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Historian Harvey J. Kaye on why we need to do more than just “debunk” nationalist myths. We also need to tell great historical stories of our own.
filed in UncategorizedHistorian Harvey J. Kaye has long argued that leftists are too negative about American history, and that our focus on its horrors and miseries risks downplaying the other side of the story: the great radicals in every generation who have fought, and often died, to make the country better, and whose legacy (and unfulfilled mission) we inherit. History is a rich source of inspiration and we have a great deal to gain by studying and learning from the inspiring figures who challenged the unjust social systems of their time, under even more trying conditions than we face today. Kaye recently joined us on the Current Affairs podcast to discuss his work.
Kaye is professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. He is the author of a number of books, including Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great, Why Do Ruling Classes Fear History? and most recently the book Take Hold of Our History: Make America Radical Again. The new book features a blurb from legendary TV producer Norman Lear, creator of All in the Family, who says “no one has ever loved a nation more or spanked it harder for straying from its premise than Harvey Kaye.”
The following transcript has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity.
Robinson
I love that Norman Lear quote because it does really capture one the central themes that runs through all of your work, all of these different books that you’ve put out over the years. They have a common underpinning, which is trying to dig out and redeem what is best and most noble about American history, while as Lear says, spanking the country hard for its various transgressions.
This latest book that you have put out is a kind of recapitulation of this argument. Take Hold of Our History: That title captures something that also comes up in the Thomas Paine book and in the Four Freedoms book. You have that wonderful question: why do the ruling classes fear history? It seems like as a historian, and correct me if this is an unfair or imprecise characterization, you are exasperated by the way that reactionaries seize the story of American history and tell a nationalist myth. They tell a story about the country. In Take Hold of Our History, you have this fascinating chapter about Newt Gingrich, who you almost admire in a certain way. Newt Gingrich has a PhD in history, and you talk about the way that Gingrich weaves this story about the role of religion in American life, and how skillfully he does that. He creates a compelling narrative about America and sells it successfully.
And it seems that a common theme in your work is a frustration that we on the left—who have so many things that we can be proud of in American history—lose sight of all these great people who came before us and this wonderful story that we have to tell. And sometimes we lapse into a cynicism about American history. And we see it as a parade of exploitation and imperialism, which in many ways it is. But we also have this great democratic legacy and tradition that we can, as you say, “take hold of.” Is that fair?
Kaye
It is. Let me just say, I’m old enough to have a past even before Why Do Ruling Classes Fear History?, which was, I think, published in 1994. Just for the record, my childhood hero was Thomas Paine. So we’ll set that out as a marker. But it’s also the case that almost all of my studies—bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD—were in Latin American Studies. And I worked on landlord/peasant relations and things like that. And because of a whole long story that would take us a whole night to discuss, I ended up shifting radically to work on the British Marxist historians. And I published a first book, The British Marxist Historians—which, by the way, is coming out again this spring in a third edition—and it was in the British Marxist historians’ work that I really discovered a sense of how to write history that really did enable me to think about history in a more dialectical and class struggle kind of way. And in that sense, not to assume that the role of the left is simply to debunk, but actually, to ask ourselves: Why do our fellow Americans evidently feel so unsettled and so anxious and increasingly so angry about the state of America? I mean, we can answer that question. If we don’t consider the degree to which—this is going to sound a little culturalist, I admit—we carry a kind of deep cultural memory of the struggles that went into making not only an American republic, but all the more the struggles that in every generation have arisen to challenge the powers that be and make demands for the people, based on the original promise that was inscribed in American history by Thomas Paine and then officially pronounced in the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the Constitution.
I wrote a book about Thatcher and Reagan, The Powers of the Past, in which I actually detail the way in which not only Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan grabbed hold of and made use of and abused British and American history to create a narrative that would obscure the struggles that I thought were important. And then in the 90s, I was pushed by a few of the British Marxist historians themselves saying, why don’t you write American history? Well, I ended up writing about Paine. And what I discovered was that I was wrong, that historians and biographers were wrong about Paine’s place in American history, that he had been so fundamental to the American Revolution, but that his memory had been suppressed for generations. And yet what I discovered—in some ways serendipitously spending all day in a library—is that in every single generation, every struggle that emerged—whether it was the free thinkers, the working mens’ parties, the abolitionists, the suffragists, the populists, the progressives, the socialists, labor unionists, and others—when they asserted themselves in a radical fashion, they often reached back to the American Revolution, and laid claim to Paine himself and Paine’s arguments to validate their claims, not only on the past, but their claims on the future.
