Twentieth Century American Radicalism

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Twentieth-Century American Radicalism: A Bibliographical EssayAuthor(s): Robert CottrellSource: The History Teacher, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Nov., 1986), pp. 27-49Published by: Society for History EducationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/493175

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Twentieth-Century American Radicalism:A Bibliographical Essay

Robert CottrellCalifornia State University, Chico

THE STORY OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY American radical-ism, of the martyred Eugene V. Debs, the prosecuted Big Bill Hay-wood, and that deportee, Emma Goldman, of the Popular Front andcomrades in depression-era fields and factories, of SNCC, SDS, andthe Weather Underground, is an enlivening and enlightening part ofthe history of the United States. Too often, however, teachers at alllevels have tended to give short shrift to the Socialist Party of Amer-ica, the Wobblies, the CPUSA, and even the New Left of such recentvintage, and to many of the fascinating individuals who filled theirranks. Time factors, of particular concern in survey courses, un-doubtedly, have played a part. So too perhaps has a lingering disin-clination to discuss certain controversial subjects in the classroom.Yet the story of indigenous American radicals, of those whodemanded structuraltransformation of the socioeconomic orderyetserved to help usher in the welfare state, is an important one indeed.The Progressives of the pre-World War I period, the New Dealers ofthe thirties and earlyforties, and the proponents of the Great Societyin the sixties all acted not only to correct some of the most strikingillsin industrial capitalist America but to stave off or dilute radicalferment. That effort sometimes included moves to quash radicalactivism, a process encouraged and exacerbated by many of a moreconservative bent. What followed were sometimes sharp restrictionson the civil libertiesof many Americansduringthe eras of World WarI, the early Cold War, and the Vietnam conflagration. This essay isintendedto serve as a reminderof both such abuses and the importantheritage of American radicalism and as a source of possible biblio-graphical materials for educators.The History Teacher Volume 20 Number 1 November 1986


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28 RobertCottrellThe four finest general studies of radicalism in twentieth-centuryAmerica are John Diggins' The American Left in the Twentieth

Century(New York: Harcourt BraceJovanovich, Inc., 1973),JamesWeinstein'sAmbiguous Legacy (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975),Milton Cantor's The Divided Left:American Radicalism, 1900-1975(New York: Hill and Wang, 1978),and John M. Laslett and SeymourMartin Lipset's Failure ofa Dream?:Essays in the History ofAmeri-can Socialism* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).Dig-gins' stylistically-eloquent work is strongest on the "lyrical eft"-thecultural radicals of the pre-World War I era; the radical split whichfollowed that conflict and the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution;the Old Left of the 1930s and, most strikingly, the attraction Com-munism held for depression-age intellectuals;and the divisive effectsof the Spanish Civil War, the Moscow Trials, and the Nazi-Sovietpact upon the forces left-of-center. Weinstein's treatmentprovides asystematic analysis of the ebb and flow of the American left andargues that radicals in this country, following the demise of theDebsian-guided Socialist Party, failed, and to disastrous ends, toemphasize openly the issue of socialism. Cantor's book focuses uponthe perceived no-win situation of radicals in America: if they linkedup with reformers,they diminished the socialist appeal and veiled thesocialist message; if they opted for revolution, they appearedas futilevanguardists in a non-revolutionary situation. Laslett and Lipset'sstudy, a collection of essays by a number of leading scholars in thefield, also concentrates upon the inability of socialism to sink deeperroots in America. As the contributorsto Failureofa Dream? ndicate,those desirous of affecting an American variant of a socialist utopiaconfronted obstacles of ideology, religion, race, ethnicity, sex, envi-ronment, and history, as well as the reality of social mobility andpolitical freedom. BernardK.Johnpoll's TheImpossible Dream: TheRise and Demise of the American Left (Westport, CT: GreenwoodPress, 1981) and Sidney Lens' Radicalism in America* (New York:Thomas R. Crowell Company, 1969) offer even broader looks atmany of the nation's leading radical and reform movements of thepast centuryand a half. Johnpoll concludes that socialism is unattain-able and is simply another version of the myth "that'Thy will could'be done on earth as it is in heaven."Nevertheless,he credits Americanradicals with having helped to reform and humanize the nation'ssocial and economic orders. So too does Lens, who adds that radicalshave given America a certain "elan vital" and that radicalism is amajor component of American history.For a clear, concise grounding on early twentieth-centuryAmeri-can radicalism, one could do far worse than to start with the initial


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Twentieth Century American Radicalism 29chaptersof The American Left, Ambiguous Legacy, and TheDividedLeft, and any number of solid monographs. Diggins and Cantor areparticularly strong in relating the varied sources of the first greatAmerican left: biblical injunctions, the teachings of Jesus, the naturalrights'philosophy of Paine andJefferson, the pre-CivilWarutopians,the Germanimmigrantswho came to the United States following theaborted revolution of 1848,the anarcho-syndicalists, the followers ofHenry George and Edward Bellamy, the social gospellers, the Popu-lists, and a small number of Marxist intellectuals.Prominent among the latter, L. Glen Seretan writes in DanielDeLeon: The Odyssey of an American Marxist (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1979), was a Curaqaoan immigrant whotouched bases with the Knights of Labor and Bellamy's Nationalistclubs before becoming the most prominent Marxist ideologue inAmerica. DeLeon fully rejected both reformism and "pureand sim-ple"unionism, casting his lot instead with the Socialist Labor Partyand the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance. Ideological rigidity, thecondemnation of reform, and heavy-handed practices, however,generally placed these organizations outside even the radicalpale. Asa consequence, not the SLP and the STLA but the Socialist Party ofAmerica, the cultural radicals of Greenwich Village and the Intercol-legiate Socialist Society, and the Industrial Workers of the Worlddominated the American radicalscene duringthe first two decades ofthe twentieth century. As Cantor indicates, the SP members wereanti-capitalist,yet their ideas were little rooted in Marxian tracts.Thevery amorphousness of the SP, which David Shannon analyzes inThe Socialist Party of America: A History (New York: MacMillanCompany, 1955), allowed for party members to come from every-where-from across the Atlantic, from the Americanheartland,fromthe intelligentsia, from the "plutocratic"class, from the pulpit. Thecommitment most felt with regard to political democracy and thecooperative commonwealth spawned leaders as diverse as Eugene V.Debs, Victor Berger,Upton Sinclair, J. G. Phelps Stokes, and GeorgeD. Herron. The determination to protest against the ills wrought bythe unfolding of industrialcapitalism and the perception that Ameri-can democracy and republican ideals were endangered by the same,as Nick Salvatore's Eugene V.Debs: Citizenand Socialist* (Urbana,IL:University of Illinois Press, 1982)suggests, resultedin the consid-erable appeal of the early SP. The party was strongest, James Greenargues in Grass Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the South-west, 1895-1943 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana University Press,1978), not in the urban-intellectual Northeast or Midwest but in theSouthwestern states of Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas.


