A few comments on Jeff Hummel’s lengthy JLS review of Tom Woods’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History (Hummel’s review essay is also reprinted here).
First, Hummel opens by noting that P.I.G. “raised an amazing amount of furor,” both among leftists and also some conservatives and libertarians. Woods’s critics have engaged in “ad hominem attacks” and charges of guilt by association, as well as “venomous assaults” including “descending to the low of Klan baiting.”
After noting this, Hummel writes, “For all of this, Woods and his editors must share partial responsibility.” and “I find it hard to sympathize with the tone of surprised martyrdom he takes in online replies to critics.” It seems to me that if one recognizes someone is the victims of such blatantly unfair and outrageous attacks, one ought not in effect blame the victim. Woods is not to blame for the admittedly “venomous assaults” against him. Nor is he to be blamed in the slightest for the “tone” he takes in defense against lowlife, venomous critics.Hummel goes on,
I therefore propose to focus exclusively on the book itself (ignoring Woods’s past associations and other writings) and evaluate its historical interpretations on the basis of libertarian theory and values...
The parenthetical here makes a veiled insinuation that Woods’s past associations are writings are somewhat racist or unsavory; Hummel adopts the stance of being magnanimous enough to overlook that for purposes of his essay. I utterly reject this implicit smear on Woods as I do other attacks on Woods by the PC chorus. Those who cry racism at the drop of a hat have cried wolf so many times and have such hypocrotical and princess and the pea standards that they have absolutely zero credibility. In fact, they have negative credibility, in the sense that when they charge someone with bigotry, racism, etc., the presumption is that the victim of these charges is probably not guilty of them.
Hummel does something similar in his remarks about Trask (and also, to a degree, Woods) (p. 76):
What is reprehensible about the Reconstruction chapter is not its denigration of the Fourteenth Amendment but its apologia for the Black Codes adopted by the southern states immediately after the Civil War. Contending that these codes have been misunderstood, PIG favorably quotes an essay written by H. A. Scott Trask and Carey Roberts ... Nearly every one of the states’ codes subjected blacks who were idle or unemployed to imprisonment or forced labor for up to one year, while “enticement” laws made it a crime, rather than simply a tort, to offer higher wages to a worker already under contract. In essence, the goal was to have government partly assume the role of the former masters by, in Foner’s words, “inhibiting development of a free market in land and labor.”
The excuse given by Trask and Roberts, as quoted by Woods (p. 81), for these provisions, is as follows:
Many [Black Codes] mandated penalties for vagrancy, but the intention there was not to bind them [blacks] to the land in a state of perpetual serfdom, as was charged by Northern Radicals, but to end what had become an intolerable situation-the wandering across the South of large numbers of freedmen who were without food, money, jobs, or homes. Such a situation was leading to crime, fear, and violence.Sometimes the line is very fine between empathically understanding the motives of historical actors and morally exculpating their actions. If Woods, through the quoted passage from Trask and Roberts, has not crossed that line with respect to white Southerners, he has skirted dangerously close. The former slaves did wander across the South and flock to cities immediately after emancipation. Many southern whites found utterly irrational and ungrateful, on the part of a people they had considered less than fully human, this desire to exercise a newly acquired freedom by doing something never permitted before and to perhaps track down lost family members who had been sold away. That any American writing in the twenty-first century who claims to be an advocate of liberty could likewise view such wandering as “intolerable” borders on disgraceful.
I fully agree that anyone who actually personally views the restrictions on rights of freed slaves as “intolerable,” or who believes the black codes were justifiable, is abominable. (However, I am not sure why it is worse for an “advocate of liberty” to have such a view than anyone else. Evil views are evil views, no matter who holds or advocates them.) Yet there is no reason whatsoever to believe that Trask and Roberts, or Woods, actually themselves believe these aspects of the Black Codes to be justified or warranted. To assume otherwise ignores not only these authors’ libertarian views (which would clearly conflict with the unlibertarian aspects of Black Codes!) but also fails to provide a charitable reading of these authors. Clearly they are explaining the sentiment of the times that gave rise to some of the objectionable (and terrible!) Black Code provisions—not endorsing it. That Hummel stays just this side of outright accusing them of endorsing racist laws—saying it “borders on disgraceful”—itself borders on disgraceful.
