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'The Story of American Freedom' by Eric Foner

Freedom wears many hats

Sunday, November 08, 1998

By Bruce Clayton, professor of history at Allegheny College

	The Story of American Freedom By Eric Foner Norton $27.95

In 1855, a noted sculptor was awarded the honor of designing a statue to crown the Capitol dome. The artist proposed a “Statue of Freedom,” a female figure holding a sword and adorned with a cap of liberty.

Sounds innocent enough, right?

Wrong, said Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, a dour Mississippi slave-holder and soon to be the president of the secessionist South. Davis was adamant. He insisted that the “Statue of Freedom” wear an ornate helmet because the liberty cap had in Roman days been regarded as “the badge of the freed slave.”

Davis, like many of his time both North and South, saw no inconsistency between freedom for white males and slavery for blacks. That white women were not allowed to vote or hold political office, or in many places even own property if married, did not trouble Davis’ sleep one bit.

It should have. As Eric Foner, an acclaimed historian shows in his stunning survey of “The Story of American Freedom,” in the “land of the free and the home of the brave” freedom (often called “liberty” or “equality”) is a big stick of dynamite. How big? Americans have been contesting — sometimes with muskets and demonstrations and bunkers and now terrorist bombs — its meaning and proper application since the first settlers stepped ashore.

The flinty Pilgrims came seeking “freedom of worship” — theirs, not anyone else’s. Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers unleashed the revolutionary idea that “all men are created equal” and should enjoy the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Great idea, said antislavery and feminist activists before the Civil War — let’s give liberty to slaves and women.

Jefferson, a true freedom fighter according to Foner, knew in his heart that his words were elastic (Jefferson would have said “universal”). True, he was dead-set against monarchy and was greatly concerned about centralized authority. He worried about “freedom from” big government.

But when later generations talked of “freedom to” — vote, be free of slavery, work in a safe environment, have control over their own bodies, pursue “happiness,” follow something other than the conventional wisdom of the time — the universality of Jefferson’s words bubble and boil.

John Stuart Mill said that the greatest threat to freedom is not government but public opinion. This is Foner’s working assumption. In masterly fashion he shows how public perceptions of freedom have evolved to today. In the late 19th century, Pittsburgh’s Andrew Carnegie and other captains of industry trumpeted “freedom of contract” and laissez-faire government to defend their swashbuckling treatment of competitors and workers, particularly labor unions.

Freedom can be manipulated to make almost anything sound legitimate. Tobacco companies as early as the 1920s were luring young women, who had just won the right to vote, by marketing cigarettes as “torches of freedom.” At the same time, U.S. Sen. David Aiken Reed from Pittsburgh co-wrote the (now) infamous immigration restriction law of 1924, a nativist echo of Ku Klux Klan’s demands that only the freedom of “real Americans” be protected.

In the 1930s, the pendulum swung the other way. According to Foner, President Roosevelt, the New Deal, liberals and Marxist intellectuals gave the country what Abraham Lincoln had said about the Civil War — “a new birth of freedom.”

Labor leaders now had the weight of the federal government behind them. Social Security and relief programs were meant to ensure everyone a modicum of economic freedom.

Some months before America entered World War II, FDR boldly identified America’s role in the great conflagration. We would fight for the “Four Freedoms” — freedom of speech and worship and freedom from want and fear. Conservatives complained about the idea of government protecting anyone from “want,” but neither they nor many liberals uttered a peep when FDR ordered that Japanese-Americans be put in concentration camps.

U.S. Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio (“Mr. Conservative”) and Eleanor Roosevelt fumed and voiced their disgust, but they were, Foner says sadly, among the very few who cared about the nation’s violation of human rights.

The last third of Foner’s fulsome book shows how in post-1945 America, the definition of freedom has been influenced profoundly by capitalism — namely post-war prosperity — and the Cold War.

The “free market” and “consumer freedom” became king and queen at home. And abroad, any country on our side, no matter how autocratic, was part of the “Free World.”

Such “truths” were battered some by 1960s radicalism that looked to the government to make America freer and safer for blacks, Vietnam War dissidents, women and gays. Foner acknowledges that the excesses of that turbulent decade galvanized conservatives who feared that all respect for authority was being lost.

“Yet,” he argues, “because of the Sixties, the United States became a more open, more tolerant — in a word, a freer country.”

Foner’s sympathies are obviously with those who yearn for moral and ethical definitions of freedom. But he understands how powerful “market capitalism” has been (and is) in determining what freedom means — “freedom from” government to do whatever one likes in order to make as much money as possible, and the devil take the hindmost.

But what will happen to traditional values if freedom is nothing more than a cover for naked self-interest or dishonest greed or mere snarling at the government? (The Internet practically sags under the number of antigovernment Web sites.)

Foner the liberal says conservatives need to be reminded that the market economy, whatever its many and lovely benefits, is inherently antitraditional, some would say revolutionary, and always brings change.

In such a world, who is to say who may wear the cap of liberty?

The most recent book by Bruce Clayton, a professor of history at Allegheny College, is “Praying for Base Hits: An American Boyhood.”