By Jason Livingood

John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr's In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003) shows how some historians evade history.

At a luncheon presentation on September 25th, Haynes told Accuracy in Media that at this time, "silliness is acceptable in the academic world if it is useful to presenting a benign view of American Communism."

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, historians soon gained access to the Soviet governmental archives. Along with massive amounts of other data, these records proved the validity of the Venona translations of the cables Soviet spies sent to their agents. In total, the Soviet archives have provided overwhelming data and support to the traditionalist interpretation of history. Yet according to Haynes, most historians (namely the revisionists) have not reacted to the overwhelming evidence from the archives in a scholarly manner.

Haynes and Klehr principally wrote In Denial in order to spark debate within the historical community over what they see as an "intellectually sick" situation. There is a professorial position at Bard College with the title, "Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies." Spying on one's own country is justified by renaming it, as Victor Navasky did, "exchanges of information among people of good will."

For the authors, the situation of current scholarship would not be nearly as depressing as it is presently were it not for the way prominent revisionists wield their power over those who come to even moderately traditionalist conclusions. Haynes and Klehr point out that, in the past thirty years, not one article that could reasonably be deemed traditionalist has been published in either the Journal of American History or the American Historical Review, the two most prestigious journals of American history.

Moreover, Haynes believes that the greatest problem in the current system is not the tenure system, but rather that the "American historical establishment tolerates shoddy scholarship." For example, the prominent revisionist historian Ellen Schrecker blames anticommunism for, among other things: inefficient government, lack of national health insurance, poor foreign policy, bad Hollywood movies and television, and slow progress in the natural sciences.

Since the early 1970's there have existed two competing and diametrically opposed points of view on the American Communist movement, the "traditionalist" and the "revisionist." The traditionalist view saw the American Communist Party both as strongly antidemocratic and as owing its loyalty first and foremost to the Soviet Union, while the revisionist position, as Haynes and Klehr put it, "took a benign view of communism, arguing that Marxism-Leninism embodied the most idealistic dreams of mankind and that American Communists were among the most heroic fighters for social justice in their nation's history." While revisionists demonized the anticommunist cause, traditionalists tended to see it in a much more favorable light.

Traditionalists urge the recognition that there were, indeed, a substantial number of Soviet spies in the United States in that era, and that the anticommunist movement was at least partially responsible for limiting the effectiveness of Soviet espionage. Most revisionists, on the other hand, have a much less nuanced view of anticommunism. Some even go as far as declaring anticommunism to be the force responsible for most everything wrong with the world today.

Haynes and Klehr acknowledge that there are some revisionist historians, like Maurice Isserman, who actually responded to the new evidence as scholars, by readjusting their theories in accordance with the facts. But as the pair write, "Far too many [revisionists], however, either remain in denial or, at this late date, shift to putting forward justifications for American Communists' betrayal of the United States." Some revisionists have chosen merely to ignore the evidence's existence. For example, Columbia University Professor Eric Foner, who has previously served as president of both the American Historical Association and Organization of American Historians, continues to this day to deny the Rosenbergs' guilt.

Haynes and Klehr describe the current state of the historical community with the following:

There is no self-examination, reflection and admission of error among most revisionist historians about what in their historical interpretative framework led them to such horribly wrong conclusions on these matters. The truth they prefer not to confront is that too many of them regarded these historical questions as matters of ideology, not matters of fact. Even when it turns out that they got the facts wrong, they are still convinced that they got the ideology right, which makes for the unresolved intellectual muddle in which they find themselves.