In a situation of some uncertainty, one thing at least can be said with assurance concerning contemporary American politics: it is a bad time for radicals and radicalism. The memories of the militant 1960’s take on that glow of indulgent nostalgia we reserve for times far enough past to be safely assimilated. We recall in tranquility that which no longer portends or threatens. When those of every political persuasion agree that the dominant national mood reflects one form or another of conservatism, radicals can find sustenance only in memory and in hope that what once was might somehow be again. For the present moment, there is little at all to cheer them. The armies of radicalism no longer constitute a significant force on the battleground of American politics.
But they have not entirely been disbanded. They have instead withdrawn to their last redoubt: the colleges and universities of the nation. Not that America’s campuses are immune to the national political climate; indeed, one regularly hears reports comparing today’s students with the silent generation of the 1950’s. In both cases, undergraduates are said to have exchanged political concerns for private interests, and to be preoccupied less with disrupting the system or building a new world than with finding themselves or getting into law school. That is not the way things are, however, with their professors. A good many former radical protesters from the 1960’s have found tenured refuge within the universities, and they have managed to keep radicalism’s dated voice alive on the campuses. Radical politics is moribund, but radical scholarship flourishes. Universities thus experience their own version of the generation gap: the newly conservative young causing consternation among the still radical not-so-young. The most common of faculty-club laments concerns the decline of political commitment and the rise of careerism and quietism in the new student generation.
It is in a way ironic that the nation’s colleges, which we normally imagine as situated on the cutting edge of intellectual and political developments, should find themselves harboring so many echoes of a played-out political generation. Social science and humanities faculties all over the country serve as museums of a mood that the rest of the nation has put behind it. The political times have passed the campuses by. Yet the situation is not really surprising. Radicalism finds a natural home in the universities of the modern Western world, and America is no exception. Harvard and Berkeley voted for George McGovern even if no one else did, and Barry Commoner of the Citizens party, himself a professor, finds that he is among friends there. It has all happened before. In the years following World War II, for example, professors still immersed in depression-era radicalism denounced robber barons and reactionaries before their mildly skeptical middle-class students much the way today’s radical assistant professors earnestly recount America’s moral failures before bemused neoconservative undergraduates.
It has not been easy for those professors who are radicals to adjust to the changes in political attitudes. But their difficulties as scholars and teachers go deeper than vagaries of political mood. America presents an awkward and unsettling environment for radicalism, and radical scholars are out of phase and out of touch more profoundly than many of them care to comprehend. What follows explores that situation for history and historians, but the analysis could easily be extended to other fields of American studies. The burden of American radical history is but a particular case of the burden of American radicalism.
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II
For the genuine radical, history ought to be, and sometimes is, an embarrassment. Those possessed of visions of a transformed reality in which men live in essential harmony with nature and each other are unlikely to find sustenance in the record of humanity’s efforts to date. When a person yearns for wholeness, community, and fulfillment—for all the blessings of the cooperative commonwealth—he must be dismayed by the endless dismal accountings of frustration, fragmentation, and loss that make up the record of organized social life.
Not that history is only tragedy, of course. Men do not always fail, and the limited victories they have achieved need not be scorned because they were provisional or ambiguous. But only those conditioned by limited expectations of human capability can be satisfied by limited achievements, and such people are not, by definition, radicals. Those whose dreams of human possibility remain unconstrained by intimations of original sin and inevitable fallibility will ordinarily want to divest themselves of the burden of the past.
But ordinarily is not always. The past is not only difficult to ignore, but it provides, properly used, an imposing instrument of social persuasion. If, taken whole, history offers its greatest consolations to conservatives, liberals and even radicals have not come up entirely empty in their search for a usable past. As with the use of Scripture, one can, through artful selection, demonstrate from history pretty much what one chooses to. Romantics imagine lost golden ages and charlatans order them up at will, but beyond nostalgia and falsification lies the subtler weapon of selective extrapolation. One isolates the patterns of progress that come or are enticed to view and builds from them, at accelerated rates, the vision of how things might yet be. We might suggest, modifying Santayana, that those who cannot remember the past have the luxury of making it up as they go along.
