A Democrat for the Ages
By Benj DeMott
Lawrence Goodwyn—great American historian of democratic social movements (and First friend)—has died.
The Times' respectful obituary covered Larry’s “authoritative” work on American populism, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America, his role in the Civil Rights movement and Texas politics (where he once served as an advance man for Senator Ralph—“Put the jam on the lower shelf where the little man can reach it”—Yarborough) as well as his career in the Academy, where he mentored a generation of young historians who have deepened our understanding of the American experience, from the republic’s founding to the 60s. I was struck, though, by the obit’s next to last graph, which invoked Breaking the Barrier—Larry’s gripping study of the rise of Solidarity in Poland—and then left readers hanging.
It had a one-off quality that hinted the book was a sort of outlier. Since much of Larry’s life-work had roots in the American South—what’s Poland got to do with it? I’m probably projecting—the Timesman may just have been squeezing in one more fact before he faded out. Still the obit left me ruefully thinking about how I’d failed to pick up on Breaking the Barrier when it first came out in 1991 even though my mind had been blown when I’d read The Populist Moment—the abridged version of the seven hundred page Democratic Promise—at the University of Rochester in the 70s. (The Populist Moment was assigned by Christopher Lasch who once told Larry he considered him his Engels—a notion that amused Larry though he thought it a bit rich for Lasch to equate himself with Marx.) Larry’s work on populism not only revived a disappeared American democratic tradition—it offered a fresh approach to political economy that sublated no-future antimonies between corporate capitalism and state socialism.
Breaking the Barrier was another great refusal of dry, quiescent political discourse. Goodwyn not only caught the heated rush of the Polish August but broke it down, telling the truly revolutionary story of how Solidarity happened. My failure to follow up and read Larry’s thrilling “Polish book" back in the day was my bad. But me and other potential readers didn’t get much help from New York intellectuals; Breaking the Barrier was reviewed dismissively in NYRB by Timothy Garton Ash who failed to mention Larry had repeatedly (if gently) cited Ash’s own book, The Polish Revolution, “as an urbane example of the simplistic conventional interpretation of Solidarity, i.e. the presumed causal role played by Warsaw intellectuals in its origins and development.” Larry nailed Ash in NYRB’s letter pages, pointing out the review amounted to “damage control.” http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1991/oct/24/solidaritys-sources/
But that unfair deal went down. NYRB reviews have weight and Larry’s work on Solidarity never got its due. An outcome that didn’t shock him. His book, after all, upheld the idea a people’s politics may hustle and flow beneath the noses of urban intellectuals (who presume to know better whether in New York or Warsaw).
I’m reminded, on that score, of a story he once told about meeting C.L.R. James—another radical thinker at home with folks who lived below (what a genteel voice once termed) “the men who make up your mind.” Larry encountered James in the early 70s at a university conference on the theme “The Year 2000.” The meeting hall was filled with academic stars who sat up front in a sort of inner circle. Larry was placed in the back and his sense of distance increased as he listened to the certified “geniuses.” He wasn’t all alone, though, as he found out when James scribbled a note to him suggesting the only thing the assembled mandarins knew about 2000 was that each hoped to be president of Harvard by then. James kept quiet for the first day or two of the conference. When he finally opened up in public, he began by recalling modern instances when striking steelworkers destroyed machines in British factories and farm workers in Trinidad fired cane fields that provided their livelihood. He pondered aloud if such heavy expressions of alienation might be worth a thought or two as conference panelists tried to project what life might be like in the next millennium. There was a pause—the silence resonated promisingly until…the discourse picked up where it had left off before James posed his question. Larry caught James’s eye and they walked right out of the room to the nearest bar.
Larry told that story when he was having a beer with First’s crew whom he was meeting for the first time. He’d just given a short talk (at a post-2000 election City College conference on Third Parties) where he’d tried to flip scripts of leftist politicos by passing on the key lesson he’d learnt from studying American populists’ methods of recruitment:
There wasn’t anything in my culture that taught me that to build a movement one has to create social relations among people that would cause them to be in a room where politics is the center of discussion. I’d been taught that what mattered is what people said in the room. But the key question is how to get people into the room to hear—and respond—to whatever is being said there.
Larry was out to connect with would-be political organizers, not editors. But his talk had collateral benefits for First. It gave me the democratic logic to back up my once inchoate faith our writers’ collective must let argument breathe. I came to lean on Larry to help explain our rejection of consensual wisdom: “First provides one answer to a question posed by (one of our most important mentors and contributors) Lawrence Goodwyn: ‘Is there a graceful and constructive device by which we can come together and, in ways that enhance all parties, disagree?’ (When Greil Marcus, responding to our new annual volume, affirms: “I love the complete absence of a line,” he’s endorsing a principle that’s long been foundational for First, thanks in part to Larry Goodwyn.)
