Published
in the Radical Historians Newsletter, No. 86–87, December 2002
Notes
on the Search for a Democratic History
Jim
O’Brien
Writing history is a lot
like writing a play. You assign leading
roles to certain characters, you place other characters in subordinate roles,
and you leave others out entirely. The
goal for both the historian and the playwright is to tell a compelling
story. Of course the historian’s job is
in many ways a lot harder. The story
must not only grip the reader, but “fit the facts” as best we know them. A historian can’t use dialogue unless there’s
an actual record of it, can’t fiddle with chronology, and can’t arbitrarily
assign personality traits to the characters.
And in choosing characters, the historian must choose people who really
lived. But even the most narrowly
confined piece of historical writing requires the author to pick and choose
among the possible characters of the story.
Which ones will make the story line work? Which ones will simply make the reader ask why
they were mentioned?
When I was growing up, a
select group of people seemed to be on stage in my history readings: monarchs, politicians, generals and admirals,
sometimes businessmen, sometimes religious leaders. “History” consisted of what they had done. Virtually everyone who had a name in any of
the history books was a white man. To
the extent that common people were brought into the story, they were nameless;
by implication, usually, they were white men also.
The political movements that
shook up American society in the sixties and early seventies democratized
American history. They thrust African
Americans on stage as important actors in that history. Starting at the very end of the sixties, they
gave a strong new impetus to historical writing about other minorities and,
most spectacularly, about women.
Working-class people of all colors and both genders began to get much
more attention than before. As
historians began looking at present-day society differently—began seeing
divisions along lines of race, gender, and class—they inevitably began asking
new questions about the past. Old
scripts were questioned, new characters came on the stage, and history was
rewritten.
During my last two years of
at the University of Wisconsin, I was fully immersed in this new look at
American history. I was part of a
loosely defined milieu of history graduate students who felt an urgency about
re-examining the past through the optic of the late-sixties political ferment. We were young radical historians who had kept
one foot (in some cases, both feet) in academia. Restive within the framework of academic
history, we hated to abandon it. Among
other appeals, it seemed to offer a way to figure out how American society had
gotten to its present state.
This re-evaluation was going
on in universities all around the country.
I knew about clusters of like-minded graduate students at Columbia,
Rochester, Northwestern, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pittsburgh, Princeton,
Yale, Berkeley, Michigan, and perhaps others that I no longer remember. But Madison stood out for two reasons: the sheer number of history students and the
breadth of activism on the Wisconsin campus.
A loose sense of community among many of the left graduate students at
Madison, gave rise to a number of common projects and a shared sense of
optimism.
Looking for “The People”
The New Left often evoked
“the people” in slogans: “Let the People
Decide,” “Power to the People,” “The Streets Belong to the People,” “The Spirit
of the People is Greater Than the Man’s Technology,” and so forth. Hopelessly vague as a label, “the people”
sometimes meant simply “the people who agree with us.” But it also expressed an honest, fumbling
desire for a kind of democracy in which ordinary people took part directly in
shaping society. Its model was the civil
rights movement in the South, which had sought to empower the least educated,
most badly abused, most fearful parts of the black population to stand up for
their rights as citizens. White radicals
had sought to extend the concept to the North, first in urban organizing
projects organized by Students for a Democratic Society in the mid-sixties,
then in campus protests aimed at giving students a greater say in running their
colleges.
For New Left historians, the
world-view that lay behind those slogans made us want to see what history had
to say about the ability of ordinary people to shake up the society. History books had generally left out the
lives of those who were neither wealthy nor famous. We wanted to put them front and center.
At the end of the sixties,
the emergence of a women’s liberation movement brought a wholly new challenge
to the way we saw history. It gave the
question “Who’s important?” a whole new twist.
It immensely complicated, even as it enriched, the effort to trace class
divisions and class consciousness in the American past.
Women’s history offered
scarcely any immediate predecessors. For
the most part, the distinctive experiences of women were not considered part of
“history,” either by mainstream academics or by recent generations of
radicals. Nearly all academic historians
were men. Of about sixty faculty members
in the history department at Wisconsin, none were women.
The women’s movement,
quickly growing in the late sixties, opened up space. It not only validated women’s pursuit of
careers, including those in academic history, but it validated women as
subjects of history. The new feminism
insisted that women’s lives are important.
It highlighted male-female relations as a central aspect of every
society, past and present. Because so
few individual women were “important” in the usual textbook sense, women’s
history meant a history that focused not on presidents and senators but on
ordinary people who had led ordinary lives.
For those who grasped its implications, women’s history offered the
opportunity for a stunning breakthrough in understanding the past.
Overall, the radical
graduate students in Madison shared a faith that the late-sixties insurgency
had opened up new ways of looking at history.
It was a far cry from my initial experience of history in grade school
and high school, where history was Americanism and the status quo was its happy
outcome. It was a turbulent, exciting time to study history, and we felt like a
brave new generation.
