Lee Benson, Historian of the United States and Activist Academic, Dies at 90

Lee Benson died on February 10, 2012, from complications after a fall. At the age of 90, he was still doing what he did all his adult life, trying to fix the world. He always did it his way, and he never outlived his usefulness.

He had his formal education at Brooklyn College (BA, 1947), Columbia University (MA, 1948), and Cornell University (PhD, 1952). But he had his real education in World War II (as a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army, earning a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for valor, and leading a platoon in the liberation of Dachau), in the Communist Party (as a community organizer, before he was expelled for "right opportunism"), and in the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia (as a research associate and sometime lecturer, until Wayne State University took a chance on his political past and offered him a tenured teaching position in 1960). It was in the army and in the communities he struggled unavailingly to organize that he came to doubt Marxist doctrine on the primacy of class in social analysis. It was at the Bureau of Applied Social Research that he learned how to systematize his skepticism and his dawning appreciation of the power of cultural differences in American life.

In the half-dozen years between 1955 and 1961, Benson published three books that established him, barely out of graduate school and still in his 30s, as a formidable presence in the profession....