Studies on the Left

STUDIES ON THE LEFT. The leading intellectual journal of the early New Left, Studies on the Left remains a compelling artefact, both for the formative intellectual experience it provided to a host of young scholars and activists and also for the continuing relevance of its contents to contemporary politics.

Founded in 1958 by graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Studies on the Left was forged in the crisis of the international left in 1956. Among the younger generation of adherents to socialism, Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalinist era purges proved cathartic but not fatal. Abandoning sectarianism for cosmopolitanism, a crop of new socialist clubs emerged on university campuses across the Midwest. In Madison, the Wisconsin Socialist Club, created out of the remains of the campus Labor Youth League branch, united its members around a shared belief that socialism could be adapted to better fit the realities of American life rather than along the existing terms of the various Old Lefts.

Inspired by the British Universities and Left Review, the Club members decided to publish a campus magazine, which became a national publication after securing grants from the Victor Rabinowitz Foundation and the activist publisher Carl Marzani. The founding editors, including Martin Sklar, David Eakins, Stephen Scheinberg, Saul Landau, Dena Samberg and Joan Bromberg, received support from historian William Appleman Williams, whose Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959) and Contours of American History (1961) provided fresh perspectives on the nature of American capitalism and foreign policy. He and other faculty members in the History Department, particularly Howard K. Beale and Merle Curti, offered a link to the Progressive School scholarship of an earlier generation and a commitment to academic freedom, which Studies emulated. Although they anticipated academic careers, its editors called for a “radicalism of disclosure” exposing the limits of the liberal scholarship of the 1950s and its “sham objectivity” that had acted as a “censoring device” of opinions that challenged the political imperatives of the Cold War. The pages of the journal would serve as a meeting place for scholarship rejected by mainstream academia.

Across its tumultuous eight years of publication, Studies made several notable contributions, among them the theory of corporate liberalism, first introduced by Martin Sklar in an article on Woodrow Wilson. Historians who characterized Wilson as a figure who had worked to curtail corporate power, Sklar suggested, were wrong. Wilson had instead forged a “Third Way” between business “anarchism” and “socialist radicalism,” reconciling the emerging corporate economy with the American liberal traditions of liberty and property rights, and the overriding vision of a global empire controlled by the United States. The resulting socio-economic reforms attempted to secure prosperity at home and new markets for American exports abroad, predicated on the “Open Door” policy enunciated by Secretary of State John Hay in 1899.

Inspired by Sklar’s conclusions, fellow Studies editors James Weinstein, David Eakins, and Stephen Scheinberg worked to elaborate on the idea. With the co-operation of “corporate liberal” businessmen, they concluded, Wilson had co-opted the demands of the Progressive Era social reform movements to shore up the capitalist system against the threat of socialism. This interpretation was itself co-opted by the leaders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), particularly in its 1963 Conference document America and the New Era, and by the speeches a few years later by Carl Oglesby, who blamed “corporate liberals” and “corporate liberalism” for the inadequacy of social reform efforts of the 1960s, the limitations placed upon domestic democracy, and the neo-colonial incursion into Vietnam among other neocolonial projects.

Another notable achievement was the publication in Studies of Harold Cruse’s “Cuba, Marxism, Nationalism, and the American Negro,” one of the earliest expressions of Black nationalism within the New Left. This article drew praise from Malcolm X, who visited the editors in Madison, and earned Cruse the contract to publish the groundbreaking Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967). Alongside this seminal piece, the editors published articles covering the Cuban Revolution, the Sino-Soviet split, the history of the American Socialist Party, the New Left, and Brecht and experimental theatre, all within the context of exploring the potential for intellectuals to rival labor as an agent for radical social change.

Desirous to stake out a position of influence within the burgeoning New Left movements, and with its editors scattered around the country, Studies relocated to New York early in 1963 under the financial stewardship of James Weinstein. There, they became closely associated with the Socialist Scholars Conference and the Free University of New York. Movement figures Tom Hayden, Norman Fruchter, Staughton Lynd, and Stanley Aronowitz further strengthened the New Left credentials of the editorial board, while Eugene Genovese offered a forceful historical voice. The journal increasingly shifted towards coverage of the progress of the various Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) projects founded by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Although they shared a belief that socialism was desirable within these organizations, the editors split over different interpretations of what the role of Studies should be and who it should address. Its pages served as the platform for the ongoing debate over whether activists should devote their efforts to working within the Democratic Party to win it over to a socialist platform, or pursue independent activism, either through community organizing or through a new left-wing party. Weinstein and fellow editor Eugene Genovese, favoring the development of a new party modelled on the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs, questioned whether ERAP was a necessary activity to building such a movement, or whether it constituted, mainly in the view of Eugene Genovese, “mindless activism,” to be a substitute for developing a coherent political program. The movement editors, more favorable to the concept of participatory democracy, which rejected pluralist attempts at community organizing and coalition building in favor of spontaneous and non-hierarchical forms of organization, believed that activists would reject the imposition of party structures.

Ultimately, these disagreements proved intractable. Hayden, Fruchter, and Lynd resigned. The next year, a further split occurred along similar lines, and it was decided to replace Studies with two journals, each led by a faction. Weinstein relocated to San Francisco, and his efforts to inspire the creation of a new socialist party faltered. In 1970, he founded Socialist Revolution, a successor journal committed to building a socialist movement. Weinstein ultimately departed, shifting to Chicago where he founded the newspaper In These Times with Martin Sklar and others in 1976, based very much on the central ideas of Studies. Weinstein remained at his post until his death in 2006, while Sklar moved sharply to the Right. Genovese, who had early turned in a rightward direction, published the short-lived Marxist Perspectives (1978-1981). In the meantime, the journal Radical America (1967-1999) had been launched in Madison, with some of the same contributors as Studies but a heavier emphasis upon demographic changes within the working, and a wider commitment to feminism and to cultural explorations.

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

Mattson, Kevin. Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945-1970. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002.

Studies on the Left Records, 1959-1967 Descriptive Finding Aid. Wisconsin Historical Society. https://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi/f/findaid/findaid-idx?c=wiarchives;cc=wiarchives;view=text;rgn=main;didno=uw-whs-mss00074