Note: The following is a slightly-edited version of the essay I wrote as introduction to the book I edited on American Radicalism. References in parentheses to chapters refer to articles included in the book.
Daniel Pope
University of Oregon
Chapter One: Introduction-The Nature and Significance of Radicalism in American History
I. Defining radicalism in the American past
In this volume, we will meet women rioters demanding price controls during the American Revolution and earnest young students trying to combine spiritualism with social change. We'll encounter German immigrant anarchists in Chicago and African-American sharecroppers and steelworkers in Alabama. After studying those who conspired to launch a revolution against slavery, we can turn to women textile workers demanding "Bread and Roses" in New England. What does it mean to label all of these groups as radical?
Although the word "radical" dates back to the middle ages, the term "radicalism" is younger than the American nation, making its linguistic debut around 1820. As an "ism" or system of belief, it is notoriously hard to pin down and assign a consistent meaning. The wit who said that a conservative is someone who admires radicals long after they're dead made the valid point that radicalism is about change, and the radicalism of one era may bolster the status quo in another. Any definition of radicalism should be bounded chronologically. And a definition of American radicalism should not pretend to cover the entire world.(1)
With those provisos, a first approximation of a definition that is broad but not all-encompassing would point to equality as a central objective and core value of American radical movements and ideas. But equality is not enough, for mainstream groups and individuals can plausibly claim a desire for greater equality. Radicals, however, are willing to employ illegitimate means to achieve that goal. Again, context counts; "illegitimate" does not necessarily mean either illegal or violent. Dominant religious and social views in mid-nineteenth century America considered it improper for women to speak in public to mixed audiences, and women who lectured about abolitionism or women's rights radically challenged those precepts. African-American men, though supposedly guaranteed equal rights by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, threatened the white supremacist order of the South at the turn of the century by exercising those rights and taking part in local politics. (See Chapter Six) The theatrical protests of AIDS activists late in the twentieth century offended upholders of the status quo whether or not they violated any laws. (See Chapter Ten)
II. Complicating the definition
But a definition of American radicalism based on equality as a goal and willingness to use illegitimate means invites probing questions. What did equality consist of? In the century or more after the American Revolution, radical movement generally took equality to mean equality of opportunity and contended that a true realization of the Declaration of Independence's noble phrase that "All men are created equal" would come in allowing equal freedom for all. Whatever different circumstances in life resulted, equal freedom would affirm the moral equality of all before God. That concept still resonates today. The African-American struggle for civil rights in the South invoked the ideals of equality before the law and an equal chance to participate in the blessings of American life. However, by the late nineteenth century, many radicals asserted that formal equality in a capitalist society was a sham. The anarchists of Chicago in the 1880s spoke of freedom, but they also claimed that capitalist interests controlled society and destroyed that freedom. For them, as for later radical groups, the overthrow of an economic system deemed exploitative became the primary goal. Equality of condition, not opportunity, was what counted. And to complicate the issue of equality further, is the use of government power to promote equality consistent with the freedom that radicals have also called for?
Another challenge to our definition comes from social movements that seem to affirm difference as much as or more than they claim equality. By the mid-1960s, for example, the civil rights movement was transforming itself into a movement for Black Power and pride. Black Power activists asked why African-Americans would want to be integrated into a burning house, a corrupt, racist society. Some feminists have asserted that, rather than push for equal access to power in a patriarchal society, women should strive to develop and protect a women's culture in which specifically female values of nurturance, peace and community would be valued. (Jokingly, it has been said that "Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.") Radical movements may demand drastic change, but they also seek unity based on traditions and common experiences and respect for who they are. We can see this in case after case, ranging from the crowds demanding fairness in the Revolutionary era to immigrant women in the Lawrence textile strike of 1912 to ACT-UP, the radicals who fought stigmatization of people with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, in the late 1980s. We must recognize that radicals often scorn equality when it is taken to mean the submergence of individual or group identity, becoming "just like" the dominant order.
Finally, this is a book about the radical "left." What about the so-called "radical right?" And is the distinction still valid? The metaphor of a left-right spectrum of political views, with the far left as radical and the far right as reactionary, has persisted since the French Revolution, when members of the National Assembly sat themselves in this pattern. But moderates have often claimed that both ends of the spectrum are similar in their disrespect for stability and gradual progress, their intolerance of democratic processes, and their attachment to violent means. Indeed, whether or not these characterizations are fair, there are real parallels. The anarchists who fought the power of capitalists (historically the left wing's mission) also rejected the power of governments (a stance that today is usually associated with the political right wing). Populists who railed against corporate control in the name of a more humane, democratic economy sometimes also sometimes blamed their woes on conspiracies of foreigners, Jews or Englishmen. Some radical groups in recent decades have refused to be placed on the left-right continuum at all. "Neither left nor right but straight ahead" was a motto of the militant environmentalist American Green Party in the 1980s and early 1990s..
