United States History

UNITED STATES HISTORY. In most eras of the Left, US history has served as the predominant form of political-scholarly popularization. For the New Left scholarly phase of the 1960s–1980s, it emerged as perhaps the most prestigious form of intellectual expression, falling rather sharply afterward, and returning to a certain level of prestige with the rise of race studies. The radical interpretations of history themselves have, however, varied widely era by era.

Left history of the United States began with the newspaper editor, often also a key movement lecturer and sometimes even a political leader seeking to explain current events against the background of American history to fellow European immigrants. The uses of history proceeded along a rather different line with the rise of an English-language socialist press during the 1890s, but the newspaper editor remained a recognized intellectual leader and interpreter.

From the Left’s earliest days, opinion sharply divided on the history of the Republic. Had American history, from at least the Revolution onward, been acted out as a class drama in deceptively “democratic” packaging? Or alternatively, had the great advances of American democracy been made but subsequently squandered by the consolidation of a class system? Neither immigrant nor native-born socialists had a monopoly on the alternative interpretations, although immigrants leaned toward the former and native-born toward the latter.

The founding of the Socialist Party and its encouragement of collective self-education, provided support for book-length efforts. Algie M. Simons, who had studied with US History savant Frederick Jackson Turner at the University of Wisconsin in Madison before moving to Chicago, wrote the most popular scholarly studies. The American Farmer (1903), drawing upon his newspaper articles, viewed the farmer as the noble if horny-handed “American type,” exploited and ruined by the rise of the industrialized market society. Social Forces in American History (1911), largely based upon documents assembled by his former professor, John R. Commons, offered a meticulously materialistic account of US history prefaced by chapters on the development of the global economy. Scarcely Marxist, with little account of the social relations of production or the US socialist movement before 1900, it was nevertheless an unprecedented accomplishment and, by implication, severely iconoclastic. Patriotism counted for little, economic and political power for nearly everything. Social Forces in American History was said have been used in some 4,000 local socialist study classes.

The editor of the prestigious International Socialist Review in its early years, Simons effectively placed history at the center of socialist understanding. Simons’s materialistic views, with the destiny of industrial workers rather less crucial than the cruelty and the crises of American capitalism, fairly represented the English-language or grass roots socialist view until the 1910s. The Appeal to Reason, overwhelmingly the most popular socialist newspaper, reached the small towns, fading sections of the middle class, and the Civil Army veterans true to their cause. It drove home weekly the narrative of historic loss and betrayal by the ruling classes.

Oscar Ameringer’s wry Life and Deeds of Uncle Sam (1909), eventually translated into some fifteen languages, reached a readership of a half-million. Here, ruling class claims to a democratic tradition met ridicule. Socialist journalist James Oneal’s History of the American Worker (1912), growing out of an agitational newspaper series, likewise accused the ruling classes of continual conspiracy and leaned heavily upon the muckraking Progressive historians of the era, above all Charles Beard. Gustavus Myers’s Great American Fortunes (1910), the book that most successfully survived into the next period, summed up the message: “History, in the main, thus far, has been an institution for the propagation of lies.... Since the private property system came into existence, an incessant, uncompromising warfare has been going on between oppressors and oppressed.”

A handful of Communist historians at first continued in this vein. Anthony Bimba, editor of the Communist Party’s Lithuanian daily, thus gathered The History of the American Working Class (1928) almost directly from the old socialist material, with a sprinkling of “vanguard” concepts. By the mid- and late-1930s, the attraction of a handful of academic writers and the gravitation of the Communist Party toward the Popular Front emphasis of “democratic forces” in the nation’s past considerably altered the view of American history. The most formidable inspiration, V. L. Parrington, had provided in his Main Currents in American Thought (1928) a model of progressive and reactionary intellectual traditions. US history explored and popularized in the new journal Science and Society as well as in the short-lived American Marxist Quarterly, also in the newspapers and magazines of the Popular Front Left, as well as by the staggering Socialist Party, carried a generally positive view of the promise of democracy tending toward socialism. Contemporary Trotskyists aimed their interests largely abroad.

Earl Browder’s 1938 pamphlet Traitors in American History: Lessons of the Moscow Trials suggested how far along the Popular Front theme could be taken, by the line of the day, into unintended caricature. By 1940, Communists had more firmly embraced Charles Beard, who had for the most part disdained Marxist-style class concepts, as the finest example of an American mainstream scholar.
But the Popular Front also promoted African American history as had no previous Left tendency. It received W. E. B. Du Bois’s monumental Black Reconstruction (1935) with mixed emotions, in part anxious about the independent-minded author’s political popularity and his indifference toward themes of progressive white, lower-class forces in the South. James S. Allen’s Reconstruction: The Battle for Democracy (1937) might be considered almost a “correction” from the class stand point, but would be better viewed as a fine parallel monograph without the vision or Biblical writing style of Du Bois. A young Herbert Aptheker published his early breakthrough studies of slave revolts in Science and Society. At a broader level, by urging Black History Week, Communists and their Popular Front allies made a major contribution to the changing perception of race.

