Harry Elmer Barnes

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Harry Elmer Barnes (1889–1968)

Historian, sociologist, progressive

  • Wikipedia (...a pioneer of historical revisionism, meaning the use of historical scholarship to challenge and refute the narratives of history promulgated by the state and the elite, most often in opposition to Whig history or as Barnes himself termed it, "court history".)
  • Stromberg

Books:

  • many, see Wikipedia
  • The History of Western Civilization (2 vols., 1935)
  • An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World (1937)
  • In Quest of Truth and Justice (1928)
  • World Politics in Modern Civilization (1930)
  • American Investments Abroad: Studies in American Imperialism (1928-35, ed.)
  • The Genesis of the World War (1926)
  • Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (1953, ed.) (PDF, 51 MB)

Essays/Booklets

Quote:

"The first World War and American intervention therein marked an ominous turning point in the history of the United States and of the world. Those who can remember "the good old days" before 1914 inevitably look back to those times with a very definite and justifiable feeling of nostalgia. There was no income tax before 1913, and that levied in the early days after the amendment was adopted was little more than nominal. All kinds of taxes were relatively low. We had only a token national debt of around a billion dollars, which could have been paid off in a year without causing even a ripple in national finance. The total Federal budget in 1913 was $724,512,000, just about one per cent of the present astronomical budget.

"Ours was a libertarian country in which there was little or no witch-hunting and few of the symptoms and operations of the police state which have been developing here so drastically during the last decade. Not until our intervention in the first World War had there been sufficient invasions of individual liberties to call forth the formation of special groups and organizations to protect our civil rights. The Supreme Court could still be relied on to uphold the Constitution and safeguard the civil liberties of individual citizens.

"Libertarianism was also dominant in Western Europe. The Liberal Party governed England from 1905 to 1914. France had risen above the reactionary coup of the Dreyfus affair, had separated Church and State, and had seemingly established the Third Republic with reasonable permanence on a democratic and liberal basis. Even Hohenzollern Germany enjoyed the usual civil liberties..."
—Professor Harry Elmer Barnes
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (1953)

Or Stromberg:

"Barnes certainly did well in the intellectual climate of the early 20th century. He wrote textbooks on world civilization and sociology, histories of western thought, edited collections in sociology and related fields, and reviewed, reviewed, and reviewed. He engaged himself in all the fashionable progressive causes – peace, economic regulation, penal reform, eugenics, etc. – all resting on the idea of conscious social planning to better society."

J.J.Martin, reviewing :

Like subsequent verses of well known songs, not many even of those well acquainted with this book recall or remember its subtitle: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and its Aftermath. That is the subject of the book, undertaken by its editor, Barnes, who wrote three of its chapters, assisted by Charles Callan Tansill, who wrote two, and six others participating in the symposium, who produced the remaining six. I often regret that political and other circumstances prevailing prevented it from being a two-volume set. Though its inspiration and supplier of its main title, Charles A. Beard, had died five years earlier, there were about the land sufficient members of the revisionist fold to have made a companion volume equally significant; the additional contributions of, say, John T. Flynn, C. Hartley Grattan, George Hartmann, Clyde R. Miller, William B. Hesseltine (I wonder what ever happened to Bill’s work on Cordell Hull?), Fred A. Shannon (a chapter by him on the imbecilities of the wartime economy would have been a hilarious interlude in this somber tale), Francis Neilson and Harry Paxton Howard, would have induced utter disintegration among the brigade of critics who found the one book simply unbearable. But it was not to be, even if some of this latter contingent did get in their say in other works.


  • Revisionism & The Promotion of Peace. Privately published; 1960.

A short essay on the state-of-the-art of revisionism. Reprinted from Liberation (Summer 1958).

  • The Genesis of the World War, 3rd edition. Knopf; 1929.

Best survey of the subject for the general reader, with useful annotated bibliography.

  • In Quest of Truth and Justice. National Historical Society; 1928.

The most complete summary of the Revisionist controversy over the causes of the first World War.

  • World Politics in Modern Civilization. Knopf; 1930.

Last half of this book is the standard Revisionist survey of war guilt literature and the main problems created by the post-war treaties.

  • Shall the United States Become the New Byzantine Empire? Privately published; 1947.

One of Barnes' first forays into Cold War Revisionism, and an anticipation of themes raised by the later generation of "New Left" revisionists. Criticizes Truman's plans to bail out the British Empire (yes, again) in its troubles in the Balkans and the Middle East.

  • Rauch on Roosevelt. Sons of Liberty; 1978.

(Reprint of privately printed 1952 edition.) Barnes demolishes court historian Basil Rauch and his Roosevelt. From Munich to Pearl Harbor-one of the most extreme and vulnerable attempts at defending and obscuring the Roosevelt pro-war policy. One of Barnes' hardest-hitting booklets, a classic example of one historian calling another's bluff. Barnes, Harry Elmer.

  • Crucifying the Saviour of France. Privately published; 1945.

In this, his first Revisionist brochure on the second world war, Barnes outlines the case for Marshall Pétain, as presented by Mrs. Seton Porter in her lengthy manuscript on Pétain's role in stepping in to save France from the ravages of a stupid war. (Unfortunately, Mrs. Porter's book remains unpublished to this day.) Petain himself read a translation of this booklet in his prison cell, shortly before his death.

  • Selected Revisionist Pamphlets. IHR; 1980.

