American Dreamers

March 28, 2011
Feminists, labor militants, civil rights stalwarts, and socialists have captured Americaâs heartâthough rarely its votesâaccording to this perceptive history of the radical left. Kazin (The Populist Persuasion), editor of Dissent magazine, surveys visionaries, organizers, and rabble-rousers, including abolitionists and free-love communards of the 1830s, Gilded Age utopian novelists and temperance crusaders, feisty Wobblies and avant-garde bohemians, patriotic Popular Front Communists and â60s firebrands. From this tumult of movements and personalitiesâeveryone from John Brown to Naomi Klein, Dr. Seuss to Noam ChomskyâKazin discerns continuities: radicals, he contends, succeed by influencing liberals rather than winning power, and by championing individual freedom and self-fulfillment; they fail when they attack religion and nationalism, advocate economic leveling, or advance sectarian purity and Marxist dogmas. Kazinâs argument that the socialist economic program was always "stillborn" while the Leftâs cultural projectâsocial equality, identity politics, artistic freedom, sexual liberation, and antiauthoritarianismâhas triumphed is not new, and it lends the book a tone more of eulogy than of celebration; still this is a lively and lucid synthesis of a vital political tradition. Photos.

June 1, 2011

A spirited defense of the positive role played by left-wing radicals in shaping American society.

Beginning with an analysis of the anti-slavery movement of the 1820s, Kazin (History/Georgetown Univ.; A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan, 2006, etc.) suggests that the effectiveness of radical social protests should not be judged by their failure to achieve significant political power but by their ability to catalyze mass movements that affect mainstream politics. The author writes that reformers in the centers of power depend upon the existence of a radical movement from below. In his view, the actions of "radical social gospelers" such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Martin Luther King Jr. far outweighed the influence of socialists and communists. Kazin describes the International Workers of the World, founded in 1905, as "an organizer of beautiful losers." Their agitation for "One Big Union" that would include all working people and "run the economy for the benefit of all" inspired broad-based popular support but no lasting victories, at least in contrast to the more narrowly defined trade-union objectives of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, formed during the same period. Both, however, played a part in laying the groundwork for the emergence of the CIO in the 1930s, as well as other significant movements in the following decades.

A coherent, wide-ranging analysis of a century of political and social activism in America.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

July 1, 2011
The most enduring impact of the radical Left can be found not as much in American politics as in American culture, Kazin says. He traces leftist reform in movements from abolitionism to feminism, the labor movement, and socialism, looking at issues from racial and sexual equality to sexual pleasure outside of marriage as he documents the Left's influence on the American sense of altruism. He begins by examining the abolitionist movement and its effect on the later civil rights movement. Later, he focuses on labor issues and socialism, communism and the anti-Communist movement, and how the Old Left morphed into the New Left. Profiling major figures, he recounts the socialist sensibilities of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Horace Greeley. He makes no claim that this is a comprehensive examination of the Left in the U.S. but affords a fascinating inspection of the convergence of ideals of individual freedom and communal responsibilityideals often in conflict in American politicsand how that convergence has influenced American politics and culture for generations.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)