It is also crucial to understand that this is not an arcane controversy. The past and, more important, our perception of it have a powerful impact on the way we respond to contemporary problems. Deniers are well aware of history’s significance. Not by chance did Harry Elmer Barnes believe that history could serve as a “means for a deliberate and conscious instrument of social transformation.”89 History matters. Whether the focus be the Middle East, Vietnam, the Balkans, the Cold War, or slavery in this country, the public’s perception of past events and their meaning has a tremendous influence on how it views and responds to the present. Adolf Hitler’s rise to power was facilitated by the artful way in which he advanced views of recent German history that appealed to the masses. It did not matter if his was a distorted version—it appealed to the German people because it laid the blame for their current problems elsewhere. Although history will always be at a disadvantage when contending with the mythic power of irrational prejudices, it must contend nonetheless.
I was reminded of the potency of history when, on the eve of the Louisiana gubernatorial election in 1991, one of David Duke’s followers remarked in a television interview that there was all this talk about Duke’s past views on Jews and blacks and his Ku Klux Klan activities. That, the follower observed, was the past; what relevance he wondered, did it have for this election? The answer was obvious: His past had everything to do with his quest for election; it shaped who he was and who he remained. It has never been more clearly illustrated that history matters. (Neither was it pure happenstance that the late Paul de Man, one of the founders of deconstructionism, also falsified his past and reworked his personal history.90)
And if history matters, its practitioners matter even more. The historian’s role has been compared to that of the canary in the coal mine whose death warned the miners that dangerous fumes were in the air—“any poisonous nonsense and the canary expires.”91 There is much poisonous nonsense in the atmosphere these days. The deniers hope to achieve their goals by winning recognition as a legitimate scholarly cadre and by planting seeds of doubt in the younger generation. Only by recognizing the threat denial poses to both the past and the future will we ultimately thwart their efforts.
CHAPTER TWO
The Antecedents
History, Conspiracy, and Fantasy
Modern Holocaust denial draws inspiration from a variety of sources. Among them are a legitimate historical tradition that was highly critical of government policies and believed that history was being used to justify those policies; an age-old nexus of conspiratorial scenarios that place a neat coherence on widely diverse developments; and hyperbolic critiques of government policies which, despite an initial connection to reality, became so extreme as to assume a quality of fantasy. The aforementioned historical tradition was taken over and co-opted by the Holocaust deniers. In the other two cases, denial was their logical successor.
The deniers consider themselves heirs of a group of influential American historians who were deeply disturbed by American involvement in World War I. These respected scholars, who called themselves revisionists, would have been appalled to learn of the purposes to which their arguments were put. In contrast to the Holocaust deniers, who make no distinction between fact and fiction, the World War I revisionists engaged in serious research and relied upon established canons of evidence. Despite these differences, deniers have tried to link the two traditions, arguing that each has sought to create an alternative history for major events of the twentieth century. However, one of these schools used traditional historiographic methodology to do so, whereas denial relies on pseudoscience.
The opening salvo in this fight was fired in 1920, when Sidney B. Fay, a professor at Smith College, published a series of articles in the American Historical Review on the origins of World War I. In these articles and in his subsequent book, Fay used archival material released after the war to argue that, contrary to prevailing American opinion, the Germans had not sought to go to war. Americans, Fay protested, had been fed a great deal of “silly propaganda” about who was really responsible for the war.1 He insisted that Germany had neither plotted nor wanted a war and had made real efforts to avoid one. On the eve of World War I, according to Fay, German statesmen were the last leaders in Europe to abandon the quest for peace and mobilize their army, doing so only when all other options had been closed.2
Thus was born American World War I revisionism. One of Fay’s earliest associates in this effort was Harry Elmer Barnes, who in 1923 became his colleague at Smith College. Barnes, a prolific writer and a full professor by the age of thirty, quickly joined the battle. Soon he surpassed Fay and virtually every other revisionist in his vehement criticism of American foreign policy. His relentless attacks on the “orthodox” presentation of the war made him a hero in Germany. In American historical circles, he was infamous for his ad hominem assaults on those whom he believed advocated the traditional historiography of World War I.3 While Barnes played a seminal role in the post-World War I revisionist debate, his importance for us is as the “father” of American Holocaust denial: He became one of Holocaust denial’s earliest proponents and wrote some of the first attacks on the history of the destruction of European Jewry. As we shall see in chapter 5, his method in both contexts was remarkably similar.
