http://www.hnn.us/articles/123272.html
2-15-10
By David Waldstreicher
For the generation that came of age intellectually in the 1970s and
80s, Staughton Lynd's Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism
(1968) was one of those tattered Vintage paperback (number V-488 to
be precise) you came across browsing in used bookstores. It was like
Black Power (or any text by Richard Hofstadter). Something you
couldn't help being exposed to even if you didn't necessarily feel
drawn to it. And Intellectual Origins could seem off-putting: the
cover said Radicalism but it came with a red, white, and blue spread
eagle motif. Still, apparent mixed message notwithstanding, many
students might have been moved to give it a look or three because the
author has been so right on about Vietnam.
I picked up my copy while trolling for course books during my
freshman or sophomore year in college. It had a great impact on me
and continues to shape my sense of the past. Lynd's chief lesson was
that a dissenting tradition informed the American Revolution a
tradition that survived the capture of the Revolution by conservative
nationalists not least because it was older, broader, and more
idealistic than the discourse upheld by conventional minders of the
Revolution's legacy.
Intellectual Origins came out a year after Bernard Bailyn's The
Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and, as the title
implies, issued a potent and intentional challenge to that book's
interpretation of Revolutionary politics. Radicalism, bourgeois or
otherwise, cannot be understood as merely a "contagion of liberty"
resulting from the Revolution. Nor can it be grasped in terms of
anti-conspiratorial ideology derived from early-eighteenth-century
"real whig" opposition writings. There was an earlier radical
tradition, religious but no less radical for being so, that trusted
in ordinary people's consciences. It was not so much American as
Anglo (but not only that), in some iterations explicitly
internationalist, and dissenting with respect to both church and
state depending on the time and place. We see echoes of it in many
different sorts of attacks on wealth and power throughout U.S.
history. This tradition included Garrisonian abolitionism, native
socialisms, aspects of Jefferson and Lincoln as well as Tom
Paine. Radicals could claim a true and thoughtful, not merely
rhetorical or mythical, connection to the American pastas some of
them have done ever since.
That this view was ever controversial, or that it raised some hackles
in 1968, may now need explaining. Between 1961 and 1968 Staughton
Lynd published a body of workarticles and anthologies as well as the
two works of history republished in 2009 by Cambridge University
Pressthat was remarkable for its breadth and vision. Indeed, the
rapid publication of his essay collection Class Conflict, Slavery,
and the United States Constitution (1967) and Intellectual Origins by
trade presses reflected the demand for his research and teaching, as
well as the recognition he had already achieved among historians
during the same years and, to a significant extent, before he became
famous as an antiwar activist. He certainly had every reason, while
working on Intellectual Origins, to believe that he'd earned the
right, and perhaps even had the responsibility, to creatively combine
his political work and his historical writingand that there would be
a ready crossover audience for such an effort. He had been hired by
Yale because of his standing, in the public eye and in the
profession, as perhaps the best "New Left" historian yet to
emerge. His writings on the possible confluences of history and
activism were also widely admired and anthologized. Being at Yale,
in turn, made it even more likely that he would be turned to as a
leader and speaker by the movement, whether at demonstrations against
the war or at meetings of the American Historical Association.
Lynd emphasized, in the conclusion of Intellectual Origins, that the
book was for "radicals." While writing it, he described himself in
one of the many new magazines of politics and culture springing up at
the time as "more and more committed to the thesis that the professor
of history should also be a historical protagonist." He was also
trying to "save the Movement of the Sixties" as he put it recently,
from bad ideas and their effects (particularly "pop Marxism," violent
as opposed to peaceful revolutionism, and an avant-gardism that
distrusted popular traditions). If there was a usable, vital radical
tradition, a historian could play an extremely important role as "the
custodian of such memories and dreams."
Lynd's own sense of American memories and dreams had been decisively
shaped, as he describes in his new memoir with Alice Lynd, Stepping
Stones, by his initial decision, in 1961, to turn down ivy-league
offers and teach at historically black Spelman College in
Atlanta. His dialogue with students and faculty there (he mentions
Alice Walker and Howard Zinn), and his experience as a leader in the
1964 Mississippi Freeedom School project, undoubtedly helped him seek
a synthesis. "I did better scholarship on the Constitution while I
was teaching five courses at Spelman, and traveling across town to
borrow books from the Emory University library, than when I came to
Yale," he writes in his recent book with Andrej Grubacic, Wobblies
and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical
History. (A Staughton Lynd Reader is also forthcoming in April 2010
from PM Press.)
His 1967 and 1968 books were in fact well received in the mainstream
press and by well-respected historians. Given their subject matter
and broad ambitions, it is hard to imagine much better reviews. Yet
it's now an established fact that the Yale history department, with
the assent of the liberal historians who had hired him, had decided
to get rid of Lynd for political reasons and chose to construe
Intellectual Origins as an excuse, with an assist from Eugene D.
