People Power: History, Organizing, and Larry Goodwyn’s Democratic Vision in the Twenty-First Century
Edited by Wesley C. Hogan and Paul Ortiz (University Press of Florida, 2021).
The history business is a curious gig. In my lifetime at least, it always seems that there’s more at stake in it than ever. It’s increasingly politicized because it is relevant; it’s increasingly relevant because it’s politicized. Fewer practitioners or pundits, these days, idealize a scientific pursuit that is separate from politics: it’s just too obvious how much good and lasting (as well as bad and cringy and forgettable) historical writing comes out of political commitments as well as from sheer curiosity. One of the first lessons they teach undergraduate history majors – in advanced classes – is that even though it’s all about evidence and original sources, history is always shaped by the battles of the present, whether it speaks to those battles explicitly or not. What that means for the ethics and politics of historians, as a guild, is the stuff of grad school – the smoky bar-retreats more than the seminars. What historical knowledge means for progressive politics, too, has remained up for debate.
When I entered graduate school, there were a few books and a few historians who seemed to have, and even to be, the answer. It had been ten years since Lawrence Goodwyn’s The Populist Moment (1978), the slimmed down version of Democratic Promise, and the word we heard was that he had arrived at graduate school with a copy of the manuscript and was told by some august professor, okay… but you have to take some courses before we give you the Ph.D.
I suspect we loved that story, which may have been just an urban legend, because it suggested that while formal academic study and resources might be helpful, they weren’t a prerequisite for producing rigorous history that mattered politically, not least history about what mattered politically. My peers and I were entranced by Goodwyn’s notion of movement culture: that progressive change has to be lived if it is going to last, it has to be everyday, it has to engage people, it has to be ritual and conversation as well as action, and that the thing that links all this can be called organizing or recruitment even if it isn’t about a labor movement or electoral politics.
This was, in other words, the sixties looking back at its antecedents, and finding the silver linings, unlike the “realists” and backlashers who had seized center stage by the time we were reading Goodwyn. Yes, the populists failed; yes, they were coopted. But that didn’t mean they hadn’t gotten important things right – democratic practices as well as anti-elite critiques, and outreach, even effective alliances, beyond the color line. If it happened in Texas a hundred years ago, why not anywhere, why not here and now, in the new Gilded Age?
A couple of years later, while we were being preached to by the most accomplished historians in New Haven about the virtues of comparative history and getting outside of American intellectual straitjackets while simultaneously being urged to narrow a research focus in order to get out of grad school before starving, Goodwyn, who taught at Duke in North Carolina, published a parallel tome, Breaking the Barrier, about the Solidarity movement in Poland. Wow, I remember thinking. And I’m just now recalling that this was the same year, 1991, when we grad students allied with two HERE locals — the clerical and technical and the service and maintenance workers’ unions – to go on strike for union recognition, better pay and health care. (We lost on recognition – of course — but the university cut admissions numbers into PhD programs to up funding and started paying more serious attention to the conditions and ethos of graduate students, instead of following the dicta of the late Dean Donald Kagan who held that investing in graduate education was like “throwing money down a rat hole.”[1] In other words, we lost to Hegemonic Forces, but our movement changed the culture and the institution at least a little, arguably more than that.) I would wager that a few of us assumed that Goodwyn would approve of our struggle and not mind that we didn’t get around to reading his new (and still underappreciated) book.
People Power is a wonderfully capacious and enlightening account of what the journalist-historian-activist Goodwyn was about — what moved him, what got him to his masterpiece in middle age, and what he did with whom for the next thirty-five years. It’s not a traditional festschrift, though it certainly is a memorial and keeps more than one flame lit. One of its signal virtues is that the authors, all fellow (small d) democrats and friends and colleagues and students of Goodwyn, don’t pretend he was perfect. The students paint a picture of a brilliant teacher with the flaws of his virtues: his engagement strategies could be so smug as to be intimidating. He roared. He mansplained.
