Okay, so today we're talking about the 1920s, domestic and international and I've got some material I'd like to go over that is in the text that I'd like to elaborate on and some material that's not.
I'd also like to note I shouldn't be recording this on the permanent recording but it can't be helped that we'll take a shorter break today and come right back and start our discussion early so that I can go slightly early today, maybe 10 minutes early and race out of here
I have to get to Dawsonville, Georgia just three hours away and then I lose an hour because of the time zone difference to speak tonight so I have to get it before the traffic gets bad I have to get out here so we'll make up for it by just having a shorter break just everybody rush to the restroom or rush to get the coffee that I guess is not in here all right but any any event in the 20s were inevitably brought face to face with presidents Harding and Coolidge and historians feeling
And I have a little commentary about that at the beginning of my chapter on the 20s,
that we always get these polls of historians that presume to tell us who the great presidents were,
and then they try to rank the presidents in order of their greatness, and then we're all supposed to accept that.
And so every so often the American public has to endure another one of these polls of professional historians.
This practice began in 1948 with Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., who polled 55 historians and published the results in Life Magazine, and then 14 years later he did the same thing for the New York Times Magazine.
Then his son, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., published yet another one of these polls in 1996, and then numerous other such polls have appeared.
Polls have appeared. C-SPAN did such a poll, The Wall Street Journal did one last year, and it just goes on and on.
Well, who comes out on top in these polls? And as I say, the occasion for bringing this up is the low ranking that the presidents we're talking about today consistently received.
Well, the top three, you could probably guess, are George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Those are always the top three in these polls.
Also toward the top in these polls are these three, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Woodrow Wilson.
So the great presidents are George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The so-called near great presidents would include at least TR, Harry Truman and Wilson.
Well, it's not surprising given that we know what the politics of most historians are,
The great historians are that presidents who strengthen the Federal Government, either through new domestic initiatives or through war, typically find themselves exalted as great, whereas those who exercise their power more modestly are relegated to the designation of average or worse.
Woodrow Wilson once said that the president, quote, is at liberty both in law and conscience to be as big a man as he can, unquote.
Well, if he accepts this invitation, that president can expect to be richly rewarded by our court historians.
Now, there was a time in American history when a powerful presidency was viewed with suspicion rather than held up as an ideal.
And I'd like to quote here, if I may, the founder and president of this very institute, Lew Rockwell,
who describes the older view of the president this way.
He says the President is mostly a figurehead and a symbol, almost invisible to myself and my community.
He has no public wealth at his disposal. He administers no regulatory departments.
He cannot tax us, send our children into foreign wars, pass out welfare to the rich or the poor,
appoint judges to take away our rights to self-government,
control a central bank that inflates the money supply and brings on the business cycle,
or change the laws willy-nilly according to the special interests he likes or seeks to punish.
Likewise, elections and election campaigns were not the be-all and end-all of American liberty.
And again, Lew Rockwell says, for those who do not vote and do not care about politics, in the old view,
their liberty is secure. They have no access to special rights,
yet their rights to person, property and self-government are never in doubt.
For that reason and for all practical purposes, they can forget about the President
And for that matter, the rest of the Federal Government might as well not exist.
People do not pay direct taxes to it. It doesn't tell them how to conduct their lives.
It doesn't send them to foreign wars, regulate their schools, pay their retirement,
much less employ them to spy on their fellow citizens.
The government is almost invisible.
Well, Alexis de Tocqueville, who was the 19th century's most perceptive foreign observer of the United States, observed in the 1830s,
In some countries, a power exists which, though it is in a degree foreign to the social body,
directs it and forces it to pursue a certain track.
In others, the ruling force is divided, being partly within and partly without the ranks of the people.
But nothing of the kind is to be seen in the United States.
There, society governs itself for itself.
The president has but little power, little wealth and little glory to share among his friends.
and his influence in the state is too small for the success or ruin of a
faction to depend upon his elevation to power.
