Eric Foner: The Protests in Wisconsin - 2011 London Review of Books
"As many commentators have pointed out, Governor Scott Walker’s plan to eliminate most collective bargaining rights for public employees’ unions has nothing to do with Wisconsin’s fiscal problems (which are far less serious than those of many other American states). Instead, it represents the culmination of a long right-wing effort to eliminate the power of unions altogether. During the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt redefined American politics by forging a majority political coalition that included labour unions, white ethnic minorities (Irish, Italians, Jews), African-Americans in the North, liberal intellectuals, Southern whites and, after the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935, the elderly. The New Deal coalition proved powerful enough to enable Democrats to win seven of the nine presidential elections between 1932 and 1964. One of its key achievements was the Wagner Act of 1935, which gave most workers the legal right to form trade unions."
| | Eric Foner: The Protests in WisconsinThanks to the public employees of Wisconsin, thousands of whom have occupied the state capitol building for the ... |
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Eric Foner: Unconstitutional Dreams: The president has birthright citizenship all wrong, 2018 New York Times
"Long before the Civil War, abolitionists black and white had proposed an alternative understanding of national citizenship severed from the concept of race, with citizens’ rights enforced by the federal government. Gatherings where northern free blacks agitated for equal rights called themselves conventions of “colored citizens” to drive home this idea. And by the conclusion of the war, the end of slavery and the service of nearly 200,000 African-Americans in the Union army and navy propelled the question of black citizenship to center stage of American politics."
|  | Opinion | Donald Trump’s Unconstitutional DreamsThe president has birthright citizenship all wrong. |
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Eric Foner: The Frontiers of American Capitalism, 2017 The Nation
The gilding of American capitalism happened on both sides of the continent.
| | The Frontiers of American CapitalismNoam Maggor’s new book captures how it took both sides of the American continent to revitalize the economy after... |
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Eric Foner: Our Lincoln, 2009 The Nation
Our Lincoln
from The Nation -- January 26, 2009
"Abraham Lincoln has always provided a lens through which Americans
examine themselves. He has been described as a consummate moralist and a shrewd political operator, a lifelong foe of slavery and an inveterate racist. Politicians from conservatives to communists, civil rights activists to segregationists, have claimed him as their own. With the approach of the bicentennial of his birth, the past few years have seen an outpouring of books on Lincoln of every size, shape and description. His psychology, marriage, law career, political practices, racial attitudes and every one of his major speeches have been subjected to minute examination."
| | Eric Foner: American HistorianRead articles and watch lectures by Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. |
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Eric Foner: We Should Embrace the Ambiguity of the 14th Amendment, 2018 The Nation
A hundred and fifty years after its ratification, some of its promises remain unfulfilled—but one day it may still be interpreted anew.
| | We Should Embrace the Ambiguity of the 14th AmendmentA hundred and fifty years after its ratification, some of its promises remain unfulfilled—but one day it may sti... |
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Randall Kennedy: The Confounding Truth About Frederick Douglass, 2018 The Atlantic
His champions now span the ideological spectrum, but left and right miss the tensions in his views.
"In the wake of Douglass’s death in 1895, it was African Americans who kept his memory alive. Booker T. Washington wrote a biography in 1906. The historian Benjamin Quarles wrote an excellent study in 1948. White historians on the left also played a key role in protecting Douglass from oblivion, none more usefully than Philip Foner, a blacklisted Marxist scholar (and uncle of the great historian Eric Foner), whose carefully edited collection of Douglass’s writings remains essential reading. But in “mainstream”—white, socially and politically conventional—circles, Douglass was widely overlooked. In 1962, the esteemed literary critic Edmund Wilson published Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War, a sprawling (and lavishly praised) commentary on writings famous and obscure that omitted Douglass, and virtually all the other black literary figures of the period.
keenly attuned to the politics of public memory, Blight shows that the current profusion of claims on Douglass’s legacy bears close scrutiny: Claimants have a way of overlooking features of his complex persona that would be embarrassing for them to acknowledge. Conservatives praise his individualism, which sometimes verged on social Darwinism. They also herald Douglass’s stress on black communal self-help, his antagonism toward labor unions, and his strident defense of men’s right to bear arms. They tiptoe past his revolutionary rage against the United States during his early years as an abolitionist. “I have no patriotism,” he thundered in 1847. “I cannot have any love for this country … or for its Constitution. I desire to see it overthrown as speedily as possible.” Radical as to ends, he was also radical as to means. He justified the violence deployed when a group of abolitionists tried to liberate a fugitive slave from a Boston jail and killed a deputy U.S. marshal in the process. Similarly, he assisted and praised John Brown, the insurrectionist executed for murder and treason in Virginia in 1859."
