A survey of Chandler Davis

Left History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Historical Inquiry and Debate, 1999

Immediately following World War I, organizations based primarily on race or class generally precluded serious interracial organization and theoretical analysis of the interplay between racial and class-based discrimination. Marcus Gamey captured the imagination of the New Negro in his quest to build an Africa for Africans, but his venture, the United Negro Improvement Association, quickly became mired in scandal, and Gamey's pandering to capitalists alienated him from more class conscious black liberationists. The Socialist Party offered a place for African Americans to work with whites to fight against capitalism, but it did not hlly integrate the problem of racism into its understanding of class struggle. The American Communist party challenged the duality represented by the Garveyites and the Socialists. Founded in 19 19, the American party took nine years to formulate its thinking on the role of racism within a capitalist society. But at its Sixth Congress, in 1928, the Communist party finally committed itself to its line on self-determination in the Black Belt. This theory's creation and the activity and discussion that it generated began a groundbreaking interracial movement based upon the idea that the struggle against racism was a precondition to class unity. By examining the complex relationship between the American Communist party and African Americans, Mark Solomon's The Cly Was Unity induces readers to rethink the historical connection between race and class and its relevance to today's society. This book, the first in a promised two-volume series, integrates first-rate interviews and archival materials with rich sources gleaned from the Communist International's archives in Moscow. In fact, this is the first book to incorporate materials from the Comintern's archives into an analysis of the relationship between African Americans and the Communist party. These revealing sources provide both national and international perspectives on the issues of race and class, placing Solomon at the center of the ongoing debate concerning the nature of American communism. To this end, Solomon deftly challenges the two schools of thought cm American communism and argues for a new paradigm. The first group of scholars, including Irving Howe, Lewis Coser, Theodore Draper, and Hawey Klehr, interpreted all aspects of internationalism with negative moral

Berghahn Books, 2023

Historians of immigration and ethnicity in the United States have typically devoted little attention to Greek Americans, while popular narratives depict them as indifferent or hostile to political and social radicalism. From acclaimed historian Kostis Karpozilos, Red America provides an alternative narrative of the Greek American experience. Focusing on the history of the Greek American Left from the beginning of the twentieth century to the Cold War, this volume uncovers the threads that bound notions of radical social change to everyday immigrant life, tracing ethnic radicalism from the boundaries of a specific community to the epicenter of American social and political history.

1999

This paper will examine Mexican American labor activism between 1940 and 1957 in Southern California by exploring some key issues and political conflicts in the life of Ralph Cuaron. As a member of the Communist Party (CP) and an activist in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CJO), he was a critical element in the Mexican American community nurturing leadership and laying the groundwork for political activism. Cuaron is representative of the generation that took the mantle of leadership in the period between the 1930s and the 1950s as a personal challenge to transform economic and political conditions of Mexican Americans. And, yet, Cuaron’s project was not so narrowly defined that it excluded all but Mexican Americans Cuaron was ultimately concerned for the plight of the working man and woman. He had joined the CP because of its belief in the potential of the working-class to transform society and make it more democratic and egalitarian. By the end of 1957 however, Cuaron wa...

American Communist History, 2019

I want to thank the executive committee, and especially Vernon Pederson, for asking me to speak to today and to everyone who came from far and wide to participate in this important conference. We are here today because we understand that when we research and write about American communism, we are entering an arena where the stakes are high: wars hot and cold have been fought, people gave their lives, others had them taken; and untold money was spent for the cause and to defeat the party altogether. In the end, the movement had an enormous impact on America's political shift to the right as well as on movements that flourished on the left. And today, in Trump's America, the history of American communism resonates. In the weeks leading up to the mid-term election, the Trump administration released a 72page report published by the Council of Economic Advisors attacking socialism. The report threatened that a democratic sweep in the midterms would likely result in the USA "becoming the next Venezuela." The report honed in on the likelihood that democrats would force government run healthcare down the throats of American citizens, ultimately draining national coffers. A sub section of the report titled: "The Socialist Economic Narrative: Exploitation Corrected by Central Planning" connects the messaging of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren with Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong. The Socialism that appears un-American in the depictions offered by Trump and his followers, takes on a different cast among today's socialists who are inspired by Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders campaign. The Democratic Socialists of America, now larger than the Socialist Party ever was, and approaching the numbers of the Communist Party, are looking to the history of socialism generally, and the American Communist party specifically, and they are asking questions about what worked in the past and what didn't. They want to learn from the Old Left's organizing strategies and world view and to understand why the USA and the anti-communist left turned so fiercely on communists. The significance of our work is clear. So is its timeliness. In the USA and across the globe, rural and urban communities are confronting challenges brought by globalization, ethnic and racial nationalism and