Well, that doesn't sound like the presidency today, needless to say, but that was how
the presidency was viewed in those days, early 19th century.
Bob Higgs, one of the great economic historians we have living,
said this, the people who ratified the original constitution never intended the
presidency to be a powerful office,
Spawning, quote, great men. Article 2, sections 2 to 4, which enumerate the powers of the President,
comprise but four paragraphs, most of which deal with appointments and minor duties.
Well, in the 20th century, this minor position was transformed into a larger-than-life office
whose occupant is expected to exude vision, leadership and greatness.
Well, this view of the President is what we would expect to hear in Mussolini's Italy
or in any fascist regime where the leader, capital L, is expected to exert bold leadership on behalf of the people.
Now you may consider this to be a cheap shot, but I mention in this context that Adolf Hitler once told a New York Times correspondent,
I have sympathy for Mr. Franklin Roosevelt because he marches straight toward his objectives over Congress, lobbies and bureaucracy.
Hitler later described himself as the only European leader who expressed
understanding of the methods and motives of President Roosevelt.
The one idea that is absolutely anathema to all such regimes
is that society is capable of running its own affairs
without the paternal custodianship of a great leader and his vision.
Now the historians who were consulted in the rankings,
presidential rankings that tell us which presidents we're supposed to like,
Conceive of the ideal president is a far-seeing demigod, rather than a humble executor of the laws.
Now, Theodore Roosevelt is a president I've written very negatively about in the past.
He's very, very popular among a great many Americans on the left and right, but I've been very critical of him
because I believe he basically was almost single-handedly responsible for putting together this new kind of presidency
Presidency, where the people are taught to have a kind of superstitious reverence for
the occupant of the presidency.
And there he is at number four in C-SPAN's 2000 poll of historians.
That poll ranked the presidents on their, quote, vision, on, quote, setting an agenda.
Other categories included public persuasion, crisis management, economic management, moral
National Authority, International Relations, Administrative Skills, Pursued Equal Justice for All, and so on and on.
Well, there's nothing on there. There's no ranking on how faithful was he to the Constitution or traditional American principles.
And this is the main problem with these polls. They take for granted that there's some objective scientific standard for determining how great a president is.
But, of course, there isn't. To evaluate whether a president is any good or not, you have to have a standard of measurement,
management, philosophical, moral, economic, and constitutional, for instance, what constitutes
good economic management? A Keynesian economist will say one thing and a free market economist
will say another. So how can you, in a non-ideological way, rank the presidents on those grounds?
Or what does equal justice for all mean? Well, that phrase has changed its meaning over time.
Under Andrew Jackson, Andrew Jackson's philosophy of government, we're talking 1830s now, was
It was called Jacksonian democracy and he used the phrase equal rights.
But what Jackson meant by equal rights was that nobody gets anything from the government.
We are equal in the sense that nobody, no big business, no lobbyist, nobody,
is able to use the coercive arm of the state to exploit his fellow man.
That's the sense in which we're equal. Nobody's getting any special privilege.
Whereas today when the phrase equal rights is used,
it nearly always refers to some kind of a grant of special privilege.
Now, Jeff Hummel, who's a professor on the West Coast, has argued that from the point of view of libertarians, many of whom occupy this very building, the greatest president in American history was actually Martin Van Buren.
Well, I'm sure some people perhaps didn't know Martin Van Buren was a president, but elected in 1836, Van Buren had been vice president for a term under, a little over a term under Andrew Jackson.
Another candidate who's been proposed as the greatest president from a libertarian point of view, I've heard William Henry Harrison, only because he died a month after he got in office so he didn't have a chance to do anything bad, so therefore he's the greatest, but Martin Van Buren has been proposed.
And Hummel's argument is that Van Buren was the best president
because he resolutely supported the free market and the Constitution
at a time when every incentive existed for him to do otherwise.
