Hendrik Hertzberg: Elena Kagan’s Not-So-Final Conflict
[Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker, where he frequently writes the opening Comment in The Talk of the Town.]
If the undergraduate is mother to the Justice as the child is father to the man, then I’m ready to believe that Elena Kagan, Princeton ’81, just might grow up to be a terrific Justice of the Supreme Court. I’ve now had the pleasure of reading the senior thesis Ms. Kagan wrote at Princeton, under the kindly, avuncular eye of the master American historian Sean Wilentz.
“To The Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933” would be an impressive enough piece of work if its author had been, say, a thirtyish assistant professor publishing in an academic history journal. Coming from a twenty-year-old college kid, it’s a truly remarkable accomplishment, quite out of the ordinary. Either that, or the college thesis-writing standards of the early nineteen-eighties were dramatically higher than I had assumed.
“To The Final Conflict” is a doorstopper of a college paper—a hundred and thirty double-spaced typewritten pages, exclusive of footnotes (unfortunately not included in the pdf facsimile). That’s around twenty thousand well-chosen words, written in a straightforward, deceptively simple style, with scarcely an infelicitous sentence or a detour into academic jargon from beginning to end. As best as can be inferred in the absence of the footnotes, the author draws much of her material from primary sources, especially the collections of the Tamiment Institute, the leading repository of documents relating to the history of New York’s trade unions and left-wing political organizations. Her synthesis of her discoveries shows a startlingly high level of narrative and analytic skill. I might quibble with some of her emphases, but her judgments are morally and politically sophisticated—in a word, judicious.
The title is a nice dash of vinegar. The allusion is to the soaring crescendo of “The Internationale,” but the conflict she’s writing about is not between anything so grand as capitalism and socialism. It’s between arm-waving socialists and other arm-waving socialists. It’s a rumble on the mean streets of the Lower East Side, pitting the militant or “revolutionary” wing of the New York Socialist Party against the moderate or “constructivist” wing—a conflict that proved decisive in dashing the Party’s hopes of becoming a serious contender for political power. Or so she argues: that’s her thesis.
With a bit of endearingly (to my eye) blithe undergraduate arrogance, she begins by proclaiming that that the elders who came to the subject before she did got it all wrong. Daniel Bell—the Daniel Bell—got it wrong. (“Bell’s thesis simply will not stand up under close scrutiny.”) Ira Kipness got it wrong. (“Ira Kipness escapes Bell’s pitfall only to blunder into one of his own making.”) James Weinstein got it wrong. (“Weinstein’s explanation is a superficial one.”)...
Read entire article at New Yorker
If the undergraduate is mother to the Justice as the child is father to the man, then I’m ready to believe that Elena Kagan, Princeton ’81, just might grow up to be a terrific Justice of the Supreme Court. I’ve now had the pleasure of reading the senior thesis Ms. Kagan wrote at Princeton, under the kindly, avuncular eye of the master American historian Sean Wilentz.
“To The Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933” would be an impressive enough piece of work if its author had been, say, a thirtyish assistant professor publishing in an academic history journal. Coming from a twenty-year-old college kid, it’s a truly remarkable accomplishment, quite out of the ordinary. Either that, or the college thesis-writing standards of the early nineteen-eighties were dramatically higher than I had assumed.
“To The Final Conflict” is a doorstopper of a college paper—a hundred and thirty double-spaced typewritten pages, exclusive of footnotes (unfortunately not included in the pdf facsimile). That’s around twenty thousand well-chosen words, written in a straightforward, deceptively simple style, with scarcely an infelicitous sentence or a detour into academic jargon from beginning to end. As best as can be inferred in the absence of the footnotes, the author draws much of her material from primary sources, especially the collections of the Tamiment Institute, the leading repository of documents relating to the history of New York’s trade unions and left-wing political organizations. Her synthesis of her discoveries shows a startlingly high level of narrative and analytic skill. I might quibble with some of her emphases, but her judgments are morally and politically sophisticated—in a word, judicious.
The title is a nice dash of vinegar. The allusion is to the soaring crescendo of “The Internationale,” but the conflict she’s writing about is not between anything so grand as capitalism and socialism. It’s between arm-waving socialists and other arm-waving socialists. It’s a rumble on the mean streets of the Lower East Side, pitting the militant or “revolutionary” wing of the New York Socialist Party against the moderate or “constructivist” wing—a conflict that proved decisive in dashing the Party’s hopes of becoming a serious contender for political power. Or so she argues: that’s her thesis.
With a bit of endearingly (to my eye) blithe undergraduate arrogance, she begins by proclaiming that that the elders who came to the subject before she did got it all wrong. Daniel Bell—the Daniel Bell—got it wrong. (“Bell’s thesis simply will not stand up under close scrutiny.”) Ira Kipness got it wrong. (“Ira Kipness escapes Bell’s pitfall only to blunder into one of his own making.”) James Weinstein got it wrong. (“Weinstein’s explanation is a superficial one.”)...