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30 Robert CottrellThere,the "forgottenpeople"--migrants, tenants,homesteaders,coalminers, railroad workers, lumberjacks, ministers, teachers, and "vil-lage artisans and atheists"--formed the nation's most powerfulregional socialist movement. Religious enthusiasm, also singled outby GarinBurbank's When Farmers Voted Red: TheGospelof Social-ism in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1910-1924(Westport, CT: Green-wood Press, 1976),coupled with the idea of class struggle,provided avitality and energy to this radical drive, which was itself an educa-tional and a political force and was "bothhateful and hopeful."Thus,those who partook of the socialist encampments heardspeakerssuchas Debs, Mother Jones, and Oscar Ameringer (see If You Don'tWeaken: The Autobiography of Oscar Ameringer* [Norman, OK:University of Oklahoma Press, 1983])both damn the "parasites"whoreaped the benefits of the toil of others and hint of the imminence ofthe Cooperative Commonwealth.But as Cantor, Diggins, and Leslie Fishbein in Rebels in Bohemia:The Radicals of TheMasses, 1911-1917(Chapel Hill, NC: Universityof North Carolina Press, 1982) all recognize, the downtrodden werenot the only ones attracted to socialism. The pre-warbohemian left,concentrated in Greenwich Village and the ISS, envisioned libertar-ian delivery in the class struggle,desiredto join "politics,poetry, andscience;justice, beauty, and knowledge," and cheered the demise ofVictorian gentility which accompanied the onset of rapidmoderniza-tion. As Fishbein writes, "forthem life had urgency,and the personaland the political could be fused. They attempted a revolutionarytransformation of consciousness that would prepare them for thecooperative commonwealth to come." The feminism extolled by thecultural radicals attracted a good number of native-stock and immi-grant women to the cause as Mari Jo Buhle records in Women andAmerican Socialism, 1870-1920* (Urbana, IL: University of IllinoisPress, 1981).The former saw socialism as usheringin "both acooper-ative and egalitariansociety";the latterretaineda firm "commitmentto family solidarity and ... women's traditional roles."For some, particularlya certain segment of America'slumpenpro-letariat, the SP itself appeared far too tame. They in turn wereattracted to the anarcho-syndicalist organization, the IWW, whosestory is carefully woven by Melvyn Dubofsky in WeShall Be All: AHistory of the Industrial Workersof the World(New York: Quad-rangle, 1969).The IWW discussed the necessity and the inevitabilityof direct action and class warfare and spoke of One Big Union andOne Big Strike which would bring the capitalist system to its kneesand result in the kind of society whereworkersno longer had to await"pie in the sky when they die." As Lens indicates in Radicalism in


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Twentieth Century American Radicalism 31America, this was "arevolutionary union ... that answered fire withfire, gunshot with gunshot, and wore overalls as a badge of honor."Fears concerning the radical nature of the IWW, the purportedbreakdown of morals abetted by the cultural rebels, and the verypopularity of the SP, along with bitterdisagreementsamong radicalsconcerning the possibilities of reformor revolution and the desirabil-ity of U.S. entrance into the Great War, brought the first greatAmerican left-wing movement of the twentieth-centuryto its knees.Shannon's The Socialist Party of America discusses the ruptureswhich occurred between the Haywood and Hillquit-Bergerbranchesin 1912, the "right-wing"and "left-wing"cadres during the war, andthe adherents and antagonists of a Bolshevik road to power in Amer-ica. Shannon obviously favors the Milwaukee-type socialists, asdoesSally Miller in VictorBergerand the Promise of Constructive Social-ism (Westport, CT:Greenwood Press, 1973).IraKipnisin The Amer-ican Socialist Movement, 1897-1913 (New York: Columbia Univer-sity Press, 1952) and James Weinstein in The Decline of AmericanSocialism, 1912-1925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967)express greater appreciation for the more militant party members.Kipnis blasts the party's conservative faction, blaming it for theouster of the IWW chieftain and other radicals, while Weinsteinchallenges the long-held assumption that the SP peaked in 1912 withDebs' most promising presidential campaign and the electoral tri-umph nationwide of some 1200 party members. Weinstein reportsthat, initially at least, the antiwar stance of the SP actuallybroadenedits appeal, and that government and business-guided repression, aswell as divisions concerning the applicability of the Bolshevik exper-iment for America, were what weakened the nation's first greatleft-wing movements. The idea that repression served to crush earlyindigenous radicalmovements is sharedby Dubofsky in his eloquentstudy, WeShall Be All. Dubofsky arguesthat the success of the IWWin garnering greater and greater support among the ranks of thedowntrodden, much like the SP's heightened popularity at the ballotbox, caused the Wilson administration and anti-radical and anti-union business enterprises to foment repression against the left.Dubofsky writes that the Wobblies, like the subjects of LawrenceGoodwyn's Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in Amer-ica* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976) and James Green'sGrass Roots Socialism proved to be practitionersof rank-and-fileorparticipatorydemocracy and community action, who, because of thedislocating effects of rapid modernization, were attracted to thepossibility of a cooperative society.The argumentthat repression played a majorrole in the crushingof


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32 RobertCottrellthe SP and the IWW is also made by William Preston in Aliens andDissenters: Federal Supression of Radicals, 1903-1933(Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1963) and by Paul L. Murphy inWorld War I and the Originsof Civil Liberties in the United States(New York: W. W. Norton, 1979). Aliens and Dissenters, likeDubofsky's work, discusses the Wobbly challenge to the capitalistorder and ensuing measures utilized to wipe out this charismaticforce. Murphy's study and the earlier Opponents of War,1917-1918(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957)by H. C. Peter-son and Gilbert C. Fite document the utilization of heavy-handedpractices, both legal and extra-legal, against dissidents.The drive to suppress radicals is also a topic of many illuminatingbiographies of pre-1920 radicals. These include Nick Salvatore'ssocial biography Eugene V. Debs, which recounts the incarcerationof the socialist martyr for his antiwar activity and his eloquentresponse on behalf of the dispossessed everywhere; Robert Rosen-stone's beautifully etched Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography ofJohn Reed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1975), which relatesthe movement into the Communist ranksby one of the lyricalleftistsand his ensuing harassment by the U.S. government; WilliamO'Neill's The Last Romantic: A Life of Max Eastman (New York:Oxford University Press, 1978), which traces the stalwart antiwarstance of one of Reed's most esteemed colleagues on the ill-fatedMasses; Sally Miller's VictorBerger,which discusses the WisconsinSocialist who was twice preventedfrom taking the seat in Congresstowhich he had beenduly elected;RichardDrinnon's Rebel in Paradise:A Biography of Emma Goldman* (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1961), which uncovers the move to deport America's leadinganarchist; and Joseph Conlin's Big Bill Haywood and the RadicalUnion Movement (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1969),which reports on the Wobblies' Wobbly, who fled an Americanjailonly to wind up an unhappy guest of the new Communist state.War and repression thus crippled the radical ranks and inducedmany reformersto shift leftward, to adopt stands against militarism,Wilsonianism, and vigilantism, which, coupled with their support ofsocial change, placed them at the forefront of American radicalismfor decades to come. As Roland Marchand's The Peace Movementand Social Reform, 1898-1918(Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 1972), Charles Chatfield's For Peace and Justice: Pacifism inAmerica, 1914-1941"*Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press,1973), and Charles DeBenedetti's Origins of the Modern AmericanPeace Movement, 1915-1929 (Millwood, NY: KTO Press, 1978) andThe Peace Reform in American History* (Bloomington, IN: Indiana


