American Radicalism

I want to begin by saying what an honour it is to be asked to take part in this remarkable conference. Unlike many of you I did not know Raphael Samuel well. But like so many historians on both sides of the Atlantic, I was strongly influenced by his work, especially his book Theatres of Memory. The study of historical memory has lately become a thriving cottage industry in the United States. Historical memory is on the front pages of our daily newspapers in debates over the flying of the Confederate flag in public venues or changing the names of institutions named after slaveholders and racists. But rarely, either among historians or journalists, does the discussion achieve the interpretive sophistication, the sympathetic understanding of how memory is constructed, or the insight into the connections between popular and official memory evident in Samuel's book. Historians of the United States tend to be an insular lot, too often unfamiliar with scholarship produced in other countries (this is one of the unfortunate consequences of our national mythology of American exceptionalism – since we are essentially different from the rest of the world, why bother learning about anyone else's history?). But when I teach classes where historical memory is a concern, I never fail to assign Samuel's book.

Two months ago I completed my last course at Columbia University, and am now riding off into the sunset of retirement. The course, which attracted around 180 students, was the history of American radicalism. Beginning with the American Revolution, it explored the ideas, tactics, strengths, weaknesses and interconnections of movements that have tried to change American society for the better – from abolitionism and feminism to the labour movement, socialism, communism, black radicalism, the New Left, and on to Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. Many students seemed to enjoy learning a history few had encountered before. The online student course evaluations – an innovation designed by the university to reinforce the idea of education as a form of commerce and students as well-informed consumers – offered insight into the purposes of what this conference calls radical history. They contained comments like 'This class gave me a totally new perspective on American History'. Or: 'The course taught me how to approach American history with a critical lens.' Or, perhaps over-enthusiastically: 'I learned how to start a revolution.'

I do not mention all this to pat myself on the back. Anyone in this room could offer such a course for the country whose history he or she studies. Moreover, this spring was a propitious moment to be teaching the history of radicalism. Many of my students were energized by the Bernie Sanders campaign. Like many upsurges of radicalism in the past, Sanders' came as a complete surprise. The historian Steve Fraser a couple of years ago published Age of Acquiescence (2015) which compared the first gilded age, of the late nineteenth century, with our own, and grimly concluded that today, unlike in the past, there is no popular resistance. He recently acknowledged that he must rethink that conclusion. To paraphrase the famous question posed by Werner Sombart – which I argued many years ago in History Workshop Journal is a bad historical question to begin with – the issue now is not 'why is there is no socialism in America', but why are so many people happy to support a socialist candidate?¹ One recent poll found that among people aged between eighteen and thirty a higher percentage had a favourable opinion of socialism than of capitalism. Whether the enthusiasm generated by the Sanders campaign will survive it is difficult to say right now. But it requires a historical perspective to understand its roots and possibilities. Anyone attentive to history would have seen that rather than creating a new left Bernie's campaign revealed one already in existence, although widely ignored. Its emergence was foretold in Occupy Wall Street, in the remarkable success of Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), in movements against the deportation of immigrants and police mistreatment of nonwhites. It can also be explained by the terrible dysfunctionality of actually existing...