Radicalism surfaced
unmistakably in the academic historical profession at the December 1969
convention of the American Historical Association in Washington, DC. There, a makeshift radical caucus pressed a
resolution against the Vietnam war and ran Staughton Lynd as a protest
candidate for AHA president. The
caucus’s initiatives freaked out the respectables, most noticeably the
then-Marxist Eugene Genovese, who wrote to Jesse Lemisch ahead of time saying,
“It will be to the knife.” In a speech
at the convention he thundered, “We must put them down, we must put them down
hard, we must put them down once and for all”—“them” being his fellow radicals. The resolution lost and so did Staughton.
My own initiation came at
the December 1970 AHA convention in Boston, surely the high-water mark of
radicalism in that organization. The
tone seemed youthful and informal, even brash.
The annual business meeting drew what seemed like more than a thousand
people, hundreds of whom voted for resolutions against the war and in favor of
radical changes in the AHA Executive Council.
(The resolution called for quotas so the Executive Council could no
longer be dominated by senior professors at a handful of elite
universities.)
The Boston convention also
included panel discussions devoted to acerbic critiques of mainstream academic
history. They doubled as political
rallies. The high point was a group
presentation by five women historians who ridiculed writings by several male
historians about women’s history. They
found that these writings all made demeaning assumptions about the proper place
of women in society. They used a
sequence of imaginative slides as a backdrop.
The audience loved it. (Getting
their paper published was another matter.
They sent it to several historical journals and got back a torrent of
sarcastic comments. It ended up being
published as a pamphlet by the Radical Historians Caucus.)
My vantage point for most of
the 1970s was my work in a cooperative printshop called the New England Free
Press, in Boston. By the time I finished
graduate school in 1971, I had pretty much lost interest in teaching. I was spoiled by being in a hotbed like Madison,
full of like-minded people to work with on common projects. I hated the idea of ending up in a small town
somewhere through the luck of the academic job market. At the same time, Madison itself was starting
to feel like a ghost town as more and more of my friends left, either to start
teaching jobs or to dig in as political organizers. I moved to Boston for no better reason than
that Paul and Mari Jo Buhle were going there and (along with Paul) so was Radical
America, which I’d worked on in Madison.
Also, the Free Press, which had become the country’s leading publisher
of radical pamphlets, seemed like an ideal place to work. I headed east.
I ended up working at the
Free Press nearly nine years, usually part-time but sometimes full-time. The Free Press was a printshop and also
published over 200 pamphlets that were distributed across the country. Its apex, I have to admit, was at about the
time I arrived. In our varied catalog, a
number of the women’s liberation pamphlets sold in the tens of thousands of
copies. The biggest seller was Our
Bodies, Ourselves, published first by the Free Press and later by Simon
& Schuster. Our prices were
astonishingly low—usually 10 cents for a sixteen-page pamphlet. In our last printing of Our Bodies, Ourselves,
before the authors turned it over to a commercial publisher in 1973, we priced
the book at 30 cents.
Already before moving, I’d
gotten involved with the Radical Historians Caucus’s newsletter, published in
Boston. After the 1969 AHA convention in
Washington, Marcia Scott, Charlie Shively, and a group of other young
historians had volunteered to publish the newsletter in order to keep alive a
spirit of cooperation among radical historians who were scattered around the
country. I guest-edited the sixth issue
in September 1971, just before leaving Madison, and I have worked on all of the
eighty-odd issues published since then.
The Radical Historians
Caucus itself didn’t last long. It took
its last gasp at the 1971 AHA convention, where Staughton Lynd led a heartfelt,
losing fight for a sweeping resolution against government secrecy. But we kept putting out the newsletter—using
the name “Radical Historians Caucus” until 1978 simply because we’d always done
it that way.
We also used the name Radical
Historians Caucus locally, for annual Boston-area conferences. Jim Green, an energetic young history teacher
at Brandeis, organized these meetings along with me and a shifting group of
other people. There was still a
congenial ambiguity about radical history at that time. Our Boston area conferences of 1972–74 drew
not only academic historians but also ex-students who were now political
organizers outside the university. The
biggest of those conferences drew a couple of hundred people.
This was a time when
hundreds of veterans of the student movement had gone into factories and other
workplaces, or into community organizing, with the idea of being part of a
revived working-class insurgency. It
didn’t feel as if there were a wide gulf between them and the other movement
veterans who had gone into teaching jobs.
Radical America magazine had a similar feel
to it. Even after Paul Buhle left Boston
in 1973 to follow Mari Jo’s teaching jobs, the magazine kept its strong
interest in history. The tireless Jim
Green was a big part of it. He took up
labor history as his main research topic after he joined RA in 1972, and
put together special issues on labor militancy of the 1930s and 1940s among
other projects. Linda Gordon, a leading
women’s historian, became an RA editor at the same time as Jim.
A fond memory from those
days is of the 1974 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, held at
Harvard University. I sat for much of
the time at a literature table with women’s history material from Radical
America and the New England Free Press.
Despite our very low prices, we sold over $800 worth of back issues and
pamphlets. I remember vividly not just
how friendly everyone was, but also how fuzzy the boundaries were between the
academic and nonacademic study of history.
As I look back, I think the
recession of 1974–75 marked a kind of watershed in what, for want of a better
term, I’ll call the former New Left.