During the approaching Cold War era and its immediate aftermath, Aptheker and Philip Foner delivered, between them, a veritable library of Marxist historical studies marked by voluminous research and strictest orthodoxy. Only The Bending Cross (1948), a popular biography of Eugene Debs by independent radical Ray Ginger, reached a larger audience with militant tales of the past.

The chief labor and social historian mentors of the New Left, David Montgomery and Herbert Gutman, grew out of and beyond the Popular Front milieu, attempting to bring a more flexible (but no less radical) view of race, class, and ethnicity into consonance with current methodological advances. These two figures were to prove crucial to the whole direction of US labor history until the end of the twentieth century and beyond, because they trained a legion of historians who went on to train others.

Montgomery, a former Communist and machinist, brought to labor history a keen sense of factory details, especially in the work process. Beyond Equality (1967), an entirely singular work bringing together a close economic history of the post-Civil War period with a study of race and labor, might be described as the foremost Marxist historical text produced by US scholars to that point. Gutman, whose Yiddish-Left background had a sustaining influence on his life, became the magus of leftwing social history, himself a discoverer and promoter of hidden history in the submerged life of the masses. Restrained by illness and early death, Gutman offered up essays in a number of journals, essays collected in Work, Culture and Society (1977). He devoted years to “The Numbers Game,” a disproof of the emerging, statistics-heavy thesis that slavery had been, at least for some slaves, a process of upward mobility.

Gerda Lerner, a youthful Communist of the 1940s and an activist in the American Women’s Congress, took up scholarly life in early middle age and also created a world of scholarship around her. A major domo or arguably the major domo of women’s history, she wrote widely but a later volume, The Creation of the Patriarchy (1986) set a standard for sweeping narrative.

An outlier in many ways, Eugene Genovese, eventually a master scholar of slavery, graduated from Communist Party circles with a Gramscian turn of mind unique for the middle 1960s. He wrote a handful of major studies, most notably Roll, Jordan, Roll (1974), elucidating slave life and the relations between whites and Blacks in the antebellum South. Drawing his own conclusions about the powerful and the powerless, he moved swiftly toward the political Right in later years.

A separate current, no less important but more clearly in the home-spun radical vein, provided intellectual inspiration for the New Left campus antiwar movement. William A. Williams’s volumes on US foreign policy, and the works of his highly influential graduate students, recuperated a sturdy isolationism with a close (and surprisingly sympathetic) study of early elites so as better to criticize the twentieth-century “corporate” order. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959) catapulted Williams into becoming a major critic of US foreign policy and a major critic of hawkish liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The Contours of American History (1961) made him “the new Beard” in the eyes of many of the scholarly radical generation. His many disciples, most formidably Walter LeFeber, together wrote dozens of studies, mostly examining the steps in the creation empire from Woodrow Wilson onward. A school of admirers, to put the linkage a bit too closely, continued into the next century. The non-marxist admirers who learned from him and helped shape mainstream discussion of US politics of war and empire included Andrew Bacevich.

The study of American life from the top down, similar in some ways to Herbert Marcuse’s critique of contemporary American culture, did much to inspire voluminous Left studies of militarism, advertising, education, prison and mental institutions, even of unions as integrating elements in the tightly woven “system.” The precocious New Left journal Studies on the Left (1959–1966) initially spread the evangel of this movement, and its lineal successor, Socialist Revolution (later renamed Socialist Review), especially in its first years, emphasized similar themes.

By 1970, an activist movement of mostly current or former graduate students worked to shape radical history networks within and outside the universities. Regional groups, most prominently the Mid-Atlantic Radical Historians Organization, held conferences and lectures, agitated on questions of common concern, and fostered or encouraged the publication of new journals. Radical America, which grew initially out of a national study group within Students for a Democratic Society in 1967 and maintained informal links with that organization until 1970, urged labor, Black, and women’s history as critical sources of insight for the spread, too soon the renewal, of the radical movement from the campuses and ghettos into a deeply rooted, powerful force. The Radical History Review, although aimed from its beginnings in 1973 at more academic networks, also urged political strategies integrated with the pursuit of knowledge.

By the later 1970s and 1980s, immediate political expectations had diminished, but activism proliferated in several ways. At the local level, many radical historians became active in public history programs ranging from labor history, race and ethnic history and women’s history to urban history and gay history. They organized public discussions, mounted visual exhibitions, worked with filmmakers on notable documentaries, and by the end of the 1980s found themselves well situated to speak publicly, if sometimes in Aesopian tones, about the past lives of ordinary peoples and the often bitter struggles for economic and political democracy. At a national level, they advanced the scholarly dialogue via important forums such as the Berkshire Women’s History conferences; the American Social History Project, which produced classroom visual aids and a landmark textbook of labor and social history; and even the Smithsonian Institution’s museum exhibits. In a scholarly sense, such additional “new” areas as Asian American, Native American, and gay history, and environmental studies, among others, likewise found their Left scholars, often central to the respective fields. Along with such subject areas, methods such as oral history became for the first time major interests of radical scholars. If radical history had once been rare in the authoritative Journal of American History, it now became commonplace.