The left-right continuum may be an imperfect device for locating social movements and ideologies, but it has a certain utility. By positing equality as a core radical goal, we exclude movements which exalted order and discipline, claimed the superiority of one group or people to another, or strove for individual choice and opportunity (often through unregulated market capitalism) as their main objective. Without dismissing the ambiguities in the left wing-right wing metaphor, it gives us a working method of clustering similar movements together and analyzing them separately from those with drastically different aims. But consider where the "New Social Movements" of the late twentieth century, as reflected in the militant theatrics of ACT-UP (See Chapter Ten), belong on the spectrum-or whether ACT-UP's focus on identity, pride and respect makes the question irrelevant.
III. Persistent Dilemmas in American Radicalism
The movements and individuals this book presents are a diverse lot, but many of them faced the same challenges and strategic choices. Briefly, we will discuss four of these recurrent dilemmas below. First, what is the relationship between-to put it starkly-reform and revolution? Next, what are the opportunities and pitfalls in working through the established means of democratic participation-voting, running for office, pressing for legislation, etc.? Third, what role, both positive and negative, has violence played in the history of American radicalism? Can violence be used to further the humane ends that radicals profess? Equally important, how should radicals respond to the repressive violence that they have historically encountered? Finally, radicals confront a cluster of issues about how to build and maintain social movements.
Almost all movements for social change maintain an ideal of a profoundly transformed society. Almost all of them, too, operate in the here-and-now, working for immediate gains-winning higher wages, enacting favorable legislation, ending unjust policies. They have found themselves confronting the relationship between short-term goals and their broader hopes for social transformation. Did radical labor movements advance or betray their aspirations for the overthrow of the capitalist system by fighting for wage increases or shorter hours? (See Chapters Five and Seven) Were the legal reforms contemplated by the participants at the Seneca Falls Convention a worthwhile first step on the road to the full equality they sought? (See Chapter Three) Did AIDS activists' fury and confrontational style alienate others and prevent them from winning tangible improvements in the treatment of people with the disease? Or did their unrelenting, "in-your-face" approach jolt their audiences into re-examining their biases and fears about homosexuality and AIDS? (See Chapter Ten) Whether consciously or not, almost all movements for social change have had to make choices about the ethics and politics of compromise and intransigence, between half a loaf now and their dreams of their full portion in the future.
Another issue American radicals have often confronted is their relationship to electoral democracy. By early in the nineteenth century, the vast majority of white adult men had won the right to vote; radicals and others fought battles to extend the franchise to white women and people of color for well over a century thereafter. Throughout most of that century, campaigns, parties and elections absorbed the interest and energies of untold millions of Americans-predominantly white male Americans who could vote, to be sure. Yet American radicals have seldom been comfortable with electoral politics. In part, the objection has been philosophical. Many have shared Henry David Thoreau's distrust: "All voting," he wrote, "is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions." Numerical majorities could not be trusted on the great moral issues such as slavery. Thus Thoreau's adage, "Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one." Would a racist white majority eliminate racism? Would a cowed or complacent populace recognize the oppression all around them, even their own oppression, and vote to end it? America's foremost anarchist, Emma Goldman, herself radicalized by the Haymarket tragedy (See Chapter Five), wrote that "the majority represents a mass of cowards."
Although most American radicals have placed more faith in the underlying goodness of the masses, the structure of American politics has also cast doubt on electoral strategies. From the women at Seneca Falls through the African-American Communists in the Depression-era South, lacking the effective right to vote meant that any success at the ballot box would have to come from others' votes. (See Chapters Three and Eight) Even the male workers attracted to the Industrial Workers of the World were frequently non-citizen immigrants or unable to meet state residency requirements and therefore effectively denied the right to vote. No wonder the Wobblies scorned party politics as a capitalist trick. (See Chapter Seven) The two-party system, dominant throughout most of the last two centuries, has discouraged voters from "wasting" their ballots on independent or minor-party candidates and has induced radicals to give their votes to "lesser evil" moderates. The dominance of big money in campaigns and its ability to wield potent influence in legislation and administration may be more blatant now but was no less real a century ago. If, as Thoreau stated, voting is like gaming, the game seems stacked against radical movements. However (and this is the heart of the radical dilemma) often electoral politics appeared to be "the only game in town," worth fighting to get into and playing with fervor once inside. The dilemma remains unresolved.