His banking policies introduced what is arguably the greatest banking system,
monetary system the United States has ever had.
He also managed to avoid not one but two unnecessary wars,
One with Mexico and one with Britain, which is a fact of particular significance when
we recall what the founders often said about war and its tendency to undermine free societies.
Now where does poor Van Buren wind up in the presidential polls?
Well he lacked vision, I suppose, but he kept the country at peace and was resolutely committed
to the constitution, come what may.
In 1948 he was number 15 out of 29 presidents.
In 1962, he was 17 out of 31, and in 2005, he was 27 out of 41.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. complained that Van Buren lacked executive energy.
Another historian described Van Buren's inaugural address as,
quote, essentially a charter for inaction.
Well, I hardly need to point out to you that those are bad things
to the official historians who rank our presidents for us.
Now, the consistently low rankings of presidents like Ulysses Grant
are due in part to the corruption associated with their administrations.
Now to a certain degree that's all well and good.
But what is the Teapot Dome scandal compared to Woodrow Wilson's catastrophic decision
in the face of strong popular opposition to involve the United States in World War I?
A horrific conflict.
At the very least, Wilson's decision, it has been argued,
paved the way for the ultra-nationalistic policies of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
Well, this brings us to the 20s and Harding and Coolidge, because what we'll find is, although they did do more domestically than
The fact is that they were, by 20th century standards, relatively inactive and therefore were supposed to hate them and rank them low, but again, that's an ideological judgment.
If you want to decide which are the best presidents, you have to decide that on the basis of your own views and what these people did when they were in office and whether or not they conformed to your views.
Well, there's a lot of scandal-mongering we could talk about with Harding.
Official scandals and personal scandals, but I hate to be a scandal-monger.
You know, the guy's dead now. I mean, as it is, I already condemned him in the book.
So let's not dwell on that too long.
It is interesting to know that on two occasions when he confronted people
who had been engaged in corrupt behavior under his presidency,
People went and committed suicide after confrontations with Harding so apparently he could be quite rough on people apparently.
But what I want to point out and focus on instead is what in fact he did, what he did do economically.
So I want to focus on the tax policies of the 20s because they are worth revisiting.
I mean it seems like nothing could be less relevant than the tax policies of the 20s.
But let's remember that during World War I, the top income tax rate had been increased from 7% to 73%.
Now, I've got students in an online course that I teach, and they're always flattering themselves about how wise they all are.
They were saying at one point, well, we know that in our country, we would never tolerate tax rates of 50 or 60%.
I said, not only would you, but you did for many years in American history that rates were very, very high.
I gave the example of in Britain, the top rate at one point was 95% and that's a democracy.
95% was the top rate, which is why in the song Tax Man, George Harrison says of the tax man, he's putting himself in his shoes,
there's one for you, 19 for me. That's a 95% rate.
In the 20s, as I suggested last time, as tends to happen in emergencies, they never quite come down to the level where they were before the emergency.
They never come back down to seven. That will never happen again. I can say with absolute certainty that never in my lifetime will the top rate ever be seven percent again.
But it did come down substantially in the 20s, and why is that? It has a lot to do with the fact that the rate of emergency is very high.
Ever in my lifetime will the top rate ever be 7% again, but it did come down substantially
in the 20s, and why is that?
It has a lot to do with Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, because he was noting that
we had more and more millionaires in America, you had a lot of wealthy people, but yet you
didn't have a lot of investment going on, not a lot of business activity.
It seemed to be, it seemed not to make sense.
Why should that be?
Why do we see people doing well, but yet we don't see enough business expansion going
on?
He concluded that the tax rates were too high, that if I start out something and I succeed then I get to keep 27 cents on the dollar and 73 will be taken away.
If I fail, I lose the whole dollar. Well, who in his right mind would consider those to be good odds?
So Mellon was of the opinion that the tax rates were so high they were actually stifling business activity,
that what individuals were typically doing was instead of using their funds to open up businesses and get people working,
working, they were taking their money and putting it in state and local municipal bonds because they were non-taxable.