America has always provided a particularly favorable environment for positive imaginings of the past by the Left. The nation that pictured itself born free and that saw its representative type as a figure of Adamic innocence never felt unduly oppressed by the weight of its history. While Americans were often ahistorical and sometimes anti-historical—Jefferson remarked typically, “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past”—it was not primarily from these attitudes that the Left took encouragement in coming to terms with the problem of history. If the American past was in certain respects absent, it was more notable for its benevolent aspect while present. Americans typically experienced more of history’s glories than its burdens. For them, the record of the past suggested not so much the inevitable limits as the limitless possibilities of human striving. The history of the nation presented an image of linear progression: good things at the origin continued duly to unfold in the direction of ever more bountiful freedom, prosperity, and justice.
If the consolations for the Left of a benevolent history belonged most obviously to liberals (Louis Hartz insisted in The Liberal Tradition in America that the American consensus rested overwhelmingly on the Lockean assumptions of free man in free society), they were not unavailable to radicals. As long as the Left could be imagined as a continuum, and not as divided into separate, indeed warring, compartments, liberals and radicals would be seen as differing over the route that politics might travel but not over its destination. During the height of Popular Front cooperation in the 1930’s, for instance, even Communists could be portrayed simply as “liberals in a hurry.”
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The progressive school of American historiography, which prevailed among intellectuals in the period between the wars, encouraged the assumption of unity on the Left. Writing in the aftermath of the social dislocations accompanying industrialization, the progressives-Charles Beard, Vernon Parrington, James Harvey Robinson—described political conflict in terms essentially dualistic, often Manichean. Their quasi-Marxist analysis emphasized economic and class conflict and presented that conflict in the various forms—aristocracy versus democracy, capitalist versus agrarian, business versus labor—in which they saw it manifested. Always the struggle matched Right against Left, and always, at least in the long run, the forces of progress won out. For all their concern over the recurring power of reaction in America, the progressives were fundamental optimists: for every Hamilton, there was a Jefferson; for every Webster, a Jackson; for every Hoover, a Franklin Roosevelt. (In certain ways the progressives stood outside the tradition of American exceptionalism in that they assumed that economic and class conflicts were everywhere, America included, the fundamental basis of politics and society, but their invincible optimism revealed the implicit, neo-exceptionalist supposition that the forces opposing progress were far weaker in America than elsewhere.) In the progressives’ dualistic universe, the line between liberal and radical blurred to indistinction, obscured as it was by the common antipathy to the enemy on the Right. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who reduced the essentials of American political history to a conflict between businessmen and everyone else, referred in typically vague fashion to the combined opponents of the business community as the “radical democracy.”
In the years since 1945, however, the progressive view of things has come under a series of attacks from various directions, so much so that it would be difficult indeed to find a professional historian today who would identify himself as belonging to the progressive school (though I suspect that a good deal of classroom teaching still follows, willy-nilly, the modern Whiggish perspective underlying the progressive world view: the sense of a continuing pattern of development in the direction of greater human equality secured by collective action). In the breakdown of the progressive interpretation, the assumption of Left unity has come under recurring scrutiny, and the new skepticism concerning the Popular Front belief in no enemies on the Left has created both new opportunities and new problems for radicals interested in forging their historical studies into political instruments.
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III
The two decades following World War II provided for American intellectuals a context unconducive to progressive attitudes. The disillusionment with the Soviet Union and the rise of the cold war, the development of mass prosperity and the decline of industrial conflict, combined to prompt a rethinking of the national past. The old progressive dichotomies, once so compelling, now appeared irrelevant, and the emphasis on class conflict gave way to a new appreciation of the extraordinary degree of agreement on fundamental values among Americans of different strata.
Consensus historians, as they came to be known, did not deny the presence of conflict in American society, but they argued that those conflicts had existed, to a degree matched nowhere else, within a framework of essential agreement on a political economy of democratic capitalism. Progressive dualism, with its simplistic and moralistic drama of the people versus the interests, misread the essence of American history. Americans had fought among themselves, to be sure, but they had quarreled about how to administer the system and not, as elsewhere, about whether the system deserved to survive. And in many ways, the most pervasive and significant of American divisions had occurred not over economics but over matters related to race, religion, ethnicity, and region.
