During 1849-1850 Harvard history professor Francis Bowen
challenged the accepted wisdom that the Hungarian revolution led by Lajos
Kossuth was primarily a struggle for freedom and a democratic republic. Instead,
Bowen pointed out, Hungary fought mainly against its own non-Hungarian
nationalities – the Slavs, Germans and Romanians (Wallachs). And that fight was
brought about by the Hapsburg Empire’s eleventh-hour decree of equal rights for
all in the empire that threatened the absolutist privileges of the Hungarian
aristocracy, which up to that point enjoyed full legal immunities, paid no
taxes, and, regarding the Romanians specifically, denied them any
representation in the Transylvanian Diet whatsoever. Bowen further described
from first-hand sources General Bem’s campaign of atrocity against the
Romanians that “almost exceeded belief” and the self-hating chauvinism of
General Damianich, who declared to his co-ethnics that “I come to exterminate
you, root and branch; and then I will send a ball through my own head, that the
last Serb may vanish from the face of the earth.” (F. Bowen, “The War of the
Races in Hungary,” North American Review, 1850: 132; F. Bowen, “The Rebellion of
the Slavonic, Wallachian and German Hungarians against the Magyars,” North American Review, 1851: 226)
Bowen was not
combating European opinion as much as the popular opinion of his own countrymen.
Swayed by the vision of another new democratic republic in international
politics, by the apparent vindication of the still unusual American model, and,
not least, by a Hungarian propaganda whose best weapon was Kossuth’s
extraordinary eloquence, even the US Presidential Administration – and the
Massachusetts State Senate also sitting on the board of Harvard University – briefly
made public support of Kossuth and his revolution an aspect of American policy.
Bowen was subsequently attacked as
a “falsifier” and “perverter” of historical truth. He was criticized for
relying only on sources that supported his argument. There was a concerted
effort to discredit him as a plagiarizer of both words and ideas. It was
insinuated that he was a front for, or even an agent of, Austria. And he was
openly accused of being a proponent of Absolutism – and thus an enemy of
American democracy – and an “admirer of Haynau and Metternich,” at the time the
bêtes noire of international public opinion. “I do not
believe,” stated one detractor, “that there can be found elsewhere in the
English language in the same compass, so many blunders, so many falsehoods, so
much literary dishonesty.” Bowen was taken to task for opposing “the general
opinion, not of this country only, but of the civilized world.” (R.
Carter, The Hungarian Controversy: An
Exposure of the Falsifications and Perversions of the Slanderers of Hungary
(1852); M. Putnam, The North American Review On Hungary (1851))
Bowen’s critics focused much of their
attack on his sources, describing one of the most important, “which has
furnished him with not less than a dozen of his citations,” as “a production of
no value whatever, and not worth noticing.” (Putnam (1851): 343) The work in
question – Hungary: Its Constitution and
Its Catastrophe (1850) – was derided as “too contemptible for serious
notice” and its author alleged to have been “an Austrian agent,” or “an
Englishman in the Austrian service (there are hundreds in the [Austrian] army,”
or a “paid advocate of Metternich or Haynau.” (Carter (1852): 25) In fact, the
source was British constitutional expert Sir Travers Twiss, Fellow of the Royal
Society, Counselor to the Queen, professor of civil law and political economy at
Oxford University and professor of international law at King’s College London. Twiss
was often called upon to aid British Embassies on the thorniest legal issues of
international diplomacy.
Not one to
shrink from a challenge, Bowen marshaled more than a dozen German, French, British
and Hungarian sources on the topic only to find himself accused of all sorts of
crimes and misdemeanors (including a “bitter aversion” for the Hungarian
language and an “intense hatred of the Hungarians.”) In the course of these
attacks his livelihood, and even his life, were threatened. In the last such
overt incursion against the freedom of academic expression at Harvard, in
February 1951 the Massachusetts State Senate used its position on the Harvard board
to remove Bowen from the University’s McLean Chair of history.
Harvard University, led by a
president who had occupied the same chair of history immediately before Bowen,
held the allegations as unwarranted and entirely spurious. The Massachusetts
State Senate was removed from the Harvard Board altogether – never to return – and
in 1853 Bowen was rehired and unanimously appointed to the Chair of Natural
Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity, a position he held actively for
the next 36 years. Harvard University continues to award an annual Francis Bowen Prize in Moral Philosophy
to this day.
I feel some affinity with Professor
Bowen. While making no claim to his erudition (Bowen, after all, graduated first
in the Harvard class of 1833), I recently published two volumes – With Friends Like These: The Soviet Bloc’s
Clandestine War Against Romania and Extorting
Peace: The Romanian-Warsaw Pact Clash and the End of the Cold War –
concerning Romania’s behavior as a state actor within the Soviet alliance,
within the wider socialist community, and internationally. In them, I challenge
previously accepted wisdom with new evidence proving that Romania was not the
Soviet Union’s “Trojan horse” in the West (or anywhere else), that Romanian
policies and actions significantly constrained Soviet international behavior
during the Cold War, and that the Kremlin “permitted” Romanian independence
only the same sense that the Moscow “permitted” the independent behavior of the
USA – because it was compelled to do so for lack of any viable alternative and
not because it did not desperately desire and actively seek to do otherwise.
