David L. Hoggan: The Hardest Core American Revisionist Historian of World War II
David Leslie Hoggan III attained a kind of grandeur. In the 1960's, he became America's supreme example of a pariah academic historian. He became unemployable.
In the summer of 1963, he and I had adjacent offices on the first floor of what had long been the William Volker Fund, but which had recently been re-named The Center for American Studies. Hoggan was the resident historian. I was a summer intern, the holder of a recently minted B.A. degree in history from the University of California, Riverside.
I was perhaps the only recent B.A. in history on the West Coast who was both a World War I and World War II revisionist. I had taken a course on American war revisionism from Warren Cohen in the fall of 1962, which was probably the only such course in the world. He was not a revisionist, but he knew the literature. He wrote American Revisionists: The Lessons of Intervention in World War One (University of Chicago, 1967). I had been a revisionist on Pearl Harbor ever since the fall of 1958, when I wrote a term paper on the subject.
In the office next to mine on the other side was Thomas Thalken, who had been a graduate student of the dean of American revisionist war historians, Charles C. Tansill. He was the Center's librarian. He later oversaw the creation of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in Iowa.
Upstairs, R. J. Rushdoony had an office. He was a revisionist historian in multiple fields, especially the history of American public education theory: The Messianic Character of American Education (November 1963), for which Hoggan wrote a detailed bibliography.
I had many discussions with Hoggan. He saw me as a potential convert to revisionism as a career. In contrast, Thalken had been advised a decade before by Tansill not to go into the field because anyone espousing such views was never going to get tenure. That was why Thalken switched his major to library science. It was a wise decision.
Hoggan in 1959 had resigned his position at San Francisco State College. He never got a decent job again. That was why he worked at the obscure Center for American Studies in 1962-1963. After the Center closed its doors in 1965, he taught at a local private junior college.
Hoggan was not trustworthy. Nobody could safely trust anything he wrote that didn't have a footnote, and which could be verified as valid. It took me a couple of decades to figure this out. He had a photographic memory, but he made up events. He would say that something happened, but he would never supply a footnote. Nobody else had ever heard that a particular event had happened. An example was this: "During the first world war, British submarines attacked both German and neutral commerce in the Baltic Sea." This statement appears on page 148 of his book, The Myth of the 'New History' (Craig Press, 1965). A few years later, I asked him about this. What was his documentation for this? He answered blithely: "Everybody knows that." In 1975, I spoke at a tiny seminar of students at the University of Southern California. It was on revisionist history. It had been organized by James J. Martin. He was an outstanding revisionist historian, one of the last. He died in comparative security. He could not secure a teaching position at any university. After my presentation, he asked if I ever knew what the source was for Hoggan's statement about submarine warfare conducted by the British. I simply recited the statement that Hoggan had given to me. He had never heard of it, either. That cheered me up.
Hoggan was a gifted linguist. He taught himself Polish just to write his dissertation. He had an extraordinary memory. Yet he wasted his talents. He was not a good writer. He was incapable of focusing for more than a couple of paragraphs. His writing style might be accurately described as stream of unconsciousness. He was tremendous on his bibliographical knowledge. He was a true gold mine in a bibliographic way. That was why Rushdoony asked Hoggan to prepare a bibliography for Rushdoony's book on the history of the leaders of progressive education in the United States.
He died in 1988, an academic pariah. Except in a very limited circle of amateur revisionist historians who were interested in Holocaust revisionism, nobody knew who he was. The academic community in the United States never paid any attention to him. His book on 1939 European foreign policy was the only book of significance published in English, and it was significant for the fact that virtually the entire academic community of modern European historians regarded its thesis as preposterous. I share that view. World War II did not begin because of Lord Halifax.
It is significant that he spent World War II in prison. He refused to fight against the Germans. He was not a conscientious objector. He just would not fight against the Germans. For this, he went to jail. The source of the story was Hoggan; I never bothered to verify it. He was not apologetic in the slightest. He said he been beaten up repeatedly in jail, which I can believe. But he had no remorse about refusing to fight.
In retrospect, Prof. Tansill's advice to Tom Thalken was solid. To be a revisionist historian of World War II in the second half of the 20th century was to commit academic suicide. I can think of no career that more clearly validates this advice than the career of David Hoggan. His career died of self-inflicted wounds.
In November 1992, I published a two-page newsletter on my experiences with Hoggan. You can read it here: http://garynorth.com/Hoggan1992.pdf.