So states and localities were awash with cash for they had enough baseball stadiums to last them 80 years.
They didn't know what to do with all the money.
But meanwhile, the private sector was starved for capital, so what could be done?
So Mellon believed that if the rate were lowered, people would be more willing to expose their income to taxation than they are now.
Now they only get 27 cents on the dollar, there's no point in doing it.
But if we make their reward greater, if we lower the rate,
then it's worth taking your money and putting it into a business venture.
So that was his proposal, that was in fact what was happening.
Now this may sound a little familiar, if it sounds familiar to you,
it may sound like something out of the Reagan years.
It worked better in the 20s than it did in the Reagan years,
but basically what's being proposed here is an anticipation of something called the Laffer curve
The Laffer Curve, in the late 1970s, an economist named Arthur Laffer, L-A-F-F-E-R, proposed this relationship,
and really what Andrew Mellon, the Secretary of the Treasury in the 20s, is doing is anticipating this relationship.
Laffer, in the 70s, proposed a graph. Let's see if we can get one that is a little darker than that.
And those of you who are listening in, I'm sure you can see a copy of this graph if you just do a Google search,
put in quotation marks Arthur Laffer, this will come right up, he says let's imagine a graph here where we've got, we've got on the x-axis we've got the tax rate and on the y-axis we have revenue and Laffer said well suppose the tax rate is 0 obviously the government will collect 0 in revenue so the point 0, 0 is plotted on this and suppose the tax rate is 100% that for every additional dollar above a certain amount you have to pay 100%
Well, in effect, the government will also get zero revenue there, because people would just stop working, or they would work under the table, or they'd engage in fraud, or they'd shelter their income, whatever necessary.
But unless people say, oh, I'd love to be a slave, take all my money away, no one's really going to do that.
So, in effect, the amount of revenue the government would get under a hundred percent rate is so negligible that it may as well be zero.
So he says these are the only two points of this graph that we know with any certainty.
with any certainty. We can't plot anything else with any certainty.
But he proposed that if we were to connect these two points, we would wind up with a graph that looked perhaps something like this.
Where for a while, the higher the tax rate becomes, the more revenue the government collects sensibly enough.
But eventually as you approach 100%, some of the disincentive effects here of 100% rate begin to come into play.
and people begin to withdraw their money, or as I say, put it in tax shelters, whatever.
You start getting that, start getting the perverse effect, the rate goes up, but yet revenue starts going down.
So he proposed that, let's imagine this as the peak point.
He says that this here is what is called the prohibitive range, that even from the government's own point of view,
you wouldn't want to tax in this range because you're actually getting lower and lower and lower revenue here.
You wouldn't want to tax up to this point.
You'd want to tax somewhere around here.
So that's what Laffer is suggesting.
Now, he was probably suggesting something that looked a little more like this.
So there's a bigger prohibitive range.
Now, as I say, he doesn't quite know where that is.
And in the Reagan years, there were a lot of promises that taxes are so high right now
that if we lower the rates, there'll be so much business activity encouraged
that the tax cuts will pay for themselves because there'll be so much new business revenue
coming in with people opening new businesses and stuff and I think it was like 17 to 20 percent was made up but the tax cuts didn't pay for themselves in the 80s and then all the people who proposed this later said we never said it would pay for itself, we said it would slightly pay for itself.
Well, I don't know, maybe they turned the microphone off when they said slightly but in the 1920s they did pay for themselves.
The rates were so high that they were actually punishing and discouraging business activity, so that in fact you did get more government revenue when over the course of the 20s the top rate was reduced from 73 to 40 and then later from 40 to 25 percent.
You did get more government revenue. You actually got the national debt, not the deficit, the debt reduced by a third in the 20s.
in the 20s. So this had tremendous consequences, and that's an important thing that Mellon has to show for himself.
