palpably preposterous.

The internationalists of the earlier era, for whom I wrote and lectured from coast to coast for twenty years after 1918, were true believers in internationalism, good will, and peace, and worked to secure these objectives. The globaloney and interventionist crowd, while prating about internationalism and peace, have done more than anybody else, except the totalitarian dictators, to promote nationalism and to revive and direct the war spirit. They have created an unprecedented spirit of interventionism, militarism, and intolerance in the United States and have helped to provoke a similar development in Soviet Russia. While blatant nationalism was checked temporarily in Germany and Italy, it has been stimulated elsewhere, from England to Indochina, eastern Asia, and South Africa. The United Nations have steadily become more REVISIONISM AND THE HISTORICAL BLACKOUT 35 nationalistic and less united, and the world trembles and shivers on the brink of the third world war before the peace treaties have all been negotiated to conclude the second. There is all too much truth in the statement of an eminent publicist that Alger Hiss's long-continued activities as an aggressive internationalist of the recent vintage did far more harm to the United States than handing over any number of secret State Department documents which he could have transcribed and transmitted to the Russians. The columnist, Jay Franklin, has given us a good summary picture of the fruits of interventionism by contrasting the twentieth-century American casualty record under five "isolationist" Republican presidents and under three interventionist Democratic presidents: Republican Presidents Theodore Roosevelt (1901-9) William H. Taft (1909-13) Warren G. Harding (1921-23) Calvin Coolidge (1923-29) Herbert Hoover (1929-33) Total for 24 Rep. years Democratic Presidents Woodrow Wilson (1913-21) Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-45) Harry Truman (1945-53) Total for 28 Dem. yrs.

Casualties 0 0 0 0 0 0 Casualties 364,800 M34>527 129^53 1,628480 Average U.S. war casualties per Republican year, o. Average U.S. war casualties per Democratic year, 58,160. Though Catholic circles have been unusually fair in tolerating the truth about the causes of the second World War, the pressure on the editors was so great that even the enlightened Commonweal permitted Mason Wade to attack Beard in its columns. But the most irresponsible attempt to attack Beard as an "isolationist" came with almost uniquely bad taste from the pen of Harry D. Gideonse, who reviewed Beard's President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941, in the New Leader.27 36 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE Beard was a native-born American who labored mightily for over fifty years to improve many phases of American intellectual and public life. No American historian, past or present, had a more honorable record as an active and effective intellectual patriot. He had never written a word which placed the interests of other nations above those of our country. Gideonse, on the other hand, is Dutch-born, surely an honorable paternity. But there is little evidence that he has ever become completely immersed in Americanism or has taken on a thoroughly American point of view. In his public statements over many years he has always given evidence of a robust internationalism which has little primary regard for American institutions or traditions. His internationalism appears to have a twofold basis: a hangover of the Dutch imperialism of the Dutch East India Company tycoons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,28 and the virus of current American globaloney. Anyhow, it has paid off remarkably well, for Gideonse was summoned from Chicago to Columbia University and then, to the amazement even of his friends, suddenly catapulted into the presidency of Brooklyn College in 1939.

While Gideonse finds other nonfactual grounds for assaulting Beard, he holds that Beard's alleged isolationism is all that is needed to brush the book aside. Indeed, all that is required for that is the fact, as Gideonse tells us twice in the course of his review, that it has been praised as a very great book by the "isolationist" Chicago Tribune. It might be cogently observed that the Tribune has also praised the Bible, Shakespeare's works, and Einstein's writings on relativity. But Gideonse has not laughed this off yet. If praise by the Chicago Tribune were not enough to destroy the validity of Beard's book, then, in Gideonse's view, it would be amply disposed of by the fact that he quotes, even sparingly, statements by eminent "isolationists" like Senators Burton K. Wheeler and Gerald P. Nye. Not even the fact, which Gideonse concedes, that he also cites Eleanor Roosevelt frequently and with respect, could redeem Beard after he had revealed his acquaintance with the statements of allegedly nefarious "isolationist" personalities.