For my money, Faulkner Fox’s depiction of octogenarian Larry in ’08 alternating from gruff critique to deeply supportive admiration of the voter turnout movement she led in Durham is priceless. He couldn’t stay away, trudging with his oxygen tank to man phones, watch kids (or watch others watching kids). “I never thought I’d see the civil rights movement again,” he said, epitomizing the optimism of the will he liked to mix with pessimism of the intellect (and about the academy and the institution where he actually thrived). The relationship between electoral and movement politics had been his theme, and here it was, playing out again in real time, in the effort to elect a black man who had been a community organizer (and could intelligently talk history). His advice was great, his perspective inspiring – until, um, it wasn’t, usually where it concerned Black volunteers and Black opponents of the campaign’s strategy. He knew, as Max Krochmal also observes, that the unconscious assertion of power by white liberals has remained a key problem on the left, but of course that didn’t make him immune from it. He may have done better deconstructing his own male privilege (and more than just verbally), as he tried to do with Fox despite a real generation gap: “I was used to having this discussion with other fed-up women, not with an old man who called himself ‘the problem,’ yet kept analyzing, kept asking questions and trying to change his own behavior to something more democratic. It gave me hope.” He was a good talker, but almost as good a listener, as Gunther Peck, historian and one of the other founders of Durham for Obama, testifies. In one shift in a Walmart parking lot he registered fifteen people who just couldn’t walk by an old guy in an oxygen tank who would actually listen to why they were so disillusioned by electoral politics.
One of the recurring images in the essays, and the one that frames the introduction, is Larry “in the kitchen,” talking at all hours about the latest strategy for making things better, or the lessons of past struggles. (See also Peter Wood’s essay.) The kitchen-talk is central because one of Goodwyn’s lasting achievements was the establishment of a center for oral history. He and his colleague William Chafe, a historian of the civil rights movement, realized at a certain point that the only way an accurate long-term history of the movement, not to mention an assessment of its lessons, would be achieved would be through a concerted effort to interview participants. This has meant training interviewers and honing their skills. The result has been the gradual evocation of a “long civil rights movement” — a cascade of scholarship so impressive and encompassing that (inevitably) some critics have called it a “vampire” that eats up particularity, swallowing everything from the ‘30s to the ‘80s. That’s at once true, and part of a territorial academic dogfight that misses the point. The real issue is the degree to which the mid-twentieth century saw a third American revolution and reconstruction, and how its achievements and limits could only be comprehended when and if the history biz itself democratized and integrated.
Goodwyn thought that American historians have been mostly complacent recyclers of myths purveyed by Leaders and reactionaries. He liked to say that great works of American literature did better history than the professionals. He was thinking of narrative works that grew out of observation of struggle and social change: Steinbeck, Melville, maybe Faulkner, maybe Dos Passos. Out of that insight, he and Chafe trained students to get people to tell their stories but also to answer key questions about local movements that might otherwise escape the archives. Goodwyn himself, as several writers describe here, drove around Texas and inspected newspapers that hadn’t been read for decades to get at the real local story of the populists and their opponents. Sometimes he found that people wouldn’t talk, out of fear. At least once, he discovered the only surviving volumes of the local paper had been hacked, doctored with scissors. There’s a lot of theorizing now about how “the archive” is political in its repressive silences. Goodwyn learned this in small towns and cities in Texas, and his methods of scholarship and teaching were devised to help students fight back. He himself fought the liberal for whom he’d once written speeches and who brought him to Duke, ex-Senator and university president Terry Sanford, to keep the Nixon Presidential Library, a history-rewriting project if ever there was one, out of Durham.
Ralph Nader testifies that Goodwyn was a “multiplier,” less visibly than in his influential books but all that much more effectively in his life. At moments of extreme backlash like the present and recent past, his example, and this book, reminds us of the long game he played and that we’re playing, even when we think we’re just talking at the kitchen table. We could focus, and maybe sometimes need to, on how we all get played and sold out, and that was an important part of the story Goodwyn told (he was a historian, after all). But in any century, backlashes and betrayals don’t happen except in response to people power that makes Reaction an imperative in the first place.
Note
1 Kathy M. Newman , “Poor, Hungry, and Desperate? Or Privileged, Histrionic, and Demanding? In Search of the True Meaning of ‘Ph. D.'” Source: Social Text, Winter, 1996, No. 49, The Yale Strike Dossier (Winter, 1996), pp. 97-131, quoted at 104. Kagan had spearheaded a plan to cut the budget for teaching assistantships and to prevent students from registering beyond their sixth year, despite a poor job market for most PhDs.