1 | David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 68; R. R. Palmer, Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). |
2 | Eric Foner, “American Freedom in a Global Age,” American Historical Review 106 (Feb. 2001), 9. |
3 | Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 11. |
4 | John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (New York: Little Brown, 1963). |
5 | Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 3–4. |
6 | Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Classics, 2006), 110. |
7 | David Brion Davis, “Free at Last: The Enduring Legacy of the South’s Civil War Victory,” New York Times, Aug. 26, 2001. |
8 | Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). For a nuanced critique see Richard Bushman, “Markets and Composite Farms in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 55:3 (July 1998), 351–74. |
9 | The Portuguese word feitoria, the African site for gathering slaves, is derived from the same root as the English “factory.” |
10 | Quoted in Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (New York: Verso, 1997), 11, 6, 260; Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery: 1776–1848 (New York: Verso, 2011), 6. |
11 | Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848 (New York: Vintage, 1996), 34. The actual economic contribution of slavery to industrialization has been the subject of many disputes. |
12 | Sellers, The Market Revolution, 398. |
13 | This paragraph follows Davis, “Free at Last.” |
14 | Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). |
15 | Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (Piscataway: Transaction, 1991), 167. |
16 | Thomas Brown, “From Old Hickory to Sly Fox: The Routinization of Charisma in the Early Democratic Party,” Journal of the Early Republic 11:3 (Autumn 1991), 342. |
17 | Rogin, Fathers and Children, 167. |
18 | Sellers, The Market Revolution, 165. |
19 | David Morris Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: HarperCollins, 1976), 226. |
20 | Sellers, The Market Revolution, 290, 294. |
21 | Ibid., 242–3. |
22 | Typically, a hurt mother in a Lydia Huntley Sigourney story laments the attitude of her son: “He despised my woman’s voice, my motherly love.” Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 47. |
23 | Howard Temperley, “Capitalism, Slavery and Ideology,” Past and Present 75 (May 1977), 105. |
24 | John Millar quoted in Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 52; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 298–9. |
25 | Robin Blackburn, “Haiti’s Slavery in the Age of Democratic Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 63:4 (Oct. 2006), 633–44. |
26 | Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 165. |
27 | See Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), for this point. |
28 | Lester D. Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 137; Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution, 87. |
29 | Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 360. |
30 | I am here following Davis, “Free at Last.” |
31 | David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 251. |
32 | David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 248. |
33 | Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 143. |
34 | Barrington Moore, Jr, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon, 1993). |
35 | Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 285. |
36 | Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 440. |
37 | Lawrence Jacob Friedman, Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 162. |
38 | Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: Norton, 2010), 19. This book appeared too late for me to fully use. |
39 | Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: Norton, 2006), 406. |
40 | Quoted in Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 154. |
41 | Quoted in Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, 406. |
42 | Grimké in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830–1870: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St Martins, 2000), 222. |
43 | There is also the example of Ernestine Rose, a Jewish freethinker and Owenite from Poland. According to Ellen DuBois, “Rose’s republican emphasis on the Declaration of Independence as a foundational text, her early attention to the centrality of enfranchisement, her emphasis on what we would call the social construction rather than the sin of inequality, her focus on legal reform rather than moral transformation, and her insistence that marriage was a personal rather than a sacred relationship” were not restricted to the single non-Christian. DuBois in Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges, 285, 286–7. |
44 | Sellers, The Market Revolution, 157. |
45 | Avihu Zakai, Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History: The Reenchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 3. Hulme notwithstanding, there are reasons not to circumscribe abolitionism within a narrowly religious frame. To begin with, it is often hard to determine how much of American millennialism was nationalist and how much involved religion per se. As Perry Miller wrote, “the steady burning of the revival, sometimes smoldering, now blazing into flame, never quite extinguished until the Civil War, was a central mode of the culture’s search for national identity.” Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Boston: Mariner, 1970), 6. |
