Lipstadt is not an expert on Harry Elmer Barnes - a much better biographical source is Harry Elmer Barnes: Learned Crusader Issues. For America's entry into World War II was the crucial act in expanding the United States from a republic into an empire, and in spreading that empire throughout the world, replacing the sagging British Empire in the process.Our entry into World War II was the crucial act in foisting a permanent militarization upon the economy and society, in bringing to the country a permanent garrison state, an overweening military-industrial complex, a permanent system of conscription. During the 1930s, Harry Barnes was acclaimed by scholars and laymen as one of the foremost intellectual leaders of his time. BIOGRAPHY. The paternity is clear.It is this much-needed stripping away of the last remaining good-war and good-war-president myth that Harry Elmer Barnes accomplishes in his final article. Auguste Comte, French philosopher known as the founder of sociology and of positivism. Aren't we merely pursuing an antiquarian interest when we examine in such detail what happened over a quarter-century ago?
He believed, properly but increasingly alone, that it was the ultimate function of the vast and growing scholarly apparatus to bring about a better life for mankind; that the ultimate function of the scholarly disciplines is to aid in carving out an ethics for mankind and then to help put such ethics into practice.
We have been delighted and honored that Harry chose the pages of Some readers might ask: why?
That was to be his great burden during the remaining years of his life, but that was also to be his undying glory.For two decades after World War II, liberal scholars and intellectuals led the way in the great "consensus" celebration of what America had become. In the minds of anti-Revisionists, the term savors of malice, vindictiveness, and an unholy desire to smear the saviors of mankind. Harry Elmer Barnes (June 15, 1889 – August 25, 1968) was an American historian. Barnes, Harry Elmer. As devoted as he was to the discipline of history throughout his lifetime, he was just as devoted to putting its lessons to the service of man. In a field of accelerating narrowness and specialization where the expert on France in the 1830s is likely to know next to nothing about what happened to France in the 1840s, Harry Barnes ranged over the entire field of historical study and vision.He was the Complete Historian; and it was the historical approach that informed his work in all the other social science disciplines in which he was so remarkably productive: sociology, criminology, religion, economics, current affairs, and social thought. He refused, like so many of his friends who knew better and had less to lose, to take the safer and more opportune course. He stood foursquare against the drive to war, and for his pains was summarily removed from his post as columnist by Roy Howard, who again knew better but felt that he had to bow to the intense pressure of interventionist advertisers against Harry Barnes. Singlehanded, he virtually created a new revisionism. And, finally, World War II is the last war myth left, the myth that the Old Left clings to in pure desperation: the myth that here, at least, was a good war, here was a war in which America was in the right.World War II is the war thrown into our faces by the war-making establishment, as it tries, in each war that we face, to wrap itself in the mantle of good and righteous World War II.
Lyndon B. Johnson is absolutely correct when he refers to FDR as his "Big Daddy." His was the opposite attitude from the detached irony of his friend Carl Becker. Jacrosse, you are right - I have also not been using Talk, and people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, so lets start now. He was the last, for example, of that stratum of rural Protestant boys who shed their religion at college and went on to constitute almost the entire founding generation of American scholars and university teachers. degree summa cum laude in 1913 and his a.m. degree in 1914, both from Syracuse University, and his ph.d. in 1918 from Columbia. Inevitably, then, these friendships were often stormy; and I don't believe there was any friend with whom Harry did not, at one time or other, break or almost break relations. It is because of its enthusiasm for World War II and its leader, Franklin D. Roosevelt, that the Old Left has never been able to understand the straight and true line that leads from the New Deal and Franklin D. Roosevelt which they adore, to the Great Society and Lyndon Johnson which they despise. He was a major figure in developing the school of history writing known as "revisionism,” that is, the critical, scholarly examination of official or orthodox history, especially of the origins and consequences of the two world wars. DIGG THIS This article originally appeared in the final issue of Left & Right.
For example, he helped For a critical assessment of his life, see: Justus D. Doenecke, “Harry Elmer Barnes,” Harry Elmer Barnes (1889-1968), American historian and sociologist, was one of the 20th century's most influential scholars. But now he was virtually alone, scorned by historians and laymen alike. Forthcoming soon, it will be entitled Characteristically.