Eugene D. Genovese: 1930-2012. Rest in Peace
One of America’s best historians, Eugene D. Genovese, passed away two days ago. He was one of my long-time friends. I knew him when both he and I considered ourselves Marxists, and his scholarship, integrity, forthrightness and outspoken and principled positions made him a figure that everyone had to contend with. Anyone who was lucky enough to have known Gene, even when at times they found themselves on opposite sides from him in a political battle, knows how much they learned from him, and how lucky they were to have had the chance to engage with him.
I will be writing a tribute to him for The Weekly Standard that appears one week from now. But those who want to know about his work and his passion for the truth, should consult the following sites for the first tributes. His family provided an obituary, which outlines the unique nature of his contributions to both scholarship and politics.
Perhaps the most moving tribute to his greatness is provided by Robert P. George, the Princeton University Professor of Jurisprudence and Politics and Director of the James Madison Center. Dr. George speaks eloquently and beautifully about Gene’s vision and his life, and what in particular he delivered to our knowledge about the nature of the slave South in our country’s past, as well as his fierce dedication to the truth that allowed him to break with the Left which for many years provided the framework for his life.
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, his friend and colleague, Mark Bauerlein, sums up Gene’s contribution this way:
Genovese will be remembered for two things that don’t often coexist in figures in our time. First, he was a scrupulous, diligent, and discerning scholar; his work on the antebellum South will stand as a monumental corpus for years to come. Second, outside the classroom and the archive, he was a vigorous partisan, sometimes confrontational, identifying political adversaries and hurling broadsides with Homeric force.
And in the libertarian magazine Reason, Jesse Walker writes that Gene was a “cultural conservative, a sympathetic interpreter of southern traditionalists, and a fierce critic of the academic left. By the P.C. wars of the early ’90s, he was routinely categorized as a man of the right, even though he still considered himself a socialist; by the end of his life, he had contributed to National Review and spoken at the American Enterprise Institute.” Walker is correct to note that at whatever stage Gene was in his political life, he always thought for himself, and never adhered to any party line.
There will be many more tributes as the news gets out of his passing. Gene Genovese was a major figure in American intellectual life, and a warm and decent human being. All of us who knew him will miss him dearly, and those who knew of him only from his writings, also understand what a great loss his passing is to the world of learning. He was, as Robert P. George so aptly says in the conclusion to his speech, a “truth-teller.”
He only began to turn away from Marxism in the 1990s? So basically he’s an idiot. I guess it’s interesting that you wrote the Rosenberg book and etc., but honestly why you write for this blog or consider yourself a person with sound judgment I really can’t understand. Why are so many conservative publications – which I take to simply mean “non-Left” publications – infested with former Communists? Affinity for Communist thought in any of its dimensions is ipso facto proof of a severe defect in judgment that ought under ordinary standards of inquiry to condemn one to obscurity. The entire socialist, materialist, whateverist, addicted-to-isms -ists is violence, deceit, self-deceit, and bad taste. I wish you people would just shut the f- up already, or that someone would shut you up. Haven’t you done enough?
Dan,
You are a very good example of why the hard right base is as big a danger to the conservative movement as the hard left base is to the Democrats, if not bigger. Your view of your perfect understanding of things is not backed up here by a single idea or fact, yet that doesn’t stop you. Your style in fact owes FAR more to the Communist ideologues of the 20th century and their rhetorical thug overkill than anything Genovese ever took from Marxism. It is you, not he, who is the true Stalinst aparatchik here. Genovese was a giant whose ideas, though very far above your reach, you would be advised to spend a lifetime studying in humility before uttering another word.
John Burack,
may be Dan refers to some egregious positions by which Genovese became famous, like when he proclaimed (1965): “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.”
In Dan’s post there is at least a clear fact – namely, he turned conservative in the ’90s. In your post there is nothing. Let’s say that as a “truth-teller” Genovese was a bit slow in grasping the truth.
Having been spat in the face for decades (I am Italian) by enlightened leftists when we told the truth, after having been called fascist all along, I have come to think that, may be, a little humility should be shown sometimes by the other side.
Anyway, the last judgment is in God’s hands, who knows the hearts. May he rest in peace.
Gene’s academic work needed no change in course, Dan, because he practiced history as historians ought to. Sadly rare today. I think it needs to be part of the record that Gene and his wife Betsey embraced Catholicism late in life, thanks to their relationship with an extraordinary student of theirs, the Catholic scholar Sheila O’Connor Ambrose. The two conversion stories are one.
Thanks Jon and Tina,
Obviously, this little tribute did not even make it to PJM’s main page, and the one comment Jon and Tina answered shows that few think it is important to event write about him.
I only wanted to add that Genovese publicly praised William F. Buckley Jr. in 1978, when he was still a Marxist, and wrote twice in those years for National Review.
Dan is the kind of person who would benefit most by reading Genovese, instead of spouting off and showing his own ignorance.
He always infuriated the politically incorrect on the Left- even when he was a man of the Left himself.
Actually, I am right, in point of historical fact. Genoese irritated the Left? Who on the Left DIDN’T irritate someone else on the Left? Do you even understand the movement? The entire enterprise is predicated on a moral arrogance that denies any, not only “humanitarian,” or “humanist,” motives to the other side – it CREATES an “other side” precisely so it can bracket them as incapable of ordinary HUMAN emotions. Only a subverted idiot could fail to reject the entire line of thinking as perverse. I will be glad when all you idiots indoctrinated and corrupted in the 40s and after by the Useful Idiots of the 20s and 30s – enraptured by your own propaganda – are dead. May God forgive you for needlessly f—ing everything up.
While Dan’s argumentative style is, shall we say, brusque — he does touch upon a salient point, and a raw nerve indeed: what is the overall worth of a fellow who trucked with moral contemptibles during a period of time in which it all “mattered” (i.e., during the Cold War, when millions were being slaughtered), and who redeems himself only later, after academic positions (arguably obtained by being reliably leftist) are secured and the dead are all buried?
“Gene’s academic work needed no change in course, Dan, because he practiced history as historians ought to.”
The problem isn’t grasp of history; it’s the *philosophy*.
I enjoy reading the material of reformed communists — as the zeal of a convert is always welcome. However, it will never depart my attention the fact that you could have been so much better, both to yourselves and others, if you’d had your philosophy on solid ground before uttering a word in public.
Case in point: Ayn Rand, who wrote in a howling maelstrom of adversity (to include that of the pompous buffoon Buckley) straight through the Soviet crescendo.