46 | Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, 402. |
47 | John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 1. |
48 | Quoted in Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, They Who Would Be Free: Blacks Search for Freedom 1830–1861 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 15. |
49 | Friedman, Gregarious Saints, 165. |
50 | Ibid., 176. |
51 | Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 160. |
52 | Foner, The Fiery Trial, 21. |
53 | Friedman, Gregarious Saints, 176–7. |
54 | Ibid., 63–4, 21–35. |
55 | Linda Kerber, “The Abolitionist Perception of the Indian,” Journal of American History 62:2 (Sept. 1975), 271–95. |
56 | Friedman, Gregarious Saints, 137. |
57 | Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). |
58 | Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and The Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 230; Blanche Hersch, The Slavery of Sex (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 7. |
59 | Friedman, Gregarious Saints, 141. |
60 | Hersch, The Slavery of Sex, 234. |
61 | Friedman, Gregarious Saints, 131. |
62 | Grimké in Sklar, Women’s Rights, 227. |
63 | Ibid., 230–1. |
64 | Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 40. |
65 | Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830 (New York: Norton, 1984), 19. |
66 | Quoted in Aileen Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850 (Lanham: Ivan R. Dee, 1989), 23. |
67 | James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York: Norton, 2007), 13. |
68 | Dwight Dumond, Antislavery Origins of the Civil War in the United States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), 56. |
69 | Kraditor, Means and Ends, 6. |
70 | Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, 403–4. |
71 | Foner, Politics and Ideology, 41. |
72 | James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 41. |
73 | Foner, Politics and Ideology, 36. |
74 | Potter, The Impending Crisis, 250. Indeed, “the Republican party received a permanent endowment of nativist support which probably elected Lincoln in 1860 and strengthened the party in every election for more than a century to come,” quoted in Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 165; Potter, The Impending Crisis, 259: “No event in the history of the Republican Party was more crucial or more fortunate” than its “sub rosa union” with nativism, that is with the rural, Protestant, Puritan-oriented population of the North. |
75 | Quoted in Merle Curti, “The Impact of the Revolutions of 1848 on American Thought,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 93:3 (June 1949), 210. |
76 | Quoted in Michael Kazin, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (New York: Knopf, 2011), 10. |
77 | Sellers, The Market Revolution, 237–8. |
78 | Quoted in Foner, The Fiery Trial, 173. |
79 | Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 21. |
80 | Oakes, The Radical and the Republican, 13. |
81 | Kraditor, Means and Ends, 29. The American Anti-Slavery Society stated in 1833, “after the sternest immediatism of doctrine, the practical reformation will be sufficiently gradual.” |
82 | Kraditor, Means and Ends, 27. |
83 | Quoted in ibid. |
84 | Quoted in McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 118, 122, 126. |
85 | David Donald quoted in Richard Carwardine, Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (New York: Knopf, 2006), 69. |
86 | Quoted in McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 181–2. |
87 | Oakes, The Radical and the Republican, 71–2. |
88 | Ibid., 23. |
89 | Quoted in ibid., 46. |
90 | Carwardine, Lincoln, 26. |
91 | Oakes, The Radical and the Republican, 88. |
92 | Ibid., 83–4. The phrase beginning “This, and only this” comes from Lincoln. The rest is Oakes’s summary. |
93 | Quoted in McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 186. |
94 | Quoted in ibid., 494–5. |
95 | Quoted in ibid., 495–6. |
96 | Quoted in Geoffrey C. Ward, “Death’s Army,” New York Times, Jan. 27, 2008. |
97 | Oakes, The Radical and the Republican, 122. |
98 | Davis in Sklar, Women’s Rights, 16. |
99 | Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997), 136; Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993). |
100 | Quoted in McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 497. |
101 | James McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). |
102 | Foner, The Fiery Trial, 323. |
103 | Quoted in McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 497. |
104 | George Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 182. |
105 | Steven Hahn, “Class and State in Post-emancipation Societies: Southern Planters in Comparative Perspective,” American Historical Review 95:1 (Feb. 1990), 84. |
106 | Moore, Social Origins, 131–2, 138. |
107 | Davis, “Free at Last,” 1. |
