5. Report on George B. DeHuszar and Thomas Hulbert Stevenson, A History of the American Republic, 2 vols

5. Report on George B. DeHuszar and Thomas Hulbert Stevenson, A History of the American Republic, 2 vols.

September 1961

To begin with an “overview” (to use a favorite and perhaps overused term of DeHuszar’s), this is, to put it bluntly, a poor book. Any work on American history, even a textbook, has certain tasks that it must perform and standards to which it must cleave. In the first place, the factual material must be rich and not skimpy; the reader must get an idea of the lavish tapestry of American history, and he must get a full and comprehensive picture. Most of the detailed critique below is devoted to protestations about the great amount of important material that DeHuszar has left out of the narrative. Just to pick an isolated instance, I do not think much of a text on American history that does not so much as mention Senator Thomas Hart (“Old Bullion”) Benton.

This is an almost extraordinarily skimpy work, a skimpiness that pervades the book but that reaches embarrassing proportions in the treatment of the colonial period and of the late-nineteenth-century period. Sometimes we find that almost the only people mentioned in an era are the presidential candidates. Furthermore, a critical defect is the almost complete absence of any quantitative or numerical data. It is often difficult to find the dates at which happenings occur, so vague and imprecise is the narrative. Apart from a few references to population figures, there are virtually no statistics of any kind in the work.

Now, I am an open and long-time condemner of the overuse of statistics, and I deplore as much as anyone the new trend in “scientific” economic history to hurl vast quantities of processed statistics at the reader, and conclude that one has captured the “feel” and essence of the past. But some statistics, surely, are necessary; and it becomes annoying to read constant references to “increases” in steel production, or living standards, or whatnot, when not the foggiest quantitative notion is presented to the reader of how large these increases and movements are. There is also an almost desperate need to present governmental budget statistics, so that the reader will know how large government in relation to the private economy has been in any given era; but neither in this nor in any other area does DeHuszar give a shred of quantitative data.

The first test of a historical work then, and one that DeHuszar fails, is a richness of factual material. But the historian is more than a chronicler; he must also have a command of the significance of events, he must be able to convey to the reader the meaning and interpretation of the past. If we would be grandiloquent, we might even use Schumpeter’s term of “vision”; the historian must have a “vision” of the meaning, of the significance, of the material he is presenting. Lamentable as is the skimpiness of DeHuszar’s factual material, it is in this area of meaning in which he fails the most; for the largest bulk of the narrative, there is no meaning, no interpretation, no vision presented of the American past: there is just dull, uninspired, unimaginative chronicle.

What good is it to list the provisions of the Compromise of 1850, or of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, if there is not the slightest attempt to explain the causes of the Civil War? There is no need to revert to the “Paul Revere Ride” school of historical writing to realize that the American past is filled with high drama, and it is tragic if this drama is not conveyed to the reader and student. But to convey it, one must realize it is there, and DeHuszar shows no sign of doing so: there is, for example, the high drama of the Republican movement, of the great ideological war between the Jeffersonian Republicans and the Republican idea, and the Federalist-Whig idea. Not understanding the connections, DeHuszar never presents the meaningful conflict.

From DeHuszar’s narrative one would never know that Van Buren reconstructed the Republican Party into the Democratic Party because he was inspired by what were fondly referred to for many years as the Principles of ‘98 (the Jeffersonian movement, the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, as against the “despots of ‘98”) and wanted to cast out the Federalist taint; one would never realize the continuity of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian principles, or of Federalism and Whiggery (Federalism’s mass-based variant).

Never do we get any insight into the political-philosophic meaning of the Jackson war against the Bank: a drive for the separation of banking and the State, as part of a general libertarian drive for separation of the government and the economy, for highly limited government, etc.

Never do we see the high hopes brought in by the Revolution of 1800, only to find Federalism returning because of the drive for war in the War of 1812. Never do we get a sense of the tragic consequences of the Civil War, or of its permanent fastening of Federalist-Whig étatism on American life and the tragic wreck of the Democratic Party. The reader will not realize that it was the Civil War and its Republican aftermath that fastened upon America excise taxation, high tariffs, heavy public debt, federal governmental banking, the draft, the income tax, government intervention in railroads, etc. Many of these facts are mentioned very briefly, but the meaning of the change is never brought to the fore.

Note what I am not asking for here: I am not asking simply that DeHuszar present American history from a libertarian point of view, that he favor liberty and oppose its restriction. I am asking that he present a meaningful picture of the American past, and not simply a World Almanac chronicle of events, which is what most of the book boils down to.

In fact, most of the book reads like some other American history textbook boiled down into its bare outlines; it reads as if the authors have virtually no first-hand familiarity with the material, or with monographic works. Indeed, I found that large portions of the book had such a close similarity to the detailed organization, and even style, of Hicks’s famous text The Federal Union as to begin to challenge coincidence.

Not understanding the import or meaning of political events in the American past is joined, in this work, with an almost absolute failure to point out the consequences of various government actions. This is particularly true and particularly unfortunate in DeHuszar’s economic history. The pitfall that DeHuszar falls into is this: if a history of economic events is simply chronicled, as DeHuszar does, it is inevitable that an inner bias is given in favor of the event, whatever that event may be—and this is the reason why so much of American historiography simply celebrates the events that happened. In economics, this is particularly true; thus, if the historian records that government subsidized railroads, if just left as is, it seems like a fine thing that more railroads were built. But a historian with sound economic knowledge must point out that such railroads represented “overinvestment” and malinvestment in railroads, which they did. But DeHuszar does not do this, and as a result, his economic narrative, in addition to being chronicle rather than meaningful history, is often unwittingly biased in favor of the government action he records.

This failure in the economic realm is not chance; for throughout the volume, DeHuszar conveys a lamentable failure to understand even elementary economic principles; almost all the economics is garbled, even when well meant, and is generally valueless.

For the great bulk of their text, DeHuszar and Stevenson hack out their narrative of dull, uninspired chronicle, bereft of significance or of sound economics—and with the chronicle extremely skimpy at that. (A World Almanac that fails even as an almanac!)

In the last half of the second volume, the book suddenly begins to come to life, and the authors begin to introduce interpretation, etc. One feels that if they are not interested or in tune with the bulk of the American past, they are interested in American history since, say, 1929. DeHuszar makes a heroic attempt to present a sound, “revisionist,” portrayal of the causes of the 1929 depression, and the Coolidge credit expansion and Hoover New Deal that caused and aggravated it; at some of this they succeed, but the inevitable garbling of economic ideas that pervades the work makes this account spotty, if superior to the rest of the book.

Also, when discussing the domestic measures of the New Deal, the authors rise above their other narrative, and engage in some good criticisms of the economic failure and the political shift of power to the State that the New Deal represents. It is in its discussion of the New Deal that the book takes on some character and value. But even here, poor economic knowledge weighs the authors down. An example of a lost opportunity: there is no better model example of the cumulative errors of government intervention than the American farm program, where one set of controls and interventions created such problems as to lead to still more in a vain attempt at correction. And yet, DeHuszar does not see this, and so lets a fine illustration of economic law and interconnectedness slip by and degenerate again into mere chronicle.

While pretty good on the New Deal, however, DeHuszar and Stevenson slip back into dull insignificance in their discussion of the Truman and Eisenhower eras, and in particular, there is no realization of the significance of the Eisenhower era and its cementing of the New Deal into the bipartisan structure of American political life. By failing to see the significance of Eisenhower as Republican conservator of the New Deal, DeHuszar lapses back into chronicle, and by implication, sometimes even express, implies that while the New Deal was unfortunate, the Eisenhower administration was pretty darn good.

But while the Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt domestic policies are set forth and explained fairly well, this is more than offset by the extreme bias, error, and evasion of fact that characterize DeHuszar and Stevenson’s discussion of foreign affairs in this generation. While inadequate and biased on World War I, the authors adopt and trumpet every bit of propaganda nonsense of American foreign policy for World Wars II and III. Oversimplified absurdities about “German and Japanese aggression” abound, after which we segue awkwardly into similar absurdities about “Soviet aggression.” Naturally, as with his historical confreres, there is an awkwardness in the transition from celebrating the great battle against the German enemy into sounding the alarm against the Soviet one. But not an iota of revisionism has been allowed to correct the florid colors of “official” history that the authors ladle into their presentations of American foreign policy. Going further back, the authors welcome the shift of America into imperialism, claim that imperialism showers benefits as it goes, and take the myth-making view of the alleged sanctity of the alleged “Open Door.”

Thus, while, in the later decades, DeHuszar and Stevenson inject some interpretation into their previously dull and skimpy chronicle, their interpretation of the Hoover and Roosevelt New Deals is fairly sound though not outstanding, but this is more than offset by the extreme bias in favor of the official historical “line” that the authors lavish on the reader in re World Wars II and III.

Of the difficulties of skimpiness that I have mentioned, one needs a little more elaboration here. That is the almost complete absence of intellectual history, of the people and the ideas that have been important in America. It is typical, for example, of the intellectual paucity of this work that, while Communism is held up to be a diabolic enemy, it is never even passably defined; the reader only knows that the Communists are a band of people who took over Russia in 1917 and who want to “conquer the world.”

As a result, the reader never learns that Communism is simply one consistent wing of socialism (DeHuszar persistently refers to Communists and socialists only as “political extremists”—a peculiarly uninformative term), and therefore there is no link between Communists and previous Marxian and other socialists, much less any realization that socialism, in turn, is simply an extreme wing of statism. If DeHuszar had begun to point these things out, as any competent historian should, then the reader might get the idea that the reason why Communism may be considered an enemy is precisely that it represents socialism or extreme statism—but this would mean a recasting of the reader’s mind into examining ideologies, and domestic ideologies at that, rather than launching yet another crusade against yet another band of foreign devils, who obscurely want to “conquer” people.

DeHuszar’s treatment of domestic Communists as simply “agents of Moscow”—ignoring the fact that they are only “agents” because they are ideological allies—perpetuates this misrepresentation.

We can only conclude from this “overview” that a good textbook on American history was almost desperately needed; and, after reading the DeHuszar-Stevenson manuscript, we can only say that it is still needed, perhaps even all the more.

And now for a detailed critique of the DeHuszar manuscript:

The Colonial Era

There is virtually nothing on the entire American colonial period; surely it is a disgrace to condense the century and a half of the American colonial experience into thirty-odd pages.

• There is nothing, for example, about early Plymouth Rock communism and its failure.
• Page 3 seems to slight American rebelliousness by saying that, after 1763, Americans “felt oppressed” by the British, while before they “accepted” British protection.
• There is insufficient stress on the British increase of measures of intervention and restriction.
• It doesn’t explain that overweighting of property owners on the coast in the colonial legislatures largely and inevitably due to the fact these are the older areas, and therefore will be overrepresented as populations shift, and apportionment lags.
• “Many” people could vote is too fuzzy and imprecise; there should be more use of recent voting studies (Brown, Williamson, etc.).
• Page 10—In DeHuszar’s own terms, the evidence presented for colonial precedent for judicial review is highly dubious. There is no mention of fact that judicial branch was not separate, but was headed by the governor and his council. Neither was the British government’s ultimate power at all akin to the later judiciary.
• Frontiersmen also “resented” the poll tax because any money tax is a hardship when the bulk of one’s “income” is barter, or self-production.
• There is no mention of the different treatment of the Indians by the Quakers, and the different results, in the colonial period. (In fact, Indian affairs are underweighted throughout the book.) The Quakers, who had no guns, treated the Indians fairly and had no need for protection.
• The Episcopal Church “did make some effort” (p. 17) to restrict other faiths. What efforts? More specifics, please!
• There is no mention whatever of Roger Williams!
• Where were the slaves (p. 21)? Only in the South? Primarily? Or everywhere?
• What is the justification for attacking New England farming methods as “poor” (p. 22)? Poor by what standard? Wasn’t land so abundant that it wasn’t economic to invest in “good” methods, conserving labor instead? Did farmers not know any better, or did others know better?
• On Southern agriculture, there is a similar attack on “waste” (p. 23). By what standards again? Why “crop yield per acre”? What about crop yield per person? Or per dollar invested?
• Throughout the book, there is economic nonsense about “shortage of money”; mercantilist regulations did not compel purchases of British goods with money, so there was no expansion for alleged money shortage. There is not enough explanation of colonial paper-money schemes and their effects.
• Page 30—Was colonial medicine poorer than European medicine? Or just poor everywhere?
• On the John Peter Zenger case, see the important corrective of “Zenger revisionism” in Leonard W. Levy, The Legacy of Suppression.
• What were the Iroquois demands (p. 38)?
• There should be some more on British brutality against the Acadian French.
• There is, in the treatment of the background of the American Revolution, a distinct undertone of British apologetics. On page 42 and again on pages 47–48, for example, DeHuszar seems to agree with the British argument that the colonists must be forced to pay for British “protection.” And who is to protect them from their unwanted “protectors,” the British? If the colonists do not wish to pay for this “protection,” what right do the British have to quarter troops among them? DeHuszar also defends the British Proclamation Line, which arbitrarily kept settlers out of western territory, and engages in nonsensical statements about the Quebec Act of 1774, saying, e.g., that the British gave the natives little political freedom “to please the people, so as to make it easier to rule them.” This should be reworded and explained more clearly.
• The Pontiac War is also treated grossly inadequately; it is not pointed out that Pontiac had a good case, since the British were arbitrarily restricting Indian trade. Also, there is unfortunately no mention of Britain’s great “contribution” to the art of germ warfare, when the British sent to Pontiac and his men blankets infected with smallpox.
• There is almost no mention of Sam Adams and Patrick Henry, and their contributions to the Revolution; the onset of the Revolution cannot be fully understood without setting forth Sam Adams’s role as agitprop leader (see, for example, John C. Miller’s Sam Adams).

In addition to the above omissions, the following are also grave omissions in the DeHuszar narrative of the colonial and pre-Revolutionary period:

• The Explorations
• The Indians—their way of life, who they were, etc.
• The problem of land tenure: feudalism, head rights, quitrent, etc.
• Puritans, witchcraft, witch-hunting, Cotton and Increase Mather
• Anne Hutchinson
• Lord Baltimore
• The British principle of “salutary neglect”
• The Regulator Rebellion—against governmental tyranny, land monopoly, and taxes
• The intellectual influence of the Enlightenment and rationalism, and John Locke
• Leisler’s Rebellion
• Negro insurrections: Cato Conspiracy (1739) and the anti-Negro reign of terror in New York (1741)
• Origins of the post office
• Land grants and land speculation
• Wage and price controls in many areas
• The Rev. Jared Eliot, scientist
• The Rev. Jonathan Mayhew, rationalist
• There is nothing on the Twopenny Act and the Parson’s Cause, nothing on the burning of the Gaspee, nothing on Thomas Jefferson and Richard Henry Lee and the Committee of Correspondence of Virginia.
• Discussion of the 1st Continental Congress is very weak and skimpy; there are no details of the Declaration and Resolves, no mention of Joseph Warren and the Suffolk Resolves, etc.
• The Revolutionary War period is, again, treated in a very skimpy manner. Along with the over-romanticizing of George Washington, there is nothing whatever about the pervasive price controls and the shortages they engendered, nothing on the Bank of North America: the origins of banking in America, as part of the finance of the government in war.
• Almost nothing on the connections between the American rebels and the British Whigs
• Nothing on Pelatiah Webster on the continentals
• Very little on the ouster of the Loyalists and the confiscation of their property—one of the great blots on the Revolutionary record
• No mention of Dickinson and the Olive Branch Petition, or Lord North’s Conciliation Plan, or of Rockingham and Shelburne in Britain

The Confederation Period

• DeHuszar conventionally regards the federal government under the Articles as being “too weak,” including the lack of power to exact taxes!
• The gravest error and bias of DeHuszar in this period is his enthusiasm for the Ordinances of 1785 and 1787, which he considers accomplishments of this period’s government, “whatever may have been its shortcomings in other fields.” There is, first, no regret expressed that the states turned over their western lands to the federal government, thus adding huge unearned property to the federal government’s unearned “public domain.” Second, the Ordinance of 1785 was a dictatorial intrusion into the western region, which set too high a minimum land sale and price, thus restricting settlement, and also enforced rectangular surveying, thus forcing the purchase of submarginal land within an otherwise good “rectangle,” instead of conforming, as in the Southern methods of surveying, to the natural topography of the land in question. In colonial days, unowned land was free to all settlers, and this represented a sharp change in the direction of étatist restriction of land settlement and increasing government revenue from land. DeHuszar shows no sign of realizing this significance of the ordinance. Furthermore, the Ordinance of 1785 foisted public schools upon each township in the region, thus taking the first step toward public schools and toward federal dictation over education. None of this seems to impress DeHuszar or dampen his enthusiasm for the ordinance.
• There is no mention of the treaty with Prussia (1785), outlawing privateering; or of the Virginia Ordinance of Religious Freedom, of which Jefferson was proudest. On the Ordinance of 1785, DeHuszar omits the fact that it almost provided for setting aside a section of land in each township for an established church of the denomination of the majority of residents.
• On Shays’s Rebellion, DeHuszar follows the usual Federalist distortions, ignoring the large role played by hostility to increased state taxes for paying war debts in appreciated money. (Forrest MacDonald, certainly not hostile to the Federalist cause, points out that many of the Shaysite leaders favored the Constitution.) Furthermore, the discussion, again too skimpy, of the Constitution’s formation, omits any mention of veterans’ pensions, of public securities and government bondholders, etc.
• And yet, insofar as DeHuszar does present an interpretive framework for this and the subsequent years, it is watered down and naively Beardian. All sorts of complications are swept away, as we find that inflation is always backed by the “debtor interests,” almost always identified with agrarians, and opposed by “creditor interests,” presumably urban folk. Never does DeHuszar give any indication that these categories are not only oversimplified but fundamentally wrong (debtors, especially in that era, were not always, or even usually, agrarian). Further, he never gives any indication that the objective observer has any reason for favoring or opposing inflation, if he does not happen to be a debtor or creditor. On these monetary questions, DeHuszar can only offer a simplistic Beardianism.

