Paul Buhle and Edmund Sullivan's "Images of American Radicalism"

"Images of American Radicalism" (Christopher Publishing, Hanover, MA), by Paul Buhle and Edmund B. Sullivan, is a remarkable achievement. It consists of photos, drawings, old magazines, leaflets, posters and buttons from the 1600s to the modern era, with extensive informed commentary. As you turn from page to page, you are both edified and entertained. The biggest pleasure is finding out about leftist connections to the broader culture that you never dreamed possible. Buhle's vision of the American left is inclusive and nonsectarian. This means that the images are drawn from Socialist, anarchist, Communist, Trotskyist and other sources. Whatever your particular affiliation, there is rich material here to educate and inspire.

Here are some tidbits:

--A cartoon protesting the invasion of the Philippines from 1901. It is a mountain of skulls being guarded by American soldiers. The caption says, "And this is what they call civilization!"

--A 1935 painting of Metacomet, the Pokanoket Chief who led an allied Indian force in 1675 to defend southern New England Indians against appropriation of their lands. The artist is Thomas Hart Benton, who was sympathetic to leftist causes.

--Various advertisements from the International Socialist Review in the 1910s, including one how to become a "successful socialist speaker." For only a SASE with 2 cents postage, you will get word on the "WINNING METHOD" that is used by lawyers, orators and leading socialist speakers.

--A photo of a May Day parade in NYC, 1940. The marchers include members of the pro-Soviet International Workers Order (IWO) in baseball uniforms from their IWO chapter teams. Their signs demand: "Admit Negroes into Big League Baseball"

If "Images of American Radicalism" only consisted of such striking graphics with informed commentary, that alone would make the book worth purchasing. What you get in addition, however, is a sweeping history of the American radical movement that is as captivating and informative as Buhle's classic "Marxism in the United States." But "Images" is much more inclusive and incorporates the various social movements such as the populists, suffragists, and abolitionists as well as more recent developments like ecology and gay liberation.

The first chapter, titled "Green Dreamers," takes a fresh look at the utopian traditions of the 18th and 19th centuries. We discover that the Shakers, for example, believed that space, talent, fruit, animals all belonged to God and were temporarily loaned to Man while he was on earth. This meant that recycling of buildings and other materials was proof of his adaptive genius, but also the power of faith.

The second chapter titled "Class and Culture" examines the birth of both the socialist and organized labor movement in the post-Civil War period. Unlike the "green dreamers," this generation was determined to change the larger society itself along more humanitarian lines. We learn about the Knights of Labor, that was founded by carpet weavers in Philadelphia in the 1870s. It grew rapidly in 1885 when railroad workers joined it in order to take on the Wall Street manipulators like Jay Gould.

Chapter three, "The Golden Age of Radicalism," continues with the labor and socialist movements as they gained mass influence through organizations like the IWW and the Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs. The emergence of mass-circulation magazines and newspapers in this period provides Buhle and Sullivan with a rich lode of graphics to work with. We are treated to the front page of the "Progressive Dentist" from 1913, which features an article on "Prosthetic Dentistry As It Is and As It Should Be," as well as "Why a Doctor Should Be a Socialist." There are also beautiful color pictures of Socialist Party campaign material, including a poster for the Debs-Hanford ticket of 1904. It has the power of a Grant Wood painting, with workers placing their vote in a ballot-box for the socialist ticket against a backdrop of a steam locomotive and a team of horses in a hayfield.

Chapter four is about the "Old Left," while the fifth and final chapter covers the current period. The people who have lived through these times will value the book for these chapters especially. Since we were probably too busy making the leaflets and buttons that are represented in the pages to reflect on them as art, we can only be grateful to Buhle and Sullivan for collecting them in one place and allowing us to savor them once again. Anybody who wheat-pasted antiwar demonstration posters on NYC lamp-posts, as I did from 1967 to 1971, will take special pleasure in seeing them again in all their glory. And this time I don't have to get my hands and clothes dirty.