Though, as we have made clear, reviewers have, naturally, been a trifle hesitant in daring to minimize Beard's status as an historian, REVISIONISM AND THE HISTORICAL BLACKOUT yj Walter Millis and Gideonse have not been dismayed or sidetracked even here. In his review of Beard's President Roosevelt and the Coming oi the War, 1941, in the Herald Tribune Book Review,29 Millis contended that Beard is not entitled to rank as an objective historian according to formal academic fictions, but really belongs back with Tertullian, Orosius, Gregory of Tours, and other "Dark Age" exemplars of the "Devil theory of history/' But it remained for Gideonse to sail in and seek to divest Beard of all claims to any standing as an historical scholar. Just why Gideonse should presume to pass on questions of historiography and to grade historians is not quite evident, though he has been doing so for some years. Professionally, though admittedly a very talented classroom orator and an effective "rabble-rouser" of the student body, he was only a somewhat obscure economist when he strode into Flatbush with his mace. But Gideonse did not hesitate to administer a sharp slap to the members of the American Historical Association, who elected Beard to their presidency in 1933, by pooh-poohing the general scholarly opinion that Beard was the "dean of living American historians." This notion and pretension, says Gideonse, is purely "fictitious." Actually, according to Gideonse, Beard has only been a lifelong pamphleteer, and his books on Roosevelt's foreign policy are cheap journalism.

In the light of all this, one could read with considerable amusement and sardonic humor an announcement in the New York Times of September 8, 1948, that Gideonse opened the college year at Flatbush with an address to entering Freshmen in which he gravely and sternly asserted that "truthfulness" is a main and indispensable quality of a college teacher; one which does not, perhaps, extend to college presidents. There were many other attacks on Beard's last two great books. They usually took one of two forms. First, there were efforts to dispose of them by brief, casual Jovian or flippant smears, without giving any attention whatever to the facts or meeting the arguments of the books. Such was Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s smear in the Partisan Review,50 implying that Beard sought to justify collaboration with the Nazis; Max Lerner's slur to the effect that they were "two rather weird affairs"; Perry Miller's description of them as 38 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE "two frenetic indictments of Franklin Roosevelt" (implying, if Miller knew the meaning of the words he was using, that Beard must have been insane); and Quincy Wright's even briefer disposition of them as "a strange argument" (strange, presumably, to Wright in that the argument was based on facts).

The other type of approach has been to smother the book under a vast welter of side issues, non sequituis, and irrelevant scoldings. This was well illustrated by the procedure of Charles C. Griffin, an expert on Latin American history, who was selected to review Beard's last book for the American Historical Review.31 He buried the book under four and a half pages of impenetrable, irrelevant, and disapproving fog, rarely coming to grips with the essential facts and arguments. About the only fair and scholarly review that the book received was by the chief authority in the field, Charles C. Tansill, in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review32 On the occasion of Beard's death one might have supposed that the opportunity would have been taken to pay a tribute to his greatness as a teacher, historian, political scientist, and liberal, at least in those journals to which Beard had been for years one of the most honored contributors, and that there would have been articles by writers who had long been admirers of Beard, until he began to examine Roosevelt's foreign policy. Instead of this we were treated to an obscene performance which reminded fair observers of jackals and hyenas howling about the body of a dead lion. Especially in point were the articles by Max Lerner in the New Republic, October 25 and November 1, 1948; by Perry Miller in the Nation, September 25, 1948; and by Peter Levin in Tomonow7 March, 1949.

In these articles most of the smears which had been irresponsibly thrown at Beard during the previous several years were amalgamated and he was portrayed as a senile, embittered, and confused "isolationist" and a traitor to the liberal cause. There was even an effort to undermine confidence in Beard's monumental books which had preceded his volumes on the foreign policy of President Roosevelt. Lerner held up to ridicule Beard's social and civic ideal: "A continental economy, spaciously conceived, controlled in a common-sense way, yielding a gracious life without all the horrors of foreign entanglements." As of 1953, such an ideal REVISIONISM AND THE HISTORICAL BLACKOUT 39 might well evoke the heartiest enthusiasm on the part of any thoughtful American. Lerner characterized Roosevelt's foreign policy as a consistent attempt to promote "the collective democratic will reluctantly having to shape a world in which it could survive." How well it succeeded in achieving this result will be apparent from an examination of Chamberlin's America's Second Crusade, and Chapter 8 of this volume.

The campaign of vilification and distortion against Beard has continued long after his death. One of the most absurd attacks appeared in 1952 in a book by John B. Harrison, a teacher of history at Michigan State College, entitled This Age of Global Stiiie. Harrison writes: This prominent historian undertook in the last days of his eccentric old age to prove by ponderous documentation that President Roosevelt set out from the beginning of the war in Europe to stealthily and deceitfully maneuver the United States into a war whose outcome was of no real concern to the American people. It is a deplorable collection of halftruths and distortions. Anyone who reads it should read also Samuel E. Morison's brilliant analysis of it in the Atlantic Monthly, August, 1948. A book containing material of this sort could be published by the old and reputable firm of Lippincott seven years after V-J Day.

