Voices of Protest
Aaron, Daniel
Voices of Protest Radicalism in America, by Sidney Lens. Crowell. 372 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by Daniel Aaron Tt was a good idea of Sidney Lens to attempt a popular survey of American radicalism if...
...Granted, Lens concedes, that the radical's "ultimate dream" of an ideal society has never been even approximated, the struggle "to correct the balance between privilege and counterprivilege" has produced at least partial victories...
...Whatever we may think of Communist political foibles," he observes (and he makes quite clear what these "foibles" were), "individual members faced hardships, beatings, and the threat of jail with considerable courage.....It is doubtful whether American labor would have experienced so forceful a resurgence without them or other radicals...
...Will the New Left, he asks, play an effective part in American politics...
...In the second half of his book, Lens is on firmer ground...
...Since he lists no bibliography and eliminates footnotes, one can only guess from what sources he borrowed, but his interpretations of men and events smack of Gustavus Meyers, V. L. Parrington, Charles Beard, and writers of that vintage and political persuasion...
...He admirably surveys the socialist and trade union movements from the Civil War down through the Thirties and interpolates his account with some vivid portraits of reformers, labor leaders, radical theoreticians, and working class martyrs...
...For example, he describes Bacon's Rebellion as a revolt of the "rural tobacco growers" who "were being impoverished by cruel and discriminating officials" and speaks of Bacon as a precursor of Sam Adams and Patrick Henry...
...If he consulted recent monographic material on the Colonial period, he has not seen fit to make use of it...
...Roger Williams and Thomas Hooker, Nathaniel Bacon and Jacob Leisler, Sam Adams and Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson belong to his legion of "leftists," as do the early trade union leaders in ante-bellum America, Utopian socialists, land and currency reformers, and, of course, the Abolitionists...
...Lens provides a brief account of the rise of that still amorphous association of protest, but wisely refrains from predicting its future...
...Reviewed by Daniel Aaron Tt was a good idea of Sidney Lens to attempt a popular survey of American radicalism if only to remind the New Leftists that the radical movement is more than five years old...
...Particularly noteworthy in this section is his fair-minded treatment of the Communist Party...
...The first half of Radicalism in America summarizes American dissenting opinion from the first settlements through the 1870's...
...His stories are the old familiar ones, but he manages to pack a good deal of pertinent information into a small space...
...Members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Students for a Democratic Society have thus far displayed at best a tepid interest in their earlier counterparts, and although Lens's hurried glance at reformers, Utopians, visionaries, rebels, organizers, and revolutionaries will hardly cause a commotion among the New Radicals, his book is a lively reminder that heterodoxy and dissent have constantly operated as a "motor force" in American history...
...Lens's definition of "radicalism" is elastic enough to include anyone who was against anything or anybody...
...The most informed student of that episode, however, holds that Bacon had no interest in promoting political reform, took no part in framing the so-called "Bacon's Laws," and cannot be regarded as a forerunner of '76...
...Lens's comments on Roger Williams and Thomas Hooker, on the Constitutional Convention and the Anti-Federalists, or on what he calls the "untamed plutocrats" of the Gilded Age also resurrect some abandoned cliches and ignore a vast amount of recent scholarship...
...Taking a cue from C. Wright Mills, Lens argues that the new insurgency, unlike most of the former crusades, is less a response to economic injustice than it is to "racial discrimination, militarism, war, alienation...
...This briskly told section reads like a rehash of the old progressive histories...
...Can it cope with the ominous but intangible social problems of an affluent society...
...Radicalism in America concludes with the author's reflections on the radical movement during the last thirty years: the decline of the Communist Party and the emergence of the New Left...
...Its supporters and leaders are not found primarily in the working class "but among Negroes, students, radical pacifists, intellectuals, middle-class women...
Vol. 30 • August 1966 • No. 8