Working through the legal, socially-approved means of electoral politics has been problematic for American radicals. What role, then, has violence played in movements for social change? In the first place, we need to emphasize that American radicals have more often been the victims of violence than its perpetrators. However we judge the wisdom or morality of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry (See Chapter Four), his attempt to overthrow slavery by violent means and all the other violent revolts against slavery combined are negligible compared to the centuries of institutionalized violence inherent in the enslavement of African-Americans. The chapters on Haymarket, the suppression of Populism in Grimes County, Texas, the Lawrence textile workers, and African-American radicals in the 1930s all indicate that repressive violence is (to borrow the phrase of 1960s Black Power advocate H. Rap Brown) "as American as cherry pie." (See Chapters Five through Eight)
Nevertheless, radical responses to the threat and reality of repression have sometimes themselves been violent. (Definitions are tricky here. Are attacks on property rather than persons violent? Are threats, harassment and humiliation, as opposed to physical assault, to be labeled violent?) John Brown's raid in 1859 punctuated a decade in which slavery's opponents lost faith in the strategy of abolition through "moral suasion" or conventional politics alone. (See Chapter Four) Chicago's anarchists in the 1880s talked about violence far more than they engaged in it, but they were hardly pacifists. (See Chapter Five) They were convinced that violent means would be needed for revolution. The Industrial Workers of the World seldom followed through on their threats of sabotage but they also believed that the ruling class would not yield to peaceful protest alone. (See Chapter Seven) American radicals have generally been aware that the prospects for violent overthrow of the existing order were quite dismal. Small groups of militants could hardly hope to take on an increasingly powerful military and police apparatus. Moreover, radical violence might provoke conservative backlash and alienate potential supporters.
Finally, it is clear that we cannot discuss violence merely in terms of its efficacy or futility in achieving radical goals. For some radical movements in the nation's past, violence has been something beyond simply a tool for achieving political goals. The food rioters during the American Revolution employed force to symbolize their beliefs in community and mutual obligations and to punish those who violated those ideals. (See Chapter Two) Suffering and martyrdom as the victims of repressive violence, as in the case of John Brown or the Haymarket anarchists, could be a way of building emotional solidarity and commitment among those who carried on the fight. (See Chapters Four and Five)
In an influential study of the 1960s New Left, Wini Breines sets forth the concept of prefigurative politics. Suspicious of structure and conventional organizational forms, the New Left's prefigurative politics aimed to "create and sustain within the live practice of the movement, relationships and political forms that 'prefigured' and embodied the desired society." Breines contrasts prefigurative politics with a strategic politics of organization building to "achieve major structural changes in the political, economic and social orders."(2) Chapter 9 on the origins of the New Left at the University of Texas indicates that the emerging movement would have difficulty balancing the deeply felt spiritual and psychological impulses toward community with its aspirations for effectiveness in the "real world." The tension between a prefigurative and a strategic politics was perhaps most visible in the New Left, but others faced the same dilemma. For example, abolitionists yearned for the company of those who shared their moral principles when white society seemed oblivious to the sinfulness of human bondage. At the same time, they had to worry about how best to craft a movement capable of influencing the nation's policy toward slavery.
A related question: Can social movements thrive without formal leadership and internal hierarchies? Conversely, at what point does a division between leaders and followers contradict professed goals of equality? People, it seems, join radical movements not only to achieve changes in society but also for the satisfactions of working with like-minded souls who share their values and aspirations. Organizations that failed to recognize and nurture these emotional bonds weakened their members' allegiance. Those which concentrated on internal cohesion might turn out to be ill-equipped to achieve their broader goals of social change.
To outline the persistent dilemmas of American radicalism is not to resolve them or to pass historical judgment on how radicals should have responded. Context always matters. Party politics, say, may be effective sometimes and futile at others. In some cases reforms can set the stage for more fundamental changes whereas at other junctures they may deflect dissent and stifle the energy of radical social movements. Yet, the same kinds of questions recur, even though the answers have always depended on time, place and circumstances.
