[Discussion] historians in trouble

[Paksoy, Hb]

Radical History 
by Harvey Klehr & John Earl Haynes 
  

  
  



In Israel's war of independence in 1948, American Communists were deeply 
involved in the covert shipment of arms to the new state of Israel, and 
Communists were prominent among those Americans wounded or killed in battles

protecting Israel from Arab attack. How do we know this? It says so in a 
standard reference book found in hundreds of American libraries. The 
Encyclopedia of the American Left, published by Oxford University Press, was

selected by Choice and Library Journal as one of the ten best reference 
books published in 1990. It sold so well that a second edition appeared in 
1998. Reference books are expected to summarize the scholarly consensus and 
to present reliable information. In fact these claims about the role of 
American Communists in Israel's founding, made in the second edition, have 
no basis whatsoever in any historical literature. Yet this and other 
distortions in this reference work have gone unchallenged by the historical 
profession. 

This last year has not been good for the reputation of American historians. 
The first exhibit: Joseph Ellis, a professor at Mount Holyoke College, 
winner of a National Book Award for his biography of Thomas Jefferson and 
the Pulitzer Prize for Founding Brothers. The Boston Globe discovered that, 
contrary to what he told his classes and claimed in interviews, Ellis had 
never fought in Vietnam, worked in the civil rights movement in Mississippi,

or even been a high-school football hero. Embarrassed by revelations that 
Ellis had lied to his students, Mount Holyoke after some hesitation 
suspended him for a year without pay and lifted his endowed chair. 

Ellis's classroom transgressions were bad enough, but at least no evidence 
has come forward regarding irregularities in his books and scholarly works. 
But not long after Ellis had been identified as a fantasist, the 
best-selling author and historian Stephen Ambrose was exposed as a 
plagiarist. Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard noted the disturbing 
similarity between passages in The Wild Blue, his popular account of B-29 
combat missions over Europe, and a previously published book, Thomas 
Childers's Wings of Morning. Sleuths quickly unearthed four additional 
Ambrose books with substantial borrowing from other writers dating back to 
1975. Coming just weeks after the considerable success of the World War II 
mini-series "Band of Brothers," based on his book, the charges received 
considerable attention. Ambrose, a former professor at the University of New

Orleans, admitted the unauthorized borrowing, explained that his books are 
researched and written by a team of employees, expressed mild remorse, and 
suggested that the plagiarism issue was something that academics took too 
seriously. His publisher did not seem overly concerned that its best-selling

author repeatedly used other writers' words. 

While journalists were scouring Ambrose's books, another high-profile 
scholar, Doris Kearns Goodwin, came under fire for the same offense. 
Formerly a professor of government at Harvard, the best-selling author of 
The Fitzgeralds and The Kennedys and a Pulitzer Prize winner for No Ordinary

Time about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt still serves on the Board of 
Overseers of Harvard University, an institution that takes student 
plagiarism very seriously. Goodwin confessed to extensive, unattributed, and

improper use of material and to making a private financial settlement to 
Lynne McTaggart, author of a biography of Kathleen Kennedy. Goodwin's 
embarrassment was compounded not only because she was forced to admit to 
additional acts of plagiarism in other books but also because she had 
previously publicly chastised Joe McGinness for improperly borrowing from 
her own work. She attributed the plagiarism to her sloppy note-taking 
methods. Goodwin stepped down from service as a commentator on The NewsHour 
with Jim Lehrer, but, despite calls from The Harvard Crimson for her 
removal, she remains on the Harvard Board. 

The most serious recent charges of academic fraud, however, were leveled at 
the Emory University historian Michael Bellesiles. In 2000, reviewers hailed

his Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture as a major work of

scholarship destined to change the terms of the debate on firearms in 
American life. Bellesiles claimed that he had demonstrated that gun 
ownership was a far less common phenomenon in early American life than had 
been widely assumed, and his publisher advertised the book as a direct 
challenge to the National Rifle Association and its values. In addition to a

glowing front-page review in The New York Times, Arming America was praised 
by academic historians and pundits and received the prestigious Bancroft 
Prize, awarded by Columbia University for the best book in American history.