The Constitution

• DeHuszar is surely impossibly naive when he declares that the reason the Constitution was submitted to special state conventions rather than legislatures was that the framers believed the people to be the source of political power. The reason was obviously because there was no hope of ratification in many of the state legislatures.
• The state battles over ratification are underplayed and neglected to such an extent that they become almost nonexistent.
• DeHuszar gratuitously sets forth a pernicious constitutional doctrine (p. 121) to the effect that, in foreign affairs, the federal government power is necessarily supreme, and not based on any power delegated by the Constitution. Somehow, he considers such power inherent.
• DeHuszar’s practice of detailed annotation of the Constitution, inserted right into the text, instead of an appendix, is inherently confusing to the reader, and is more in keeping with a political science text than a history text, where it is decidedly unhistorical. Thus, in one annotation, he notes that the direct tax provision has not been used since the Civil War. What Civil War? This has not yet been established in the text.
• DeHuszar defends the tyrannical provision of Section 5 that a Congress may deny the seat of any member; surely this leaves an instrument of tyranny against an unwanted party or creed; yet DeHuszar praises this “protection for Congress”; what of protection for the individual Congressman?
• In another gratuitous, despotic, and unhistorical annotation (p. 144), DeHuszar defends the obviously unconstitutional practice recently developed of making military appropriations for more than two years’ time.
• Again, in annotating Article 2, Section 3, DeHuszar, in unhistorical fashion, acts as if it is a natural law that the president submits a list of legislation (“must legislation”) which Congress is then supposed to pass or reject. The original intent was not to make the president the initiator of all legislation.
• Explanation of the “full faith and credit” clause is sloppy; if DeHuszar’s account is correct, how come many states do not extradite criminals to other states? This needs some explanation. Why doesn’t the clause compel extradition?
• DeHuszar again (as in his jejune foreign affairs-power-to-the-president-theory) presumes to call Article 4, Section 4 “needless,” because to say that the federal government is to “defend each state against invasion,” ignores the fact that this is implied by any invasion of the United States. But it is obvious that the Founders, in contrast to DeHuszar, did not regard an invasion of one state as automatically an invasion of all others, because they regarded sovereignty as essentially in each state, not in the federal government.
• DeHuszar also justifies a violation of the clause that the state must apply for federal troops against domestic violence, to add that, of course, the federal government can call in troops to protect its property. This action is still unconstitutional.
• DeHuszar is illogical in annotating Article 5. He says that it is unlikely that state legislatures will ever propose constitutional conventions for amendments; why not have Congress propose them? This ignores the prime fact that the original Constitution itself was proposed in a convention, not in existing legislatures, and that it was ratified in conventions not legislatures.
• DeHuszar is rather too “revisionist” on the Magna Carta (importance restricted because only rights of barons involved, etc.). DeHuszar should consult the recent swing back to high importance of Magna Carta, trial by jury, etc. in such works as Faith Thompson, R.L. Perry.
• DeHuszar complacently accepts the current state negation of the Second Amendment, in the Sullivan Law, etc. Didn’t the Fourteenth Amendment extend the Bill of Rights to the states? Shouldn’t there be bills of rights for protection of the individual against the state? Not considered by DeHuszar.
• On the question of “due process of law,” DeHuszar seems to accept meekly the current narrow “formal due process” interpretation, without mentioning the great nineteenth-century doctrine of “substantive due process.”
• Is DeHuszar complacent about current state-federal evasions of the provision against double jeopardy?
• DeHuszar’s interpretation of the much-neglected Ninth Amendment is highly confused. While he admits that it implies the existence of natural rights of the individual, he then weakens the import by saying that the “Ninth Amendment is not designed to protect any rights.” On the contrary, if the rights enumerated in the rest of the Constitution are not to “deny or disparage others retained by the people,” this must mean that the other natural rights are equally sacrosanct and are to be defended against government (both federal and state), and that these rights are to be discovered by the courts. This Ninth Amendment, unbeknownst to DeHuszar, or to our jurists, is the great potential charter for libertarian constitutional law.

The Federalist Era

The leading flaw in DeHuszar’s discussion of the Federalist era is his general bias in favor of the Hamiltonian étatist program. The Hamiltonian program was adopted to a sufficient extent to fasten Federalist statism on America almost permanently; the Republican program emerged as an almost desperate revolution against the collectivistic aims of the Federalists; against the federal government’s special privileging and regulating of banking, leading to inflation; against its foisting of a public debt on the country; against its high tariff program; against its high taxes, internal taxes, and high budget; against its development of a big and standing army and navy, against its correspondingly bellicose foreign policy, against its contempt for free speech, etc.

DeHuszar (1) fails to see any of this, fails to see that with the emergence of Hamilton and the Federalist era, the lines were to be drawn for what were essentially to be the party of statism and the party of liberty; and (2) DeHuszar supports the Hamiltonian program, and defends it with the usual Federalist myths.

Thus, DeHuszar states (p. 190) that the “establishment of financial stability was another major accomplishment” of Hamilton, that the Hamiltonian central bank, the Bank of the United States, “stabilized American finances,” and was a “successful business undertaking” (no wonder it was successful! being permitted by the U.S. government to create money and lend it out, with the government a star borrower).

DeHuszar also interprets the Hamilton conflict in oversimplified, “class-conflict” [Charles A.] Beard-[Vernon L.] Parrington terms: for Hamilton’s system were the “merchants, bankers, and manufacturers”; con were the “farmers.” It is peculiarly unfortunate that DeHuszar should perpetuate these Beardian class-conflict myths, especially because they have been in the process of being riddled and overturned for fifteen years now ([Joseph] Dorfman, [Bray] Hammond, etc.). Actually, there were plenty of merchants and businessmen who were pro-Jefferson and anti-Hamilton.

Though, in the twentieth century, DeHuszar seems to oppose high tariffs, he backs the Hamilton program as providing “balance,” encouraging American industry (but artificially!), etc.

• DeHuszar’s treatment of George Washington is jejune and eighth-gradish: Washington is supposed to have gained experience for managing the United States from managing his estate and similar rubbish.
• DeHuszar gives almost no space to, and doesn’t realize the significance of, the Whiskey Rebellion. The Whiskey Rebellion was one of the first shots fired (literally and figuratively) in the libertarian Republican movement that began to form in protest against étatist Federalist rule. Albert Gallatin, for example, played a considerable role as a theoretician of the Whiskey rebels, although he did not favor open rebellion. DeHuszar hardly knows of Gallatin’s existence.
• The gravest error in DeHuszar’s class-conflict view of the Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians is that he actually links up the Jeffersonians to the modern Democratic Party as an alliance of the Southern and Northern “urban workers”!!! In this way, DeHuszar not only adopts oversimplified Beardianism but also Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and the Marxists. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that there virtually were no “workers” in the modern sense in that era, but independent self-employed businessmen-artisans. To talk of “urban workers” has been shown to be fanciful and unhistorical for the Jackson era (by Dorfman), much less for the 1790s.
• DeHuszar should not give the impression that George Washington, in 1792, etc. was an Olympian figure, above the political battle. He was much closer to being a tool of Hamilton and the Federalist program.
• With DeHuszar’s persistent deficiency in intellectual history, there is no mention whatever of the body of Republican theory that was being developed in this era: of the writings of George Logan, of John Taylor of Caroline, of the absolute free speech views developed by such as Tunis Wortman, etc. None of these people are so much as mentioned by DeHuszar.
• DeHuszar’s discussion of the French Revolutionary wars is highly distorted, placing sole blame for the wars on the French. This is certainly untrue, and overlooks the counterrevolutionary monarchical alliances to crush the French Revolution, especially before the Napoleonic era.
• There is no mention of the famous Paine-Burke confrontation.
• I suppose that we should be grateful for the fact that DeHuszar is a moderate Federalist rather than a “High Federalist,” and therefore takes the Adams rather than the Hamilton position on war with France; on the other hand, he is pretty complacent about the letters of marque and navy seizures of French ships.
• DeHuszar’s position on the Alien and Sedition Acts is poor. They were not just “severe” and “vengeful”; they were unconstitutional aggression against freedom of speech, press, and opposition to the policies of the government. Under cover of a virtual war with France, the Federalists, scenting “subversion” and an international Jacobin conspiracy, moved to suppress dissent at home. DeHuszar greatly underestimates both the quantitative extent of the prosecutions under these acts, as well as the qualitative impact: the pinpointing of the most influential Republican editors, etc. DeHuszar also shows bias in stating that the opposition to Adams was vicious, bitter, and made false statements in the press, thus almost justifying the Alien and Sedition suppression; he neglects to point out that the Republican press was no more vituperative than the gutter Federalist press; vituperation in politics was the style of the day, and there was no “Madison Avenue” politeness to camouflage the different views.
• DeHuszar seems to have no conception of the fact that the Eleventh Amendment was an invasion of individual liberty by protecting a state government against suit by a private citizen of another state.
• DeHuszar, as I’ve indicated before, has no conception of the great significance of the “Revolution of 1800.”
• DeHuszar repeats the old myth, now exploded, of Hamilton being the deciding voice in picking Jefferson and Burr for president. Also, naval war with France began in 1798, not in 1796.

In addition to the above omissions, DeHuszar omits the following important matters of this era:

• Hamilton-Republican conflict on federal internal improvements
• The Logan peace mission and the Logan Act (1798) outlawing a private individual’s helping to make peace with a foreign country
• The Neutrality Act of 1794; George Washington’s tyrannical action (1796) in refusing to let the House see papers relating to Jay’s treaty, thus setting the executive above the representatives in Congress
• Fries’s Rebellion (1799) against property taxation, and his conviction for “treason”
• The “army of the black cockade” raised to fight France, and its actions
• The espionage interception by the administration of the Monroe-Logan letter (1796) and subsequent recall of Monroe
• The first federal bankruptcy law (1800)
• The federal expansion of the post office and post roads (1794)
• Who was selected to be on the Supreme Court
• The critical Supreme Court ruling that the internal direct tax on carriages (1794) was not “direct” but an “excise,” and therefore not restricted by the Constitution (Hylton v. U.S.—1796); or the decision restricting the constitutional prohibition on state ex post facto laws to criminal, not civil, laws (Calder v. Bull—1798)—both highly unfortunate decisions
• The invention of the steamboat, the pioneering textile entrepreneurship of Samuel Slater; the growth of Deism (Elihu Palmer)
• Jefferson’s unfortunate plan for a state public school system
• Franklin’s Autobiography, such libertarian poets as Philip Freneau, or Joel Barlow and the “Hartford Wits”
• The common federalist smears of Jefferson as an opponent of property and religion, as a Jacobin agent, etc.
• Hamilton’s further domestic program, as developed toward the end of the 1790s: extended federal judicial bureaucracy; federal improvement of roads; construction of canals; laws to punish sedition; higher taxes; large increase of army and navy; federal institutions for promoting the arts and sciences; reducing the frequency of elections (and hence of checks by the public on the rulers)
• Hamilton’s youth, dubious ancestry, etc.

The Revolution of 1800 and Jefferson’s First Administration

• Again, DeHuszar indulges in the false and mechanistic interpretation of the Revolution of 1800 and Jeffersonians as being “agrarians,” anticommerce, etc.
• Since DeHuszar puts in virtually no personal data about Americans of the past (except for his romanticizing of Washington), it is uncalled for to put in insults about Jefferson being “untidy”; somehow, DeHuszar has the room for this backdoor gossip but omits any mention whatever of Jefferson’s historic first inaugural address.
• Also Beardian is DeHuszar’s dismissal of the tax-lowering, anti-public debt policies of the first Jefferson administration as simply being “agrarian” favoritism; thus DeHuszar manages to ignore the sophisticated and consistent laissez-faire ideology of the Republican theorists. The burden of taxation, Mr. DeHuszar, was not just on farmers; it was on all producers.
• Page 225: What is the “Mason-Dixon” line, suddenly referred to? How was it established?
• There is no mention of the ratification of the Convention of 1800 with France, this time with no conditions required.
• There is no mention of democratic step of opening congressional debates to the public.
• On Marbury v. Madison, DeHuszar is, strangely, almost apologetic about judicial review and its infringement on the “legislative power” of Congress; surely, judicial review is an essential part of the Court’s judicial function.
• DeHuszar is weak and vague in explaining the Yazoo land claims. Who were the “anti-Jefferson Republicans?” No mention of John Randolph of Roanoke, who broke off from the Jefferson administration on the Yazoo land subsidies; DeHuszar fails to point out that Randolph realized that the Yazoo payoff was a departure from Old Republican principles (the “Principles of ‘98”) to award $48 million to fraudulent Yazoo claimants.
• DeHuszar doesn’t point out the importance, and the unfortunate nature, of Fletcher v. Peck (1810), which protected government grant of special privilege as if such a grant were equivalent to a sacrosanct private contract.
• DeHuszar is, unfortunately, happy about the failure to impeach Justice Chase, thus creating precedent for unchecked judicial tyranny or error—unchecked by constitutional provisions for impeachment, now a dead letter. (Chase deserved impeachment if any judge did.)
• What year was the Louisiana Purchase? Dates?
• What year was the Burr Conspiracy?
• As indicated above, there is no mention of Jefferson’s historic first inaugural address, with its emphasis on limited government, states’ rights, individual liberty, and “neutralism-isolationism”: “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”
• There is a very skimpy discussion of the highly important financial policy of Jefferson-Gallatin in the first administration, with its great reduction in the national debt, its cut in government expenditures, and its repeal of all internal taxes (e.g., the whiskey tax).
• DeHuszar’s treatment of the Burr conspiracy is very skimpy. Burr’s challenge to Hamilton of a duel was not due primarily to the 1800 election (where Hamilton’s role was not very important anyway), but to Hamilton’s blocking Burr from becoming governor of New York in 1804. Also, DeHuszar doesn’t realize that Burr’s was to be a private expedition against the Spanish territories, and therefore not really “treason.” DeHuszar is not appreciative enough of John Marshall’s very proper strict construction of the “treason” clause in the Burr case.

The Abandonment of Republican Principle, and the Road to War

DeHuszar is totally oblivious to the high drama and tragedy of the Jefferson administration: that while on the high road to the completion of the promise of the Revolution of 1800, toward the abolition of the public debt, the virtual abolition of federal taxes and tariffs, the abolition of the U.S. armed forces, the Republican Revolution was halted and reversed by a drive toward war with England—launched by Jefferson and Madison. This tragic reversal led to the virtual reestablishment of Federalism:

• To a big army and navy, a bellicose foreign policy
• High tariffs and the virtual ending of foreign trade for quite a while
• The governmental promotion of inflation, bank expansion, and fiat paper—thus turning away from the Republican promise of bankless ultrahard money
• Increase in the public debt and government budgets
• The resumption of internal taxation, etc.

Never was there a clearer case of the poisonous influence of power on a statesman as on Jefferson and his fellow Republicans in the second Jefferson administration and under Madison. For a while, during and after the War of 1812, Jefferson even toyed with high tariffs and paper fiat money. Albert Gallatin, on the eve of the war, brought forth a grandiose scheme for federal internal improvements (not even mentioned by DeHuszar). Almost all Republicans went along with the tide, forgetting their Republican principles, or partially forgetting them, in the process, with a few honorable exceptions, such as George Logan and John Randolph of Roanoke—especially the former.

DeHuszar understands very little, not only of the above central political issue of the time, but even about the road to war itself. Thus, his view of the Chesapeake affair is almost the reverse of the truth. He claims that “The American people were united in their anger, and wanted to go to war. Jefferson, by contrast, hoped for peace.” The facts are almost the reverse: the American people were never united, the Federalists resisting the war because of their pro-British views, and joined by antiwar people like Logan and Randolph.

In contrast, Jefferson here began the descent down the slippery slope to war. Incredibly, there is not even any mention of the Nonimportation Act of 1806–1807. Also no mention of the fiasco of the Monroe-Pinkney Treaty of 1806. The discussion of the Chesapeake affair is highly skimpy; we are not even informed that the British not only fired on but also killed and wounded some Americans, which generated the uproar. There is also no mention of the British offer of reparations for the Chesapeake affair, nor of the fact that Jefferson blocked this settlement for years because he continued to order British warships out of U.S. waters. Here again, DeHuszar is terribly skimpy; he says that Jefferson banned British “ships” from American waters; it was only warships that were banned.

DeHuszar has no mention of Napoleon’s use of the Embargo Act to seize millions of U.S. goods and shipping under the Bayonne Decree (1808); nor is there mention of the strengthening of the American embargo by the Enforcement Act (1809). There is virtually no mention of the growth of a nullification-interposition sentiment in New England, nor of the federal court decree (1808) upholding the constitutionality of the embargo.

DeHuszar doesn’t mention that the British had been using impressments and other interferences with shipping for a long while.

DeHuszar doesn’t pose or answer the question: did the U.S. government know that Napoleon had not really suspended the Berlin-Milan decrees when it was plunging into war ostensibly to force Britain to revoke its Orders in Council? Neither is it satisfactory to say that the United States went to war without knowing of Castlereagh’s surrender on the Orders in Council: what was there to prevent us revoking the declaration of war when this was discovered?

It must be granted that, while DeHuszar’s account is too pro-administration, most of the way, he does concede that the neutral rights question was not the real cause of war, but rather such drives as the drive for land expansion in Canada and Florida.

There should have been more stress on Jefferson’s power-poisoned vindictiveness in prosecuting Burr for treason, plus his arrogant refusal to bring pertinent papers on the Burr case to Justice Marshall—thus continuing the Washington tradition of holding the executive unaccountable to either the legislative or judicial branches.

DeHuszar doesn’t realize the important nature of the election of 1812, which, since the Orders in Council had already been repealed to no avail, was a true test of war vs. peace; nor does he indicate that George Clinton was the peace candidate. DeHuszar indicates some of this, but not clearly enough. Clinton was a peace Republican, an “Old Republican,” now supported by the Federalists on the peace question.

DeHuszar does not mention:

• the conflict over renewal of the Bank of the United States and its liquidation in 1811
• Jefferson’s taking up the permission of the Constitution, promptly, to outlaw the slave trade after January 1, 1808
• mention of the Jefferson administration making it possible for Congress to make specific appropriations, thus increasing its check of the executive branch, plus annual accountings of executive acts
• that the Republican betrayal of their own principles began, in fact, early in the administration by the failure to repeal the Logan Act, despite Jefferson
• Madison’s attempt to prosecute a panel of lawyers under the Logan Act for agreeing with Spain that certain American claims were invalid (1803)
• the beginning of the slavery-in-the-territories problem with Logan’s resolution to prohibit the import of slaves into the new Western territories
• Jefferson’s general bellicosity in his second administration, as exemplified in his near-generation of war with Spain, aggressions and threats of force in the Gulf and over West Florida and Texas, etc.
• Logan’s tragic peace mission to London (1810), after which his old Republican defenders virtually treated him as a pro-British traitor
• the fact that, while the old-line pro-British Federalists opposed the war, such ominous figures as ex-Federalist John Quincy Adams, virtually prowar on principle, joined heartily in the drive to war. Jefferson, Madison, Gallatin, etc. working hand-in-hand with John Quincy Adams began to favor national internal improvements, a national university, etc.
• the disastrous refusal of Jefferson to even consider submitting the Monroe-Pinkney Treaty with Britain to Congress

Also, DeHuszar is wrong in thinking that Jefferson overturned a large number of Federalist officeholders; actually, he partially betrayed Republican principles of democratic selection of public officials and rotation in office by not turning out very many Federalists from office!

War and Postwar, 1812–24: the Consolidation of Federalism and the Virtual Liquidation of the Republican Party

This deliberately paradoxical title (superficially, of course, the reverse happened) catches the inner meaning of the events of this era. For, under the retreat from Republicanism into war, in collaboration not only with John Quincy Adams but with other neo-Federalists like Clay and the younger [John C.] Calhoun (“the war hawks”), the upshot of the war was as follows: monetary chaos, bank paper inflation and the reimposition of the Bank of the United States, revival of the public debt, a return to internal taxes, a shutting off of foreign trade leading to hothouse manufactures and a subsequent drive for a permanent protective tariff (successful in 1824), an increased budget and army and navy. In short, while the aims of the war (both on sea and on land) were a complete and utter failure, the “accomplishment” of the war was a liquidation of the Republican principles and a reversion to Federalism, although only the Republican Party label remained.

With the Federalist Party dead, the Monroe administration represented the quiet, bipartisan consolidation of this notable event, with Federalists seeping increasingly into the Republican Party. Monroe, by instituting “bipartisan” appointments to replace the very mild Jeffersonian “spoils system,” consolidated organizationally this shift of political principle. There was, however, a significant difference between what we may call the new Federalists and the old: the old were pro-British and pro-aristocrat; the new were simply bellicose American nationalists, who also threw in their lot with democracy, with the mass of the people. In short, the new Federalism (later Whiggery) was the program of Federalism expanded and revitalized on a mass-base support. It should not be overlooked that the aristocratic-like caucus system of nomination was destroyed, in favor of democracy, not by the Old Republicans but by Adams, Clay, and their followers. None of this important saga penetrates to DeHuszar.