Thus it had been the peculiar American experience to avoid the ideological conflicts that had convulsed other nations in the process of modernization. Daniel Boorstin discovered The Genius of American Politics in the national preference for commonsense practicality over ideology. For Boorstin, “dreams made in Europe . . . were dissipated or transformed by the American reality.” Here pragmatism reigned supreme, supported by a widespread prosperity (David Potter identified Americans as The People of Plenty) that made fundamental conflict—and thus ideology—unnecessary. So it was in America and so, largely, it had always been. Louis Hartz located the key to the American condition in the nation’s non-feudal past. America, with no experience of an ancien regime, did not have to undergo a democratic revolution. Where the French Revolution had destroyed an aristocratic order, the American Revolution had simply preserved Lockean realities. There having been no extreme Right, an extreme Left never developed; there having been no feudalism, there was to be no socialism. America lacked ideology, in any formal sense, because it lacked the historical dialectic that had produced the European dogmas of Left and Right. In this bsence, liberal consensus flourished.
The rise of consensus history had debilitating effects on radical uses of the past. The attack on progressive historiography weakened radicalism both by shrinking the distance between political extremes—politics in America was reduced in consensus perspectives to a narrow struggle for the Center—and by the related assumption that any form of ideological politics was alien to the American tradition. If all politics took place within the narrow bounds of classical liberal assumptions and if, in any case, American divisions over politics were more often sociocultural than socioeconomic in nature, then radicalism simply drifted out of the range of serious political discussion. The tendency to denigrate radicalism derived further major impetus, of course, from a cold-war atmosphere that made radical politics appear dangerously suspect as well as hopelessly anachronistic.
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By the mid-1960’s, however, a strong reaction had developed against consensus history and politics. A new generation of historians, removed from the anti-Communist passions of the postwar years, rediscovered Marx and rejected American uniqueness. Having witnessed—and often participated in—the indecorous, sometimes violent protests for racial equality and against the war in Vietnam, these activist scholars were unimpressed with a view of the past emphasizing stability and social harmony. Theirs was not an America immune from history’s evils; instead, they portrayed a society disfigured in its present, as in its past, by enduring patterns of war, racism, and poverty.
Since so much of their passion issued from their anti-war sentiments, it is not surprising that these New Left historians devoted such careful attention to the history of American foreign relations. (Many young scholars participated in this, but it was the middle-aged William Appleman Williams who served as godfather to all the revisionists.) They produced a startling new version of the cold war, with America as the author and responsible party, and, working backward and forward in time, established a framework for the analysis of modern U.S. foreign policy featuring inexorable capitalist advance, usually under the rubric of “open-door expansionism.” (Less imaginative scholarly predecessors had, in their impoverished lexicon, spoken of this simply as a desire for free trade.)
The New Leftists focused their energies in domestic history chiefly on what might be called the demystification of liberalism. They minimized presumed liberal achievements in social reform and the regulation of business (as in Gabriel Kolko reinterpreting the progressive era as The Triumph of Conservatism) and delighted in implicating liberals in what had earlier been seen as instances of right-wing repression (as in a number of studies of McCarthyism that devoted more attention to the inadequacies of Harry Truman, Hubert Humphrey, and the Americans for Democratic Action than to the antics of the junior Senator from Wisconsin and his reactionary allies).
The attack on liberalism revealed the departures of the new radicalism from the old. If the New Leftists shared elements of mood and ideology with the progressives (they certainly spoke more respectfully of Charles Beard than the consensus historians had), they also differed from them in their fundamental sense of the American situation. The progressives, finally, were nationalists who believed in America. The New Left did not. Progressive dualism featured a moral conflict in which the forces of progress could normally be expected to carry the day; the moral universe of the New Left remained far more bleak. New Left historians could find few mainstream heroes to match an unlimited supply of villains.
Unlike the progressives, New Left historians found it difficult—and uncongenial—to differentiate among Jefferson, Jackson, or Roosevelt and their conservative enemies: all had accepted the basic political and economic rules of the American game. New Leftists wanted not to recapture a liberal past; they wanted to expose and transcend it. The liberal establishment stood as the primary obstacle to their political ambitions, the Old Right of business conservatives and their provincial political spokesmen having become irrelevant. What had seemed to progressives a genuinely reformist tradition presented itself to the New Left as an elegant facade for elite domination, all the more insidious for its surface plausibility. Behind the illusory achievements of social reform, the new radicals could see only bonds of social control. So intent were some New Leftists on dismantling the liberal past and discrediting liberal heroes that they even contrived to extend sympathetic treatment to outright conservatives—Herbert Hoover and Robert Taft, for example—who, but for their opposition to liberal stalwarts, would almost certainly have been more roughly handled.