Within a year, however, disturbing questions about Bellesiles's use of 
sources and data began to emerge. Critics were unable to find not merely 
some of the documents he cited, but some of the document collections he had 
claimed to have examined. Skeptics also discovered he had not quoted 
accurately from records they did unearth, and they were unable to verify a 
number of his claims. Quantitative historians demonstrated that figures he 
had calculated about the percentages of colonists who owned guns were 
mathematically implausible and based on flawed sampling techniques. By the 
end of 2001, Emory University had undertaken an investigation to determine 
if he had committed fraud, and, if so, how he should be penalized. 

The charges against Bellesiles are of a different magnitude than the sins of

Ellis, Ambrose, and Goodwin. Whatever their culpability, none has been 
accused of inventing documents or deliberately misquoting or 
mischaracterizing historical evidence in the service of an ideological 
cause. But such actions, while certainly not common among historians, are, 
unfortunately, not once-in-a-blue-moon occurrences. 

Paul Buhle is a faculty member in American Civilization at Brown University 
and one of the luminaries in the study of American radicalism. Like many of 
his colleagues in this area, he has impeccable radical credentials. He 
attended the University of Illinois, where he became a socialist and an 
activist in Students for a Democratic Society during the 1960s. At a brief 
stop-over at graduate school in Connecticut he started Radical America, a 
journal devoted to American history and popular culture, before arriving at 
the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1967 for further graduate 
training. While his S.D.S. colleagues turned to violence and increasingly 
apocalyptic rhetoric, Buhle nurtured Radical America, which was supported by

grants from left-wing foundations and devoted to "throwing monographs at an 
intellectually keen audience" instead of bombs. 

Even before he received his Ph.D. in American history in 1975 for a 
dissertation entitled Marxism in the U.S. 1900-1940, Buhle had made a mark 
as a prominent figure among New Left historians. Since then he has written, 
co-authored, or edited at least eighteen books and innumerable articles. He 
writes for such journals as Radical History Review-a publication that 
plainly states it "rejects conventional notions of scholarly neutrality and 
'objectivity,' and approaches history from an engaged, critical, political 
stance"-and contributes regularly to Tikkun. As the history profession has 
become increasingly politicized in recent decades, Buhle has increasingly 
written for more mainstream journals, including the prestigious Journal of 
American History, and has contributed to the Organization of American 
Historians' professional Newsletter. He founded and continues to direct the 
Oral History of the American Left at the Tamiment Library of New York 
University, an ambitious effort to develop an extensive archive of 
interviews with hundreds of radical activists. Along with his wife, his 
fellow Brown historian Mari Jo Buhle, a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation 
"genius grant," and Dan Georgakas, Buhle co-edited the Encyclopedia of the 
American Left. 

There is no reason why radical historians cannot do good history; one can 
disagree with the conclusions another historian has reached, dispute the 
significance he places on certain facts, or challenge the interpretive 
framework he uses, and still recognize that he has illuminated a problem, or

uncovered new information, or challenged old preconceptions. Years ago, in 
Radical America, Buhle himself insisted that radical historians had to be 
scrupulous about their facts. Criticizing the discipline of history, he 
nonetheless praised many of its practitioners by noting: "The most important

positive feature we see is that, through imposition of fairly rigorous 
standards of evidence, the profession has helped to produce a great mass of 
historical writings which, although they may often ask trivial questions, 
nevertheless provide data that is generally reliable." 

