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  Interview with Historian Eric Foner: 'Life Is Getting More Difficult for Americans'

Interview with Historian Eric Foner 'Life Is Getting More Difficult for Americans'

Part 2: 'Freedom Has Been Privatized'

Foner: I think here is the irony of American history. We don't have an established church. When you have an established church nobody takes religion as seriously as we do here. We have a free market in religion. The religious groups are competing with each other. Maybe our Founding Fathers made a big mistake. Maybe we should have had an established church.

SPIEGEL: We talked about the Americans' confidence that they are the symbol of freedom. You wrote a book about the concept of freedom in American culture. How did its meaning change over the centuries?

Foner: Freedom today in terms of how ordinary people think of it is entirely different from what the Founding Fathers meant. Back then, freedom was the right to participate in the political nation, the right to vote, to be a citizen. Today, freedom has been privatized. It is how you dress, what your sexual orientation is, choosing your own life. That's fine. But that is not what Thomas Jefferson was talking about.

SPIEGEL: Jefferson, the principal author of the American Declaration of Independence, talked about mankind's inalienable right to liberty but was himself a slave owner.

Foner: At the time they believed owning slaves made you free. Slavery reinforced freedom, and freedom reinforced slavery.

SPIEGEL: How so?

Foner: Free was the man who was autonomous, who didn't depend on someone else for his living. In other words: a man working for wages his whole life is not really free. That is why Jefferson said, you have to own land. Southerners said, -- and they weren't being hypocritical -- they said slavery is the foundation of freedom because if you own slaves, you are freer yourself.

SPIEGEL: The Founding Fathers declare freedom to be the right of man but a great many people do not benefit in their own country. Is that not hypocritical?

Foner: You are quite right. It is not a contradiction, however, if you are convinced that some are unworthy of freedom. Freedom reinforces racism and discrimination against omen. Today freedom has become genuinely universal in this country. But to do that required the greatest crisis in our history, the Civil War, the civil rights movement, the women's movement. It requires tremendous struggles to expand the boundaries of freedom -- that's what history teaches us. What people think freedom is 50 years from now is not going to be necessarily the same as what they think about it today.

SPIEGEL: Did the concept of freedom also change after the civil rights movement, after 1968?

Foner: This notion of diversity as essential to freedom is now deeply rooted, especially among a younger generation. I have a daughter who is in college, and she was born long after the civil rights movement. She has grown up in a world of tremendous ethnic diversity -- and she doesn't even notice it.

SPIEGEL: That is a reason for hope.

Foner: It is. At the same time non-white Americans still face barriers. Real estate brokers won't show a black person a house in certain neighborhoods. Banks won't give loans to black people on the same basis as white people. When black people claim greater rights, people say: you can vote now, you no longer have segregation, so what are you complaining about?

SPIEGEL: You have written a standard work about the missed opportunities after the American Civil War. What should have been done differently?

Foner: Let me start by giving you a number. In all of American history there have been five black senators, including Barack Obama. Two of them held office during Reconstruction, immediately after the Civil War. That war not only destroyed slavery. The Constitution was rewritten to give black people full legal and political equality for the first time.

SPIEGEL: But soon the situation changed.

Foner: It was an amazing experiment in genuine democracy. And it created a tremendous backlash among whites: the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, violence, terrorism. After 10 years the war-torn country came back together again. But the reconciliation was on the basis of white supremacy. The fact that 186,000 black men fought for the North in the Union Army was completely forgotten.

SPIEGEL: Until 1965 many blacks in the South could not vote.

Foner: Yes. With the Voting Rights Act of 1965 blacks could vote nationwide but the civil rights movement did not need any new laws or constitution. The federal government went in and registered all these people and let them vote. It wasn't like South Africa where they had to write a new constitution. We had everything. So it was a missed opportunity for a hundred years.

SPIEGEL: Now the country has a presidential candidate who is not white. What is your assessment?

Foner: The fact that a black man can be the presidential candidate for the major party is a highly significant thing. There is nobody alive today who was a slave and there is nobody alive today who owned a slave. Nonetheless, obviously slavery is still kind of a raw wound in American life. When I was growing up it barely appeared in history books, at most there would be a picture of some happy slaves playing the banjo. More recently, there's been much more attention. But still, here is an interesting fact. There is no museum of slavery in the United States. We have a Holocaust Museum. But what do you think we would feel if in Berlin, there was a giant museum about slavery and nothing about the Holocaust? When you talk about slavery, a lot of white people feel it is an accusation against them.

