Radical America and Cultural Correspondence

RADICAL AMERICA (1967-1999), CULTURAL CORRESPONDENCE (1975-83). These two political and cultural journals of the New Left milieu were launched with a similar generational intent. The editors sought a reconciliation of the Left with elements of popular culture and with the ongoing transformation of working-class life.

These journals, with circulations that only in occasional issues topped 5,000, had a common founder: Paul Buhle. They also had a generous handful of common editors and contributors and to a less but significant extent a connection with Madison, Wisconsin of the 1960s.

Radical America began as an outgrowth of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and until 1971 carried on its cover “An SDS magazine.” The connection had been only informal, but until the 1969 collapse, SDS chapters ordered bulk copies and SDS activists often served as personal distributors, taking issues to local bookshops on consignment. In more than a few cases, SDS members actually worked in those bookshops as clerks or managers, within settings where political and cultural discussions flourished especially but not only among graduate students.

RA sought to reconnect with a sense of Left history in the United States that had seemed to disappear almost entirely and to ground a mostly historical saga in a sense of multiracial collective identity. History graduate students served as its major audience. It attracted an additional audience of elderly leftwing readers who found in its pages ways to connect with their own pasts, going back to the 1920s or earlier. Its enthusiastic readers included, among the better known, journalist Anna Louise Strong (from China), poet Walter Lowenfels, novelist Jack Conroy, labor newspaper veteran Harvey O’Connor, labor educator Solon De Leon (son of Daniel De Leon), and in later decades, the famed media scholar Herbert Schiller.

Radical America’s single best-known contributor, C.L.R. James, would remain influential among readers and editors until the magazine’s demise. The author of the totemic Black Jacobins, a text widely available thanks to a 1962 paperback reprint used widely on campuses, offered a more or concise overview of world history, popular culture, and current revolutionary prospects. His historic role in Pan Africanism blended with his belief in the multiracial working class and his hopes for new milieux and their dreams. He shared much with the New Left students and their disdain of capitalism and “state capitalism.” James looked to the Global South to enliven the Left of the West, a view widely shared in New Left, and he moved past his own history of Trotskyism to embrace the Vietnamese revolution and others, including the Cuban Revolution that gave hopes to the Caribbean islands like his birthplace, Trinidad. Whether in Ghana, Hungary, France, the United Kingdom, the United States or his own native region, he emphasized the activity of the masses themselves as the key to social transformation.

James himself, his writings and his oratory across US campuses for several years, opened up the path to young scholars’ embrace of Black history, including a recuperation of W.E.B. Du Bois and encouragement to the new generations of scholars. Thus, Black Liberation, fused with Marxism, became a major note in the pages of the magazine, not only in historical essays but also poetry and the documentation of current struggles, most especially in Detroit.

Women’s history occupied equal space, in part because of the editorial group around RA, but also because the surge of feminist scholarship closely followed that of Black history in method and in example, “history from the bottom up.” The second best-selling contribution to the magazine, “Women in American Society,” by Mari Jo Buhle, Ann Gordon and Nancy Schrom Dye, appeared in 1971 and reappeared as a pamphlet, selling perhaps ten thousand copies for classes formal and informal, serving as a model for feminist scholars elsewhere.

The single best-selling issue, Radical America Komiks (1969) with two printings of 15,000 each, pointed in another direction, the redeploying of popular culture genres. Barely “political” in any ordinary sense, assembled by Gilbert Shelton, the most popular “underground comix” artist of the day, RA Komiks glorified antiwar sentiment and marijuana, with raucous humor. Some academic readers were reported to be stunned. Five years later, Radical America published as a special issue the comic “Underhanded History of America, by Nick Thorkelson and Jim O’Brien, arguably the first leftwing graphic novel to take up the national saga.

The collapse of SDS and the milieux around the New Left at large coincided with a move of a few editors together to the Boston area in 1971, and there the magazine remained, more precisely in blue-collar Somerville, through its last days. A 1983 “Fifteen Year Anthology” issue offered selections of history, politics and culture that would prove, in some ways, a model for the remaining years. Editorial boards in those later years included many activists and teachers and a generous handful of noted historians, including Jim Green and Linda Gordon. Other key editors included Jim O’Brien, who had moved from Madison to Boston to help edit the magazine, in later years also Margaret Cerullo, John Demeter, Judy Smith, Marla Erlien, Allen Hunter, Frank Brodhead and Sarah Bartlett, as well as artist Nick Thorkelson. As reflected in part in an anthology collected by Green, the struggle to understand working class life and its possibilities remained central throughout the life of the magazine, with increasing emphasis on anti-racist struggles in Boston itself, on the work of the Latin American Left (several editors took part in support movements of the time), along with racial and especially LGBTQ gender issues. The left-feminist views seen in RA’s pages during the 1970s-1980s indeed set the course for many readers’ understanding. The militant versions anti-racism, but also a lesbian feminism with strong support for blue-collar movements, endeared the magazine to a regional and local audience that sustained it until the end.

Cultural Correspondence, launched by two erstwhile editors of RA (Buhle and Dave Wagner, who began as Poetry Editor), took its name in part from the tabloid published by C. L. R James’s Detroit followers during the 1950s. Here, to the discomfiture of a faction around Raya Dunayevskaya, contemporary working-class culture including television and favorite meals took on significance of its own. These tastes reflected, according to James’s supporters, real sympathies and should be understood by socialists as part of the life of a class in evolution. Thus “CC” became, in the vision of its editors, a way to grapple with popular culture as it had evolved and continued to evolve around class and racial issues. If the Frankfort School had brilliantly depicted the supposed downward drift of culture, turning the scale right-side up might show what the best and worst of popular culture might mean.

George Lipsitz, destined to be a. major figure in multiracial cultural studies (and of the evolving field of American studies) lent a heavy influence, along with media historian Daniel Czitrom. In some issues, so did surrealist Franklin Rosemont and a group around him, linked to City Lights Books and an offshoot volume of 1982, Free Spirits, in collaboration with Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Wonders might be found in past comic strips, created environments and art outside of the official art world, oddball music, and such. As the semi-annual production of issues wound down, the magazine turned to the Radical Humor Festival at New York University in 1982, and then to artist-activist PAD/D (Political Arts Documentation/Distribution), both current moments in the anti-Reagan cultural impulses of the time. In CC’s final issue, C.L.R. James pointed to Black women’s fiction as a marker of great importance for culture and politics.

Buhle, Paul, ed. History and the New Left: Madison, Wisconsin, 1950-1970. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.

Buhle, Paul, ed. Popular Culture in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.

Green, James R., Ed. Workers’ Struggles Past and Present: a Radical America Reader. Philadelphia. Temple University Press, 1983.

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