Instead, DeHuszar deplores, conventionally, the failure to renew the First Bank of the United States in 1811, thus depriving the war effort of needed resources. He deprecates the unwillingness of state militia to cross the lines of their states during the war. And, while in a previous page, he pointed to the Canada and Florida objectives of the war hawks, he also, and contradictorily, apologizes for the war by calling it, inanely, the “Second War of Independence,” a battle for “economic liberty,” etc. (pp. 260 ff.). He also thinks that the rise of industry and more self-sufficiency during the war was a benefit, his ignorance of economics preventing him from realizing the detriment and distortion of cutting off international trade and the most efficient allocation of resources. It is also absurd for DeHuszar to find as a benefit of the war the machinery for settling disputes emerging from the Treaty of Ghent: the dispute had been settled without the war. The historian must face up to the fact that the War of 1812 was an unmitigated disaster, whether from the point of view of the aims of the war or of its political consequences.

These details are also worth noting:

• DeHuszar, incredibly, makes no mention whatever of the suspension of specie payments by the banks from 1814–1816, or of the function of the new Bank of the United States to appease the banks by joining in their inflation.
• DeHuszar actually goes to the length (p. 280) of defending wildcat banking as leading to increased growth, prosperity, etc., thus unwittingly adopting the most egregious fallacies of the present-day Keynesians, and such Keynesian economic historians as Carter Golembe. “Rag paper” did not relieve a “shortage of specie.” There is no mention of the very important experiments (all abject failures) with state-owned fiat-paper banks in the West during the Panic of 1819, or of the judicial decisions on their unconstitutionality. There is no mention of the strict constructionist theory (which makes a great deal of juristic sense) that the constitutional prohibition against state “bills of credit” also implies prohibition of state banking.
• On the steamboat, DeHuszar fails to mention the political and judicial disputes that raged around attempts to grant steamboat monopolies by state governments.
• DeHuszar has virtually nothing on the construction of governmental canals and their widespread failures.
• DeHuszar is wrong in simply stating (p. 275) that U.S. foreign trade suffered many difficulties from the European wars; on the contrary, U.S. foreign trade and shipping prospered by neutral selling to both sides, until the Jeffersonian embargoes, etc. and the U.S. entrance into the war.
• Again, on wildcat banks, these were expressions of outright fraud, not just expressions of “boundless optimism.”
• DeHuszar defends fractional-reserve banking, without even mentioning the opposition case.
• The Keynesian balance-of-trade-school is again adopted in DeHuszar’s fallacious “explanation” of the “shortage of specie” in the West and South: because the West and South bought more from the North and East than vice versa. Another expression of DeHuszar’s economic ignorance. Everyone would like to “buy more”; the question is the cause of this, which was the excessive inflation in the West and South relative to the East. DeHuszar has the causal sequence reversed.
• It is absurd to give such short space to discussion of banking and industry, sandwiched inside a small chapter, together with religion, the life of the people, etc. Religious Revivalism, says DeHuszar, “contributed much to the development of individual character” (p. 283).
• There is no mention of Thomas Cooper, of Thomas Ritchie, or of John Randolph of Roanoke.
• DeHuszar gives an erroneous impression of the newspapers and magazines of the time and of their influence. It should be emphasized that the cultivated American of the time was widespread, that the leading businessmen and statesmen, etc. were remarkably well read in English reviews, books, Adam Smith and his followers, etc., and that reference to these permeated the American newspapers as well.
• Favoring the Second Bank of the United States, DeHuszar omits mention of the cogent Webster and Randolph opposition and its arguments.
• DeHuszar’s account of the causes of the Panic of 1819 is inadequate and garbled; he doesn’t understand the consequences of the Bank of the United States’s inflation of 1817–1818, and pins most of the blame on land speculation, which was only one consequence of that inflation.
• DeHuszar’s discussion of the tariff and the tariff movement is skimpy and erroneous; he doesn’t see, first, that the tariff of 1816 was not supposed to be a higher tariff, but, instead, a gradually lower tariff than the prohibitive “tariff” that the War of 1812 and its blockade had imposed. The protectionist movement as a pressure group of the modern type began in 1820, and DeHuszar does not see this at all: there is no mention of the bellwether of this movement, Mathew Carey, of Hezekiah Niles, or of the Pittsburgh center, such as Rep. Henry Baldwin.
• DeHuszar has no mention of the crucial effect that the Panic of 1819 had in the later formation of the Jacksonian movement, by imparting an unforgettable lesson about the evils of inflationary banking to such men as Thomas Hart Benton, Amos Kendall, and Jackson himself, and stimulating hard-money thought among economic writers.
• By gravely citing the arguments of the “American System” without even mentioning the arguments of its opponents, DeHuszar seems to be biased in favor of that system and its fallacies.
• Further, DeHuszar doesn’t seem to realize that, as we pointed out, above, the American System was not so much new, as a reversion to and expansion of Federalism—placed on a new mass base. The New Federalism favored the Bank of the United States, high tariff, governmental internal improvements, etc. To describe this doctrine as “nationalist,” as DeHuszar does, omits the crucial element of the theory: its étatism, its collectivistic expansion of government over the life of the individual and of the economy. It is not only the glorification of the nation, but of the nation-state.
• We have already indicated that DeHuszar has no comprehension of the political meaning of the Monroe era; it was hardly an “Era of Good Feelings,” to quote the nonsensical title usually given it: this was the era when slavery, the tariff, the central bank, and internal improvements became “hot” political issues. The only “Good Feeling” was the superficial fact that America was living under a one-party system, because of the death of the old Federalist Party. Monroe was not handpicked by Madison, contrary to DeHuszar; there was a great deal of enmity there. Furthermore, DeHuszar omits the crucial struggle between Monroe and William H. Crawford for the presidential succession in 1816. Monroe, a former deep-dyed Republican, now a “bipartisan” federalist type, defeated Crawford, the candidate of the “Old Republican” forces. Crawford was supposed, then, to succeed Monroe; this was the general agreement. Yet in the Monroe administration, such men as Adams and Clay had prominent roles, and in 1824, Monroe took the crucial (anti-Crawford) step of refusing to name his successor, and refusing even to uphold the old caucus system (where Crawford would have won renomination easily). Thus, Monroe completed his final betrayal of the “Old Cause.” None of this penetrates to DeHuszar, who hardly knows of Crawford’s existence, much less of the principles and the cause that he represented.
• There is no criticism of McCulloch v. Maryland, and no mention of the substantial opposition to the decision by Jefferson, and by Jefferson’s legal theorist Judge Spencer Roane of Virginia.
• One of the expressions of Monroe’s new-Federalism was his bellicose “Monroe Doctrine,” which DeHuszar treats throughout as something akin to Holy Writ; the so-called doctrine had no legal standing, but was just the pronunciamento of one president, a pronunciamento which, indeed, was to launch the career of American imperialism in Latin America. The operative word here is “imperialism,” not, as DeHuszar believes, “elder brother” to our sister nations. No mention of Monroe’s designs on Cuba. (This foreign affairs bellicosity and imperialism was really a joint policy of Monroe and Adams as his Secretary of State). DeHuszar omits the fact that part of Adams’s motivation in rejecting joint British declaration of the “Monroe Doctrine” was the wish to preserve a free hand for potential conquest of Cuba.
• There is no mention of such important Supreme Court decisions as Cohens v. Virginia, Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, and Green v. Biddle (1823), which, again, treated a contract between states as a private contract.
• There is no mention of the fur-trade monopoly virtually granted to John Jacob Astor by congressional prohibition of aliens from engaging in the fur trade.

The Polarization of American Politics, 1824–28: the Drive toward Federalist Statism, and the Reconstruction of the “Old Cause” in the Democrat Party

The mid-1820s was an era of high drama and great significance for American politics, a drama and significance that totally escape DeHuszar. What happened was that a few libertarian and quasilibertarian malcontents saw, by 1820, what had happened to Old Republican principles, and saw that Federalism had crept back to power by the back door. Thomas Jefferson, a libertarian once again and now out of power, chafed at Monroe’s neo-Federalism; so did Thomas Ritchie, and the “Richmond Junto”; so did William Duane, the old Jeffersonian warhorse of the Philadelphia Aurora (also not mentioned by DeHuszar); so did John Randolph of Roanoke and John Taylor of Caroline, and some others, including the brilliant young New York politician Martin Van Buren.

Martin Van Buren was one of the greatest statesmen in the history of the United States, and his almost heroic accomplishment has gone unrecognized by DeHuszar as well as by most other historians. (See the recently developing biography of Van Buren by Robert Remini.) For Van Buren, a politician rather than a theorist, strongly sensed the desertion of the Old Cause in the Monroe era. Never an ideologist, Van Buren’s political sentiments were fused in a momentous meeting he had with the venerable Jefferson, a meeting from which Van Buren emerged to be dedicated lifelong to a reconstitution of the Old Republican Cause. The Crawford candidacy of 1824 was, unbeknownst to DeHuszar, the final attempt of the Old Republicans, resting on the old caucus system, to take back control of the Republican Party, only to lose to the natural combination of neo-Federalism in Adams and Clay.

Facing the heightened drive toward étatism and Big Government by the consistent étatist John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren set about, deliberately and using every skill of political organization, to create a new “Republican” party upon the ruins of old; he set out, virtually single handed, to bring back the libertarian principles of the Old Cause by creating a new political party as a vehicle for those principles: the Democratic Party. It is one of the most monumental feats in American history that Van Buren was able, in a few years, to succeed at this task, to weld together such formerly disparate elements as Tammany Hall, Thomas Benton of the West, Thomas Ritchie, etc., into a great new party.

Contrary to what most historians have written, Van Buren did not simply do this for political patronage, nor did the Adams-Clay versus the Jackson parties emerge immediately after the Adams election as a vehicle for Jackson. Van Buren, after seeing the étatist trend of the Adams administration, risked his political life for principle, by breaking with it, and setting out on the enormous task of welding a new political party. His pick of Jackson was deliberate as he was the only man with prestige enough to appeal to the new mass of voters. Jackson, a military man with sound instincts but at this time of scarcely formed ideology, was deliberately presented by Van Buren with a fait accompli, with a party, the only party with which Jackson could win, already committed to Old Jeffersonian principles. And with this vehicle and this candidate, Van Buren engineered the monumental “Revolution of 1828.” All of this escapes DeHuszar completely. (It should also be noted that the other great ideologist-statesman of the new Democracy, Thomas Hart Benton, was converted to the Old Cause as a young Senator by none other than John Randolph of Roanoke: thus Jefferson and Randolph passed on their principles to the younger generation of leaders.)

As I’ve said, all of this escapes DeHuszar. DeHuszar doesn’t mention the wrecking of the caucus system, or the dramatic moment when Stephen Van Rensselaer mystically betrayed the Crawford Cause.

• DeHuszar is totally wrong when he says that the Democratic Party and Jackson “paid little attention to principles”; on the contrary, it was dedicated to limited government, low budgets, strict construction, separation of government from banking, hard money, opposition to internal improvements, states’ rights, etc. (Only on the tariff, for sectional reasons, did the party equivocate, although it was essentially for free trade, especially in the South.)
• DeHuszar paints Adams as unfortunate and confused; Adams failed politically, however, not because he was confused but because he was consistent, driving forward beyond what was politically acceptable at the time, toward statism at home and abroad; yet DeHuszar does not even mention Adams as an advocate of the American System.
• DeHuszar again repeats the Schlesingerian fallacy that Van Buren’s and Buchanan’s machines were backed by “urban workingmen.” Neither is there any evidence that the “less prosperous” voted for Jackson and the “more prosperous” for Adams; indeed, there is considerable voting evidence in the big cities to the contrary. (See various journal articles on “Who Voted for Jackson?”)
• There is no mention of significance of Adams’s first address to Congress: it favored a strong army and navy, federal bankruptcy law, a national university, a national astronomical observatory, federal internal improvements (roads, canals, rivers, and harbors), and a bellicose and interventionist foreign policy in Latin America.
• There is no mention of Adams’s Latin American meddling and the Panama Congress, the drive toward a possible war with Spain, and Adams’s bellicose desire to close U.S. ports to some British shipping to exact reciprocal concessions—this foreign intervention and bellicosity being important ingredients in inducing Van Buren and the others to form their opposition party.
• There is no mention of the Anti-Masonic Party (opposed, then, to Jackson as a Mason).

Era of the Jacksonian Democracy

• DeHuszar shows no comprehension of the ideological role of the Jacksonian movement, nor of the hard-money economics and laissez-faire politics behind the war against the Bank, nor of the important role of the classical hard-money economists such as William M. Gouge or Amos Kendall. There is no mention of the consistent, pure Jacksonian formation: the Loco-Focos, centered in New York, nor of their important ideological organ, the New York Evening Post, with its editors William Leggett and William Cullen Bryant.
• Jackson did not “introduce,” as DeHuszar deprecatingly claims, the “spoils system” of appointments. He was carrying out a philosophical Republican principle—of responsibility of office-holders to the public, of rotation of office, etc.—that Jefferson had previously mildly inaugurated. There are only two alternatives: a rotating “spoils system,” responsive to elections, or a permanent perpetuating oligarchical caste of “civil servants” of the bureaucracy; as we shall see further below, one of DeHuszar’s major defects is his wholehearted bias in favor of the “civil service” system, without even recognizing the opposing arguments.
• DeHuszar’s “overview” here is grossly inadequate, with almost no mention of the slavery question, of the continuity between Federalist and Whig principles, or even of the great significance of the Democrat-Whig conflicts.
• Again, DeHuszar totally misreads the Jacksonian movement by saying that Jackson’s significance was the introduction of “personal politics.” The truth is almost the reverse: the crucial significance of the Jacksonian movement was the reestablishment of political parties in American life as the vehicle for political principles. This was back to the political party system of the 1790s.
• Jackson’s Bank War is given absurdly little space: his veto message only receiving one paragraph, and the reasons not fathomed at all. DeHuszar thinks Jackson was simply anti-foreign and against the Bank as “undemocratic”; it was, of course, much more than that.
• The Bank of the United States did not, in general, restrain the state banks; it stimulated bank credit expansion.
• It is absurd for DeHuszar to have a chapter entitled “Politics in an Age of Depression: 1837–1843”; first, the depression was not that important, especially after the first years of the Panic; secondly, this melds in the later Jacksonian era with the Whig interlude.
• There is no mention of the significance of Van Buren’s independent treasury as the logical extension of the hard-money, separation-of-government-from-banking position of the Jacksonians.
• There is no mention of Van Buren’s magnificent insistence upon strict laissez-faire, lower budget, and no interference with the economy or governmental relief, in coping with the depression of 1837. (The fact, as will be seen below, that DeHuszar does recognize the laissez-faire significance of the 1921 recovery a century later, indicates that Benjamin Anderson was, as it were, grafted onto a completely different and inferior remainder of the text.)
• He doesn’t mention Jackson’s achievement in getting rid of the public debt (or of the failure of Jefferson to carry through the original Republican principle of debt repudiation!).
• DeHuszar doesn’t realize, again, the significance of the election of 1840, won by mobilizing the mass of voters through the use of modern demagogic techniques, organized by the crafty Thurlow Weed. As recent studies show, it was the election of 1840 that mobilized an outpouring of new voters, more than previous elections.
• There is no mention of Jackson’s reversion to a foreign policy of peace, settling shipping problems with Great Britain that Adams had exacerbated to near the point of war, etc.
• There is no mention of the failure of Jackson to ally himself with Benton on the nullification question, etc. No mention of the U.S.-Canada friction of 1837–1838, or of Van Buren’s neutrality proclamation.
• There is no mention of the unfortunate and fateful decision of Marshall in Barron v. Baltimore (1833), which decided that the Bill of Rights’ protections for the individual were not binding upon the state governments. No mention of Briscoe v. Bank of Ky. (1837) or Charles River Bridge decision (1837) or of dissent in the former by Mr. Justice Story. No mention of the unfortunate decision of New York v. Miln (1837), upholding the state police power to regulate vessels into New York.
• It is not true, as DeHuszar maintains, that Jackson believed in the “increased power of the national government.” The truth is precisely the contrary.
• One grave defect of DeHuszar’s treatment of the 1830s is the near-failure to mention, and total failure to emphasize, the rise of antislavery and abolitionist sentiment; William Lloyd Garrison and The Liberator; the crucial distinction between the Garrisonian, nonviolent, “no-government” abolition (involving, e.g., a secession from the South), and the coercive abolitionists; no mention of the Nat Turner slave revolt (1831); no mention of the fateful rejection by the Virginia convention of 1831–1832 of state emancipation and, instead, the Southern drive toward a tightening of slave restrictions: curbs on slaves, their education, etc., and prohibition of voluntary manumissions. No mention of the rise of “personal liberty” laws in the North. No mention of the Southern reaction of antiabolitionist propaganda laws, and the Jackson acquiescence in postal censorship in the South to this effect. This extreme minimizing of the growth of the slavery issue in the 1830s makes the emergence of slavery as the critical issue in American politics in the mid-1840s seem like a bolt from the blue—which it was not.

The Breakup of the Democratic Party and the Slavery Question: 1844–60

• The Whig victory in 1840 was, or should have been, merely an interlude in the march to victory of Jacksonian principles. The Jacksonian succession was firmly established: it was to be two terms of Van Buren, followed by two terms of Benton, an era in which the Old Republican cause could have triumphed throughout the Union, and with such depth that it could not have been dislodged. The fateful interruption of this seemingly inevitable Democratic era was not the Whig interlude of 1840–1844; it was the tragic and fateful split engendered in the Democrat Party by the Texas Question. It was Van Buren’s (and Benton’s) firm opposition to the admission of Texas into the Union in 1844 that effectively ended the chances for the Van Buren-Benton succession, and thus ended the chances for a sixteen-year reign of ultra hard money, minimal government, and laissez-faire.
• The tragedy of the 1844 split, furthermore, is that Van Buren and Benton made a great tactical error in picking the Texas issue for making their stand against the extension of slavery. The aim—opposition to any expansion of slavery into the Western territories—was a noble and sound one; but the tactic was tragically wrong. For, on well-established principles, a territory that desired admission into the Union, even though the Republic of Texas was slave, should have been admitted without fuss, and the free-soilers should have held their fire until the Western territories became a problem. By taking their stand against the overwhelmingly popular move to admit Texas, Van Buren and Benton killed the chances for the Old Cause—a point that the dying Jackson saw with crystal clarity. It is possible, though of course not certain, that if Van Buren had held his fire, as president he—and Benton—would have been able to steer the Democratic Party firmly into free-soil principles, and thus have avoided the Southern secession.
• Again, none of this penetrates to DeHuszar, who doesn’t even realize that there was a split within the Democracy in 1844. Not that the immediate Jacksonian aims were not achieved; on the contrary (and here again DeHuszar doesn’t realize this), President Polk was the last Jacksonian, and his administration advanced the Old Republican ideals of hard money (with the restoration of the independent treasury), and low tariffs approaching free trade. The cog in the machinery, of course, was the war against Mexico, something that would not have been undertaken by Van Buren.
• In the Tyler administration, there is no mention by DeHuszar of the Federal Bankruptcy law (a favorite Federalist device—1841), of the Dorr Rebellion in Rhode Island, or of the slavery problem in the Creole case or the Giddings resolutions; no mention of beginnings of Know-Nothing party (the American Republican Party); no mention of Clay’s loss in New York in 1844 due to the new Liberty Party, angered by Clay’s weak stand on Texas.
• There is omission of the key links in the story of the annexation of Texas, specifically Secretary of State Upshur’s pressing for annexation after Texas had, for the time, lost interest; also of Tyler’s sending troops to Texas and the Gulf.
• There is no mention of the Antirent War, and the subsequent end of feudalist remnants in New York (1839–1846).
• On the Mexican War, DeHuszar, unfortunately, by omission of crucial facts, reveals a bias in favor of the United States’ aggression. He overlooks the crucial fact that the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819 had defined the Texas boundary as being at the Nueces River; after the Texas annexation, the United States cavalierly tossed away the treaty, to claim that annexation rendered it obsolete, and then claimed the territory to the Rio Grande (as well as chunks of New Mexico territory). DeHuszar also leaves out the crucial fact that the war was precipitated by Polk’s order to General Taylor to march across the Nueces and down to the Rio Grande—a naked act of aggression. Yet, even after this act of aggression, the Mexicans (whom DeHuszar claims “wanted war”) did not fight. Polk, in private, was preparing a declaration-of-war message, but of course it was better to maneuver the Mexicans into firing the first shot—this was done by the aggressive blockade of the Mexican town of Matamoras (on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande) by Taylor’s troops. When the Mexicans crossed the Rio to try to relieve the blockade, Polk inserted flag-waving rubbish about Mexican attack on American soil, and the war was on. None of this penetrates into DeHuszar’s account.
• There is no mention of Calhoun’s opposition to the Mexican-American War, and virtually no mention of the widespread American opposition to the war, including Tyler, Benton, the Whigs, etc., or of the Whig gains in the congressional elections of 1847 in reaction against the war. There is no mention of the Frémont affair.

