The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945-1970

2. Historical Protagonist/Professional Historian: Spelman, Columbia, and a Ph.D.

34 The Admirable Radical Chapter Two ✴ ✴ ✴ Historical Protagonist/Professional Historian Spelman, Columbia, and a Ph.D. Our society is at a loss for a sense of direction, at what gives life meaning . . . An individual in this situation has often turned back to his past for clues . . . I feel the need for a trade. I feel the most natural way to relate to others is by unselfconsciously offering a service of unquestioned usefulness, which they can use as they wish. But in our situation , what is useful? I am not satisfied . . . with being a doctor; with banking or printing. The historical evidence offers a certain discipline to the philosophical inquiry . . . history represents an evidential approach to existential questions . . . In any human understanding, we postulate an identity, [sifting] it through the evidence of differences, and are left with a sense of identity and understanding. —Staughton Lynd Professor Lynd is one among a large, and growing, group of younger scholars who combine the old zest with professional excellence and human maturity which are ridding the radical tradition of the bad intellectual habits into which it fell so often in the past . . . To challenge established positions . . . requires, in the challenger, something of the awkwardness of an objector. It would seem, then, that Staughton Lynd and Professor Lynd are in fact the same person. [Lynd’s scholarship] enforces the realization that as we argue about the past so also we are arguing about—and seek to clarify—the mind of the present which is recovering that past. Nor is this an unimportant part of the mind of the present. For some of the largest arguments about human rationality, destiny, and agency, must always be grounded there: in the historical 34 Historical Protagonist/Professional Historian 35 record . . . the writing of history, in this kind of way, is also an act of contemporary self-consciousness . . . It should be unnecessary to keep on reminding oneself of ultimate purposes in the pursuit of a profession . But one does sometimes doubt the usefulness of history today, when the present appears to be so perilously near to the edge of it all. —E. P. Thompson Lynd was admitted to Columbia University’s graduate faculty of political science in the History Department in July 1959 to begin a Ph.D. in the fall. History is not often considered a trade of “unquestioned usefulness,” but Lynd’s approach aids in our grasp of the field as serviceable and rewarding. He was bringing the metaphysical spirit underlying Macedonia to the archives. In a petitionlettertoColumbia ’sgraduateschooltoenrollinHistoricalMethods,Lynd outlined his research goals. He expounded on his intention to locate sources for a master’s thesis that would serve as the basis for the Ph.D. His original title for the dissertation reflects Lynd’s political worldview: “Government by the People: The Struggle for Direct Democracy in the Revolutionary and PopulistProgressive Eras.” A master’s thesis on the struggle for direct democracy in the late eighteenth century would lay the groundwork. And by direct democracy, Lynd meant “participation by all citizens personally in government,” unlike their role in a representative system. What he called direct democracy was “understood by the 18th century as ‘democracy,’ whereas the representative system we now call ‘democracy’ they called ‘republicanism.’” Two studies would aid Lynd in his initial investigation: Simon Noveck’s The Democratic Idea in the United States, 1774–1801 and Elisha Douglass’s Rebels and Democrats. Lynd’s dissertation would eventually take the title, “The Revolution and the Common Man: Farm Tenants and Artisans in New York Politics, 1777–1788.”1 Staughton Lynd’s foray into the past started with his master’s thesis: “AntiFederalism in Dutchess County, New York: A Study of Democracy and Class Conflict in the Revolutionary Era.” After Lynd completed the master’s degree in June 1960 as an Erb Fellow, his thesis won the William P. Lyons Master’s Essay Award in 1961. It was published in book form in 1962 by Loyola University Press. Lynd’s local, case-study approach tested the structural generalizations of Carl Becker and Charles Beard. Becker’s History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760–1777 argued that the American Revolution was as much a clash over who should rule at home as it was about home rule or defeating the English. Progressive historian Charles Beard stressed the economic interests of the Federalist supporters of the Constitution—those who would 36 The Admirable Radical...