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Twentieth Century American Radicalism 33University Press, 1980) indicate, the war splintered the peace move-ment, resulting in one branch becoming even more desirous of effect-ing large transformations in the existing order. Among those partici-pating in this leftward shift by antiwar forces were three men whoproved to be dominant figures in American radical and reform ranksfor decades to come. Their stories are best recounted in W. A.Swanberg's Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist (New York: CharlesScribner's Sons, 1976), Jo Ann Ooiman Robinson's Abraham WentOut:A Biography ofA. J. Muste (Philadelphia, PA: Temple Univer-sity Press, 1918), and Peggy Lamson's Roger Baldwin: Founder ofthe American Civil Liberties Union (Boston, MA: Houghton MifflinCompany, 1976).Thomas soon headed the SP, Muste long served asthe nation's foremost peace activist, and Baldwin helped to establishand nurture the American Civil Liberties Union.While the radical-reformersof the Thomas-Muste-Baldwin stripehelped to keep alive left-of-center ideals throughout the ofttimespolitically quiescent twenties, revolution in Russia both strengthenedand weakened the attraction of the left for many Americans. TheBolshevik triumph exacerbated divisions among the socialists, whobattled over the appropriateness of Leninism and revolutionary tac-tics for their own land. The early story of American Communism isrecorded in Irving Howe and Lewis Coser's The American Commu-nist Party:A CriticalHistory (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Inc.,1962)andin Theodore Draper'sTheRoots of American Communism(New York: Viking Press, 1957) and American Communism andSoviet Russia, The Formative Period (New York: Viking Press,1960). These works follow the evolution of American Communismfrom left-wing socialism and syndicalism, the initial disagreementsofthe would-be revolutionaries, the impact of the Bolshevik vision, theestablishment of the Comintern, and the Russian dominance whichresulted in first infantile-leftism, then united-front tactics, and finallythe eventual Stalinization of the American party. The Howe-Coserand Draper studies correspondingly analyze the devolution from theindependent stance of such early American comrades as John Reedand Max Eastman to the sycophancy so characteristic of later partyleaders.The already prevalent obeisance and vacillations of the CPUSAand the sharp diminuition of SP adherents resulted in a vacuum onthe American left. Non-sectarian liberals and radicals did cometogether in 1922 to form the Conference for Progressive PoliticalAction, which backed the 1924presidentialbid of Wisconsin SenatorRobert La Follette. A too-frequently neglected work, KennethCampbell McKay's The Progressive Movement of 1924 (New York:


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34 Robert CottrellColumbia University Press, 1947), provides a thoughtful account ofthe La Follette effort, which it deems the initial formal tie betweenorganized labor, the socialists, and farmers.The failure to establish a permanent farmer-labor party and thedeath of the CPPA's leading light once again appeared to close offpolitical alternativesof a radicalnature, no matter how mild. Conse-quently, as Swanberg notes, intellectuals, radicals, and reformersresponded with some enthusiasm to the 1928 presidential campaignof Norman Thomas. Because of his performance in this race, theformer minister managed to produce a minor, albeit shortlived, res-urgence in the fortunes of the SP.

The actual catalysts for the revitalization of the American left,however, provedto be the GreatDepression, whichafflictedcapitalisteconomies worldwide, and the onset of fascist aggression. As thewestern economic orders plummetted, the lone socialist stateappeared increasingly attractive. In fact, as Lee Elihu Lowenfish's"American Radicals and Soviet Russia, 1917-1940"(University ofWisconsin dissertation, 1968) indicates, the Communist experimentbegan to look like "amodel for planning, socialism and industrializa-tion." Richard H. Pell's Radical Visions and American Dreams:Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years*(New York:Harper & Row, Publishers, 1973)also notes how Russia was viewedas a progressive state which provided an alternative to democraticcapitalism and "thedying American Dream."Furthermore,Pells analyzes the attractivenessof socialism, with itsemphasis upon community and cooperation, for intellectuals whoseown land was suffering what seemed to be the inevitable effects ofdestructive individualism and competition. The critical intelligentsiaduring the thirties, Pells writes, desired to help usher in "genuinepolitical and cultural revolution that would transform the lives ofevery American"and economic transformation based upon planningand production-for-use.The major beneficiaries of this ideological shift and of the rekin-dling of reformism and radicalism turned out to be Franklin D.Roosevelt's New Deal administration, the CP, and Popular Frontorganizations. Many on the left backed Roosevelt, while others con-demned the New Deal as a reformist faqadefor the corporatizing ofAmerica. Perspectiveson leftwardcritiquesof the Roosevelt packageappear in William E. Leuchtenburg'sFranklin D. Roosevelt and theNew Deal, 1932-1940"*New York: Harper& Row, Publishers, Inc.,1963), Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s The Age of Roosevelt series**(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957, 1958, 1960), James


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TwentiethCenturyAmericanRadicalism 35MacGregor Burns' Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox* (New York:Harcourt, Brace, 1956), Donald R. McCoy's Angry Voices:Left-of-Center Politics in the New Deal Era (Lawrence: The University ofKansas Press, 1958), GeorgeWolfskill andJohn Hudson's All But thePeople: Franklin D. Roosevelt and His Critics, 1933-1939(Toronto:MacMillan Company, 1969), and Robert McElvaine's The GreatDepression: America, 1929-1941* (New York: Times Books, 1984).Leuchtenburg and Schlesinger argue that the New Deal itself pos-sessed radical tinges, with the former declaring it to be a "revolution"because of its establishment of a welfare base and expansion of thefederal government's role in the economy, and the latter suggestingthat the first New Deal in particular challenged the antiquated con-cept of laissez-faire and moved in the direction of planning, develop-ments long advocated by the American left.Several chroniclers of this period argue that the appearance ofpopular insurgencies caused Roosevelt to shift leftward somewherenear the midpoint of his first term. Francis Fox Piven and Richard A.Cloward's interdisciplinary work, Poor People's Movements: WhyTheySucceed, How TheyFail* (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977),looks at the unemployed workersand industrialworkers'movementswhich helped bring about jobs programs, unemployment insurance,and measures designed to foster collective bargaining. Yet the insti-tuting of such concessions, in large part the product of "massdefiance,"resulted in a diminishing of the militancy that had resultedin such dramatic gains as well as a strengthening of the verycapitalistsystem whose abuses had compelled the appearanceof "poor people'smovements." Mass movement leaders-many of whose ideas, initiallyat least, seemed to be likened to those popular on the left-challengedNew Deal tenets and brought attention to the plight of the destitute;key figures are portrayed in Alan Brinkley's Voicesof Protest: HueyLong, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression* (New York:Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), Abraham Holtzman's The TownsendMovement: A Political Study (New York: Bookman Associates,1963),and Leon Harris' Upton Sinclair:American Rebel (New York:Crowell, 1975). McElvaine's study includes a fine chapter on the"thunder on the left" whose appearance he argues did indeed helppropel Roosevelt "to the leeward in order to keep afloat." The shiftMcElvaine suggests was more political than ideological, involved nosharp philosophical alteration, and was expedient. He writes,"Roosevelt simply went in the same direction that a majority of thepeople at the same time weregoing-toward the left, towardshuman-itarian cooperative values."


