Concluding comments
Genovese, Eugene D.
Confessions? Apologies? Nothing could be further from my mind. It has never occurred to me to apologize to anyone for the content of my life, which I would have judged on its balance of good...
...In the last few years I have published some harsh critiques of the behavior of the left on our campuses and have been astonished by the extent of the private encouragement and support I have received from both old and new leftists, who, alas, continue their public silence...
...That was the theme of my essay "On Antonio Gramsci," which first appeared in Studies on the Left and became the centerpiece for my book In Red and Black...
...Do we not need to reexamine those meanings...
...Admit it: this time I got your attention...
...Cohen writes that his preferred portion of the left "refused to call socialist anything not truly democratic...
...388 • DISSENT...
...Cohen wonders where I have stood on certain questions...
...I share his concern that any such feint is likely to end with the whitewashing of the crimes and injustices suffered especially by black people today...
...To rebuild a credible left we shall have to reexamine our understanding of "democracy," "equality," "social justice" and other code words...
...Has she not supported the disgraceful attempts to silence contrary voices...
...These matters bear heavily on contemporary concerns...
...Well, where does Foner stand now...
...For secularists as well as Christians need to sort out carefully the relation between philosophical ideals and political performance in order to determine the extent to which the one has followed inexorably from the other...
...So pace Mitchell Cohen and Sean Wilentz...
...And business includes the use of flagrant mendacity in political struggles...
...For that matter, he may wish to consult my defense of revolutionary violence in From Rebellion to Revolution...
...But is it not true that the opening of our associations to, say, women has meant their opening to women who accept the radical political line or remain silent...
...Instead of debating the current actions and political future of the left, let us debate Genovese: his authoritarian personality, his vile temper, his apostasy, his elitism...
...On these matters we do have some deep disagreements, but they may well turn out to be smaller than they seem, once we get down to a careful and comradely debate on the specifics...
...She, like Foner, willingly accepted me as editor in full knowledge of my politics, which I never hid from anyone...
...Could we then get back to business...
...In contrast, Foner led that successful effort to get the Organization of American Historians to condemn apartheid in South Africa...
...I do believe that socialism is finished 388 • DISSENT but am no more enamored of capitalism than I ever was...
...Yes, I know the history of atrocities committed by SUMMER • 1994 • 387 The Riposte Christians...
...Foner, as is his wont, refers to my ill-tempered polemic against Herbert Aptheker of thirty years ago without mentioning my subsequent essays on Aptheker and my assessment of the destructive features of our quarrels...
...I served on the editorial board of Science & Society in the late 1950s and was instrumental in opening its pages to Trotskyists, social democrats, and others...
...Have he or the other leaders of the OAH he mentions protested against Howard University's refusal to let David Brion 386 • DISSENT The Riposte Davis, a recent past president of the OAH, speak on campus...
...May we now put the autobiographies, confessions, and other sideshows to rest and reexamine critically the principles and practices of a left worthy of respect and support...
...Foner is dissembling shamelessly...
...I share Christine Stansell's respect for the healthy attitude displayed by people like Adam Michnik and only regret that I should have given any other impression...
...Suppose I plead guilty to all charges and confess to being a scoundrel...
...The gambit advanced by Foner and KesslerHarris is transparent...
...But I also argued that we must engage in practices that would prepare us for a socialist America that respected freedom and diversity...
...The technological and economic revolution through which we are living is creating vast problems that will, in all probability, be settled through one or another form of social corporatism...
...When I spoke of a measure of shared responsibility, I intended no equation...
...Never anticommunist at all, he refuses to acknowledge the burden of the urgent political question he was asked...
...Much depends on what means "personal...
...Cohen asks if the radicalism of the civil rights workers was not justified by the injustices they had to confront in a system that offered no redress...
...I was wrong...
...Please understand: I am not as much concerned with crimes of yesterday as with the crimes of the present and with the future of the American left...
...We will fail if we do not reexamine our longstanding premises...
...but where outside the Christian West did concepts of personal freedom and of limits to state authority arise and flourish...
...I have suggested that we atheists have a good deal to learn from Christian ethics and ought to engage Cornel West and others in a respectful debate...
...I first met Irving Howe at that time, having sought him out to plead that he and his comrades join us in an effort to overcome old hostilities and make a new beginning...
...Taken with other items, they provide the rudiments of my own answer to The Question...
...He will find the record clear...
...I have always insisted that we of the left may claim for ourselves no rights that we are not prepared to grant others and have defended the academic freedom of conservatives as well as leftists...
...Do not office and patronage depend on litmus tests for adherence to, or silence about, the politicization of the organizations...
...If I have slighted the record of the social democrats, I shall repent and reform...
...Repeatedly, I have called upon the left to take a principled stand on such issues, only to be greeted by silence...
...I would ask that he reflect further on the "stupid resolution" to which he refers...