The political upheavals that had generated New Left revisionism subsided with the cooling of racial conflict and the winding down of the war. A politics less inflamed found its correlative in scholarship less tendentiously ideological. This did not mean a reversion to consensus interpretations, however; even as the political mood of the 1970’s seemed quirky, erratic, and difficult to label, so the world of American historiography entered a period resistant to precise classification. Some measure of radical impulse remained. The general public appeared to move uncertainly Right over the course of the decade, but, as already noted, enough student radicals from the 60’s had become professors in the 70’s to keep Left perspectives more acceptable in the universities than in the larger culture.
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Yet while a strain of radicalism persisted, the most significant shift in historical studies had to do only indirectly with questions of ideology. It was the rise of the new social history that dominated professional interest and attention in the 70’s. Whatever its ideological implications, the new social history was most notably radical in its manner of defining what history as a field was all about. The new history turned scholars’ attention away from their traditional preoccupations—political, institutional, and intellectual developments as determined by the most visible and prominent elements in society—toward a new emphasis on the aggregate everyday experiences of life by ordinary people.
The new history required of historians that they immerse themselves in the perspectives of outside disciplines: anthropology and sociology, demography and statistics. In terms of substance, fashionable interests turned to the history of women and the family; of racial and ethnic minorities; of popular social movements; of the working class (not including mainstream trade unions or their leaders); of mass religious experience; of slavery (from the perspective of the slave quarters); of community development; of social mobility (or—in some cases preferably—of its absence). Farewell to great men (and occasional women), great ideas, and great events; today the history of everyperson. Laurence Veysey summed up the canons of the new history as a preference for quantitative evidence (traditional literary sources being “always the product of a small elite”) and, more broadly, as the sense “that history should be viewed in terms of the processes affecting the great majority of people alive at any given time, with special attention to the anonymously downtrodden, those whose standard of living and prestige are the lowest.”
Veysey’s reference to the “anonymously downtrodden” indicates the affinity apparent between the New Left and much of the new social history (although Veysey himself minimizes the connection). It was Jesse Lemisch, one of the most militant of New Left historians, who urged that American history be rewritten “from the bottom up,” and many social historians are dedicated to doing just that. They write of the masses and, presumably, from the masses’ perspective (though not often, it should be noted, for the masses: a good deal of the new social history is inelegant at best and unreadable at worst, and a heavy reliance on statistical analysis combined with a weakness for sociological abstractions makes much of it accessible only to the most persevering professional readers). There are, it is true, a great many exceptions. Even as many social historians write readable prose, so also do many carry on their research unencumbered by restrictive ideological presuppositions. The new social history is less a conceptual monolith than was the New Left. Nonetheless, Professor Lois Banner’s generalization concerning practitioners of women’s history—“they adopt a model of oppression and try to find the sources of that oppression and of past attempts at liberation from it”—could easily be extended to laborers in other sections of the social-history vineyard.
The radical populists and the Marxists among the social historians share with the New Left a preoccupation with the inadequacies of liberalism. Unresolvable class conflict is to them the engine of social life and they join the 60’s radicals in identifying as liberalism’s greatest culpability its evasion of that reality. The New Left relentlessly attempted to expose liberal political reform as a more-or-less conscious sham, intended essentially to deflect radicalism by offering token or even fraudulent gestures of change; its only positive function, so the argument went, lay in its often ingenious use by entrenched corporate groups to protect and extend their interests. Radical social historians characteristically make the same points by ignoring electoral or legislative politics altogether. Some of this has to do less with ideology than with historiographical fashion, but for those so inclined, how better indicate the meaninglessness of politics for people’s lives than by leaving it out of accounts of those lives? (Radical political movements, of course, are exempt from the general ban.)
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IV
The extensive common ground between the New Left and the radical fringes of the new social history becomes clear in a recent left-wing survey of American history, A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn of Boston University.1 Based heavily on a wide—if radically-skewed—range of secondary works, Zinn’s populist social history provides a useful source for an analysis of recent radical uses of the past. It also reveals, quite unintentionally, the continuing dilemma of radicals anxious to find in the American experience resources for the social revolution of which they dream.