Where he once gloried in standing on the margins of the historical 
profession, Buhle now claims to inhabit the middle of a broad stream. In a 
featured essay in The Newsletter, he wrote: "Every scholar has a perfect 
right to political and personal views: rigidly anti-Communist, Communist or 
(for the great majority of us) 'other.'" Leave aside the less than perfect 
balance-anti-Communists are rigid while Communists are just, well, 
Communists. Focus instead on the suggestion that Paul Buhle works in the 
mainstream of some wide scholarly consensus that lies between the rigidities

of anti-Communists and Communists. In fact, the span of acceptable politics 
in Buhle's worldview is far left of center. He is willing to put Stalin on 
the left as an extremist, but only if one agrees that Harry Truman is an 
extremist of the right. Writing in Radical History Review in 1994, Buhle 
judged Truman as "America's Stalin" and went on to declare, "when the 
judgment of the twentieth century's second half is made, every American 
president will be seen as a jerk. After Truman, Nixon yields only to 
Reagan-still another Truman heir-as the jerkiest of all." 

Apart from the coarseness of the writing, how accurate is the radical 
history produced by Paul Buhle? A review of some sections of the 
Encyclopedia of the American Left shows that it is about as accurate as The 
Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Take the issue of the funding of the Communist 
Party, U.S.A. by the Soviet Union, by now about as established and 
uncontested a "fact" as one could imagine. (Among other evidence are the 
receipts signed by the party leader Gus Hall for millions of dollars handed 
over to him by K.G.B. couriers.) The first edition of The Encyclopedia of 
the American Left gave little attention to the issue of Soviet fund- ing of 
American Communism. When the second edition appeared in 1998, after abundant

documentation of Soviet subsidies had been published, Buhle felt compelled 
to offer a convoluted and deceptive account of the issue. 

He first noted that secret ties between immigrant radicals and their 
homelands were not unusual. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 
Germans, Irish, and other ethnic Americans were constantly sending money 
back to comrades in their homelands and "inevitably, legal niceties were 
avoided." Of course, this was money from America to foreign countries, not 
the other way around. He did allow that the Bolshevik revolution had changed

this pattern in some ways. But, while there were Soviet subsidies to 
American Communists, he insisted that most of the money still flowed the 
other way-from Americans to the U.S.S.R.; "the overwhelming flow of money 
went from American shores to the Soviet Union, mainly for specific 
campaigns, such as food support in the early 1920s and war relief in the 
1940s." But this deliberately confuses apples and oranges. The huge amounts 
of funds, openly raised and openly sent to the U.S.S.R. for famine relief in

the early 1920s and war relief in the 1940s, cannot be compared to Moscow's 
clandestine subsidies to a revolutionary political movement within the 
United States. Further, the bulk of the famine and war relief was not even 
from immigrant radicals as Buhle implies but from a broad spectrum of 
Americans motivated by humanitarian concerns. For example, Herbert Hoover, 
no friend of Bolshevism, spearheaded the Russian famine relief campaign in 
the early 1920s. 

As for the specific monies transferred to the U.S.A. by the K.G.B., Buhle is

silent. Instead, in another entry written with fellow co-editor Dan 
Georgakas, he attributes the U.S.A.'s ability to support a daily newspaper, 
despite a lack of advertising and a paucity of members, not to Soviet 
subsidies, but partly to "the strength of library subscriptions in the 
Soviet Union and its bloc." In contrast to these relatively benign-sounding 
library subscriptions, Buhle tries to divert attention by pointing to C.I.A.

funding of an ex-Communist leader: "Heavily funded by C.I.A. sources, ... 
Jay Lovestone, now fervently anti-Soviet, used his personal network of 
associates to shape labor's own counterintelligence agency. Millions of 
dollars were passed to friendly labor officials in Europe, particularly in 
France and Italy. Later, connections between the C.I.A. and heroin gangsters

reputedly began in a complex alliance against French Communists." 

East bloc libraries and institutions did purchase thousands of subscriptions

to U.S.A. publications. But these were a lesser indirect subsidy of American

Communist activities and were not in the same league with Soviet delivery to

the U.S.A. of millions of dollars in cash subsidies, subsidies that go 
unexamined in The Encyclopedia of the American Left. Moreover, whatever the 
merits or morality of the C.I.A. funding of Jay Lovestone's anti-Communist 
activities, there is far less documentary evidence to support the charge 
that the C.I.A. was linked to "heroin gangsters" than to evidence 
demonstrating Soviet subsidies to the U.S.A. to support espionage. 