In taking on conventional wisdom I
was fully aware of the need to provide a broad array of specific cases with
thousands (about 5,000) of sourced footnotes in order to prove that a paradigm
shift in interpretation was warranted. On this point I stand with Bowen that
“questions of fact, when by any means the prejudices of the community have been
excited in relation to them, can be settled only by abundance of testimony; and
we have therefore summoned into court a crowd of witnesses … whose united and
harmonious testimony can leave no doubt upon a mind of ordinary capacity,
however unwelcome the truth may be, or how obstinate soever the bias by which
its reception at an earlier day was prevented.” (Bowen (1851): 236-237) Indeed,
the manner in which cognitive biases operate, and how they operated regarding
US-Romanian and Soviet-Romanian relations in particular, is a central theme of
my work.
In various attacks which Professor Bowen
would have found familiar, I have since been accused of “falsifying” and
distorting history. My work, some claim, is “unilateral.” (A. Pavelescu, 3/4/11,
wordpress.com) My name, others suggest, has been placed on the opinions and
work of others. (C. Vasile, 17/12/11, contributors.ro). And some even claim that
I am a front – or agent – of Romanian intelligence, a proponent of “National Stalinism,”
and an admirer of and apologist for Nicolae Ceauşescu – the bête noir
of international public opinion for much of the last quarter-century. (V.
Tismaneanu, 11/05/13, 20/12/11, 30/5/11, contributors.ro)
More imaginatively, I am accused of
posing as an American spy (after years of publicly refuting media allegations
that I was “the CIA’s antenna”) and as having requested and been granted Romanian
asylum from repressive American democracy during the Ceausescu regime – although
probably not for economic reasons. (A. Bădin, 18 & 19/10/12, badin.ro)
Of course, any challenge to
conventional or accepted wisdom is bound to stir up emotion, controversy and
criticism. Such contrary revelations have not only to be proved but to be
proved over and over again, in enough specific cases that the new contours
emerge clearly, before paradigms and interpretations are changed. There is no
mystery or conspiracy here. Paradigm change is admitted only with great
reluctance by those who have grown accustomed to the old paradigm, and especially
by those who have based their own interpretations and even their careers upon the
now obsolete paradigm. What will remain of their work if their orienting
foundations are shown to be little more than clay feet?
That said, many of the allegations listed
above are obviously intended to distract attention from the books. Their aim is
not to engage the arguments contained within them but to refocus attention away
from them; and upon anything that can in some way be construed as culpable in
the attitudes or behaviors of the author, either discovered or invented. Some detractors
have indirectly appealed to US institutions and authorities to join in their
campaign by alleging a threat to US interests in Romania, and even to Romania
democracy itself, caused by my subversive labors. I have, for example, been
accused of seeking to undermine US policy and discredit the CIA.
In 1850-1852 Professor Bowen was
subject to a similar offensive involving the misrepresentation of his sources,
spurious attacks on his methodology, and allegations of insidious motivation
and clandestine agency. One detractor openly acknowledged in a 66 page diatribe
that the first 50 pages were devoted to attacking Bowen’s sources and how he
used them (and, although not openly admitted, his “dubious” motivations for
writing on the topic). (Carter (1852)) The final portions of that diatribe
comprised simple denials and reiterations of the initial contention – from the
same or similar sources – that prompted Bowen’s articles in the first place.
Thus, declared the critics, there
had never been “since the earliest times, any political distinctions in
Hungary, founded on difference of nationality,” and Hungary, “never attempted to proscribe the languages of the non-Magyar
inhabitants of Hungary, or to impose the Magyar upon them by violence.” (Putnam
(1851), p. 293; Carter (1852), p. 54) The proofs offered were the assertions of
Hungarian officials and Hungarian aristocrats in Europe and America, which
consistently reflected only what was most liberal and generous in Hungarian
political thinking at the time. The Romanians/Wallachs, the critics insisted,
enjoyed full equal rights and “any misapprehension on this subject that could
exist among the Wallachs is only to be accounted for by their extreme
ignorance.” (Putnam (1851), p. 332)
The evident failure to comprehend
the broad difference between declaratory and implemented policy, between
expressed intent and actual behavior, was astoundingly naïve. Bowen’s U.S.
critics appear not to have known, for example, that Budapest nullified the
application of equal rights in Transylvania as soon as it was decreed by Vienna
in 1848 (thereby mobilizing the great assembly at Blaj). Limited to official
Hungarian declarations, those critics were compelled to rely on falsifications,
simple denials, and (self-) deceptions in campaigning against Professor Bowen,
his writings, and the variety of his sources and witnesses.
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