John Summers: What Politics Does to History
[John Summers is visiting scholar in history at Boston College.]
*The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945–1970
by Carl Mirra
Before Staughton Lynd vanished from intellectual society, he was one of the country’s most recognizable and controversial academics. “I was to be an American Lenin and a tenured professor at an Ivy League university,” he has recalled of the hopes he inherited from his famous parents, Robert and Helen Lynd. By 1970, the year Carl Mirra concludes his new biography, Lynd represented a new model of scholarly activism. But Mirra, a former U.S. Marine and conscientious objector, identifies with his subject so completely that the biography is best read as a collaboration. And this absence of critical distance confirms the old suspicion that Lynd’s scholarly activism abolished distinctions worth preserving. Lynd was never a historian who selects significant problems for study, but one who knows most of the answers in advance.
The current revival features a new collection of Lynd’s political writings, a memoir, Stepping Stones (written with his wife, Alice), and new editions of Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution, and Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, books that made his reputation. Like Progressive historian Charles Beard, Lynd accused the founders of staging a counter-revolution that betrayed the democratic potential of the early republic. Yet Lynd went “Beyond Beard,” reviving the abolitionist interpretation of the Constitution and moving slavery from the margins to the center of debates over the founding. The righteous indignation he applied to these difficult questions helped initiate the long fashion for sneering at dead white men of ideas, and turned history from a means of understanding to a record of heroes and villains....
Lynd’s case established the tacit boundaries for politically committed scholarship. Within those boundaries, a movement for radical history flourished, with many of his younger colleagues gaining tenured university positions on the strength of monographs such as William Appleman Williams’s The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, Gabriel Kolko’s The Triumph of Conservatism, and Aileen Kraditor’s The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement. Yet some of Lynd’s radical peers balked at the anti-intellectual strain he represented. The University of Iowa’s Christopher Lasch conducted a teach-in with him, and defended him after Chicago State rescinded its employment offer. Lasch collected 1,500 signatures, including those of Martin Luther King Jr. and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., for a petition that called Lynd’s case “a particularly flagrant invasion of academic freedom,” and “an indication that a new McCarthyism may emerge from the tensions of the Vietnamese war.”
But the friendship of Lasch and Lynd was coming apart over the movement’s double-standards. “To you the radical tradition is sacred and must not be analyzed, except to murmur approvingly,” Lasch complained in a 1964 letter to Lynd. Another letter from that year shows Lasch bridling at his “glorification” of radicals, which “strikes me as leaving us as historians absolutely nowhere.” Lasch thought he detected in Lynd’s stridency “the special blend of simple-minded sentimentality and real ruthlessness…that is emerging as the chief characteristic of the ‘new’ Left.”
Read entire article at New Republic
*The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945–1970
by Carl Mirra
Before Staughton Lynd vanished from intellectual society, he was one of the country’s most recognizable and controversial academics. “I was to be an American Lenin and a tenured professor at an Ivy League university,” he has recalled of the hopes he inherited from his famous parents, Robert and Helen Lynd. By 1970, the year Carl Mirra concludes his new biography, Lynd represented a new model of scholarly activism. But Mirra, a former U.S. Marine and conscientious objector, identifies with his subject so completely that the biography is best read as a collaboration. And this absence of critical distance confirms the old suspicion that Lynd’s scholarly activism abolished distinctions worth preserving. Lynd was never a historian who selects significant problems for study, but one who knows most of the answers in advance.
The current revival features a new collection of Lynd’s political writings, a memoir, Stepping Stones (written with his wife, Alice), and new editions of Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution, and Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, books that made his reputation. Like Progressive historian Charles Beard, Lynd accused the founders of staging a counter-revolution that betrayed the democratic potential of the early republic. Yet Lynd went “Beyond Beard,” reviving the abolitionist interpretation of the Constitution and moving slavery from the margins to the center of debates over the founding. The righteous indignation he applied to these difficult questions helped initiate the long fashion for sneering at dead white men of ideas, and turned history from a means of understanding to a record of heroes and villains....
Lynd’s case established the tacit boundaries for politically committed scholarship. Within those boundaries, a movement for radical history flourished, with many of his younger colleagues gaining tenured university positions on the strength of monographs such as William Appleman Williams’s The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, Gabriel Kolko’s The Triumph of Conservatism, and Aileen Kraditor’s The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement. Yet some of Lynd’s radical peers balked at the anti-intellectual strain he represented. The University of Iowa’s Christopher Lasch conducted a teach-in with him, and defended him after Chicago State rescinded its employment offer. Lasch collected 1,500 signatures, including those of Martin Luther King Jr. and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., for a petition that called Lynd’s case “a particularly flagrant invasion of academic freedom,” and “an indication that a new McCarthyism may emerge from the tensions of the Vietnamese war.”
But the friendship of Lasch and Lynd was coming apart over the movement’s double-standards. “To you the radical tradition is sacred and must not be analyzed, except to murmur approvingly,” Lasch complained in a 1964 letter to Lynd. Another letter from that year shows Lasch bridling at his “glorification” of radicals, which “strikes me as leaving us as historians absolutely nowhere.” Lasch thought he detected in Lynd’s stridency “the special blend of simple-minded sentimentality and real ruthlessness…that is emerging as the chief characteristic of the ‘new’ Left.”