The Battleground of History: Race, Communism
Editor's Digest: A review of recent research and commentary
Much of our understanding of the present is shaped by our understanding of the past, which is why history remains a battleground of competing interpretations. Two especially contentious areas are race in the US and the history of communism.
Race
David Beito explicates the fuller, more complicated story of the relationship between black author Zore Neale Hurston and Eleanor Roosevelt, in particular the First Lady’s resignation from the Daughters of the American Revolution. “It does not foster a complete historical understanding,” Beito concludes, “to ignore, or rationalize those cases when political calculus overrode, and sometimes contradicted, more laudable goals.”
Focusing on his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Richard Gunderman stresses Martin Luther King Jr.’s healing racial vision, rooted in religious ideals. “Many of King’s arguments clearly presume that his readers recognize and share fundamental natural law assumptions about moral responsibility and human dignity.”
The accepted story of urban decay in the late twentieth century is “white flight,” motivated by racism. A new book by Jack Cashill, reviewed by Woody Cozad, questions the conventional story and finds other reasons behind the abandonment of American cities. “When your mother gets mugged for the second time, that’s untenable. When your home gets broken into for the second time, that’s untenable.”
Communism
Marx and Engels laid the foundation for communism by painting a dark picture of the industrial revolution. Was it accurate? Donald Boudreaux says no.
Meanwhile, responding to an attempt to “normalize” the experience of communism in East Germany,Robertas Bakula says, “There is no redeeming of the socialist experiment. Nothing was ‘normal’ about the totalitarian life in socialist GDR, if by ‘normal’ we mean pursuit of human happiness and fulfilment.”
Finally, in yet another rejection of a conventional narrative, Wesley Jeffries argues that it is wrong to blame liberalism and the market for the social and economic turmoil in Russia following the fall of communism. “The political space for liberal reforms in Russia was far smaller than has been appreciated by critics that claim that an unrestrained program of ‘shock therapy’ was forcefully imposed,” he writes. “The insider deals and half-measures that passed for reform in Russia had been shaped and constrained not just by the perverse incentives of would-be oligarchs and their political allies, but by communist opposition that made its influence felt in both parliament and the state apparatus.”