Diverting attention to the C.I.A. is Buhle's favorite tactic when confronted

by stories of Soviet money. He is not careful whether the stories are true 
or not. In one essay published in the Newsletter, he linked the 
C.I.A.-funded American Committee for Cul- tural Freedom to the "highly 
prestigious scholarly series 'Communism in American Life.'" According to 
Buhle, the 'Communism in American Life' series "was secretly planned by the 
board of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, with generous funding 
arranged for a handful of scholars." The 'Communism in American Life' books 
were critical of the U.S.A., and linking them to the C.I.A. was Buhle's way 
of discrediting them. Yet Buhle's cited source, Sigmund Diamond's 
Compromised Campus, made no such charge. Diamond, a vociferous critic of the

A.C.C.F., discussed the attempt of the A.C.C.F. to play a role in the 
'Communism in American Life' project and its recommendations for authors. 
But Diamond also wrote that the Fund for the Republic, creator of the 
'Communism in American Life' project, rejected the proposals from the 
A.C.C.F., and he says nothing about C.I.A. funding of the project. Contrary 
to Buhle's assertion, there is no evidence that the series was planned by 
the A.C.C.F. or that the C.I.A. arranged the funding. 

It is not only on the issue of funding that the Encyclopedia of the American

Left engages in falsification and obfuscation. The new evidence from Moscow 
archives has documented not only extensive Soviet financing of the C 

.U.S.A. but also direct Party participation in espionage against the United 
States. Those like Buhle who have devoted their lives to trumpeting a 
distinctly American, independent radicalism have been discomfited by these 
revelations. Rather than confront the issue, they have dissembled. 

The first edition of The Encyclopedia of the American Left did not have an 
entry for "Secret Work." Enthusiasts for American Communism long had 
ridiculed stories of a party underground and Communist involvement in 
espionage told by ex-Communists such as Whittaker Chambers, Louis Budenz, 
and Elizabeth Bentley. By the time the second edition appeared in 1998, the 
documentary material emerging from Russian archives had established that the

C 

.U.S.A. had an underground secret apparatus that cooperated with Soviet 
intelligence. The Venona documents, deciphered cables between K.G.B. spies 
in the United States and Moscow, began to appear in 1995 and further 
confirmed the widespread participation of American Communists in espionage. 
The issue had to be confronted, so for the 1998 edition Buhle wrote an entry

on "Secret Work." 

Buhle admitted that some top-level Communists were aware of Soviet espionage

but found a convenient scapegoat: the same Jay Lovestone, party leader in 
the late 1920s, who had also served as his foil on the issue of funding. 
Lovestone was a handy villain because he indeed had connections with Soviet 
intelligence, but chiefly because after the mid-1930s he became a leading 
anti-Communist and in the 1950s assisted the C.I.A. "A handful of trade 
union officials-most prominent among them, Jay Lovestone, former Communist 
Party leader and future associate of the Central Intelligence Agency 
(C.I.A.)-and some liberal intellectuals apparently traded secret 
communications with the Soviet regime in the 1930s, but the substance of 
them involved personal information without any great importance or 
high-level security connections." Buhle loathes Lovestone because he became 
an anti-Communist. By implying that the only Communist leader who spied for 
the U.S.S.R. also spied for the United States, he tried to suggest that the 
whole issue was at least morally equivalent. But, of course, when Lovestone 
aided the C.I.A., he was an American citizen helping an American security 
agency, hardly the same thing as an American citizen assisting a hostile 
foreign power such as the Soviet Union. 

Nor was Lovestone the most significant C 

.U.S.A. leader to participate in Soviet espionage. Earl Browder and Eugene 
Dennis, who led the C 

.U.S.A. from 1930 to 1959, a period during which the party was far more 
important than it had been during Lovestone's brief reign in the 1920s, were

closely connected to Soviet intelligence. Buhle never names the "liberal 
intellectuals" he says also engaged in Soviet espionage, possibly because 
there were none. Nor does Buhle explain why they or anyone else would use 
espionage channels to provide, as he writes, "personal information" to the 
U.S.S.R. 