As one reads through "Images of American Radicalism," you can not help but conclude that there has been a living continuity between one historical epoch and another. Veterans of the 1930s labor movement made their influence felt on the civil rights and peace movements of the 1960s. The notion that 1930s or 1960s politics and culture completely disappeared and that each new generation of radicals have to start from scratch is not only false, it is a concession to bourgeois ideology. Time Magazine and similar venues are anxious to prove that all the radicals of the 1930s, or the 1960s, surrendered to consumerism and patriotism. Buhle and Sullivan offer powerful documentation that the left always continued to exert its influence, even when the radical movement as such seems to be in low ebb.

Some of the most interesting revelations have to do with the continuity between one generation and another in the cultural field. For example, as the Truman cold war unfolded in the late 1940s, radical artists took a stand against what Buhle and Sullivan call "the crazed rationalism of the welfare-warfare state." A new magazine called Circle connected Andre Breton, a 30s era surrealist friendly to Trotskyism, with a young San Francisco poet named Philip Lamantia, who played a major role in the new poetry movement of the 1950s. This literary movement, which included other left-wing San Francisco poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the New York City beats, and unaffiliated voices such as the green-minded Zen Buddhist rebel Gary Snyder helped to shape the literary consciousness of many young radicals in the early 1960s, including myself. Circle's final issue in 1948 called for "a culture which fights for its freedom, which protects the economic interests of its workers in all fields including the arts, and which can create for itself new forms and new voices, against reaction and the threat of war. . ."

It was only with the arrival of the 1960s that the radical message once again explicitly came to the surface. Now that McCarthyism had been defeated and communism was no longer a dirty word, young rebels no longer regarded the older left traditions as beyond consideration. Moreover, they came up with their own contributions to leftist politics and culture. One of the most interesting examples of how the older generation influenced the new was the creation of the alternative newspaper Los Angeles Free Press in 1964. The founder was Art Kunkin, a former secretary to C.L.R. James!

"Images of American Radicalism" is a tremendous resource to scholars and writers who are trying to understand the grand narrative of the left in this country. Furthermore, it inspires activists who will inevitably gain confidence from the knowledge that they do not stand alone. There is nothing odd about being a rebel in this country. In a very real sense, social protest is a mainstream activity even though the bourgeois historians and ideologues try to cover up this fact.

One of the reasons I find "Images of American Radicalism" so rewarding is that it confirms suspicions that I had developed during the course of oral history interviews with the iconoclastic film-maker Fred Baker that there is a seamless continuity between the radical movement of today and that of our historical predecessors. Baker is a living proof of that continuity.

The son of a Communist member of the Fur and Leather Workers Union, Baker had a fine singing voice and a flair for performing. His first appearances were on the sidewalks of Brooklyn in the late 1930s, belting out left-wing songs to raise money for Spanish Civil War medical aid. Later on he became a featured tenor soloist with Pete Seeger's People's Song. Never a political activist as such, Fred sought ways to keep the progressive spirit alive as he moved more directly into the world of show business. After beginning a career in the theater, he soon discovered that his first love was film. In the 1960s, he began research on the comedian Lenny Bruce that eventually led to the production of the legendary documentary "Lenny Bruce Without Tears." He also made the groundbreaking underground film "Events," which explored sexuality in terms never seen before in American film. It was compared favorably to "I am Curious Yellow" at the time. Fred says that he looks at his entire life work, from singing in left-wing choruses, to making iconoclastic films, as an attempt to create an alternative vision to the injustice and exploitation of mainstream society.

Another link between generations is found in Shannon Wheeler's anti-establishment and surrealistic comic book "Too Much Coffee Man." Wheeler's main artistic influence is Gilbert Shelton, creator of The Furry Freak Brothers, who celebrated the counter-culture and the antiwar movement in his legendary series. Shelton moved from Austin to France some years back and young Wheeler had made a pilgrimage there to meet his main influence. We discover in "Images of American Radicalism" that none other than Paul Buhle worked with Shelton to put out Radical America Comics in the 1960s. In this case, the link is between the 60s and the 90s, a hopeful sign of renewal.

For discoveries like these, and for the sheer joy of being a radical in the United States, there is no finer source book than "Images of American Radicalism."

(a slightly edited version of this article appeared in "New Politics")

Louis Proyect