The reception accorded Chamberlin's America's Second Crusade was in keeping with the blackout procedure and in line with that given to the Morgenstern and Beard volumes. Chamberlin was a too-important and wellknown author to be given the silent treatment by all newspapers and periodicals, though the leading liberal periodicals tended to ignore his book. It was, naturally, glowingly praised in the Chicago Tribune, and equally lavishly smeared by the New Yoik Post. The New York Times treated the book about as badly as feasible under the circumstances.33 While it placed a long review of a slight book by the elder Schlesinger on page 3 of the Sunday Book Review, it relegated Chamberlin's striking volume to page 34. It ^0 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE chose as the reviewer of the book Samuel Flagg Bemis, well known as perhaps the bitterest critic of revisionist writing among the historians.

But even Bemis was unable to make much headway against Chamberlin' facts and logic. He frankly admitted that he would not "argue the case with Mr. Chamberlin." In reviewing the Morgenstern book, Bemis had written that the American situation in late 1941 constituted "the most awful danger that ever confronted our nation." He still stuck to this thesis, despite his admission that there is no factual basis for it: "That captured Nazi archives do not reveal any actual plans to attack the New World, as Mr. Chamberlin repeatedly stresses, does not make any difference. The intention was there." Bemis pictured Germany and Japan as "the two colossi whose power in victory would have closed on our freedom with the inexorable jaws of a global vise." Therefore, our second crusade was a success and a necessity, even though Bemis admits that Russia is now more powerful than Japan and Germany combined could ever have become, and its power is concentrated in one nation rather than being divided among two, who might often have clashed: "Stalin has stepped into everything that Hitler and Japan first started out to get, and more. Soviet Russia has rolled up an agglomeration of power greater than ever menaced the United States, even in 1941."

Bemis concluded his review with what is possibly the most incredible example of "foot-swallowing" in the whole history of book reviewing: One thing ought to be evident to all of us: by our victory over Germany and Japan, no matter what our folly in losing the peace, we have at least survived to confront the second even greater menace of another totalitarian power. . . . We might not stand vis-a-vis with the Soviets today if President Roosevelt had not entertained a conviction that action against the Axis was necessary. In other words, all the physical, financial, and moral losses of the United States in the second World War were justified and well REVISIONISM AND THE HISTORICAL BLACKOUT 41 expended in order that we might face another world war against a far stronger enemy. With these comments we may well leave Bemis to the logicians. The New York Herald Tribune Book Review handled the Chamberlin book much as did the Times.34 It placed the review on the twelfth page, following reviews of many relatively trivial volumes. It did not seek out a professorial critic, but assigned one of its own "hatchet men/' August Heckscher, to write the review.

While the book was smeared as a revival of "pre-war isolationism/' Heckscher was not able to succeed any better than Bemis in disposing of Chamberlin's material and arguments. He had to rest satisfied with espousing the "perpetual-war-for-perpetual-peace" program of our current internationalists. If the first and second crusades have failed to provide peace, security, and prosperity, we can "keep on trying." Other and more bloody crusades may turn the trick, though even Arnold J. Toynbee has admitted that any further crusades may leave only the pygmies—or, perhaps, only the apes or ants—to wrestle with the aftermath. Perhaps the most remarkable example of smearing the Chamberlin book was the review which was published in the New Leader,35 written by our old friend, Harry D. Gideonse. The New Leader is a sprightly journal controlled mainly by Socialists and ex-Socialists who deserted Norman Thomas in his brave stand against our entry into the second World War, and by totalitarian liberals. Both groups were fanatically in favor of our intervention in the second World War and are now in the vanguard of those who wish us to enter a third crusade in the interest of perpetual war for perpetual peace and the suppression of Red sin throughout the world. Chamberlin writes for this periodical, though his presence seems somewhat incongruous in such an editorial group.

