http://www.hnn.us/articles/125432.html
4-12-10
By Carl Mirra
Carl Mirra is Associate Professor of Social Studies in the Ruth S.
Ammon School of Education at Adelphi University. He is author of The
Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent with a
foreword by Howard Zinn (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2010).
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On April 9, 2010 Staughton Lynd was the featured speaker at the
Organization of American Historian's event, "Remembering Howard
Zinn." Lynd concluded with a story taken from Zinn's SNCC: The New
Abolitionists. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee worker
Oscar Chase was beaten in jail. Zinn and two attorneys waited with
with Chase in the Hattiesburg, Mississippi FBI office for an officer
to take their statement. Zinn was generally "presentable," while the
lawyers were in neatly pressed suits. Chase's shirt, meanwhile, was
"splattered with blood," his face swollen and blood was "caked over
his eye." Zinn recalls a moment of "sick humor" when an FBI agent
appeared and asked, "Who was it got the beating?"
Reflecting on this incident, Lynd wondered: "Is this a description
of academic history? Surely we too need to be more precise…in
distinguishing victims from executioners." During the 1960s, many
radical historians like Zinn and Lynd made such distinctions, took
sides, and were all too frequently condemned for producing biased
scholarship. With Zinn's unfortunate death in January 2010, a flurry
of cries about one-sided, biased history is again being tossed about.
But, avoiding sides and seeking "balance" can distort the historical
record. Historian Jesse Lemisch recalled a book used in history
courses at Yale in the early 1960s, David Potter and Thomas Manning's
Nationalism and Sectionalism in America 17751877. It contained four
slave narratives: two that were negative and two more positive
toward servitude. Lemisch noted that a reader might conclude that
slavery was equal parts positive and negative. His On Active Service
in War and Peace documented how the nation's most revered historians
engaged in biased scholarship in support of the state at a time when
radical historians were chastised for their uneven, one-sided
scholarship. He cites several examples of so-called objective
historians aggressively advocating anti-Communism in their
scholarship. Conyers Read's 1949 presidential address before the
American Historical Association argued, "Total war, whether it be hot
or cold, enlists everyone and calls upon everyone to assume his
part. The historian is no freer than the physicist… This sounds like
advocacy of one form of social control as against another. In short,
it is." One can only imagine the hysterical reaction if a Howard
Zinn or Staughton Lynd had appeared before the AHA to demand that
everyone must assume their part in the socialist cause.
Advocacy on behalf of the state often passes unnoticed, while radical
advocacy seems to irk historians.
While the complaints about Zinn's biased history are all too
familiar, the tribulations of his comrade and friend Staughton Lynd
are less so, yet most instructive for understanding how taking sides
can advance the scholarly project. Lynd's radical, political
engagement enhanced his scholarship, and placed him on the right side
of history in at least two monumental events of the postwar
years: the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War. Perhaps no
recent figure better represents how radical historians were
mistreated at precisely the time they were correcting a rather
distorted historical record, whether it was Conyers Read calling for
anticommunist crusades, or mainstream scholars denial about the
importance of slavery in shaping American history.
Alice Walker explained that her early days of Civil Rights activism
in the South were propelled by "the amazingly courageous and generous
Staughton Lynd," who "made it possible to carry on." Lynd traveled
to the South in the summer of 1961 to teach at Spelman College, an
all women's African-American college, where he encountered the young
Walker. He was recruited by Zinn, who was already teaching history
there. "I have admired [Lynd] enormously ever since I first met
him," Zinn wrote shortly before his death, because he is an "exemplar
of strength and gentleness in the quest for a better world." Lynd
was quickly pulled into the movement for racial integration and later
gained widespread notoriety and reverence for his role as the
coordinator of the legendary Mississippi Freedom Schools in 1964.
