The Stange Career of Eugene Genovese

Historian Eugene Genovese died last week at the age of 82, and Steven Hahn as an excellent obituary in The New Republic. Genovese wrote several fine books about the American South, of which my favorite is Roll, Jordan, Roll: the World the Slaves Made (1974). This is the best book I have read on American slavery, packed from end to end (and it is very long) with facts of every sort. Genovese also wrote with great insight about the slave owners, especially in The Political Economy of Slavery (1965) and The Mind of a Master Class (2005), co-authored with his wife, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. In the 1960s Genovese was an avowed Marxist, and he once imperiled his academic career by publicly celebrating a Viet Cong victory over US troops. Yet the harshest criticism of Genovese's early work came from the left, and it amounted to the charge that me made American slavery out to be too nice, and too successful. Roll, Jordan, Roll is about accommodation: the accommodation the slaves and their owners reached over labor and living conditions, and the accommodations the slaves made to their lives as human chattel. It is much concerned with religion, and it is possible to come away from some parts of the book with the impression that slaves were able to construct meaningful, fulfilling lives. Genovese's work on slave owners seemed to some people downright apologetic, since he worked very to understand how they justified their situation. This justification, he argued, was rooted in their rejection of commercial capitalism; they saw themselves as leading a more noble, less crass way of life, in which human connections mattered more than cash.

How is a scholar's work related to his politics? Genovese's career offers a fascinating perspective, because over the course of the 1970s he abandoned Marxism and turned toward the right. He did not embrace capitalism, however; instead he turned toward conservative Catholicism and its corporatist critique of commercial society. He and his wife were remarried in the Catholic church and became active in anti-abortion circles. Genovese found himself abandoned by his old political allies and embraced by Southern conservatives, even speaking a few times to audiences of Lost Cause apologists and white supremacists.

What happened? Did those leftists critics of Roll, Jordan, Roll see something in it that I missed, a longing for a world rooted in eternal truths instead of market fluctuations? Was his involvement in Marxism a sort of training for a longer-lasting commitment to the Catholic church, both causes an expression of Genovese's need for an over-arching intellectual framework that would give meaning to his work? Did he come to think that the slave owners were onto something, or was he drawn to them in the beginning because he shared their view of nineteenth-century capitalism?

Of course the Genoveses were not the only left-wing intellectuals who moved to the right after 1970. This was part of the general collapse of left's ambition to remake the world, but it also derived from the failure of many particular leftist initiatives. As a critique of capitalism, the culture of the 60s failed miserably. All its tropes were readily appropriated by savvy marketers pushing new lines of consumer goods (think The Love Bug). Feminism came to mean mostly the right of women to work in the same corporate jobs as men, a victory for equality but at the price of enmeshing yet more people in capitalism's web. People who really wanted a society not dominated by commerce moved out of the leftist mainstream, either toward radical environmentalism or into religious fervor. There was also an aesthetic revulsion on the part of many intellectual Marxists to the reality of the 60s; instead of a more pure and less selfish world we got dirty hippies, race riots, and a surge in out-of-wedlock births, and the disgust these inspired drove many fastidious leftists back to the right. Like many others, the Genoveses found that traditional religion offered a more persuasive alternative to consumer society than Marxism had -- and fortunately for their marriage, they traveled this path together.

Pondering all this, I turn my mind back to Roll, Jordan, Roll. To me, it is simply a great work of scholarship, distilling a staggering amount of learning into a book I greatly enjoyed reading. I refuse to see it as a political manifesto. Everyone has politics, and sometimes they very much get in the way of studying history. But Genovese's politics seem to have driven him to understand the world of slaves and slaveowners on their own terms, and that sort of coincidence is something we can only celebrate.