Left Marginalia: The Radical Imagination in Postwar America

In an era that has witnessed the disappearance of any effective counterweight to the power of international capital, historians Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps have written a persuasive reminder of an American left tradition that once offered more than the audacity of hope. Occupying the "margins" while contending for the "mainstream,"¹ activists from across the race, gender, and ideological spectrum drew inspiration from the revolutionary and abolitionist examples of the 19th century. What they sought was a fundamentally more democratic and egalitarian society than anything imagined by the self-proclaimed defenders of American liberty. Using a variety of tactics and political formations, socialists, feminists, Black nationalists, and environmentalists advanced at various points the goals of individual liberation and social equality. Registering the frustration of the left in the post-Great Recession miasma, the authors argue that the left has moved closest to the mainstream when it privileged coalition building over vanguard heroics. The left alternative has been most persuasive when it merged the dual impulses of personal freedom and economic justice.

One of the many virtues of Radicals in America is that it postulates a coherent definition of American radicalism. "What makes left-wing criticism radical," they argue, "is the conviction that freedom, equality, democracy, and solidarity will demand changing the existing order of social life in fundamental ways," displacing the power of concentrated capital and fashioning "new egalitarian ways of social interaction and political engagement."² Acknowledging the left's many contradictions and hypocrisies, Brick and Phelps succeed in demonstrating the persistence of these principles throughout most of the postwar period. Equally important, they have decisively demolished the image of the American left as one dominated by the aspirations of the white male wage worker or student radical. This is an ambitious history of American radicalism in which women, gays, lesbians, and racial minorities are more than bit players in a larger drama of the White Working Class. It's also a history that looks skeptically on the claim that the trade union represents the principal agent of working-class emancipation.

From its origins in the abolitionist movement, Brick and Phelps argue, the American left has occupied a position of marginality from which it has critiqued a nation invested in the maintenance of hierarchies that violated human dignity. At its best, the left has called on American society to resolve its contradictions and restructure its institutions so that a "future society governed by self-determination and cooperation" would be possible.³ Radicals had to negotiate a "dialectic" or "tension between two commitments: the willingness to hold fast for a minority view and the struggle to imagine and help fashion a new majority."⁴ While the authors focus on the period after 1945, they understand the longer tradition to which postwar dissent belongs as well as the political and ideological forces that shaped it. They also use it as a foil against a contemporary left that frequently fails to offer anything more than shrill self-righteousness or apocalyptic doomsday scenarios.

In the authors' estimation, abolitionist Wendell Phillips best exemplified the radical tradition of occupying the outer perimeter while struggling to influence the wider society. A "principled oppositionist," Phillips became the target of repression even while he maintained his confidence that most people possessed redeeming qualities. Phillips' philosophy "rested on a deep belief in the cause of democracy," since he sincerely believed that the majority could be persuaded to embrace the democratic principles it already held, but which "prejudice or indifference," as Phillips put it, prevented them from practicing.⁵ Phillips and the abolitionists nevertheless believed in the fundamental decency of humanity and its capacity to be persuaded by reason. Not all in the radical tradition would subscribe to such a salutary view of the masses.

Yet what the authors want us to understand about Phillips, their representative radical, was his unwavering commitment to the democratic potential of the majority despite his own persecution and torment. What undergirded that conviction? "Only a powerful...