For those accustomed to conventional histories and unfamiliar with current radical preoccupations, A People’s History will indeed provide, as the dust jacket suggests, a “surprising new look at American history.” Through Zinn, Jesse Lemisch’s dream of seeing things from the bottom up has found expression. This is, in the author’s words, “the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, . . . of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, . . . the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, . . . the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America.”
Zinn is the ultimate populist historian. Most national histories, he suggests, commit the fallacy of telling the story of the United States—or of any nation—as that of a community of people with a set of common interests. But, Zinn insists, nations are not communities and the idea of a unitary “national interest” disguises the reality within all societies of intense conflicts which, while varied in form, come down to a fundamental social division between “victims and executioners.” It is the job, then, of humane American scholars to take the side of the victims—blacks, women, Indians, prisoners, working-class whites, the poor—against their oppressors and write history accordingly. Having laid out his preferences, and on the apparent assumption that, biases once confessed, anything goes, he proceeds to construct a morality tale. Zinn denies that it is his intention to romanticize the victims or vilify the executioners, but that is the way the book turns out. His rhapsodizing about Indian life, for example—before, of course, the horrors of European intrusion—has to be read to be believed, and it seems beyond his capacity to credit decency of motive to anyone not of the lower classes. Given his vision of social reality, it is difficult to see how it could be otherwise.
Since, for Zinn, mainstream politics tends to be of, by, and for the elite and touches only peripherally the true needs and concerns of the people, his book dwells but occasionally, and then normally in terms of disparagement, on the usual stuff of textbook history. The reader will learn little or nothing here of Hamilton’s financial program, Jackson’s struggle with the Bank of the United States, the Kansas-Nebraska Act and its implications for sectional conflict, disputes over the tariff, the development of regulatory control over business activity, the rise of the welfare state. Great American statesmen are notable by their absence and by the skepticism—if not outright dismissal—with which they are treated when present. Influential individuals and groups come into view only when bad things have to be accounted for, electoral politics only as “an ingenious mode of control,” social and economic reform only as desperate efforts to resist the socialist challenge. Not even the new political history, which draws attention away from national issues and political leaders down to the ethnocultural bases of mass politics, can induce Zinn to suppose that politics has anything genuine to do with popular concerns. Nor is he interested in economic development, except insofar as it is based in exploitation and distributes its rewards unfairly. There is for him no economic problem; from his account one might suppose that economic prosperity develops by spontaneous generation.
Zinn’s history, then, takes place outside the ordinary channels of public activity and among the anonymous of society. When his dispossessed make contact with public authority, it is in the form of resistance: riots, strikes, protests, military desertions, refusals—great and small—of every imagining. The people, at least the authentic people, are always in protest. For long stretches, indeed, A People’s History consists of little more than descriptions of one public disturbance after another, the tedium of which is relieved only by Zinn’s lively prose (he writes better than many of his radical colleagues) and by his extensive, and often effective, use of quotations. Zinn prefers his protesters to be as unruly and intransigent as possible. Those who work through the system and for limited gains (Samuel Gompers and the AFL) inevitably get compared to their disadvantage with those (Big Bill Haywood and the IWW) who will not be mollified. Even relatively militant organizations, like the CIO of the 1930’s, fall under the author’s disfavor when they give up their wildcat protests and instead “channel the workers’ insurrectionary energy” into the prosaic paths of collective bargaining and social democracy.
The problem for Zinn and for radical historians generally is that while they imagine the people existing in a state of perpetual protest, the people seem, in the end, to have so little to show for it. Things change, but—from the radical perspective—nothing changes. The system remains securely in place, the establishment firmly in control. This poses a particular dilemma for Zinn, who is not content merely to record a history of oppression. Although he intermittently senses that he is dealing with unpromising materials, he wants to extract from history a measure of radical hope, to use the past to “anticipate a possible future.” He says that he does not want to “invent” people’s victories, but he nonetheless operates at, and sometimes beyond, the limits of plausible interpretation in ferreting them out of the record. Zinn is forever seeing things on the edge of slipping out of control, the people poised at the point of rebellion. But it never quite happens.
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Why it is that what so obviously should happen does not requires a good deal of explaining. Part of Zinn’s answer lies in the elite’s infernal talent for deflecting the people’s anger back among themselves, away from its rightful target:
How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the schools of the rich remain untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar aircraft carriers. How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women for equality by giving them small special benefits, and setting them in competition with everyone else for jobs made scarce by an irrational, wasteful system. How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred—by economic inequity—faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices.