And I thought, “Where are we, on the left, that we’ve become so good at debunking and critiquing?” And my generation wrote a lot of history from the bottom up. But why is it that, on the left, whether we’re talking about liberals, progressives, or socialists—why is it that those works have not found their way into the discourse of American politics through those who claim to be progressives? As a friend of mine said, “Why is it that the left refuses to lay claim to the heroes who are rightly theirs?” Why do they feel it necessary to take down the folks who—look, nobody is a saint, okay? We can lay out the names of people who are treated as heroes who weren’t, who were by no means saints. But the left has this instinctive look at history where they want to smack and debunk and deconstruct.
And I’m not saying everyone. But I asked myself the question: “How can this be?” And here’s what I think it is. In the wake of the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, the left was in such retreat, that the instinctive response on a lot of people’s parts was to point fingers at the kinds of things that had been so long suppressed from the schoolbooks such as slavery, the marginalization of women, the suppression of labor movements—all things that we know about, and, by the way, are in the history books today. But it’s the case that the movements on the left will say—call it political correctness in a way—God forbid, somebody should talk favorably about Lincoln. Someone’s gonna say, “But didn’t you know that Lincoln did such and such?” Or about FDR. “Didn’t you know that such and such?” Well, I actually do think that liberal Democratic politicians—especially the neoliberal but liberal, Democratic politicians—ran and continue to run from history. I don’t think it’s just ignorance. I think they just literally run from history, because they’re afraid that Black Lives Matter, or the socialist left, or you know, the women’s movement will take them down. And as a consequence, they turn their backs on a history that also fails to consider the struggles from the bottom up—the struggles of slaves, the struggles of women, the struggles of workers. I can go right through American history.
So I mean, my point was that we have to speak—and I’m saying this in a political way—to the anxieties of our fellow citizens, and let history, in essence, remind them of who they are. We have to master the narrative far more effectively than we’ve done probably since, well, indeed, since FDR.
By the way, I’ll give you a footnote to that. Back in 1986, we were living over in England, and it was election year, ‘87. That summer Labour got walloped by the Tories. Absolutely walloped. Thatcher just triumphed. And I thought to myself, well, when did we hear Labour remind the Brits themselves of their own grand story of struggles, whether going back to the peasant rising or the labor movement? I wrote a piece for the Guardian. I wrote it so effectively that the editor titled it, “Our Island Story Retold,” and it clearly wasn’t my island, but it was the case. And I think that that made me all the more determined to ask similar kinds of questions here in the States.
I’m sorry, I went on so long.
Robinson
That’s a good place to start. Speaking of British Labour in that period, I was recently reading G.A. (Jerry) Cohen’s piece that he wrote in the 1990s about why Labour needed to get back to first principles. And he was looking at some of the arguments that they’d been making, the rhetoric they’d been using. And he pointed out something that recently showed how the Tories were actually raising taxes rather than cutting taxes. And he said, Well, you know, what are you doing with this kind of rhetoric? Well, you’re pointing out the hypocrisy of the other side, but you’re almost reinforcing the idea that raising taxes is a bad thing by establishing yourself in opposition to the hypocrisy of the other side. But what the other side are doing is weaving a narrative, a story, something inspiring. And he said: We need to get back to our socialist principles. We have something that we can be proud of. We have good ideas, we have an inheritance, we have a tradition. There’s so much that we shouldn’t give up in favor of pure critique, because pure critique inspires nobody.
Kaye
I was thinking about this whole idea of critique. This goes back probably to the ‘80s, the Reagan years, and I remembered somebody saying that the left always falls back on critique when it’s out of power. But it never really seeks to remind Americans of a story that would enable them to realize that the way things are is not the way they have to be, that you can critique and just satisfy people’s anxieties by letting them, you know, bellyache about things.