Among the ex-student radicals who went into working-class settings as organizers,
a wide variety of ideas flourished in the early seventies. Alongside the devotees of classic Leninism,
other groups worked to apply, in one way or another, the anti-authoritarian
leanings of the campus left in new arenas.
But in times of rising unemployment, vulnerable workers tend to feel
cautious, and organizers tend to cling to what they think of as tried-and-true
models.
By the end of 1975, nearly
all the extant local clusters of ex-student organizers had embraced one or
another version of Leninism. They had
joined small national groupings that vied with each other to “lead” the working
class. From the point of view of most
ex-student radicals who had become academics (including historians), this
tendency represented a sterile, pointless exercise—to be feared if it were
successful (because most of these groups included Stalin in the tradition they
sought to uphold) and to be ridiculed in any case for the thinness of its
ideas. It accelerated the bifurcation of
“the movement” into campus and off-campus components.
I felt a different tone in
the left historical work too. People
who’d come out of the student movement with apocalyptic hopes underwent
flattened expectations in the 1970s. And
the younger left historians just then coming into their own didn’t have the
kind of stake in the New Left’s optimism that we’d had. In 1976 I went to a conference in New York
put on by the Mid-Atlantic Radical Historians Organization on the topic of
American Communism. I was startled by
the tone of the sessions—how emphatically the New Left historians there
rejected the notion that the crisis of the Great Depression could have had any
more radical an outcome than it did.
The politics of the time
affected the New England Free Press, too.
Our pamphlets excelled at saying what was wrong with the status
quo—“consciousness raising,” as the women’s movement called it. But as the decade wore on,
consciousness-raising became less important than figuring out what to
do—something for which “the movement” had a multiplicity of answers, none of
them entirely convincing. Even though we
gradually sharpened our printing and design skills, and produced better-looking
pamphlets, the Free Press became less relevant politically. We sold fewer pamphlets, and more of them
went to college classes (required reading) rather than to curious individuals
or to political groups that could use the pamphlets for outreach.
After 1973, New York City
was the center of radical history. That
year, a group of people of my generation pulled together a big, lively radical
history conference at Fordham University.
They formed MARHO (the Mid-Atlantic Radical Historians Organization),
started a series of well-attended biweekly forums, and began the Radical
History Review, which continues today.
When Molly Nolan, who helped
initiate the New York group as a grad student at Columbia, came to teach at
Harvard in 1975 she breathed new life into our own radical history scene. She drew together a group of extraordinarily
bright grad students (including Roy Rosenzweig, Betsy Blackmar, Carol Lasser,
Jean-Christophe Agnew, Joe Interrante, Jan Lambertz, and Warren Leon among
others) who in turn drew in other talented young historians. They started a series of modest
radical-history forums, and formed a Boston branch of MARHO which took
responsibility for some issues of the Radical History Review.
Touches of combativeness
marked radical historians’ relation to the history profession. Jobs weren’t easy to come by or to keep. Relations within history departments were
often strained. But the real trend in
the 1970s was cooptation, not combat. So
well did some radical historians master the techniques of scholarly writing
that the “mainstream” of academic history broadened to include them. Social history, including most importantly
women’s history, became a vehicle for extending the standard techniques of
academic history into new areas.
Academic conventions,
especially those of the Organization of American Historians include plentiful
panels on interesting social-history topics featuring self-identified left
historians. But a deadly dull format
still permeates academic history conferences.
One or two participants read long papers, then two or three commentators
read their responses, and finally those in the audience who haven’t drifted
away can comment or ask questions. That
tiresome format has persisted.
The preceding discussion is set in what is rapidly becoming the distant
past. It sets forth a dilemma that faced
radical historians at the end of the 1970s.
Responses to that dilemma varied immensely, all the way from renouncing
(and denouncing) leftism to abandoning the academy altogether in favor of
immersion in left activism. The most
significant responses, though, have been in the classroom and in the broadly
defined arena of public history.
For radicals in academia, classroom teaching has involved an uphill
struggle, not so much to get students to embrace a particular version of
history as to embrace history itself.
Whatever our own slant on the relevance of history—as inspiration, as
exposé, as background for understanding the present—we have had a faith that
somehow the understanding of history can be empowering. Especially among hard-pressed working
students at non-elite schools, this faith is often elusive. But I have been struck by the creative ways
that left historians have wrestled with the dilemmas of helping their students
to gain and benefit from historical understanding.
Others are much better equipped than I am to evaluate the ways in which
the democratizing impulses of the 1960s have influenced public history. I can only suggest here that virtually every
aspect of popular presentations of the past has been affected. The influence can be seen in museum exhibits,
documentary films, TV mini-series, walking tours, a broadened scope for oral
history, and “living history” presentations.
The multi-faceted American Social History Project, initiated by Herbert
Gutman, and the newer Gotham Center, initiated by Mike Wallace as a way of
letting New York City’s history speak to its present-day problems and
opportunities, are only two examples of the efforts to democratize public
history.
The high hopes that I remember from the late ‘60s and very early ‘70s
are faded and changed but not dead. For
all the frustrations that decades of conservatism in national political life
have brought, and for all the structural limitations facing historians in any
setting, the impulses for a democratic history live on.