Poetry

Foner seeks in this collection to deal with the relationship of the historian to the world in which he lives, and he acknowledges that “the context within which a historian lives and writes affects [his] choice of subject and approach to the past.” He therefore begins the collection with a new essay he titles “My Life as a Historian,” in which he seeks to put his own work in the context of his political and personal life. The essay is, indeed, revealing, but perhaps not in the way Foner hoped. He begins with a little anecdote he obviously thinks is cute, but which fully exposes the mindset from which he approaches his intellectual task. He writes that a friend “who grew up in Communist Hungary” once remarked to him: “I was raised in a country where we understood that most of what the government says is untrue.” And Foner replied: “That’s funny … I grew up in the same country.” We know, therefore, that in Foner’s eyes, the United States is as unfree and oppressive as the totalitarian regimes foisted upon Eastern Europe by Stalin at the end of World War II.

Foner, as he reveals, was a bona fide red-diaper baby. His father, he relates, lost his job teaching history at City College of New York after a state legislative committee held hearings about the influence of Communists in higher education. (He does not mention that the hearings coincided with the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, when Foner’s father was touting the party line that FDR and Britain—not Hitler and the Nazis— were the real enemy.) Ironically, the historian hired to replace him was none other than the young Richard Hofstadter, who, years later, became Foner’s mentor at Columbia University’s graduate school, and whose position at Columbia Foner now holds.

Foner seeks in this collection to deal with the relationship of the historian to the world in which he lives, and he acknowledges that “the context within which a historian lives and writes affects [his] choice of subject and approach to the past.” He therefore begins the collection with a new essay he titles “My Life as a Historian,” in which he seeks to put his own work in the context of his political and personal life. The essay is, indeed, revealing, but perhaps not in the way Foner hoped. He begins with a little anecdote he obviously thinks is cute, but which fully exposes the mindset from which he approaches his intellectual task. He writes that a friend “who grew up in Communist Hungary” once remarked to him: “I was raised in a country where we understood that most of what the government says is untrue.” And Foner replied: “That’s funny … I grew up in the same country.” We know, therefore, that in Foner’s eyes, the United States is as unfree and oppressive as the totalitarian regimes foisted upon Eastern Europe by Stalin at the end of World War II.

Foner, as he reveals, was a bona fide red-diaper baby. His father, he relates, lost his job teaching history at City College of New York after a state legislative committee held hearings about the influence of Communists in higher education. (He does not mention that the hearings coincided with the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, when Foner’s father was touting the party line that FDR and Britain—not Hitler and the Nazis— were the real enemy.) Ironically, the historian hired to replace him was none other than the young Richard Hofstadter, who, years later, became Foner’s mentor at Columbia University’s graduate school, and whose position at Columbia Foner now holds.