IV. The Significance of American Radicalism in American History
The history of American radicalism is full of dramatic stories and vivid personalities. This can be reason enough to study it. But some would contend that radical movements and individuals are fringe elements of little significance in understanding the broader dimensions of American history. They point out that radicals throughout American history have consistently failed to gain majority support, have found themselves marginalized, and have sometimes indeed deserved the scorn and ostracism they encountered. Some historians celebrate radical weakness. For them, the nation's success, its expansive prosperity and political freedoms, have made radicalism superfluous at best. The distinguished historian Daniel Boorstin claimed approvingly, "Here the number of people who do not accept the predominant values of our society is negligible."(3) Others have contended the weakness of American radicalism is the result less of national success than of America's intellectual impoverishment. In this interpretation, Americans, trapped by their own optimistic, individualistic assumptions about their society, have been unable to think imaginatively about alternatives to the "American way of life."(4) These "consensus" interpretations of the American past, highly influential in the decades immediately following World War II, made little room for a radical tradition in American history.
Admittedly, the history of American radicalism demands a capacity for irony and an understanding of futility. Left-wing movements have often fragmented in absurdly hair-splitting internal debates while their opponents have stayed focused on maintaining power and wealth. Radical demands have often transmuted into social change that strengthened established interests and power relationships. The women and men who gathered at Seneca Falls in 1848 and demanded women's suffrage as an emblem of equal rights for all could live to see a suffrage movement that all too frequently called for votes for women as a counterbalance to the "dangers" posed by black and immigrant male voters. (See Chapter Three) Southern Populists who wanted a coalition of poor whites and African-Americans based on their common exploitation within a few years could see (and in some cases take part in) Jim Crow's clampdown and substantial political disenfranchisement of poor whites as well as blacks. (See Chapter Six) Marxists worked to build industrial unions in the 1930s which brought their members not to the barricades but to suburban ranch homes and shopping malls in the fifties. Conservatives of the 1980s and 1990s turned the New Left's suspicion of oppressive government into a call for dismantling the welfare state. The sixties' radical slogan "Power to the People" was an ancestor, however distant, of the conservative call for "empowerment." If we direct our attention to these transformations, we might even conclude that the main impact of radical movements has turned out to be buttressing the status quo.
Yet consideration of the variety of radical movements in this volume should dispel the notion that American radicalism is a mere sideshow on the fringes of the nation's history. Movements of those who suffered exploitation and discrimination, and of others who sympathized with them, wrought major changes in American society-though, as Karl Marx noted in another context, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please." (Women, too, we might add, as Chapters One, Three and Seven in particular indicate.) Radicals' impact did not always match their intent, but they did affect the course of American history. Beyond this, American radicals deserve our attention and at least a degree of respect for their ideas and their ideals. We can, sometimes at least, hear (borrowing Abraham Lincoln's phrase) "our better angels" speaking to us in the words of the dissenters, protesters and revolutionaries on the American past.
Radicals at times in American history have been forerunners, pressing demands treated as outlandish or subversive at the time but eventually accepted as practical and just. Politicians like Abraham Lincoln were appalled at John Brown's anti-slavery raid on Harper's Ferry (See Chapter Four). A year and a half later Lincoln was Commander-in-Chief in the effort to subdue the Confederacy. Military victory, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 brought about the end to bondage that Brown and others had died for. The eight-hour day movement which mobilized hundreds of thousands of workers in 1886 set the scene for the Haymarket incident and repression of radical labor, but in the longer run corporate and public policies recognized workers' demands for shorter hours. (See Chapter Five) Mainstream politicians ridiculed the Populists' 1892 Omaha Platform, but in the twentieth century much of their program came to fruition in popular legislation. (See Chapter Six) The Civil Rights movement against segregation and legalized discrimination in the 1950s and 1960s encountered fierce resistance, but its demands for equal rights became law, its principles became rhetorical commonplaces among liberals and even conservatives, and its leaders-at least those no longer alive to disturb the establishment's peace-celebrated as national heroes.
Yet the role of path breaker has usually been bittersweet. The price of eventual victories has been high, and the triumphs have often been tinged with defeat. Those who fought for independence from Great Britain in a revolutionary war in order to escape old world corruptions and challenge concentrated power wondered about their accomplishment as the new nation moved toward competitive individualism rather than a republic of virtuous citizens upholdinig the common good. (See Chapter Two) Anti-slavery demands for immediate abolition helped launch a struggle that won a sort of freedom very different and very much less complete than they had envisaged. (See Chapter Four) When a reporter asked the Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas if Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal had carried out the Socialists' program, he replied, "Roosevelt did not carry out the Socialist platform, unless he carried it out on a stretcher."(5)
If, as observers since Alexis de Tocqueville have observed, America has been a nation of acquisitive individualists, it has been the fate of American radicals to offer a counter-tradition. Richard Hofstadter half a century ago said that the nation had been a democracy, but a "democracy in cupidity rather than a democracy of fraternity."(6) Protesters, however, contended that there were American ideals higher than private gain. In the Revolutionary era, Americans widely believed that a self-governing nation (a republic) could not survive without "civic virtue," which demanded a sense of community, solidarity and self-sacrifice. Radical movements from independence through the nineteenth century drew upon republican strains of common good and equality.