Genovese, a historian and critic from the left whose objections had
little to do with the merits of Lynd's account of ideas in the
seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.
Wittingly or not, Genovese seems to have functioned as something of a
hired gun. C. Vann Woodward was showing his review around the
history department before it appeared it print, and Genovese was
invited to teach at Yale for a year soon afterward. Lynd's
neo-Marxism contended with Genovese's more orthodox variety; his
emphasis on abolitionists and founding fathers challenged Genovese's
exclusive interest in the old South. Genovese had also publicly
attacked Lynd's politics before he reviewed Lynd's two books in the
New York Review of Books. The review deliberately conflated the
issues, calling Lynd a "demagogue" and wielding its title,
"Abolitionist," as a slur. For Genovese, Lynd's insistence on
slavery as an issue during the Revolutionary era, and on the
abolitionists as carrying on a broader tradition, was simply
ahistorical. Real abolitionism meant support for slavery's
antithesis, wage labor, which was unthinkable in the pre-capitalist,
revolutionary era (or among slaveholders who were not capitalists)an
a priori assumption that, it subsequently became clearer, undergirded
Genovese's own work. Genovese went further in denouncing Lynd's
elaboration and celebration of rights, natural law doctrines, and
conscience as politically irresponsible. In a subsequent exchange of
letters in NYRB (which scholar Gary B. Nash remembers as deeply
influential even as he recalls his wonder at Genovese's vitriol),
Lynd insisted "the Founding Fathers morally condemned
slavery." Other countries abolished slavery between the Revolution
and the 1820s: "it is not in the least anachronistic to ask why the
United States failed to do likewise."
There's still much at stake in this debate. If one ignores the part
about capitalism and antislavery, Genovese's argument that all talk
about slavery's relationship to the Revolution and the founding of
the republic is anachronism or presentism is basically the same one
now associated with Bernard Bailyn's most famous student Gordon S.
Wood (who also used the term "anachronistic" with respect to Lynd in
1969). But even Genovese has admitted, recently, that slavery
"loomed over the Constitutional Convention." To preserve his
"honorable" planter class who "defended principles," Genovese,
however, has amplified their apologies for "slavery in the abstract,"
ignoring the rise of racial defenses of slavery designed to deflect
natural rights doctrines. (Wood, for his part, complains publicly
about books on slavery pouring from the presses, while carefully
segregating the subject from his irony-laced narratives about
founding fathers and "democratic" capitalism.)
More or less blacklisted from the history business, Lynd has raised
tough questions about the academic life and its limits, urging
radical historians to cast their net wider. He also asks why
historians have stopped doing "structural analysis" or proposing "big
ideas that could be tested" (nor, I'd add, doing so while writing as
clearly and accessibly as Lynd). Lynd has commented that the
academic profession now grants legitimacy to "stories of
cancer-stricken chimney sweeps and unwed mothers so long as their
authors still cede the main story to their more conservative
colleagues." This is a point of tremendous importance. Even Gary
Nash's 2005 The Unknown American Revolution rests content to treat
its story and characters as "alternative" and to avoid a clash of
interpretations over the Constitution, though that text has long been
a battleground, and is bound to spark conflicts going forward.
What is striking in retrospect about Intellectual Origins is that
Lynd did not claim more for the traditions he investigated than he
could plausibly demonstrate. For the variety of intellectual
history-cum-radical memory Lynd practiced, it wasn't necessary to
trace strains of thought that flowed with the mainstream or became
ideology. What mattered were ideas that endured and came to inspire
radical players in American life.
Ideas of this kind were implicit in the revolutionary mindset limned
by Bailyn. But he soon lashed out at historians like Lynd who
focused on figures who called for fundamental social change. Lynd,
in turn, objected that Bailyn's revolutionary consensus marginalized
both John Locke and Thomas Paine, even while citing them, and
neglected natural rights as a source of radicalism. Bailyn's "real
whig" opposition sources of republican ideology also dismissed the
radical side of the English Civil War and its legacies. More recent
historians like Jonathan Scott see the late seventeenth century as a
time of "troubles" that sparked an "extraordinary intellectual
fertility" which was international in scope and productive of
precisely the radicalizing questions of conscience that Lynd
highlights. Writers on the left of the American Revolution,
including especially Paine and Jefferson, began following the
footsteps of the originary English rebels by questioning the
inalienability of private propertythe bedrock of government for
Locke, but also the source of a potent critique of slavery (as a
violation of inalienable property in one's own person).