SPIEGEL: They feel guilty?

Foner: No. They don't feel guilty. They feel that they are being told they should feel guilty. But the reason that, despite great progress, African-Americans, are still considerably behind whites in income, in life expectancy, health, is not because of slavery. It is because of all the discrimination and inequality of the last century. It is things that are still going on today. Even though I am a historian, I think the obsession with slavery is probably wrong. It directs attention away from the poor education of black children in urban ghettos. We do need to know history. But you shouldn't use it as an excuse not to deal with today's problems.

SPIEGEL: What does this mean regarding the election?

Foner: Now, we will see. Maybe Obama will lose because a lot of people will find it impossible to vote for a black man, although I don't think so. Race is significant but it's not the only thing on people's minds. Obviously, Obama does not define himself as the black candidate even if black people see him that way.

SPIEGEL: But not all. Some do not think he is one of them.

Foner: They thought that at the beginning. Once it became apparent that he might actually win, blacks rallied around him. That is also a generational question. Obama does not represent the old generation which is a product of the civil rights movement, but a younger group. They benefited from it enormously but they weren't part of it. They also appeal to white voters. Some of these older ones don't trust that. They think they are moving away from the race-based black politics.

SPIEGEL: In his now famous speech last March, Obama told the African-American community: You are not only victims. You must also change. It was surprising, coming from someone who wants to get elected.

Foner: That is addressing white people who want to be sure that he is not just some black nationalist. Just as when McCain goes and talks to the civil rights group the NAACP, he is not going to get any votes there. He is reassuring well-intentioned suburban white voters who don't want to think of themselves as racist and who are saying, I can vote for him, and I am not a racist. So all these things are symbolic.

SPIEGEL: What can black Americans expect from Obama?

Foner: What he could do is give them more money. That would help. I hate to be old-fashioned. The biggest problem for poor people is the lack of money. The thing that has most injured black people in the last 30 years is deindustrialization. One of the greatest accomplishments of the civil rights movement was getting people access to good industrial jobs. But these jobs disappeared in the 1980s because companies moved overseas. It is not a race problem but blacks hurt most.

SPIEGEL: In Europe Obama is very well liked and he helps to improve the image of this country. How much do Americans care about what foreigners think of their country?

Foner: It depends on how you pose the question. If you ask people, do you care what French people think about us, the answer is no. But if you asked people, would you like to gain the respect of people in other countries -- sure.

SPIEGEL: The neoconservative political consultant Robert Kagan says that whoever will be president of the United States, his credo will be: What's good for America is good for the world. Is that so?

Foner: I would turn it around. What is good for the whole world is also good for America. Let's go back to the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson said, we are writing it to show "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." We don't have that anymore. A good example is our health care system. It is completely broken. But nobody says, let's look to Germany or England or France to see what they do about it.

SPIEGEL: What would happen if a president today would suggest that?

Foner: He would be attacked. Four years ago the democratic presidential contender John Kerry was attacked because he said about Iraq that we need to find an international threshold of approval. Despite all this talk, however, many Americans are not happy with the fact that we are despised so much in the world. I have a house in the country, in Connecticut. It's in this rural area. It is moderate Republican. And a local official said to me, I am embarrassed when I travel overseas to tell people I am American. A lot of Americans don't like that we are seen as bullies, aggressors, as people who don't play by the rules.

SPIEGEL: An important reason for the bad image is the Iraq War.

Foner: A situation like in the ‘70s. We had lost our way and we were doing things that no one else approves of. The problem now is that McCain is trying to channel Reagan by saying we have to be strong and build up the military. But economically, that would be completely unviable.

SPIEGEL: Obama also wants to expand the military and deploy more troops to Afghanistan.

Foner: Yes, he does. I think Obama is digging himself into a rather deep hole.

SPIEGEL: In what way?

Foner: The Democratic position such as it is on the war in Iraq is it's bad because it's the wrong war, we should be fighting in Afghanistan. History suggests that getting into a big war in Afghanistan is a bad idea. Many countries have tried it and they haven't succeeded. If Obama does it, his presidency will be destroyed. In six months, it will be Obama's war, not Bush's war.

SPIEGEL: Professor Foner, thank you very much for this interview.

Interview conducted by Karen Andresen and Cordula Meyer.

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