If You Charge Facts With Bias, Historians Are Guilty

Recently, FoxNews.com described me as a “social justice warrior . . . reinterpreting [history] according to new progressive laws applied retroactively.” The Federalist.com, meanwhile, called my work “identity-politicized garbage.”

This followed a piece on the WashingtonPost.com in which I highlighted the paradox that, while Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill fiercely opposed the Nazis, they didn’t argue against the bedrock of Nazism itself: race supremacy. “The Allied leadership did not fight the war over fascist race-nationalism,” I wrote. “That was the historical path not taken.” 

Was mine an anachronistic critique from ahistorical hindsight? No: there is plenty of evidence of Roosevelt and Churchill’s contemporaries who criticized Nazism as Nazism. African Americans did so, as did American and non-American Jews, a Palestinian veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and more. In other words, contemporaries offered grounds for “judging” Roosevelt and Churchill. 

Not a provocative argument, it seemed to me, as a historian of 20th-century Britain. But it triggered quite a response. (One right-wing blogger even threatened me.) Why?

Intellectual historian Nils Gilman put the matter this way: “right-wingers assume that professional historians approach the past from the same (e.g., primordially political) perspective as they do . . . therefore what they are doing is simply providing a corrective to the leftist political bias of the academy.” In the eyes of some on the political right, history is a zero-sum game whose goal consists of scoring more points than an opponent; it makes sense that they lash out when they think “the other side”—me, in this scenario—has indeed scored some.