Often, nineteenth-century radicals associated republican virtues with a "producer class," those whose efforts produced the goods that people needed in life. Threatening these values and hence the survival of a self-governing republic were parasites-bankers, lawyers, brokers and other middlemen who profited from others' productive labor. Producer-class radicalism saw the growing gaps in wealth and power in American life as violations of the Declaration of Independence's promise of equal, natural rights. Unlike Marxists, who believed that the fundamental source of oppression was the class divide between property owners and propertyless workers, producer-class radicals generally accepted the institution of private property as long as it was widely and equitably distributed. Honest labor earned property, and this property, in turn, would preserve the independence and virtue of a republic of workers, small businessmen and farmers.
Although many nineteenth-century radicals adopted the metaphor of an equal start in the race of life, they consistently held that life was not simply a scramble for material riches. "Man over money" was a Populist catch-phrase that encapsulated much of this sentiment. In the twentieth century, as noted above, the emphasis shifted from equality of opportunity to equality of condition or results. But twentieth-century radicals also expressed an idealism that criticized the materialistic society they perceived and sacrificed personal interests for their vision of the common good. Even Marxists who generally avoided the language of ethical judgment and instead tried to analyze social change through the tenets of "scientific socialism" displayed a striking willingness to risk their lives, their fortunes and their honor for the causes they believed in. (See Chapters Eight and Nine) The immigrant women workers who went out on strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912 (See Chapter Seven) carried banners that read "We want Bread and Roses." The African-American Communists in the South during the Great Depression often linked their cause to the values of an uncorrupted Christianity. (See Chapter Eight)
Radicals in the twentieth century (especially those within the Marxist orbit) also reminded their fellow Americans of the significance of social classes in a society which often seemed willfully determined to deny that classes existed. Contending against business unionism, consumerism, a rhetoric of equality and classlessness from the political mainstream, and the homogenizing effects of popular culture, radicals have usually been the ones to stress that the nation has been divided. Their appeals for the unity of the working class may have been simplistic, unrealistic or unheard, but when attention to social class divisions is absent from the nation's agenda, political debate is thereby impoverished.
Nevertheless, class divisions often intersected with other fissures in American society, notably racial oppression. Racism has been the Achilles' heel of American radicalism. Racism in white America in general has curtailed the appeal of radical movements. Racism among movement participants has divided groups and transformed demands for equality into calls for preserving whites' privileges. Ethnic divisions among European-Americans have also hindered movements for change. Explicit or implicit in almost all of the articles in this collection are accounts of ethnic and racial tensions. Admittedly, as in the case of the strikers in Lawrence whose ethnic backgrounds helped motivate their militancy, ethnicity could be a resource for radical movement building. (See Chapter Seven) However, we will also read (See Chapter Four) of the uneasy sense among African-Americans that John Brown had substituted his will for their self-activity in planning and executing his raid on Harper's Ferry. The egalitarian and democratic sentiments of the Seneca Falls Declaration (See Chapter Three) came to coexist with a strain in the movement for women's suffrage that justified it to counteract the political influence of African-American and recently-arrived immigrant men. Chapter Six provides a case study of literally murderous racism at the turn of the twentieth century destroying a coalition of white and black farmers in the rural South. African-Americans in South during the Great Depression (See Chapter Eight) faced the same kind of racism; the Communist Party was the only predominantly white social movement in the U.S. at the time dedicated to full racial equality. White students in the early 1960s whose discontent blossomed into a "New Left" (See Chapter Nine) found inspiration and gained experience in the movement for black civil rights and integration. In the mid-sixties, with the shift toward African-American nationalism and the rise of Black Power, interracial movements seemed both less possible and less desirable. The white student left by the late sixties seldom found effective ways to work in conjunction with African-Americans or other people of color. New Social Movements in recent decades such as environmentalism, feminism and gay and lesbian liberation have also been challenged to deal with racism within their own ranks. (See Chapter Ten) Meanwhile, since the 1960s, as radicals garnered headlines and television news footage, conservatives, taking advantage of a backlash with a substantial racial component, consolidated political power. We cannot predict with any certainty whether racism will continue to thwart aspirations for change, but we can be sure that overcoming racism, both within social movements and in the society at large, is a great challenge facing American radicals.
