Activist Reviews
True Left History: An Impossible Dream?

Encyclopedia of the American Left
Second Edition
Edited by Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas
Oxford University Press, 1998, 928 pp.;
$125, hardcover

Review by John Trinkl

ow to capture the entire history of the U.S. Left in one book? An impossible task, but the new edition of the Encyclopedia of the American Left comes as close to that goal as can be hoped.

Practically the entire legacy of the U.S. Left has been erased from popular consciousness, buried by U.S. triumphalism in the Cold War, euphoria over the roaring success of certain sectors of the economy and rampant materialism and individualism. We live in an era when Time Magazine can proclaim Albert Einstein as “Man of the Century” without mentioning that he was a socialist.

This book offers a strong antidote to that amnesia. Newcomers to left activity will gain a strong appreciation of the role leftist individuals and organizations have played in this country by even a cursory look at the Encyclopedia of the American Left. Helen Keller, Jack London, John Dos Passos and Dashiell Hammett may not be known to the average person as radicals or socialists, but they were. The role of not only explicitly socialist organizations such as the Communist Party, but also of hundreds of labor, women’s and ethnic groups, radical schools and publications and cultural groups in shaping U.S. history is comprehensively presented. Seasoned activists will also benefit from the vast marshaling of stories from the U.S. Left’s past. Fascinating nuggets like the entry on Aaron Copland’s leftist activities and on Ybor City, a radical and revolutionary enclave in the Tampa, FL, area abound. Brought up to date to take into account the impact on the Left of the last decade, the new edition is almost 25 percent larger than the 1990 version.

Are there shortcomings? Certainly. The book is very strong on the cultural history of the U.S. Left—“Radical Poetry” alone fills eight pages. But the encyclopedia is weaker on unions. There is a good deal of coverage of labor activities, but one would have hoped for a general topic on unions, surveying different left stances toward labor unions at different periods. There is one topic on dual unionism and one page on industrial unionism, but no separate listings on topics such as industrial concentration, rank-and-file organizing or wildcat strikes.

There are overviews of a wide variety of ethnic/national groups: Hungarian-Americans, Armenian-Americans, Lithuanian-Americans, Finnish-Americans, Ukrainian-Americans all get their one-to-1½ pages. However, African-Americans, who have been in this country since before the Mayflower and have played such a pivotal role throughout U.S. history, also get their 1½ pages. True, there are strong sections on the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panther Party, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, etc., but one would have hoped for a comprehensive overview. To the editors’ credit, almost all entries are written by scholars or activists very knowledgeable about—or, in some cases, part of—the movements and issues they describe. (The entry on pacifism, for instance, was co-written by WRL’s David McReynolds.) This makes for generally very accurate and informed commentary, in contrast to with most mainstream descriptions of the Left, which someone has described as trying to write about what an orchestra is doing without hearing the music.

On the other hand, a few of the commentaries may be a little too close to their subjects. For example, the entry on the Greensboro Massacre (in which five members of the Communist Workers Party who were leading an anti-Klan rally were killed by the KKK and Nazi groups in North Carolina in 1979) provides a good overview of the issue. However, the only alternative to the CWP’s strategy of armed self-defense is presented as “unarmed pacifist opposition and reliance on the police,” with no mention of other strategies or tactics. And the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, a highly divisive issue at the time for the U.S. Left, is presented in more favorable terms than some might agree with and could have benefitted from a more nuanced description. But overall the entries are fair and informative. The main shortcoming—an unavoidable one—is that almost all are only able to skim the surface of the topic before having to move on to the next topic. To rectify this, most entries have a very helpful list of further readings on their topics.

As to style, most of the entries are well written, if somewhat dry. The latter fault may be due to the dead hand of the academic press that published the book (Oxford University Press). It may well have strained out individual writing flair in the very serious cause of presenting a respectable encyclopedia. Probably no major harm done here, but on certain topics you don’t get the real feeling of the issue. For example, the entry on the Yippies says, “Whereas the Left stood for political praxis, Yippies testified to a sense of political insignificance and exhaustion on the part of many Americans in this period.” Well, maybe you had to be there, but the Yippies were also part of a broad convergence of cultural and political radicalism the like of which had not been seen in this country since the 1920s. To get a better flavor of the 1960s period, try digging out The Movement toward a New America, the Beginnings of a Long Revolution, by Mitchell Goodman.

These differences with individual entries, however, are far outweighed by the overall comprehensivenesss of the book and the hundreds of informative topics it takes up. Any two leftists would have disagreements with some of the formulations and presentations here. But if everyone agreed with everything, it wouldn’t be a book about the U.S. Left.

As it is, this is the best single book about the U.S. Left to have on your shelf. The contradiction, if you are an activist, is that you probably can’t afford to own it at $125 a pop. This reference will be largely inaccessible to those who most want and need it. If your local town or school library doesn’t have it, campaigning for them to get it will be very worthy political work.

John Trinkl is an editor and writer living in San Francisco. He covered the U.S. Left for the (National) Guardian Newsweekly from 1976 to 1985.