Gabriel Kolko

Gabriel Morris Kolko (August 17, 1932 – May 19, 2014) was an American historian. His research interests included American capitalism and political history, the Progressive Era, and U.S. foreign policy in the 20th century. One of the best-known revisionist historians to write about the Cold War, he was also credited as "an incisive critic of the Progressive Era and its relationship to the American empire." U.S. historian Paul Buhle summarized Kolko's career when he described him as "a major theorist of what came to be called Corporate Liberalism...[and] a very major historian of the Vietnam War and its assorted war crimes."

Kolko was of Jewish heritage. He was born in Paterson, New Jersey, the son of two teachers: Philip and Lillian (née Zadikow) Kolko. Kolko attended Kent State University, studying American economic history (BA 1954). Next he attended the University of Wisconsin, where he studied American social history (MS 1955) and was taught by William Appleman Williams. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1962.

During these years, Kolko was active in the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID). By the time SLID published his first pamphlet, Distribution of Income in the United States, in 1955, Kolko had already completed a stint as the league's national vice chairman. Following his graduation from Harvard, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at SUNY-Buffalo. In 1970, he joined the history department of York University in Toronto, remaining an emeritus professor of history there until his death in 2014.

According to antiwar activist Eric Garris, Kolko first established his reputation as a historian writing about the "close connection between the government and big business throughout the Progressive Era and the Cold War [...] but broke new ground with his analysis of the corporate elite's successful defeat of the free market by corporatism." Early in his career, beginning with his books The Triumph of Conservatism and Railroads and Regulation, Kolko used a revisionist approach as a way of analyzing history. Soon he was considered a leading historian of the New Left, joining William Appleman Williams and James Weinstein in advancing the so-called "corporate liberalism" thesis in American historiography.

This was a thesis that disputed the "widely held view that government regulates business, arguing that, instead, business steers government", and Kolko used it to analyze how America's social, economic, and political life was shaped beginning with the Progressive Era (1900–1920). But for Kolko, a social policy of "corporate liberalism" (or what Kolko preferred to call "political capitalism") shaped the mainstream agenda of all that was to follow afterwards in American society, from The New Deal (1930s) through to the post-World War II era of the Cold War (1947–1962), and onwards. Kolko's argument that public policy was shaped by "corporate control of the liberal agenda" (rather than the liberal control of the corporate agenda), revised the old Progressive Era historiography of the "interests" versus the "people", which was now to be reinterpreted as a collaboration of "interests" and "people." So too, with this revised version of recent American history, came the tacit recognition that this fulfilled the business community's unspoken, but deliberate, aim of stabilizing competition in the "free market."

This was an idea summarized by journalist and internet columnist Charles Burris when he argued that:

Rather than "the people" being behind these "progressive reforms", it was the very elite business interests themselves responsible, in an attempt to cartelize, centralize and control what was impossible due to the dynamics of a competitive and decentralized economy.

In retrospect, Kolko summarized this phase of his career when he wrote that: