Eugene Genovese | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Eugene Dominic Genovese (1930-05-19)May 19, 1930 Brooklyn, New York, U.S. |
| Died | September 26, 2012(2012-09-26) (aged 82) |
| Alma mater | Brooklyn College (BA) Columbia University (MA,PhD) |
| Spouse | |
| Awards | Bancroft Prize (1975) |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | University of Rochester Rutgers University Sir George Williams University |
Eugene Dominic Genovese (May 19, 1930 – September 26, 2012)[1] was an Americanhistorian of theAmerican South andAmerican slavery.[2][3] He was noted for bringing aMarxist perspective to the study of power,[2] class and relations betweenplanters and slaves in the South.[3] His bookRoll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made won theBancroft Prize.[4] He later abandoned the left and Marxism and embracedtraditionalist conservatism. He wrote during theCold War and his political beliefs were viewed by some as highly controversial at the time.[2]
Genovese was born on May 19, 1930, inBrooklyn, New York.[2] His father was an immigrantdockworker and Eugene was raised in a working-classItalian American family.[3]
In 1945, at the age of 15, he joined theCommunist Party USA,[3] and was active in the youth movement until he was expelled in 1950, at the age of 20, for disregarding party discipline[3] or, as he said, "for having zigged when [he] was supposed to zag,"[5][6] a decision approved by then communist organiser and later fellow historian of slaveryRobert Fogel.[7] He earned hisBachelor of Arts fromBrooklyn College in 1953 and hisMaster of Arts in 1955 and aPh.D. inhistory in 1959, both fromColumbia University.[8] He taught at another dozen universities, includingYale,Cambridge andRutgers.[8]
He was later discharged from army service for hiscommunist leanings.[3]
Genovese first taught at Brooklyn's Polytechnic Institute from 1958 to 1963. During the early years of theVietnam War, when there was a growing range of opinions about the war and theCivil Rights Movement, he was a controversial figure as a history professor atRutgers University (1963–67), and at theUniversity of Rochester (1969–86), where he was elected chairman of the Department of History.
He was an editor ofStudies on the Left[9] andMarxist Perspectives and was on the editorial board ofScience & Society.[9] He was famous for his disputes with colleagues left, right and center.[5] DefeatingOscar Handlin in 1978, he was elected as the first Marxist president of theOrganization of American Historians. From 1986, Genovese taught part-time at theCollege of William and Mary,Georgia Institute of Technology,University of Georgia,Emory University andGeorgia State University.
In 1998, after moving to thepolitical right in his thinking, Genovese founded The Historical Society, with the goal of bringing together historians united by a traditional methodology.[10]
At an April 23, 1965,teach-in atRutgers University where he was teaching, Genovese stated, "Those of you who know me know that I am a Marxist and a Socialist. Therefore, unlike most of my distinguished colleagues here this morning, I do not fear or regret the impendingViet Cong victory in Vietnam. I welcome it." This comment was widely reported and generated a backlash of criticism. Politicians questioned Genovese's judgment and sensitivity to the responsibility inherent in being a Rutgers professor.Richard M. Nixon, then out of office and living in New York, denounced him, and the Republican candidate for governor of New Jersey,Wayne Dumont, challenging GovernorRichard J. Hughes, used Genovese's statement as a campaign issue, demanding that Hughes dismiss Genovese from the state university. Bumper stickers saying "Rid Rutgers of Reds" popped up on cars across the state. Genovese insisted that he did not mean to say that he hoped American servicemen would be killed. No state laws or university regulations had been broken, and Genovese was supported by fellow faculty members on grounds ofacademic freedom. He was not dismissed from his teaching position.[11]
Rutgers PresidentMason Gross refused to re-examine the university's position, and Dumont lost to Governor Hughes. President Gross' defense ofacademic freedom was honored by theAmerican Association of University Professors, who presented him and Rutgers with itsAlexander Meiklejohn Award in 1966. Genovese moved to Canada and taught atSir George Williams University in Montreal (1967–69). In 1968, Genovese signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.[12]
At the 1969 convention of the American Historical Association, radical historiansStaughton Lynd andArthur Waskow, speaking on behalf of the Radical Caucus, introduced and later withdrew a resolution demanding an end to not only to the war in Vietnam but also to an “immediate end of all harassment of the Black Panther Party”. A substitute resolution introduced by the radical scholarBlanche W. Cook "deplored and condemned" the war and urged withdrawal of all American troops. It was Cook's resolution that eventually came to a vote.
During the discussion on the resolution, Genovese gave a speech, saying that although he opposed the Vietnam war, if the radicals' resolution passed, the bulk of historians in the AHA, who favored the war, would be forced to resign from the group. Noting that the majority of Americans also supported the war, Genovese said that those citizens were as moral and deserving of being heard as the war's opponents. The Radical Caucus, he said, were a bunch of "totalitarians." Genovese ended his speech by saying that the time had come for historians to isolate and defeat the New Left and "put them down, put them down hard, once and for all."[13][failed verification] When the vote was finally taken, the resolution lost, 647 to 611.[13]
Genovese argued that the Southern slaveholders were not rational economic actors and that slavery made the south unable to develop in the same way the Northern states would.[14] This was seen as a restatement, albeit from the left,[15] ofUlrich B. Phillips' thesis that American slavery was a reciprocal if uneven relationship between the slaves and the slaveholders.[16] Genovese's intellectual closeness to Phillips was shown by him quoting Phillips on the front of his first book.[17]
The Political Economy of Slavery[18] was a collection of essays that examined the economic Southern slave economy through aMarxist lens, arguing it waspre-capitalist with apaternalistic ideology[19] that conflicted with thecapitalist norms of the industrial North,[20] agreeing with the more conservative analysis ofUlrich B. Phillips.[21] Genovese contends that the economic logic of slavery was rational within its own context, but ultimately unsustainable due to its resistance to technological progress[22] andinternal contradictions. By redefining scholarly debate on the relationship between capitalism and Southern slavery it remains one of Genovese's most influential works.
In 1968, Genovese wrote a criticalhistoriography of the major studies of slavery in the Americas from ahemispheric perspective.[23] He considered the demand byMarxistanthropologistMarvin Harris inPatterns of Race in the Americas[24] for amaterialist alternative to the idealistic framework of historians such asFrank Tannenbaum,[25]Stanley Elkins,[26] andGilberto Freyre. Tannenbaum had first introduced the hemispheric perspective by showing that the current status of blacks in various societies of the Western Hemisphere had roots in the attitude toward the black as a slave, which reflected the total religious, legal, and moral history of the enslaving whites. Tannenbaum ignored the material foundations of slave society, most particularly class relations. Later students have qualified his perspectives but have worked within the framework of an "idealistic" interpretation. Harris, on the other hand, insisted that material conditions determined social relations and necessarily prevailed over counter-tendencies in the historical tradition. Harris' work revealed him to be an economic determinist and, as such, ahistorical. By attempting to construct a materialism that bypassed ideological and psychological elements in the formation of social classes, he passed into a "variant of vulgar Marxism" and offered only soulless mechanism.[27]
In the 1960s, Genovese in his Marxist stage depicted the masters of the slaves as part of a "seigneurial" society that was anti-modern, pre-bourgeois and pre-capitalist inThe World the Slaveholders Made.[28] In 1970 Stampp's review found fault with the quantity and quality of the evidence used to support the book's arguments.[29] He took issue with the attempt to apply a Marxian interpretation to the Southern slave system.[30]
In his best-known book,Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), Genovese examined the society of the slaves. This book won theBancroft Prize in 1975. Genovese viewed the antebellum South as a closed and organically united paternalist society that exploited and attempted to dehumanize the slaves. Genovese paid close attention to the role of religion as a form of resistance in the daily life of the slaves, because slaves used it to claim a sense of humanity.[31] He redefined resistance to slavery as all efforts by which slaves rejected their status as slaves, including their religion, music, and the culture they built, as well as work slowdowns, periodic disappearances, and escapes and open rebellions.[32] Genovese appliedAntonio Gramsci's theory ofcultural hegemony to the slave South, as well as to Caribbean case studies.[33]
In his 1979 book,From Rebellion to Revolution, Genovese depicted a change in slave rebellions from attempts to win freedom to an effort to overthrow slavery as a social system.[34]
In the 1983 book that he co-wrote with his wife,The Fruits of Merchant Capital,[35] Genovese underscored what he regarded as tensions between bourgeois property and slavery. In the view of the Genoveses, slavery was a "hybrid system" that was both pre-capitalist and capitalist.
InThe Slaveholders’ Dilemma,[36] Genovese explores how antebellum slaveholders sought to reconcile their contradictory commitments to slavery with Enlightenment ideals of liberty and progress. He argued that they could neither fully abandon nor fully integrate the dominantliberalism of the nineteenth century.[37] It was seen as a turn to a greater concentration onintellectual history.[38]
The Mind of the Master Class,[39] analyzes how antebellum Southern slaveholders, through a richly documented survey of their reading, religious beliefs, and political philosophy, constructed a deeply conservative, paternalistic intellectual worldview rooted in classical and Christian traditions to justify slavery while engaging with broader transatlantic and modern debates.[40]
Starting in the 1990s, Genovese turned his attention to thehistory of conservatism in the South, a tradition which he came to adopt and celebrate. He examined theSouthern Agrarians in his studyThe Southern Tradition.[41] In the 1930s, these critics and poets collectively wroteI'll Take My Stand, their critique ofEnlightenmenthumanism. He concluded that by recognizing human sinfulness and limitation, the critics more accurately described human nature than did other thinkers. He argued that the Southern Agrarians also posed a challenge to modern American conservatives who believe in market capitalism's compatibility with traditional social values and family structures. Genovese agreed with the Agrarians in concluding that capitalism destroyed those institutions.[citation needed]
In his personal views, Genovese moved to the right. While he once denounced liberalism from a radical left perspective, he now did so as a traditionalist conservative. His change in thinking included abandoning atheism and re-embracingCatholicism,[42][43] the faith in which he had been raised, in December 1996. His wife, historianElizabeth Fox-Genovese, had also shifted her thinking and converted to Catholicism.[44][45]
In 1969, Genovese married historianElizabeth Fox. She died in 2007 and he published a tribute to her the next year.[46] Genovese died in 2012, aged 82,[2] from a "worsening cardiac ailment" inAtlanta, Georgia.[47]
{{cite book}}:ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)Genovese, the first Marxist to be elected President of the Organization of American Historians, discusses Marxism's changing status on American campuses, and traces his career from his membership in the Communist youth movement to his becoming History Department Chairman at the University of Rochester.
The work of Eugene Genovese is widely perceived within and beyond the historical profession as a product of creative Marxist scholarship, especially now that hisRoll, Jordan, Roll has become for many reviewers "a definitive benchmark in the historiography of slavery." A close analysis of works such asThe Political Economy of Slavery shows his greatest lacunae: the minimizing of the significance of black struggle and the magnifying of whatever elements of passivity can be found among blacks insofar as they actively participated in the Civil War. Accommodation and the plantation as community are overdone themes.online
