radicalism

1. The doctrines or practices of radicals.
2. The quality of being radical.

Radicalism--political and social movements and ideologies that aim at fundamental change in the structure of society--has been a persistent feature of U.S. history. Radical movements have challenged Americans to live up to their professed ideals and have developed penetrating critiques of social and economic inequality.

Two distinct, although often overlapping, radical traditions have coexisted in America. Some radical movements accept the society's prevailing emphasis on the ideal of the "free individual" (often linked with ownership of property as the guarantor of personal autonomy) and seek to eliminate obstacles to its fulfillment or extend it to excluded groups. Much of nineteenth-century labor radicalism fitted this pattern, as have many expressions of feminism and black radicalism. Other movements, based on a collectivist outlook, reject individualist values and see private property as an obstacle to genuine freedom. Various socialist and communitarian movements have exemplified this type.

Traditions transplanted from Europe helped shape radicalism in colonial America. The concept of the "freeborn Englishman" postulated that government did not possess the right to interfere with basic individual liberties and justified resistance to overbearing authorities. The tradition of "moral economy" asserted that government had a responsibility to protect the basic well-being of all citizens. According to this view, economic life should be governed by the noneconomic consideration of equity rather than the vagaries of the free market. In addition, the religious revivalism of the Great Awakening in the 1740s stimulated the idea that devout men and women should strive to purge a corrupt society of sin. Although not necessarily linked to any specific political program, this sensibility fostered the notion that American society was in need of fundamental change.

These customary values and popular traditions helped produce and legitimize the colonial resistance to British rule that culminated in the American Revolution. And during the Revolution, along with other political and social ideas, they were absorbed into the comprehensive ideology of republicanism that came to dominate American political culture. In republican thought, stable democratic government rested on a citizenry possessing political "virtue"--that is, the ability to place the good of society above selfish concerns. This quality stemmed from "independence," especially that economic self-reliance that derived from ownership of productive property.

Much of nineteenth-century American radicalism came directly from the Revolution. The Declaration of Independence, which posited the equality of all humankind and the right to resist unjust authority, inspired later generations of radicals. Nineteenth-century radicals, moreover, feared that the evolution of American society was imperiling the republican heritage of independence and broad social equality, and they searched for ways to restore the virtue and independence central to republicanism. But some radicals, such as participants in communitarian experiments, rejected altogether the individualism and commitment to private property of the society at large. Hundreds of such communities, mostly short-lived, were established before the Civil War; their appeal rested on widespread dissatisfaction with the intense competitiveness of American life and on the premise that far-reaching social change could be brought about without violent conflict by building a model of the new society within the old.

Most nineteenth-century radicals, however, sought to preserve individual independence rather than submerge it in a cooperative social order. Throughout the century, for example, the labor movement searched for ways to restore the ideal of the independent citizen in the face of the spread of factory production, the loss of the artisan's autonomy, and growing social inequality. From the Workingmen's parties of the late 1820s to the Knights of Labor in the 1880s, labor spoke the republican language of social harmony and economic independence rather than the Marxist language of unavoidable class conflict. Its characteristic goals were shorter working hours (to enable laborers to fulfill their responsibilities as republican citizens), the establishment of producer cooperatives (to counteract the spread of wage labor and the erosion of economic independence), and access to western land for eastern workers. The Industrial Revolution, labor radicals insisted, was leading Americans toward a society of fixed, hostile, and unequal classes. As in Europe, "nonproducers" reaped economic benefits while ordinary laborers struggled to make ends meet.

The Populists of the 1890s also spoke this republican language, although Populism, more than previous movements, looked to the national government to end the subservience of the small producer to a transportation and credit system that made a mockery of the idea of economic independence. Drawing on an idea developed by Greenbackers earlier in the century, Populists called on the government to take control of the currency from private bankers and directly finance the marketing of small farmers' crops. Henry George, author of the single most influential work of nineteenth-century radicalism, Progress and Poverty, stood squarely within this tradition of small-producer radicalism. His proposal to nationalize the land promised to restore republican equality and social harmony at a time of bitter labor conflict and a widening gap between rich and poor.

A similar emphasis on individual freedom, but in this case based on the idea of ownership of one's self rather than ownership of property, inspired nineteenth-century movements like abolitionism and feminism, which aimed to extend the idea of equal rights to subordinated groups. Antebellum abolitionism, the greatest radical movement of that era, established the pattern by which most future movements would operate in America's democratic political culture. It was open rather than secretive and relied on moral suasion (the widespread dissemination of pamphlets, newspapers, and speeches) rather than violence or coercion. Abolitionism, moreover, was the nation's first racially integrated radical movement, and northern blacks and fugitives from bondage like Frederick Douglass became prominent leaders. The movement drew on the impulse for social change unleashed by the Second Great Awakening early in the century and traditional American democratic values to argue that slavery was a gross violation of human rights. And out of abolitionism emerged nineteenth-century feminism, which demanded for women the same legal and political equality the crusade against slavery sought for blacks. Not until after the Civil War, in the wake of a dispute over whether the struggle for women's rights should temporarily be laid aside in order to concentrate on obtaining the vote for male former slaves, did an independent feminist movement emerge, one that did not rest on the abolitionist constituency.