108 | Eric Foner, “Abolitionism and the Labor Movement,” in Foner, Politics and Ideology, 67. |
109 | Quoted in ibid., 62–3. |
110 | Robin Blackburn, “Fin de Siècle: Socialism after the Crash,” New Left Review I/185 (Jan.–Feb. 1991), 153. |
1 | Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1998), 67, 75. |
2 | Richard Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), xvii–xviii. |
3 | Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the American Left (New York: Vintage, 1969), 3. |
4 | John Locke, Two Treatises of Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Ian Shapiro (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), §§25. |
5 | Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction: 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), 383. |
6 | Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 166. |
7 | So powerful was this recognition that an Italian stowaway was discovered who knew only one word of English, “McKinley.” |
8 | Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams, 5. |
9 | James Weinstein, Ambiguous Legacy: The Left in American Politics (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975), 4. |
10 | Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the American Left (New York: Vintage, 1969), 35. |
11 | Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: Norton, 1991), 337–8. |
12 | Denning, The Cultural Front, 3. |
13 | Zeev Sternhell with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, trans. David Maisel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 31. |
14 | Randolph Silliman Bourne, War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays: 1915–1919, ed. Carl Resek (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 2; Richard P. Adelstein, “‘Islands of Conscious Power’: Louis D. Brandeis and the Modern Corporation,” Business History Review 63:3 (Autumn 1989), 167. |
15 | David W. Noble, The Paradox of Progressive Thought (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), 48. |
16 | William E. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 39. |
17 | Adelstein, “Islands of Conscious Power,”162. |
18 | Ellis Wayne Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly: A Study of Economic Ambivalence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 17. |
19 | Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, 31. |
20 | Quoted in Barry D. Karl, The Uneasy State: The United States from 1915 to 1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 9. |
21 | Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 1933–1935, vol. 2 of The Age of Roosevelt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 550. |
22 | George Packer, “The New Liberalism,” New Yorker, Oct. 17, 2008, 84–91. |
23 | Quoted in Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Knopf, 1948), 428–30. |
24 | John Chamberlain, Farewell to Reform: The Rise, Life and Decay of the Progressive Mind in America (New York: Liveright, 1932; Chicago: Quadrangle Paperbacks, 1965), 220, 230–1. |
25 | Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams, 82. |
26 | Jordan Schwarz, The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Knopf, 1993), 134. |
27 | Edmund Wilson, “An Appeal to Progressives,” New Republic, Jan. 14, 1931, 237. |
28 | John L. Shover’s Cornbelt Rebellion quoted in Harvard Sitkoff, Fifty Years Later: The New Deal Evaluated (New York: Knopf, 1985), 13. |
29 | E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage, 1996), 133. Long’s followers were “The people from the red clay country and the piney woods, from the canebrakes and the bayous, the shrimp fishermen and the moss fishermen, the rednecks and the hillbillies and the Cajuns,” according to Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval, 1935–1936, vol. 3 of The Age of Roosevelt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 52. |
30 | Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval, 43. |
31 | Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 357. |
32 | Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years, 103; Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 369: “Roosevelt and his closest advisers realized that the expulsion or excommunication of ‘Big Business’ was the key to holding together a coalition subject to disintegration from both the left and right.” |
33 | Harold L. Ickes, The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, vol. 1 (New York: DeCapo Press, 1974), 363. |
34 | David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 275. |
35 | Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years, 153. |
36 | Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval, 422. |
37 | Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1999), 197–8. |
38 | Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 242, 246. |
39 | Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 264. |
40 | Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 168. |
41 | Lionel Trilling, “Young in the Thirties,” Commentary 41:5 (May 1966), 43–51. |
42 | David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 248. |
43 | Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 24. |