In the United States, the property question could never be divorced
from the slavery question. In Class Conflict, Slavery, and the
United States Constitution, Lynd explained how and why the
Revolutionaries crafted a "compromise of 1787": northern capitalists
and the plantocracy securing each others' interests, in the process
keeping the antislavery and levelling radicals at bay. Just as
persuasively, Lynd showed how Jefferson and his political heirs
conceived of American history as driven by embattled farmers against
conspiring urban elites. The roots of such orthodox progressive
history lie in the so-called great compromises of the early republic
(Though abolitionists tried to undo that orthodoxy by forcing the
nation to confront what they called its original sin). Just as
importantly, Lynd excavated the roots of contemporary American
historical imagination in the abolitionists' own debate about whether
the constitution was proslavery (William Lloyd Garrison) or in the
last instance antislavery (Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln).
Intellectual Origins tells the sunnier side of the story: an
important strain of radical and cosmopolitan thinking survived the
compromises that secured northern (mercantile) private property by
solidifying southern (slave) property. Given that certain figures in
the founders' generation "demythologized" private property, the
Revolutionary mind-set could still be a resource for those who argued
against slavery, despite the Constitution's turn toward the
safeguarding of property as a greater good. And, indeed, the
struggle against racial slavery could be about more than that: more
even than a defense of a free labor system construed as the opposite
of chattel slavery. It might become, like the ideology of the
Revolution itself, a site of internationalism in a nationalist age
and of a critique of
capitalism insofar as contemporary capitalism relied on slave labor.
While the mainstreaming of antislavery in the north may have had much
to do with its compatibility with wage labor, there were other
aspects of abolitionism, especially in its more uncompromising
versions, that existed in tension with the status quo antebellum and
pointed toward democratic expansions of the political landscape. It
was the radical democratic imperatives of abolitionism, including
advocacy of the right to free speech, perhaps as much as the
insistence on free labor in the territories, that upset the political
consensus over slavery. On this score, recent appreciations of the
abolitionists can be read as an extended footnote to Lynd. What's
news here is the recognition now given to the role played by African
American activists and thinkers. The irreverent populists,
influential Quakers, working-class William Lloyd Garrison, and
anti-capitalist Henry David Thoreau we meet in Intellectual Origins,
all of whom thought long and hard before acting to change history,
are now familiar figures who live in your local Barnes and Noble.
Lynd was unusual, however, in underscoring the connection of
abolitionism to the Revolutionary generation. But that wasn't a sign
of willful nativism. He refused to choose between a Revolutionary
American and a cosmopolitan internationalist tradition, finding the
influences twinned in radical and antislavery figures like Thomas
Paine and Wendell Phillips. His double-truth telling here
anticipated a major theme in recent work on nineteenth and twentieth
century America which promote a "post-nationalist" and post-imperial
approach, focusing on black and white internationalists like David
Walker and Frederick Douglass, who riffed on both the Revolution and
its limits. This new body of scholarship, though, tends not to go
back to the roots of the story in the seventeenth century. The few
writers who do get back, like Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh in
The Many-Headed Hydra and Linebaugh in his mind-blowing Magna Charta
Manifesto, get attacked as romanticists and nit-picked for factual
errors that are somehow excusable in works that celebrate radicals
and runaways without raising issues of class, like Simon Schama's
Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution.
A look back at Lynd suggests that contemporary radicals may be all
too invested in the myth of American consensus (in other words,
they've read too much Bailyn and Wood, and not enough Lynd). Lynd
gives us a glimpse of a lost synthesis of American history that has
rich implications for our own time. In Lynd's vision, warsand, in
America, the unavoidable turmoil that war provokes in the politics of
race and classgenerate crises that spur creative reassessments of
social relations. Lynd's work reminds us that in times of national
crisis people have often entered or re-entered politics to "cast
their whole vote," regardless of the previous rules of the political
game. Lynd's account of the sources of radicalism in America before
and after 1776 seems right on time now as well as being more in tune
with recent scholarship than with mainstream work published circa 1968.
Even forty years later, Intellectual Origins and Class Conflict,
Slavery and the U.S. Constitution seem remarkably fresh in part
because the bulk of the historical profession refused Lynd's implicit
challenge to develop a new synthesis encompassing both the Revolution
and the Civil War. His books and more recent reflections bear close
scrutiny because he provides moral clarity "The American Revolution
had the possibility of abolishing slavery [but] the revolutionary
leadership failed to act" missing from the work of other
historians, even those who lean left. There's nothing namby-pamby
about the sense of possibility that's alive in Lynd's version of the
past (He sees the Civil War as the first American revolution because
"millions of dollars of slave property was confiscated without
compensation"). Lynd's return or rather, our return to Lynd can
remind us that radicals are always down for the count, and always getting up.
--
David Waldstreicher is Professor of History at Temple University.
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