When it is not conspiring to divide and conquer, the establishment relies on its “twin tactics of control in the face of revolutionary challenge: reform and repression.” While Zinn’s elite does not shrink from coercion—it will, he says, “if necessary to maintain its control, kill us”—it prefers subtler methods of social dominance. It offers just enough mobility, just enough prosperity, just enough freedom to beguile a population already socialized into its values through the functioning of schools, churches, families, the political system, and the instruments of mass culture. The American system of control—“the most ingenious . . . in world history”—keeps itself going through an elaborate pattern of “small rewards” sufficient to maintain the loyalty of a middle class delegated to act as “guards of the system.” Should even that buffer fail, Zinn suggests, the elite will turn, as it has so often in the past, to its “ultimate weapon” of foreign intervention and war as a way of sustaining capitalism, diverting attention from domestic conflict, and creating that artificial sense of national unity necessary to supplant the genuine community of interest among the poor.
Given the extraordinary sophistication and suppleness of the system he describes, we might well expect Zinn to be reduced to despair, as so many radicals in fact are. Yet, as already indicated, that is not at all the case; his is an irrepressibly sanguine temperament. Zinn’s people continue, no matter what, to resist and rebel, and he can discern in the most mundane forms of discontent signs of the times. Things may yet, he hopes, “get out of hand.” And when they do, Zinn presents us, in a lyrical conclusion, with a vision of a world transformed:
The society’s levers of powers would have to be taken away from those whose drives have led to the present state—the giant corporations, the military, and their politician collaborators. We would need . . . to reconstruct the economy for both efficiency and justice, producing in a cooperative way what people need most. . . . Everyone could share the routine but necessary jobs for a few hours a day, and leave most of the time free for enjoyment, creativity, labors of love, and yet produce enough for an equal and ample distribution of goods. Certain basic things would be abundant enough to be taken out of the money system and be available—free—to everyone: food, housing, health care, education, transportation.
The great problem would be to work out a way of accomplishing this without a centralized bureaucracy, using not the incentives of prison and punishment, but those incentives of cooperation which spring from natural human desires. . . . Decisions would be made by small groups of people in their workplaces, their neighborhoods—a network of cooperatives . . . a neighborly socialism avoiding the class hierarchies of capitalism and the harsh dictatorships that have taken the name “socialist.”
People with time, in friendly communities, might create a new, diversified, nonviolent culture. . . . Men and women, black and white, old and young, could then cherish their differences as positive attributes, not as reasons for domination. New values of cooperation and freedom might then show up in the relations of people, the upbringing of children.
In the end, we either believe in that sort of thing or we do not, but even those who believe ought to understand that they must find support for their vision in eschatological hope and not, Zinn’s willed illusions to the contrary notwithstanding, in the record of the past.
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V
Not all radical historians, of course, go as far as Zinn in utopian projections, in populist romanticism, or in selective sorting of the past for present purposes. More tough-minded radicals, one suspects, would resist any notion that A People’s History of the United States represents the state of the radical historian’s art. Yet the problems exemplified in Zinn’s book plague other, more subtle, left-wing historians as well, and they do so because they are inherent in the nature of American history. The contradictions of radical history show up with particular and ironic clarity in the works of recent radical scholars themselves.2
Radical historians have always lined themselves up on the side of the people. Traditional radical historiography did so in such a way, however, as to diminish the people even as it celebrated them. For progressive historians, and much of the New Left, the people remained a generalized abstraction, lacking discrete definition, identity, or autonomy. The people’s leaders took on specificity and personality, but those in whose name they struggled remained, by and large, in impenetrable obscurity. The people were that great mass to whom things and history happened. They were often announced as about to arise or as on the march, but theirs were lives imagined essentially only in reaction to impersonal forces or to the significant few who served as history’s actors. Radical historians did the people every honor except to recognize them as independent human beings.