The end of the Mexican war ushers in the critical era of the growing dispute about slavery. The gravest failure of DeHuszar here is his failure to give any sort of interpretation of the causes of the Civil War, and instead to offer skimpy chronicle. My own view is that the road to Civil War must be divided into two parts: the causes of the controversy over slavery leading to secession, and the immediate causes of the war itself. The reason for such split is that secession need not have led to Civil War, despite the assumption to the contrary by most historians.

The basic root of the controversy over slavery leading to secession, in my opinion, was the aggressive, expansionist aims of the Southern “slavocracy.” Very few Northerners proposed to abolish slavery in the Southern states by aggressive war; the objection—and certainly a proper one—was to the attempt of the Southern slavocracy to extend the slave system to the Western territories. The apologia that the Southerners feared that eventually they might be outnumbered and that federal abolition might ensue is no excuse; it is the age-old alibi for “preventive war.” Not only did the expansionist aim of the slavocracy to protect slavery by federal fiat in the territories as “property” aim to foist the immoral system of slavery on Western territories; it even violated the principles of states’ rights to which the South was supposedly devoted—and which would logically have led to a “popular sovereignty” doctrine. Actually, with Texas in the Union, there was no hope of gaining substantial support for slavery in any of the territories except Kansas, and this had supposedly been settled by the Missouri Compromise. “Free-Soil” principles for the Western territories could therefore have been easily established without disruption of existing affairs, if not for the continual aggressive push and troublemaking of the South.

If Van Buren had been president, he might have been able to drive through Congress the free-soil principles of the Wilmot Proviso, and that would have been that. As it was, President Taylor’s bill would have settled the Western territory problem by simply adopting “popular sovereignty” principles in New Mexico, Utah, Oregon, and California territories—admitting them all eventually as free states. Instead, the unfortunate deathof President Taylor and the accession of Fillmore, ended this simple and straightforward solution, and brought forth thepernicious so-called “Compromise” of 1850, which exacerbated rather than reduced interstate tensions by adding to the essential Taylor program provisions for stricter enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. Since the Fugitive Slave Law not only forced the Northern people to collaborate in what they considered—correctly—to bemoral crime, but also violated Northern state rights, the strict Fugitive Slave Law was a constant irritant to the North.

The shift from free-soil principles in the Democratic Party and toward the Compromise of 1850 wrecked the old Jacksonian Democracy. The open break became apparent in Van Buren and the Free Soil candidacy of 1848; the failure of the Democratic Party to take an antislavery stand pushed the old libertarians into Free Soil or other alliances, even into the new Republican Party eventually: this tragic split in the Democratic Party lost it its libertarian conscience and drive. Pro-southern domination of the Democratic Party in the 1850s, with Pierce and Buchanan, the opening up of the Kansas territory to slave expansion (or potential slave expansion) in 1854, led to the creation of the antislavery Republican Party. One tragedy here is that the surrender of the Democrat and Whig parties to the spirit of the Compromise of 1850 forced the free-soilers into a new party that was not only free-soil, but showed dangerous signs (in Seward and others) of ultimately preparing for an abolitionist war against the South. Thus, Southern troublemaking shifted Northern sentiment into potentially dangerous channels. Not only that: it also welded in the Republican Party a vehicle dedicated, multifold, to old Federalist-Whig principles: to high tariffs, to internal improvements and government subsidies, to paper money and government banking, etc. Libertarian principles were now split between the two parties.

The fantastic Dred Scott decision changed the political scene completely: for in it the Supreme Court hadapparently outlawed free-soil principles, even including the Missouri Compromise. There was now only one course left to the lovers of freedom short of open rebellion against the Court, or Garrison’s secession by the North from a Constitution that had indeed become a “compact with Hell”; and that escape hatch was Stephen Douglas’s popular sovereignty doctrine, in its “Freeport” corollary: i.e., in quiet, local nullification of the Dred Scott decision.

At this critical juncture, the South continued on its suicidal course by breaking with Douglas, insistent on the full Dred Scott principle, and leading to the victory of their enemy Lincoln. Here again, secession was only “preventive,” as Lincoln had given no indication of moving to repress slavery in the South.

It is here that we must split our analysis of the “causes of the Civil War”; for, while this analysis leads, in my view, to a “pro-Northern” position in the slavery-in-the-territories struggles of the 1850s, it leads, paradoxically, to a “pro-Southern” position in the Civil War itself. For secession need not, and should not, have been combated by the North; and so we must pin the blame on the North for aggressive war against the seceding South. The war was launched in the shift from the original Northern position (by Garrison included) to “let our erring sisters depart in peace” to the determination to crush the South to save that mythical abstraction known as the “Union”—and in this shift, we must put a large portion of the blame upon the maneuvering of Lincoln to induce the Southerners to fire the first shot on Fort Sumter—after which point, flag-waving could and did take over.

I apologize for the length of the above discussion; but I think it important to establish a framework of analysis of the complex slavery and Civil War issues before pointing to the DeHuszar errors.

• In the first place, none of this penetrates the DeHuszar narrative; but this is not as grave a defect as the fact that no interpretation has penetrated that narrative.
• More specifically, DeHuszar doesn’t recognize the significance of Van Buren’s break with the party he virtually founded, including his willingness to compromise with Whig principles (tariff, internal improvements, etc.) for alliance on free-soil; DeHuszar is extremely vague on the Free Soil platform—only it, he says, was “affirmative” (meaning?); the Wilmot Proviso problems are skipped over blithely, and there is no mention of the prohibition of slavery in Oregon, or the Clayton Compromise. Nor does DeHuszar grasp the significance of the Taylor proposals.
• DeHuszar’s deprecation of “lynch law” in California does not do justice to some of the important successes of “vigilante justice” (cf. Alan Valentine’s book).
• DeHuszar again lapses into inflationist error by opining that the Gold Rush “relieved chronic shortage of specie” in America.
• What does DeHuszar mean when he says that the small Southern farmers were “economic subjects” of the planters who “fixed prices”? This is economic ignorance again, as is the nonsensical criticism of New York businessmen “who controlled” shipping and merchandising of cotton “and therefore reaped most of the profits.” This is utter economic nonsense of the Marxist-populist variety.
• DeHuszar makes many errors in his brief discussion of education and social conditions in the first half of the nineteenth century. He doesn’t seem to realize that women had always worked; female labor was not introduced in the factories. Neither is it right to say that the factory system “deprived children of schooling”; they had never had schooling before. In fact, the Sunday-school system was invented by a private businessman, Samuel Slater.
• DeHuszar is apparently biased in favor of state laws to impose minimum compulsory schooling.
• It is, again, economic nonsense to talk of the high price of slaves causing a “money shortage” in the South.
• DeHuszar does not seem to see clearly that the main reason for the rise in the price of slaves was the prohibition on their importation.
• What in the world does it mean to say that “transcendentalism is particularly adaptable to American life” (p. 380)?
• Again, on page 382, DeHuszar indicates that the cities became more desirable because they provided tax-supported schools.
• What sense is there in saying that “family ties” were “weakening” because women’s rights became wider, and divorce easier? Is a “strong family” only to be achieved by treating wives as chattels of husbands, or by prohibiting divorce (compulsory maintenance of marriage)?
• DeHuszar joins most fellow historians in deprecation of Garrison: “too extreme” on the slavery question. Garrison and his confreres presented “distorted” propaganda against slavery and depicted slave owners “in the worst possible light.” Surely it should not be difficult for a professed libertarian to understand that the institution of slavery is an inherent evil—equally as evil, for the persons victimized—as socialism (which it resembles), and that the issue is not whether slave-masters regarded their slaves benevolently. As Burke once said about government: “The thing! The thing itself is the abuse!” Further, DeHuszar omits the extraordinarily significant solution of Garrison—not war, but secession from the South.
• DeHuszar omits the severe tightening of antislave regulations in the South.
• There is no mention of Thoreau’s theory of civil disobedience. There is no mention of the goals of the Mann-Barnard educationist movement: public schools, the compulsory molding of the “whole child,” etc.
• It is surely illogical to sandwich mention of the abolitionists in a chapter with other obscure reformers, such as temperance advocates, etc.
• DeHuszar misses the significance of the death of Silas Wright (who is never mentioned), who, if he had not died in 1848, would probably have been the candidate of the Democracy, thus possibly saving the Old Republican team.
• There is no mention whatever of the Negro slave revolts.
• There is no mention of the [Preston] Brooks assault on [Charles] Sumner (1856).
• There is no mention of the aggressive Southern Convention at Vicksburg (1859), which called for legalization of foreign slave trade, as well as for a federal territorial slave code.
• No hint of knowledge appears that bank credit expansion caused the Panic of 1857.
• Why must there be the euphemism about Commodore Perry’s “persuading” Japan to open its ports to U.S. trade? The operative word here, Mr. DeHuszar, is force, coercion. Once again DeHuszar displays a strong tendency (redoubled later) to be an apologist for American imperialism.
• The exposition of the Ostend Manifesto is very weak. Not giving the date of this bellicose war threat against Spain for the seizure of Cuba, DeHuszar gives the impression that it was issued by Polk; actually it was issued by Buchanan and endorsed by Pierce in 1854.
• Incredibly, DeHuszar completely omits the struggle within the South over secession—the views of the cooperationists, etc.
• There is also much too little on the Northern shift of view from peace to war, and a consequent failure to give sufficient significance to Lincoln’s maneuvering of the South to fire the first dramatic shot to make the South look like the aggressor.
• There is no mention of the Crittenden plan, or of such important books of the time as Hinton Helper’s The Impending Crisis. Nor is there any discussion of the growth of outright pro-slavery-for-all theory, such as that of George Fitzhugh and Henry Hughes, America’s first “sociologists.” There is no treatment of the important shift of Southern sentiment over the years from an anti- to a proslavery position.
• DeHuszar misses the significance of the whole realignment of parties due to the slavery issue: with the Compromise of 1850, Southern and pro-Southern Democracy was joined, in effect, by the conciliatory Whigs (Clay, Webster), while many Jacksonian free-soil Democrats drifted into the Republican ranks.

The War Against the South and Its Consequences

To say that DeHuszar’s treatment of the Civil War is hopelessly inadequate would be a grave understatement. Here is one of the great defects of this book. The Civil War was one of the most momentous events in American history, not only for its inherent drama and destruction, but because of the fateful consequences for America that flowed from it. Yet there is not a hint in DeHuszar of any realization of this great drama or these momentous consequences. Instead, we have a hasty chronological run-through of the Battle of Bull Run, the Emancipation Proclamation, et al.

We have said above that the War of 1812 had devastating consequences for the libertarian movement; indeed, it might be said that it took twenty years of devotion and hard work for the Jacksonian movement to undo the étatist consequences of that utter failure of a war. It is the measure of the statist consequences of the Civil War that America never recovered from it: never again was the libertarian movement to have a party of its own, or as close a chance at success. Hamiltonian neo-Federalism beyond the wildest dreams of even a John Quincy Adams had either been foisted permanently on America, or had been inaugurated to be later fulfilled.

Let us trace the leading consequences of the War Against the South: there is, first, the enormous toll of death, injury, and destruction. There is the complete setting aside of the civilized “rules of war” that Western civilization had laboriously been erecting for centuries: instead, a total war against the civilian population was launched against the South. The symbol of this barbaric and savage oppression was, of course, Sherman’s march through Georgia and the rest of the South, the burning of Atlanta, etc. (For the military significance of this reversion to barbarism, see F.J.P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism). Another consequence, of course, was the ending of effective states’ rights, and of the perfectly logical and reasonable right of secession—or, for that matter, nullification. From now on, the Union was a strictly compulsory entity.

Further, the Civil War foisted upon the country the elimination of Jacksonian hard money: the greenbacks established government fiat paper, which it took fourteen long years to tame; and the National Bank Act ended the separation of government from banking, effectively quasi-nationalizing and regulating the banking system, and creating an engine of governmentally sponsored inflation.

So ruthlessly did the Lincoln administration overturn the old banking system (including the effective outlawing of state bank notes) that it became almost impossible to achieve a return—impossible that is, without a radical and almost revolutionary will for hard money, which did not exist. On the tariff, the virtual destruction of the Democratic Party led to the foisting of a high, protective tariff to remain for a generation—indeed, permanently, for the old prewar low tariff was never to return. It was behind this wall of tariff-subsidy that the “trusts” were able to form. Further, the administration embarked on a vast program of subsidies to favored businesses: land grants to railroads, etc. The post office was later monopolized and private postal services outlawed. The national debt skyrocketed, the budget increased greatly and permanently, and taxes increased greatly—including the first permanent foisting on America of excise taxation, especially on whiskey and tobacco.

Thus, on every point of the old Federalist-Whig vs. Democrat-Republican controversy, the Civil War and the Lincoln administration achieved a neo-Federalist triumph that was complete, right down the line. And the crushing of the South, the military Reconstruction period, etc., assured that the Democratic Party would not rise again to challenge this settlement for at least a generation. And when it did rise, it would have a much tougher row to hoe than did Van Buren and company in an era much more disposed to laissez-faire.

But this was not all. The Civil War saw also the inauguration of despotic and dictatorial methods beyond the dreams of the so-called “despots of ‘98.” Militarism ran rampant, with the arrogant suspension of habeas corpus, the crushing and mass arrests in Maryland, Kentucky, etc.; the suppression of civil liberties and opposition against the war—among the propeace “Copperheads,” the persecution of Vallandigham, etc.; and the institution of conscription. Also introduced on the American scene at this time was the income tax, reluctantly abandoned later, but to reappear. Federal aid to education began in earnest and permanently with federal land grants for state agricultural colleges. There was no longer any talk, of course, about abolition of the standing army or the navy. Almost everything, in short, that is currently evil on the American political scene, had its roots and its beginnings in the Civil War: but to read DeHuszar, one would never begin to realize this.

I have said above that, because of the slavery controversy of the 1850s, there was no longer a single libertarian party in America, as the Democratic had been. Now the free-soilers had left the Democrat ranks. But, especially after Dred Scott had pushed the Douglas “Freeport Doctrine” to the fore as libertarian policy, there was hope for a reunited Democracy, especially since the Democrat party was still very good on all questions except slavery. But the Civil War wrecked all that, and monolithic Republican rule would impress its neo-Federalist program on America to such an extent as to make it extremely difficult to uproot.

• In addition to not catching any of the above, DeHuszar omits any mention of the interesting provisions of the Confederate Constitution (which repealed the general welfare clause, prohibited as unconstitutional federal subsidies, tariffs, or internal improvements!).
• He almost omits the whole crucial problem of the early desire on the part of many Northerners to let the South depart in peace.
• He calls Stanton “honest.”¹²
• He fails to mention the opposition of the majority of Lincoln’s cabinet to his provocative decision to reinforce Fort Sumter.
• He fails to mention the rush to clamber on the war bandwagon by such former pro-Southerners or conciliators as Buchanan, Douglas, Everett, Pierce, et al., and even Garrison and the American Peace Society.
• He overlooks the flag-waving reaction in the North at the maneuvered firing on Fort Sumter (compared to the lack of interest in the North to the Southern firing on the ship the Star of the West near Sumter only a few months before).
• DeHuszar doesn’t mention the huge inflation in the North and the fall in the value of the greenbacks.
• He doesn’t mention Jay Cooke’s maneuvering to enact a National Bank Act so as to provide a guaranteed bank market for Cooke’s government bonds.
• DeHuszar absurdly chides the oppositionist Southern governors for resisting the high taxes, the conscription, and the crushing of states’ rights by the Davis administration. To DeHuszar the matter is simple: these things “had to be done” to “carry on the war”; yet the Southern governors logically believed that it was pretty absurd, not to say ironic, to surrender in war those very things in defense of which the war was supposedly being fought. Granted that this kind of attitude is today considered rather quixotic; but an attempt should be made to understand it.
• DeHuszar ignores the move of Fernando Wood for secession of New York City from the Union, in protest against the War Against the South.
• DeHuszar, in keeping with his general bias in favor of American warmongering, seems to favor Seward’s threat of war with France, which had “violated the Monroe Doctrine.”
• DeHuszar doesn’t seem to realize that the Emancipation Proclamation made war to the death inevitable: it was something like the equivalent of the later “unconditional surrender” policy.
• DeHuszar is very vague on the railroad land grants: “some land,” “some money”: How much? To whom? There is no mention of the Crédit Mobilier scandals, or the failures of the subsidized railroads.
• There is no mention of Vallandigham.
• At one point (p. 439), DeHuszar adopts the fallacious Beardian theme that the support for the Republican economic policies of the Lincoln administration came from “northeastern businessmen.” This is highly oversimplified (cf. the recent research of Unger, Sharkey, and Cobe); the eastern bankers, for example, remained Democrats, devoted to hard money and to free trade, while the Pittsburgh iron and steel magnates supported inflation and high tariffs (e.g., Thaddeus Stevens, “Pig Iron” Kelley, etc.).
• I do not expect DeHuszar to adopt wholeheartedly the theory of what we may call “Lincoln-assassination revisionism”—that Secretary of War Stanton was responsible for, or at least a member of, the assassination conspiracy, but certainly this hypothesis should be mentioned, especially in view of Stanton’s highly mysterious actions after the assassination, the mysterious demise of Booth, and the highly irregular trial of Booth’s coconspirators in a military court. The recent finding of a coded note by one of Stanton’s key aides implicating Stanton adds fuel to the fire.
• There is no mention of Vice President Stephens, of the Confederacy’s great fight against Southern conscription and suspension of habeas corpus.
• There is no mention of Charles Sumner!
• There is no mention of the Trent affair.
• There is almost no mention of the Union’s naval blockade.
• He does not mention the “Confiscation Act” of July 1862, prefacing the later Emancipation Proclamation by freeing the captured slaves of “rebel” masters.
• There is complete omission of important Supreme Court cases arising from the Civil War: Ex Parte Merryman (1861), the Prize Cases (1863), Ex Parte Vallandigham (1864), for example; also no mention of earlier Supreme Court decisions: the License Cases (1847), legalizing state restrictions on the sale of liquor; the Passenger Cases (1849), prohibiting state taxes on immigrants; Cooley v. Board of Wardens (1851), legalizing state police power over pilots in the Philadelphia port; Ableman v. Booth (1859), upholding constitutionality of fugitive slave law.