Larry got a little too fragile to enjoy the frisson of disagreeing with a friend in his last years. So I’ll allow I’m glad we were almost always on the same page in the Age of Obama. He understood Obama’s elections as large democratic achievements—triumphs of the organizing tradition he’d traced in his work on populism and the Civil Rights movement. As a white Southern liberal, he’d seen enough to know (what “every card-carrying white supremacist in the Republican Party knows”): “those are not softballs Obama is throwing.” Yet Larry never forgot economic relationships have a “causative bearing on democratic possibilities” in America (as in all societies around the world). And he realized as long as bankers rule, the party of hope is living on the creative margins. I think he got Obama time’s mix of forward motion and stasis exactly right in an interview he did with Jan Frel for Alternet in 2010 http://www.alternet.org/story/148582/lawrence_goodwyn%3A_the_great_predicament_facing_obama?paging=off¤t_page=1#bookmark. That interview comes close to being his final testament.
Larry didn't have energy to compose anything new for this year’s annual First volume. (He’d been a regular contributor to First since we reprinted excerpts from Breaking the Barrier in our earliest issues.) But his prophetic side is represented in That Floating Bridge, which includes an out-of-left-field First piece he wrote in 2004 (before Obama’s epic Convention speech) that called attention to the Democrats’ rising star in Illinois and to the passing of another exemplary democrat, Poland’s Jacek Kuron.
Larry dug the young Obama because the candidate broke rules of spin: “he does not see political recruitment as requiring the fabrication of constant agreement.” Obama’s liberal-minded readiness to hear and respond outside the box linked him to Kuron in Larry's head since the Pole’s “enduring democratic legacy is his commitment to candor as an instrument of politics and his belief one worked with anyone who was willing to help one deal with a persisting social malfunction inherited from the past.” Ten years on, it seems Obama is still in Kuron’s tradition.
Larry extolled Kuron for being willing, unlike most intellectuals, to cop to what he couldn’t comprehend. Kuron famously said about Solidarity’s rise: “I thought it was impossible. It was impossible. I still think it was impossible.” Goodwyn noted this “unsolicited burst of Kuronesque candor” distanced Kuron from more vainglorious Polish intellectuals who imagined themselves as Solidarity’s vanguard (though they were just as clueless as Kuron when it came to understanding the movement’s self-organization). Kuron’s comment endeared him to Solidarity’s working class heroes like Lech Walesa who “thereafter relied on Kuron, among others, to interpret the utility of Warsaw types…”
Indeed, upon hearing of Kuron’s death, Walesa used Kuronesque language for repayment. Kuron was indispensable, he said. Solidarity was “impossible” to imagine without him. Polish speak.
Let us now praise famous Poles!? Larry's realized Solidarity's "Polish speak" wasn't that far gone from southern accents of down home folk in America's provinces. His faith in democratic conversations was founded on a feeling for the dignity of everyday people everywhere. He credited his father, a military man and New Deal fan, with nurturing respect for self and others. Along with advice on First, Larry passed on parenting tips he got from his pop. I valued, in particular, a lesson he’d been taught after he’d screwed up one time as an adolescent. Larry had come home with his buddies in a trashed car that he hadn’t been supposed to drive in the first place. He expected his pop would chew him out. But it didn’t happen. When Larry asked his pop why he’d kept cool, his pop said: “Never embarrass your son in public.” Good counsel I’ve tried to live by with my son.
I’m reminded just now of my own dad’s responsiveness to Larry’s example. Back in the 80s, Larry’s work on populism informed my dad’s review of Ronald Steele’s fine biography of Walter Lippman, enabling him to zero in on the anti-democratic nature of Lippman’s template for mainline political commentary. About 20 years later, I told my dad to check Breaking the Barrier’s “Critical Essay on Authorities”—a brilliant summative appendix analyzing how/why intellectuals have misinterpreted social movements—since it was relevant to what he was writing on at the time. My dad read that appendix and immediately went back and read the entire volume (though he was dead-lining himself). When he was done, he mused to me in a voice that took in the wackness of it all—how could there have been no prizes for that book?
I told him the tale of Ash. But—let that go—prizes are ashes.
Larry Goodwyn’s work is alive and burning.
.
From October, 2013
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