But the fact that Chamberlin is a regular contributor to the New Leader weighed less heavily with the editor than his offense in debunking our first and second crusades and his warning against our entering a third. Therefore it was decided that Chamberlin's book must be smeared, and a man was chosen to do it who could be relied upon. There was no doubt about Gideonse's depend42 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE ability for the task, both from his wellknown general attitude toward interventionism and from his earlier elaborate smearing of Beard in the New Leader. Gideonse did not let the editor down, except that he was only able to bring to bear against Chamberlin the same threadbare smears that he had used against Beard. He led off with a blanket condemnation: "This is a bitter and unconvincing book." The worthlessness of much of Chamberlin's book, according to Gideonse, required nothing more in the way of proof than to show that he agreed with Colonel McCormick and the Chicago Tribune: "At least half of the contents of Mr. Chamberlin's book is another rehash of the Chicago Tribune history of World War II."

Gideonse repeated the old alarmist dud to the effect that, if we had not gone to war against Hitler, he would have made a vassal of Stalin and Soviet Russia and would have controlled the Old World "from the English Channel to Vladivostok." In the December 18, 1950, issue of the New Leader, Chamberlin submitted a crushing answer to Gideonse and other smearing reviewers. The New York Post called Chamberlin a "totalitarian conservative" and painted him as a special favorite of the McCormickPatterson axis. The overwhelming majority of the reviews of the book did not rise above the level of smearing, the lowest point of which was reached in the review by James M. Minifie in the Saturday Review of Literature.56 That the progress of disillusionment with respect to the results of the second crusade and the shock of the Korean war may have made a few editors a trifle more tolerant of reality in world affairs was, possibly, demonstrated by the fact that Chamberlin's book was warmly praised in the review in the Wall Street Journal and was accorded fair treatment in the interventionist Chicago Daily News.

Frederic R. Sanborn's concise, elaborately documented, and closely reasoned volume, Design for War, devoted chiefly to an account of President Roosevelt's secret war program after 1937, was treated much like the Morgenstern and Chamberlin books, though it was more extensively ignored in the press. When not ignored, it was smeared in most of the reviews. The New York REVISIONISM AND THE HISTORICAL BLACKOUT 43 Times thought that it had taken care of the matter by handing the book over to Samuel Flagg Bemis for reviewing. By this time, however, Bemis had read the latest edition of my Struggle Against the Historical Blackout, with its account of his foot-swallowing feat in his Times review of the Chamberlin volume. So Bemis, while rejecting Sanborn's version of American diplomacy from 1937 to Pearl Harbor, was relatively cautious and respectful. Months after the book appeared, the Herald Tribune finally and reluctantly reviewed it, after much prodding by Sanborn. It handed it over to another warhorse among the hatchet men, Gordon A.

Craig, of Princeton. He indulged mainly in the shadowboxing for which Walter Millis had shown such talent. The review, while of the smearing variety, was evasive, as had been Craig's review of Morgenstern's book in the Times years before. He refused to confront the facts and even went so far in historical humor as to accept Cordell Hull's statements at their face value. The Sanborn book was smeared in most of the Scripps-Howard papers that reviewed it at all (vide the Rocky Mountain News, February 18, 1951), though this chain had been in the vanguard of prewar "isolationism." A characteristic newspaper slur was that of the Chattanooga Times, which proclaimed that the Sanborn book was "as impartial as the Chicago Tribune or Westbrook Pegler." Felix Wittmer reviewed the book in the New Leader (March 26, 1951). The editors had, apparently, become bored themselves with the monotonous uniformity of the unvaried dead cats thrown at revisionist books by Harry Gideonse. The Wittmer review was a masterpiece of "doublethink." He smeared the book as "a sad spectacle," and "a biased and myopic account of diplomacy in the guise of objectivity." He accused Sanborn of "amazing ignorance of modern Japanese policies." Yet, a little later on, he expressed himself as in almost complete agreement with Sanborn's account of the crucial Japanese-American negotiations in 1941: "It is perfectly true—as Dr. Sanborn proves—that in 1941 the Japanese seriously wanted peace and that Roosevelt and Hull used every possible device to forestall it, and to provoke an open attack by Japan." He even admits that Roosevelt and Hull anticipated this 44 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE attack. He excuses all this on the ground that our entry into the war was obligatory for American security from Nazi invasion and for the salvation of humanity, and that the provocation of the Japanese was only "penetrating foresight/' because Hitler and Mussolini were just mean enough not to rise to Roosevelt's war bait in the Atlantic. Hence, we had to incite Japan to attack us in order to get into the war through the Pacific back door. Even the New Leader felt impelled to publish a rejoinder by Sanborn.