Prominent among the other academics who joined Fay and Barnes was Charles A. Beard.4 Beard derisively dismissed the “Sunday-school theory” of the war: namely that Russia, France, and England, “three pure and innocent boys,” were assailed by two villains, Germany and Austria, who had been conspiring to commit “cruel deeds in the dark.”5 Not only did they reject the idea of German responsibility, but they were distressed by the Versailles treaty’s use of the notion of war guilt in order to impose severely punitive conditions on Germany. The revisionists considered Article 231 of the treaty, which held German aggression responsible for imposing a war on the Allies, “historically incorrect and morally unjustifiable.”6
But these revisionists did not just exonerate Germany; they excoriated the Allies, accusing them of behaving duplicitously before and after the war. In their view, the British and French, anxious to lure the United States into the war, prevented it from learning about the very real German desire for peace and the “reasonable and statesmanlike” proposals offered by the Germans in order to avert war.7 France’s aggressive and combative policy repeatedly closed off options for peace. Britain falsely accused Germany of committing horrible atrocities. According to the revisionists, even when World War I ended the Allies continued to behave in a deceptive fashion and refused to consider evidence that contradicted the notion of sole German war guilt.8 The British, French, and American acts of postwar deception were particularly odious to the revisionists because as victors, the Allies knew that Germany was not really guilty. Using their power to keep the truth from emerging, the Allies engaged in a calculated refashioning of fact and forced the dregs of defeat down German throats even though the Germans did not deserve it.
Some of the more extreme revisionists, Barnes prominent among them, specifically castigated President Woodrow Wilson as responsible for the expense, losses, and miseries of the war and for the “arrogant and atrocious policies of France and England.”9 They claimed that Wilson’s initial support of American neutrality was disingenuous. According to their account, Wilson had long been convinced that England could not defeat Germany without American aid. Consequently he decided to enter the war on England’s side as soon as possible and simply waited for the proper provocation to do so.10 World War II revisionists would voice virtually the same arguments about President Roosevelt. They contended that, just like his predecessor Wilson, Roosevelt had long intended for the United States to enter the European fray and was only waiting for the right opportunity to make it happen. According to these critics, both men were less than honest with the American people and both led the United States down a disastrous foreign policy path.
In fact, much of the revisionist argume
nt was historically quite sound. Germany was not solely culpable for the war. The Versailles treaty contained harsh and vindictive elements that placed so onerous a financial burden on Germany as to virtually guarantee the collapse of the Weimar regime. The French did have ulterior motives. The American munitions industry and bankers did benefit greatly from the war. The war did not bring peace to Europe or resolve any of its long-simmering disputes. The revisionist cause was strengthened by the fact that during the war the British propagated all sorts of false horror stories about German atrocities against civilians, including that the Germans used homicidal gas to kill noncombatants, employed babies for target practice, and mutilated Belgian women. The American public, unaware that a hoax was being perpetrated, proved particularly susceptible to these stories.11 (This effort was so successful that an entire industry was born as a result: The field of public relations traces its origins directly to British and, to a lesser degree, American propaganda regarding the war.) Twenty years later, when reports reached Americans about Nazi Germany’s use of gas to kill Jews, the lingering impact of these false atrocity tales was evident. Americans dismissed the second spate of stories as yet another set of tall tales about the Germans. The problem, of course, was that this time the stories were true.
One of the reasons many Americans were intrigued by revisionism and supported the noninterventionism of the interwar period was that although the war had ended in victory, the outcome was far less than had been anticipated. During the war politicians such as Wilson nourished the notion that this was a crusade for democracy, when in fact it was more often a matter of distasteful national interest.12 For many people, including World War I revisionists, these efforts to cast the war in grandoise, hyperbolic terms backfired. They were bitterly disappointed that the war had been neither the democratic crusade nor the war to end all wars Wilson had promised.
Neither did it establish peace among the war-weary peoples of the earth. As the situation in Europe became increasingly volatile in the interwar years, growing numbers of Americans, the revisionists and isolationists foremost among them, became embittered and disillusioned.13 They were convinced that an unsuspecting American public had been duped and that American intervention in the war had been an unmitigated disaster not only for the United States but for the world.14 Their ex post facto attacks were bitter and unwavering. During the interwar period the debate over World War I’s origins provided a framework for the passionate discussion of American foreign policy. The revisionists’ aim was to alter public opinion.15 Revisionism became the prism through which future policies were refracted.16
Harry Elmer Barnes is the only link between these revisionists and Holocaust denial. But the revisionists’ arguments were nonetheless a perfect foil for the deniers. Their contentions about government chicanery, mistreatment of Germany, and atrocity reports and their desire to change public attitudes were too tempting to be ignored. The deniers would hijack this movement and use it for their own purposes.
On both the home and international fronts the interwar period was a turbulent time. Critics of American foreign policy were to be found at all points of the political spectrum.17 On Capitol Hill, liberals, conservatives, and progressives faulted Roosevelt and the direction of his overseas policies.18 In certain quarters there was a conviction that there existed a conspiracy or a series of conspiracies to do America harm. Red scares took on the character of a witch-hunt. A deep-seated xenophobia tinged with significant antisemitism emerged in the United States. As the impact of the depression intensified, there was also a growing sentiment in various quarters that someone—a group, ideology, financial interest—was to blame. The ramifications of these fears could be seen in a variety of arenas.
The passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 was motivated by a desire to limit the number of people not of Anglo-Saxon Protestant background who could enter the country. Opponents of the new type of immigrants charged that they were changing the face of America. Passed when Americans felt financially secure, the act won even stronger support as the economic and international situation deterioriated. The depression fostered a deep distrust of business and banking interests. For many people the culprits responsible for this steadily deteriorating situation were easily identifiable.