Now this is significant, and I think that although next time when we talk about the Depression,
we're going to see some of the aspects of the 1920s economy that were unhealthy and not sustainable,
I think it's safe to say that some of these tax rate reductions were responsible for some of the 20s prosperity,
And I cite the fact that in 1926, the unemployment rate reached an unbelievable 1%, which is just unthinkable given that there are always some people who are in and out of work and yet it was only 1%.
The United States became, in the 20s, solidified its position as a great economic power so that total world production, its share of total world production was 34%.
So, that's an astonishing figure. The next closest country in share of total world production was basically tied with Britain and Germany, and they had with each 10%.
So, it's an extraordinary achievement. And so, no, you know, they didn't, they weren't as interesting and exciting as Teddy Roosevelt.
They didn't go on safaris or anything like that. But, well, you know, the country was prosperous and for the most part at peace.
Peace. So, you know, it seems that probably in some ranking that would account for
something. Now the second and last aspect I want to, I guess this is third, the
first part was ranking the presidents and why that's difficult to do. The second
part is this domestic stuff. The third part is just a brief thing about foreign
policy because it's often said that in the 1920s the United States became
isolationist, okay, and that that was a bad thing. That's actually not
This is not true and most historians now are not really saying that anymore.
First of all, the term isolationist is a ridiculous word that was invented to smear people.
It does not shed light on anything. I have never known anybody who was an actual isolationist
or just thought that we should just block our ears and everybody just sit in the corner
and not have any interaction whatsoever with the rest of the world.
To the contrary, isolation is typically somebody who just favors neutrality and foreign policy.
It's nothing weird about it, it's all it means.
Now the reason I think some people have believed
that the country became isolationist in the 20s
is, I think it's two reasons.
One is that it certainly was not as involved
in world affairs as it is today.
So by that standard, yes, it did retreat somewhat,
but maybe that's not a reasonable standard of measurement.
But the second thing is that there are a couple of things
that the U.S. government did that did have
a kind of isolationist flavor to them.
The first one was an increase in protective tariffs in the 20s.
Tariff rates went up substantially, and in a way you could say that's sort of an isolationist thing.
You're cutting yourself off from international trade when you do that, so arguably that was somewhat isolationist.
And the reductions in immigration that occurred in the 20s have been argued as evidence of isolationism.
Immigration was restricted to 150,000 people per year, which by international standards is still fairly generous.
This is supposedly the meanest, angriest, wickedest decade of all in immigration.
You're still talking about 150,000 per year, which is about 150,000 more immigrants than, say, Japan admits to this day.
But those are the arguments there.
But beyond that, you don't see isolationism.
You see internationalism, for better or worse.
I'm not endorsing or knocking any of the things I'm about to disclose to you,
but just telling you that the myth of isolationism in the 20s does not hold.
So, for instance, the Washington Naval Conference, which was held in 1921 to 1922, brought together
the major naval powers of the world, which would be the U.S. and Britain and France and
Japan and Italy, and they reached agreements on the limitation of armaments.
Now, this conference had real consequences.
The major powers actually blew up some of their largest ships that were called capital
and it was based on a kind of a Wilsonian idea that large stocks of armaments tend to lead to war and so therefore disarmament was a key to peace.
So that actually occurred. Now the United States led that and it occurred in the United States.
So it doesn't seem like something that an isolationist country would do, leading an international disarmament campaign.
Of course this is a time when air power is beginning to be more important in wars and of course the Washington Naval Conference doesn't deal with air power.
The United States also joined what were called the Four Power Pact and the Nine Power Pact.
The Four Power Pact, which consisted of the U.S., Britain, France and Japan, urged signatories
to consult with each other on matters pertaining to security in the Pacific, because all of
those powers had Pacific possessions, the United States had the Philippines for example.