When he turned to the issue of espionage in the 1940s, Buhle's essay in the 
Encyclopedia first justified spying and then trivialized it. Buhle first 
stated that the Office of Strategic Services, America's chief World War II 
intelligence agency, gave a new dimension to left-wing secret work by hiring

radicals and thus "unleashed an unprecedented flurry of left-wing spy 
activity, some of which inevitably continued into the Cold War era." But he 
never explained why it was "unprecedented" or why it "inevitably" continued.

Likewise, he noted that the employment of so many left-wingers on the atomic

bomb project "virtually ensur[ed] the passage of some highly classified 
information to a power which at the time was a formal ally." Once again, he 
eschews any effort to explain who spied, or why any left-winger would 
inevitably be a source of information for the U.S.S.R. One obvious 
implication is that the American government was responsible for whatever 
espionage took place because the atomic bomb project and the O.S.S. hired 
left- wingers. Buhle does not seem to recognize that his assumption that 
left-wingers would "inevitably" want to assist the U.S.S.R. by turning over 
secret information provides a very powerful rationale for the Truman 
administration's Loyalty-Security Program that Buhle himself despises. 

Regardless of the inevitability of Com- munists spying for the Soviet Union,

Buhle dismisses the significance of the espionage issue. "Such intrigues had

almost no role in the day-to-day activities of the American Left, save for 
the need of Communists to deny the existence of spying by or for the 
Russians and for anti-Communist socialists to insist upon its central 
importance to American Communists at large." But how can what Buhle calls 
"an unprecedented flurry of left-wing spy activity, some of which inevitably

continued into the Cold War era," be irrelevant to historical debates over 
whether the C 

.U.S.A. was a legitimate participant in domestic politics during the Cold 
War era? Further playing down the importance of espionage, he reduces the 
"secret apparatus" to "rumors circulated within and without the Left 
concerning possible Russian agents" and adds speculation that "American 
Communist leaders may have informally assured members that the Russians 
could penetrate the renowned American security state... . Garrulous 
old-timers who had served in the Spanish Civil War and World War II 
sometimes hinted and even bragged about what they might be able to do in a 
moment of international crisis." 

Immediately after belittling the significance of "such intrigues" involving 
the Soviet Union, Buhle suggests that there was more significant "secret 
work" committed on behalf of Israel by American Communists: "Little was said

within the Left or outside it concerning the largest incident of illegal 
activity: the shipment of arms and assorted war materials to the new state 
of Israel." Apart from its irrelevance to the issue of Soviet espionage, the

question of American Communist covert assistance to Israel in 1948 is 
presented without any supporting evidence. Neither of the two sources Buhle 
provides at the end of his entry says a word about the issue. 

His further claim that "among those Americans wounded or killed in battles 
protecting Israeli gains from Arabs, Communists played a prominent role" is 
unsupported by any evidence. Yehuda Bauer, the distinguished Israeli 
historian, called the claim "sheer nonsense." The former national president 
of the American Veterans of Israel, Simon Spiegelman, labeled it "absolutely

false," noting that most of the forty Americans and Canadians who died in 
1948 were actually connected to one of the right-wing Israeli political 
movements The most thorough account of the Jewish role on the American left 
does not mention any such volunteers. American Communists would have 
trumpeted this sacrifice in the late 1940s, but there is no evidence they 
ever did. Jewish Currents, a magazine founded by ex-Communists whose writers

and editors have run innumerable articles about Israel and Communism, has 
never mentioned "the prominent role" played by American Communists fighting 
and dying in the Israeli War of Independence. 

We contacted Jewish Currents regarding Buhle's claim of Communists fighting 
in the Israeli war of independence. The magazine in turn got in touch with 
several veteran radicals, including the Daily Worker's correspondent in 
Palestine in 1947-1948, who unanimously dismissed the assertion as laughable

or outrageous. 