Before we started talking today, I was thinking about this project of mine that I’ve been pursuing all these years. And I was remembering that in the 1920s, the term debunk became part of the political discourse. And there was a popular historical writer who went after the idea that George Washington was the father of our country. And he made the case that it was really Thomas Paine. Now all well and good. But the point is, it’s in the ‘20s when the left really was marginalized. And labor unions had really been pushed aside after World War I. And you had the Red Scare, and then you had the immigration quotas. The left barely existed in the ‘20s. There was the new Communist Party, but the numbers were hardly worth talking about. The socialists were significant, but would never be as significant as they had been when Eugene Debs was alive. And I was thinking it wasn’t interesting. So in the ‘20s debunking became the thing for the left. And then, in the late ‘70s through the ‘80s, we fell back on that again. The tragedy is that we’ve been falling back on it for the last 45 years. On behalf of my fellow left historians from whose generation we call the ‘60s and ‘70s, there’s a hell of a lot of good history that ought to be articulated into a form that politicians on the left—AOC and Bernie—ought to grab hold of.
As much as I love Bernie and I voted for him—in the ‘80s I wondered if I’d ever get to vote for a guy like Bernie Sanders, and then he was on the ballot for the Democratic nomination in 2015-2016—I have a critique of Bernie in those terms. Okay. In 2015, Bernie Sanders was clearly the rising star—he’s not a Democrat with a capital d—but of the Democratic Party. And the Clintonites clearly were worried. However effective the machine might be that they’d created, they were worried. I think it was November of 2015. Bernie went to Georgetown University to give a speech to explain democratic socialism. Now, look, there’s a role for you writing about democratic socialism and Bhaskar [Sunkara] and all the rest of us. But if a politician has to go before the American people to explain what democratic socialism is, we’re in trouble. What I mean by that is, if you’re gonna have to spend part of your time explaining yourself, you’re not going to win the final election.
But more important than that, he did an incredibly amazing and brilliant thing. He linked himself to the tradition of FDR, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the better angels of LBJ’s nature. Now that was marvelous. Then what he did is he grabbed hold of the FDR that most Americans actually, deep down, admire, even if they couldn’t tell you the story of FDR. Okay. So I thought, this will be the turning point. This is where the Clintons will be on the run. And then what did Bernie do? He went back on the campaign trail and never mentioned FDR in any major fashion again. And Hillary, of course, picked on him because instead of Bernie talking about the New Deal and reviving it, he talked about Scandinavia. And she said, “Well, we’re not Denmark.” And she won that debate. And nobody remembers anything about it.
Robinson
Because Americans are suspicious of Europe and know nothing about it.
Kaye
Right. Look, I’ve been living in the Midwest for 40 years. I can tell you, you’re not going to convince any midwesterner, however much they may have Scandinavian roots, to vote for someone who’s gonna pitch a foreign country. Now, let me come to 2019. So now Sanders runs again. Great. And if one looked at his website, one would have said this is the FDR of the 21st century. I mean, it had everything, the labor question, it had the economic Bill of Rights and all that. But out on the campaign trail, he didn’t talk FDR. And I think it was probably November of 2019 when he decided he’s going to explain democratic socialism again. He did the same thing. He made a really great speech. And then he went back out on the campaign trail, and he didn’t pick up on it. And I can tell you that when the debates began, he should have done what Eugene Debs did in 1918, defending himself to the jury. Debs was convicted of sedition under the Wilson administration during World War I. And what he did in his own defense is he stood before the jury, and he actually started to call into the courtroom Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, and Abraham Lincoln. He actually called into the room radical and progressive figures from American history in defense of his own politics and his socialist understanding of the world. Well, Bernie, on that debate stage, every time he spoke of, say, Medicare for All or anything else, the likes of Buttigieg, or Harris, or somebody came at him for being ready to bankrupt the United States. What Bernie should have done is called FDR into the room and reminded the Democrats that if they think they’re the Democrats with a capital d, that he’s the socialist with a capital s, they’re missing out on the fact that he stands alongside the greatest Democratic politician ever.
Robinson
So the argument here would be that instead of saying, “Well, you have all these social democracies in Europe, and they seem to do quite well,” you don’t need look at these other places that Americans don’t know about. In fact, you can appeal to things that Americans have just forgotten in their own past. You can say, “Well, what has actually happened is that the Democratic Party has lost everything that made it worth voting for.” There’s something that we can be proud of, that has been abandoned and betrayed.
