The Left and Public Memory

Abstract

Oral histories, for all their worth as primary sources, take on even greater value by defying instrumentality-by protecting lived experience and memory from historians' arguments and narratives. In the historiography of the twentieth-century American Left, personal testimony serves as a counterweight to the tendency toward a kind of reverse Whiggism in which inevitable (or overdetermined) decline and defeat replace progress and triumph. Perhaps this reverse Whiggism is itself inevitable in any long view of radicalism's fortunes, especially when, at the century's end, an organized and powerful Left exists only in the persecution complexes, paranoid fantasies, and political demonology of the dominant Right. But political and labor historians have recently begun to recognize the dangers of what Robin L. Einhorn calls narratives of irrevocable loss. If we believe that the really important battles were irrevocably lost years ago, Einhorn writes, there seems little reason to write history. George Lipsitz, Dana Frank, and others urge their colleagues to stake out a middle ground between celebration and despair and to discover a place for contingency and hope in the stories they tell.' The D words-decline, defeat, disillusionment, despair-certainly find their way into Paul Avrich's eloquent Anarchist Voices. What would you think if I told you that anarchism is a pipe-dream? asks Laurance Labadie, son of the anarchist printer and archivist Joseph A. Labadie (p. 16). Lena Shlakman, who read Kropotkin as a sixteen-year-old factory worker in Vilna and then saw him speak in New York, confessed after her 101st birthday that now I am discouraged. I don't believe that 'it'-the free society-will ever come (p. 328). Many of Avrich's subjects speak in generational terms. A