We have already pointed out that virtually all the important periodicals—Time, Newsweek, the New Yorker, the Saturday Review oi Literature, the Nation, the New Republic, Harper's, and the Atlantic Monthly—had wisely decided that they could protect the Roosevelt and interventionist legend better by ignoring the book entirely than by smearing it in reviews. The American Historical Review did not even mention the volume in a book note. The reviewing of the book by Charles Callan Tansill, Back Door to War, ran true to the form established with reference to revisionist volumes. The Tansill tome is more outspoken and more heavily documented than any other revisionist treatise. So, while it more violently enraged interventionist reviewers, it intimidated and restrained them in some cases. At least they were more restrained than they would have been if the book were not so formidable an exhibit of arduous and exhaustive scholarship.

Dexter Perkins reviewed the book about as gingerly and cautiously in the New York Times Book Review (May 11, 1952) as, earlier, Bemis had handled the Sanborn volume. He was, apparently, also somewhat concerned about a possible comment on his review in future editions of my Historical Blackout. Aside from reiterating his wellknown theme, to the effect that President Roosevelt was reluctantly pushed into war by the force of an ardent and alarmed public opinion, Perkins mainly contented himself with berating the "animus" and "bitterness" shown by Mr. Tansill. This bitterness appeared to consist, actually, in producing documentary proof that the Roosevelt-Hull diplomacy constituted one of the major public crimes of human history. The review by Basil Rauch in the Herald Tribune Book Review (June 1, 1952) was as brash and reckless as was Rauch's own book, REVISIONISM AND THE HISTORICAL BLACKOUT 45 Roosevelt horn Munich to Peail Harbor. It was not unfairly referred to by one reader as "a masterpiece of misrepresentation."

As the Byzantine emperor, Basil II, earned the title of "Basil the Bulgar-Slayer," so Rauch can surely be awarded the title of "Basil the Creator." As I have shown in my brochure, Rauch on Roosevelt, Professor Rauch, in his book, created for Mr. Roosevelt a foreign policy which bore very slight resemblance to the one which the President actually followed. So, in his review of the Tansill volume, he created a book which had little relationship to the one he was supposed to be reviewing. The book and the review must both be read to allow one to become fully aware of the extent to which this is true. Rauch accused Tansill of making statements and drawing conclusions which had no documentary support whatever, though in the book itself hundreds of footnotes and references to acres of documents were presented to buttress Tansill's statements. Back Door to War was tardily and loftily smeared in the Saturday Review oi Literature of August 2, 1952, by Professor Lindsay Rogers of Columbia University. Professor Rogers is not a "court historian," but he was the leading court political scientist and court jester in the original New Deal "brain trust." He pays tribute to "the enormous industry of five years which this ponderous tome required." But he tells the reader that it has been "largely wasted"

because Professor Tansill has outdone the late Dr. Beard in espousing the "devil theory of history" and has interlarded his book with distressing diatribes. The devil theory of history appears to reside in the fact that Professor Tansill adopts a critical attitude toward the Roosevelt foreign policy and that he assigns considerable personal responsibility to President Roosevelt for the course of our foreign affairs after 1933. The "diatribes" are occasional penetrating comments on Roosevelt and his foreign policy which, had they been directed against the critics of Mr. Roosevelt, would have been praised by Professor Rogers as distilled wisdom and brilliant bons mots. The Tansill book was belatedly reviewed at length in the Nation (October 4, 1952) by Professor Charles C. Griffin, who had reviewed the Beard volume in the American Historical Review. It is 46 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE evident from the opening sentences of the review that Professor Griffin regards any comprehensive marshalling of the facts relative to Roosevelt foreign policy as a "violent attack" upon them. The gist of the review was much the same as that by Professor Rogers in the Saturday Review of Literature. Both reviewers are compelled to recognize the vast amount of research which went into the preparation of the Tansill book, but Professor Griffin, like Professor Rogers, holds that all this is vitiated by Professor TansnTs cogent and penetrating characterizations, which are variously described as "opprobrious and objectionable terminology," "invective," "innuendo," "insinuation," and the like. Doubtless Professor Griffin, like Professor Rogers, would have regarded this material as brilliant and praiseworthy verbiage if it had been written in praise of the Roosevelt policy. But, at least, Professor Griffin's presentation of his views on the Tansill volume constitutes a formal and ostensible review, not a brief and casual smear, and he does concede at the end of his review that the Tansill volume has value in that it corrects the fantastic mythology which prevailed during the second World War.

