Eugene D. Genovese

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Eugene Dominic Genovese (born May 19, 1930) is a noted historian of the American South and American slavery.

Genovese was born in Brooklyn and was awarded a BA from the Brooklyn College in 1953, an MA from Columbia University in 1955, and a PhD in 1959. Genovese taught at the Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn from 1958 to 1963. He was a highly controversial history professor at Rutgers University (1963-1967), and at the University of Rochester (1969-1986). From 1986 onwards, Genovese taught part-time at the Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Georgia, Emory University and Georgia State University. In 1969, he married the historian Elizabeth Fox.

Raised in a working class family in Brooklyn, he was active in the Communist youth movement until he was expelled "for having zigged when I was supposed to zag." He was an editor of Studies on the Left and Marxist Perpectives. He was famous for his disputes with colleagues left, right and center.[1] He became the first Marxist president of the Organization of American Historians defeating Oscar Handlin. In 1998, after moving to the right, he founded The Historical Society, with the goal of bringing together historians united by a traditional methodology.

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[edit] Supporting the Viet Cong

At Rutgers, his call for supporting the Viet Cong led state politicians to call for his ouster from his position at New Jersey's premier public university. At a teach-in on April 23, 1965, 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 impending Viet 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. However, no state laws or university regulations had been broken, and Genovese was supported by fellow faculty members on grounds of academic freedom. He was not dismissed from his teaching position.

A gubernatorial candidate that year, Wayne Dumont, who was challenging Governor Richard J. Hughes, used Genovese's statement as a campaign issue. However, Rutgers President Mason Gross refused to re-examine the issue, and Dumont lost to Governor Hughes. President Gross's defense of academic freedom was recognized by the American Association of University Professors, which presented Rutgers with its Alexander Meiklejohn Award in 1966. Genovese moved to Canada and taught at Sir George Williams University in Montreal (1967-1969).

[edit] Slavery Studies

Genovese, in 1968, provided a critical historiography of the major studies of slavery in the Americas from a hemispheric perspective. He considers the demand made by Marxist anthropologist Marvin Harris in The Nature of Cultural Things (1964) for a materialist alternative to the idealistic framework of Frank Tannenbaum, Stanley Elkins, Gilberto Freyre, and others. Tannenbaum first introduced the hemispheric perspective by showing that the current status of blacks in the various societies of the Western Hemisphere has roots in the attitude toward the black as a slave, which reflects the total religious, legal, and moral history of the enslaving whites. However, 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, insists that material conditions determined social relations and necessarily prevailed over counter-tendencies in the historical tradition. Unfortunately, Harris' work reveals him to be an economic determinist and, as such, ahistorical. By attempting to construct a materialism that bypasses ideological and psychological elements in the formation of social classes, he passes into a "variant of vulgar Marxism" and offers only soulless mechanism.

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. In his best known book Roll, Jordan, Roll (1974), Genovese examined the world of the slaves. Genovese saw the ante-bellum South as a closed and organically united paternalist society that cruelly exploited and attempted to dehumanize the slaves. Genovese paid close attention to the role of religion in the daily life of the slaves as a form of resistance because it gave the slaves a sense of humanity. He redefined resistance to slavery as any effort on the part of the slaves to give themselves humanity and thus implicitly rejecting their status as slaves. Genovese applied Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony to the slave south.

He placed paternalism at the center of the master-slave relationship. Both masters and slaves embraced paternalism, though for different reasons and with varying notions of what paternalism exactly meant. For the slaveowners, paternalism allowed them to think of themselves as benevolent and to justify their appropriation of their slaves' labor. Paternalist ideology, they believed, also gave the institution of slavery a more benign face and helped deflate an increasing abolitionist critique of the institution. Slaves, on the other hand, recognized that paternalist ideology could be twisted to suit their own ends, by providing them with improved living and working conditions. Slaves struggled mightily to convert the benevolent "gifts" or "privileges" bestowed upon them by their masters into customary rights which masters would not violate. The reciprocity of paternalism could work to the slaves' advantage by allowing them to demand more humane treatment from their masters.

In 1970, Stampp reviewing Genovese's The World the Slaveholders Made (1969) found fault with the quantity and quality of the evidence used to support the book's arguments. He also took issue with the attempt to apply a Marxian interpretation to the Southern slave system.

Religion was an important theme in Roll, Jordan, Roll and other studies. Genovese argued that paternalism was the key to understanding the slaveholding class. Evangelicals recognized slavery as the root of Southern ills and sought some reforms, but no substantial change, of the system. Genovese's contention was that after 1830 southern Christianity became part of social control of the slaves. Furthermore, he argued, the slaves' religion was unconducive to millenarianism, hence to a revolutionary political tradition.

