"Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible": Staughton Lynd, Jesse Lemisch, and a Committed History

In the spring of 1968, a time of tumult on many American campuses, several hundred intellectuals, mostly younger faculty and graduate students, gathered at the University of Chicago for the founding meeting of the New University Conference (NUC). The Chicago meeting reflected all the ambivalence of people who were, for the most part, in an institution (the academy) that they saw as part of a corrupt American society. The two sides of this ambivalence were expressed most starkly by two New Left historians who had much in common but had drawn different lessons from their experiences.

Staughton Lynd, in a keynote speech, argued that commitment to a university career and its "upward scramble" inevitably compromised a commitment to political activism. "You cannot work at a university as a factory worker labors at the bench. . . . Whatever we may think, or think we think, university life requires us to act as if our radicalism were episodic and of secondary importance." ¹

Lynd acknowledged that not all left intellectuals should become activists, and he quoted approvingly Noam Chomsky's claim that the intellectual's first responsibility is "'to insist upon the truth,' 'to speak the truth and to expose lies.'" But he argued that "that portion of the truth to which we will be led, the truth which seems to us significant, is not independent of our experience. . . . We are not merely oppressed by the university, we are conditioned too." ²

At the very least, Lynd said, "we ourselves must have a foot solidly off the campus." He held out the possibilities of either part-time teaching combined with part-time activism or of alternating "years of full-time intellectual work with years of full-time work for the Movement." "Disgorge the bait of tenure," he said, "and the problem of making a living can solve itself year-by-year." He continued: "Face the problem of livelihood as husband and wife, accepting the possibility that sometimes one of you, sometimes the other, will be the main breadwinner, and you will have taken a long step toward solution of the so-called woman question. Face the problem of livelihood together with your friends in the Movement, recognizing that at some times you may support them, at others they you, and that you can all take greater risks because of this assurance, and you will have taken a long step toward the overcoming of alienation." ³

Jesse Lemisch, a younger historian who had taken part in organizing the conference, did not like what he heard in Lynd's speech or in what he took to be the overall tone of the meeting. He wrote an overnight leaflet to distribute at the conference, voicing his dissent. ⁴ He started by endorsing "the consensus at the conference that the movement needs some of the information which intellectuals--both inside and outside of the university--can provide." He went on, though, to ask, "What is going to be your attitude towards intellectuals who call themselves Left but whose work has no immediate or even apparent long-term usefulness to the movement?" He complained that his earlier suggestion that "radical historians should meet as a group . . . and ask each other what it means to be a radical historian" had been dismissed as irrelevant by the conference's planners.

Lemisch said, "I have plenty of reason myself to dislike professors, and I think that most of the work they are currently doing in all fields is trivial. But I do not dislike scholarship. I think that the idea of finding out how things actually work and have worked is an extremely radical idea." He argued that the conventional wisdom of the movement could not be a reliable source of guidance as to which research topics are important.

What if the movement is wrong? As Staughton pointed out, it has been wrong many times. It is dead wrong about women...