We also contacted Professor Buhle directly and asked for the documentary 
basis for the claim. Buhle responded that it was based on oral history 
interviews but he could remember only the name of one of the interviewees 
and was not sure if that was the correct one. We obtained a copy of the 
interview from the Tamiment Library at New York University. It contained no 
support for the Encyclopedia's assertion. Additional inquiries to Professor 
Buhle requesting the documentary basis for the published claim in the 
Encyclopedia produced no specific sources. 

It was Labor Zionists and the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee that 
coordinated the vast majority of the fundraising and arms shipments that 
went to Israel in 1947-1948, not, as Buhle implies, American Communists. The

Czech Communist government shipped arms to Israel, and there are rumors of 
I.R.A. contributions. Some stray American Communists might even have been 
involved. But how could this constitute the "largest incident of illegal 
activity" on the part of the Left? Even if one or two oral history 
interviewees claimed to know a stray American Communist who fought and died 
in Israel, how could a responsible historian accept it as the truth in the 
absence of any documentary evidence? And even if there were one or two such 
obscure people, how did they become transmogrified into playing "a prominent

role"? A handful of American radicals immigrated to Israel in the 1950s to 
escape McCarthyism in the United States. But there is no evidence of how 
many were Communists or how many were killed or wounded in subsequent 
Israeli wars. By 1950, the C 

.U.S.A., which had supported the founding of the state of Israel in large 
part because the Soviet Union had done so, was actively hostile to Israel 
and all manifestations of "Jewish nationalism," in parallel with a similar 
Soviet shift. 

Nor, of course, are the two cases-American Communists secretly spying 
against the United States for Stalin, and American Communists secretly 
working for Israel-comparable, even if the latter were true. An American 
Communist who moved to Israel and fought in its armed forces was not 
violating any American law. An American Communist who secretly turned over 
classified U.S. government information to representatives of another 
government was breaking the law and betraying his country. Buhle's 
unsupported and spurious claim functions in The Encyclopedia of the American

Left as a distraction from the issue of secret work by the C 

.U.S.A. on behalf of the U.S.S.R. 

Buhle concluded his exercise in damage control by speculating that the 
collapse of both the U.S.S.R. and "the Cold War leadership of the American 
labor movement" might turn up new "documentation of secret relationships 
between Americans and either the K.G.B. or the C.I.A." Only in the mind of a

left-wing extremist who equated Harry Truman with Joseph Stalin could 
American trade unions assisting an American government agency be equated 
with American Communists assisting Stalin's U.S.S.R. Buhle added, "as of the

late 1990s, documents examined in the Soviet Union or reprinted for scholars

offered little that was new in regard to illegal or secret work by Soviet 
sympathizers." In fact those documents have revealed a great deal that was 
both new and illuminating to anyone with eyes to see. It was simply that 
Buhle did not want to see, and so he shut his eyes and pretended nothing was

there. 

Buhle is not the only contributor to the Encyclopedia of the American Left 
whose ideological enthusiasms are far stronger than their analytical 
abilities or truthfulness. The editors display a penchant for authors whose 
preferred method of dealing with unpalatable material is to ignore it. One 
entry on Finnish-American radicalism reports on the thousands of American 
Finns, mostly Communists, who moved to Soviet Karelia in the early 1930s but

conveniently forgets to mention that hundreds of them were murdered by 
Soviet political police during Stalin's purges. No Holocaust denier could do

better. There has been no uproar about the lies and distortions in this 
mendacious reference work and no one has called Paul Buhle to account for 
his peculiarly creative facts about American Communists fighting in the 
Israeli war of independence. If he truly does inhabit the mainstream of the 
historical profession, it is in deep trouble. 



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>From The New Criterion Vol. 20, No. 10, June 2002 
©2002 The New Criterion | Back to the top | www.newcriterion.com 
The URL for this item is: 
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/20/jun02/buhle.htm 

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