Harry Elmer Barnes (1889–1968) was an American historian, sociologist, and journalist. He advanced the New History, promoted the integration of history with the social sciences, and became a leading revisionist critic of the origins of the First World War, a position that later extended to controversial views on the Second World War.
Background
Harry Elmer Barnes was born on June 15, 1889, in Auburn, New York, a city in Cayuga County in the Finger Lakes region of central New York. He later was associated with Port Byron, New York, a village in the same region, where he attended the local high school before entering Syracuse University.
His formative interests developed in an academic setting that was beginning to connect history with the social sciences. His later career centered on the integration of history with sociology, economics, and criminology, a theme that emerged from the scholarship he pursued as a student.
Education
Barnes attended Port Byron High School before enrolling at Syracuse University. Syracuse was chartered in 1870 under the auspices of the Methodist Episcopal Church and had grown into a coeducational university in upstate New York. Barnes received his bachelor's degree summa cum laude in 1913 and a master's degree in 1914. At Syracuse, he was stimulated by the teaching of Philip Parsons and prepared a history of pre-Comtean sociological literature.
In the academic year 1916 to 1917, Barnes studied at Harvard on a fellowship, where he prepared an extensive history of sociological contributions to political theory. Harvard, founded in 1636, was the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, and its graduate programs in the social sciences attracted scholars during this period. His studies at Harvard built on his earlier work in historical sociology and furnished material for his later writings on historiography and Western thought.
He completed his doctorate at Columbia University, where he received a Doctor of Philosophy in history in 1918. While at Columbia he was University Fellow in Historical Sociology and Cutting Travelling Fellow in History. Columbia, which began in 1754 as King's College in New York City, was then a center of the New History movement, and Barnes studied under James Harvey Robinson and James T. Shotwell, two of its founders.
Career
Barnes began his professional career at Syracuse University as an instructor in historical sociology for about two years after his bachelor's degree. He then became a lecturer in history at Columbia University, where he had earned his doctorate. Columbia at this time was a leading center of the New History, the movement that Barnes later promoted in his own writings.
In 1918 he became associate professor of history at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, a post he held until 1919. Clark had been founded in 1887 as a graduate research institution, which gave its faculty an emphasis on advanced scholarship. From 1920 to 1923 he served there as professor of history of thought and culture. In 1919 and 1920 he taught as professor of history at the New School for Social Research in New York, which had been founded in 1919 by progressive scholars, several of whom had been associated with Columbia.
From 1923 to 1930 he was professor of historical sociology at Smith College, a women's college founded in 1871 in Northampton, Massachusetts. He also taught at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, which was founded in 1821 as a liberal arts college. In Philadelphia he taught at Temple University, founded in 1884 as a institution offering evening instruction to working students. He taught at the University of Colorado in Boulder, the state's flagship public university, and at Indiana University in Bloomington, which was established in 1820. He lectured also at Barnard College, the women's college affiliated with Columbia and founded in 1889, and in many university summer schools.
From 1929 to 1940 Barnes worked in the editorial department of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, where he served as an editorial writer and special commentator on social issues. The chain, which grew out of the newspaper ventures of E. W. Scripps and Roy W. Howard, gave him a national platform for commentary on public affairs. During these years he lectured widely on penology, criminology, and education and consulted on criminology and penology for federal and state agencies.
From 1943 to 1944 he served as chief consultant on prison industries for the War Production Board, the wartime agency established in 1942 to direct American industrial production during the Second World War. In his later years he became known for historical revisionism and Holocaust denial. Barnes died on August 25, 1968, in Malibu, California.
Religion
Barnes did not belong to a documented religious denomination, but he wrote extensively about religion and questioned conventional views of orthodox faith. His books The Twilight of Christianity (1929) and Role of Religion in a Secular Age (1929) addressed the place of religion in modern secular society.
Christianity, the religion at the center of these works, arose in first-century Judea and developed into a diverse family of churches and traditions in the Western world. By the early twentieth century, historians and social scientists increasingly examined religious institutions as social and historical phenomena, a perspective that shaped Barnes's critical approach to the subject.
Politics
Barnes was not a party politician, and no party affiliation is documented for him. His political views are evident in his writings and public commentary, which made him a prominent critic of official narratives on war and foreign policy.
In the 1920s he argued against the view that Germany alone was responsible for the First World War, a position he developed in books such as The Genesis of the World War (1926). He was long regarded as a progressive intellectual of the American Left, but during the 1930s and 1940s he became associated with the Old Right because of his opposition to the New Deal, the economic and social programs introduced by Franklin D. Roosevelt, and to American entry into the Second World War.
His anti-interventionist stance linked him with a broader current in American politics that opposed foreign military commitments and resisted expansions of federal power, while emphasizing skepticism toward government explanations of wartime decisions.
Views
Barnes believed that history should be used to develop informed judgment about public affairs and to expose outworn myths and illusory doctrines that hindered cultural progress. He held that social problems could be understood only in light of their historical background, and he advocated the integration of history with the social sciences.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
After Barnes's death, the economist and historian Murray Rothbard wrote a tribute in which he called Barnes “the last of the truly erudite historians.” Rothbard also described Barnes as a scholar whose historical approach informed his work in sociology, criminology, religion, economics, and current affairs.
