The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Cultural War
By Eugene D. Genovese
University of Missouri Press/320 pages/$29.95

It must be fully thirty years now since my attention was first drawn to the phenomenon of Eugene Genovese. At the time he was an obscure assistant professor at Rutgers University--a confessing Marxist--who made the rather (for then) provocative statement that he "did not fear a Viet Cong victory in Vietnam; I welcome it." For his troubles he became a major issue in the gubernatorial race in New Jersey, where I was then a graduate student. Even the august Richard Nixon weighed in on the side of those who called for Genovese’s immediate dismissal. Governor Richard Hughes stood his ground; his Republican challenger lost; Professor Genovese went on to become one of the most important historians in the United States, if not the most important of his generation. This volume of his shorter writings-- essays, reviews, one polemic and one memoir-- helps explain why. Genovese’s field is the history of the slave South, which he has explored from the point of view of both masters and slaves. This is, evidently, a very treacherous field from an ideological point of view, since it brings Genovese into direct confrontation with the "abolitionist" bias that has informed American historiography for more than a hundred years. His view is not that the slaveholders were uniquely evil, but rather that they were "good and decent people who tried to live decently with their slaves." In this they were doomed to fail, "for at the bottom," he continues, "their relations with their slaves rested on injustice and violence. Therein lay the tragedy that has made them, individually and as a class, the most arresting of Americans."

His fascination with the slavocrats has taken Genovese along some interesting highways and by-ways, and we are offered a fairly broad sample in the essays in this book. Throughout his career he has been concerned with Southern conservatism, the role of religion in antebellum society, the slavocratic intelligentsia and literary class, even with Black nationalism. In recent times he has become interested in the varieties of contemporary American conservatism, about which he has written with occasional sympathy and considerable understanding.

Genovese is also the most readable of American historians. On the subject of liberal Protestant theologians: "As an atheist, when I read much Protestant theology and religious history today, I have the warm feeling that I am in the company of non-believers." On the theological quarrel over slavery in the run-up to the civil war: "The God- fearing southern people turned to the Bible to justify slavery, and the Bible did not disappoint them." On judicial activism: "Why have a Constitution at all, if a majority of an appointed Supreme Court--the organ of state least accountable to public opinion--can make the Constitution say whatever it wishes?" On the Declaration of Independence: "Demonstrably, the signers did not understand the Declaration to mean what modern egalitarians claim it means. It should be enough to recall that a slaveholder wrote it, and that slaveholders signed it." On Western civilization: "Contrary to current lying, [it] has been distinguished not by racism, imperialism, and the denigration of women, which have disfigured all civilizations, but by its extraordinary and partially successful movements of opposition to those enormities." He refers to the American civil war as "the War of Southern Independence." If this is a Marxist, one feels like shouting, then we really must have more of them!

Not that Genovese is a partisan of free-market economics, or at least of unbridled laissez- faire--far from it. In fact, what attracts him to the Southern brand of American conservatism is precisely his view that over the years it has "resisted bourgeois society, its atomistic culture, and its marketplace morality." This explains his generous appraisal of the late M. E. Bradford, and his evident interest in the paleo-conservative journal Chronicles. Of the "emerging global marketplace" he writes: "Animality and filth, like everything else, have become commodities, which people are called upon to tolerate as expressions of freedom and feel free to buy as much as they wish." I hope Genovese will forgive me for saying so, but he is precisely the kind of "aristocratic socialist" Marx and Engels dismissed with the back of their hand as long ago as 1848!

"Genovese has lately come to the attention of American conservatives of all tendencies because of his stout-hearted defense of academic freedom, civility, and ordinary decency in American universities."--Mark FalcoffGenovese has lately come to the attention of American conservatives of all tendencies because of his stout-hearted defense of academic freedom, civility, and ordinary decency in American universities. Evidently he and his wife, the historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, have had quite a time of it at the various places they have taught, at one of which they were even (falsely) accused of forcing graduate students to do their laundry! Of course, one can hardly expect less when one writes passages like these:

Anything that comes with a cri de coeur for the poor, the oppressed, and the downtrodden passes muster and may be expected to be greeted with hosannas, no matter how absurd the arguments and blundering the scholarship.

Academia normally defines as political that which lies beyond its ideological consensus, which is generally though not always accurately perceived as "liberal." And academia defines as objective and scientific that which expresses its own prejudices and viewpoint.

The countless opportunists and careerists who dominate the historical associations call themselves liberals as a matter of political convenience. They went with the McCarthyite flow in the 1950s and go with its leftwing variant today. In the unlikely prospect of a fascist or communist ascendancy tomorrow, they may be counted on to apply for party cards as soon as it looks like a smart move.

Perhaps the most interesting selection in the book is an essay entitled "The Question." It first appeared in the "democratic socialist" journal Dissent, and asks very pointedly, "What did you know [about Soviet Communism], and when did you know it?" Unfortunately, the dozen or so answers that Dissent commissioned are not reproduced here, but after reading Genovese’s challenge many readers will go off to the library in search of them. What an unpleasant read it must have been for all those unctuous, self-congratulatory fools in Dissent’s stage army. Here was Genovese insisting that the moral responsibility for Stalinism falls not just on bona fide members of the Communist Party (like himself) but on liberals, "democratic socialists," "radical democrats," and others--those who "could usually be counted upon to support, ‘critically,’ of course, the essentials of our political line on world and national affairs."

Throughout this essay Genovese offers some tempting autobiographical apercus, some of them consigned to the footnotes. They begin the story of a young Sicilian-American from Brooklyn who joined the Communist movement at age 15, but was expelled from the party at age 20. By his own admission he remained a supporter of the Soviet Union and its international policies "until there was nothing left to support." Nonetheless, Genovese is a towering figure among American historians and intellectuals--an iconoclast whose full autobiography one hopes one day to read. Perhaps sometime soon the professor will turn aside from the history of the American South to produce it.

Mark Falcoff is a resident scholar at AEI.