The Nine Power Pact consisted of these four, along with China and four other European countries,
aimed at securing what was called the open door in China, in other words, ensuring that
trade with China would be open and free to all nations and would not be characterized
by exclusive privileges for one country that a lot of countries had sometimes tried to
acquire in defiance of the weak and frustrated Chinese government.
So these are two examples of a pact in which the United States enters in which it agrees
to engage in consultation with other powers.
Now isolationism means you don't give a darn what other powers have to say.
So again these tend to overturn that myth.
But that's sort of international diplomacy or politics but in international economic
policy the United States was also internationalist.
Some of you may know in 1923 Germany experienced one of the most destructive bouts of monetary
monetary inflation in history, monetary inflation so bad that there's a special word for it
called hyperinflation, that the inflation is so bad that the currency unit collapses
all together, that people would go to a bar and order two beers at once, because if they
drink one and then order another one, the price will have doubled by the time they order
a second one. I mean, that's how fast it's going. As soon as you get paid, you have to
in fact, workers were getting paid twice a day, because they'd get paid one time, then
You've got to throw, just whatever, buy anything, buy anything with it, but just get it off your hands and it just sort of leads to a vicious circle.
Everybody's got to get rid of it. People panic that it's going to be worth less and less and less.
There's a story of somebody, this may be an apocryphal story, but had a wheelbarrow full of German marks to go out shopping and just set it down to look in a shop window to see if there's anything worth buying.
and then turned around and found that the money was still there
but somebody had made off with the wheelbarrow.
There's no point in trying to run off with this money.
It's not worth anything.
There are photographs of children who are gluing the worthless marks together
to fly them as kites or putting them together as blocks
and making pyramids out of them.
People burning the currency to keep warm.
It was a complete disaster.
The German government had been recklessly inflating its currency
in order to make its reparations payments in inflated and therefore less valuable currency.
But the strategy spun out of control and led to this hyperinflation.
At the height of this hyperinflation, it took over 4 trillion German marks to equal one American dollar.
So, in one of the government business partnerships that was increasingly common in the 20s,
It was banker Charles Dawes who, encouraged by the White House, put together a reconstruction plan for Germany called the Dawes Plan.
Dawes established a new payment schedule in line with Germany's ability to pay.
He developed a plan to put German currency on a more stable footing and managed to raise $110 million in emergency loans that were issued by private bankers, not the US government,
in order to see the German government through the crisis.
Dawes was also able to secure French withdrawal from the Ruhr,
which was a resource-rich industrial area of Western Germany
that the French had occupied in 1923 out of frustration
with half-hearted German compliance with reparations payments.
So again, that's not something that an isolationist power engages in.
Dawes ended up winning the Nobel Peace Prize for that
and became the Vice President in 1924.
Now then in 1928 we have something called the Kellogg-Briand Pact, some of you may know about, signed by dozens of countries, and this was an international initiative, a lot of pacifists were involved in it, and the purpose of it was to try to outlaw war as an instrument of policy, and it declared aggressive war to be illegal.
Well, you know, all right, nothing is easier than to ridicule this document.
I mean, how are you going to enforce war being illegal?
I mean, obviously you have to go to war.
That would be okay because they're only declaring aggressive war to be illegal.
If somebody engaged in aggressive war, you could still go stop them.
But the thing is that no aggressor who engages in aggressive war ever says,
I'm an aggressor, engaged in aggressive war.
They always claim they're acting in self-defense or they're liberators or whatever.
and there was no enforcement mechanism, but whether we think this was a valuable document or a silly document or naive or whatever, the point is that an isolationist country unconcerned with world affairs would not have spearheaded an international campaign on behalf of an initiative like this.
In the culture, culturally we see an internationalist sort of spirit.
The United States never joined the League of Nations, as I'm sure you know,
but it did take part in certain League activities and joined a number of League committees.
There was a League of Nations Committee on Intellectual Cooperation.
This League on Intellectual Cooperation was formed because intellectuals,
intellectuals, thinkers and journalists and writers were oftentimes ashamed of the way they had acted during World War I.
