Genovese, Eugene D.

GENOVESE, EUGENE D. (1930–2012). Few historians left their imprint on the American historical profession and the study of American slavery more than Eugene Genovese. Born into an Italian American working-class family in Brooklyn, New York, Genovese joined the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) in his teenage years. However, he was expelled at the age of twenty, stating “I zigged when I was supposed to have zagged.” Genovese gained a PhD in History from Columbia University in 1959, one of several young left-wing historians to earn their doctorates in the late 1950s and early 1960s. While these historians benefited from the decline of McCarthyism, they also broke with the economistic and deterministic Marxist analysis of a previous generation of historians associated with the CPUSA.

Genovese gained infamy in 1965 during the teach-in movement against the Vietnam war. During a teach-in at Rutgers University, where Genovese was a professor, he stated that “I do not fear or reject the impending Vietcong victory in Vietnam. I welcome it.” The comments caused a national outcry, with Genovese’s academic status at Rutgers becoming a central focus of the New Jersey gubernatorial election and political leaders such as Richard Nixon calling for Genovese’s firing. Despite his opposition to the war, Genovese maintained a fraught relationship with the New Left who he believed, in emphasizing student revolutionaries at the expense of the working class, had produced no theory for social change. In 1969, he drew the ire of numerous fellow left-wing historians when he opposed a motion calling on the American Historical Association (AHA) to publicly condemn the Vietnam war. Genovese claimed it was not the role of the AHA to take political positions, stating for the organization to “put them down [radical historians], put them down hard, and put them down once and for all.”

Genovese produced a significant amount of scholarship that reshaped the field of American slavery. In The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and the Society of the Slave South (1965), Genovese argued that southern slavery represented a non-capitalist mode of production centered on slaveholder domination that grew increasingly antagonistic with the bourgeois capitalist North. In 1974, Genovese published Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. Building from Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony and the Hegelian master–slave dialectic, Genovese meticulously traced the history of the intertwined relationship between slaveholder and enslaved, rather than treating either in isolation. Significantly, Genovese stressed the importance of Black religious experience to the development of an enslaved culture and community. Roll, Jordan, Roll won the Bancroft Prize, the first self-defined Marxist work to win the prestigious award. Genovese served as president of the Organization of American Historians from 1978 – 1979, the first explicit Marxist to be elected to the head of the organization. Genovese continued to produce influential scholarship, often in collaboration with his wife Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. The Genoveses criticized new social history’s lack of attention to political power and emphasized that while the slave South was part of the world of commerce, it was characterized by a set of non-capitalist relations of production. While numerous criticisms have been levelled at Genovese’s scholarship, from his admiration for the slaveholding class and theory of paternalism to his characterization of southern antebellum society as non-capitalist, many of the questions Genovese raised continued to set the agenda for the study of American slavery and the history of capitalism.

In the late 1970s, Genovese founded the academic journal Marxist Perspectives (1978 – 1980). While he had sat on the editorial board of other left-wing journals, such as Studies on the Left, Genovese intended Marxist Perspectives to be his decisive academic contribution. Over a decade in the making, Marxist Perspectives brought together radical historians and left-wing intellectuals from across the profession and symbolized the growth of Marxist scholarship in the preceding years. Despite producing several important articles, the journal collapsed after only ten issues due to unreconcilable tensions between Genovese and the editorial board. As with other projects, Genovese’s deeply idiosyncratic personality, which demanded excessive loyalty from colleagues and often confused academic debates with political enemies, paved the way for Marxist Perspectives’ collapse.

From the 1980s onwards, Genovese became increasingly estranged from the American left. Long critics of the New Left and second-wave feminism, by the early 1990s, the Genoveses embraced Roman Catholicism and their politics shifted significantly to the right. In 1994, in the pages of Dissent, Genovese scolded the academic left for its support of “mass murder” and regimes of “despotism.” Four years later, in response to the perceived growing political correctness and sidelining of diplomatic and military history in the academy, Genovese helped found the Historical Society as an alternative to the major historical associations. Genovese died in Atlanta, Georgia.

Kolchin, Peter. "Eugene D. Genovese: Historian of Slavery." Radical History Review 88. (Winter 2004): 52-67.

Novick, Peter. That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Raeburn, Gabriel. “The Rise and Fall of Marxist Perspectives: Eugene Genovese and the Fight for Hegemony in Radical American Historiography.” Modern Intellectual History (23 March 2021): 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244321000135.

Sinha, Manisha. “Eugene D. Genovese: The Mind of a Marxist Conservative.” Radical History Review 88 (Winter 2004): 4–29.