“Overview” of 1865–1896 Period

Here, once more, is one of DeHuszar’s gravest and almost inexplicable, failures: the extraordinarily skimpy treatment of the entire 1865–1896 era. This was an era that virtually created modern American life, and yet only a scant 150 pages are devoted to its entire scope.

There is, in particular, no mention whatever of the “robber barons,” or the whole problem that they represented. There is no discussion in anything like the needed scope of the rise of big business, the methods of the rise, the distinction between laissez-faire and artificial subsidy, etc. It is truly astonishing that this most important fact of the era is virtually ignored. There is only one fleeting reference to Rockefeller and one to Morgan; much, much more is needed.

This era, too, saw the rise of the strange gods of socialism and socialistic movements, yet DeHuszar barely mentions Karl Marx once, or the socialistic movements emanating at least in spirit from him. On the labor union movement, DeHuszar, if anything, tends to be favorable; on the antitrust movement, DeHuszar is mixed, but generally approves. Thus, insofar as he takes sides on the crucial issues of the era, DeHuszar meekly takes the wrong ones.

Also, he tends to favor, without being too explicit, the alleged “needs of the farmer,” so that there is no really incisive criticism of the Populist and even the later Progressive movements. The great wave of federal regulation beginning with the ICC in the 1880s is greeted pretty much with approval by DeHuszar, who does not realize that this is the beginning of quasi-socialism, which was, in the twentieth century, to go far beyond the étatism of the neo-Federalists.

Neither does DeHuszar understand what was happening to the Democrat Party; not once does he mention the word “Bourbon.”¹³ Yet the problems facing Bourbon Democracy are the key to understanding the continuity of quasi-libertarian thought that the Democrat Party brought to the United States throughout the nineteenth century.

To understand the problems facing the libertarian as the Civil War ended, let us picture his point of view: the Old Cause, indeed America itself, was in complete shambles. What was to be done? The first and most obvious task to the libertarian—who had become a so-called Bourbon Democrat—was to free the South from its savage burden of military tyranny. This was task number one, finally concluded in 1876. On the money question, the Jacksonian ideal of ultrahard money was so thoroughly left behind by the Lincoln revolution that the Bourbons, unfortunately but understandably, lost sight of the ultimate Jackson-Van Buren goals. It seemed impossible to free banking from federal intrusion; indeed, it was also clear that the first monetary task was to end fiat greenback paper and to restore the gold standard. This task, after much travail also, was accomplished by 1879.

Lowering the budget and taxes significantly seemed beyond reach, although the Cleveland administrations later made a try, and the massive internal improvement subsidies to railroads ended after the Panic of 1873. Throughout the states, government roads had replaced private turnpikes (this trend started before the Civil War) but not much seemed to be able to be done about that. What was left, then, as a viable Old Republican issue, was the protective tariff, and this became a dominant political issue after the mid-1870s.

Thus, by the mid-1870s, the Bourbons had helped to accomplish their most pressing tasks, and had restored America at least to some semblance of prewar “normalcy” in the South and in monetary matters. The tragedy of Bourbon Democracy was not only that the Old Republican laissez-faire fervor had begun to recede—because in Bourbon ranks it was often notable and strong—but the fact that the Bourbons had to face the new upsurge of quasi-socialism of a proletarian-farmer based drive for (1) breaking up big business, (2) farm subsidies, (3) fiat and silverite inflation, (4) regulation of industry, etc.

The Bourbons did not, like the Jacksonians, have decades with only a neo-Federalist enemy to face; they had to face also the aggressive onslaught of the new quasi-socialist movements. Hence the failure and the ultimate disappearance of Bourbon Democracy—but this is for a later section. Even from the beginning of the postwar era, Bourbons had to face quasi-socialist challenges from within the Democrat Party itself.

Needless to say, all of this escapes DeHuszar.

• In DeHuszar’s overview, he absurdly places the major credit for U.S. industrial development on the technological improvements in steelmaking; he asserts ominously that the “activities of some corporate managers led both national and state governments to place limitations on them” (p. 448), thus justifying these interventions; he states rather naively that workers formed unions to “protect themselves”—thus ignoring, as he does throughout, the dominant strain of violence (over the worker as well as the employer) in the labor union movement.
• DeHuszar asserts the utter absurdity that the Granger movement was the “first large-scale, public effort by any economic group to win government power for its own advantage”; what of the protectionist movement or the movement for railroad subsidy? He also ignores the substantial business participation in the Granger movement (cf. Benson).
• He states flatly that there was “no difference between the parties” and “scarcely any issues” from 1877–1896; this ignores the critical differences between Bourbon Democracy and the Republican Party.

The Reconstruction Era: 1865–76

• DeHuszar, while commendably opposed to the Radical Reconstructionists, again misconstrues their composition, in a Beardian manner, by stating that they were pro-tariff; this was not true of many, e.g., Charles Sumner.
• Why the gratuitous and unhistorical assertion (p. 460) that the Fourteenth Amendment “has been used by the federal Supreme Court in ways that its authors probably never imagined”? Why single this amendment out when this is true of most of the Constitution?
• While DeHuszar opposes Radical Reconstruction, he approves, surprisingly, of the socialistic welfare-state measures of the carpetbag-Negro governments of the South: tax-supported schools, welfare aid, etc., which to DeHuszar made these states “more nearly on a par with other sections of the country in welfare measures.” Oh?
• Similarly, DeHuszar defends much of the extravagant carpetbag spending: “still, some of these [state] debts were incurred for such purposes as building schools and roads”—this is supposed to make the expenditures good?
• Contrary to what DeHuszar writes, recent research shows there were few farmers favoring greenbacks in 1868; most of the inflationist pressure of this period came from iron and steel magnates, etc. (Sharkey, etc.)
• DeHuszar takes the unfortunate step, here as later, of supporting wholeheartedly the movement for “civil service,” a terribly antidemocratic principle (a fact now apparently forgotten), and one which foisted upon America a permanent, secure, uncheckable bureaucratic caste. To DeHuszar, this is simply “demonstrated ability” superseding the “spoils system.”
• Again, DeHuszar discusses the problems of cheap vs. hard money as simply and naively “debtor interests” vs. “creditor interests”—as if there is nothing that an objective observer can say about the problem, or no general or “public” interest.
• DeHuszar makes no mention whatever of Charles O’Conor and the Straight[-Out] Democratic ticket of 1872, which tried to rebel against the Democrat abandonment of principle to nominate the old archenemy Horace Greeley (pro-high tariff, Fourierite socialism, etc.).¹⁴
• It is distorted to say that “manufacturers and bankers contributed large sums to the Republican Party”—and to the Democratic Party as well!
• There is no mention of Ex Parte Milligan (1866)!
• There is no mention of the Supreme Court decisions permitting Reconstruction, or of other Reconstruction decisions, such as Ex Parte McCardle (1868), Texas v. White (1869), Ex Parte Garland (1867), Cummings v. Missouri (1867), Mississippi v. Johnson (1867).
• There is no mention of “Black Friday” and the attempt to corner gold.
• There is no mention of the beginning of naval imperialism, with U.S. naval seizure of the Midway Islands (1867).
• He does not mention the Alabama Claims—the various arbitration treaties, etc.
• There is no mention of Grant’s imperialist attempt to seize and annex Santo Domingo, rejected by the Senate (1870).
• There is no connecting up of the Depression of 1873 with inflation and credit expansion.
• DeHuszar is wrong in thinking that the impeachment of Johnson would have set a terrible precedent: the impeachment of a president. On the contrary, while Johnson was right in the concrete case, the impeachment precedent would have been magnificent! As it is, the defeat of the Johnson impeachment, like the earlier defeat of the Chase impeachment, almost permanently placed the executive beyond congressional reach.
• DeHuszar’s account of the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) so garbled as to be virtually unintelligible (p. 480). What happened was the emasculation by a 5–4 decision of the privileges and immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, for the protection of individual rights against the states.

The Rise of the Industrial Era, 1877–96

• What, DeHuszar, are “monopolistic rates” by railroads? What standards define “monopolistic”?
• There is no mention of the economic consequences of federal railroad intervention and regulation: virtually a model case, down to the current ills of the railroads.
• What was the date of Munn v. Illinois?
• There is no interpretation or analysis of the consequences of the Sherman, etc., antitrust acts.
• It is nonsense of DeHuszar to say that the major support for such urban machines as the Tweed Ring were the “new immigrants” from southern and eastern Europe. The new immigrants had hardly made a dent: the major support was “old immigrant” Irish.
• The “Russian” immigrants were actually Russian Jews—a substantial ethnic difference.
• This chapter includes the economic nonsense that “in bargaining over wages, hours... the employee in larger industry was scarcely a match for his employer.” Must historians always be economically ignorant?
• It is highly overdrawn to say that the “AFL forthrightly supported capitalism.” (I am getting tired of “Gompers worship” among conservatives.)
• There is a completely distorted account of the Haymarket riots because DeHuszar fails to mention that it involved the persecution (almost openly unjust) of anarchists; yet DeHuszar doesn’t mention anarchists or anarchism once in the book (including the great contribution—and unique contribution—that the “individualist anarchists”—Warren, Tucker, Spooner, etc.—made to American political thought).
• There is no mention of the key political figure of Senator Roscoe Conkling.
• DeHuszar justifies antitrust laws: “When some corporations [made] formal agreements of various sorts that aimed, among other things, at limiting competition and raising prices, many Americans brought pressure... to pass laws that would dissolve these agreements and restore the principles and practices of free enterprise [sic].”
• He virtually favors land grant subsidies to railroads as hastening development; he doesn’t point out that lack of profits were due to the overbuilding and premature building caused by the subsidy process.
• There is almost no discussion of the conservation movement and certainly no mention of economic interests backing it (e.g., raising the price of western lands).
• There is no mention of large-scale state and local government loans and grants to railroads.
• There is no mention of how retailers tried to suppress successive innovations in retailing by law.
• In the list of advantages of the corporation, he doesn’t mention limited liability.
• He inserts some Marxian nonsense about the different interests of “finance capitalists” and “industrial capitalists,” whose interests are supposed to be clashing—or perhaps Veblenian nonsense. Again, economic ignorance. (p. 508)
• DeHuszar thinks that one group of business buyers or sellers can interfere with the “free market” by “setting the price for all others.” Nonsense once more.
• Happily, DeHuszar does concede that monopoly is very difficult to establish on the market, and that the railroads were vigorous competitors.
• Also, he is good on opposing the post-1871 compulsory driving of the Indians onto reservations [that were] made tribal property, and good on favoring the Act of 1887, breaking up Indian land to distribute to individual families.
• There is no economic analysis of the problem of open range vs. fencing, etc.
• He subscribes to the economic nonsense about “excessive” production of cotton caused by the credit system. Did the credit-granting merchants deliberately sustain losses by insisting on cotton as the crop in the South?
• He seems to favor the governmental agricultural experimental stations of the states, and of the federal government—very “effective”?
• DeHuszar is apparently very favorable toward the chronic griping of the farmer: “farm depression,” need for “coping,” etc.
• He writes as if disparity between rich and poor is somehow unique in the cities. Why? (p. 560)
• He doesn’t mention that E.L. Godkin—and his Nation—was a leading advocate of laissez-faire (with the unfortunate exception of civil service reform).
• He is too kind to the often socialistically inclined settlement house.
• He favors modern prison reform and the alleged ideal of “rehabilitation” of prisoners. Justification?
• DeHuszar’s treatment of Darwinism is terribly garbled; not just that “man has evolved from some type of animal,” but that higher forms all evolved from lower forms.
• He gives much too favorable a view of pragmatism. Not that “any idea to be accepted as true” must be tested as “working,” but that the true is only that which “works”—and “works” for what? By what standard? Pragmatism was not only critical of religion, but also of so-called “formalism” in social and other philosophy, in short, of abstract logic.
• There is no mention of Marxism (virtually); almost nothing on communitarians.
• There is nothing on Sumner, Lester Frank Ward, the clash of the older laissez-faire economists (Walker, Perry, Sumner) with the “new” socialistic economists.
• There is a completely garbled account of the social gospel; no mention of previous laissez-faire clergymen or the great laissez-faire tradition of the “Common Sense” clergymen/moral philosophers of the mid-nineteenth century (Wayland, etc.).
• DeHuszar appears to approve of the public-library movement.
• There is no mention of such important magazines as North American Review or The Forum.
• He is biased, as I have indicated, in favor of the Pendleton Act of 1883.
• He neglects to mention President Garfield’s laissez-faire views (unfortunately superseded by the civil-service reformer Arthur).
• To DeHuszar, the new warships built in 1882 signal the end of a “long period of neglect” of the U.S. Navy—more evidence of DeHuszar’s promilitary bias.
• DeHuszar, further, fails to appreciate the significance of the new bursts of étatism in the Arthur and Harrison administrations.
• What “act of considerable immorality” of Cleveland? If it could be a highlight in a political campaign, it can be mentioned in a text.
• Again, DeHuszar makes the mistake of identifying “business interests” with a pro-tariff stand; only some business interests.
• He seems to favor the pan-American imperialism of Secretary Blaine.
• DeHuszar is definitely biased in favor of Cleveland and Olney’s war-mongering intervention in the Venezuela-Britain dispute. Therefore, he does not recognize this as a betrayal of old neutralist principles.
• There is no mention of the close linkages between Mark Hanna, the “Ohio Gang,” and the Rockefeller-Standard Oil interests.
• There is no mention of Congress’s Anti-Force Act, vetoed by Hayes in 1879.¹⁵
• There is no mention of the dubious achievement of Secretary of the Navy Whitney’s status as founder of the “new navy.”
• Not nearly enough space is given to the significant Interstate Commerce Act—under Cleveland, the Democrat—or such previous bills as the Reagan bill or the McCrary bill.
• There is no stress, incredibly, on Cleveland’s reversion to an income tax.

There is no mention of:

• the weakening of the ICC in the Supreme Court decisions of the Maximum Freight Rate Case and the Alabama Midlands Case (both 1897)
• the repeal of the Tenure of Office Act (1887)
• the brouhaha over the Sackville-West letter to “Murchison,” which virtually ruined Cleveland in the campaign of 1888
• Coxey’s Army
• the conservation question
• the Federal Bankruptcy Act of 1898

There is insufficient mention of U.S. imperialism over Hawaii, but there is no mention of:

• the U.S.-Samoan treaty, for a naval base in Samoa, and its vicissitudes in the Senate in the 1870s
• the United States joining the Madrid Convention (1880)
• the Burlingame Treaty with China on immigration (1868) or its revision in 1880

He is skimpy on Blaine’s aggressive meddling in Latin America, e.g., his attempt to abrogate the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty with Britain in order to gain exclusive control over any Isthmian canal. There is no mention of:

• the Frelinghuysen-Zavala treaty of 1884
• Senate approval of the Geneva Convention for prisoners (1882)
• near war with Germans over Samoa and virtual war under Cleveland
• near war with Canada over fishing rights, settled by the Bayard-Chamberlain treaty of 1888
• a tripartite protectorate over Samoa emerging from the Berlin Conference (1889)
• severe friction with Italy (1890–1891) over the lynching of a “Mafiosi” in New Orleans
• Harrison’s near war with Chile over a slight (1891)
• the Springer v. U.S. decision (1881) upholding the constitutionality of income tax, later reversed by Pollock v. Farmer Loan and Trust (1895)
• the crucial adoption of the “substantive due process” doctrine by the Supreme Court in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific RR (1886)
• the “separate but equal” decision of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) until late in the second volume—the present placing is unhistorical
• the decision on the constitutionality of state regulation of insurance rates, under police power, in Holden v. Hardy (1898)
• Smyth v. Ames (1898) or of Addyston Pipe and Steel v. U.S. (1899)
• the split in the religious denominations caused by slavery, of the development of rationalist-individualist Protestantism (Wayland), of Bishop McQuaid’s opposition to proposed federal aid to education, or of the founding of Reform Judaism (Isaac Mayer Wise)
• Walter Rauschenbusch or Billy Sunday
• the establishment of Ph.D. degrees and graduate study for the social sciences, based on Germanic models
• the laissez-faire jurists such as Cooley and Tiedemann, or of Supreme Court Justices Bradley, Brewer, and Field—or, in contrast, the left-wing views of Justice Harlan
• Hamilton Fish or Stephen Foster or the McGuffey Readers or Booker T. Washington or Frederick Douglass or even, I believe, Thomas A. Edison
• the laws on contract labor
• the Statue of Liberty
• Ignatius Donnelly
• the highly significant development: the imposition of Jim Crow laws on the South by the Populists after their overthrow of the Southern Bourbons (cf. Woodward, etc.)
• Horatio Alger novels

There is almost no mention of Senator Edmunds’s opposition to the antitrust laws as unconstitutional.

Another indication of DeHuszar’s bias in favor of the various government interventions in business in this era:

Industrial and financial owners and managers had now become aware in many cases that industrial growth had brought harm as well as good, and united with the many other Americans who sought change... by means of government action. (p. 598)

There is no mention of the rise of racist thought, Anglo-Saxon supremacy, etc. in this era, nor of later figures such as Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant.

And, incredibly, there is no indication at all that DeHuszar grasps the significance of the Bryan candidacy of 1896: that this represented the end, the final defeat, of Bourbon Democracy, and the virtual end of the laissez-faire principle as an effective force in American party politics.

From Republic to Empire

In his discussion of the Spanish-American war, and the preceding and subsequent acts of American imperialism, DeHuszar acts throughout as a fallacious apologist for the drive to empire. It is in his treatment of the launching of the American empire that this book shifts gears, so to speak, as it greatly accelerates the degree and extent of its biases and distortions.

On the one hand, DeHuszar is highly naive: the Americans helped the natives, brought roads, schools, hospitals (all public!), etc. The subject peoples reaped “many benefits.” There is virtually no mention, per contra, that any American economic interests benefited from the special privileges of American military rule and intervention.

On the other hand, DeHuszar virtually adopts the disastrous neo-Marxian, neo-Leninist argument for imperialism that was set forth by the theoretician of imperialism, Brooks Adams (who goes unmentioned by DeHuszar). Imperialism was justified, opines DeHuszar, because “the industrial capacity and the financial resources of the U.S. had become so great that [they] could be put to use on a wide scale... abroad” (p. 598).

As we saw above, DeHuszar’s treatment of the beginnings of American imperialism in the naval incursions of the late-nineteenth century (Midway, Samoa, etc.) are very skimpy—if they are treated at all.

Imperialism, vaguely opines DeHuszar, “contributed to satisfying at least some of certain economic, strategic, and emotional needs of the American people at the time.” Whose needs, DeHuszar? And satisfied at whose expense?

In his discussion of the Hawaiian Revolution against Queen “Lil,” DeHuszar omits the most important fact of all: that this revolution was stimulated, and participated in, by U.S. Minister Stevens and by the United States Marines. It was not just vague “Americans” who participated. This is the reason for Cleveland’s vigorous, and proper, repudiation, and was the conclusion of the Blount Mission, of which there is also no mention.¹⁶

While there are flashes of good material against the launching of the Spanish-American War and on the opposition of businessmen to war, DeHuszar tends to justify the results of the war and the establishment of empire.

