Philip S. Foner

Philip S. Foner (1910–1994) was an American Marxist labor historian and teacher. The author and editor of more than 100 books, the prolific Foner wrote extensively on what were at the time academically unpopular themes, such as the role of radicals, blacks, and women in American history. In 1941, Foner became a public figure when he was stripped of his teaching position at City College of New York over his communism. Foner is best remembered for his massive 10-volume History of the Labor Movement in the United States, published between 1947 and 1994, and for the 5-volume collection The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass.

Contents

Biography

Early years

Philip Sheldon Foner was born December 14, 1910 on the Lower East Side of New York City.[1] His parents were emigrants from the Russian empire. Foner grew up in Brooklyn, and graduated from Eastern District High School.[1]

Foner obtained his Bachelor's degree from the City College of New York (CCNY) in 1932, and his Master's degree from Columbia University in 1933. In 1941, he received his Ph.D. from Columbia.

Foner married Roslyn Held in 1939. The pair had two children, Elizabeth and Laura.

Academic career

Foner became an instructor of history at City College of New York in 1933, the same year in which he obtained his Master's degree.[1] He taught there through 1941, when his first book was published, Business and Slavery: The New York Merchants and the Irrepressible Conflict.[2]

In 1941, Foner and 50 other faculty members at the City College of New York were forced from their teaching jobs during an investigation of communist influences in higher education by the New York state legislature's anti-communist Rapp-Coudert Committee, officially known as the Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate the Educational System of the State of New York. Foner's three brothers — his twin Jack, a professor of history at CCNY; Moe, a worker in the CCNY registrar's office; and Henry, a substitute teacher in the New York City public schools — were also embroiled in the controversy and were terminated from their jobs as well.[1]

After his dismissal from City College, Foner became a principal and chief editor for Citadel Press, based in New York City.[1]

In 1947, there appeared the first volume of what would become Foner's magnum opus, A History of the Labor Movement of the United States, released by International Publishers, a publisher very close to the Communist Party USA. Writing as a Marxist, Foner emphasized the role of the working class and their allies in a class struggle dating back to the earliest days of the American republic, thereby presenting what one historian has called "a formidible challenge to the orthodox John R. Commons interpretation of labor history."[2] Further volumes would appear in the series throughout Foner's life, with a tenth and final installment, published shortly before the historian's death, taking the story to the eve of the Great Depression.

Two years later, the first installment of Foner's other multi-volume work, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, saw print, also through the auspices of International Publishers in New York City. Ultimately five volumes of this work would appear, published between 1949 and 1952.

In 1967, Foner was once again readmitted to the halls of academia when he was hired as a history professor at Lincoln University, a historically black university located near Oxford, Pennsylvania. Foner retained this post until his retirement in 1979.[1]

Following his retirement, Foner continued to publish books at a frenetic pace, usually in the role of co-author of document collections in association with a younger scholar.

In 1979, nearly three decades after the mass firings at City College, the New York State Board of Higher Education apologized to the Rapp-Coudert victims, terming the conduct of the Rapp-Coudert Committee "an egregious violation of academic freedom."[3]

Foner also became a professor of history at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey in 1981.

Following his wife Roslyn's death, Foner married again in 1988, with the second union ending in divorce in 1991.

Accusations of Plagiarism

Foner's work, always politically controversial, has not been without even deeper criticism. In 1971, a 30-page article in the respected academic journal Labor History extensively documented the way that Foner plagiarized material from an unpublished master's thesis by James O. Morris in his 1965 book, The Case of Joe Hill.[4] Morris charged that "About one quarter of the Foner text is a verbatim or nearly verbatim reproduction" of his manuscript and that edited quotations from other sources had been exactly reproduced, including ellipses.[5]

Further charges were levied in May 2003, when labor historian Mel Dubofsky accused Foner of having "borrowed wholesale from my then unpublished dissertation" on the Industrial Workers of the World for use in Volume 4 of his History of the Labor Movement in the United States.[6] Dubofsky charged that Foner extracted large chunks of this dissertation "without attribution or inverted commas."[6] Dubofsky further alleged that Foner had engaged in a similar pattern of behavior with the unpublished work of other young scholars "too numerous to mention."[6]

Another important American scholar, John Earl Haynes, has asserted a pattern of shoddy accuracy by Foner in the footnoting of some of his work.[7]

Death and legacy

Philip Foner died December 13, 1994.

Philip Foner was the uncle of historian Eric Foner, a former head of the American Historical Association. Eric Foner's father was Philip's brother Jack D. Foner (1910–1999), himself a professional historian.

Footnotes

  1. ^ a b c d e f Lawrence Van Gelder, "Philip S. Foner, Labor Historian and Professor, 84." New York Times, December 15, 1994, pg. B20.
  2. ^ a b Herbert Shapiro, "Philip Sheldon Foner (b. 1910)," in Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas (eds.), Encyclopedia of the American Left. First edition. New York: Garland Publishing Co., 1990; pp. 232-233.
  3. ^ "Jack D. Foner," Perspectives, American Historical Society, April 2000.
  4. ^ Labor History, vol. 12, no. 1 (Winter 1971), pp. 81-114.
  5. ^ Scott McLemee, "Seeing Red: Philip Foner influenced a generation of young labor historians, but critics call him a plagiarist who helped himself to their research." Chronicle of Higher Education. vol. 49, no. 42 (June 27, 2003), pg. A11.
  6. ^ a b c Melvyn Dubofsky in "Was Foner Guilty of Plagiarism?" History News Network, George Mason University, June 2, 2003. Retrieved May 31, 2010.
  7. ^ John Earl Haynes in "Was Foner Guilty of Plagiarism?" History News Network, George Mason University, June 2, 2003. Retrieved May 31, 2010.

Works

Books written

Books edited

Further reading