Those upholding the established order in the United States have frequently described radicals as un-American. They have portrayed dissent as alien and even subversive. Granted, there is some basis for these accusations. Documents in recently-opened Soviet era archives and newly-declassified decoded cables demonstrate, for instance, that a handful of American Communists were involved in Soviet espionage in the 1930s and 1940s, and that the party continued to take financial assistance from Moscow through the 1980s.(7) In a less sinister sense, American radicals might be called un-American when they identify with radical movements in other nations. Tom Paine, the radical pamphleteer of the American Revolution, was an intense American nationalist, but he also viewed himself as a citizen of the world and joined radical movements in England and France. Immigrants with strong sentiments about their native lands were often at the forefront of radical causes in this country. From sympathizers with the French Revolution in the 1790s to anti-apartheid activists in the 1980s, solidarity across national boundaries has been an aspect of the radical tradition. Much of American radicalism, then, has been internationalist.
Yet it is equally important to insist that our radical tradition is thoroughly and distinctively American. Radicals reflected the values of the surrounding society even as they criticized them. American radicals drew inspiration, not just opportunistic advantage, from the egalitarian rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence. (See Chapter Three) Garrisonian abolitionists exalted the individual conscience as much as the most unbridled Transcendentalists and the individual will as much as the most determined frontiersmen. When the Communist Party in the late 1930s adopted the slogan "Communism is twentieth-century Americanism," their foes claimed it was phony, but party members themselves believed they were taking the best in the American tradition to its historically-determined outcome. The students in Austin, Texas who studied European theologians to find a "breakthrough to new life" also drew upon their own middle-American Protestant upbringing. (See Chapter Nine) The 1960s counter-cultural motto "Do your own thing" was not far removed, as Thomas Frank has recently contended, from the advertising slogans of rebellion and non-conformity through consumption.(8)
Beyond this, radicals in this country had to contend with American realities. They grappled with fundamental issues in this society. For instance, the centrality of slavery, racism and discrimination could not be ignored. Sometimes American Marxists in the early twentieth century lapsed into formulaic statements that capitalism alone caused the "race problem" and that socialism alone was necessary to end it, but the Communist Party threw itself into the struggle against specifically racial oppression. (See Chapter Eight) The women's movement in the late 1960s and 1970s frequently asserted the unity of all women in the face of common oppression, but, hearing the insistent voice of women of color, now contemplates the significance of difference among women. Another example of American radicalism's encounter with basic phenomena of the culture: American religiosity permeates much of the history of American radicalism. Evangelical Protestantism and the second Great Awakening are inseparable from the great antebellum movements for social change. Nor did this relationship disappear in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era: evangelical themes infused the Knights of Labor, the Farmers' Alliances and People's Party, and even the I.W.W. In the twentieth century, self-proclaimed atheist Marxists have drawn, consciously or otherwise, on the prophetic strains in the Jewish tradition. And in recent decades radical Catholics have been prominent in movements for peace and social justice.
Therefore, both terms in the phrase "American radicalism" bear our attention. The radical tradition has also been an American tradition. The history of American radicalism presents an array of colorful, controversial personalities and dramatic scenes. There is much to be gained from studying its strategies and styles, even if you find yourself at odds with its values or angered by its tactics. At the same time, we hope this reader will allow you to use American radicalism as a window on broader issues. Interpretations of American history which read radical traditions out of the story miss important dimensions of our past. To comprehend America, we must also come to grips with the radical dimensions of American history. The articles and documents in this reader are selected to further that understanding.
1. Of course the subjects included in this reader do not encompass all of American radicalism. The American radical tradition is-as this introduction hopes to demonstrate-broad and diverse.
2. Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left 1962-1968: The Great Refusal (Second ed., New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), pp.6-7.
3. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (paperback ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p.138.
4. Louis B. Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (paperback ed., New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955) is probably the best-known example of this interpretation.
5. Quoted in W.A. Swanberg, Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986), p.204.
6. Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (paperback ed., New York: Vintage Books, 1954), p. viii.
7. Evidence of espionage, and the involvement of some American Communists, can be found in John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999) and Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Fridrik Igorevich Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).
8. Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).