King (1979) argued that Genovese incorporated the theoretical concepts of certain 20th-century revisionist Marxists, especially the ideas of Antonio Gramsci and his construct of hegemony. Genovese's analysis of slavery, the blacks, and the American South elicited criticisms of various portions of his exceedingly important historical contributions. Areas of criticism include Genovese's placing of the master-slave relationship at the center of his interpretation of the American South, his views on southern white guilt over slavery, his employment of Gramsci's construct of hegemony, and his interpretations of southern white class interests, slave religion, the strength of the slave family, the existence of slave culture, and the generation in antebellum times of black nationalism.

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. In the 1983 book he co-wrote with his wife, The Fruits of Merchant Capital, 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-capitalistic and capitalistic.

[edit] Turn to the Right

Starting in the 1990s, Genovese turned his attention to the history of conservatism in the South, a tradition that Genovese came to celebrate more and identify with. In his study, The Southern Tradition: the Achievements and Limitations of an American Conservatism, he examined the Southern Agrarians, critics who collectively wrote I'll Take My Stand, their critique of Enlightenment humanism. Genovese concluded that by recognizing human sinfulness and limitation, the critics more accurately described human nature. The Southern Agrarians, he noted, also posed a challenge to modern American conservatives, with their mistaken belief in market capitalism's compatibility with traditional social values and family structures. It destroys them. In his personal views, he has moved sharply to the right. Where he once denounced liberalism from a radical left perspective, he currently does so as a traditionalist conservative. In December 1996, Genovese converted to Roman Catholicism, following the conversion of his wife Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.

[edit] Works

  • The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and the Society of the Slave South, 1965.
  • "Materialism and Idealism in the History of Black Slavery in the Americas." Journal of Social History 1968 1(4): 371-394. ISSN 0022-4529
  • In Red and Black: Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History, 1968.
  • The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation, 1969.
  • Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, 1974.
  • with Elizabeth Fox Genovese, "The Political Crisis of Social History: A Marxian Perspective", Journal of Social History, 10 (1976), pp. 205-20.
  • From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World, 1979.
  • co-written with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism, 1983.
  • The Slaveholders' Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820-1860, 1992.
  • The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism, 1994.
  • The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Cultural War, 1995.
  • co-written with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class : History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview, 2005

[edit] Endnotes

  1. ^ Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession (1988) p 412

[edit] References

  • Ansart, Dorothy and Judith Grier, "Inventory to the Records of the Office of Public Information on the Vietnam War Teach-Ins, 1965-1966," [1], accessed visited Nov. 24, 2005.
  • Boles, John & Nolen, Elelyn Thomas (editors) Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honour of Sanford W. Higginbotham, Louisiana State University Press, 1987.
  • Davis, David Brion "Southern Comfort" New York Review of Books, October 5, 1995. pages 43-46
  • Davis, David Brion. In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery (2001) 110-120.
  • King, Richard H. "Marxism and the Slave South: a Review Essay." American Quarterly 1977 29(1): 117-131. ISSN 0003-0678 Fulltext in Jstor
  • Kolchin, Peter. "Eugene D. Genovese: Historian of Slavery." Radical History Review (2004) no. 88, 52-67.
  • Linden, Adrianus Arnoldus Maria van der. A Revolt Against Liberalism: American Radical Historians, 1959-1976 (1994) pp 167-220.
  • Livingston, James. "'Marxism' and the Politics of History: Reflections on the Work of Eugene D. Genovese." Radical History Review (2004), no. 88 pp 133-53.
  • Meier, August & Elliott, Rudwirck Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915-1980, University of Illinois Press, 1986.
  • Parish, Peter Slavery: History and Historians, New York: Harper, 1989.
  • Radosh, Ronald. "An Interview with Eugene Genovese: the Rise of a Marxist Historian." Change 1978 10(10): 31-35. ISSN 0009-1383 Abstract: 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.
  • Roper, John Herbert "Marxing through Georgia: Eugene Genovese and Radical Historiography for the Region" pages 77-92 from the Georgia Historical Quarterly, Volume 80, 1996.
  • Shalhope, Robert E. "Eugene Genovese, the Missouri Elite and Civil War Historiography" pages 271-282 from Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society, Volume 26, July 1970.
  • Shapiro, Herbert. "Eugene Genovese, Marxism, and the Study of Slavery." Journal of Ethnic Studies (1982_ 9(4): 87-100. ISSN 0091-3219. Abstract: The work of Eugene Genovese is widely perceived within and beyond the historical profession as a product of creative Marxist scholarship, especially now that his Roll, Jordan, Roll has become for many reviewers "a definitive benchmark in the historiography of slavery." A close analysis of works such as The 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.
  • Stampp, Kenneth M. "Interpreting the Slaveholders' World: a Review." Agricultural History 1970 44(4): 407-412. ISSN 0002-1482
  • Steirer, William F. "Eugene D. Genovese: Marxist-Romantic Historian of the South" pages 840-850 from the Southern Review, Volume 10, 1974.

[edit] External links