The American Radical.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Brief Article

This is a useful biographical primer on forty-six individual radicals throughout American history--including Tom Paine, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglas, Eugene V. Debs, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Emma Goldman, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Mother Jones, Woody Guthrie, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. The editors have assembled some of the best left-wing historians practicing today to write the sketches. I especially enjoyed Thomas C. Holt's piece on Du Bois and Staughton Lynd's on A.J. Muste since the authors added their own personal accounts of these men or their times. This is an ideal book to acquaint high-school or college students with the rich tradition of American radicalism, and it is a handy guide for leftists of any age.

But I have two problems with it. First, it is lopsided in favor of radicals in the Nineteenth and the first two-thirds of the Twentieth Century. This slights the insurgents and insurgencies of the last twenty-five years. After Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. (where, by the way, is Fannie Lou Hamer?), the book has only three entries: Michael Harrington, Abbie Hoffman, and Audre Lorde. I longed to read about Cesar Chavez...