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JAMES BURKHART GILBERT
many of his associates were obsessed by the threat of class struggle and
developed a system of informal government which excluded radicalism
but made a place for conservative labor leaders. The result of these
efforts was to help create a political system which opened its doors
to
those who accepted the dominance of the corporation in American life
(which welcomed, even, those who wished to make the corporation into
a socially responsible institution) and which slammed the door shut in
the face of profound social change.
Because of their antagonism to other historians and their works,
New Left writers have been described as revolutionists, attempting to
displace a few powerful possessors of the written past. But the meaning
of New Left history is a good deal more complex than this formulation
suggests, and certainly, the historical profession is not monolithic.
Bar·
ton Bernstein's edition of writings,
Towards a New Past,
reveals just how
much New Left history is at the center of the discipline. The contril>–
uters to this volume come from Harvard, Wisconsin and Columbia, with
one each from Yale and Johns Hopkins - a list of most of the principal
graduate schools in American History. This is no provincial attack upon
the dominant training centers. Quite unmistakably, New Left history
is
in many ways in the tradition of challenge to prevailing historical ideas.
In one sense at least, it is part of the developing and always shifting
reinterpretation of the past. For such reasons, it has all of the traits
of other historical works: brilliance and mediocrity; conservative and
radical methodology. And while New Left historians have been impa.
tient with older historians, yet sometimes they repeat old fallacies and
antiquated methods.
Placed side by side, the contributions to this volume by Jesse Le·
misch, Eugene Genovese, Staughton Lynd and Christopher Lasch hardly
appear similar. But they have one common trait, which at least super.
ficially unites the whole Bernstein collection: a reaction against the
liberalism of the fifties, and against the once-prevalent radical view of
the New Deal as a precious system created in the Golden Age of Amer.
ican history. They share a preoccupation with the kinds of problems
raised by the current student left (although these professors raised them
before the present generation of students were "politicized").
The preponderance of articles (three) in this collection dealing with
twentieth-century American foreign policy is no accident. New Left
history began with an assault on the assumptions of the Cold War and
a search for the origins of American dominance in the world. In effect,
such attacks have paralleled the reevaluation of American foreign policy
undertaken by George Kennan in his
American Diplomacy,
published in
