The Story Of American Freedom, by Eric Foner

Sometimes grammar can make a big difference in how one is to view a book. This book would have been considerably easier to praise had it (accurately) labeled itself as “A Story of American Freedom,” thus emphasizing the author’s perspective and not presuming to privilege it. Using the definite article, invites the reader to test the author’s sincerity to balance, and the author not surprisingly comes up wanting. A useful test of a book like this one is to see how the author addresses the subject of FDR’s Four Freedoms, and this author fails terribly by viewing it as the official war aims of the United States of America during World War II as well as viewing America as having an obligation to provide to blacks (and other oppressed groups) freedom from want and freedom from fear. This is, of course, patently ridiculous and entirely impossible. Similarly, the author’s chapter on Conservative freedom completely fails to understand the nature of conservatism in America and demonstrates the author’s inability to deal with contemporary politics with any sort of balance. Fortunately, not all of the author’s varied takes on freedom throughout American history are equally braindead, but these set the tone and indicate that the author is perhaps not as competent to talk decisively about freedom as he thinks he is.

One of the more interesting and revealing aspects of this book is that the author does not really attempt directly to give a definitive meaning of freedom (which also undercuts the title of the book because of its strident postmodernism). Instead, this book treats us to fragmentary pictures of freedom that are generally divided by time but also by mindset. The author notes, as just about every commentator of freedom with brain cells has noted, that freedom has always been highly contentious and highly contradictory in its meaning. By freedom many people seek to oppress others. In the name of economic freedom, for example, paternalistic government acts just as oppressively as a plantation owner towards those it considers its property. There is in the raw material of this book the space for a fascinating story of different conceptions of freedom and how it is that the freedom promised by slavery and the freedom promised by socialism and Progressive American ideals are, in fact, not very different, and that the desire to escape from responsibility complicates moral freedoms or even a just appreciation at individuals of high moral fiber. Freedom is complicated by what it is that we want to be free from, and the author is right to note that we cannot be free from our history, though typically he mangles it to argue for something like the 1619 project rather than a more broad-based understanding of the history of freedom that we cannot escape.

This book is more than 300 pages long in terms of its contents and it is divided chronologically and thematically into thirteen chapters. The book begins with an introduction. After this, an opening chapter engages the birth of American freedom with a look at the context of the freedom that colonial Americans found and sought (1). This is followed by a chapter of the early American republic and the struggles over various visions of freedom that co-existed with slavery (2). This is followed by a discussion of the empire of liberty in the early American republic that discussed democracy in America as well as labor ideology (3). After this comes a discussion of the boundaries of American freedom, including a conception of the political community (4). A chapter on the Civil War as a new birth of freedom then follows (5), along with a chapter on the liberty of contract in the Reconstruction and Gilded Age periods and those who were not happy with it (6). The author then tackles Progressive freedom (a suitable candidate for official oxymorons) (7) as well as the birth of civil liberties in World War I (8). This is followed by the New Deal and the corruption of freedom it involved (9) as well as the author’s views of the freedoms for which America fought World War II (10). This is followed by discussions of Cold War freedom (11) and its limitations, the anarchical and decadent nature of sixties freedom (12), and the laudable but incomplete conservative freedom that followed (13). The book ends with notes, acknowledgements, and an index.