44 | William Isaac Thomas, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, ed. Eli Zaretsky (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 42. |
45 | Gary Gerstle, American Crucible, 16. |
46 | Glenda Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights 1919–1950 (New York: Norton, 2008), 193–4. |
47 | The UMW, ILGWU, and the building trades unions had mostly immigrant members. |
48 | Cohen, Making a New Deal, 333. |
49 | David Brody, Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth Century Struggle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 230. |
50 | The best book on American ethnicity, Werner Sollors’s Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), ignores the role of the CIO. According to Sollors, ethnicity naturalized the immigrant’s free choice; as a Detroit pastor explained, “Sweden is my mother, but America is my bride.” The result was a kind of fictive kinship for American national identity. While this is illuminating in describing what happened within each ethnic group, it does not describe what occurred between them. The left harnessed ethnic and national identification to class-consciousness, showing what the immigrants had in common historically. |
51 | Cohen, Making a New Deal, 316–17. |
52 | Ron Rothbart, “‘Homes Are What Any Strike Is About’: Immigrant Labor and the Family Wage,” Journal of Social History 23:2 (Winter 1989), 267–84. |
53 | James R. Barrett, “Rethinking the Popular Front,” Rethinking Marxism, no. 4 (2009). |
54 | Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 34, 39, 41. |
55 | Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years, 240. |
56 | Brody, Workers in Industrial America, 82–3 |
57 | William Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 157–8. With the denouement of the “Court Fight,” “the curtain effectively rang down on the New Deal itself.” David M. Kennedy, “How FDR Derailed the New Deal,” Atlantic Monthly 276:1 (1995), 88. |
58 | Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 20. |
59 | Gerstle, American Crucible, 169, 2. |
60 | Cohen, Making a New Deal, 252, 270–1. |
61 | John B. Kirby, Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era: Liberalism and Race (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980), 204f. |
62 | Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 75:3 (Dec.1988), 786–811. By 1943 the Detroit NAACP was one of the most working-class chapters in the country. |
63 | Roy Rosenzweig and Barbara Melosh, “Government and the Arts: Voices from the New Deal Era,” Journal of American History 77:2 (Sept. 1990), 607. |
64 | Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939 (New York: Metropolitan, 2006), 102. |
65 | Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942), 378. |
66 | Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams, 283f. |
67 | Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (New York: Norton, 2009), 18. |
68 | Quoted in ibid., 20, 28. |
69 | Ibid., 155. |
70 | Trilling, “Young in the Thirties,” 47, emphasis added. |
71 | In 1919, James Weldon Johnson, the first black field secretary of the NAACP, called the strike “the mightiest weapon colored people have” and urged that it be directed against Jim Crow, and not just against labor exploitation. |
72 | Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: Perennial, 2006), 135; Richard H. Crossman, ed., The God That Failed (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 131. George Fredrickson, Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 187. |
73 | Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon, 2002), 54. |
74 | Gerstle, American Crucible, 163. |
75 | Herman Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage (New York: Harper Brothers, 1850). |
76 | Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years, 156. |
77 | Steve Fraser quoted in Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 158. New Dealers, wrote Robert Kelley, were “a young, shirt-sleeved crowd, self-consciously brainy and professorial, whose irreverent style offended WASP America.” Robert Kelley, “Ideology and Political Culture from Jefferson to Nixon,” American Historical Review 82:3 (June 1977), 522. Even the politics of homosexuality that became important later could be found in the Popular Front period, as in charges that “do-gooders, bleeding hearts and long-hairs” ran the government, or that TVA was pervaded by “the swishing of long wings” and by visions of “Green Pastures and De Lawd.” Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years, 253; Michael Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 78. |
78 | Edmund Wilson, “The Literary Consequences of the Crash,” in Wilson, The Shores of Light (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1952), 498–9. |
79 | Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams, 98. |
80 | William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 291–3, 268–9. |
81 | The concept permeates much of Europe’s writing of the late thirties, as in Orwell (“No one, now, could devote himself to literature as single-mindedly as Joyce or Henry James”), Auden (“Tomorrow the bicycle races/ Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But today the struggle”), and Brecht (“Ah, what an age it is/ When to speak of trees is almost a crime”). |
