The Political, the Personal and the Polemical: Eric Foner on Freedom
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
“The past is the key to the present and the mirror of the future.”
— Robert G. Fitzgerald (1840-1919), free African American and a founder of the Freedom Bureau’s schools in North Carolina quoted in Foner’s Our Fragile Freedoms.
“We’re all fighting over what it means to be an American right now,” Oscar-winning actress and Hollywood producer Jennifer Lawrence, the star of The Hunger Games and Winter’s Bone, recently observed. If Lawrence sees it, who doesn’t? It’s everywhere. The fight she has in mind—call it a chapter in the ongoing culture wars — has been waged in the streets of LA and Chicago, in courtrooms, classrooms, the workplace, homes and in the pages of newspapers and magazines.
How will it end? That’s not clear. It might end with more democratic socialists elected to public office, or it might end with a conflagration engineered by Trump & Co. We the people will have a say in how it plays out.
Not many American historians have joined the fray with more gusto and integrity than Eric Foner, a professor emeritus at Columbia University—which recently knuckled under to Trump and mangled the cause and the practice of academic freedom.
Foner is the author of more than two-dozen books, including biographies of Tom Paine, Nat Turner and Abraham Lincoln, as well as comprehensive studies of Reconstruction, the Civil War, the underground railroad and two aptly titled volumes, Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World and Battles for Freedom: The Use and Abuse of American History. A student of historiography and the study of history, as well as history itself, Foner would like yet another American Revolution, one which would fulfill the promise of Reconstruction when Blacks held public office and the nation made strides toward equality until a counterrevolution came along and installed Jim Crow.
Our Fragile Freedoms, Foner’s latest book, brings together topical and timely essays reprinted from The Nation, The London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. They originally appeared in print from 1992 to 2024, many of them from the second decade of the twenty-first century. They are still fresh.
Insights and electrifying observations abound. In the introduction, Foner echoes and endorses a quotation from Thomas Wentworth Higgginson—the commander of a unit of African American soldiers in the Civil War. “Revolutions may go backward,” Wentworth wisely observed. Foner explains that Americans suffer from “amnesia” as well as ignorance about the past. He reminds readers that contrary to popular belief, “segregation was not enshrined in law until the 1890s.” That’s useful to know.
The first essay, chronologically speaking, is about Richard Hofstadter, the author of the classic, The American Political Tradition, a longtime Columbia Professor and, along with James P. Shenton, one of Foner’s mentors.
Foner explains that Hofstadter joined the American Communist Party in 1938, remained a member briefly, then abandoned the left in 1939 and withdrew from all active politics in 1952 when Adlai Stevenson lost the race for the White House to Eisenhower. “I can no longer describe myself as a radical, though I don’t consider myself to be a conservative either,” Hofstadter told his brother-in-law, the lefty novelist Harvey Swados, the author of Out Went the Candle, Standing Fast and a collection of stories titled Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn. Other lefties took the path Hofstadter took and helped to purge radicals and radicalism from academia.
In his essay on C. Van Woodward— the author of The Strange Case of Jim Crow, who aimed to prevent the historian and Communist Party member Herbert Aptheker from teaching at Yale— Foner notes that “most historians are not very introspective and lead uneventful lives, making things difficult for the aspiring biographer.” As long as I have known Foner, which goes back to the late 1950s, when we were both undergraduates at Columbia, Foner has mostly not been introspective.
But it would not be fair to say that he has led an uneventful life. In 1960, he and I created a campus political party called Action, which was meant to lift students out of apathy. We campaigned against the House Un-American Activities Committee, sponsored a concert by Pete Seeger, who was then blacklisted, and hosted a talk at Columbia by Benjamin Davis, an African American and a member of the American Communist Party, who was banned from speaking at City College.
We also lampooned Governor Rockefeller’s fallout shelter program, a real boondoggle that would have done little or nothing to protect citizens in a nuclear war.