I mean, obviously, I really don’t like the word patriotism, because I just think the connotations are so ugly that I never agree with those who say, “Oh, we want the left to reclaim patriotism.” But I do think pride in various parts of the American story and American culture is something that I have. I mean, there’s so much that has just been deliberately suppressed. Of course, you can speak about the radical King. We have this advantage with Martin Luther King, Jr. where he’s been elevated to sainthood, essentially, where no one can speak ill of him. But what they do is they just make sure that nobody actually listens to anything he said, right? But what that means is that we have one of the American saints that you can’t speak ill of who endorses, basically, the entire Bernie program.
Kaye
Two things I’ll remind you of. Do you remember Michael Moore’s film, Where to Invade Next?
Robinson
Yes.
Kaye
Well, most people seem to have missed the point of that movie. He was not praising the Europeans for their innovations in social policy. His whole point of the movie was to say, every one of these things, as a progressive initiative, was rooted actually in the American story. He says it.
Robinson
I remember. If people aren’t familiar with it, Michael Moore basically goes and looks at other countries—he looks at the school lunches in France, and health care in different countries. And he looks at all of these things they have. The title is like, we should invade these countries and take their innovations, but then the twist that he puts on it is, then he comes back to America. He’s like, Well, wait a second, all of these things have deep American roots. And we don’t have to necessarily look around the world. The answer was within ourselves all along.
Kaye
We’re not going to get anywhere telling people how good it is in Sweden. For example, how many people do you think in America would know who the father of Social Security is? And maybe you don’t, either?
Robinson
Who is the father? Thomas Paine?
Kaye
Thomas Paine! “Agrarian Justice.” He begins with the rights of mankind.
Robinson
I want to talk about Thomas Paine. You’re one of the foremost Thomas Paine experts in the country. You’ve written about him extensively. He’s in this new book. And one of the arguments that you make in the piece on Thomas Paine and in the new book is that we need to read Paine and reclaim Paine. And it is absolutely true that, of the Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine is the least discussed, despite being probably the single most influential—or at least a man without whom I think it’s pretty clear the American Revolution would not have happened.
People who discover Paine always all go through this wonderful revelation, where you realize that this person without whom the country would not exist, was so bitingly critical of religions, such a strong defender of democracy, was against slavery. He lacked all of the vices that make so many of the other Founding Fathers such an embarrassment and so difficult to take true pride in—because whatever their accomplishments, it’s very difficult to celebrate anyone who owned human beings. But Thomas Paine is a very different story. And because Thomas Paine is someone you could be proud of, who stood up on principle, there was a deliberate effort to suppress and forget Thomas Paine’s contribution.
Kaye
And if Paine were alive, he would say, “But please understand, what I really did was to show Americans what they were already doing.” In 1774 and 1775, Americans literally rose up and ejected British authority from government roles. And they created committees. It was an anarchist’s dream. The colonials literally established committees to govern themselves through the course of 1775. In fact, the irony is, the first person to realize what was at stake in all of it wasn’t an American. Paine hadn’t even arrived in America, other than some weeks before this speech was given. Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, went before Parliament to warn his fellow parliamentarians and said not to push the Americans any further, that they might realize they’ve already carried out a revolution. Nine months after he gave that speech in Parliament, Paine publishes, with the encouragement of Ben Franklin and others, the call for the revolution.
But even then, the first call in the pamphlet “Common Sense” is to remind Americans that they were instinctively democratic, that humanity is instinctively sociable and democratic, and that it’s the British who have imposed this terrible regime on us. And it’s imperative to get rid of kings and literally create a democratic republic. Paine’s brilliance was that he saw his fellow citizens and held up a mirror to that. To go back to Bernie, Bernie recognized how angry Americans were, and that’s why he harped on the billionaires. What Bernie didn’t do was remind Americans why they might feel that way. Indeed, socialism is back on the agenda in various forms. But in my mind Bernie could have created a narrative that other politicians would have either had to embrace or, literally, switch parties.
Robinson
And by that you mean the idea that we don’t like kings. We’re a country founded in opposition to the rule of kings, and billionaires essentially have become monarchs, right? They are unaccountable, right?
Kaye
Right. Well, even FDR called the likes of the billionaires—the multimillionaires of the ‘30s—he called them economic royalists.
Robinson
Yeah. And drawing that connection in people’s heads between King George and Jeff Bezos can really be quite powerful.