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36 Robert CottrellThe leading Americanradicalorganization duringthese hardtimeswas, of course, the CPUSA. The party'srole on behalf of blacks andnon-unionized workers, its shift to an alliance with liberal elementsduring the Popular Front phase, and its link with the sole socialiststate, resulted in a sizeable increase in membership and considerableinfluence in intellectual and labor circles. Howe and Coser'seloquentyet sometimes strident TheAmerican Communist Party and HarveyKlehr's solid but plodding The Heyday of American Communism:The Depression Decade* (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1984) pro-vide caustic analyses of CP actions throughout the period. Howe andCoser discuss the shift toward and then away from ultra-leftism

duringthe early thirties,both "thedevotion, heroism, and selflessnessof many Communist unionists" and "the sectarianism and obtuse-ness" of partyleaders,the intellectuals' move left-which purportedlyinvolved commitment "to acause that turnsout to be not a failurebuta falsehood," the years of Popular Front success and respectability,and the CP's genuflecting response to the Nazi-Soviet accords. Klehroffers a wealth of information about party practiceswhich he sees asbeing determined by the Comintern "notto suit the needs of Ameri-can Communists but to satisfy the needs of the Soviet Union." BertCochran'sLabor and Communism: TheConflict that Shaped Ameri-can Unions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977) alsosharply stresses the shifts from "redunionism" to Popular Frontismto support of the Nazi-Soviet pact.As Theodore Draper indicates in a pair of articles recently pub-lished in the New York Review of Books, "AmericanCommunismRevisited" and "ThePopular Front Revisited"(1985), a far differentportrayal of the American comrades has been painted by, amongothers, Roger Keeran's TheCommunist Partyand the Auto WorkersUnion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UniversityPress, 1980),HarveyA.Levenstein'sCommunism, Anticommunism, and the CIO(Westport,CT: Greenwood Press, 1918), and Mark Naison's Communists inHarlem during the Depression* (New York: Grove, 1984). Keeranfavorably emphasizes the role played by Communists in organizingthe mass production industries, while arguingthat the party'sunionactivists did not blindly follow Soviet dictates. Moreover, he chal-lenges the notion that the party adopted a reformist thrustduringthePopular Front era. Whilefocusing upon thesignificanceof redbaitingfor the CIO, Levenstein also refuses to lambast Communist unionactivity. Naison notes that along with too few others, party membersfought on behalf of blacks during the depression decade.The appeal of the CP throughout the thirties is related in JessicaMitford's A Fine Old Conflict* (New York: Vintage Books, 1978),


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Twentieth Century American Radicalism 37Vivian Gornick's The Romance of American Communism (NewYork: Basic Books, Inc., 1977), Helen Collier Camp's "Gurley:ABiography of ElizabethGurley Flynn, 1890-1964" Columbia Univer-sity dissertation, 1980), Nell Irwin Painter's TheNarrative of HoseaHudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South* (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), Adison Gayle's RichardWright: Ordeal of a Native Son (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press,1980), Al Richmond's A Long View From the Left: Memoirs of anAmerican Revolutionary (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc.,1972), George Charney'sA Long Journey (New York: Dell Publish-ing Co., Inc., 1972), Bruce Cook's Dalton Trumbo (New York:Charles A. Scribner'sSons, 1977),Justin Kaplan'sLincoln Steffens:A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), David KingDunaway's How CanI KeepFrom Singing: Pete Seeger* (New York:McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1981),Joe Klein's Woody Guthrie:ALife* (New York: Ballantine Books, 1982),John Gates' TheStory ofan American Communist (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1958), SteveNelson's Steve Nelson: American Radical (Pittsburgh: University ofPittsburgh Press, 1981),and Len De Caux's Labor Radical:From theWobblies to the CIO (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1970). Theseaccounts explain the attraction of Communism for native Americansand immigrants, Jews and gentiles, wealthy individuals and poorones, urban and rural folk, laborers and professionals, intellectualsand folk artists, red diaper babies and the children of conservativehouseholds. Daniel Aaron'sgraceful Writerson the Left*(New York:Avon Books, 1961) concentrates upon the movement into the Com-munist camp by certain literaryfigures.

These radicals, their political soul mates, and many others left ofcenter gladly participated in Popular Front organizations, whichbroadened the appeal of Communism and helped revive the Ameri-can left. A number of works roundly criticize the Popular Front andits adherents. Eugene Lyons damningly titles the period in The RedDecade (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941). Notwithstanding hisobvious and often embitteredbiases, Lyons' book enables the reader,with some care, to chart various actions undertaken by variousreformers and radicals. James Williams Crowl's Angels in Stalin'sParadise: Western Reporters in Soviet Russia, 1917-1937, A CaseStudy of Louis Fischer and Walter Duranty* (Washington, DC:University Press of America, 1982)questions the professionalism oftwo well-known Popular Front journalists. Crowl argues that hissubjects, in orderto remain in good standing with Soviet authorities,purposefully falsified theirchronicles of developments in Communist