The review by Arthur Kemp in the Freeman, May 19, 1952, was friendly and commendatory. Professor Tansill's book was harshly reviewed in the American Historical Review, October, 1952, by Dean Julius W. Pratt. That the latter had lined up with our "Ministry of Truth" could have been ascertained in advance of the review by comparing his early, trenchant, anti-imperialist writings, in his books and in his articles in the American Mercury, with his recent America's Colonial Experiment. The flavor of his review could readily be anticipated. However, Dean Pratt did concede that the book was the most "weightily documented" of the revisionist works on the second World War and that "Professor Tansill has produced a book of great learning." One statement in the review calls for corrective comment: "The fact that a scholar with Professor Tansill's wellknown views on American foreign policy was allowed the free run of confidential State Department files should lay at rest the theory that there exists a favored group of 'court historians' who speak only kind REVISIONISM AND THE HISTORICAL BLACKOUT 47 words of Rooseveltian diplomacy." While Professor Tansill did examine more documents than any other revisionist historian, he had nothing like the free access to archives and diaries which was accorded to men like Professors Langer and Gleason and Dr.

Herbert Feis. Dr. Beard's attacks on the State Department favoritism eased his entry, and some of his former graduate students were in charge of important sections of the documents. Even so, he was barred from many, his notes subjected to scrutiny, and some of them confiscated. One of the most extreme smears of the book was written by a professional historian, Professor Richard W. Van Alstyne of the University of Southern California, and published in the Pacific Historical Review, November, 1952. Van Alstyne concluded that Back Door to War is "a striking monument to pedantic scholarship, but it is built on a tiny mound of historical understanding." He did, however, make one sound point: that the book has a misleading title, in that it is more a study of the origins of the second World War than specifically of Roosevelt foreign policy. The New Republic did not review the book, but the editor, Michael Straight, subjected it to the lowest and most amazing smear that any revisionist book has yet received. In the issue of June 16, 1952, Straight delivered himself of the following material, suitable for presentation by the late Mr. Ripley: This book is part of the devious attack on American diplomacy directed by Dr. Edmund Walsh, S.J., from Georgetown University. Tansill argues that the U.S., not Germany or Japan, was the aggressor in the Second World War. . . .

These are the superstitions that occupied Beard in his senility and focused John T. Flynn's mania for hatred. It would be easily dismissed, were it not such useful material for demagogues in the 1952 campaign. Nothing better illustrates the shift in attitude on the part of the New Republic since the 1920^, when it took the lead in promoting Revisionism under Herbert Croly and Robert Littell, even 48 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE though Mr. Straight's mother was also financing the journal at the time. Very interesting and relevant, as bearing on Mr. Straight's charge that Professor Tansill's book was the product of a Catholic plot to smear Rooseveltian foreign policy, is the fact that the Catholic periodical, America, reflecting the interventionist wing of American Catholic opinion, published a rather bitter attack by Father William A. Lucey upon the Tansill volume in its issue of June 14, 1952.

A very amusing and instructive example of the length to which interventionists will go in quest of smears of revisionist books is provided in the case of the Christian Register. This periodical is edited by Melvin Arnold, a liberal Unitarian and the head of the Beacon Press which has published the books by Paul Blanchard that have so vigorously attacked Catholic political power. Yet, being an ardent interventionist and adulator of Roosevelt foreign policy, Mr. Arnold reached out eagerly for this hostile review of the Tansill book by Father Lucey in one of the leading political organs of Jesuit Catholic journalism and reprinted it in the December, 1952, issue of his own magazine. Professor Tansill's book was reviewed in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, December, 1952, by Professor Ruhl Bartlett. Professor Bartlett had been put on the program of the American Historical Association at Chicago in December, 1950, to criticize the paper presented at that time by Professor Tansill on the background of the American entry into the second World War. He was somewhat roughly handled by Professor Tansill in the discussion that followed. All this was well known to the editor of the Mississippi Valley Historical Review. Nevertheless, he chose Professor Bartlett to review Professor Tansill's book, and the result was just what could have been expected. The flavor of the review is shown by the closing lines: "The book is unredeemed by humor, art or insight. To read it and to write about it are unrewarding tasks."