82 | Malraux’s interest, Kazin added, was not in Communism but in Communists. Alfred Kazin, Starting Out in the Thirties (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 20–2. |
83 | Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (New York: New American Library, 1968), 121–2. |
84 | Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years; 129; Karl, The Uneasy State, 174, 199. |
85 | Kirby, Black Americans, 193f. |
86 | Ibid., 172–3. |
87 | Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008), 3–31. |
88 | Sitkoff, Fifty Years Later, 94–5, 99. |
89 | Karl, The Uneasy State, 173. |
90 | Korstad and Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost.” |
91 | Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 111. |
92 | These included Nora Stanton Blatch Barney, a granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony II, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Gerda Lerner, Eleanor Flexner, Aileen Kraditor, Amy Swerdlow, and Claudia Jones, a Harlem Communist Party leader. |
93 | Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 98. |
94 | The pamphlet proved an important source for Eleanor Flexner in her seminal Century of Struggle (New York: Atheneum, 1972). |
1 | Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), 358. |
2 | Quoted in Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times, new and updated edn (New York: Verso, 2009), 341. |
3 | Robert Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 137. |
4 | Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 2–3. |
5 | Philip Roth, The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (New York: Vintage, 1997), 123. |
6 | Michael Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1975). |
7 | For neo-Marxist social theory consider Immanuel Wallerstein, Eugene Genovese, Eric Wolf, Gabriel Kolko, William Appleman Williams, Fredric Jameson, as well as widely read British authors like Perry Anderson, Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson. |
8 | Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945 (New York: Vintage, 1970), 3. |
9 | Quoted in William Graebner, The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 20. |
10 | H. Stuart Hughes, “Why We Had No Dreyfus Case,” American Scholar 30 (1961), 478. |
11 | Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 179. |
12 | David J. O’Brien, American Catholics and Social Reform: The New Deal Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 217. |
13 | Michael Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), 6; Richard Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt” (1954), in Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 39. |
14 | Alan Wolfe, America’s Impasse: The Rise and Fall of the Politics of Growth (New York: Pantheon, 1981); Charles Maier, “The Politics of Productivity: The Foundations of American International Economic Policy after World War II,” International Organization 31 (Autumn 1977). |
15 | In this atmosphere, one figure gave Cold War liberalism its own moral depth, namely Freud. However, the liberals read Freud through a conservative lens. Reflecting the new ethos of mass consumption, which invested marriage and personal relations with an intensity comparable to that which the Popular Front put into the workplace, Cold War liberalism associated Freud with an anti-utopian “maturity ethic.” |
16 | Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 241. |
17 | The duty of intellectuals, Chambers explained, was “to keep pointing out why the Enlightenment and its fruits were a wrong turn in human history.” Michael Klimmage, The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 146. |
18 | Ibid., 94, 222–3, 146, 11. Witness created the core postwar persona, captured by the right, the witness. David Horowitz wrote of his New Left years, “I was like Whittaker Chambers … a young man inspired by the high-minded passions of the left who had broken through to the dark underside of the radical cause.” Still later, Ann Coulter rallied Bush era conservatives: the liberals “have the media, the universities, the textbooks. We have ourselves. We are the witnesses.” David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 2; Ann Coulter, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2003), 17. |
19 | “Our Country and Our Culture,” editorial statement, Partisan Review 19 (May–June, 1952), 282–4. |
20 | One can grasp the difference between the New Right and the New Left by examining Ayn Rand’s two famous novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). Though replete with the adolescent rebellion against authority and the even more adolescent sexuality, shared by the New Left and the New Right, Rand’s novels overflow with a Nietzschean contempt for “losers,” “spongers,” and “free-riders.” The New Left, by contrast, was the child of the New Deal. Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 264. |
21 | Richard Gillam, “The Perils of Postindustrialism,” American Quarterly 34:1 (Spring 1982), 465–6; Daniel Geary, Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). |
