Social Science, Camelot, and Other Evils of the American Half Century

In his long career as a revisionist historian, which only ended with his death in 1968, Harry Elmer Barnes found himself constantly opposed to what he called Court Historians. He coined this term to describe those historians who could always be counted on to put the deeds of reigning politicians in the best possible light, especially in foreign affairs. As a skeptic on World Wars One and Two, as well as the Cold War, Barnes had his work cut out for him.

For Barnes, the Cold War came down to the perfection of the system described in George Orwell’s 1984. Thus, "wars – hot, cold, or phony, but mainly cold and phony – are being used to an increasing extent as the basic instrument of domestic political strategy in order to consolidate the power of the class or party in office.... The real enemy is not nations or forces outside the borders, but parties and classes within the country that are antagonistic to the party and class which hold power." Further: "According to Orwell, there is no desire to defeat the foreign enemy quickly and decisively, for to do so would undermine the propaganda campaign of fear, curtail or end the armament boom, threaten a depression, invite social discontent, and jeopardize the existing social, economic, and political order" (An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World, III (1965), p. 1325).

Barnes believed it was the duty of non-Court Historians to spotlight the transnational, ruling class collusion made possible by the Cold War.

The late Murray N. Rothbard broadened Barnes’s concept into that of the Court Intellectual. As Rothbard pointed out more than once in his writings, intellectuals’ income is an uncertain thing on the free market. As a result, many intellectuals will seek a safe berth and a steady living as servants of state power and apologists for state policies and interests.

As Rothbard put it, the Cold War era was marked "by the reappearance on a large scale of the ‘Court Intellectual’ – the Intellectual who spins the apologia for the new dispensation in return for wealth, power, and prestige at the hands of the State and its allied ‘Establishment’" ("Harry Elmer Barnes as Revisionist of the Cold War," in Arthur Goddard, ed., Harry Elmer Barnes, Learned Crusader (1968), p. 314).

This explains Rothbard’s interest in the Reece Committee hearings in the early 1950s. In this rather misunderstood episode, Congressman Carroll Reece (R., Tenn.), assisted by staff member René Wormser and consultant George de Huszar, looked into the grant-making policies of the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. In the end, the effort ran aground on accusations of intellectual "McCarthyism" and the disruptive antics of Congressman Wayne Hays (D., Ohio). Nonetheless, the Committee shed light on the big foundations’ promotion of empiricism, centralized "team research," big universities over small colleges, moral relativism, internationalism, and social engineering. (See Tax-Exempt Foundations: Hearings, 83rd Congress, 2nd Session (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1954).)