They had just been shills for their governments. They had repeated obviously false propaganda.
They had demonized the enemy as being subhuman. And then they looked and thought, gee, we're the intellectuals.
You know, we're the ones who are supposed to be above all this. And we got right down in the muck as well.
And so a lot of intellectuals wanted to form an international group like this,
The League's Committee on Intellectual Cooperation to foster international scholarly communication,
to hold international conferences on various subjects.
So this League Committee looks to try to bring about, for example, things like textbook revision,
that if there's a French textbook that says, you know, all the Germans are barbarians,
well we should probably not do that if we want to foster international understanding.
So there was that type of thing. Or it encouraged countries to learn to institute things like
Like the study of the history and languages of, in the United States for instance, Russia,
China and Japan.
Now you had official, at the college level, you had departments teaching the languages
and cultures of these places on the understanding that the more we know about the countries
of the world, the more we understand them, the less likely there will be misunderstandings
that lead to war.
So that was the internationalist spirit behind this.
It wasn't just a coincidence that these academic departments got started, the thinking was
The more we know about other cultures, the more we will encourage peace.
It was also during the 1920s that the Student Exchange Program got started,
which is now, it's a familiar staple of American education.
In my own high school we had a Swedish guy named Johan,
and he was sort of, you know, slightly, a little slightly clueless, you know,
and so it was kind of cute to watch him try to cope with American life and culture.
But the idea of the program was that to know them is to love them.
You get to know some guy from Sweden, well you're less likely to go to war with Sweden.
Well I guess in that sense it's worked, right? We've had complete nothing but peace with Sweden over the years,
but the idea was that Americans would go study here, and foreigners would go study other places,
again fostering international understanding.
And in fact we have an addition to that, that in the 20s there was a tremendous bout of what became known as revisionist history.
Now this term revisionist history has been used so many times that it almost loses all meaning.
I've had people come up to me and say your book is great, meaning the one that you folks have.
Your book is great because it goes after the revisionist historians.
And I've had other people say your book is great, it's a great work of revisionist history.
So people don't know if I'm attacking revisionism, if I am a revisionist.
Well there isn't a fixed or stable meaning of what the term means.
A revisionist simply is somebody who looks at the received version of history
and then goes back and reexamines it to see if it actually is true
or whether it's propaganda, and particularly revisionism, for example, revisionism after World War I would go back and look at some of the claims made by the victors and say that did some of these things really happen, did these atrocities that were claimed really happen, or was Germany as the peace treaty claimed, was Germany really exclusively responsible for the outbreak of the war, I mean does Russia bear no responsibility, does France bear no responsibility, is that really true?
And the thinking oftentimes among revisionists who are engaged in their work not only after wars, but a lot of times after wars, is that sometimes wartime is not the best moment to make impartial judgments.
Nobody's impartial during a war. You've got to go after the enemy. Who's going to be impartial during those years?
But now when passions have cooled, we've got to go back and re-evaluate all these claims we made and all the bogus history we wrote, and we've got to look at the documents and see what they tell us.
and that's what they tell us and in the 20s you already began to see revisionist looks at history like Sydney Fay was writing articles in major historical journals arguing that Germany was not exclusively responsible for the outbreak of the war.
Later on you had Harry Elmer Barnes writing that in fact Germany was perhaps the least responsible for the outbreak of the war.
Now this is all debatable but the point is the fact that these debates were occurring is an example of revisionism and whether you support revisionism or not
The point is they thought of themselves as internationalists.
What motivated them was the idea that you cannot foster international understanding on the basis of myths.
And if we're led to believe that World War I was caused solely by some wicked devils in Germany
and that none of us bore any responsibility, well, this is no way to base international peace,
to demonize one group who are going to resent that forever.
We have to look at everything impartially and then make our judgments on that basis.
So those are, I think, some examples of an internationalist spirit at work in the 20s.