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38 Robert CottrellRussia. Paul Hollander's Political Pilgrims: Travelsof WesternIntel-lectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba 1928-1978* (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1981) acknowledges that Russianofficials whitewashed the true horrors of their oppressive state butalso indicates that a millennial emphasis in the direction of politicalreligiosity blinded the visitors to the Communist "utopia."DavidCaute's The Fellow- Travellers:A Postscript to the Enlightenment(New York: MacMillan Company, 1973)chargesthat Western intel-lectuals overlooked or made light of repression inside the SovietUnion which would have infuriated them had it occurred elsewhere.Caute writes that the fellow-travellersglorified the Communist statebecause of disillusionment with their own lands which had failed tolive up to the professed ideals of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity."Instead, poverty, unemployment, grave maldistribution of wealth,inequality of opportunities, exploitative conditions, and imperialismcontinued unabated. Thus, the concept of "progress-by-evolution"was shatteredand adesperatesearchfor a new road to changeensued.Particularly after 1928 with the unfolding of the Five-Year Plan, thatpath seemed to be hewn by the Soviets. Pells' Radical Visionspointsout that the threat of fascism and the war propelled formation of thePopular Front. The result, however, Pells believes, was not "afulfill-ment of but a retreat from the creative ferment and radical possibili-ties of the early 1930s,"an argument Staughton Lynd also makes in"The United Front in America: A Note" (Radical America, 1974).Pells argues that "thepassionate anti-fascism of the Popular Frontonly succeeded in paralyzing the Left long before the real gunsshatteredwhat remainedof the decade's radicaldreams"and resultedin a discarding of critical faculties. He also suggests that the innateconservatism of many writers on the left, a conservatism which bothdrew many to and received sustenance from the Popular Front,prevented more systematic and lasting critiques of the Americansocial and economic order. Following the signing of the pact, manyeasily seemed to transfer"their oyalties from socialism to democracy,from economic justice to political pluralism,from collective action topersonal mobility, from the Internationale to the American Dream."Pells' study and Frank A. Warren'sLiberalsand Communism: The'Red Decade' Revisited (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1966)provide the most comprehensive analyses of the Popular Front.As Warrenrecords, the onset of the GreatDepression in the capitalistnations, which contrasted so sharply with the apparent economicaccomplishments of the Soviet Union, along with the fear of bothdomestic and international fascism, caused many left of center toconsider Communists as potential allies, to view Russia in a favorable


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Twentieth Century American Radicalism 39light, and to urgeformation of aunited anti-fascist front. Yet Warrenindicates that the Popular Front "liberals"all too frequently adopteda double standardregardinghuman rights'violations in the U.S.S.R.and often failed to retain theircritical perspective. Such was the case,Warrenindicates, because "thePopular Front mind could not toler-ate ambiguity; it did not understand 'critical support.'" Still, heacknowledges the complexities of the Popular Front and declaresthat on all major issues of the period "therewere at least two andusually three differing attitudes." Warrenalso relates those cataclys-mic events which weakened and then broke the Popular Front: CPpractices in the Spanish Civil War, the Moscow trials, and the Nazi-Soviet pact.Matthew Josephson's Infidel in the Temple: A Memoir of theNineteen- Thirties (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), MalcolmCowley's The Dream of the Golden Mountains: Remembering the1930s* (New York: Viking Press, 1980), and Alfred Kazin's StartingOut in the Thirties* (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), provideinsights concerning the lure that the Popular Front held for radical,but non-Communist intellectuals.Thedisillusionment,dismay, anddisgustwhichfollowed announce-ment of the German-Russian agreement and the collapse of thePopular Front are discussed in Norman Holmes Pearson's "TheNazi-Soviet Pact and the End of a Dream"(America in Crisis: Four-teen CrucialEpisodes in American History, ed. Daniel Aaron [NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1952]), Norman Markowitz's "AViewFrom the Left: From the Popular Front to Cold War Liberalism"(The Specter: Original Essays on the Cold War and the Origins ofMcCarthyism,eds. Robert Griffith and Athan Theoharis[New York:New Viewpoints, 1974]), Pells' Radical Visions, Caute's Fellow-Travellers, and Warren's Liberals and Communism. These worksnote the shattering effects of the pact upon left-of-center unity ingeneral, and upon the CPUSA more specifically. Eric Hobsbawm inThe Revolutionaries (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973)attempts toexplain the response of the comrades in terms fardifferent than thoseusually presented by scholars.

There s somethingheroicaboutthe Britishand FrenchCPs inSeptember1939.Nationalism,politicalcalculation,evencom-monsense,pulledone way, yetthey unhesitatinglyhoseto putthe interestsof the internationalmovement irst.As it happens,they were tragicallyand absurdlywrong. But their error,orrather hat of the Sovietlineof the moment,andthepolitically


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40 RobertCottrellabsurdassumptionn Moscow thata giveninternationalitua-tion implied hesamereactionsby verydifferently ituatedpar-ties,shouldnot leadusto ridicule hespiritof theiraction.This show the socialistsof Europeshouldhaveacted n 1914and didnotincarrying ut the decisionof theirInternational. his showthe Communistsdid act whenanotherworldwarbrokeout. Itwasnot theirfault that the Internationalhouldhavetold themto do something lse.

Obviously, what Hobsbawm suggested about the Britishand Frenchcommunists could be applied as well to their Americancounterparts.Unlike the CP, other American radical organizations failed tobenefit much from the apparently promising conditions of the thir-ties. Warren'sAn Alternative Vision: The Socialist Partyof the 1930s(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1974) chronicles theinability of Norman Thomas'compatriots to garnerbroadersupportduring a time of capitalistic failings. While most historians condemnthe party for not adapting to the exigencies of the period and forrefusing to join the Popular Front, Warrenargues that the socialistsbehaved correctly, retainedtheirradicalideals, and thus presentedanalternativeto New Deal reformism and Stalininst Communism. H. L.Mitchell's Mean Things Happening in ThisLand: TheLifeand Timesof H. L. Mitchell, Co-Founder of the Southern Tenant FarmersUnion (Montclair, NJ: Allanheld, Osmun, 1979) traces the tale of asocialist-guided labor drive which attempted to contest class andracial barriers n the South duringthe 1930s.Constance Aston Myers'The Prophet's Army: Trotskyists in America, 1928-1941 (Westport,CT: Greenwood Press, 1977) illuminates the emergence of a small,militant organization, whose members believed that a centralizedBolshevik-like structure was required to bring about revolution inAmerica. Alan M. Wald's James T. Farrell: The RevolutionarySocialist Years*(New York: New York University Press, 1978) ana-lyzes one famous artist's involvement with the American "Trots."Despite certain limited successes in their union work, however, theTrotskyists remained but a tiny sect.The German invasion of the U.S.S.R. in the summer of 1941,American entranceinto the war, and the subsequent formation of theGrand Alliance, enabled the CPUSA to recoup, albeit temporarily,some of the ground lost by the left following the announcement of theNazi-Soviet pact. In Which Side Are You On?:The American Com-munist Party during the Second World War* (Middletown, CT:Wesleyan University Press, 1982), Maurice Isserman writes thatguided by Earl Browder, the organization appeared "to be moving


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TwentiethCenturyAmericanRadicalism 41toward a more realistic appraisal of their position in American life."He continues: "Their failure to do so had an immense impact on thefuture of American radicalism and much can be learned from theirexperience." Isserman's book is also significant because it wasintended to provide a revisionist history of American comrades dur-ing the war. Yet while Which Side Are You On? does indicate thatcertain party members displayed a degree of independence in theirunion activities and in efforts to improve the plight of blacks, it alsoaffirms that key shifts of policy were determined abroad and thenfollowed at home by those desirous of remainingtied to "thetrain ofrevolution."

