The Story Of American Freedom

Eric Foner

Picador, £25, pp422

All words are promiscuous, ready to be turned to whichever cause a suitor demands, but some words are more promiscuous than others. The word 'freedom' is a total slut. It has had so many meanings, been violated by so many dysfunctional lovers, that we would be wise now to approach it with suspicion. Like the proverbial good time had by all, is it not now soiled goods, its affections devalued by being spread thinly?

In his new monumental history of American freedom, Eric Foner, professor of history at Columbia University, readily accepts this mutability. As he says, 'Freedom has been used to convey and claim legitimacy for all kinds of grievances and hopes, fears about the present and visions of the future.' But, like so many historians writing from an American perspective - this is, after all, a history of American freedom - he manages to retain an innocent love for the concept, convinced that, deep beneath the layers of meaning that have been forced upon it, is one still true and pure.

He can not help but bask in the buttery sunlight of the American constitution and the immense act of collective will that brought it into being. And yet, as he acknowledges, even that wellspring was contaminated. Thomas Jefferson and his close friend James Madison may well have been prime movers in the shaping of the document at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 but, even as they spoke of the inalienable rights of liberty, they were also slave-owners. How they defined freedom and how their slaves did so would have been brutally different matters.

For British readers, particularly those of the Left, it is these kinds of contradictions throughout American history which make it hard to view America's love affair with the concept as anything other than the greatest act of collective self-delusion in modern history. Almost two centuries after the newly drafted Constitution left slavery intact, for example, John F. Kennedy would describe the war in Vietnam as a battle to assure the 'survival of liberty' even as thousands of Vietnamese were losing theirs as a result of it.

Again, Foner recognises this. Like an elder of the tribe who has seen them come and seen them go, he can not deny himself the wry shake of his greying head at the idiocy of it all. But at the same time, he says, the concept is such a fundamental part of America's sense of itself - its pursuit was the very reason, indeed, that the Pilgrim Fathers struck out for the western shores of the Atlantic - that, however it has been perverted, it deserves examination.

Unfortunately, what this means is that, in the first half of the book, it is little more than a retread of familiar American constitutional history with freedom less as a theme than a riff. One can not escape the suspicion that Professor Foner had his eye on the book lists for first-year university history courses. No doubt his own students will be encouraged to shell out for a copy on arrival in class (an old, and therefore forgivable trick of tenured professors everywhere).

In the second half, as he studies the demands for freedom in the post-war period, the story becomes rather more interesting. The narrative of the civil rights movement followed by the birth of political feminism and, in turn, the discovery of a voice by almost every special interest group in the US, can not help but be invigorating. Foner himself is swept along by it all, arguing - in a rare expression of opinion - that while the Sixties would eventually be blamed for America's ills, the country had become by their end 'a more open, more tolerant - in a word, a freer country'.

His examination of the role played in the securing of these freedoms by the Supreme Court under Justice Earl Warren provides the best proof that, in one respect, America has become freer down the centuries. Once it was a nation where legislators sat in conclave, deciding what freedoms the populace should enjoy; then it became a nation where, through protest and demonstration, the populace declared which freedoms they demanded, and the legislators interpreted the law to fit those demands. We are right to be suspicious of the claims to the concept of freedom made by the US. But, if only in the remarkable reforms of the Sixties, they do occasionally stand up to examination.

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