22 | Alain Touraine, The Post-industrial Society (London: Wildwood House, 1974), 8–9. |
23 | John Fowles in American Scholar 30 (1961), 612. |
24 | Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 173. |
25 | Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 53. |
26 | Ibid., 188. |
27 | Ronald Sukenick, Down and In: Life in the Underground (New York: Collier, 1988), 17. |
28 | David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 2001), 38. |
29 | Walter Laqueur, Europe in Our Time: A History 1945–1992 (New York: Penguin, 1993), 315, 268. |
30 | William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: Norton, 2003), 162, 424, 534. |
31 | C. Wright Mills, “Letter to the New Left,” New Left Review, no. 5 (Sept.–Oct. 1960). |
32 | Robert F. Williams, Harold Cruse, and LeRoi Jones were the key figures. |
33 | Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America, and the Making of a New Left (New York: Verso, 1996), 147–8. |
34 | Judith N. Shklar, Redeeming American Political Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 112. |
35 | Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 10. |
36 | Ibid., 185, 29. |
37 | Thomas Borstelman, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 42. |
38 | Peter Kellogg, “Civil Rights Consciousness in the 1940s,” Historian 42:1 (1979), 39. |
39 | Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 245–59. |
40 | Abdul R. Janmohamed, “Negating the Negation: The Construction of Richard Wright,” in Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah, eds, Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives (New York: Amistad, 1993). |
41 | Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: Harper, 1945), 284. |
42 | William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 7. |
43 | Ibid., 116–17, 138–9. |
44 | George M. Fredrickson, Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 259. |
45 | David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 46–7. |
46 | Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 47. |
47 | Fredrickson, Black Liberation, 261. |
48 | Jackson, Civil Rights, 88, 117. |
49 | Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 78. |
50 | Leigh Raiford, “Come, Let us Build a New World Together,” American Quarterly 59:4 (Dec. 2007), 1129–57. |
51 | Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 77–8. |
52 | Constance Curry, Joan C. Browning, Dorothy Dawson Burlage, Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 342. |
53 | Matusow, The Unraveling of America, 310–11. |
54 | David Barber, A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why It Failed (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 96, 99–100. |
55 | Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1988), 39. |
56 | Dominick Cavallo, Fiction of the Past: The Sixties in American History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 74–5. |
57 | Carson, In Struggle, 129. |
58 | Geary, Radical Ambition, 101. |
59 | Hayden, Reunion, 44. |
60 | John McMillian and Paul Buhle, The New Left Revisited (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 164. |
61 | A good example is the Clamshell movement during which every imaginable form of inequality, such as gender, sexual orientation, age and physical disability, was taken into consideration in the attempt to shut down a nuclear power plant. Barbara Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the 1970s and 1980s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). |
62 | Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962–1968: The Great Refusal (New York: Praeger, 1982), xiv. |
63 | William H. Chafe, Never Stop Running: Allard Lowenstein and the Struggle to Save American Liberalism (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 205. |
64 | Matusow, The Unraveling of America, 78. |
65 | Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008), 288. |
66 | “The question nobody wants to say … is that the people around Dr. King, and Dr. King himself – we were all left wingers,” added Reverend Wyatt T. Walker, King’s chief of staff. Jackson, Civil Rights, 1–3, 50, 52, 105. King was also a typical representative of the Popular Front in that he sought to hide his politics. When Harper signed King to write Stride toward Freedom, published in 1958, it assigned an editor to him, Melvin Arnold, experienced in protecting liberal authors from red-baiting. When King wrote that capitalist materialism was “far more pernicious” than communist materialism, Arnold changed it to “as pernicious.” When King wrote that socialism and capitalism each had a half-truth, Arnold changed it to “partial truth.” When King used the word “collective,” Arnold axed it because it had slave-labor connotations. When King wrote that the “economic power structure usually supports and controls the political power structure,” Arnold had him take out the whole passage. |
67 | Peter B. Levy, The New Left and Labor in the 1960s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 32. |
68 | Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: American Library, 1977), 174. |
