Franfurt School, 1936: Old Right isolationist Harry Elmer Barnes in his better days

The 2/1936 issue of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung contained an English-language review by F.N. Howard of a two-volume 1935 work by Harry Elmer Barnes and Henry David, The History of Western Civilization (1936). Barnes (1889-1968) is mainly remembered today as a crackpot Old Right isolationist propagandist, obsessed with That Man Roosevelt and how he allegedly planned the Pearl Harbor attack. His posthumous reputation is reflected in this obituary by Murray Rothbard, an Old Right "libertarian", at the neo-Confederate LewRockwell.com site, Harry Elmer Barnes, RIP (1968).

Deborah Lipstadt in Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (1993) writes at some length about Barnes excursions into the exceptionally sleazy field of Holocaust denial. By 1964, he was embracing something just short of full-blown Holocaust denial, which he expressed that year publicly in the rightwing American Mercury in an article called “Zionist Fraud”. (A Holocaust denial site reproduces a version of the article here; but such sites cannot be trusted to reproduce documents with accuracy and integrity, though this one does support their cause.) Barnes also published in the leading Holocaust-denier periodical, the Journal of Historical Review.

But in 1936, Barnes was still an eminent historian who had not yet embraced complete rightwing crackpottery. As Lipstadt writes:

Some of his numerous books and articles, particularly those on Western civilization, were used as required texts through the 1960s at prestigious American universities, including Harvard and Columbia. Barnes also lectured widely at other universities throughout the United States, his arguments about needless American participation in World War I winning the admiration of many people in the United States and abroad, including the publisher of the Nation, Oswald Garrison Villard; the Socialist leader Norman Thomas; the journalist H. L. Mencken; and the historian Charles Beard. At one time he served as bibliographic editor of Foreign Affairs.

But she also notes that a few years after the First World War, Barnes had shifted from his wartime anti-German jingoism to an advocate of the idea that “Russia and France wre chiefly responsible” the war, a view he had occasion to share personally the exiled former Emperor Wilhelm II (Kaiser Bill, as he was known in ridicule in the US during the war) in 1926.

In the 1936 review, F.N. Howard writes:

A strong sense of uneasiness and insecurity, amounting often to panic, takes hold even of historians in time like ours, urging them to desert I lie exhausting absorption in detail and monographic precision for the more ample environment of Weltgeschichte [world history]. Violently shaken from their traditional system the sharp decline in prestige of the sanctioned symbols occasioned by precipitous shifts in the material level, some historians set out once again to provide their nation or race with a compelling myth of its origin, its past, and historic vocation. The tale of the rise and fall of Empires can easily be woven so as to suggest the special destiny of favored nations, yield up evidence for current prejudice, supply a basis for popular yearnings, or offer a vantage point for prophecy and divination. Nature or Providence, it may be alleged ever so cautiously, works to assist a chosen people in their appointed task. Weltgeschichte may, however, be made to serve another and antithetical purpose, that of deflating local pretensions by reference to enlarged horizons.

Barnes, he says, takes the second course in the work under review.

Barnes has been protesting for almost two decades now against dogmatic perspectives and traditional perversions of history. A student of the late James Harvey Robinson, he has from the beginning of his career been affiliated with the self-styled school of the ,,New History”, whose aim it has been to emphasize the significance of modern achievements in the natural and social sciences for political thought and behavior. World history, to them, offers a vast canvas on which to illustrate the fruitfulness of the application of „intelligence" and „open-mindedness" to the perplexing problems which mankind has had to face in its social and cultural evolution. In recent years B. has shown a tendency to move away from Robinson's Enlightenment orientation in the direction of the more materialistic formulations of Beard, Veblen and even Marx. The consequent focus on cultural and social-economic forces in the development of Western civilization makes his book a refreshing contrast to the religious and political apologetic of [Hal Fischer] and [Edward Eyre, whose work was also under review in the same piece].

The dilemma inherent in B.s attempt to fuse the divergent conceptions by which he has been influenced into a consistent philosophy of history results in frequent contradictions and an obvious lack of coherence. The deeper implications of a dialectical conception of history are not fully realized either in the general organization of the work or in the treatment of the history of culture. His diagnosis of the ills of contemporary society is much more realistic than his prescriptions for their cure. The book teems with exhortations to altruism and „experimentalism“ in the adjustment of human affairs. „The chief need of the world today“, he concludes is for „innovators“, to lead us out of our „cultural lag“. [MY EMPHASIS]

Barnes’ brand of “experimentalism” and innovation in the field of history in his later years proved to be very dubious ones.

Since the “dogmatic perspectives and traditional perversions of history” against which Barnes had been protesting since the 1920s were perspectives that attached virtually any blame whatsoever to Imperial Germany in starting the First World War, it’s a little surprising that Howard wasn’t more explicitly critical on that point. Writers and historians on the left didn’t agree with the verdict of the Versailles Treaty that Germany was solely responsible for the outbreak of the war; they tended to view Russia, France and Britain and sharing in the blame. And even Wilsonian internationalists would have found it difficult to escape the thought by 1936 that the Versailles Treaty and the implications of its war-guilt assumptions left something to be desired.

But Barnes' one-sided version of the issue essentially exempting the German Imperial government for any blame for the Great War was not one that anyone of left-leaning viewpoints in 1936 was likely to find very appealing.

Tags: frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, harry elmer barnes, isolationism, old right, radical right