It is the great achievement of the new social history that it is beginning to turn this around. By use both of massive quantitative evidence, now made accessible by the computer, and of previously underused oral and written sources, the new historians are managing effectively to portray something of the reality, both collective and individual, of the lives of ordinary men and women of the past. The search for reality is not infrequently undercut, it must be noted, by lingering strains of populist sentimentality: those social historians who find it necessary to insist repetitively and self-consciously on the dignity, courage, and decency with which those of whom they write carried on their lives patronize their readers and their subjects alike. Still, the people come into their own in this new history as subjects and not just objects; they act as well as being acted upon. The lines of influence between the general culture and various subcultures are seen to be not unilinear and direct but reciprocal and mediated. The working-class immigrants, slaves—these and other groups earlier lost to detailed analysis can now be understood with a new depth and sophistication and, more important, can be appreciated as being, in no small part, creators of their own culture and makers of their own history.
Yet that is precisely the problem: people who are makers of their history are responsible for their history. And radicals do not like the history the people appear to have chosen. For radicals, old and new, the American system has consistently operated in ways contrary to the interests of the working class. The workers, in this view, should have been in that state of constant agitation Zinn sometimes likes to imagine for them Yet clearly they have not been. Zinn and others regularly fail to distinguish between worker militance on work-related issues and fundamental protest against the system; they confuse, in their hopefulness, job consciousness with class consciousness. So the dilemma remains: the people, whom radical historians want to see as self-determining and self-defining, seem to be implicated in their own victimization. They accept, or at least acquiesce in, a system that oppresses them.
The unwillingness of the working class to think and behave in the way radicals would have them is but one element in the larger embarrassment of radical history. The history of the American Left is a history of failure: socialism has never taken hold and remains weaker than in any other Western industrial nation; radical movements have characteristically lacked continuity and ideological coherence; the union movement has settled for more and better of what already is rather than dreaming of something different.
Radical historians have attempted in a variety of ways to explain all this away. Some have focused on repression, but while it unquestionably existed, it hardly did so in more severe forms than in all those countries where radicalism has, at least in comparative terms, flourished. Some emphasized the failure or betrayal of working-class leaders, but the otherworldliness of Eugene Debs and the compromises of Samuel Gompers can bear only so much explanatory weight. Others have observed simply that the final returns are not yet in. Things may only have been delayed, and the failure of socialism in the past says nothing definitive concerning its prospects in the future. This argument had some cogency in the days of Left unity. Those who saw radicalism as the logical extension of liberalism could point to a line of progress from mugwumpery through populism and progressivism to the New Deal, and, plotting that line into the future, could point with no little plausibility to its final destination in socialism. Yet that line of logical progression has been severed by the radicals themselves, who see liberalism not as radicalism’s progenitor but as its most insidious enemy. To them, radicalism exists as liberalism’s alternative rather than its culmination. Thus radicalism now stands, by its own choice, independent and exposed in the American political spectrum; it can no longer look to liberalism’s past successes as a beacon for future hope, but must depend on its own meager historical resources.
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Explanations for the failure of American radicalism are not difficult to come by. Students of the subject, some radicals included, have pointed to such obvious factors as the absence of class identification, rising living standards, extensive social mobility, ethnic heterogeneity, and the early extension of the suffrage to the working class. The deeper reality to which most of these elements, ethnic pluralism excepted, point is one which many radicals cannot bear to contemplate. They will engage in the most elaborate and tortuous intellectual gymnastics in order to avoid confronting Carl Degler’s conclusion that “in the final reckoning . . . the failure of socialism in America is to be attributed to the success of capitalism.” (The German sociologist Werner Sombart made the same point rather more prosaically early in the century when he noted that “all socialist utopias have come to grief on roast beef and apple pie.”)
Rather than ponder the obvious, radicals prefer to take refuge in the obfuscations of “false consciousness.” The people may choose, but they do not choose well, bemused as they are by the encompassing “hegemonic” values of bourgeois culture. The concept of false consciousness is among the least morally attractive of radical inventions: it is surely the height of arrogance to define as in-authentic any consciousness other than one’s own. The category also cuts against the grain of the attempt to impute self-definition and dignity to the working class, since it would seem difficult to have respect for those as easily duped and deluded as this line of thought suggests. How can we think highly of those who have not the sense to know their own interests? If the people are so easily deflected and cajoled, they become little more than the inert “great beast” Hamilton is supposed to have conjured up.