That propensity once again proved all too real during the earlypostwar period when the revised Moscow line and the Cold Warcaused visions of a new leftist upsurge to dissipate. Both develop-ments only quickened the movement of many prewar liberals andradicalsinto the anti-Soviet, anti-Communist camp, and helpedstaveoff the possibility of a new Popular Front. For a good number ofthese progressives or former progressives, the wartime tie with theRussians had been tenuous at best or even an evil to be discardedoncethe Nazi threat was quashed. Markowitz's "A View From the Left"and Robert Clayton Pierce's "Liberals and the Cold War:Union forDemocratic Action and Americans for Democratic Action, 1940-1949" University of Wisconsin dissertation, 1979)relate the growinghostility which helped feed the Cold War atmosphere, destroyed theremaining vestiges of Popular Frontism, and severely crippled theAmerican Left. The Moscow trials, left-wing strife within the labormovement, and the Nazi-Soviet accords had already disposed moreand more Americans to view the Soviet system as the embodiment of"redfascism."(See Leslie Kirby Adler's "The Red Image: AmericanAttitudes Towards Communism in the Cold War Era" University ofCalifornia at Berkeley dissertation, 1970].)The increasing tendency to view all criticism of U.S. domestic andforeign policies which emanated from the left as "red-inspired" er-tainly proved to be a key factor in the abysmal showing of HenryWallace in the 1948presidential race. The bid for the White House byRoosevelt's former Vice-President, the major left-oriented organiza-tional effort of the immediate postwar period, is lucidly revealed byCurtis MacDougall in Gideon's Army (New York: Marzani & Mun-sell, 1965) and by Markowitz in The Rise and Fall of the People'sCentury: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941-1948(New York:The Free Press, 1973).Both assertthat public associationof the Wallace candidacy with the Communists ensured a smashing


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42 RobertCottrelldefeat.

Many historians agreethat the poor performance by Wallace bothreflected and exacerbated the demise of the American left. The inten-sifying Cold War, the evaporation of the Rooseveltian atmosphere,and CP practices resulted in a reduction of progressive strengthto ashell of the Popular Front era. Several excellent studies emphasizethe anti-radical crusade which flourished during this period. Themost encompassing work, David Caute'svirtually encyclopedic TheGreat Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisen-hower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), records a litany ofactions undertaken against leftists and even liberals in publicemployment, the military,the State Department, the United Nations,unions, education, journalism, libraries,the sciences, the media, andthe arts. Stanley I. Kutler's The American Inquisition: Justice andInjustice in the Cold War*(New York: Hill and Wang, 1982) high-lights official cases of misconduct and efforts to repress unpopularradical organizations and individuals during the first years of thepostwar era. Caute and Michael R. Belknap in Cold WarPoliticalJustice: The Smith Act, the Communist Party, and American CivilLiberties (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977) document theactions taken against the leading, but badly faltering,radicalorgani-zation of the period. Victor S. Navasky's Naming Names, LarryCeplair and Steven Englund's TheInquisition in Hollywood: Politicsin the Film Community, 1930-1960"*Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press, 1983), and Nancy Lynn and Sheila Schwartz's TheHollywood Writers' Wars* New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982)care-fully study the effects of the red scare in one, highly visible arena.Navasky vividly records the remembrances of those who did andthose who did not accede to legislative interrogation, while Ceplairand Englund and Schwartz trace the decimation of the Hollywoodleft. The autobiographical The Educationof CareyMc Williams NewYork: Simon and Schuster, 1979) includes equally penetratingglimpses of the human costs of the postwar witch hunt. Athan Theo-haris' Seeds of Repression: Harry S. Truman and the Origins ofMcCarthyism (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1977)asserts that theCommunist phobia in no way suddenly sprouted with the demago-guery of Joseph McCarthy, while Robert Griffith's The Politics ofFear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate (Lexington: UniversityPress of Kentucky, 1970)weaves the story of the nation's number onered-hunter. Mary Sperling McAuliffe's Crisis on the Left: Cold WarPolitics andAmerican Liberals, 1947-1954(Amherst:The Universityof Massachusetts Press, 1978) discusses the role played by certainself-proclaimed progressives in nurturing the domestic Cold War.


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TwentiethCenturyAmericanRadicalism 43The post-World War II red scare did effectively decimate theCPUSA, for so long the largest organization on the left. As noted

before, the party pathetically contributed to its own demise. Afterbenefitting so measurably from the Grand Alliance and the revisedPopular Front of the wartimeyears, the American Communists wereconfronted with the shock of yet another Moscow-directed leftwardshift as the Cold War evolved. The party'sdeterioration is recordedby Joseph R. Starobin in American Communism in Crisis, 1943-1957*(Cambridge:HarvardUniversity Press, 1972)and by David A.Shannon in TheDecline ofAmerican Communism:A History of theCommunist Party of the United States since 1945 (New York: Har-court Brace, 1959).Starobin challenges the notion that the Americanpartywas guided by directorders from the Soviet Union, arguingthat"a mental Comintern" influenced Communist practices. Shannoncharges that obeisance to the USSR was surely the single mostimportant factor which led to the collapse of the CPUSA: "Therevolution does indeed devour the children it has borne and nursedand never weaned."Charges of espionage also hurt the party, and Allen Weinstein inPerjury:The Hiss-Chambers Case(New York: Vintage Books, 1979)and Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton in The Rosenberg File: ASearch or the Truth*(New York:Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983)argue that the Communist dream did indeed lead some to spy for theSoviet Union. Such, Weinstein and Radosh and Milton declarerespectively, was the lot of Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg. Strik-ingly, both Perjuryand The Rosenberg File remain bitterly contro-versial works.The very attraction of various intellectuals to Stalinism, an attrac-tion which William L. O'Neill statescontinued long afterthe inking ofthe Nazi-Soviet pact, damaged the left aswell. In A Better World:TheGreat Schism: Stalinism and the American Intellectuals*, O'Neilldiscusses the "largeemotional investment in the Soviet Union"madeby key membersof the intelligentsia and how that purportedlyhelpedto pervert the nation's political climate. Unfortunately, O'Neill'sanalyses often appear questionable, such as when he suggests thatthese individuals were far more morally culpable than those whoeither directly aided or failed to impede the postwar red scare.By the mid-fifties, the Old Left had all but withered away, andthose who held onto the radical tenets of the thirties were soon

confronted with the Khrushchev revelations of Stalinist terrors andthe Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolt. These twin develop-ments produced the Kronstadts which led many of the faithful toleave the CP and denounce the socialist homeland. Vivian Gornick's


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44 RobertCottrellTheRomance of American Communism and Irving Howe and LewisCoser's The American Communist Party quite possibly provide themost revealing reminiscences of the shattering effects of the twoevents. Believing that the CPUSA is effectively interred, Howe andCoser acknowledge that the movement had attracted sincereidealistsand dedicated anti-fascists. However, they also chargethatbecause ofthe comrades'uncriticalstance toward the Soviet Union, "anatrophyof moral sensibility among many American liberals" had occurred.Furthermore, the authors reason that:

for nearlyfour decadesthe CommunistPartyexerteda pro-foundly destructiveand corrupting nfluenceupon Americanradicalism. In looking back upon its history ... one is struckmostof all by the enormouswaste of potentiallyvaluable humanbeings,men who had dreamedof a betterworldand had beenready ogivetheir ives norder o realizet. Before hisstarkandtragicfact nothingthat could happenin the partyduringthemid-fiftiesmeantverymuch.