...Bellush deems [me] insufficiently anti-Communist" (New York Times Book Review, Jan...
...Socialism, like capitalism, is a socioeconomic system, and I see no theoretical or historical reason to believe that socialism must be democratic...
...I thought "a little agnosticism" was precisely what I was calling for when I suggested that we reexamine our own first principles and give a respectful hearing to those of others...
...Yes, it was justified...
...Will you now ask that it be rescinded...
...Meanwhile, permit me to point out that I have been trying to raise these questions on the left for more than a quarter century, only to have them ignored or to find myself pilloried...
...Did he, in fact, at any point in his career publicly criticize the communist movement or any part of the left for its atrocities...
...Conservatives especially like to play that game, which permits them to bear with equanimity the misery of others, and I have long insisted that some such tendency seriously undermines the claims of Burkeanism...
...And, as he should know, as president of the OAH, I fought hard for that reformation, only to be denounced by the radical feminists for allegedly opposing what I in fact vigorously and successfully supported...
...The left will have to clean up its act if it wishes to survive or deserve to survive...
...I have here attacked "radical egalitarianism," as I have for decades...
...For without a firm measure of democracy and personal freedom the corporatism we are likely to get would be a nightmare...
...Wilborne Washburne resolutely (and vainly) attempted to expose the hypocrisy by offering an amendment to condemn "necklacing...
...Cohen charges me with being "en route from one belief system to another when a little agnosticism might be in order...
...Nothing could be further from my mind...
...Insufficiently" anticommunist...
...Thus, I expected Eric Foner and Alice Kessler-Harris to do everything in their power to obfuscate the issues, for they rank among the leaders of the thinly disguised totalitarianism in which the American left wallows...
...Thus, Robin Kelley soberly asks if I propose a hierarchy of body count and punishment...
...What any of this tells us about "radical egalitarianism" escapes me...
...Kelley notes that "while much of his critique should not be dismissed," the Organization of American Historians had long excluded Jews, women, and people of color, who now have a platform from which to speak...
...And here I fear that I sorely and understandably irritated Mitchell Cohen by seeming to lump social democrats and liberals with Stalinists...
...Do her political actions differ from those of frank totalitarians...
...But what do "socialism" and "democracy" mean...
...Does he now publicly criticize the gross violations of academic freedom and common decency that are being committed on our campuses...
...Subsequently, I published a number of political pieces, from The Future of Freedom in an International Civil War to "Critical Legal Studies as Radical Politics and Ideology" (Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, 1991) and The Southern Tradition (in press...
...Well, why not...
...Fortunately, honest critics are facing the immediate issues...
...Alice Kessler-Harris worked with me on Marxist Perspectives, which had close relations with several European Communist parties...
...Did he ever once defend conservatives whose academic freedom was being violated...
...I wish he would identify that other belief system...
...Are first-rate women scholars like Gertrude Him melfarb, to say nothing of feminists who openly criticize the radicals, tolerated...
...Thus I can appreciate Sean Wilentz's concern about the implications of my social corporatism, but I suspect that he and I would not be far apart about the kind of corporatism we want...
...It has never occurred to me to apologize to anyone for the content of my life, which I would have judged on its balance of good and evil...
...But let us talk about the present: would her Women's Studies Program hire—or even encourage its students to read the work of—scholars with conservative, antifeminist, or dissident-feminist views...
...We knew each other well, worked together, and never disagreed on the communist movement or the Soviet Union or the principal issues of world politics...
...His proSovietism matched my own year by year...
...He accuses me of personal attacks...
...Kelley ends, magnificently, by asking us all to take stock of our campus behavior today...
...Whatever my sins, I tried to fight against the importation of Stalinist methods into our own movement and therefore opposed attempts to impose our partisan will on our colleagues in the historical associations...
...Not once during the thirty years or so of our association did she challenge my stance on communism, the Soviet Union, or international affairs...
...Will you demand that the OAH openly evaluate the circumstances that led to its passage and to the transformation of the OAH into a partisan political organization...
...I am concerned with a reexamination of concepts and values shared by the left as a whole...
...10, 1993...
...I supported the communist movement and the Soviet Union because I was convinced of the moral as well as material superiority of socialism over capitalism—convinced that the socialist countries could and would reform themselves and end their political brutality while preserving socialism itself...
...Where and when have I invoked the personal filth that his political faction routinely pours over me and especially my wife...
...Is it not clear that all such political resolutions and related actions have had less to do with the issues supposedly at hand than with making the associations inhospitable to those with different political views...
...If she was an anticommunist during all those years, when, where, and how did she speak as such...
...Yes, I know...
...Yet when challenged by Bernard Bellush to clarify his political position, Foner replied, "Evidently, Mr...
...When I write on religion I always carefully identify myself as an atheist...
Vol. 41 • July 1994 • No. 3
