Gabriel Kolko, Cold War revisionist, dies and is celebrated by libertarians
From former managing editor of Reason magazine and CHA signer, Jesse Walker:
The leftist historian Gabriel Kolko has died at age 81. He wrote many books that drew interest from libertarians, from Railroads and Regulation (1965), on the early history of the Interstate Commerce Commission, to The Limits of Power (1972), on the early history of the Cold War. But the Kolko book that libertarians love to invoke the most is The Triumph of Conservatism (1963), his history of the Progressive Era.
From Antiwar.com founder and CHA signer, Eric Garris:
Gabriel Kolko died yesterday (May 19, 2014) peacefully at his home in Amsterdam. He was 82.
Kolko was an American historian who wrote about the close connection between the government and big business throughout the Progressive Era and the Cold War. He was considered a leading historian of the New Left, but broke new ground with his analysis of the corporate elite’s successful defeat of the free market by corporatism. Kolko’s thesis “that businessmen favored government regulation because they feared competition and desired to forge a government–business coalition” is one that is echoed by many observers today.
Counterpunch editor, Jeffrey St. Clair:
We received word this morning that our friend and long-time CounterPunch writer Gabriel Kolko died yesterday at his home in Amsterdam. Kolko, author of The Triumph of Conservatism, Anatomy of a War, and A Century of War, was one of the pre-eminent historians of our time. Kolko was born in Paterson, New Jersey in 1932. He attended Kent State University and received his doctorate in history from Harvard.
Historian and CHA signer Paul Buhle adds:
When I arrived in Madison in 1967, even several of the old socialist pamphlets in the Wis State Historical Society had “Gaby Kolko” scrawled on the title page. He donated when leaving campus.He was a major theorist of what came to be called Corporate Liberalism, the corporate control of the liberal agenda, but he was also a very major historian of the Vietnam War and its assorted war crimes, etc.With a small handful of other writers, William Appleman Williams at the top of the list, Kolko pointed away from the Cold War liberalism of Arthur Schlesinger Jr and others, then dominant in the historical profession, who worked quietly with the CIA while trumpeting their fidelity to free ideas. These Cold Warriors had effaced the traditions of Charles Beard, and Kolko along with Williams restored Beard, the best of both Charles and Mary Beard, in the process.
From libertarian writer and CHA signer, Charles Burris:
The great revisionist historian Gabriel Kolko has died. Historians have long recognized that the Progressive Era, 1900 to 1920, was a critical watershed in American political-economic and intellectual history. It was the gestation period of the modern welfare-warfare state. So many crucial events and legislative enactments occurred in the period such as the birth of the Federal Reserve banking cartel, the Harrison Narcotics Act, the Pure Food and Drug Act, the ascendancy of the Eugenics movement and “scientific racism,” the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment and the progressive income tax, the Seventeenth Amendment and the popular election of U. S. senators, the Eighteenth Amendment and Prohibition, and the abandonment of America’s traditional non-interventionist foreign policy, first following the Spanish-American War (Cuba and the Philippine Insurrection), in Latin America and Mexico, and more decisively in the First World War in Europe.