"Historians are not supposed to be influenced by their personal
experiences," Lynd observed, "but I was, profoundly." Spelman
students, for example, had a greater stake than most in "knowing
whether the signers of the Declaration were idealists who failed to
carry out their program or hypocritical racists who killed Indians
and bred Negroes while declaring that all men are equal." Of course,
history is more complicated than examining polar opposites, but
Lynd's point was that leading scholars, including even progressive
historians such as Charles Beard and Carl Becker, "had not taken that
question with sufficient seriousness to let it guide" their
research. Too many historians have operated on the presupposition
that white tenant farmers and artisans were the Revolutionary era's
most oppressed population, "overlooking one fifth of the nation that
was in chains."
Lynd explored the significance of slavery at the Constitutional
Convention in an article titled, "The Compromise of 1787," which he
published in a collection of essays in Class Conflict, Slavery and
the United States Constitution. Details concerning Lynd's
scholarship are beyond the scope of this essay. But, consider that
Pulitzer Prize winning historian Joseph Ellis classified Lynd's Class
Conflict as "the ground breaking scholarly analysis" on the meaning
of slavery at the Convention. Former OAH president Gary Nash has
also cited the importance of Lynd's work and how it "sparked his
own." The point here is that Lynd's immersion in the Civil Rights
movement forced him to take sides, which in turn, improved historical inquiry.
Lynd was also an early leader of the anti-Vietnam War movement,
chairing the first march on Washington against the War in April 1965
that attracted roughly 20,000 people, the largest such demonstration
in U.S. history up to that point. He also participated in a
controversial trip to Hanoi in 1965-66, with Tom Hayden and Communist
historian Herbert Aptheker. While in Hanoi, Lynd delivered a speech
in which he accused the Johnson administration of lying. He was at
the time a promising history professor at Yale University. Kingman
Brewster, then Yale's president, used language from the law of
treason to describe Lynd's activities in Hanoi. Lynd's charge that
the Johnson administration lied to the American people is now well
confirmed, particularly concerning the machinations surrounding the
Tonkin affair that led to the escalation of the Vietnam War. The
U.S. government also misrepresented its position on negotiations with
North Vietnam before Lynd's trip, which Robert McNamara acknowledges
in his book In Retrospect. Highlighting this misinformation in 1965,
rather than in retrospect thirty years later, got Lynd into
trouble. Not only did Yale's president see it as treason, but his
department chair described him as "strident," and he was eventually
dismissed by the Ivy League institution.
A paired comparison of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr and Lynd is
instructive. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. taught history at Harvard
University, and was a special adviser to JFK in the early
1960s. While an advisor to President Kennedy the administration
failed in its illegal attempt to overthrow Cuba's dictator, Fidel
Castro, in what is know as the "Bay of Pigs" scandal. Before the
invasion, Schlesinger sent a now well-known memorandum to the
President discussing possible responses should the operation fail;
among the options: evade, deny or plead ignorance. Schlesinger, who
did raise an objection to the covert fiasco, later admitted that the
government was not forthright, and of course, his memo encouraged
such behavior.
In defending himself against the Yale president's accusation, Lynd
wondered why the president of Harvard was not similarly concerned
about Schlesinger's behavior. "For one historian to lie in
Washington is almost patriotism," Lynd quipped, "while for another to
try to tell the truth in Hanoi, is almost treason." Schlesinger
resigned from Harvard in January 1961 and the Bay of Pigs unfolded in
April 1961, but the point is that Schlesinger prodded the president
to lie, and Lynd pointed out that a president lied, yet it was the
radical who challenged the status quo that faced social
sanctions. Schlesinger was awarded a professorship at City
University of New York in 1966, while two years later Lynd was denied
tenure at Yale and subsequently blacklisted from the profession.
Lynd's steadfast involvement in the sixties protest movement, and his
ethical commitment to discerning who were indeed the "victims" and
"executioners," certainly helped him make a contribution to
scholarship on the Revolutionary era. Yet, his contribution to
racial justice and working to end an unnecessary war contributed to
his place as an historical protagonist.
As the late Alan Dawley put it, "It was not just Yale that [Lynd]
spoke to, but the whole country." In traveling to Vietnam, Lynd
"humanized the enemy" and tried to crack "the Cold War mold that had
driven the U.S. to invade Vietnam in the first place. It may have
cost him his career but how many history professors end up with a
place in history?"
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