Hummel also expresses his distaste for the popular style and presentation of the P.I.G. series, even though that very accessibility has meant the exposure of tens if not hundreds of thousands of people to more or less libertarian ideas, or at least those contrary to the received (socialist-mainstream) wisdom (I understand that Woods’s book has sold over 100,000 copies).
Also, Woods’s views on the American Revolution are obviously a legitimate interpretation of events, as Hummel more or less concedes: why else did Burke support the Americans and oppose the French? Is he, too, seeing the same imaginary differences Woods sees?
Hummel writes: “Woods ends up wallowing in the constitutional fetishism of conservatives, worshipping the document (correctly interpreted, to be sure) as the sacred text of America’s political religion.” Hmm, I think the same could be said of Randy Barnett—does Hummel have the same critique of Barnett? In any event, what is wrong with looking at the original understanding of certain constitutional clauses? It’s another argument for our side: here are the rules the regime said it would abide by, and it refuses to, twisting the words to mean nearly the opposite of what everyone was led to understand they meant. Why is this “fetishism”?
And so what if Woods spends time pointing out that the First Amendment didn’t apply to the states? Isn’t that true? But Hummel asks: “Why harp on a detail that every competent historian, informed journalist, and educated citizen already knows?” Umm... by this definition, there are about 37 educated citizens in America. I mean, how many historians outside of libertarian or conservative conferences know or will admit this?? Is he serious? He is bashing Woods for pointing out something that he implies is true... because it is well-known (when it really isn’t).
Then Hummel says he doesn’t care if secession is a constitutional right. (”Why should any libertarian care one whit whether secession was a legal right?”) Who cares if he doesn’t care? What’s the relevance of that? It’s a legitimate historical question, isn’t it?
Woods’s point about the 14th Amendment being illegally ratified is more “constitutional fetishism” — as if the regime’s refusal to abide by its own rules isn’t an interesting and important proselytizing point for libertarians.
As for whether Woods misread Howard Beale ... I believe he only quoted one or two whole paragraphs from Beale’s book. Beale’s point is simply that people had things other than Reconstruction policy on their minds in 1866, and that the Radical victory in that election is not attributable to their position on Reconstruction. So I just don’t get this critique.
As for Hummel’s point about neutrality laws — that libertarians should oppose them because they infringe on private individuals’ right to engage in trade — this is a good point. But does that imply that neutrality laws are not a tolerable second-best alternative to full-scale interventionism?? Again, where is the critique of Woods?
Re Hummel’s comments on Woods’s views on Yalta: I think Hummel is misreading Woods. Woods did not argue that the U.S. could have done much to save Eastern Europe; he made only the smaller but still historically interesting point that FDR really doesn’t seem to have cared one way or the other. In fact, libertarian Richard Ebeling has made the same argument: Ebeling writes: “Based on his comments to Cardinal Spellman and other Americans, and from his explicit giving of a free hand to Stalin in Poland and the Baltic States at the Teheran Conference, in fact FDR really did not give a damn whether the people in these countries got anything more.”
Hummel goes on:
“Whether the moral right of secession is conditional or unconditional is a question about which libertarian political theorists disagree. I have made the case for an unconditional right of secession in my own book on the Civil War. [2] But Woods dares not go down that path. Because if the states have a moral right to secede from the Union, regardless of motives or grievances, then counties have an unconditional moral right to secede from states, and individuals from counties. This not only sanctions the Confederacy’s 1861 firing on a federal fort in Charleston Bay but also John Brown’s 1859 raid on a government arsenal at Harpers Ferry, which was merely an attempt to apply the right of secession to the plantation.”
? wha? Why would woods “dare not” go down this path? Why does Hummel assume Woods would be against the Harpers Ferry raid—?
Hummel also refers to DiLorenzo as a neo-Confederate (and an amateurish one at that). Now DiLorenzo is a respected libertarian-Austrian intellectual; I am not aware of him describing himself as a neo-Confederate; and given that this term has pejorative connotations that are untrue of DiLorenzo (e.g., the term usually implies someone is an advocate of agrarianism as well as a return to racist segregation if not chattel slavery), it is outrageous to apply this label to DiLorenzo. (This reminds me of David Horowitz, himself unfairly accused of bigotry, wickedly and disgustingly calling Pat Buchanan an anti-semite.)
