Carl Mirra: The Battle over Radical History, Part 2
[Carl Mirra is Associate Professor of Social Studies in the Ruth S. Ammon School of Education at Adelphi University. He is author of The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent with a foreword by Howard Zinn (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2010).]
I am the author of the biography, The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945-1970, that was nominally reviewed by John H. Summers in “What Politics Does to History” (TNR online July 19, 2010). The essay was couched as a review, but reads instead like a broadside against my subject, with little reference to the specific arguments raised in the biography. Summers accuses Lynd of refusing to “acknowledge the many-sidedness of history” in part because my subject “knows most of the answers in advance.” Summers’s “review” suffers precisely from his conscious distortion of the record to arrive at this own predetermined conclusions. In other words, Summers “knows most of the answers in advance,” which prohibits him from examining the nuances of Lynd’s scholarship and how it was dealt with in my biography.
The essay opens with a quote from Lynd that he “was to be an American Lenin.” Nowhere does Summers address my book which clarifies that Lynd repeatedly and explicitly rejected such an old left orientation. While Summers asserts that radical historians have “turned history from a means of understanding to a record of heroes and villains,” he does exactly that by setting Lynd up as the villain: an American Lenin....
Equally disconcerting is that Summers relies solely on Genovese and Lasch to critique Lynd, having failed to mention how those two scholars influenced his own studies. Lasch was “the most appealing model to me” (Summers, Every Fury on Earth, p. 6). Any historian concerned with understanding would balance the incendiary remarks from Lasch and Genovese with leading scholars who endorsed Lynd’s contribution to the scholarly project. There is ample supply of scholars from both sides of the spectrum who weigh in on Lynd’s work in my biography. C. Vann Woodward, for instance, understood some of Lynd’s work discussed in Summers’s piece as “closely reasoned” and “well researched.” Here was Summers’s chance to clarify a significant debate, but he chose instead to ignore the “many-sidedness” of the issue....
Read entire article at The New Republic
I am the author of the biography, The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945-1970, that was nominally reviewed by John H. Summers in “What Politics Does to History” (TNR online July 19, 2010). The essay was couched as a review, but reads instead like a broadside against my subject, with little reference to the specific arguments raised in the biography. Summers accuses Lynd of refusing to “acknowledge the many-sidedness of history” in part because my subject “knows most of the answers in advance.” Summers’s “review” suffers precisely from his conscious distortion of the record to arrive at this own predetermined conclusions. In other words, Summers “knows most of the answers in advance,” which prohibits him from examining the nuances of Lynd’s scholarship and how it was dealt with in my biography.
The essay opens with a quote from Lynd that he “was to be an American Lenin.” Nowhere does Summers address my book which clarifies that Lynd repeatedly and explicitly rejected such an old left orientation. While Summers asserts that radical historians have “turned history from a means of understanding to a record of heroes and villains,” he does exactly that by setting Lynd up as the villain: an American Lenin....
Equally disconcerting is that Summers relies solely on Genovese and Lasch to critique Lynd, having failed to mention how those two scholars influenced his own studies. Lasch was “the most appealing model to me” (Summers, Every Fury on Earth, p. 6). Any historian concerned with understanding would balance the incendiary remarks from Lasch and Genovese with leading scholars who endorsed Lynd’s contribution to the scholarly project. There is ample supply of scholars from both sides of the spectrum who weigh in on Lynd’s work in my biography. C. Vann Woodward, for instance, understood some of Lynd’s work discussed in Summers’s piece as “closely reasoned” and “well researched.” Here was Summers’s chance to clarify a significant debate, but he chose instead to ignore the “many-sidedness” of the issue....