69 | Matusow, The Unraveling of America, 88, 140–1. |
70 | Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur, eds, The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), 199; Matusow, The Unraveling of America, 110ff. |
71 | Milkis and Mileur, The Great Society, 438. |
72 | The New Left was the child of the New Deal. SDS, the most important New Left organization after SNCC, was a breakaway from SLID, the Popular Front-inspired Student League for Industrial Democracy. Among SDS’s founding members, Al Haber was the son of a left-wing New Deal lawyer who had served in postwar Germany. Sharon Jeffrey’s parents were both trade union organizers. Paul Potter’s father had been on Truman’s Council of Economic Advisors. Steve Max’s father had been managing editor of the Daily Worker, the Communist newspaper. Tom Hayden came from a Catholic working-class background, at that point politically conservative but still the backbone of the New Deal. For several years the United Auto Workers would be the primary funding source of SDS, and the Port Huron statement was written at a UAW retreat. |
73 | Philip Roth, American Pastoral (New York: Vintage, 1988), 164. |
74 | Kearns, Lyndon Johnson, 304–7. In a 1965 article Bayard Rustin, who had been a communist in the thirties, and served prison time during World War Two as a draft resister, argued that the civil rights extremists were caught up in the same illusions as the liberals since their aim was to shock and therefore to expose the hypocrisy of the white liberals. The advocates of shock, Rustin wrote, “are often described as the radicals of the movement, but they are really its moralists. They seek to change white hearts – by traumatizing them.” They praise Malcolm because “they think he can frighten white people into doing the right thing.” They are apparently convinced that “at the core of the white man’s heart lies a buried affection for Negroes.” Nonviolence he added, “could absorb the violence that is inevitable in social change wherever deep-seated prejudices are challenged.” Chappell, A Stone of Hope, 60–2. |
75 | Alexander Bloom, Long Time Gone: Sixties America Then and Now (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 106. |
76 | Both quotes from in Milkis and Mileur, The Great Society, 442. |
77 | Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 76. |
78 | “The perception of credibility trumped every other aspect of military strategy,” writes Gordon Goldstein. Gordon Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2008), 166–7, 220–1. |
79 | Kearns, 154; Lloyd Gardner, Pay any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam (Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1995), 96. |
80 | Barber, A Hard Rain Fell, 41. |
81 | Loren Baritz, Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us Into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 34, 38. |
82 | Hughes, “Why We Had No Dreyfus Case.” |
83 | Barber, A Hard Rain Fell, 37. |
84 | Marshall Sahlins, “The Future of the National Teach-in: A History” (1965), in Sahlins, Culture in Practice: Selected Essays (New York: Zone Books, 2000), 209ff. |
85 | Tom Wicker, On Press (New York: Viking, 1978), 16. |
86 | Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Knopf, 1977), 42. |
87 | Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 196. |
88 | William James, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” in James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (New York: Henry Holt, 1915). |
89 | Quoted in Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), 372. |
90 | Gloria Emerson, Winners and Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses, and Ruins from a Long War (New York: Random House, 1976), 8. |
91 | Nat Hentoff, “Behold the New Journalism – It’s Coming after You!” Evergreen Review 50 (July 1968), quoted in Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 187. “The pose of objectivity and the obsession with internal structure and imagery [gave] way to something wilder, more personal, more intense and apocalyptic.” Dickstein, Gates of Eden, 66. |
92 | Michael E Staub, “Black Panthers, New Journalism, and the Rewriting of the Sixties,” Representations 57:1 (Winter 1997), 55. |
93 | Emerson, Winners and Losers, 5, 10, 88,104. |
94 | Judith Thurman, “Walking through Walls: Marina Abramovic’s Performance Art,” New Yorker, Mar. 8, 2010, 28. |
95 | Myra MacPherson, Long Time Passing: Vietnam and the Haunted Generation (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2001), 125. |
96 | Emerson, Winners and Losers, 50. |
97 | Tom Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 163. |
98 | Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1974). |
99 | Emerson, Winners and Losers, 22. |
100 | Young, The Vietnam Wars, 202. |
101 | Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 3; H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 60. |
102 | Emerson, Winners and Losers, 133. |
103 | Robert D. Heinl, “The Collapse of the Armed Forces,” Armed Forces Journal 108:19 (June 7, 1971), 30–8. |
104 | Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 50. |
105 | Baritz, Backfire, 6. |