Thus far, the Journal of Modern History has not reviewed the book. In the criticisms of the Tansill volume by such professional historians as Professors Harrington, Pratt, and Van Alstyne, there REVISIONISM AND THE HISTORICAL BLACKOUT 49 is one slightly humorous item, namely, the charge that Tansill does not support all of his contentions by citations from confidential archival material. As a matter of fact, the only honest and fair criticism of TansnTs procedure is that, like so many professional diplomatic historians, he relies too much on archival and allied materials when other sources of information are often far more illuminating and reliable. Nevertheless, his professorial critics contend that he never proves an assertion unless he brings archival material to his support, even though he may cite scores of more important types and sources of evidence. One might be led to suppose that Tansill could not prove the guilt of President Roosevelt relative to Pearl Harbor unless he could produce from the archives a confession signed in the handwriting of the late President.

From what has been set forth above, it is evident that not one professional historical journal has provided readers with a fair and objective appraisal of Professor TansnTs monumental volume, Back Door to War. The majority of the newspaper reviews smeared the book, though it was warmly praised not only by the Chicago Tribune but by some other papers like the Indianapolis Star. In the newspaper reviews the dominant note was TansnTs alleged bias and bitterness— in other words, his devotion to candor and integrity. Interestingly enough, the editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer was apparently so displeased by the unfair reviews that he wrote an editorial (June 8, 1952) praising the Tansill volume and commending Revisionism in general. Probably the most extreme job of smearing ever turned in on a liberal who attacked the foreign policy of Roosevelt was done on John T. Flynn, whose revisionist writings were limited to two brochures on Pearl Harbor and to a few passages in his book, The Roosevelt Myth. Flynn had long been a special favorite of the liberal journals. He was probably the leading specialist for the New Republic in exposing the evils of finance capitalism. His Security Speculation was a masterpiece in this field. His Graft in Business was, perhaps, the ablest indictment of the business ideals and methods of the Harding-Coolidge era. He was one of the staff who 50 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE aided Pecora in his investigation of the sins of Wall Street. He was also an assistant to Senator Gerald P. Nye in the famous munitions and armament investigation. He was at one time a member of the Board of Higher Education in New York City and a lecturer at the New School for Social Research. Few men rated higher in the esteem of eastern Liberals.

But when Flynn became a leading member of the America First movement and began to oppose President Roosevelt's war policy, his erstwhile liberal admirers, who had taken to warmongering, turned on him savagely. Their animus increased when Flynn revealed the fascist trends in our war policy in his book, As We Go Marching, and when he told the truth about Pearl Harbor in two trenchant brochures. Since that time he has been the victim of incessant smearing by the totalitarian liberals and the interventionist crowd. They have done their best to drive him into penury and obscurity. Only his fighting Irish spirit has enabled him to survive. Even the Progressive, despite its antiwar policy, joined in the smearing. A good sample of the irresponsibility in smearing Flynn is the statement of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in the New York Post, to the effect that the Yalta Conference will redound to the honor of Franklin D. Roosevelt "unless a Fascist revolution installs William Henry Chamberlin and John T. Flynn as official national historians/' It so happens that Flynn has, for more than a decade now, been recognized as one of our most stalwart libertarians and individualists, and has even been smeared for being such by persons in Schlesinger's intellectual circle. One of the reasons for their frenzied hatred of him is his revelation of fascist trends in Roosevelt foreign policy and its political results. Chamberlin is also conspicuous for his libertarian trends and his protests against military state capitalism.

The blackout contingent was even more successful in their attacks on Upton Close. As a result of his candid radio broadcasts on our foreign policy he was driven off the air, from the lecture platform, and out of the press, and his books on the Far East were virtually barred from circulation.

REVISIONISM AND THE HISTORICAL BLACKOUT 51 Though I have personally written nothing on Revisionism relative to the second World War beyond several brief brochures seeking to expose some of the more characteristic methods of the blackout contingent, the Smearbund has gone to work on me far more vigorously than was the case following aJJ my revisionist articles and books combined after the first World War. The silent treatment has been comprehensively applied to anything I have published recently, in whatever field. When my History oi Western Civilization appeared, in 1935, it was very glowingly reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, of the Herald Tribune Booics, and of the Saturday Review oi Literature. The American Historical Review gave it a long and favorable review by the foremost American authority in the field. When my Society in Transition was published, in 1939, the Times accorded it the unique honor of reviewing a college textbook on the first page of its Book Review. But when my Survey oi Western Civilization and Introduction to the History oi Sociology were published in 1947, and my Historical Sociology in 1948, none of the abovementioned publications, so far as could be discovered, gave any of them so much as a book note. Apparently the movement has gone so far that authors are being suppressed or given the silent treatment for fear that they might, later on, publish some little truth on world affairs. The author of this chapter was, naturally, suspect because of his writings on the first World War.