Kaye
Or Donald Trump. A petty king.
Robinson
In a golden tower ruling over you.
Kaye
Yeah. Exactly.
Robinson
There are a number of inspiring things about Paine. As a writer, I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from him because he is someone who is a debunker, right? He essentially debunks the Bible. He goes through and points out all the eternal contradictions meticulously. In “The Rights of Man,” he’s debunking Edmund Burke while writing this takedown of Edmund Burke. But the other thing is that he is a democratic (small d) writer in that he has faith in the public, in a wide public to be able to appreciate sophisticated ideas, and one of the incredibly inspiring things about Thomas Paine’s writings about Common Sense is you realize that this is a guy who did not dumb anything down for people. He had a great faith in people’s ability to understand his argument and he managed to succeed in getting really strong, radical political writing to an absolutely massive audience with actual historical effect.
Kaye
Everyone should realize that he was raised in an artisan household, in the upper reaches of the working class. His father was a corset maker. Paine apprenticed as a corset maker. But it’s also the case that he did attend school up until the age of 13. He loved British literature, Shakespeare, Milton, and Bunyan, apparently, and he actually aspired to be a poet, which did not happen and his poetry is fairly mediocre. But his writing has a poetic character to it. Paine really understood that working-class people were underestimated because he was one of them. And so he knew how to speak in a way that didn’t speak down to people. So the debunking that he does starts by opening with a question of democracy. And he reveals to his readers, who he knows are going to be predominantly Americans, the degree to which what they are already doing is carrying out a revolution for—he never uses the word—democracy. Okay, he actually envisioned a community meeting under a big oak tree to deliberate and create rules that would govern everyday life. And then he goes on to debunk the revered English Constitution, the role that kings have played. He uses reason; he uses history. He uses incredible, even vulgar, humor to pull them down. And then he comes back. He comes back to the people. And, by the way, he drops hints. We should be wary of rich people, too, not just kings. At one point, he says that the rich are afraid. He doesn’t mean they’re afraid to make money. What he means is they’re afraid to say what needs to be said. We need a revolution.
Robinson
One of the pieces of advice you have in the book is that we should read Paine, not just respect Paine. Some of Thomas Paine’s writing is incredible. You really don’t get it until you read it. I am a strong advocate of going back to primary sources because oftentimes historical characters are so much more interesting than the third person description of them. As I was reading Thomas Paine’s writing, I found things about corporations. There’s anti-corporate stuff in there. You mentioned the humor. I’m a big fan of the “snarky parenthetical aside,” and at one point he quotes a Bible passage: “And the Lord ordered all of them slain.” He just puts in a parenthetical: “(the Bible is full of murder).” It’s just so funny, so snarky, so irreverent, and it’s so fresh. And to hear that voice coming to us from hundreds of years in the past is just an amazing feeling.
Kaye
You know, his mother, who was an Anglican, made him memorize the Bible. His father was a Quaker. The Quakers believed in a sort of an inner light. There was this contradiction in the family in terms of religion. And he could probably sense the contradiction. And the more he reads the Bible at his mother’s command, he basically realizes that this can’t be God. He believes in God. He’s young. He thinks God would not be this cruel. He rejects that. Okay. That’s that parenthetical statement about the murderousness. That’s the same Paine who was commanded to read the Bible.
Robinson
He detests the Bible. I mean, what’s so interesting is that he’s scathing about the Bible, and organized religion, but he’s such a strong defender of God. In fact, he says, “There is a Bible, and the Bible is the natural world. We need to be inspired by the world around us, which is what has been actually created or revealed to us by God.” Basically, he doesn’t like the Bible because he finds that it cheapens our wonder at the natural world, at all of creation around us.
Kaye
He says, “My religion is to do good.” And he says, “The model for that is the creation itself, that God, an all-powerful being, created the earth and humanity, and that this was an incredibly generous gift. And we should all take that as an example of what we should be to each other.” I first read The Age of Reason when I was 15. And I remember there was this question: Well, where is God if God created all of this, and what is he or she doing now? Somewhere in The Age of Reason, there is an answer, which is probably what the physicists came to believe. It’s the idea that the universe is expanding, and maybe the creation is continuing. And I do believe that Paine makes a reference to that. It’s just an aside that I remember from when I was 15.