The American Sociologist, 2022

This article addresses the sociological approach and political engagements of the early twentieth century sociologist, Herbert Adolphus Miller (1875–1951). He is now largely forgotten, but he had deep connections within the Chicago milieu of pragmatist sociology and social reform activities through both the Settlement movement and the Survey movement. In 1914 he wrote a volume in the Cleveland Survey on Immigrant children in the school system and in 1918 was appointed to head the division on Immigrant Contributions in the Carnegie Corporation’s project on ‘Methods of Americanization’, in which Robert E. Park was head of the division on Immigrant Press and Theater (Park in The Immigrant Press, 1922). If Miller’s name is recognized at all it is as author with Park of Old World Traits Transplanted (1921), a work subsequently attributed to W. I. Thomas. We examine the nature of Miller’s research on immigrant populations from subject nationalities in Europe, undertaken in Cleveland and a...

Syracuse University Magazine, 2013

Education and Culture, 2006

2018

Seiler 4 (and African Americans and Native Americans) from mainstream America-race, ethnicity, gender, religion, citizenship and the rights therein-are only important because of the political consequences associated with difference. As seen in Chicago, New York, and other high population areas across the United States, political machines and voter fraud were growing problems of the period. But in an era where most women (with the exception of Wyoming) were not allowed to vote, and African Americans, through grandfather laws and literacy tests, were often prevented from voting, the issue of the vote had less to do with illegal activity and more to do with legally allowed activity. My research in Chicago, while focused on education reform and progressive era reformers, tended to pull towards topics of difference. Hull House was a hub of reform activity in Chicago: it was close to the Haymarket Street Riot, both in location and association; it became a center for labor and union meetings, including the United Garment Workers' Association of America; and Jane Addams and other associates of Hull House spoke out strongly against many of the problems facing Chicago at that time, including the Pullman Strike and the 1894 trial of Eugene V. Debs. Hull House's close association with John Dewey, renowned education reformer, and interest in education, holding classes and lectures for children and adults in need within its walls, made Hull House and social workers an important part of the education reform, kindergarten, and public playground movements. Race, ethnicity, gender, and religion were and are important politically because these were areas of identifiable difference which helped to shape citizenship arguments. Class was also an identifiable difference between most "native" Americans and immigrants. A common parable is that where a rich man gives a dime, a poor man gives a dollar. In combination with the uncharitable anti-immigrant and anti-working poor attitudes held by many of the rich, voter Seiler 5 discrimination, both legal and illegal, only accentuated the class divide and caused more social insecurity for working-class Americans, immigrants, and people of color. This insecurity and distrust often culminated in violent frustration such as the events at the Pullman Strike and the Haymarket Square Riot. Historiography: Questions of Citizenship: Citizenship is a topic that ties in directly with immigration, and so is frequently discussed alongside it. Tova Cooper's Th e Autobiography of Citizenship: Assimilation and Resistance in US. Education describes the generational problems between immigrants and their rapidly Americanizing children, as well as some of the systems put into place by school systems which encouraged immigrant children to Americanize. 2 Cooper organizes these ideas by ethnic groups, including Native Americans and African-Americans. Additionally, Guarding the Golden Door by Roger Daniels, discusses immigration restriction, beginning with the founding fathers. 3 The political means of exclusion necessarily denote intense discussion of citizenship, and Daniels argues that a dueling nature between America's immigrant past and present, between American immigrants (non-Native Americans) with citizenship and those without further intensified these discussions.

History and Theory, 2003

Lee Benson was one of the first American political historians to suggest a "systematic" revision of traditional political history with its emphasis on narrow economic class analysis, narrative arguments, and over-reliance on qualitative research methodologies. This essay presents Benson's contributions to the "new political history"-an attempt to apply social-science methods, concepts, and theories to American political history-as a social, cultural, and political narrative of Cold War-era American history. Benson belonged to a generation of ex-Communist American historians and political scientists whose scholarship and intellectual projects flowed-in part-out of Marxist social and political debates, agendas, and paradigmatic frameworks, even as they rejected and revised them. The main focus of the essay is the genesis of Benson's pioneering study of nineteenth-century New York state political culture, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, with its emphasis on intra-class versus inter-class conflict, sensitivity to ethnocultural determinants of political and social behavior, and reliance on explicit social-science theory and methodology. In what follows, I argue that The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy has its roots in Benson's Popular Front Marxist beliefs, and his decade-long engagement and subsequent disenchantment with American left-wing politics. Benson's growing alienation from Progressive historical paradigms and traditional Marxist analysis, and his attempts to formulate a neo-Marxism attentive to unique American class and political realities, are linked to his involvement with 1940s radical factional politics and his disturbing encounter with