No matter its practices, the dissolution of the CP resulted in a largevacuum on the American political spectrum-the left, in fact,appeared to wither away. Yet in reality, reform and radical fermentcontinued even duringthis generallyquiescent time and the seeds of aprogressive rebirth were being planted by civil rights and peaceactivists. Thomas R. Brooks' The Walls Came Tumbling Down(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974) and Harvard Sitkoff'sThe Strugglefor Black Equality* (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981)trace the importance of protest in the streets, the WarrenCourt, andfederal legislation in breaking racial shackles. The ways judicialrenderings helped tear down the academic version of Jim Crow arenoted by J. Harvie Wilkinson III in From Brown to Bakke: TheSupreme Court and School Integration: 1954-1978* (New York:Oxford UniversityPress, 1979).Severalexcellent studies,particularlyLawrence S. Wittner's Rebels Against War: The American PeaceMovement, 1941-1960"* New York: Columbia University Press,1969), Charles DeBenedetti's The Peace Reform in American His-tory, Milton S. Katz's "'Peace, Politics, and Protest': SANE and theAmerican Peace Movement, 1957-1972"(St.Louis Universitydisser-tation, 1973),and Neil H. Katz's "RadicalPacifism and the Contem-porary American Peace Movement: The Committee for NonviolentAction, 1957-1967" University of Maryland dissertation, 1974),dis-cuss the emergence of an anti-nuclear drive as the age of Eisenhowerneared its close.


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TwentiethCenturyAmericanRadicalism 45These works also focus upon the massive civil rights and peacemovements of the 1960s. So too do a series of other excellent mono-

graphs, including William Chafe's Civilities and Civil Rights:Greensboro,North Carolinaand the Struggle or Freedom* (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1980), which provides a careful case studyof the protractedbattle to end segregation and discriminatorypracti-ces. Howell Raines' My Soul Is Rested, Movement Days in the DeepSouth Remembered* (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1977), likeCivilities and Civil Rights, relies upon oral history to present amoving account of the civil rights' struggle of the early sixties. Thetwo finest analyses of seminal civil rights' organizations are Clay-borne Carson's In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the1960s* (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981) and AugustMeier and Elliot Rudwick's CORE: A Study in the Civil RightsMovement, 1942-1968* (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).The Chafe, Carson, and Meier works point out the way many partici-pants in the freedom fight were pushed in more radical directions, asboth initial successes and stunted hopes fueled the desire for morerapid and more deepseated change. Piven and Cloward's Poor Peo-ple's Movements contains insightful chapters on the civil rights andwelfare rights movements which trace the emergence and absorptionof mass insurgencies. Revealing sketches of top black leaders of theera are presented by Stephen B. Oates' Let the TrumpetSound: TheLife of Martin Luther King, Jr.* (New York: Harper & Row, Pub-lishers, 1982), TheAutobiography of Malcolm X* (New York: GrovePress, Inc., 1966), and Standing Fast: The Autobiography of RoyWilkins*(New York: Penguin Books, 1982).The antiwar movement of the Vietnamyears is brieflydiscussed byWittner and more fully by DeBenedetti and by Nancy Zaroulis andGerald Sullivan in Who Spoke Up?:American Protest Against theVietnam War, 1963-1975* (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Com-pany, Inc., 1984), which clearly casts middle-class and professionalpeace-makers in a more favorable light than the New Leftists. WhoSpoke Up? correctly points out that this "was a homegrown move-ment of the Left which eventually encompassed the entire politicalspectrum"and was an amorphous coalition of diverse factions andindividuals who often possessed in common only their hatred of theSoutheast Asian conflict. Zaroulis and Sullivan refuse to accept theargumentthat the youthful dissidents guided the movement, arguingrather that "it was conceived, nurtured, and largely directed byadults,"and was originally inspired by A. J. Muste and I. F. Stone.For fuller accounts of these elderly mavericks, see Jo Ann OoimanRobinson's Abraham Went Out and Robert Cottrell's "I. F. Stone:


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46 Robert CottrellRadical Journalist"(Mid-America, 1984).

Regardless of the revisionism of WhoSpoke Up?,the New Leftdidprove instrumental in the emergence anddevelopment of the antiwarmovement. The most careful and thoughtful presentation of theleading New Left organization is KirkpatrickSale's SDS (New York:Vintage, 1974). Sale's work is indispensable for understanding thehopes and fears, the early optimism and the laterjaded pessimism ofthe New Left. He arguesthat SDS began as a reformorganization butsoon moved into radical and revolutionary stages, a pattern alsofollowed by many black militants. Sale, perhaps more fully than anyother chronicler of the period, credits SDS with having helped torevitalize the American left andwith having caused many to questionin a fundamental way their government'sdomestic and foreign poli-cies. The leftward shift which Sale detects as beginning to envelopSDS by 1965, is also noted by Edward J. Bacciocco, Jr.'s workman-like The New Left in America: Reform to Revolution 1956-1970(Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1974), Thomas Powers' Viet-nam: The Warat Home* (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1984), MichaelFerber and Staughton Lynd's TheResistance (Boston: Beacon Press,1971), and Todd Gitlin's insightful The Whole World Is Watching*(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). As much a polemicas a work of history, Ferber and Lynd'sbook focuses upon the draftresistance movement and unabashedly sides with "the politics ofresistance." The ideological thrust of SDS is analyzed by James L.Wood's New Left Ideology: Its Dimensions and Development (Bev-erly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1975)and Wini Breines'Commun-ity and Organization in the New Left: 1962-1968* (New York:Praeger, 1982), which serve as useful correctives to the oft-heardargument that the New Left was untheoretical and unthinking. PeterClecack's Radical Paradoxes: Dilemmas of the American Left 1945-1970 (New York: Harper& Row Publishers, Inc., 1973)looks at fourintellectual progenitors of the New Left-C. Wright Mills, PaulBaran, Paul Sweezy, and Herbert Marcuse-and concludes that theyoung radicals did somewhat simplistically adopt the "mythof revo-lution." Irving L. Horowitz's C. Wright Mills: An American Uto-pian* (New York:Free Press, 1983)concentrates more fully upon themaverick sociologist who coined the phrase "the New Left." NigelYoung's An Infantile Disorder?: The Crisis and Decline of the NewLeft (Boulder: Westview Press, 1977) and Irwin Unger's The Move-ment: A History of the American New Left, 1959-1972 (New York:Dodd, Mead & Company, 1974) present highly critical generalaccounts of the radicals of the sixties. Young chargesthat the shift in