• Cuba, he proclaims, gained from being a U.S. protectorate and the United States’ “usual humanitarian [public] works.” The United States, he declares, euphemistically, “managed” to have the Cubans accept the Platt Amendment. “Managed”?
• There is no mention of such early imperialist acts as the guano island seizures (1856, etc.) and the Tyler-Webster threats against any European conquest of Hawaii (1842). There is no mention of the Senate rejection of Hawaiian annexation in 1897, nor of Secretary of State Gresham’s excellent attack on imperialism and entangling alliances (1894).
• There is no mention of the creation of a Naval Advisory Board, in the 1880s, of “kept” civilians to agitate for increased naval appropriations (centering largely, I will wager, in contractors selling to the Navy). There is no mention of the Naval Act of 1890 and the “navy second to none” agitation, developing a huge navy by 1900.
• There is no mention of the Ocean Mails Subsidies Act, giving subsidies to the merchant marine.
• There is no mention of the neo-Leninist imperialism of Senator Albert Beveridge, nor mention of the gallant opposition (followed by resignation) of Speaker Thomas Reed to the war with Spain.
• There is no mention of the absurd—and deliberate—State Department exaggeration of the degree of U.S. property damaged in the Cuban rebellion. The State Department claim was $16 million; a U.S. claims commission later found the total to be a mere $360,000, but that was after the war.
• Why doesn’t DeHuszar point out the crucial fact that the United States Army, in its bloody suppression of the Philippine Rebellion (of Aguinaldo, et al.) used precisely the same methods as those of “Butcher” Weyler in Cuba that had stirred American jingoes into attack on Spain? This includes the infamous “concentration camp” policy and execution of prisoners. (How often am I reminded of Isabel Paterson’s phrase, “The Humanitarian with the Guillotine”?)
• Why doesn’t DeHuszar mention the strong possibility that it was the Cuban rebels who blew up the Maine, so that they could engineer precisely the flag-waving hysteria that occurred? Why couldn’t this possibility occur to people at the time?
• DeHuszar glosses over the fact that the N.Y. Journal stole the de Lôme letter from the post office. Why wasn’t this crime prosecuted by the United States?
• On the Philippines again, there is no mention of “Hell-Roaring” Jake Smith, who, in his bringing of humanitarianism to the Philippines, decreed that, in a certain area, every building be burned and every native over ten years of age be killed. Nor does he mention the fact that the suppression of the Philippine fighters for independence cost the United States almost $200 million. Did the U.S. taxpayer benefit?
• DeHuszar falls for the “Open Door” myth, hook, line, and sinker, and treats it as Holy Writ equivalent in standing to the Monroe Doctrine. No mention of its being an instrument of U.S. economic and political imperialism.
• An enormous defect is that there is no mention of Teddy Roosevelt’s pro-Japanese policy before the War of 1905 with Russia, and, indeed, his egging on of the Japanese to launch their attack on Russia. If he had included this, this would have spoiled the myth of perpetual Japanese “aggression,” which, as we shall see, DeHuszar clings to in his treatment of World War II.
• DeHuszar finds—or rather, adopts—all sorts of excuses for Taft’s economic imperialism. He is not conscious of the irony of a cumulative imperialist policy (cumulative as is domestic intervention) where first territory X is conquered, then Y must be conquered to “protect” X (X being much more exposed, by definition, to foreign countries than the home country), and then Z must be conquered to protect Y, and so on virtually ad infinitum. Far from analyzing this process inherent in imperialism, DeHuszar falls into the trap.
• DeHuszar seems completely oblivious to the significant change of foreign policy by Taft to be anti-Japanese (after the pro-Japanese policies of T.R.). This is tied in with Willard Straight, the Harriman interests in Manchuria, etc., a story that needs some presentation (cf., for example, the book of Charles Vevier).
• It is absurd—and wildly anti-Japanese—to say that the Twenty-One Demands “practically made China a Japanese colony.”
• In defense, once again, of the so-called “Open Door,” DeHuszar is biased against the Lansing-Ishii Agreement, which recognized the reality of special Japanese interests in China.
• Throughout, indeed, the current and later chapters, DeHuszar errs grievously in treating China as a noble, dedicated, unified country, when it was never unified (until the conquest by the Communists, as a matter of fact) but was always divided up among numerous war lords. Central-government Chinese rule over Manchuria is just as much “imperialism” as Japanese rule. DeHuszar, as we shall see, cannot permit himself any objective look at pre-World War II China or Japan, because he has to put Chiang Kai-shek into a (retrospectively) heroic and correct mold, to justify a pro-Chiang position today. In this, of course, he enthusiastically follows the line of “official,” antirevisionist, U.S. historiography.
• In the Panama Revolution, DeHuszar fails to point out that Teddy Roosevelt and Hay worked hand-in-glove with the revolutionaries.
• While DeHuszar is biased in favor of the numerous bellicose interventions in Latin America as “protecting American investments,” he also fails to pursue the matter and point out who these investors were, and what their pressure role was on the American government.
• DeHuszar is biased in favor of the imperialist “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. He also says nothing against Roosevelt’s launching of the tyrannical and unconstitutional device of an executive agreement to put into effect the meddling into the Dominican Republic the Senate had already rejected as treaty.¹⁷ But for DeHuszar all was well, for “soon the Dominican Republic was enjoying both financial stability and political quiet.”
• DeHuszar is also biased in favor of Taft’s “dollar diplomacy” in the Caribbean: this time in “defense of the Panama Canal” (itself the result of imperialism, subterfuge, and socialism—DeHuszar makes no mention of the socialism of the Canal Zone, where the U.S. government owns all), and in Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, etc. Wilson pursued a similar policy in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, etc., again with DeHuszar’s approval.
• DeHuszar justifies the so-called “purchase” of the Virgin Islands (1917)—a “purchase” effected under a virtual threat of war against Denmark, which is not mentioned by DeHuszar.
• There is no mention of the substantial economic interests backing the various figures in the Mexican Revolution, specifically the “Oil War” between American and British interests (an oil war that influenced much American policy in the 1920s, also unknown to DeHuszar). Francisco Madero (whose laissez-faire views are also not mentioned by DeHuszar) was backed by the Standard Oil interests, while General Huerta, who overthrew Madero, was backed by Lord Cowdray and British Royal Dutch Shell Oil. This was the reason for Wilson’s otherwise inexplicable war to the death against Huerta, his refusal to recognize Huerta for years, etc. (Wilson vowed, in a letter to Lord Grey, that he would oust Huerta; he did.)
• The essentials of the Panamanian Revolution are omitted: particularly the fact that T.R.’s indignation against Colombia was against requiring the Panama Canal Company to pay some money to Colombia, not the U.S. taxpayer. This issue was completely misrepresented in the U.S. press, as was the administration’s close tie-in with speculators who “took” the taxpayer for a $40 million ride as result of the revolution (the Canal Company’s concession was to expire very shortly, so that none of this $40 million was necessary). There is no mention of T.R.’s disgraceful libel suit against the New York World for uncovering the facts or of the Supreme Court decision throwing out the suit. (See the recent work of Earl Harding, The Untold Story of Panama.)
• There is no mention of the influence on the Open Door doctrine of American business interests in China, who had formed an expansionist pressure group, the American Asiatic Association. There is no mention either of Hay’s not very open-doorish attempt to obtain an American naval base in China at Samsah Bay (1900)—at which point, we might add with amusement, the Japanese reminded its founder, John Hay, of the Open Door.
• There is no mention of the Perdicaris-Raisuli incident (1904).

The Progressive Era and the New Freedom

DeHuszar is weak and ambivalent on the Progressive movement. He sees and criticizes it for strengthening the national government vis-à-vis the public, but he also concedes that its legislation “corrected” business practices.

• He is too brief on the Progressive movement’s figures, and too skimpy, for example, on Charles Beard, on his stress on realty vs. personalty,¹⁸ and, in particular, on Beard and his fellow Progressive historians and political scientists bringing to the fore economic motives for political actions.
• DeHuszar mentions here the new Progressives; but who were the laissez-faire people of the previous era against whom they were rebelling? Why are they not mentioned? DeHuszar is biased in favor of the local and state social welfare legislation of the Progressive Era, or at least seems to be: housing codes, maximum-hour laws, workmen’s compensation laws, etc.
• There is no hint of the role played in insurance regulation—as a means of quasi-cartelization—by the insurance companies themselves. The same is true of other government regulation, and DeHuszar makes no mention of it there either.
• DeHuszar seems to be biased in favor of the inheritance tax. He also adopts the Progressive mythos of “special privileges” to local utilities, presumably thus justifying their regulation. Such things as permission to use the streets are hardly special privileges, and much of the bribery that went on was “defensive” rather than “aggressive”—none of this is indicated by DeHuszar.
• Czolgosz, the assassin of McKinley, is called an “extremist,” a word that DeHuszar uses from now on as a catchall. What in the world is an “extremist”? Actually, Czolgosz was a self-styled anarchist, though he was not connected with any anarchist movement. Once more, DeHuszar thus overlooks the problem of the anarchist movement, and the flood of repressive anti-anarchist legislation that was passed in the wake of the McKinley assassination, particularly in state sedition laws.
• DeHuszar is openly biased in favor of the Elkins Act of 1903, outlawing railroad rebates; he doesn’t realize that the fact that railroads themselves approved the bill indicates the use of government regulation as a compulsory cartelizing device against the maverick or efficient railroads.
• Further, DeHuszar supports the economic nonsense of the “conservation movement,” agreeing about the “rapid and wasteful” use of forests, etc. By what standards? At one point, he recognizes that wealth comes only through use, and appears to defend some of the “exploitation,” but he ends by justifying the conservation laws: the Forest Reserve Act, the Carey Act, etc. There is no mention whatever of the substantial economic interests behind conservation laws: the landowners subsidized by irrigation, the landowners whose prices are raised by government withholding of land, etc. (See Hays, Peffer.)
• In the monetary sphere, DeHuszar adopts the myth of bank “inflexibility”; the problem was just the reverse.
• There should be more stress on the fact that Judge [Alton B.] Parker’s nomination by the Democrats in 1904 was the last gasp of Bourbon Democracy. Parker’s overwhelming defeat by T.R. ended the attempted conservative comeback in the Democratic Party, and from then on the Democrat Party was to be a left-wing instrument.
• DeHuszar is wrong when he agrees that the corporation income tax was legitimate because it was an excise tax, since it is “passed on” to consumers in prices. The fact is that it is not passed on, so that the corporate income tax should have been unconstitutional as well as the personal.
• There is almost no mention of the Sixteenth Amendment, and the subsequent income-tax law inaugurated by Taft, or of the corporal’s guard opposition, or of the [Cordell] Hull promise that tax rates could never get much over one percent!
• In what way, to comment on DeHuszar’s adoption of the old bromide, was Taft “ineffective” in his handling of Congress? It seems to me that the problem of the Taft administration was that Taft was much too effective.
• There is no mention of George W. Perkins.
• (To backtrack, there is no mention of the fateful decision of the Supreme Court to acquiesce in the federal outlawry of polygamy.)
• DeHuszar fails to point out the great significance of Champ Clark’s defeat for the nomination; for if Clark, an “isolationist,” had been nominated, the United States would probably never have entered World War I; there would have been no absolute defeat of Germany and Austria, no Hitler, and probably no Bolshevik Revolution. The fateful and dramatic act was Bryan throwing his votes to the “Progressive” Wilson! Yet DeHuszar lets all this go by.
• DeHuszar follows the usual tradition of being biased in favor of the Federal Reserve System (FRS): it made banks “safe,” “held reserves,” etc., except that DeHuszar’s economic explanation of the Federal Reserve is highly garbled. He fails completely to understand the inherently inflationist nature of the establishment and continuance of the FRS. He concedes, further, that the FRS “did well” in World War I: did well, that is, by inflating the money supply to provide the government funds for the war effort—thus following in the tradition of the Civil War and War of 1812.
• DeHuszar also repeats the old economic nonsense about how workers achieved higher wages because of Henry Ford’s great, creative act of increasing wages for his workers. This is sheer economic absurdity and implicitly depredates the great achievement of the capitalist, free-market economy.
• There is no mention of the Supreme Court decisions of Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918), declaring unconstitutional the Keating-Owen Act of 1916 outlawing shipment of goods made by child labor. Also no mention of the fateful decision of Muller v. Oregon (1908), which declared a constitutional maximum-hour law for women—fateful particularly because it was based on a sociological (instead of legal) brief submitted by Louis Brandeis.
• There is no mention of T.R.’s flamboyance on the Negro question: first, dining with Booker T. Washington, scandalizing racists, and then turning around to dishonorably discharge three companies of Negro soldiers simply because a few AWOL Negro soldiers had rioted in Brownsville.
• There is no mention of Taft’s setting up the socialistic postal savings system.
• There is no mention of Taft’s tyrannical Mann Act (1910).

World War I

DeHuszar no more understands the significance and impact of World War I than he does the previous wars. One of the most important truths about American history is the fateful impact that wars have had in aggrandizing the State and crippling individual liberty, not only during but also as a permanent legacy after the war.

World War I gave the United States an enormous push down the road to socialism, toward the Big State. In the first place, World War I was the first war in which the burgeoning crew of left-wing ideologues and experts (many of whom are still around) were called in to “plan” and mobilize the economy for war. No previous wars required “mobilization” of the economy; but in this war the whole crew of economists, industrial planners, sociologists, etc. were ready: price control, labor control, priorities, production planning, etc.—all had their baptism of fire in World War I.

DeHuszar understands none of the significance. From then on, World War I became the great model and inspiration for the later generations of socialists and planners: “if we can do it for war.”...

Further, World War I saw an enormous increase in the government budget and tax rates, especially income-tax rates. DeHuszar’s hailing of Mellon’s cutting of income-tax rates in the 1920s obscures the whole significance, because he does not inform us that these were highly piddling cuts compared to the enormous tax rate increase in World War I—left to America as a permanent legacy.

If there was conscription in the Civil War, World War I was the first war where Americans were drafted to fight in “foreign wars”—an act that many constitutional lawyers (see John W. Burgess) insisted was unconstitutional.

As in previous wars, there was an effectively higher “tariff” which was cemented by a high tariff right after the war. The Army and Navy budgets greatly increased. World War I also led to enormous suppression of civil liberties, including the passage of state and federal antisedition laws, and anti-alien laws. Monetarily, the United States went effectively off the gold standard for the duration, thus going on fiat paper, and multiplying inflation.

And, moreover, World War I was the first era in which the federal government acted to sponsor, favor, and even create labor unions. It was also the initiator of federal public housing.

None of this significance is really grasped by DeHuszar.

• In discussing European militarism, DeHuszar fails to point out that Great Britain began far ahead of Germany in the size of its navy, etc. Germany was the last of the colonial powers, the others already having grabbed their share—there is no recognition of this.
• The account by DeHuszar of the onset of World War I is completely garbled, almost completely tied to the “official” Allied history, and completely ignorant of revisionist scholarship. Germany is presented as virtually forcing war upon everyone. It is not true, for example, that Great Britain went to war because of Belgium; one would have thought it common knowledge by now that this was the official British line later acknowledged to be myth. Britain was committed to go to war by secret alliance, and Belgium was seized on as a cynical excuse (Belgium had been pushed by Britain and France into violating its neutrality anyway. See [Alexander] Fuehr, The Neutrality of Belgium [1915]). There is no mention whatever of the roles played by [Sergei] Sazonov, [Alexander] Izvolski, Raymond Poincaré, etc. (Cf. innumerable works, e.g., [H.E.] Barnes, [Genesis of the World War], [Sidney B.] Fay, [Origins of the World War].)
• Further, DeHuszar neglects to mention that Serbia mobilized before Austria did, and before Serbia rejected the Austrian ultimatum.
• Also, there is no mention of German attempts to restrain Austria.
• There is no mention of Russia’s long-term Pan-Slav ambition.
• There is an overblown account of German espionage in the United States, no mention of British espionage, and inadequate mention of the British propaganda machine.
• The explanation is inadequate on the correctness of the German submarine position in international law, especially as compared to the British blockade position. (See, for example, [Edwin M.] Borchard and [William P.] Lage, Neutrality for the United States [1937].)
• He overlooks the critical role of the “munitions makers” in fomenting “preparedness” and the big arms budget. It is disingenuous in extreme, for example, for DeHuszar to say that the National Security League “consisted mainly of private citizens wanting to strengthen the armed forces of the United States.” Yes, indeed, but which private citizens? The munitions makers, who reaped contracts from big arms budgets. (See the famous speech in Congress by Representative Clyde Tavenner, 1915, on the economic interests represented in the “Navy League.”)
• DeHuszar neglects Wilson’s secret war plans for economic mobilization. (See, for example, Margaret Coit, Mr. Baruch. DeHuszar, by the way, makes no mention of the key role in American politics that Baruch played from World War I on, whichever the political party in power—in fact, he makes no mention of the rather mysterious growth of a whole group of people, not civil servants but high policy officials and advisers, who seem to be equally “beloved” by both parties—Baruch being the first. Other, current examples: Sidney Weinberg, C. Douglas Dillon, General Clay, etc.)
• There is no mention of the stirring opposition to the war by LaFollette, et al.
• DeHuszar proclaims that the World War I effort “required” economic mobilization. Why? Thus, DeHuszar concedes the arguments of the “war socialists.”
• DeHuszar even goes so far as to justify the government’s seizure of the railroads—a terrific precedent for socialism—as a measure simply to “coordinate their operation more quickly.” Is government a more efficient coordinator than private enterprise, Mr. DeHuszar?
• DeHuszar seems to justify, also, the War Labor Board, which originated the tradition of compulsory arbitration, government favoritism to unions, etc.
• DeHuszar seems to be totally unaware of the significance of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which was a notable recognition of reality by Russia, as well as a treaty of ethnic self-determination for the nationalities of the Ukraine and White Ruthenia (“White Russia”).
• There is no mention of the fact that the Allies continued their starvation blockade of Germany after the armistice, and until the peace treaty was signed.
• There is no mention of the Polish reign of terror amongst the Germans in Silesia before the plebiscite.
• He does not mention the Allied promise to Germany that they would disarm if Germany accepted the Versailles diktat—after which, of course, the Allies never did.
• DeHuszar is vague and uninformative about the actual effects of the Versailles and other diktats in Eastern and Central Europe, though he does concede their excessive severity. No mention, therefore, of the dismemberment of Hungary, the creation of a truncated and economically unviable Austria (especially with tariff barriers everywhere, etc.), the creation of a Czech despotism over the Slovaks, the Ukrainians, the Sudeten Germans, and the Hungarians in the “country” of Czechoslovakia, the creation of a Serb tyranny over the Croats, etc. of Yugoslavia.
• DeHuszar is definitely biased on behalf of the League of Nations, and endorses the mythological nonsense that it was the “greatest tragedy that the U.S. failed to join the League” (p. 725). Again, he asserts that the United States’ failure to join the League, “thereby lessen[ed] whatever chance the other nations of the world might have had to guarantee peace...” (p. 787). Thus, DeHuszar utterly fails to recognize the role of the league as the attempted enforcer of the territorial status quo imposed by the Versailles diktat, preventing revision by the victimized nations—all under the camouflage of “collective security.”

One of the gravest failures of this book now appears: the absolute inadequacy of DeHuszar’s definition of Communism. This is all he says of the nature of the Communist movement: the Communists, he says, were “a band of professional revolutionaries,” who “started making it [the Soviet Union] the base for a campaign of world conquest.” I can think of no more absurd and inadequate treatment of the Communist movement. What has happened is that the Communists are defined as simply a band of people who decided that they want to conquer the world. This type of “Fu Manchu” treatment ignores the crucial fact of what Communism is: Communism is militant Marxism—it is the attempt to carry through Marxist revolution, to establish a thoroughgoing, 100 percent, proletarian-led, socialism. Communism, then, is socialism militant.

