Restless Natives

In a sometimes insightful 1981 study of socialist organizations in the Progressive Era United States, Aileen Kraditor—disavowing her earlier left politics—relayed a cutting piece of wit. She quoted Lewis Carroll: “‘When I make a word do a lot of work like that,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘I always pay it extra.’” ¹

She meant that leftists in the American past had failed to understand either American society or American workers, that radical categories and vocabulary could fit American realities only if radicals stretched all of these beyond the bounds of credibility. Kraditor also detected this tendency to make words do impossible work among those of her colleagues who identified with the radicals they studied. She pointed her finger most accusingly at Old Left history, with its search for slave revolts and militant workers, who might be enlisted into a radical tradition leading to the communist-led Left of the mid-twentieth century. Angry peasants and determined craft unionists alike were part of a revolutionary proletariat-in-the-making in this version of history, simply working its way toward full consciousness. Warren Susman, although he remained far friendlier to the Left, also rebuked attempts to forge a usable history that distorted the past, interpreting concepts and activities out of context. ²

New Left historians like Staughton Lynd, tireless activist and author of Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (1968), left themselves open to similar charges. Lynd discerned in vastly disparate historical circumstances a continuous, bright thread: “man’s existential freedom to choose.” ³ To him, Henry David Thoreau, Karl Marx, Martin Luther King, Jr. (and perhaps Ho Chi Minh as well), for all their obvious differences in perspective and experience, were still fundamentally the same, in the way that counted most. All fought for freedom, hence all were radicals. “Freedom” and “radical” were among the words that did the most work for the New Left and, if we are to grasp the perspective of New Left scholarship, to place it in turn within a historiographic context, we have to understand the meaning and function of these words, in context. To comprehend the continuing project of a history of American radicalism, we must acquaint ourselves with the New Left of the 1960s.

Harvey J. Kaye and Elliott J. Gorn are making a bid to influence our contemporary perception of the radical tradition in America with the “American Radicals” series they are editing for Routledge Press. The lively and useful collection The American Radical (1994), edited by Kaye with Mari Jo Buhle and Paul Buhle (also from Routledge), appears as a kind of companion piece to the series. Kaye and Gorn have kicked off their series with two biographies of twentieth-century American leftists: William Appleman Williams and Michael Harrington, two men with rather different politics, who both nonetheless would qualify for entry in many a New Left intellectual’s pantheon.

The New Left’s initial project was to “speak American,” to construct a left-wing politics safe from accusations of foreign influence and lineage. Given the history of nativism and antiradicalism in the United States, an “American” radicalism meant one whose ideas and dreams descended from northwestern Europe, preferably from Anglo-American culture. The central political principle this radicalism would elevate was direct democracy, local self-rule; shades of what Robert Wiebe calls “lodge politics” (not to mention the Saxon forest). ⁴ Accepting the contention that communism, and perhaps other forms of statist socialism, derived from sweatier, swarthier regions, the New Left sought a nativist radicalism in their present. For the New Left, “radicals” need not be socialists, and “freedom” might be got in private, if not individually. Historians like Lynd pursued a native radical tradition to which activists could append their own radicalism. One hastens to add that this intellectual nativism, borne of white involvement in the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, carried none...