Foner was, and still is in some ways, a child of the early 1960s, the era of the Civil Rights Movement and before the advent of Black Power. At the very end of an essay titled “Chicago, 1968,” in which he mentions my biography of Abbie Hoffman (Foner wrote the introduction to that volume), he asks, “When did the decade of the Sixties end? Did it end at all?” He adds, “We sometimes seem to be reliving those years that did so much to shape the world we live in.”
It’s characteristic that he asks a question about the Sixties and doesn’t make a blanket assertion one way or another about the era, and that he offers the phrase “sometimes seem” rather than state something more definitive. I think I understand where he’s coming from. After all, when the Chinese Communist leader, Zhou Enlai, was asked for his opinion about the French Revolution, he apparently said, “It’s too early to tell.” Indeed, it is, and in some ways it’s too early to make a definitive statement about the Sixties. That era continues to shape our world.
Foner knows that our views of history are continually shifting, that today’s events frame our perspectives on the past, and that a study of the past can illuminate the present and shed light on the future.
No, there’s no autobiographical section in Our Fragile Freedoms, but there are isolated bits and pieces of valuable information about the author himself. In an essay titled “Du Bois,” he explains that he met the founder of the NAACP and the author of The Souls of Black Folk in Brooklyn in 1960 and that Du Bois was a friend of his parents, Jack and Liza, and that earlier that day same he and his brother, Tommy Foner had picketed a Woolworth store in New York to protest against segregation and to “demonstrate solidarity with the sit-ins taking place in the South.”
Du Bois, then 92, explained that he wanted to join the protests, but that his wife, Shirley Graham, wouldn’t let him. Foner adds, “Age had not dimmed his passion for political action or social change.” I would suggest that age has not dimmed Foner’s passion for political action and social change, though he has not ventured into the streets. There is more than one way to express passion for political action.
Foner has expressed his passion by writing and teaching and mentoring dozens of students who have earned doctorates, found teaching positions in academia and who have aimed to explore in the classroom and their writings controversial chapters in American history, including slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, now all under assault by Trump, the MAGA folks and Republicans.
On the subject of the past, one might quote the Southern novelist, William Faulkner, author of The Sound and the Fury and Light in August, who noted famously, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Perhaps that comment has never been truer than right now with the Trumpers rewriting history, censoring textbooks, outlawing the teaching of subjects like racism, and bringing back statues of Confederate generals.
It might be that given the family history, Foner has been somewhat reluctant to join causes. In the introduction to Our Fragile Freedom, he explains that “In 1942, during a purge of ‘subversive’ instructors at the City University of New York, his father and uncle lost their teaching positions,” and that his mother was “dismissed from her job as a high school art teacher.”
Foner observes that their experience taught him an “important historical lesson…the fragility of civil liberties” and that “freedom of speech and the right to dissent” are not “ingrained in the American system.” Today, citizens are learning that lesson all over again, the hard way, by losing their jobs, their civil rights and even their citizenship.
Foner is fearless when he writes about history, historians and contemporary political figures. In a long trenchant essay about Barack Obama titled “The First Black President,” he writes that Obama rejected idealism and became a “pragmatist,” that he rejected the suggestions of Black activists who wanted him to be braver and more outspoken than he was, and that, like Bush and Trump, he misled the American public about the war in Afghanistan.
“Obama characteristically sought a middle ground,” Foner writes, “laying out the historical basis for Black grievances, while suggesting that white fears and resentments also had legitimate roots.” By fueling white fears and resentments, Obama might have helped to pave the way for Trump. Foner does not reach that conclusion, but it seems a strong possibility.
Our Fragile Freedoms is probably Foner’s last book. It is also the capstone to a long and illustrious career as a courageous and dedicated American historian who has celebrated John Brown, Eugene Victor Debs, Frederick Douglass and Rosa Parks, and who has exposed racism and the enslavement of African Americans as a blight on our national identity as a land or freedom and democracy. He has carried on the work of his father, Jack, his mother, Liza, and his uncle Phil. Three cheers for the Foners.