How can it be that DeHuszar introduces the subject of Communism while giving no indication that its meaning and goal is Marxian socialism? Because to do so would mean that (a) Communism is simply a wing, a variant, of socialism; and (b) that socialism, in turn, is statism rampant, statism pushed to a logical conclusion. In short, DeHuszar’s version of “Communism” permits him to lead the reader into a simplistic World War III (so far in the form of a “cold war”) against a mysterious gangster enemy, a set of foreign devils who simply want to “conquer the world” (i.e., like Fu Manchu). Were the reader to find out that Communism is a variant of socialism, and socialism is, in turn, statism writ large, then he is likely to turn his attention from prosecuting a war against a set of foreign devils called “Communists” (along with their so-called “agents” at home) to the larger and more domestic problem of socialism and statism. The reader might begin to believe that the “enemy” is ideological and domestic, rather than personalized and foreign—but in that case, of course, the DeHuszar “official history” case for World War III (the Cold War) goes by the board.

The Nineteen Twenties

The 1920s launches DeHuszar into the most distorted and biased sections of the book: his bias in favor of the “official line,” the “court history” of World Wars II and III. No hint of revisionism or even of doubt is allowed to mar the façade; the previous pedestrian chronicle, almost disinterested in the topic, now changes, and meaning, passion, and bias infuse the account—unfortunately almost completely in an erroneous direction.

We begin with DeHuszar’s deploring U.S. postwar isolationism: “The great difficulty was that the American people wanted peace, but the majority of them would not allow the U.S. government to use its enormous political, economic, and military power to prevent the aggressive acts of other countries” (p. 790).

During the 1920s, declares DeHuszar, the Soviet Union “was waging the war against all non-Communist nations that it had declared in 1917.” This is myth and absurdity, and rests on a semantic equivocation on the term “war”; “war” should have a precise meaning (as should any important term), and to the ordinary reader it conveys that meaning: of military battle across boundaries, etc. Standing on this precision, the absurdity of this statement is clear: Soviet Russia was waging war against nobody in the 1920s; it was all too happy to be left alone. The Allied powers had just concluded their lengthy intervention with troops in the Russian civil war (a fact which DeHuszar hardly mentions); the Soviets had re-lost much of their western borders to Poland; it was the reverse of bellicose in foreign affairs.

If the term “war” is used in the ideological sense, this is superficially more plausible, but actually this is completely equivocal and distorted semantics. Furthermore, ideologically, conflict between socialists, quasi-socialists, libertarians, etc. was waged within various countries before the Russian Revolution and after. If Soviet Russia and other countries with Communist rulers were suddenly wiped out tomorrow, “domestic” Communists and, more important, other wings of domestic socialists and statists, would still remain. So let us abandon this dangerous and mischievous equivocation on the term “war,” this pernicious confusion of the military and the ideological, the foreign (inter-State) and the domestic (intra-State).

• DeHuszar says that “a group” opposed to the Versailles Treaty gained control of Italy. Why say “a group”? Why not name it: the Fascists. Furthermore, Italy was not exactly anti-Versailles.
• DeHuszar says, rather ominously, that Russia “regained” areas lost by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. But how? It regained them because the Allies (favorites of DeHuszar) insisted at Versailles that Germany must renounce the Brest-Litovsk treaty. Ergo...
• DeHuszar fails to mention Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which was a significant retreat back to capitalism after the utter economic failure of Lenin’s “War Communism.” None of this is mentioned by DeHuszar, who doesn’t even indicate the relationship between Communism and socialism.
• DeHuszar is biased against the Washington Conference and the London Naval Treaty, which he denounces as “pro-Japanese.”
• DeHuszar utterly fails to see the significance of the collective-security, war-inducing nature of the Kellogg-Briand Pact.
• DeHuszar’s view of the basic nature of the 1920s domestically is highly erroneous. He thinks it saw a dismantling by the Republicans of the Wilsonian apparatus of State intervention. Except for the specific “war socialism” that Wilson himself dismantled, very little of the increased statism was dismantled: taxes and the budget were still very high. Indeed, the Republicans sharply raised the tariff, and imposed a Federal Reserve System that was more interventionist and inflationist than ever. The virtual prohibition on immigration, ending the “melting pot” policy traditional of America, completes a corrected picture of an increase of statism in many crucial areas of American life. The fact that the Republicans were “friendly to business” means little; “business” can be statist (the mercantilists, Hamiltonian-Whigs, etc.), and even collectivist too (see later fascistic experiments in the National Recovery Administration, etc.).
• DeHuszar is ambivalent on farm price supports and subsidies, often seeming to favor them: at last, a “paying attention to problems” of the farmer, etc.
• He also seems to favor veterans’ pensions “to provide care for veterans.”
• He does not mention Hoover’s imposition of federal radio-channel socialism and the owning of channels by the federal government, a truly tragic retreat from a developing private radio-channel system under the common law.
• DeHuszar’s only vague reference to the Palmer raids was that they were restrictions on “political extremists.” Huh? Why not mention: pacifists, socialists, etc.?
• There is no mention of the political use of the Red Cross during and after World War I.
• DeHuszar neglects the racist nature of the immigration restrictions, and the racist basis for fixing the quota system.
• There is no mention of the Rockefeller-Sinclair rivalry underlying much of the Teapot Dome affair.
• DeHuszar, unfortunately, justifies the quasi-fascist, quasicartelist attempts of Hoover in the 1920s to encourage “fair business practice” codes in industry.
• DeHuszar is biased in favor of government intervention and regulation of meat packers and stockyards: an “effort to protect farmers from possibly unfair treatment” (?) [in original].
• He offers more garbled economics: the McNary-Haugen bills were not designed, as DeHuszar states, to “get farmers the American price” for their crops; they already had the American price. The object was to raise that price above the world price.
• There is no mention of the economic interests of the founders of McNary-Haugen (Peek and Johnson) in the farm price supports (as sellers of farm machinery).
• There is no mention of the relation of Benjamin Strong, kingpin of the Federal Reserve, to the Morgans; in fact, no mention of Strong at all.
• There is no mention of inflation and credit expansion as a cause of the 1920–1921 depression.

Here I may mention one of the good aspects of the book: DeHuszar has obviously read Benjamin Anderson and included some Andersonian revisionism about the 1929 depression—and the 1921 depression. He points out, for example, that the federal government let the economy recover by itself in 1921, in contrast to 1929. This is broadly true and welcome, but there should be mention of the attempts of Hoover to upset this policy, and intervene in the economy (as he did in 1929).

• DeHuszar also includes Andersonian revisionism about Federal Reserve credit expansion being a cause of the Depression in 1929. This is also good, but some of the case is bungled, as DeHuszar believes that speculative, stock-market credit was somehow inherently worse than other types of credit. Also, he favors the government lending money to banks in need. (For DeHuszar’s treatment of the Hoover New Deal, see below.)
• It is also pleasant to note DeHuszar’s criticism of the high Fordney-McCumber Tariff, followed by his criticism of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff and its depression-worsening effects. Mildly pro-protection or neutral in early years, DeHuszar comes to recognize the unfortunate effects of protection with the high tariffs of the 1920s.

There is no mention of the fateful incident when the federal government intervened in a pro-union manner in a labor dispute for the first time in peacetime: the Hoover-Harding intervention in the steel strike’s aftermath and the call for a ten-hour day.

• There should also be mention here of the crucial role played by the burgeoning left-wing social-gospel control of “social-action” groups, etc. in the various church denominations. Also, the tie-in with socialist and Communist groups should be mentioned (the leader of the steel strike was W.Z. Foster, for example).
• DeHuszar is overly critical of installment credit, as not “increasing real wealth.” Installment credit is an excellent and productive institution; the trouble is overly and artificially cheap credit throughout the economy, as in the 1920s.
• There is no proof of increased concentration in American industry, though DeHuszar asserts this as a fact.
• DeHuszar is surely excessive in thinking there is a simple, direct connection between “progressive education” and the Progressive movement.
• There is no mention whatever, in DeHuszar, of the following important events:
  • the institution of the AMA medical quasi-monopoly with state laws following the Flexner report on medical education and the compulsory closing of many medical schools;
  • the Sacco-Vanzetti case
  • the Scopes trial and the whole problem of evolution vs. fundamentalism
  • the Holmes-Brandeis dissents and legal philosophy
  • the Railway Labor Act—the pro-union, interventionist legislation in peacetime
  • such Supreme Court decisions as Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923), Bailey v. Drexel Furniture (1922)
  • the Sheppard-Towner Act (1921)
  • welfare aid to states
  • and the founding of the FBI
• He gives an unfair description of Mencken, who did not simply ridicule values Americans held dear; he was a battler for liberty and for individual excellence, and against frauds and unwise reforms of all sorts, and he exerted a liberating effect on the youth of the day.

The Hoover Administration

• Adding more Andersonian revisionism, DeHuszar correctly points out that the effect of Hoover’s White House conferences was to prolong the Depression and unemployment by keeping wage rates up. I would like to see some more details on this.
• However, DeHuszar is not nearly as sound on the remainder of the “Hoover New Deal” program. He doesn’t clearly indicate that the Farm Board program led to increased surpluses. While he has a good criticism of pump-priming public works, he favors the RFC, which “prevented people from losing bank deposits” and “followed principles of private banking”—an absurd claim. He fails to mention Hoover’s inflation program or the Glass-Steagall Act of 1932. He also fails to mention Hoover’s fateful tax-raising action (especially income tax) in 1932. There is no mention, curiously, of the important Norris-LaGuardia Act, with its significant consequences for granting special privileges for violence to labor unions.
• On the causes of the Depression, DeHuszar again displays his lack of economic knowledge. He attributes it to three things: overexpansion of credit (good, except he places special emphasis on speculative credit); overproduction; and the preceding farm depression, with its lesser real purchasing power for the farmers. The latter two are wholly fallacious, and the last clause reflects again the adoption of the egregious “purchasing-power” fallacy where the farmers are particularly concerned.
• DeHuszar’s depiction of the Japanese war in Manchuria is straight from the official mythology. In 1931, DeHuszar thunders, the Japanese “opened the first of a series of aggressive campaigns against China,” and the road to World War II. This is supposed to have occurred just as Chiang was about to unite China. Overlooked is the fact that China consisted of numerous warlords, that Chinese warlords were destroying Japanese investments in Manchuria (which places Japanese invasion of Manchuria at least on a moral par with aggressions against Latin American countries to protect U.S. investments—which DeHuszar supports). Also overlooked as a motive for the expansion, is Japan’s fear of Soviet Russia on its northern border. Also overlooked is the problem of the Chinese Communists, who do not exist for DeHuszar until after World War II, when there is no longer any necessity to be retrospectively pro-Chinese. (see [Charles C.] Tansill, [Back Door to War], [William L.] Neumann, [America Encounters Japan]).
• In discussing the League of Nations and Japan, DeHuszar doesn’t mention the fact that the league report was quite sympathetic with the Japanese position and recommended that Japan’s special interest in Manchuria be accepted.
• There is no mention of the spread of collectivist ideas in the business world during 1932, symbolized in the widespread business support for the fascistic Swope Plan, ancestor of the NRA. There is also no mention of the rise of socialistic thought in that year, with books by [George] Soule, Stuart Chase, etc. calling for a “New Deal” and a planned economy.

The New Deal

The discussion of the New Deal is generally good, though not outstanding, since there is not adequate analysis of the economic consequences of the various New Deal measures. DeHuszar sees that this was a radical shift in the direction of State power, and also that it failed to cure the Depression, for which that shift supposedly occurred.

Yet, DeHuszar maintains that the New Deal “did bring valuable safeguards into industry, banking and trade” (p. 876).

• There should be more of a realization of the significance of the union-privileging Section 7a of the NIRA.
• DeHuszar is very poor on the Wagner Act: he persists with its apologists in seeing the Wagner Act as guaranteeing “the right to join unions,” which workers had had for a century. He does not see that the essence of the Wagner Act was compulsory unionization (in the sense of collective bargaining) of an arbitrarily defined production unit if a majority of workers approve, and the outlawing of an employer’s firing someone for being a union organizer or adherent.
• Also, there is no mention of the substantial Communist (both Stalinist and Trotskyist) influence in the newly formed CIO, and its sit-down strikes.
• There is no analysis of the economic consequences of the Fair Labor Standards Act. DeHuszar also writes favorably of federal housing subsidies. He is good, however, in criticizing the TVA.
• His account of the famous Literary Digest poll is garbled: the point is that the failure of the poll stimulated more scientific polling techniques.
• There is no mention of the increase in Federal Reserve requirements as a precipitant of the Depression of 1937–1938.
• DeHuszar is biased in favor of ICC regulation of trucks and buses.
• The “debunking” school of historians is unfairly attacked, and their merits not recognized. Further, DeHuszar does not realize that they began in the 1920s, not the 1930s.
• He mentions the Neutrality Acts of 1930s without explaining them or stating what they are (p. 968).
• It is John Maynard, not “Alfred” Keynes (p. 968).
• There is no mention of the Sugar Act, with its vast sugar cartel.
• He shows ignorance of the reality of “Good Neighbor” imperialism in Cuba (cf. R. Smith).

World War II

As was indicated above, DeHuszar here offers a simpliste and totally uncritical version of the official line: German, Japanese, and Soviet aggressors push forward, finally to be met by the resistance of noble Allies. Predictably, as with all official historians, there is great difficulty figuring out the sudden transition between all-out war against the German and Japanese aggressors, to cold war against the Soviet aggressor. There is always the danger of the reader beginning to wonder exactly when the Soviets launched their aggression and stopped being a defender against German aggression, whether perhaps German and Japanese aggression were justified against Soviet aggression, or maybe vice versa.

• DeHuszar states that for the Soviet Union, World War II was “one more phase in the drive to overthrow non-Communist governments.” Since the Soviet Union was attacked by Hitler and almost beaten, it is difficult to make sense out of this statement.
• At one point, DeHuszar states flatly that the Soviet Union “began the Cold War,” and at another that it launched the Cold War “in 1944,” but that the United States only realized this in 1947. All this makes little sense. What did the Soviet Union do in 1944 to launch the Cold War?
• On Italy’s “aggression” against Ethiopia, nothing is said of the Walwal incident, or of Ethiopian slavery.
• What year did the Spanish Civil War end? Date? There should also be more on the war, in addition to its large emotional impact on the United States, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, etc. There is virtually no mention of it.
• There is no mention whatever of Vichy France.
• If Soviet diplomats functioned as spies, so do most diplomatic organizations maintain spies.
• DeHuszar has the usual official line on the Munich Pact: the “inability to stand up to Hitler,” and all the rest, as well as references to Hitler’s “unlimited ambitions,” etc. (Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War needed here, along with Tansill, Barnes, and Burton Klein.)
• DeHuszar is totally wrong about “desperate efforts by Polish leaders” to avoid war. The truth is just the opposite: Poland broke off negotiations and refused to resume them, even when Hitler’s offer on the corridor was so “weak” that the Weimar Republic would have scorned it as a sell-out of German interests. Britain urged Poland to maintain this intransigent stand.
• DeHuszar says that “German planes repeatedly bombed Polish cities,” thus implying that Germany launched the bombing of civilians. He doesn’t realize that the bombed Polish cities were right behind the lines, and therefore came within the laws of war permitting bombing of “garrison” cities. On the other hand, there is no mention whatever of the fact that it was Britain who launched the obliteration bombing of civilians in cities way behind the lines; Germany didn’t want to do this (it had virtually no strategic bombers) and was forced to take up the British on it. (See Veale, Advance to Barbarism.)
• It is naïve to say that the Poles “never received the aid promised them by Britain and France.” How in the world could they? Doesn’t this indicate that the promise should never have been made? Or that the moral was the folly of a “tough” policy with Hitler, and not the presumed folly of appeasement?
• DeHuszar neglects the Russian offer with the Finns to exchange territory for the Karelian Isthmus, and that Karelia was strategically considered a “dagger pointed at Leningrad,” especially in German or pro-German hands? There is no mention that Germany only invaded Norway after it had discovered Britain was imminently going to invade Norway itself, and after Britain had mined Norwegian waters.
• Again, DeHuszar directly states that Germany opened airraid campaigns against British cities, when the reverse is true. Further, he says that Britain bombed German “air bases,” when Britain, and later the United States, concentrated on obliteration bombing of crowded working-class districts. There is no mention, furthermore, of the atrocity of the American bombing of Dresden, when it was no military target whatever, but crowded with many thousands of refugees.
• There is nonsense about the German-Italian-Japanese alliance “apparently directed against the U.S.” Why apparently? It would be more logical that it was directed against the Soviet Union. Contrary to what DeHuszar writes, the Germans did not deliberately attack U.S. destroyers before Pearl Harbor. The Germans always sought to avoid naval action with the United States, but the United States persisted in seeking it.
• There is no mention whatever of the numerous Allied atrocities committed against the German people—and in the discussion of Potsdam, not a word about the agreement to ship back behind the Iron Curtain many thousands of German refugees (cf. [F.J.P.] Veale, [Freda] Utley, [Montgomery] Belgion, [Austin J.] App).
• There is no mention of the reign of terror committed by Communist partisans in France and in Italy right after the war, against alleged collaborators (see Huddleston, for France; Villari, for Italy; Veale, War Crimes Discreetly Veiled).
• He takes the “Atlantic Charter” seriously! (See Flynn, Crocker.)
• A typical chapter title reads, “Firm U.S. Resistance to Japanese Expansion.”
• There is no mention of the November 27, 1941 Hull ultimatum to Japan to get out of China.
• The book is very weak on Pearl Harbor. There is no mention of FDR and Stimson’s “maneuvering the Japanese into firing the first shot,” or of FDR’s knowledge of the Pearl attack a few days in advance, and his deliberate failure to warn Pearl Harbor in case the Japanese should find out and call off the attack. (Cf. Theobald, Kimmel, Barnes, Morgenstern, etc.)¹⁹
• To say that “[a]s a result of the Soviet viewpoint, there is still no settlement with Germany” is rather an odd statement, in view of Russia’s continual pleading that a peace treaty be signed with Germany, and our persistent refusal to do so.
• There is no mention of the pernicious consequences of the wartime OPA, nor of the unionizing and compulsory arbitration engaged in by the War Labor Board, nor of the vast governmental inflation, joined with the maintenance of very low interest rates. There is no mention of the savings-bond drives, and its result in inflationary expropriation of the holders.
• There is a terribly distorted discussion of our treatment of the Nisei. He does not mention the fact that, despite no evidence whatever of Nisei disloyalty through the whole war, the Nisei were herded into concentration camps for the duration of the war. Surely it is the height of euphemism to call this “moving... to places” removed from the coast.
• There is no mention of the mass-sedition trial, or of the use of the Smith Act to jail Trotskyite opponents of the war.
• What were Henry Wallace’s political views? Be specific.
• There is no mention whatever of the leading role that U.S. Communist advisers played in getting the United States into the Pacific war; the Communist espionage agent Lauchlin Currie was our adviser to Chiang, and in that role, persuaded Chiang to keep fighting the Japanese, and not to conclude any peaceful agreement. To admit this would be to destroy the recent image of the noble Chiang. There is also no mention of the fact that Stalin and the Communists were ardently pro-Chiang until the middle of World War II.
• Contrary to DeHuszar, the Axis powers had not been “readying themselves for aggressive war.” Hitler, for example, was terribly unready, especially for a war of any length. (See Burton Klein [Germany’s Economic Preparations for War].)
• Most of the lend-lease aid and its impact came after Stalingrad rather than before.
• There is no mention of General Vlasov’s surrender to the Germans, or of the Ukrainians and White Ruthenians first welcoming the Germans as liberators, until they began to oppress the peoples in turn.
• There is no mention of the persistent record of U.S. aggression against (Vichy) France: Guadalupe, Martinique, North Africa, etc.
• There is no mention of the whole “Second Front” controversy, or of Churchill’s desire to invade the Balkans.
• There is no mention of U.S. refusal to recognize the rebels against Hitler—the German underground.
• There is no mention of the U.S. occupation and torture of SS prisoners at Malmedy.
• There is no mention of the Eastern European expulsion of millions of Germans, mass slaughter, etc.
• DeHuszar’s account of Hiroshima is almost incredible for its distortions. DeHuszar says that the Japanese, after Hiroshima, at last surrendered unconditionally except that they were allowed to keep the emperor. But this was precisely the only condition that they had insisted on for surrender months before. So Hiroshima and Nagasaki butchery accomplished precisely nothing. Yet DeHuszar implies the reverse!
• Astonishingly, all mention of the important Teheran Conference is omitted. The Quebec Conference is also omitted.
• DeHuszar neglects to point out that the Russian acquisition of “Eastern Poland” was based on the old British Curzon Line, which demarcated an area that was not and is not Polish, but rather Ukrainian, White Ruthenian, and Lithuanian.
• There is no mention of the Communist-inspired Morgenthau Plan for the pastoralization,²⁰ and therefore barbarization of Germany, nor of its partial going into effect before 1948, nor of the socialistic planning, price controls, etc. that this entailed.
• DeHuszar evades mention of the reason why Russian troops were withdrawn from Austria, and a peace treaty signed by all: Austria was agreed to be permanently neutral and relatively disarmed.
• There is no mention of the socialistic policies foisted on Japan by our occupation troops.
• There is no mention of U.S. permanent seizure of Japanese territory after World War II; the Ryukyus (Okinawa), Guam, etc.
• There is no mention of the ex post facto nature, the illegality of Nuremberg Trials, the failure to maintain proper rules of court procedure, etc.
• There is no mention of UNRRA failure to help German refugees. There is a sloppy description of the operation of the Security Council: any of the Big 5 can veto proposal for action, not just action “against itself.”
• There is no mention of which German or Japanese leaders were tried: Göring, Hess, Yamashita, etc. There is no mention of the WAC or WAVES, or the Eleanor Roosevelt proposal of a labor draft, during the war.
• There is no mention of the problems of the conscientious objector in World War II (see Sibley and Jacob).