The 1890s and the early twentieth century, which witnessed so many changes, saw a fundamental shift in American radicalism. The American Federation of Labor (afl), which replaced the Knights as the major labor organization, adopted a less far-reaching set of goals than its predecessor. Its "bread-and-butter unionism" concentrated on improving the wages and hours of its members within the existing system rather than challenging the organization of the economy. Yet the afl was the first major labor organization to accept the reality that the wage-earning class was a permanent feature of American life rather than an aberration caused by a departure from republican principles.

Other groups at the time built upon a frank acceptance of class conflict to seek more radical outcomes. Socialism, a minor presence in American life since its transplantation by German immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century, suddenly became a mass movement. With its greatest strength among Jewish and German immigrants, in the former Populist strongholds of the Southwest, and among native-born miners and skilled workers, the Socialist party polled nearly a million votes in 1912 for its presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs. Although its ideology ultimately derived from Karl Marx's critique of capitalism and his vision of a proletarian revolution, the Socialist party adopted an evolutionary, electoral approach to social change. More radical in tactics was the Industrial Workers of the World (iww), which sought to organize unskilled industrial workers, women, and racial and ethnic minorities--all groups excluded from the afl. In its call for labor solidarity and its aim of superseding capitalism by worker-controlled production, the iww harked back to the Knights. The organization was destroyed by the wave of repression that followed World War I, which also fatally weakened the Socialist party.

Although both the Socialist party and the iww were open to black membership, neither developed a special program regarding racism or an analysis of blacks' distinctive position in American society. Since blacks were part of the working class, the liberation of the proletariat would liberate them as well. With most white radicals blind to blacks' unique experience, black radicals tended to turn not to integrated organizations but to nationalism. The largest black mass movement of the early twentieth century was that organized by Marcus Garvey, whose message on pan-Africanism and racial pride appealed to tens of thousands who had migrated from the rural South to northern ghettos only to encounter pervasive racism.

The 1930s and World War II saw the final flowering of American socialism, embodied this time in the Communist party, which reached a membership of 100,000 and exerted an influence beyond its numbers in the labor movement, civil rights organizations, and intellectual circles. Unlike their socialist predecessors, the communists did not focus on electoral politics, but took the lead in militant struggles of numerous kinds in depression America--union organization, unemployment relief, civil rights activism. Their connection with the Soviet Union gave the communists the prestige of association with the world's only socialist society while at the same time making them vulnerable to abrupt changes in party policy geared to Soviet rather than American realities.

The advent of the cold war turned the Soviet connection from an asset into a severe liability, unleashing a period of political repression that drove the party underground, victimized many of its members, and destroyed its influence. But the 1950s and 1960s witnessed new expressions of American radicalism. The drive for civil rights, the largest mass movement since the depression, mobilized southern blacks and black and white allies throughout the country in a successful assault on the South's system of segregation and disfranchisement. Like the abolitionists, civil rights advocates drew on mainstream values of equality and individual self-determination to pose a powerful challenge to entrenched racism. And like abolitionism, the movement's tactics were grounded in nonviolence and moral suasion, in the belief that white America could be persuaded to live up to the national creed.

Meanwhile, partly inspired by civil rights activism, a New Left arose among white youth. For the first time in American history, the torch of radical leadership passed to college students, before World War II a tiny, largely conservative portion of the population. The New Left was new in its conscious rejection of the belief that the working class was the predestined agent of social change, in its identification with revolutionary movements of the third world rather than the Soviet Union, and in its focus on the spiritual crisis of a society of abundance rather than on widespread economic misery. But it drew upon radical ideas dating back to the abolitionists and communitarians--a distaste for competitiveness and materialism in American life, a desire for individual autonomy and authenticity, a belief in direct action by morally pure individuals.

By the end of the 1960s, with the Vietnam War inspiring massive opposition on college campuses, the New Left had turned into a full-fledged generational revolt, complete with its own counterculture avowedly hostile to middle-class respectability. But in the early 1970s, the movement splintered. Some participants went underground into a self-destructive crusade of violence; others moved on to different issues, ranging from the second wave of feminism to environmentalism and the peace movement; still others abandoned it altogether, rejoining the American mainstream.

As the nation entered the 1990s, there were many radical organizations and issues, but no coherent radical outlook or movement to serve as a focal point for demands for far-reaching change, like abolitionism in the nineteenth century and socialism and communism in the twentieth. One thing, however, seemed certain. Every generation of Americans since the Revolution has seen the emergence of one kind of radical movement or another, and the future is not likely to be different.

Bibliography:

Sidney Lens, Radicalism in America, rev. ed. (1969); Staughton Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (1968).

Author:

Eric Foner

See also Abolitionist Movement; Civil Rights Movement; Communist Party; Debs, Eugene V.; Feminist Movement; Garvey, Marcus; Haymarket Affair; Industrial Workers of the World; Knights of Labor; New Left; Populism; Socialism; Students for a Democratic Society; Utopian Communities.

n.

The conservatism of to-morrow injected into the affairs of to-day.

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: the political orientation of those who favor revolutionary change in government and society