The Spirit of American History

The author, a senior in Kirkland House majoring in History, teaches a Soc Rel 149 Section on "Radical Interpretations in American History."

What might be the content of a "radical" interpretation of American history? Where might one begin? And how might one define the terms, American and radical? The questions are important to contemporary radicals and to American citizens in general, but the answers we have received so far have been fragmentary and contradictory.

On the one hand we have Marxist and Marx-influenced scholars, some good and some poor, who take materials apart in search of an organic historical pattern leading up to and including the generally accepted "American crisis" of our time. Among these are famous and controversial men such as William A. Williams, Barrington Moore Jr., Herbert Aptheker, and Staughton Lynd. As far as these four are concerned, the American polity has undergone two revolutions--1776 and 1861--two counter-revolutions--1789 and 1877--and subsequently, has pretty much raced along a path of increased industrialization, increased routinization, and increased, or at least not lessened, social inequity and cultural depravity.

On the other hand, radicals can look to contemporary moral thinkers of various hues--Herbert Marcuse, R. D. Laing, Albert Camus, Leroi Jones--who level their sights at the attitudes rather than the content of the American historical picture, and explode the necessity as well as the desirability of such American traits as self-advancement, money-mania, and social indifference. Their complaints, taken at the aesthetic and philosophical levels, reach us through a different tradition than the complaints of historians, but they are more powerful for that fact, and, indeed, for their stark prescience, seem to need none of their Hegelian or Sade-ian predecessors to be powerful.

Even so, moral and historical interpretations of the national experience require some point of intersection to reach us all, or even to reach some of us. Americans whatever there is in the "Organization Man" syndrome of modern sociology, do have different spiritual centers even if their everyday behavior seems tightly organized and compulsively conformist. The simple fact that most of us have genes and cultural traits acquired somewhere else than in America necessitates a fence-straddling approach to national identity. Norman Mailer, among others, has tried to speak to the American side of us, i.e., to the side that we have acquired since getting off the boat. Philip Roth, on the other hand, has attempted to bring us back to the boat while we sit, stagnant, in America and has superbly evoked our confusion about cultural identity.

Yet the fusion remains necessary, not only if Mailer or Roth would like to become the next "great American writer," but also because we all are in pursuit of roots and future at the same time. So the radical interpretation of history, whether in arts or in archives, must save us from solipsism at the same time as it delivers us from the social scientists.

And how, pray, might it do so?

Almost too simply, the answer comes out: community. We need to consider the American community in all its devious and marvelous turns through history. We need, more still, to feel, to experience that history, as if it were truly our own. Of course, few Americans are really Americans, in the sense that Frenchmen are French, or Englishmen English: we just haven't been here that long, most of us. Still, we are now Americans, troubled mostly by the problems of America; and to relate fully to those problems we need to relate fully to their history as problems, even if we cannot relate ourselves to the country's history as a whole. In essence, Malcolm X asked us to do this in his autobiography--to suffer the black people's agony, to relieve their humiliation, in an effort to further our stature as Americans while we extended our humanity.

With regard to the black people, or vis a vis the history of manufacturing in America, or the collection of American antiques, or an interest in American art, one might feel a dillettante, or boorish. Listen to any knowledgeable person--especially a European--and he will tell you to study European painting, the fate of the Jews, Florentine curios, etc., if you would find your heritage.

But that suggestion, implying that there is no American culture worth knowing, is antediluvian and, for our purposes, quite irrelevant. Neither Lamartine nor Gauguin can be of much use to us in our search for a real America behind the murk, the insouciance, and the chauvinism of the American mind. Indeed, an intense facing up to facts about this continent and its history is far more instructive, especially about the future of our world, than a facing backward to Europe, still a center of ferment and ideas, but no longer the depository of sane leadership.

In terms of future directions, as well as past trends, the history of America is not only relevant--it is, like the history of Russia and China, absolutely essential to being at home in the modern, crazy world.

But, in what way is a broad, admittedly dilettante-ish appreciation of American history "radical?" Is that not merely a codification of the typical concerns of middle-class Americans? Obviously it is, for the history and the future of America is in the hands of the middle class and its select few at the top. It is there, rather than in the speculation of Montaigne-esque aristocrats, that the American life-style and thought pattern have customarily dwelled.

And radical thought itself--as expressed in underground newspapers and other literature--has distinctly middle-class roots and oppressively middle-class problems. Everything that radicalism has run to has had a middle-class ogre at the other side of the room. The hippie counter-culture is only a step-by-step pursuit of opposites, rather than a one-step approach to novelty. So, if we are basically middle-class in our concerns, I would suggest that we have to define, concretize, and mitigate those concerns before we can hope to wander further afield in any direction at all.

Thus, radical history is necessarily the history of our problems, and our foolishness and our enigma. It is, in historical terms, the history of an emergent people who freed, by and large, from 18th century shackles of thought and polity, wandered into a new continent and found some new spiritual and social constricts. The shackles that we have acquired, indeed, are twentieth century ones that we have bred quite apart from Europe, and to which, ironically, European philosophers have addressed themselves in the twentieth century.

And if the American has, in some ways, defined the issues for philosopher and writer by dilineating and living out the philosopher's worst fears of oppression, suppression, loneliness, and irrationality, then the crucial place for a surge of newness is surely America. The best use of Sartre and Camus, then, is in the home.

For there is something missing in all our lives, and there is something radically wrong with us as a country. Thus far we have peered somewhat foolishly at America through the positivist telescope that Marx built a century ago rather than analyzing ourselves in a softer, less "scientific" manner. We are, I think, an attentive and sensitive people, needful of homily and love and sense in our dealings with the world of ideas, with which, after so long a battle with material things, we are scarcely accustomed to dealing. It is renewed notions of community and ethics that our generation will confront; and, indeed, is confronting. We must live out the past, and weigh its several components, if our confrontation is to be successful.