The Story of American Freedom

Eric Foner

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1977

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction and Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

Meanings of Freedom

The meanings of freedom serve as an overarching theme throughout The Story of American Freedom. Foner describes how Americans have understood the concept of freedom. In his Introduction, he explains that his concern is “less with abstract definitions than with the debates and struggles through which freedom acquires concrete meanings, and how understandings of freedom are shaped by, and in turn help to shape, social movements and political and economic events” (xvii). As the meaning of American freedom has changed many times over the course of its history, the debate over it “has tended to focus on certain dimensions of the idea” (xvii). Foner describes three primary dimensions of freedom as political freedom, which is the right to participate in public affairs; personal freedom, which is the ability to make individual choices; and economic freedom, which concerns personal economic matters. The theme runs throughout the book, typically in relation to how certain groups perceive the idea of freedom during certain periods in American history.

The best example of this is the issue of slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War. Foner argues, “To the North, freedom meant for ‘each man’ to enjoy ‘the product of his labor’; to southern whites it conveyed mastership—the power to do ‘as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor’” (97). Another example concerns the idea of manifest destiny in the 19th century. Foner explains that the Indigenous American idea of freedom “centered on preserving their cultural and political autonomy and retaining control of ancestral lands,” (51). But this idea was incompatible with the ideas of western settlers, “for whom freedom entailed the right to expand across the continent and establish farms, ranches, and mines on land that Indians considered their own” (51). A more contemporary example comes from the book’s final two chapters, which contrasts the liberal positive meaning of freedom for those involved in the civil rights movement to the conservative negative meaning of freedom for those involved in the rebirth of conservatism in the late 20th century. While the positive meaning of freedom is moving toward something—the right to vote, for example—the negative meaning of freedom is moving away from something—freedom from government regulation, for example.

Social Conditions that Make Freedom Possible

A secondary theme in The Story of American Freedom is the social conditions that make freedom possible. These conditions include “what circumstances must exist to allow freedom to flourish,” and what obstacles must be removed to achieve freedom (xiv). He explains,

At one time or another, Americans have identified as obstacles to the enjoyment of individual freedom governmental authority, social pressures for conformity, bureaucratic institutions, ‘private’ arrangements like the traditional family, and concentrated economic power (xix).

Get access to this full Study Guide and much more!

8,800+ In-Depth Study Guides
4,700+ Quick-Read Plot Summaries
Downloadable PDFs

This theme recurs throughout the work, as the freedoms associated with virtually every era were limited in some way before they were expanded. The first example comes from the Revolutionary War era, “when ownership of productive property was widely seen as essential to individual autonomy” (xix). Thus, the conditions that made freedom possible in this era was the ownership of property. In Chapter 1, Foner argues that property was “interwoven with eighteenth-century understandings of freedom” (9). Property qualifications for voting were common for nearly the first century of the republic. Foner explains in Chapter 3, “Although the speed of the process varied from state to state, by 1860 everyone had eliminated property qualifications for voting. The result was to sever the traditional link between propertied independence and membership in the political community” (52).

The theme also arises in the discussion of labor relations during the Gilded Age. Foner explains in Chapter 6 that by 1900, “the process of economic concentration had extended into most branches of industry—a few giant corporations dominated steel, oil, […] and the manufacture of agricultural machinery. The political influence of these enterprises matched their productive power” (166-117). The monopolizing of industrial production and the massive concentration of wealth, in which the bottom half of the population had the same income as the top one percent, were barriers to economic freedom for workers. As labor “raised the question whether meaningful freedom could exist in a situation of extreme economic inequality,” reforms were sought that would allow for the social conditions to make freedom possible (126). Similarly, the activists involved in the second wave of feminism in the 1960s faced barriers to freedom in the form of “a set of social values that did not allow them to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings” (295). Like other marginalized groups of the era, the social conditions that would make freedom possible for these feminists was nothing short of complete equality.

Boundaries of Freedom

In his Introduction, Foner explains that by “boundaries of freedom” he means the definition of those entitled to enjoy freedom (xviii). The concept of who is eligible for American freedom has been contested throughout most of the nation’s history. While the United States was founded on the principles that all men are created equal, and that liberty is a human entitlement, many people and groups have been deprived of liberty and freedom throughout most of the nation’s history. Foner argues that “the boundaries of freedom have been as contested as the word’s definition itself” (xx). Among the imaginary lines that make up the boundaries of freedom, the most persistent have been those based on race, class, and gender (xx). Limitation of freedom based on class was a central feature throughout most of the nation’s first century. The boundary of freedom for Americans of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in addition to race and gender, was the ownership of property. Not until 1860 did every state in the Union eliminate the requirement of property for voting. Foner points out in Chapter 1, “Whether liberal, republican, or some combination of the two, most eighteenth-century commentators assumed that only certain kinds of persons were fully capable of enjoying the benefits and exercising the rights of freedom” (9).

The boundaries of race and gender were even starker in the 19th century than class was in the previous century. Foner argues in Chapter 4, “As older exclusions fell away—notably property and religious qualifications for voting—others were retained and new ones were added” (69). In explaining how strong the race and gender exclusions, Foner writes, “Democracy in America was capable of absorbing poor white men at home and waves of immigrants from abroad, yet erected impenetrable barriers to the participation of women and non-white men” (69). The grounds for exclusion shifted away from the economic dependency of non-propertied persons in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to what was described as “natural incapacity” (71). In the social hierarchy of the time, Black Americans and women were said to lack the innate endowments necessary for participation. In the 1857 Dred Scott decision by the United States Supreme Court, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote in his opinion that Black Americans could not be citizens because the American “political family” was restricted to whites. Foner argues, “In effect, race had replaced class as the boundary separating which American men were entitled to enjoy political freedom and which were not” (75).