(Reprint of 1972 Arno Press edition.) A handy collection of some of Barnes best. Excellent introduction to the whole Revisionist controversy after World War II through the eyes of the protagonist.

  • The Chickens of the Interventionist Liberals Have Come Home to Roost. Sons of Liberty; 1977.

(Reprint of privately printed 1954 edition. Also available in Barnes' Selected Revisionist Pamphlets.) Describes the ideological "flip-flop" of those "old liberals" who, mindful of the lessons of Revisionism of World War I, were all for neutrality and pacifism in the early thirties -- until The Devil Himself came along in Germany, to be replaced at the end of the war by a new League of Devils from Russia. This is one of the most biting critiques of the new "totalitarian liberalism" and its concommittant "globaloney" ever to appear in print. Writing in 1954, at the height of the much-exaggerated "McCarthy era," Barnes does not try to conceal a certain satisfaction that the liberal totalitarians are at last getting a taste of the fear-and-smear techniques they themselves used against non-interventionists and Revisionists in the late thirties and forties. Poetic Justice.

  • Was Roosevelt Pushed into War by Popular Demand in 1941? Sons of Liberty; 1977.

(Reprint of privately printed 1951 edition.) Barnes' reply, delivered at the 1950 convention of the American Historical Association, to a paper of Prof. Dexter Perkins in which Perkins had argued that Roosevelt merely "followed the lead" of American public opinion (as measured by polls in 1940-41) in moving toward war. Barnes notes how Perkins distorted and twisted his statistics in order for them to follow his "line," and then examines those polls himself, concluding that when the often "loaded" questions are "unloaded," the real answer of the American people at that time becomes clear, a consistent and overwhelming opposition to any moves recognized as likely to get America into war.

  • "Select Bibliography of Revisionist Books Dealing with The Two World Wars and Their Aftermath". Privately published; 1958.

Compiled by Barnes and 7 other scholars, this includes often-colorful synposes of each work listed. Much Revisionist work has been done since this was put together, but it remains the indispensable guide to early Revisionism. (The entire contents have been incorporated into the present bibliography.).

  • Blasting the Historical Blackout. Boniface Press; 1976.

Originally published by the author in 1962, this 42-pager is devoted to an appraisal of the Revisionist breakthrough marked by the publication of Taylor's Origins of WWII (q.v. ).

  • Pearl Harbor After a Quarter of a Century. IHR; 1980.

A reprint of Barnes' 123-page monograph on Pearl Harbor, originally published in 1968 in the journal Left and Right (and later by Arno Press & The New York Times, 1972).
Murray Rothbard called this article "(Barnes') final word on the task which had occupied him for the last quarter of a century: the true story of Pearl Harbor ... the culminating synthesis of a quarter century of Revisionist inquiry.".

  • Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers; 1953.

A comprehensive symposium by eight leading Revisionist scholars dealing with all important phases of the second world war insofar as it affected the United States, including the European background and the disastrous aftermath. Especially notable for demonstrating the determined effort of historians, newspaper editors, and commercial publishers to prevent the truth from reaching the American public, and for its exposure of the shameless efforts to stifle the truth concerning Pearl Harbor. The best general book on the causes and results of the entry of the United States into the second world war.

  • The Court Historians versus Revisionism. Privately published; 1952.

Barnes takes apart two war-mongering books: Langer & Gleason's The Challenge To Isolation 1937-1940, and Herbert Feis's The Road to Pearl Harbor. Cynical in the extreme.

  • Revisionism & Brainwashing. Privately published; 1962.

A survey of the war-guilt question in Germany after two world wars.

  • The Barnes Trilogy. IHR; 1979.

Compilation of three of Barnes' best-known Revisionist pamphlets: The Court Historians versus Revisionism, Blasting the Historical Blackout, and Revisionism & Brainwashing (q.v.).

  • Revisionism: A Key to Peace, and Other Essays (Cato Paper No. 12). Cato Institute; 1980.

The title essay, here presented for the first time since its appearance in the Spring, 1966 Rampart Journal, is the lengthy bibliographic review and summing-up of the state of revisionism. In it Barnes develops the theme that the Historical Blackout has been supplemented by the "blur-out" (by which the Establishment at last guardedly admits long-time revisionist contentions, but blurs them out by dwelling on a mass of irrelevant and secondary detail -- the classic example being Roberta Wohlstetter's whitewash, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision) and the "smother-out" (by which discussion of critical issues is drowned out in a cacaphony of wailing about alleged "Nazi atrocities"). Also presented here are "Revisionism and the Historical Blackout" and, for the first time, Barnes' long-suppressed essay on "How '1984' Trends Threaten American Peace, Freedom, and Prosperity." Introduction by James J. Martin.

  • The Struggle Against the Historical Blackout, 9th edition. Privately published; 1952.

Probably Barnes' single most important World War II Revisionist brochure -- and the longest, continually revised and expanded. In describing the story of the Blackout as it unfolded, Barnes reviewed each significant development in Revisionist historiography, and then examined the treatment (or lack of treatment) given by the mass media, the reviewers, and the Establishment generally. Court historians like Samuel Elliot Morison, Samuel Flagg Bemis, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Thomas A. Bailey, and assorted other Liberal ideologues learned to think twice about what they were going to say in print, knowing that Barnes would call their bluffs in future editions of this devastating brochure.

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