To backtrack a bit, there was also no mention of the following, covering both the 1930s and 1940s: the Jehovah’s Witnesses decisions of the Supreme Court; General Hugh Johnson or Professor Warren’s gold buying plan; Father Charles Coughlin; the FDIC; the Nye Committee; General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, Chiang, and the Burma Road; the “Hundred Days” of FDR; the Silver Purchase Act; the National Resources Planning Board; the Walsh-Healey Act, for minimum wages in government contracts; the Smith Act; the Ludlow Resolution for a referendum on any war; the Gold Clause Cases of 1935.

The Postwar Era

Let’s pause and take an overview of DeHuszar’s treatment of the postwar era.

While good on the original New Deal, DeHuszar doesn’t seem to realize that this New Deal has been fastened on the country, and that World War II only served to vastly expand the State; greatly increase the size of the government budget, the public debt, and the arms budget; foisted apparently permanent conscription in peace or war; established a tradition of government meddling everywhere, and increasingly so. But somehow DeHuszar doesn’t realize this, so that he generally praises the Eisenhower administration for reducing the scope of government. It increased the scope; but the main point is that the Eisenhower administration made no move to roll back the New Deal revolution, and therefore the administration performed the function of consolidating the New Deal-Fair Deal system. In short, the first Republican administration in a generation placed its stamp of approval on the New Deal, and thus made sure it would be a permanent, irreversible part of American life. This was its major “achievement,” and yet DeHuszar doesn’t seem to recognize this at all.

Further, the organization of this last part of the book is very poor: the Truman administration; the Eisenhower administration; economic and social affairs; and then, at the last, the United States in world politics—thus with the latter material illogically split from the first chapters, the organization doesn’t hang together at all.

• In treatment of Truman, there is no mention whatever of his emergence from the notorious Pendergast machine.
• There is a very skimpy account of the Truman-Wallace break. Cause?
• Why were Marshall and Acheson “memorable”? (They are hardly mentioned on any other page.)
• There is an absurdly idyllic picture of government using its war surplus sales to promote “free enterprise”—these were almost always subsidies.
• There is not enough stress on shortages as consequences of OPA price control.
• DeHuszar greatly underestimates the importance of the CEA, and overlooks its creature and ally in Congress, the Joint Committee on the Economic Report.
• DeHuszar is biased in favor of the government control of atomic energy.
• There is no mention of the Pearl Harbor Inquiry.
• There is no mention of the important crisis on the Left, when the Eleanor Roosevelt-Reuther-CIO-Hillman forces deserted Henry Wallace after first backing him (1946–1947), and formed in the process the ADA. A key here was Reuther’s victory in the United Automobile Workers over the Communist-conservative (?) [in original] coalition backing Thomas.
• There is no mention of the non-Communist oath provision of the Taft-Hartley Act—nor of the 1947 shift of NAM from backing repeal of the Wagner Act to a Taft-Hartley-like proposal. This backdown, and also the backdown by Taft, eliminated the fervor of the anti-union forces who thought, mistakenly, that Taft-Hartley was effective. This is not pointed out by DeHuszar.
• Most Republicans, not only Truman, were and still are in favor of high farm price supports.
• DeHuszar seems to be biased against the Twenty-second Amendment (no-third-term amendment).
• There is no mention of public housing, Title I, etc.
• There is no mention of Truman’s seizure of the steel industry, nor of the Supreme Court decision that it was unconstitutional [see Decision of Mr. Justice Black: Sawyer v. Youngston Sheet and Tube (1952)].
• There is no mention of the juristic controversy over civil liberties between Black, Douglas vs. Frankfurter, Clark, et al.
• There is no mention of the McCarran Act being a bill of attainder or of it violating Fifth Amendment provisions.
• There is no mention of the bill of attainder aspect of the attorney-general list.
• Perhaps the Russian atomic bomb was advanced by its espionage activities in the United States, as DeHuszar states, but there is no mention of the fact that Russia acquired the H-bomb before us.
• Contrary to the impression of DeHuszar, the Jews did not accept the UN partition boundaries for Israel. The Arabs, furthermore, did not invade Israel. How could they, when admittedly all the fighting took place on Arab soil? The Arabs went into Arab Palestine territory to help their unarmed Palestinian brethren against attack. There is no mention of the continual Jewish guerrilla warfare against Britain, or of the Israeli aggression against Arab Palestine—symbolized by the fact that its current boundaries are far beyond what was grabbed for Israel by the UN partition. There is also no mention of the one million Arab refugees driven out of their homes, their properties confiscated, or of Israel’s refusal to readmit them!
• Neither was the UN action in the Congo in 1960 a “success.” DeHuszar should have been able to see this even at the time of writing, for the entire principle of the UN action was the centralization of the so-called “Congolese nation” (which has only existed as a figment of Belgian imperialist boundary carving), and the crushing of such independent and viable countries as Katanga.
• There is no mention of the fact that Russia’s reoccupation of Hungary was only done under cover of the much more “aggressive”—by international law—British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt, which the allied forces launched while the Hungarian crisis was going on.
• There is no mention of the highly left-wing propaganda systematically spread by UNESCO—not just interested in international “cooperation.”
• Further, while the IMF, according to DeHuszar, was “designed to help countries avoid inflating their money,” the truth is precisely the opposite: the IMF is designed to help countries keep inflating when they don’t want to stop!
• DeHuszar, in general, has much too favorable a view of the various allied international agencies of the UN.
• There is no mention of the huge increase in the arms budget that resulted from the Korean War, or of the restoration of the excess-profits tax.
• That DeHuszar seems to be highly complacent about the post-war institutionalization of the New Deal-Fair Deal and its expansion may be seen in this comment: “Government authorities at all levels found it necessary” to have high taxes and budgets. “Found it necessary”?
• What, specifically what, “reduction” of government power was effected by the Eisenhower administration, as DeHuszar claims? Where? On the contrary, note the size of the budget, other indications, etc., and it will readily be seen that the extent of government power over the individual was much greater at the end of the Eisenhower era than at the beginning.
• There is no mention of the concentration camps provided—and built—by the Communist Control Act of 1954.
• The recent Supreme Court decisions did not only hamper governmental fighting of Communists; they also protected civil liberties of the individual. DeHuszar does not seem to consider this at all.
• Also, DeHuszar doesn’t seem to realize that Ike’s many “pro-business” appointments did not necessarily (here, did not at all) reduce the power wielded by the appointed offices. The same mistake is made here as in analyzing the 1920s. “Pro-business” does not necessarily mean “pro-genuine free enterprise.”
• There is no mention of Ike’s firing of conservative Clarence Manion (1956) as head of the Intergovernmental Relations commission, and of his replacement by “modern Republican” Meyer Kestenbaum.
• There is no mention of the failure of Republicans to return to the gold standard.
• In the Dixon-Yates affair, it was not just one officer of the Bureau of the Budget who was linked with the banking firm that financed the project; the officer was the one who wrote the contract (Adolphe Wenzell).
• This is a truly incredible blunder: there is no mention of the Democratic recapture of Congress in 1954!
• There is no mention of the substantial conservative third party entering the campaign of 1956: the Andrews-Werdel ticket, mainly on the repeal of the income tax.
• Why are such things as increased social security, grants for medical care, college scholarships by government, etc.—all extensions of New Deal-Fair Deal welfare state measures under Ike—considered by DeHuszar to be “notable accomplishments”? (p. 1096)
• Why would a rapid reduction in taxes, in the 1958 recession, have meant that the government had not allowed the economy to recover by itself? Surely a tax reduction connotes less government repression and interference with the economy.
• There is no mention of the important Treasury-Federal Reserve “Accord” of 1951, which freed the Fed from the obligation of supporting the prices of government bonds.
• There is no mention of the McClellan Committee investigation of union racketeering, or of the Landrum-Griffin law.
• There is no mention of the peacetime draft, nor of the jailing of Lucille Miller for opposing the draft.
• There is no mention of the hotly debated issue of fluoridating water, or of the problem of the possible poisonous or cancerogenic properties of many food, hormone, etc., additives that have permeated American agriculture since the war.
• There is no mention of the inquisitorial Buchanan Committee, or of the Rumely case decided by the Supreme Court.
• There is no mention of the detention and final release of Ezra Pound.
• DeHuszar does not seem to realize the significance of the fact that Eastern Europe was occupied by Soviet Russia in the inevitable wake of the conquest of Germany and its Eastern European “puppet” allies. Nor does he realize that much of Communist expansion after the war was also due to the fact that the main body of guerilla troops against Germany and Japan were Communists.
• He gives a distorted account of Ike’s invasion of Lebanon (1958), which gives the impression that the invasion succeeded in averting a threat of Communist rebellion. Actually, the facts are the reverse: the troops were called in to aid President Chamoun, who was soon overthrown and replaced by a neutralist rebel (not pro-Communist), after which U.S. troops sheepishly withdrew in failure.
• Also, DeHuszar is wrong in stating that the CIA is simply an information-gathering (espionage?) agency; it is also operational, engaging in guerrilla warfare and sponsored revolution without benefit of congressional constitutional declaration of war (and is therefore unconstitutional): note its operations in Iran, Guatemala, Laos, Algeria (maybe), and Cuba.
• There is no mention of the various critical military and strategic principles of these years: “containment” and George Kennan; “liberation”; “massive retaliation” and “brinkmanship” and Foster Dulles; the theories of “counterforce” and “preemptive war.”
• There is no mention of the new “science” of strategy, the Air Force’s intellectuals of the RAND Corporation, Herman Kahn, etc.
• There is no mention of the recent growth of the Right: Goldwater, Birch Society, etc.
• There is no mention of Acheson’s “dust will settle” speech on Korea; or of constant American trouble with Syngman Rhee.
• There is no mention that the repeated Chinese warnings that it would attack if MacArthur approached the Yalu had been ignored by all (see the book of Allen S. Whiting).
• There is no mention of Hoover-Joseph Kennedy “Fortress America” position.
• Incredibly, there is no mention of the Berlin-German problems, of Quemoy-Matsu problems, of Laos-Indochina problems, etc.
• There is no mention of the Khrushchev-Stalin differences.
• No stress is put on Khrushchev-China differences, on inevitability of war vs. peaceful coexistence.
• The Communist political influence in West Germany is “small” for one simple, unmentioned reason: the Communist Party is outlawed there.
• Iraq and the United Arab Republic are not “Soviet-influenced,” but neutralist.
• Why is small Soviet foreign aid to underdeveloped countries an “economic offensive,” while huge U.S. foreign aid is not?
• There is no mention of the “dollar-shortage” reasons given for the original Marshall Plan.
• DeHuszar gives a highly colored account of the U-2 incident: Khrushchev “uttered such insults,” etc., as to break up the conference. All Khrushchev asked for was that Ike express “regrets” for the spy flights—admittedly illegal under international law and provocative—a custom which every state has followed when caught in espionage. Instead, Ike proclaimed the righteousness of his stand and refused to express regrets.
• It is not accurate that the Soviet Union is “threatening” West Berlin. The Soviet Union wants to liquidate World War II and regularize existing reality: returning permanent Western access guarantees for West Berlin, in exchange for Western recognition-of-reality of the East German government and the Oder-Neisse line. At this point, it looks as if such reasonable negotiations may well succeed. The situation is far more complex, therefore, than DeHuszar’s simplistic and haphazard treatment.
• There is no mention of Trygve Lie, or of Dag Hammerskjöld.
• There is no mention of the life terms for Puerto Rican nationalist agitation by Pedro Albizu Campos and others, or of the attempted assassination of Truman and congressmen by Puerto Rican independence fighters.
• There is no mention of the SANE Nuclear Policy Committee.
• There is no mention of postwar revulsion against progressive education and of such leaders of this revulsion as Bestor, Albert Lynd, Mortimer Smith, or the Council for Basic Education.
• There is no mention of the China admission-to-UN problem.
• There is no mention of such leading postwar economists as A.F. Burns, the National Bureau [of Economic Research], Paul Samuelson, and J.K. Galbraith.
• There is no mention of the Southern “massive resistance” policy to compulsory integration and no mention of Prince Edward County, Virginia’s abandonment of its public schools and Virginia’s repeal of compulsory attendance law.
• There is no mention of the fact that big business is no more concentrated now than in 1900 (Adelman, Nutter, etc.).
• There is no mention of the recent antitrust cases: the breakup of DuPont-General Motors, etc.; and no mention of Lowell Mason’s lone fight against antibusiness trust-busting in the FTC.
• There is nothing about the current plight of the railroads.
• There is nothing about the deterioration of the post office service.
• There is nothing about the problems of urban blight, traffic jams, Negro and Puerto Rican frictions in cities, and immigration.
• There is no mention of increasing conservation and national parks, and government recreation.
• DeHuszar seems to be biased in favor of special laws protecting women in industry.

There is the grave flaw of not mentioning one of the great sociological problems of the 1950s: the “Age of Apathy,” as generally remarked. Ike’s “extreme moderation” and his immunity to opposition until the final year of his term eliminated political strife from public life, and led to the apathetic belief on the part of the public that there were no issues anymore. The college youth were the “silent generation” who went, searching for security, into the easiest corporation job with the most attractive pension scheme. DeHuszar has no mention of the phenomenon of the “Organization Man,” pointed out in the seminal book of [William H.] Whyte and a host of followers: the man with no ideas of his own, who only adjusts to the “team” and what he thinks are the ideas of others. This profoundly “collectivist” spirit of mind was also embodied in the new type of architecture: the suburban developments with their picture windows and their united hatred of privacy and solitude, etc. In sociology, this was expressed in the interesting and popular categories of David Riesman: there seemed to be general agreement that Americans had largely become “other directed,” rather than the self-reliant, Protestant-ethic-guided, “inner-directed” American of the nineteenth century. The dominance of others, of society, was also reflected in the neo-Freudian theories of [Karen] Horney, [Harry Stack] Sullivan etc. None of this penetrates to DeHuszar.

• There is no mention of the shackling of productivity by the featherbedding and other work rules of unions.
• DeHuszar engages in some leftist-type deploring of the alleged plight of the migrant workers, who are paid less than factory workers. Why in the world shouldn’t they be paid less? Must everyone be paid as much as a factory worker, regardless of his occupation? Again, this is economic ignorance displayed by the author.
• There is, further, no mention of the governmental prohibition of “wetback” labor—a supposedly “humanitarian” step engineered by leftists, and resulting in prohibition of the wetbacks being able to come to the United States to improve their lot, as they desperately wish (hence the “wet backs”).
• There is no mention by DeHuszar of the inflation and ease of credit in the current boom being reminiscent of the 1920s—heralding perhaps another 1929?
• There is no mention of the fact that contemporary religious revival, or much of it, is purely social, part of the current cult of “togetherness” and “other direction,” as witnessed in the continual watering down of religious dogma.
• He favors the consolidations of small, local school districts in name of efficiency: but this will lead to a stronger and more centralized educationist bureaucracy.
• There should be a critique of the “crash program” idea in scientific research (cf. [John] Jewkes, [D.] Sawers, [R.] Stillerman [The Sources of Invention (1958)]; also J.R. Baker [Science and the Planned State, (1945)]).
• He surely gives an exaggerated praise for the Salk vaccine, which has not yet cured polio, and, current reports indicate, might be itself responsible for hepatitis or cancer in some.
• Why is there no mention of the FCC’s outlawry of “pay TV”? Surely pay TV will improve the quality of the programs.
• There is no mention of the recent success in the magazine field of Playboy and its imitators for adolescent “sophisticates.”
• There is no mention whatever of the most famous literary movement and cultural movement since World War II: the “beatniks”—Kerouac, Ginsburg, Zen Buddhism, etc.
• There is no mention of the odd state of modern art (abstractionism), modern music (no melody, or harmony for that matter), and modern sculpture (abstract).
• There is no mention of the rise of Jazz, and its transformation from the exuberant neoclassical polyphony of New Orleans, to the Schoenberg-influenced “bop” and “modern jazz.”
• There is no mention of the prevailing influences of Freudianism, and Freudian and pseudo-Freudian categories in modern culture.

Finally, DeHuszar completely omits mention of perhaps the most significant fact of the American economy—and even American society—as we reach the present day. This was the point alluded to by Eisenhower in his highly significant farewell address: the growth of an arms-dominated economy, of a “military-industrial complex” functioning, as C. Wright Mills termed it, as a “power elite.”

More and more, the energies of private enterprise are directed not toward the consumer but toward feeding the unproductive maw of the military machine, toward influence purchasing to acquire contracts, etc. The interpenetration of military and industry is embodied in the common practice of retired generals getting posts in the arms industries: obviously not for their business ability but for their influence at the Pentagon. And, increasingly, there is the danger of the society becoming a “garrison state,” with discouragement of expression of fundamental dissent, etc.

It is one of the measures of the fundamental failure of DeHuszar’s work that none of these problems are so much as mentioned, let alone discussed soundly. DeHuszar is content with pointing to the material boom of America at midcentury, to the “bathtubs” (as we may generically refer to them), which is fine—but he also ignores the problems of America: the threat of a garrison state and a military-industrial complex, the spiritual blight of “other direction,” and the “organization man” replacing individualism, etc. And, as I have stated, in ignoring the political function that the Eisenhower administration performed, he somehow manages to forget the menace of the expanding State, and the advancing “Deals” or “Frontiers” at mid-century.

On the 1960 presidential campaign, DeHuszar fails to mention the rather important candidacy of Adlai Stevenson, the deferential, “me-too” campaigning of Dick Nixon, and the Norman Vincent Peale anti-Catholic blunder, as well as Kennedy’s impressive showing on the Catholic question in his address before the ministers at Houston.