Radicalism

Radicalism. Radicalism in the United States owes its origins to the so‐called Radical Reformation of the sixteenth century and to civil rebellions and millenarian movements reaching far back in human memory. Indian rebellions against European colonizers and transplanted pietist communes offer the clearest precursors of American political radicalism. Thomas Paine's antimonarchical Common Sense (1776), the first widely read document with direct bearing upon the fate of the incipient nation, was characteristic in two ways. The revolution Paine helped inspire stopped well short of addressing social class, race, and gender inequities. Yet Paine's continuing attack on wrongful authority nevertheless gained him the enmity of ungrateful American conservatives, forcing him into postrevolutionary political exile. The burden of radicalism had already passed to the direct action of Shays's Rebellion in Massachusetts in 1786, which sought to redress economic privilege. Fifteen citizens received death sentences (two actually were hanged), a small figure compared to the vengeance visited upon the organizers of and participants in a long series of Indian and slave uprisings, real and potential.

Radicalism found new outlets in the early labor movements and the utopian and communitarian movements of the Antebellum Era. Urging shorter hours, free public schools, and free land in the West, early workers' movements ultimately failed, but they did make their mark upon public life and Democratic machine politics. The great reform movements of the mid–nineteenth century—women's rights, antislavery, and spiritualism—began from a different standpoint. Social class as such concerned them less than the vision of universal citizenship and multifaceted social improvement. Meeting in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, the first women's rights convention declared a new revolutionary principle for half the human race. Abolitionists likewise demanded the expropriation of wrongfully held human “property.” Spiritualism, an often misunderstood link between the various reform movements and a larger population of sympathizers, grew from a rejection of patriarchal Calvinism and a belief in the oneness of the human spirit with nature.

The outbreak of the Civil War eclipsed every movement but war itself—and emancipation of the slaves. African Americans abandoning the plantations helped speed the Union victory, but Republican party “Radicals” finally abandoned African Americans to what W.E.B. Du Bois called “a new capitalism and a new enslavement of labor,” establishing a model for global economic expansion. The first American followers of Karl Marx, mostly German immigrants, renewed efforts to create a radicalized labor movement. Swept away in the postwar conservative reaction, socialism arose in different forms following the national railroad strikes of 1877, and reemerged in the labor and populist movements of the 1880s and 1890s.

Intermittently for the next half‐century, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans would find a thin section of socialists and labor radicals ready to address race issues with special urgency. The Knights of Labor briefly mobilized a half‐million working people during the mid–1880s. Populism (and its constituent movements known as the Farmers' Alliance) revived multiracial radicalism in other forms, including cooperatives and third‐party politics. Socialists struggled in vain to halt the Spanish‐American War and the American slaughter of Filipino nationalists. A large and influential Socialist party found a constituency of working people early in the twentieth century, only to be crushed by the repression of the Woodrow Wilson administration after 1917.

Twentieth‐century intellectuals like Du Bois, labor activists such as A. Philip Randolph, and advanced figures within such labor movements as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) proposed drastic changes in society's racial orientation as well its economic‐political character. A thoroughgoing antiracism emerged in the 1920s when a defeated American Left, looked abroad to forces shaking the colonial world. American communists, altogether too closely tied to the Soviet Union but sometimes heroic in their own local circumstances, struggled to build an antiracist movement. In part, they achieved impressive success—at least until the Cold War—in building egalitarian industrial unions and a radical interracial culture.

The Cold War and its concomitant domestic repression chilled radicalism severely. Civil rights radicals, however, never quite as crushed as labor radicals had been, revived the direct‐action approach, from the Montgomery bus boycott to the lunch‐counter sit‐ins to the Black Power movement of the 1960s. The anti–Vietnam War movement; environmentalism; feminism; activism by Indian, Chicano, and Asian‐American groups; and, still later the gay‐rights movement, added new dimension to the American radical tradition. But by the 1980s, the hegemonic power of capitalism had overwhelmed resistance in most quarters. Radicalism again consisted, as it had during earlier low periods, largely of support for revolutionary movements abroad and antinuclear protest movements at home. The close of the twentieth century found American radicalism dispersed and institutionally weak. Nevertheless, the partial revival of a weakened and corrupted labor movement, and the appearance of new immigrant populations (most notably from the Dominican Republic and Haiti) with definite radical sentiments, showed signs of reawakening a radicalism damped down by defeat and disappointment.
See also Black Nationalism; Civil Rights Movement; Communist Party—USA; Debs, Eugene V.; Gay and Lesbian Rights Movement; Goldman, Emma; Indian Wars; Populist Era; Populist Party; Sixties, The; Slave Uprisings and Resistance; Socialist Party of America; Students for a Democratic Society; Women's Rights Movements.

Bibliography

Alden Whitman, ed., American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, 1985.
Richard Flacks , Making History: The American Left and the American Mind, 1988.
Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Harvey J. Kaye, eds., The American Radical, 1995.
Jeremy Brecher , Strike!, 1988.
Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Left, 1998.
Paul Buhle and and Edmund Sullivan , Images of American Radicalism, 1998.

Paul Buhle