Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History (PM Press) by Staughton Lynd & Andrej Grubacic

Author:Staughton Lynd & Andrej Grubacic [Lynd, Staughton]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: POL005000, POL042010
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2008-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

American Radical Historians

I THINK THAT you would agree with the assertion that despite the apparent widespread acceptance of “history from the bottom up,” an important part of American history is still written from above, even, interestingly, by fellow radical historians who have left the small matter of master narrative and interpretation to “indoor” or established historians. We still have to endure hagiographies of Founding Fathers or Funding Fathers (Great Union Leaders). But even when we read amazing works on the self-activity of the miners, or on the self-government of the pirates, we are still left with the feeling that the response from the Left was to write an ethnography of the poor. Valuable as this task is, we should not surrender the questions of interpretation to the “vertical” historians.

A young historian named Thomas Humphrey has written: “[We] have succeeded only in pressing the authors of the master narrative to alter their stories slightly, or to add another box for ‘the poor’ on the side of the page.” That is, the historical Establishment is happy to give us the franchise for chimney sweeps who get cancer, or textile workers who burn to death when the employer locks the door. We may talk to our heart’s content about—I am quoting David Brion Davis’ review of The Many-Headed Hydra—“romanticized pirates as well as prostitutes, religious zealots, bandits, highwaymen, and criminals of all sorts.” But we must leave the overall interpretation of what it all means to historians who celebrate society as it is.

No change in the historiography of the Revolution is more important than that which has ever so slowly recognized the centrality of slavery. Yet we have recently watched a cinematic version of the abolition of the British slave trade in which slave revolts in Haiti and Jamaica go almost unmentioned and abolition happens because of the conscience-stricken efforts of aristocrat William Wilberforce. As Peter Linebaugh has said, it is an “Amazing Disgrace.” Thankfully, others such as Adam Hochschild, Marcus Rediker in his history of the slave ship, and Simon Schama’s brilliant Rough Crossings, have rediscovered the slave as protagonist and tragic hero.

When my attention as an historian shifted from the adoption of the Constitution to the formation of the CIO, I was taken aback to find that in the one field as in the other the major works appearing were biographies of Founding Fathers. The underlying mindset appears to be that the decline of the labor movement in the United States can only be set right again from above. In 1995, when John Sweeney became President of the AFL-CIO, the biographers of Sidney Hillman and Walter Reuther circulated an open letter to Sweeney. The letter hailed his elevation as “the most heartening development in our nation’s political life since the heyday of the civil rights movement,” assessed his election as “promis[ing] to once again make the house of labor a social movement around which we can rally,” and pledged “to play our part in helping realize the promise of October.” A

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