Historian Eric Foner Talks Freedom

Eric Foner believes that the question of freedom is at the heart of America.

In his 1998 book “The Story of American Freedom,” the Columbia University history professor argued that while the meaning of freedom has changed dramatically in America’s history, it has always been central to our discourse and identity as a nation.   

“Every political issue in American history seems to eventually come down to some question of freedom or its absence,” Foner said in a New School presentation.

In “The Story of American Freedom,” Foner notes that when the Declaration of Independence placed liberty as a value second only to life itself, one significant part of America’s population was living completely without liberty or freedom as slaves, and that another significant part, white women, were living with severely limited freedom.

Foner, who has written for the New York Times, the Nation, the Guardian and is a frequent guest on PBS, has noted that this disparity continues in modern times. After 9-11, America waged wars on an enemy who President Bush said hated us for our freedoms in wars with names like Operation Iraqi Freedom.  Concurrently, Foner noted in a 2004 History News Network article, the American government suspended of legal rights including habeas corpus, trial by impartial jury, the right to legal representation, and equality before the law regardless of race or national origin.

Foner, a liberal historian in the tradition of Howard Zinn and Richard Hofstadter (Hofstadter was Foner’s mentor at Columbia; Foner memorialized Zinn for The Nation) has said that in the modern age, freedom is most often invoked by conservatives in terms of freedom from intrusive government and excessive taxes. Historically, Foner says, that has not been the only way Americans have thought of freedom.

“There are other ideas of freedom in
American history, other concepts which maybe also deserve a second look:
freedom as economic security as during the New Deal,” Foner said in an episode of C-Span’s Booknotes. “That's what freedom often
meant; freedom as justice for those who've been deprived in our history.”

Foner’s personal history no doubt influenced his understanding of American history. His historian father was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, leading him to conclude that freedom can be very precarious.

But freedom in America hasn’t just changed in terms of who has it and doesn’t; it has evolved and taken on several different meanings. Foner writes that the Bill of Rights did not become a symbolic cornerstone of America’s Freedom until well into the 20th century.

Foner said that during the beginning of the Cold War, freedom was closely
associated with consumption and peoples’ ability to purchase goods in the
marketplace; Foner points to how then-Vice President Nixon illustrated American freedoms in terms of ownership of consumer goods during his “kitchen debate” talk with Khruschchev. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, the civil rights and women’s lib movements focused on personal freedom. Foner recounts the way that the word freedom was used drifted rightwards in the ‘80s, with President Reagan terming Nicaraguan and Afghani anti-Communist rebels “freedom fighters.”

Writing for The Nation in 2004, Foner argued that the concept of freedom is still changing, and that it is still critical for it to be understood in all its permutations.

“Groups from the abolitionists to modern-day conservatives have realized that to "capture" a word like freedom is to acquire a formidable position of strength in political conflicts,” Foner wrote. “Freedom is the trump card of political discourse, invoked as often to silence debate as to invigorate it. The very ubiquity today of the language of freedom suggests that we need to equip students to understand the many meanings freedom has had and the many uses to which it has been put over the course of our history.”

Eric Foner speaks tonight for at the The event is free.