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Twentieth Century American Radicalism 47SDS policy proved disastrous as the young rebels entered an "infan-tile left"stage, while Unger damns both the white and black radicalsof the period for adopting militant stances. Gitlin's The Whole WorldIs Watching argues that the New Left itself was influenced by themass media'shandling of the movement. That analysisis borne out bythe revealing autobiographical pieces, Raymond Mungo's FamousLong Ago: My Life and Hard Times with Liberation News Service(Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), Abbie Hoffman's Soon to Be a MajorMotion Picture (New York: Perigee Books, 1980), and Jane Alpert'sGrowing Up Underground* (New York: William Morrow and Com-pany, 1981). Mungo helped found LNS, which attempted to linkunderground papers around the country; Hoffman became a mediadarling as a leader of the Yippies; Alpert signed up with those whodetermined that "the war must be brought home."Milton Viorst's Fire in the Streets: America in the 1960s* (NewYork: Simon and Schuster, 1979)employs biographical sketches onthe likes of SNCC's John Lewis and Stokely Carmichael, CORE'sJames Farmer, SDS's Tom Hayden and James Mellen, the YippieJerry Rubin, and Allen Ginsberg, who bridged the beats and thehippies, to provide a highly readable overview of the antiwar,student,civil rights, and counter cultural movements of the 1956-1970 era.Lawrence Lader's Power on the Left: American Radical Movementsince 1946 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979) offers anexcellent study of both the demise of the Old Left and the emergenceof "the movement." Lader discusses the necessity of leftist-liberalcollaboration, while examining what he perceives to be the failings ofthe American left. Above all else, he asserts, the left must alwaysrecognize the need "to fuse democratic values and a socialist vision ofsociety into a uniquely American unity," something he believes theDohrns and Rudds forgot. The failure of movement participants toemploy fully the concept of participatory democracy they so elo-quently propounded is revealingly illustrated in Sarah Evans' Per-sonal Politics* (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979). Evans veryinsightfully traces the roots of the women's liberation movement inthe civil rights and New Left organizations of the sixties. All toooften, she notes, women were relegated to menial, subservient, and,occasionally, humiliating roles. Angered, movement veterans beganto form consciousness-raising groups and breakawayfrom the estab-lished New Left.

As the movement spawned in the fifties and sixties began to dissi-pate because of divided loyalties, sectarianism,revolutionary postur-ing, the withdrawal of American land forces from Southeast Asia,


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48 Robert Cottrellspent energy, and an economic downturn, the left once again under-went an all-too-familiar pattern of splinter and decay. An additionalfactor, that of repression, played a majorpart in the evident cripplingof recent American reformism and radicalism. As David J. Garrowuncovers in The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From 'Solo' toMemphis* (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), an intensive effort wasundertaken to besmirch and destroy the reputation of the nation'sleading civil rights activist. Jon Wiener's Come Together:John Len-non in His Time* (New York: Random House, 1984) relates howgovernmental practicesoperatedto silence one of the leadingculturalfiguresof the generation. Abe Peck's UncoveringtheSixties: TheLifeand Timesof the UndergroundPress* (New York: Pantheon Books,1985) and David Armstrong's A Trumpet to Arms: AlternativeMedia in America* (Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, Inc., 1981)indicatethat a concerted and official effort was made to silence the publica-tions which many of the young considered to be their own. Frank J.Donner's TheAge ofSurveillance: The Aims and Methods ofAmeri-ca's Political Intelligence System* (New York: Vintage Books, 1981)and Robert Justin Goldstein's Political Repression in Modern Amer-ica: From 1870 to the Present* (New York: Schenkman PublishersCompany, Inc., 1978) serve as detailed and convincing critiques ofgovernment malpractices against domestic dissidents, malpracticeswhich spawned not only the post-World War II era but the entiretwentieth-century.Happily then, there is a wealth of bibliographicalmaterialrelatingto twentieth-century American radicalism, the incorporation ofwhich can prove stimulating and provocative in a classroom setting.Perhaps the single most fruitful treatment for a surveycourse in U.S.history is John Diggin's The American Left in the TwentiethCentury,a fast-paced, often eloquent work which provides insightful informa-tion on the three great American lefts of the past eight and a halfdecades. The American Left also contains concise biographicalsketches on a number of radical leaders and a large number ofexcellent photographs and drawings, likely to promote discussionand thought. Milton Cantor's The Divided Left might serve better inan upper-division or graduate class in twentieth-century Americanhistory. Although not as fluid as Diggins' study, The Divided Leftincludes revealing chapters on the origins of modern American left-wing movements and the SLP, the SP, and the Wobblies, pre-WorldWar I cultural radicals, the twenties, and Old Left, the early ColdWar, the New Left, and still more recentdevelopments. In addition, itpossesses an all too brief, but highly useful bibliographical essay.James Weinstein'sAmbiguous Legacy, on the other hand, could well


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TwentiethCenturyAmericanRadicalism 49be employed as the basic text for an upper-division or graduatecourse in twentieth-century American radicalism. Arguably moresympathetic to his subject than either Diggins or Cantor, Weinsteinnevertheless condemns both the opportunism and sectarianism whichhave afflicted the left. Still, Ambiguous Legacy'ssocialist perspectiveenables an instructor to pair this work with more critical studies suchas David Shannon's The Socialist PartyofAmerica, IrvingHowe andLewis Coser's The American Communist Party, and Irwin Unger'sThe Movement, all fine but sometimes scathing treatments of theirsubjects. To supplement such readings, one might well utilize theeloquent If You Don't Weaken:TheAutobiography of Oscar Amer-inger, Vivian Gornick's The Romance of American Communism,The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Howell Raines' My Soul IsRested, as well as the more scholarly Nick Salvatore's Eugene V.Debs, Richard Pell's Radical Visions and American Dreams, Law-rence Lader's Power on the Left, Milton Viorst's Fire in the Streets,Lawrence Wittner's Rebels Against War, Kirkpatrick Sale's SDS,Sara Evans' Personal Politics, and Nancy Zaroulis and GeraldSulli-van's WhoSpoke Up?.These latter works perhaps better enable oneto appreciate more fully the passionate appeal socialism, Commu-nism, the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War campaign,and the women's movement possessed for many.

Notes*Available in paper covers.**Volume one is available in paper covers.

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