106 | The policeman was the father of Jesse Helms, the well-known conservative Senator from North Carolina. |
107 | Mike Marqusee, Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties (New York: Verso, 1999), 127. Malcolm X called himself “one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism.” “I don’t see any American dream,” Malcolm added, “I see an American nightmare.” Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 221; Barber, A Hard Rain Fell, 19. |
108 | Glover, Humanity, 58. |
109 | New York Times, Nov. 30, 1969. |
110 | Nation, Dec. 15, 1969. |
111 | Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010), 135. |
112 | Roth, American Pastoral, 206. |
113 | Kearns, Lyndon Johnson, 343. |
114 | Ibid., 328. |
115 | Gardner, Pay any Price, 180. |
116 | Wells, The War Within, 208. |
117 | Jules Witcover, The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968 in America (New York: Warner Books, 1997), 138. |
118 | Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2009), 230. |
119 | Kearns, Lyndon Johnson, 327, 281. |
120 | Edward Shils, “American Society and the War,” in Anthony Lake, The Vietnam Legacy: The War, American Society, and the Future of American Foreign Policy (New York: New York University Press, 1976). |
121 | Lippmann, Sept. 1968, quoted in Gary Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 66. |
122 | Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 3. |
123 | Witcover, The Year the Dream Died, 488. |
124 | Ibid., 492–3. |
125 | Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955). |
126 | Perlstein, Nixonland, 218. |
127 | Witcover, The Year the Dream Died, 475. |
128 | Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, 123. |
129 | Young, The Vietnam Wars, 192. |
130 | Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, 76. |
131 | Ibid., 8. |
132 | Godfrey Hodgson, More Equal than Others: America from Nixon to the New Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 141. |
133 | Barber, A Hard Rain Fell, 101. |
134 | Ibid., 115. |
135 | Such statements may seem to lend support to the now canonical view that women left the New Left because of the obstinacy and resistance of men, but this view is inaccurate. Women left the mixed-left insofar as they did because they wanted an all-women’s movement; they were not reacting to men’s bad behavior, and would not have reacted differently had men behaved better. |
136 | Hodgson, More Equal than Others, 156. |
137 | Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage, 1980), 204–7. |
138 | Karen V. Hansen and Ilene J. Philipson, eds, Women, Class and the Feminist Imagination: A Socialist-Feminist Reader (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 7. |
139 | This is Catherine MacKinnon’s formulation. |
140 | Jennifer Ring, “Saving Objectivity for Feminism: MacKinnon, Marx, and Other Possibilities,” Review of Politics 49:4 (Autumn 1987), 471. |
141 | Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory,” Signs 7:3 (Spring 1982), 532. |
142 | Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: ‘Pleasure under Patriarchy,’ ” Ethics 99:2 (Jan. 1989), 318. |
143 | Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement” (1981), 212, quoted in Mary Louise Adams, “There’s No Place like Home: On the Place of Identity in Feminist Politics,” Feminist Review 31 (Spring 1989), 23. |
144 | Justin Suran, “Coming Out against the War.” American Quarterly 53:3 (Sept. 2001), 465. |
145 | Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958–c. 1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 725. |
146 | Shane Phelan, Identity Politics: Lesbian Feminism and the Limits of Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 73–4. |
147 | Martin Duberman, A Saving Remnant: The Radical Lives of Barbara Deming and David McReynolds (New York: New Press, 2010). |
148 | Hansen and Philipson, Women, Class and the Feminist Imagination, 305. |
149 | Cynthia Griggs Fleming, Soon We Will Not Cry: The Liberation of Ruby Doris Smith Robinson (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 117. |
150 | Emerson, Winners and Losers, 7. |
151 | Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 11. |
152 | David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 12. |
153 | John Nichols, The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition – Socialism (New York: Verso, 2011). |
154 | Martine Storti quoted in Ross, May 1968 and Its Afterlives, 189. |
155 | Luisa Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1996), 1. |
156 | Douglas Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), vii. |
157 | Emerson, Winners and Losers, 112. |
158 | Thomas Wolfe, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), 56. |
159 | Roger Sale, “Hurled into Vietnam,” review of Dispatches by Michael Herr, New York Review of Books, Dec. 8, 1977. |
160 | Tim O’Brien, Going after Cacciato (New York: Broadway, 1999), 320. |
161 | Ibid., 14. |
162 | Tom Wicker, One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream (New York: Random House, 1991), 423. |
163 | Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas (New York: Metropolitan, 2004), 8. |