In 1935, Sen. Gerald P. Nye (R-ND) convened hearings on the role of shipbuilders, munitions manufacturers, and international bankers in World War I. The premise of the hearings was that it was not only political leaders who bore the blame for getting the country into this war. “Wicked” Wall Street bankers aided and abetted by “sinister” arms merchants were part of an insidious self-enriching effort to lure the United States into the conflagration.19 The Nye committee hearings aroused intense isolationist sentiment in the United States and had profound implications for American foreign policy.20 Though they found no evidence to prove Wall Street responsible for precipitating American involvement, some senators believed the hearings the most effective medium for fostering American isolationism during this period. When Sen. Homer T. Bone (D-WA), a vehement isolationist, observed in 1935 that the war had been “utter social insanity,” and that America had “no business” being in it, his view resonated with millions of people.22
In certain quarters there was little doubt as to the identity of those responsible for the dire situation facing the United States. Roosevelt was accused of pandering to “Jewish interests” with his foreign policy. Sen. Hiram W. Johnson (R-CA), echoing a view harbored by a growing number of antisemites, complained in February 1939 that all the Jews were “on one side, wildly enthusiastic for the President and willing to fight to the last American.” He charged that Jews’ loyalties were to their group and not to their nation. Arrayed against this powerful entity, Johnson continued, were “those of us—a very considerable number who are thinking in terms of our own country, and that alone.” Johnson argued that though Germany’s treatment of its Jewish population was at the heart of the struggle over American policy in Europe, no one was brave enough to say so because they were afraid of “offending the Jews.” He accused Roosevelt, whom he believed had a “dictator complex,” of having found the Jews powerful supporters who vociferously demanded that he provide aid for “their people, who neither live here, nor have anything in common with our country.”23
Father Charles C. Coughlin’s antisemitic diatribes on CBS radio had a nationwide listening audience in the millions, and his journal, Social Justice, reprinted antisemitica that came directly from the propaganda machine of Joseph Goebbels (without, of course, identifying the source). In 1941 Democratic congressman John E. Rankin of Mississippi, a known antisemite, accused “Wall Street and a little group of our international Jewish brethren” of trying to precipitate a war and complained that “white Gentiles” were being persecuted in the United States.24 In 1941 isolationist senators investigated the movie industry’s use of propaganda to “influence public sentiment in the direction of participation by the United States in the present European war.”25 The hearings took on an antisemitic tone because virtually all those named by the investigation were Jewish. Charles A. Lindbergh believed that Jews constituted a separate, distinct, and cohesive unit committed to a policy of interventionism and possessed of the political power to realize their goal.1* His public expression of these views attracted tremendous controversy.26
In the wake of Germany’s absorption of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, even such a respected scholar as Charles Beard attacked two “major pressure groups” for thwarting a realistic American “foreign policy based on geographical position and its democratic ideals.” The two groups were the idealistic internationalists and the “boarders,” ethnic groups and communists whose “hopes and passion are linked with the fate of foreign governments and nationalities.”27
The age-old inclination to find a Jewish conspirator behind a country’s problems was deeply ingrained. Jews had been blamed for poisoning wells, killing Christian children, spreading the Black Plague, and causing famines, earthquakes, and dr
oughts. In twentieth-century America this kind of conspiratorial delusion was given a major boost when Hentry Ford, whose name was synonymous with American ingenuity and industriousness, blamed a Jewish conspiracy for social and economic upheavals. Between 1920 and 1927, Ford’s Dearborn Independent, which had a circulation of 600,000, published the Protocols in English and ran a series of articles accusing Jews of utilizing communism, banking, labor unions, alcohol, gambling, jazz music, newspapers, and the movies to attack and weaken America, its culture and people. The Jews’ objective was to absorb the country into the “All-Judan,” a putative world government. Published in book form, The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem sold over a half a million copies in the United States and was translated into sixteen foreign languages.28
The Protocols were often cited as “evidence” of a Jewish conspiracy. An article in the Chicago Tribune contended that communism was intimately linked to the Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. On the same day that this article appeared, the Christian Science Monitor’s lead editorial, entitled “The Jewish Peril,” argued that the Protocols bore a striking similarity to the conspiracy of the Order of the Illuminati.29 Conspiracy theorists had long identified the Illuminati as Lucifer’s modern successors. They supposedly used reason to undermine religion and the political order and establish world government. Not only were they said to be the force behind the French revolution but they were also held responsible for Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto and facilitated the rise of communism. According to this nexus of conspiratorial delusions, which the Dearborn Independent repeated, Jews, and Jewish bankers in particular, were responsible for the Illuminati’s nefarious deeds. Those who unearthed this conspiracy were able to impose a logical coherence on the seemingly irrational nature of their charges—bankers aiding communists—by arguing that the bankers anticipated that the communists would create a world government that they would then appropriate and control.30
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