R.I.P., Gabriel Kolko (1932-2014)
I was saddened to read of the recent death of prominent historian Gabriel Kolko. He suffered from an incurable neurological disease and relocated to the Netherlands. He then took advantage of that nation’s legal euthanasia option and died in Amsterdam on May 19.
When I was an undergraduate, I read and found immensely provocative Kolko’s “The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916” (1963). Kolko argued in the book that big businesses of the early twentieth century actually wanted the federal government to regulate them in order to avoid more restrictive legislation from state legislatures. Self-styled “Progressive” reformers, in Kolko’s interpretation, were wolves in sheep’s clothing. They worked in sneaky ways to preserve corporate power and to short-circuit efforts to rein in exploitative corporate profit-seeking.
In the later stages of his career, Kolko turned increasingly to American war-making and foreign policy, and his works included: