A Teaser on the Left

James Livingston has seized upon the occasion of Eugene Genovese's passing to write a series of extended meditations on Genovese, on intellectual history, and on Livingston's own development as an intellectual historian.  His latest entry in this series, published at his blog Politics and Letters, includes some provocative reflections on academics' ideas of the Left -- reflections which are informed by and in some ways formed against Michael Kazin's American Dreamers.  Livingston will engage Kazin's text (and Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind) more fully -- and more forcefully, no doubt -- during our Friday afternoon roundtable discussion at the S-USIH conference.  (See the full conference program here.)

In the meantime, I thought our readers might be interested in this excerpt from Livingston's post, in which he discusses "the Left's laggard intellectual condition."

My “dissertation book” on the origins of the Federal Reserve came out in April 1986, while I was a post-doctoral fellow at the National Museum of American History, a great gig because no one knew what we, the fellows, were supposed to be doing all day.  Me, I mainly roamed around the Library of Congress, having talked my way into a stack pass and finding too many wonderful books that had nothing to do with my appointed task, which was to write something called “Accumulating America: How Centuries End, Where Politics Begin.”  That roaming was the origin of a schizophrenic book called Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940, which was published in November 1994 as an entry in Alan Trachtenberg’s series at UNC Press.  It was my formal debut as an intellectual historian and my angry farewell to economic history.  The only reader the press could find was, of course, Martin J. Sklar.

While at the Museum, I marveled at the attitudes of the other fellows—they all seemed to derive, by some route, from Harvard, Yale, or Cornell, although the southern front (Chapel Hill, mainly) was graciously reinforced by Pete Daniel—because they all took the gig for granted, as if a year off to do exactly what you want was just a common card in the academic hand every graduate student was dealt.  As far as they were concerned, this was normal, this was what you were supposed to expect as you created a career in academe.  So I felt like a freak.  For the first time since my conversion experience to Marxism and its attendant political extremities—not to mention its intellectual idiocies—I wondered about my affiliations.  These incredibly smart, uniformly decent people were all on the Left, but this space as they understood it was, to me, another planet.  We shared no assumptions, no premises.  Most of our conversations were prolonged attempts to articulate these.

I was making my way as a junior professor just like they were, but they seemed to know what they were doing.  And I had an inkling back then that their sense of academic entitlement had something to do with their definition of the Left as the site of withdrawal and release from the work-a-day world—the place where exemption and abstention from its demands became the same thing, rather than the frictional, contentious point of intersection between theory and practice, or between social classes and political visions.

So conceived, the Left had become a cloister where beautiful souls gathered, just as the university had become a safe haven for intellectuals in flight from a world newly convulsed by supply-side, neo-liberal programs of economic rebirth.  It was where you went if you could afford to favor “social equality” and “altruistic justice” over “individual liberty,” as Michael Kazin has recently framed the choice the American Left has always had to make.

Does that sound like resentment?  Very well, then.  I’ve never believed that you could be in but not of this world.  I’ve always been Protestant enough to know that the condition of grace is sin, which is the deep, undeniable, disgusting corruption of your soul, the kind that comes with the territory of the world as it exists, not as you would like it to be, or as you can afford to rise above it or buy your way beyond it.   I’ve never believed, as Kazin and most of our comrades on the Left do—here they have a lot in common with Eugene Genovese—that individual liberty and social equality are the terms of an either/or choice.  OK, call it resentment.

So even back then, I was worried about the intellectual—or is it the epistemological?—orientation of the Left.  I wondered why my comrades didn’t think of themselves as the mainstream, the lifeblood, of American political discourse.  Why did they think that Marxism and socialism were still scandalous?  I wondered why they needed to believe that they were marginal figures in the academy and out.  How was that belief realistic in view of Genovese’s professional success, not to mention the careers of David Montgomery, Herbert Gutman, and William Appleman Williams?

I wondered why they hadn’t considered the possibility that the originality of American politics (and with it the American Dream) resides in two cognate discoveries specific to the revolutionary experience of the late-18th century.  First, the discovery that sovereignty is the inviolable property of the people “out of doors,” not the state, the party, the cabinet, the government, or the nation.  The patriotism that has always inspired the Left to return to the first principles of the founding—original intent, as it were—derives from this protean notion of sovereignty, because it lets us distinguish between the will of the people and the expressions of power that enact and embody the nation as a state.  Second, the discovery that equality is the necessary condition of liberty, not its negation.  The founders understood that republican liberty could not outlast the moment when equality became its opposite, when, as James Madison put it, the rights of persons were  overruled by the rights of property—when “the poor were sacrificed to the rich.”  The Left seems never to have caught up with this insight, preferring to think of liberty and equality as mutually exclusive moral imperatives rather than eminently compatible commitments.

I’ve been wondering about the Left’s laggard intellectual condition ever since that privileged year in D.C., living six blocks east of the LC, about a mile down the Mall from the NMAH.  And now I begin to think that precisely because I have been lost in these thoughts all these years, I was never surprised by Gene Genovese’s political twists and turns.  Like our comrades on the Left, he was always looking for an Archimedean point outside the object of his critique—capitalism—which would then serve as the place where exemption and abstention from the world as it exists could become the same attitude toward the world as it exists.  He wanted to be in but not of this world.  So, like a true believer, he always needed a sturdy faith in a world elsewhere.

You can read Livingston's entire post here.

Disembodied Voices in Intellectual History

In his recent post on Embodiment in Intellectual History, Ben raised the question of how intellectual historians might more effectively or fruitfully consider the "embodied aspects of the people about whom we write." He suggested that a consideration of "intellectuals' physical presences may grow more important as disembodied communication technologies become more and more ubiquitous." 
I began to wonder:  when was the last time that our communication technologies weren't in some way disembodied.  We probably have to go back to prehistory for that.  But I forbid my students from beginning their essays at the dawn of time, or writing an introductory paragraph about the course of human history, so I will spare you a similar sweeping gesture.  Besides, we do (mostly) U.S. history around here -- our wayback machine doesn't go very far back (though it might be salutary for us if it did). 

So as I thought about Ben's post, and I thought about how intellectual historians might "do embodiment" well, I was reminded of one of my favorite sections of A Godly Hero, Michael Kazin's brilliant biography of William Jennings Bryan.*

Kazin's extended meditation on the sonority of Bryan's voice provides an excellent example of how intellectual historians can explore what someone's physical presence meant for the articulation and reception of his or her ideas.  In the Great Commoner's case, this particular aspect of Bryan's (self-consciously performative) self-performance seems to have imbued his ideas with a liveliness and appeal that they lacked when presented in mere text, as printed words upon a page.

Kazin writes about the almost magical power of Bryan's speaking voice.

How did he do it? One born too late to hear Bryan on the stump or in a convention hall can only gather up reminiscences and marvel that, in an era satiated with oratory, he could lead so many people, foes as well as allies, to describe him as the most compelling speaker they'd ever heard (48).

Listeners commented on the extraordinary timbre of Bryan's voice:

Nearly every recollection begins by describing the quality of that voice. "Sonorous and melodious," "deep and powerfully musical," "soothing but penetrating," "free, bold, picturesque," "clear as a cathedral bell..." (48)

As Kazin points out, such praise sounds very much like the aesthetic judgment audiences might have pronounced upon a stage actor's talents.

Like them, the Nebraskan could project his voice a remarkable distance. Mary Bryan recalled one day in 1898 when, from inside a hotel room in Corpus Christi, she could hear her husband perfectly "three long blocks" away.  At national conventions, before the introduction of amplified sound in the early 1920s, Bryan's was often the only voice that could reach every seat in the house. And his diction -- clear, precise, and rendered with a slight prairie twang that passed for no accent at all -- ensured that listeners could understand every word (48).

I am intrigued by the gendered aspects of Bryan's appeal.  Apparently, he sounded like a man was supposed to sound.  And I can't help but wonder: what were women supposed to sound like when they spoke in public?  "They weren't," would be the easy laugh line here.  But there were women on the Chautauqua circuit, and I suspect that someone like Carrie Nation could hold a crowd's attention.  But I don't know that her appeal was aesthetic -- or acoustical -- in the way that Bryan's seemed to be.  Instead, part of the draw there (in addition to audience interest in the content of her speech) might have been the sheer spectacle of going to see a woman -- and such a woman! -- speak in public.

In terms of going to hear women, I suppose that famous female vocalists and melodramatic actresses could have drawn great crowds wherever they performed. But except for stage performers and professional entertainers, I wonder if there were many women who would have been able to draw a crowd simply to hear the sound of their speaking voices, as crowds wanted to do in Bryan's case.

In the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, what were the aesthetic expectations for public female -- and/or feminine -- speech?  (I mean besides "Ladies, please don't!")  What acoustical features, what kind of sonority, might have marked a pleasing, public female voice?  If you have some bibliographic suggestions, please add them to the comments below.  This is something I'll need to look at in relation to my work in the early 20th century, and I should probably base my understanding of the matter on something more authoritative than Singin' in the Rain.  ("I caiiiiiint staiiiind him.")

In any case, Bryan's heyday may have been the age of oratory, but it was not yet the age of radio. Kazin writes:

A...GOP partisan named Ira Smith first heard Bryan in 1896. Half a century later, he recalled: "I listened to his speech as if every word and every gesture were a revelation. It is not my nature to be awed by a famous name, but I felt that Bryan was the first politician I had ever heard speak the truth and nothing but the truth." The next day, Smith read the same speech in a newspaper and "disagreed with almost all of it." He was glad, in retrospect, that "the most remarkable orator of the century" had passed his prime before the onset of radio. Otherwise, Smith, who ran the White House mailroom for five decades, believed the Nebraskan would certainly have been elected president (49).

To me, this is perhaps the most striking insight of all -- one of those "for want of a nail" arguments that sets history swinging on the hinge of a single slim contingency.

Heck, maybe old Ira Smith was right.

Or was he making the kind of appeal to technology's magic -- or to charisma's power? -- that often serves as a sop to our most simplistic explanatory urges?  For example, we've probably all heard some version of "Kennedy beat Nixon because of television."  That's a little too easy.  And I think it would be really bad history to say, "If Bryan had been broadcast coast to coast on the radio, he surely would have won the White House."  But Kazin, who doesn't tend to write bad history, doesn't say that.

Furthermore, as Kazin points out, it was not merely his voice alone that made Bryan so appealing; it was his deep sincerity. "Listeners enjoyed being in his presence and often felt inspired by a guileless orator who seemed an authentic representative of the producing classes. A politics of character thus blended into a politics of celebrity as Bryan's voice became known throughout the land" (49). That part about "being in his presence" suggests a whole performative rhetoric of look and gesture, physicality, sturdy manliness, that went along with that big sonorous voice.  So radio might not have helped Bryan much anyhow.

In their introduction to an audio clip of Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech, recorded in a studio twenty-five years after it was first delivered, the editors at GMU's History Matters site note that the recording "does not capture the power and drama of the original address."  Perhaps only listeners who had heard Bryan speaking live and also heard that recording could judge whether or not the recording "gets" Bryan.  Listening to his disembodied voice today, we have the challenge of wading through almost one hundred years of technologically mediated cultural history -- or culturally mediated technological history -- that have worked to shape what we think a (man's) voice ought to sound like.

But if audio recordings didn't seem to do justice to Bryan's oratorical gifts, that may have had less to do with the disembodiment of Bryan's voice than with the disembodiment of Bryan's audience.  Maybe it wasn't enough for Bryan to stretch himself out upon a Cross of Gold in a recording studio; maybe he needed a stadium full of people to bring power to his performance.

Along with Ben, I too would be interested to hear (!) our readers' thoughts on the more general question of how attention to embodiment can work in intellectual history.  I would suggest that exploring the (dis)connection between voice and presence, ideas and embodiment, matters not only in history, but for history -- for how we study it, for how we write it, and for how we perform it (and ourselves) here in the silent cacophony of the intellectual history blogosphere.

What say you?

---------
*If my discussion of this book seems vaguely familiar to you, it might be because I swiped a few paragraphs for this post from my old blog.  But I had, like, Seven Faithful Readers.  So I'm guessing it's new to you.

Socialism is the Name of Our Desire

Last week I presented to about 60 secondary history teachers, alongside two of my colleagues at our lab school, University High, on the topic: “Teaching Socialism in American History.” I argued that including the history of socialism in the secondary U.S. history survey was important because, in the all important quest to make history more interesting for young students—since polls regularly show that high school students consider history the most boring subject—the history of socialism would give students space to imagine a different world. Counterfactual thinking is important to the development of historical imagination. It helps students think about the differences between history, in its constructedness, and the past, in its finiteness. Counterfactuals highlight historical contingency in ways that make the study of history more compelling than the Whiggish, even teleological narratives spun by textbooks. Werner Sombert’s crucial question—“Why no socialism in America?”— which has helped shaped a century of American historiography, is just the type of counterfactual question that we should ask our young history students.

Lest you dyed-in-the-wool empiricists out there object, I should point out that I also argued that including socialism as part of the U.S. history curriculum paints a more accurate picture of U.S. history. In making this case, I relied heavily on Michael Kazin’s indispensable new book, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (which Mike O’Connor reviewed for USIH here.) Kazin contends that the left, defined as “that social movement, or congeries of mutually sympathetic movements, that are dedicated to a radically egalitarian transformation of society”—has transformed the moral culture, or "common sense” of the nation, even though it has never been a serious threat to the concentrations of political and economic power. He writes: “Leftists who articulated big dreams of a different future did much to initiate what became common, if still controversial, features of American life. These included the advocacy of equal opportunity and equal treatment for women, ethnic and racial minorities, and homosexuals; the celebration of sexual pleasure unconnected to reproduction, media and educational system sensitive to racial and gender oppression and which celebrates what we now call multiculturalism, and the popularity of novels and films with a strongly altruistic and anti-authoritarian point of view.” In short, Kazin argues that the cultural left, from Harriet Beecher Stowe, to Max Eastman, to Toni Morrison, to Matt Groening, “articulated outrage about the state of the world and the longing for a different one in ways the political left was unable to do.”

Kazin’s thesis is exciting for intellectual historians because, insofar as the left has been influential in American life, such influence is best assessed by taking stock of how its ideas have been incorporated into mainstream cultural frameworks. This is not to say that American Dreamers is a work of intellectual history. Kazin takes ideas seriously, and intellectuals seriously, but usually as tangential to the larger social history of political movements. That is to say, he rarely pauses to analyze intellectual sources with any rigor. Which is fine. Like I said, the book is indispensable as a synthetic historical overview of the American left. I definitely plan to assign it to undergraduate students.

American Dreamers is also a good place for intellectual historians to begin rethinking the paradoxes of radical thought. For instance, in an obscure footnote Kazin quotes a stunning passage from Richard Hofstadter’s Age of Reform: “The dialectic of history is full of odd and cunningly contrived ironies, and among these are rebellion waged only that the rebels might in the end be converted into their opposites.” Kazin relates Hofstadter’s point about the populists in order to make his case that many New Left dissidents, those who staged dramatic sit-ins at universities across the country, ended up controlling the reigns of cultural power as represented by humanities departments. Although this paradoxical development sends shivers down the spines of conservatives such as Pat Buchanan—whose pithy quote, “Culture is the Ho Chi Minh Trail of power; you surrender that province and you lose America,” became a rallying cry for conservative culture warriors—Kazin qualifies the effect of tenured radicals.

On the one hand, Kazin recognizes, along with Richard Rorty, that New Leftists have reshaped American culture to be far less sadistic. Concomitantly, they changed the way millions of young Americans have learned about their nation. Kazin writes: “Gradually, their ideas about history, literature, and a just society percolated down to secondary schools across the land. Black studies, Chicano studies, women’s studies, queer studies, and cultural studies; history which examined America as a nation dominated by white people bent on empire, the so-called ‘holy trinity’ of ‘race-class-and-gender’ and the virtues of multicultural identity—all were norms of pedagogy and scholarship by the end of the twentieth century.” Although this is more than a touch overstated—more secondary students continue to learn from traditional curriculums than from those inflected with New Left ideas, and even most college surveys avoid using the “E word” (Empire) when describing the role of America in the world, apart from the era of the Spanish-American War—Kazin is basically correct about this remarkable cultural transformation.

But on the other hand, Kazin’s analysis of the cultural left is tempered by his pessimism that such success matters little in the face of conservative economic and political power. “The cultural influence of the post-1960s left thus became a background melody to a political narrative written largely by conservatives. It softened the tone and created some striking ironies”—such that Fox broadcast sixties radical Matt Groening’s satirically subversive The Simpsons for over two decades at the same time its news station became an effective mouthpiece of the Republican Party’s right-wing—“but it did not rewrite the script.” The trajectory of this analysis is similar to a line of thought I’ve been exploring: to what degree has New Left thought been sopped up by neoliberalism (cultural liberalism mixed with economic conservatism)? Kazin’s analysis that, “as respect for the individual rights of everyone advanced, the advocacy of collective uplift and economic equality receded further,” begs the following question: was the advance of the former the precondition for the recession of the latter? The answers to this question might determine whether the left has a future.

Kazin is a careful and fair scholar. But he gets caught up in his own brand of polemics when analyzing contemporary left public intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, and Howard Zinn. Although he is quick to point out that such intellectuals are handicapped by the fact that their ideas are disconnected from a movement—since a left political movement is mostly non-existent—he is even quicker to dismiss their ideas as grim and unrealistic. Kazin is especially harsh in rehashing his dour assessment of the late historian and activist Howard Zinn. Me thinks he doth protest too much.

Kazin begrudgingly recognizes that Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which has sold over two million copies, has “became the most popular work of history an American leftist has ever written.” “Unfortunately,” Kazin writes, “Zinn’s big book was stronger on polemical passion than historical insight. For all his virtuous intentions, he essentially reduced the past to a Manichean fable and made no serious attempt to address the biggest question a leftist should ask about U.S. history: why have most Americans accepted the legitimacy of the capitalist republic in which they live?” This is a weird point of criticism given that a few paragraphs prior Kazin addresses the ways in which Zinn sought to answer “the biggest question.” “The American elite,” Kazin paraphrases Zinn, “used its wealth to pit ‘the 99 percent’ of the people ‘against one another’ and employed war, patriotism, and the military to ‘absorb and divert’ the occasional rebellion.” So the real problem is not that Zinn fails to address “the biggest question,” but rather that Kazin dislikes Zinn’s answers.

For Kazin, the American people cannot be reduced to either heroes or dupes. Fair enough. A professional historian should recognize nuance, complexity, irony, blah, blah, blah. But should A People’s History of the United States be judged by these standards? Or should it be assessed as a primary document of the left, similarly to how Kazin analyzes the Port Huron Statement? In other words, is accuracy or effect the barometer? Kazin assesses most of his primary sources according to the latter. What good did it do? Did it help the left? Did it make America better? I would argue Zinn’s book, and his legacy, should be analyzed as such. Kazin’s glib assessment of Zinn the lousy scholar—he didn’t even cite his sources!—is really beside the point.

Kazin has always been open about recognizing his personal position relative to his subject matter. He was the son of anti-Stalinist leftists. He was a New Leftist. He was a Maoist who cut sugarcane in Cuba. He was also, as the reader of American Dreamers discovers, a hippie communard who sought to get closer to nature while living in a group house and growing his own food in Oregon in the early 70s. Kazin has since gone out of his way to renounce some of his earlier positions as flawed. But, unlike someone like David Horowitz, he remains a man of the left, evident in that he’s the current editor of Dissent. I could compare his trajectory to Todd Gitlin’s. Gitlin was a renowned SDS member who has since worked hard to convince leftists that loving America—the flag!—is necessary and good. Similarly, Kazin was the only panelist on the American Exceptionalism plenary (that concluded last year’s USIH conference) who seemed to think American Exceptionalism something the left could embrace.

Given Kazin’s reflective self-positioning, I find it strange that he fails to see the ironies that plague his analysis of Zinn. For example, Kazin charges Zinn with, essentially, being a lumper, or, gasp, an uber-lumper. In contrast, Kazin carefully splits the left throughout his book. For example, one of my favorite chapters is titled, “The Tale of Three Socialism”: the prairie socialism from Wisconsin to Milwaukee, the secular-Jewish socialism of the needle unions, and the radical modernism of bohemian New York. Kazin also expertly delineates the differences between Old and New Lefts. And yet, in writing a book about the American left, from the 1830s to the present, he can’t help but also do some lumping of his own. Mike O’Connor expertly clarifies this problem in his review of American Dreamers:

It is difficult to know how Kazin might have addressed this problem short of writing an entirely different book. A deeper issue raised by American Dreamers, however, is whether “the left” qualifies as a tradition in the sense that Kazin intends. Without a core tenet, text or history, do the disparate struggles for justice in the name of race, gender and labor constitute a single movement? Moreover, to what extent does the work of later radical activists derive from that of earlier ones? To cite Kazin’s earliest examples, can we draw direct lines from David Walker to Malcolm X, Frances Wright to Robin Morgan, or Thomas Skidmore to Occupy Wall Street? Kazin suggests that all of these figures and groups are committed to the ideal of equality and therefore such connections are justified. But have these leftists seen themselves as unified in a common project? Is such self-conscious identification necessary to be designated a tradition in this sense?

Ironically, again, Zinn is perhaps the most influential chronicler of those radicals in American history whom Kazin would deem worthy of lumping together. Most contemporary radicals understand the history of the American left through Zinn. David Walker, Big Bill Haywood, Jane Addams, Eugene Debs, Tom Hayden, and many more, continue to be imagined as part of an unbroken chain of leftists. Such an imagination is thanks due in no small part to Zinn. Had a public intellectual from an earlier era achieved something of this magnitude, Kazin would not have heaped so much scorn. Zinn certainly did more than Dissent to keep Kazin’s beloved left—my beloved left—alive during its nadir! (Kazin is only recently the editor of Dissent!)

Nitpicking aside, read American Dreamers. Learning about the history of those Americans who dreamed of a better world is a good antidote to cynics who decry the Occupy Movement’s lack of achievable goals. As Kazin writes in his conclusion: “the utopian impulse should not be smothered under a patchwork quilt of policy prescriptions.” For Kazin, and for me, socialism is the name of this utopia. Or, as Lewis Coser and Irving Howe wrote in a 1954 Dissent essay: “Socialism is the name of our desire.” “Socialism,” Kazin writes, “has never been the name most Americans would choose for their dream society; today, many doubt such a society is either feasible or desirable. Without such an ideal, however, whatever we name it, the real world will be ever harder to change.”

Book Review: O'Connor on Kazin's *American Dreamers*

Review of Michael Kazin’s American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). ISBN: 978-0-307-26628-6. 352 pages.

Reviewed by Mike O’Connor
Georgia State University


The U.S. history survey course is typically a rather liberal affair. It frequently offers a Whiggish narrative in which the evils of the American past—British imperialism, slavery, robber baronism, U.S. imperialism, the Red Scare(s), economic depression, Jim Crow, gender inequality, Cold War paranoia—are consistently, if often belatedly, overcome by the words and actions of those who are dedicated to an expanding vision of freedom. Despite Gordon Wood’s attempt to highlight the radical nature of the American Revolution, or Eric Foner’s insistence that freedom hasn't always meant what it does today, the typical introduction to U.S. history seems an object lesson in Hartzianism. To the longstanding consternation of conservatives, it is very difficult to fit into this story the ideals of those who “[stand] athwart history, yelling Stop.”[1] Yet, as Michael Kazin points out in his new book, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation, the left resists, just as strongly, assimilation into this version of the national narrative.

Perhaps this is because radicals (a word Kazin uses interchangeably with “leftists”) are not merely liberals with greater dedication or purity, but a different beast altogether. In Kazin’s “classical” formulation, the left is “that social movement…that [is] dedicated to a radically egalitarian transformation of society” (xiv n.). While radicals who are dedicated to equality will find much in common with liberals who prioritize their own specific conception of freedom, the two groups will also differ on many key issues. When these philosophies have come into conflict, the much smaller left has typically found itself marginalized. On the other hand, when the two movements have found common cause, it is the liberal groups that have gotten the credit. To the extent that radicals have affected policy at all, Kazin writes, “they generally did so as decidedly junior partners in a coalition driven by establishment reformers” (xiv). Whatever victories that the left has managed to achieve, then, “never occurred under its own name” (xv). This pattern has resulted in an underappreciation of the contributions of the left, one that is perpetuated in many classroom narratives.

American Dreamers provides a welcome corrective to this tendency. Perfect for use with undergrads, it is a compact, readable overview of the history of the American left. Perhaps the book’s greatest achievement lies in imposing order on an otherwise unruly subject. Its seven chapters do not merely move forward in time, but instead concentrate on the movements that most clearly embodied leftist aspirations at a given moment. In successive chapters, Kazin explains, analyzes and criticizes abolitionism, suffragism, the trade union movement, Populism, socialism, communism and the New Left, concluding with the fragments of a contemporary left represented by such disparate figures as Naomi Klein, Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky.

Some of these movements are more easily summarized than are others. The Communist Party of the USA, for example, is comprehensible within an institutional framework, and much ink has already been spilled interpreting the New Left. (Kazin himself is one who has extensively covered the latter ground.) For the general reader, however, the most helpful features of American Dreamers will be its author’s interpretive frameworks, which corral otherwise sprawling subjects into comprehensible stories. The initial chapter, for example, uses three significant primary documents from U.S. intellectual history to situate the origin of the American left. The three pamphlets—Frances Wright’s Course of Popular Lectures, Thomas Skidmore’s The Rights of Man to Property, and David Walker’s Appeal…to the Colored Citizens of the World—each appeared in the fall of 1829, and together they defined the central issues for future generations of American radicals: gender, labor and race, respectively. From this rather narrow focus, Kazin is able to generalize outward about the role of religion in antebellum protest movements. “Radicals made no apologies for using language that drew a sharp line between the sinful and the righteous…Their approach was proudly illiberal” (10). This point allows him to segue to the abolitionism’s religious roots, a subject that sets up the two following chapters, which cover that movement before and after, respectively, the Civil War. In less certain hands this barrage of topics could be quite disorienting, but Kazin’s structure imposes a discipline on them that renders the shifts quite manageable.

Another example of this successful scaffolding is the treatment of American socialism. This subject can range from the Shakers to Robert Owen to hippie communes, but Kazin reasonably focuses on the period of the movement’s greatest influence: 1890-1920. He frames his treatment around the notion that “three different kinds of socialisms existed, somewhat uneasily, during the Progressive Era, and they suffered different fates” (113). The first of these groups were the Midwestern laborers and farmers, perhaps best exemplified by the Milwaukee “sewer socialists” who elected the nation’s first socialist mayor and Congressperson. The secular Jews who worked in New York City’s garment district and published the Daily Forward make up the second group, while avant garde cultural modernists comprised the third. Such a taxonomy allows Kazin to explain how socialism could cast such a long shadow during this period while leaving a legacy that boasts of few tangible accomplishments.

Similar fates were met by most, if not all, of the movements chronicled in American Dreamers. This unavoidable observation has led many to conclude that leftism in the United States has been a failed project. The thesis that rests somewhat lightly over the book takes issue with this perception. Kazin is the first to admit that no specific political victories are notched in the left’s column, but that does not mean, he argues, that radicalism has not significantly influenced American history. He claims for the left a much greater effect than success in any political campaign: it has “transform[ed] the moral culture, the ‘common sense’ of society” (xiii). Its willingness to take extreme and unpopular positions has made such stances familiar over time, so that more broad-based liberal movements could, essentially, turn them into actual political changes. Additionally, the expression of leftist views through cultural vehicles such as literature, art, film and music has had the greatest effect in transforming once-radical ideas into mainstream ones. “The cultural left articulated outrage about the state of the world and the longing for a different one in ways that political left was unable to do” (xiv).

Such an argument recalls, of course, Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front, and Kazin’s chapter on twentieth-century communism, with its biographical portraits of Woody Guthrie and Paul Robeson, and treatment of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, echoes the themes of the earlier book. American Dreamers breaks new ground, however, in applying a similar concept consistently to all periods of American history. The Hutchinson Family Singers, for instance, toured the antebellum nation performing abolitionist songs such as “The Bereaved Slave Mother” and “The Fugitive Slave.” Kazin argues that their great popularity suggests that “[t]he music of abolitionism may have reached as many Americans as turned out to hear anti-slavery speakers” (23). Henry George and Edward Bellamy were instrumental figures in spreading the word about socialism in the late nineteenth century, and the cause of the New Left was communicated most effectively not by “traditional kinds of leaders” (such as union officials or elected politicians), but by “celebrities.” Figures such as Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Abbie Hoffman, Robin Morgan, Eldridge Cleaver and Martin Luther King, Jr. possessed a cultural clout that was as important as their political thinking or activism. While William Lloyd Garrison or Eugene V. Debs might also have been considered earlier leftist celebrities, their relationship with the movement was different: the unstructured nature of the New Left meant that what the celebrities “said and did often steered the activist core, instead of vice versa” (217).

American Dreamers is filled with similarly interesting observations, and the book makes for an easy and compelling read. Yet one of the very trends that Kazin laments—the recurring dynamic by which the left is put in the position of “handing off” its momentum to liberals at crucial moments—must have presented him with a difficult narrative problem. Since American Dreamers concerns leftism rather than liberalism, Kazin repeatedly abandons particular concerns just at the moment in which they finally arrive on the national stage. Without the liberal or mainstream perspective, and the possibility of narrative climax, the book is reminiscent of eavesdropping on one side of a telephone conversation. Early on, for example, one learns much of early abolitionism but comparatively less of the rise of the Republican Party and the Civil War. The pattern continues when the book covers Populism but says little about Progressivism, treats early twentieth century labor radicalism in some detail but glosses over the New Deal, and highlights the campaigns against racism by the Communist Party USA but sends the reader elsewhere for the gains of the Civil Rights Movement.

It is difficult to know how Kazin might have addressed this problem short of writing an entirely different book. A deeper issue raised by American Dreamers, however, is whether “the left” qualifies as a tradition in the sense that Kazin intends. Without a core tenet, text or history, do the disparate struggles for justice in the name of race, gender and labor constitute a single movement? Moreover, to what extent does the work of later radical activists derive from that of earlier ones? To cite Kazin’s earliest examples, can we draw direct lines from David Walker to Malcolm X, Frances Wright to Robin Morgan, or Thomas Skidmore to Occupy Wall Street? Kazin suggests that all of these figures and groups are committed to the ideal of equality and therefore such connections are justified. But have these leftists seen themselves as unified in a common project? Is such self-conscious identification necessary to be designated a tradition in this sense? American Dreamers will likely raise these provocative questions for many readers, though a through consideration of them lies outside of its scope.

The structure and overarching thesis of American Dreamers provide a framework that allows the reader easy entry into the wide-ranging topic of American leftism. At the same time, Michael Kazin’s insight and depth of knowledge continually challenge received notions about the subject. While the book is unlikely to upend the primacy of liberal Whiggery in the nation’s classrooms, placing it in dialogue with this vision could serve to foster new thinking on the subject, for teachers and students alike.

-----------------------------------------------
[1] William F. Buckley, Jr., “Publisher’s Statement,” National Review, November 19, 1955, 5. Available here.

Final Plenary on American Exceptionalism

For those who missed the conference or who missed the final plenary, I offer a couple of photos. Above and to the left, Ben Alpers introduces Mike O'Connor who chaired the plenary. Above and to the right, the panel: (L-R) Eric Foner, Beth Bailey, Michael Kazin, and Rogers Smith.

The idea for the plenary sprang from a post of Ben's and took shape under Mike's direction. The turn out was solid for a Friday evening in NYC. A lively question and answer session followed an interesting exchange among the panelists.

Of the many themes addressed over a couple of hours, two stayed with me: all the panelists made note of the need to place whatever might be considered American exceptionalism in an international context. To that end, Eric Foner mentioned Ian Tyrell's work a few times. See Tyrrell's website.

The other theme was the production of usable myths that accord with ideas of American exceptionalism--a point raised most clearly and succinctly by Beth Bailey. I have wondered in posts on this blog what Americans think the American military is doing when it goes overseas, and what the nation's soldiers think they are killing and dying for, if not for a theology of American exceptionalism?

While I have argued that civil religion covers this idea more comprehensively, Beth Bailey made some very serious points regarding the construction and consequences of ideas wrapped up in the exceptionalist narrative.

another thought on American exceptionalism

The recent revival of American exceptionalism as a political issue has been noted a few times at USIH. In November, I wondered why an idea so generally scorned by historians could be getting new legs in politics. Last month, Ben traced the term's shifting meanings over time, from its origins in Marxist thinking to its status today as a "conservative shibboleth." Another, slightly more recent (February 14) take on this phenomenon can be found on the website of The New Republic, where Georgetown historian Michael Kazin (The Populist Persuasion, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan) has approached the subject from the perspective of President Obama's political difficulties surrounding the phrase. The president's measured support for American exceptionalism has been too lukewarm to earn him points with conservative critics, and Kazin assesses Obama's use of the term to date as neither "productive" nor "convincing." Kazin nonetheless argues that the president, despite his difficulties with celebrating the nation's uniqueness, "neither can nor should discard the exceptionalism creed...[Instead, he] can use exceptionalism to suggest that the country has yet to live up to its ideals and simultaneously, to garb his policies, from health care to immigration to foreign aid, as what the country needs for this to finally happen." Click here for Kazin's post.

another thought on American exceptionalism

The recent revival of American exceptionalism as a political issue has been noted a few times at USIH. In November, I wondered why an idea so generally scorned by historians could be getting new legs in politics. Last month, Ben traced the term's shifting meanings over time, from its origins in Marxist thinking to its status today as a "conservative shibboleth." Another, slightly more recent (February 14) take on this phenomenon can be found on the website of The New Republic, where Georgetown historian Michael Kazin (The Populist Persuasion, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan) has approached the subject from the perspective of President Obama's political difficulties surrounding the phrase. The president's measured support for American exceptionalism has been too lukewarm to earn him points with conservative critics, and Kazin assesses Obama's use of the term to date as neither "productive" nor "convincing." Kazin nonetheless argues that the president, despite his difficulties with celebrating the nation's uniqueness, "neither can nor should discard the exceptionalism creed...[Instead, he] can use exceptionalism to suggest that the country has yet to live up to its ideals and simultaneously, to garb his policies, from health care to immigration to foreign aid, as what the country needs for this to finally happen." Click here for Kazin's post.