If, however, we free ourselves from obscurantist categories and begin to address on their own terms the decisions made by people in the past, we might obtain a less condescending view of working-class consciousness. We might see that most workers and their families, recognizing instinctively the limits and trade-offs all social systems impose, sensed that life within the American industrial system, for all its burdens, offered them more than did any realistic alternative. If they knew that Horatio Alger (if they had read him) and his tales of rags-to-riches had nothing to do with most of them, they also knew, as Stephan Thernstrom and others have reminded us, that rags-to-respectability was a real possibility. In that sense, the American Dream was not a fraud; social mobility did exist, as did rising real wages. So also the political system, which clearly they did not run and whose first priority was not their welfare, nonetheless offered more participation, more accessibility, more responsiveness to the concerns of people like themselves than did that of any other country. In most of Europe, the “political nation” excluded the workers; in America, the workers had a place, however marginal, within the political community. From what we know of late 19th-century voter participation rates, we can see that conventional politics did not appear so meaningless to people at the time as it has to radical historians since.
The people, then, were neither dupes, nor cynics, nor creatures of little faith. They simply did not put nearly so heavy an emphasis on workplace or political agitation as their left-wing chroniclers think or wish they had. Radical historians, perceiving that workers did not find brotherhood, fulfillment, or autonomy in the public sphere, can only suppose that these things therefore did not exist for them. They forget that, then as now, it is to the realms of family, friendship, church, and ethnic community that most people look for their deepest satisfactions. The workers had a better sense of the limits of public life than have those who tell their story. Moreover, those “hegemonic” values of leisure, affluence, and consumption which many workers adopted represented not the moral detritus of a corrupt bourgeois culture but a range of proximate ends forming one part of a larger structure of purpose and meaning. It is remarkable that radical historians, who insist on the nuances of lower-class culture, should regularly write of the middle class and its values in terms of such crude caricature.
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All this is not to suggest that we should exchange for the fantasy of class warfare a myth of stable harmony. The costs of modernization in America, less heavy than elsewhere, were heavy nonetheless. There, were real victims—blacks, Indians, the desperately poor—as there also was bitterness, apathy, and rage. Some workers fought intensely to retain pre-industrial norms; others dreamed of a new cooperative order. America was an enormously complex society, and historical generalizations necessarily hide some things and distort others. But we cannot, as historians, be satisfied only and forever with particular pieces of the past; we must try for certain purposes to put them together into a larger picture. And when we do, it seems clear that the story sketched above is more faithful to the evidence of how things were and of how people behaved than is the radical historian’s alternative.
Skeptics might object that this version of things suggests too much of the consensus interpretation of the American past, which currently is regarded as something of a historiographical anachronism. But fashions in historical understanding have little to do with the substance of the evidence. Historical knowledge is cumulative, but historical interpretations are not. We change our minds about the past less often because the evidence requires us to than because we have new questions to ask of it or have new ideological concerns to bring to it.
Once again, the argument against radical views, and for consensus, can be found in much radical history itself. After all, the rage of New Left historians against the American past and present developed because they, unlike the progressives, found it so difficult to discern signs of radical hope in the American experience. In political instincts, they shared much with the progressives, but their history tended to disregard progressive dualisms and to interpret America and Americans as a social unit, emphasizing, as had consensus history, a common set of national values dissented from by only a small minority of the people. That is why there were, for them, small distinctions but no real differences between Hamilton and Jefferson, or Hoover and Roosevelt. Consensus history itself did not always celebrate what it recorded; analytical descriptions of the past need not coincide with normative judgments. The essential consensus argument asserted that American political, social, and economic development had differed significantly from that of other Western industrial nations, and much that radical historians have written, stripped of its rhetorical flourishes, has not disagreed with that. The notion of false consciousness is then but one of many devices for finessing what cannot be ignored.
Which is why, as noted earlier, most American radicals know that for their hopes to be realized the past must be transcended, not recaptured. It cannot even be extensively built upon; the road to the radical utopia lies blocked, as it ever has been, by Sombart’s roast beef and apple pie. And when such a diet is provided in an environment which offers opportunity for individual dignity and freedom as well, it is hard to see how, or why, the roadblock might be removed, especially when the utopia that supposedly lies beyond is constructed of cotton candy.
1 Harper & Row, 614 pp., $20.00.
2 For a brief and dispassionate Teview of recent perspectives on American radical history, see Robert Rosenstone, “Summing Up the Division of the Left,” Reviews in American History, VII (September 1979), pp 439-444.