Not even scholarly optimism about the validity and radical uses of class, race, and gender perspectives could be maintained in light of the conservative drift from the White House to undergraduate students. Fields established at great personal cost, such as women’s studies and Black studies, hugely fruitful in scholarship, often found their scholars, by the 1990s if not before, often beset by student apathy and the long-run effects of insufficient university commitment. The single most notable scholarly success, forcing the concept of class upon an unwilling historical profession, had already suffered by the late 1980s fresh attacks from scholarly Right and even sections of the Left restive at white racism and the apparent eclipse, with deindustrialization, of the proletarian project. Despite the scholarly elaboration of women’s history in particular, and the appearance of such major class- and race-oriented works as Eric Foner’s Reconstruction (1988), the momentum of radical history had been decisively slowed.
By the mid-1980s, a growing popular disbelief in historical process and a growing interest in seemingly transhistorical cultural subject-matter tended to overshadow and undermine the prestige of historically-minded studies. In a dramatic change, some older and younger figures earlier associated with the Left, Eugene Genovese along with a handful of contributors to the New Republic, shifted rightward in their views of history, abandoning Marxism altogether or insisting that any positive history of the Communist Party and its supporters had been completely discredited. The large cohort of 1960s-generation scholars, however, maintained their position and continued to turn out impressively detailed work in fields of gender, labor, ethnic, race, and environmental history, with strong new historical studies of the Communist milieu.

The keenest and most lauded contributions to leftwing history by the 1990s and beyond leaned most heavily toward race, but secondly toward culture. Robin D.G. Kelley, considered by many the most admired outright Marxist, had already set the pace with Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (1990). His biography Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009) won an array of prizes and set a new standard for historians working in music and culture. Gerald Horne, an almost impossibly prolific scholar, has written a score of books within the Popular Front tradition, ranging from colonialism on a global scale to the role of the Left in the US and Anglophone Caribbean. Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America (2020) and Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here (2016) have greatly subsequently added to the history of racism.

Jaqueline Dowd Hall coined the phrase the “Long Civil Rights Movement,” linking the grand movements of the 1960s to the struggles of the Southern Left going back generations, a crucial detail ignored by prominent liberal historians. Michael Honey and Robert Korstad added crucial links to the history of labor and the Left in the South, studies updated but also viewed from a different angle by Michael Goldfield, The Southern Key (2020). George Lipsitz, an unofficial dean of leftwing American Studies, developed in A Rainbow at Midnight (1996) a new way to see transracial, blue collar culture and struggles over culture from the World War II onward, a view carried into subsequent works, including The Production of Difference (2012) by David Rodiger and Elizabeth Esch.

The rather sudden appearance of gay, lesbian and bisexual history, treated in a scholarly way, arrived with a suddenness during the 1970s-1980s and became a standard, in some ways, for the new generations of work. George Chauncey’s Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (1994) offered a key example of the scholarship already underway in the much-noted anthology, Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (1989) edited by a team of scholars.

The history of the US empire overseas and its ominous guidance from Wall Street and Washington DC had no finer or more influential scholar than Gregory Grandin. Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism (2006) confounded older and newer assumptions, building upon the work of W.A.Williams’s students including Walter LaFeber and Lloyd Gardner. Vijay Prashad’s The Karma of Brown Folk (2001) with concepts adapted from W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, examined the American role in the “dark nations” of Asia and Africa. Subsequent important global studies in the same vein include Nan Ensted, Cigarettes, Inc. (2018) Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Migra! (2010).

Looking centuries further back in history, the study of “Atlanticism,” the Atlantic phase of colonialism and the use of slavery and the slave trade to enrich and empower the West, can be credited to Marcus Rediker among other scholars. Following British historians and US historians of Europe including Natalie Z. Davis among others, radical historians sought to look anew at early contacts between Europeans and Native Americans, but also the mix of race connections that helped prompt the controversial 1619 Project, including Carol Anderson, White Rage and Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom and Elizabeth Hinton, Unearthing the Roots of Black Rebellion (2021).

For the popular reader looking to scholarly journalism as recent history, the histories of jazz, blues, and Rock ’n Roll, later Salsa and Hip-Hop among other subjects, the leftwing interpretation remained as elusive as race themes shone through. Scholarly analysis of historical background to developments within popular culture yielded an overlap of interests with American Studies and other fields in some of the freshest areas of interest. Following the lead of George Lipsitz, younger leftwing academics developed studies of vernacular music, ethnic cultural styles and trends, intersections of idioms, and the continuities between political and cultural rebellion. such as Tricia Rose, Black Noise (1994) and Nan Ensted, Ladies of Labor (1999).

Abelove, Henry, Betsy Blackmark, Peter Dimock, and Jonathon Schneer, eds. Visions of History: Interviews with E. P. Thompson. New York: Pantheon, 1983.

Buhle, Paul and Edward Rice-Maximin. William Appleman Williams: The Tragedy of Empire. New York: Routledge, 1995

Buhle, Paul, ed. History and the New Left. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.

Lerner, Gerda. Fireweed: a Political Autobiography. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2003.

Lewis, David Levering. W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919. New York: Owl Books, 1994.

Lewis, David Levering. W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century. NewYork: Owl Books, 2001.