Jesse Lemisch: The Final Word on Radical History
Editor's Note: This letter was submitted to New Republic 7/20 but not published
[Jesse Lemisch is Professor Emeritus of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.]
As another historian of the Left, I have had my disagreements with Staughton Lynd about issues around scholarship and activism for more than forty years."Who Will Write a Left History of Art While We Are All Putting our Balls on the Line?" I inquired of Lynd in 1968 reprinted in Journal of American History, September 1989). But it would never occur to me to start a critical piece, as does John Summers ["What Politics Does to History," TNR, July 19], with the notion that Lynd"vanished from intellectual society," as if this were some willful act on Lynd's part. Having been rejected by fourteen colleges and universities in the Chicago area for frankly political reasons, as well as from Yale, he remade himself as a creative left lawyer and continues to function as an intellectual.
This is a story of resourcefulness, not of vanishing.
Lynd played an important role in breaking the iron hand of politically driven consensus historiography by suggesting in his Anti-Federalism in Dutchess County, New York that it was time to pay renewed attention to Carl Becker's thesis that the American Revolution was not only a war for home rule, but also a war over who should rule at home. His Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, reprinted by Cambridge University Press last year, forty years after its original publication, laid the intellectual foundations for later scholarship in early American history by showing that American radicalism derived not from the tepid English traditions which Bernard Bailyn mistook for radicalism (see Lemisch,"What Made our Revolution?" [review of Bailyn, Origins of American Politics], TNR, May 25, 1968) but rather from a more radical seventeenth-century past later illuminated by Christopher Hill in The World Turned Upside Down.
As for Lynd's activism, he will be remembered by history as a major American radical of the twentieth and twenty first centuries who has played and continues to play a leading role in civil rights, anti-war, prisoner rights and other causes. Summers, who has written about C. Wright Mills, should know that vanishing from"intellectual society" is often a badge of honor.
[Jesse Lemisch is Professor Emeritus of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.]
As another historian of the Left, I have had my disagreements with Staughton Lynd about issues around scholarship and activism for more than forty years."Who Will Write a Left History of Art While We Are All Putting our Balls on the Line?" I inquired of Lynd in 1968 reprinted in Journal of American History, September 1989). But it would never occur to me to start a critical piece, as does John Summers ["What Politics Does to History," TNR, July 19], with the notion that Lynd"vanished from intellectual society," as if this were some willful act on Lynd's part. Having been rejected by fourteen colleges and universities in the Chicago area for frankly political reasons, as well as from Yale, he remade himself as a creative left lawyer and continues to function as an intellectual.
This is a story of resourcefulness, not of vanishing.
Lynd played an important role in breaking the iron hand of politically driven consensus historiography by suggesting in his Anti-Federalism in Dutchess County, New York that it was time to pay renewed attention to Carl Becker's thesis that the American Revolution was not only a war for home rule, but also a war over who should rule at home. His Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, reprinted by Cambridge University Press last year, forty years after its original publication, laid the intellectual foundations for later scholarship in early American history by showing that American radicalism derived not from the tepid English traditions which Bernard Bailyn mistook for radicalism (see Lemisch,"What Made our Revolution?" [review of Bailyn, Origins of American Politics], TNR, May 25, 1968) but rather from a more radical seventeenth-century past later illuminated by Christopher Hill in The World Turned Upside Down.
As for Lynd's activism, he will be remembered by history as a major American radical of the twentieth and twenty first centuries who has played and continues to play a leading role in civil rights, anti-war, prisoner rights and other causes. Summers, who has written about C. Wright Mills, should know that vanishing from"intellectual society" is often a badge of honor.