The sub rosa activities of the blackout Smearbund have gone much further. I have been smeared as both an extreme radical and an extreme reactionary and as everything undesirable between these two extremes. One historian smeared me as a "naive isolationist," though, in actuality, I was working for sane internationalism at the time of his birth. The Smearbund has not only condemned my books to the silent treatment, barred me from all leading periodicals, and sought to dissuade publishers from accepting my books on any subject, but its members have also carried on extensive subterranean intrigue seeking to discourage the use of my textbooks in the fields of the history of civilization and sociology, where the content of my tomes does not touch even remotely on CJ2 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE the issues of Revisionism. Going beyond my writings, the blackout "Gestapo" forced the most powerful lecture manager in the United States to drop me from his list of lecturers.

The blackout boys have not rested content with smearing those who have sought to tell the truth about the causes of the second World War. They have now advanced to the point where they are seeking to smear those who told the truth about the causes of the first World War. At the meeting of the American Historical Association in Boston in December, 1949, two papers were read by Richard W. Leopold and Selig Adler that endeavored to undermine the established revisionist writings regarding the prelude to that conflict.37 Adler implied that Revisionism, after 1918, was, in its origins, a sort of Bolshevik plot, and that revisionist writers were, consciously or unconsciously, dupes of the Bolsheviks and unrepentant Germans. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in an article in the Partisan Review,38 has even gone so far as to attack those who have written in a revisionist tone on the causes of the Civil War.

The next step will be to attack the revision of historical opinion relative to the causes of the American Revolution and to find that, after all, "Big Bill" Thompson was right in his views of that conflict and in his threat to throw George V into the Chicago Ship Canal. In other words, Revisionism, which only means bringing history into accord with facts, now seems to be rejected by the blackout boys as a mortal sin against Clio, the Muse of their subject. This attack on Revisionism, even with respect to the first World War, is now creeping into the routine college textbooks. It provides the leitmotiv of Harrison's abovementioned book, This Age oi Global Stnie. Not only are books concerned primarily with an honest account of the diplomacy connected with the coming of the second World War ignored and smeared, but similar treatment is accorded to books which even indirectly reflect on the official mythology in this area. For example, A. Frank Reel's splendid and courageous book on The Case oi General Yamashita was rather generally attacked, and outrageously so by John H. E. Fried in the Political Science Quarterly, September, 1950. W. T. Couch, who had done splendid work as head of the University of Chicago Press, was reREVISIONISM AND THE HISTORICAL BLACKOUT 53 lieved of his post in part because of criticism of his publication of this book. The best book on Japan which has been published since Pearl Harbor, Mirror for Americans: Japan, by Helen Mears, was allowed to die quietly by its publishers after the blackout contingent began to exert pressure against it.

While the Smearbund has usually rested content with an effort to defame and impoverish those of whom it disapproves, it went even further in the case of Lawrence Dennis and sought to jail him on the charge of "sedition." Dennis, a brilliant Harvard graduate, had served in important posts in the American diplomatic service for eight years. He had been one of the first to enlist in the Plattsburg training experiment before the first World War (1915) and had served with distinction as an officer in the war. After retiring from the diplomatic service, he was employed by leading banking and brokerage firms as an expert on foreign bonds. Like John T. Flynn, he was then a favorite of left-wing American liberals and had exposed the foreign bond frauds in the New Republic at about the same time that Flynn was doing a comparable piece of work on the investment trusts. He incurred the wrath of the liberals by bringing out a book in 1936 entitled The Coming American Fascism. Here he predicted that the New Deal would wind up in a system of Fascism, whatever the name given to it, and described what the system would probably be like. The interventionists were enraged by his Weekly Foreign Letter, which opposed our entry into the second World War, and by his The Dynamics of War and Revolution, the best book written in the United States on the institutional forces pushing us into war and on the probable results of such a war. The prowar forces induced Harper & Brothers to withdraw the book almost immediately after publication.

Though Dennis is, actually, an aggressive individualist, he was accused of being an ardent fascist and was railroaded into the mass sedition trial in Washington in 1944. That the trial ended in a farce was due mainly to the fact that Dennis personally outlined and conducted the defense. But, though surely one of the most talented writers and lecturers in the United States today, he has been driven into complete obscurity; not even Regnery or DevinAdair dares to bring out a book under his name.