Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Hobson, Christopher Z.

and affirming that Black and Native Americans surely support their armed strug-
gle. Mead, who opined that the brigade would “totally bypass the left,” summed
up the feeling of resentment: “There’s two kinds of people-there’s those doing
armed work, and they can take all the risks and make the sacrifices and we can
sit back and criticize them... [W]e can just go about our work and revolution is
some nebulous hope or passing fad” (200)
Burton-Rose’s lack of criticism of this armed work limited the book’s
appeal for me. Although the author disapproves of some of the brigade’s more
boneheaded moves, he appears to only sympathize with left-wing critics who
supported domestic armed struggle, like the Left Bank Collective or the Coven.
The book reaches its nadir on this score in a chapter centred on an underground
press article critical of the brigade. There, Burton-Rose records the criticisms of
members and supporters of the brigade, bookended with his own critique of the
article, which includes language and political arguments reminiscent of the circa-
1970s urban guerrillas he portrays.
I have to disagree with Burton-Rose. I do believe that it is easier to rob
banks and bomb buildings than to change people’s minds about capitalism and
organize workers. And despite claims for the brigade’s anti-vanguardism, I am
convinced that this is endemic to urban guerrilla struggle, whether Leninist or
not, as glimpsed at in the brigade’s dismissal of much of the left and in state-
ments like: “[N]o more mass meetings stalemating action” (179). But for all this
criticism, the book is a must read for anyone with a critical eye who wants to
change the world and avoid the dead ends of the past. As a communiqué by the
brigade put it: “There are two things to remember about revolution: we are
going to get our asses kicked, and we are going to win” (237) 
Peter Graham
Queen’s University
Barbara Foley, Wrestling with the Left:  The Making of Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
In August 1968, I took part in a bus drivers’ strike at the Chicago Transit
Authority, where I had a summer driving job. Picketing and rallies provided the
chance to speak with drivers I had known only casually. One was a Black man,
about fifty, who turned out to have been active in the great 1937 Flint sit-down
that unionised General Motors. “I worked with the Socialists”, he recalled.
“Communists, too. I was pretty much in with them, until I realised they cared
more about themselves than us”.
My friend’s comment reflects a collective intellectual shift by thousands of
young Black workers and activists attracted to the Communist Party (CP) in the
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1930s. Barbara Foley’s study of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, on the other hand,
recognises no such shift or any reason for one. Foley presents the most benign
version of the CP’s behavior — its policies were largely correct except for its
wartime subordination of Black and class struggle, a brief deviation corrected
and “acknowledged” after criticism (63-64, 318). Foley portrays the party’s
healthy leftism by mentioning, for example, that Paul Robeson performed Soviet
along with US folk songs, showing “the internationalism embedded in people’s
cultures everywhere” (81). Those aware of Stalin’s repression of national minori-
ties and Jews in the 1930s and 1940s will understand Robeson as politically naïve
or willfully blind. Foley’s naïveté in 2010 is another matter.
Given this view of the CP, Foley believes Invisible Man’s anticommunism
must represent not a turn in Black radical consciousness but a personal accom-
modation born of ambition and conformism. Her pursuit of this thesis has two
parts, both archivally based: a study of Ellison’s early writings and political devel-
opment, and an analysis of Invisible Man’s textual evolution.
Foley’s account of Ellison’s changing politics is flawed by an effort to sep-
arate an earlier Ellison critical of CP actions but still pro-Marxist from a later
one whose “programmatic anticommunism” emerged “in the late 1940s, and not
before” (17). This picture bifurcates a continuous intellectual development in
order to show Ellison as jumping on the cold war bandwagon. To this end Foley
avoids commenting on some early Ellison statements, such as a 1945 comment
to Kenneth Burke that the CP’s whole direction was wrong “since 1937”, long
before the wartime errors Foley recognises (64). She never mentions others, such
as Ellison’s 1945 words to Richard Wright in relation to the CP, “I would like
very much to talk with you concerning independence of thought”, which crystal-
lize Ellison’s growing sense of the party’s hostility to such thought.1 And while
considering Ellison a “cold warrior” (20), Foley ignores recent scholarship that
finds his relation to liberal ideas more complex and critical than she assumes.2
The study of Ellison’s drafts is valuable, if flawed. Foley reconstructs in
plausible if partial detail the evolution of major episodes such as the eviction,
the subway experience after Tod Clifton’s murder, and the confrontation in
which Brother Jack’s glass eye pops out; transformations of some characters and
omission of others; and the omission of whole text threads, notably one involv-
ing the journals of a young Marxist roomer at Mary Rambo’s. These reconstruc-
tions show that early drafts were more Marxist, and also more naturalistic in
method than Invisible Man’s final text. “These unpublished materials”, Foley says,
“ indicate the very different novel that Ellison might have written, indeed, started
to write” (12). It is fair to say Foley wishes he had, in fact, written this novel: her
discussion of the final text is unremittingly harsh, discounting it as a cold war
tract.
While focusing on the novel’s evolution away from Marxism, Foley fails to
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consider at all its evolution toward theorizing African Americans’ position in the
United States. Foley does not ask, for example, when Ellison introduced to the
eviction scene the two-page catalogue of the Provos’ possessions — emblemati-
cally representing African Americans’ mixed identity — or, in the subway scene,
the concluding Harlem street tableau indicating that this identity has depth and
complexity the Brotherhood cannot see (240–45, 302–5). Foley’s treatment of
the protagonist’s final meditation on his grandfather’s dying words (338) never
discusses Ellison’s affirmation of the US “principle” and doesn’t relate it to the
strategic conception — central to African American history since Douglass — of
using the US constitution as a weapon for struggle. Indeed, in a basic way,
Invisible Man’s quality as a representation of specifically African American experi-
ence is not very important to Foley.
Wrestling with the Left adds detail to our knowledge of Ellison’s early period
and of his novel’s evolution. But its analysis of political contexts is naïve, its the-
sis that Invisible Man would have been a better work if it had remained more pro-
communist is implausible, and its failure to consider the novel’s assessment of
African American identity and history provides ironic if belated confirmation of
my friend’s assessment that “they cared more about themselves than us”.
Christopher Z. Hobson
SUNY College at Old Westbury
NOTES
1 Ralph Ellison, Letters to Richard Wright, 1937–1950. Richard Wright Papers. JWJ MSS 3, Box 97,
Folder 1314, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
2 Examples include works by Meilí Steele, Danielle Allen, James Seaton (in Ralph Ellison and the Raft of
Hope, ed. Lucas Morel, 2004), Jesse Wolfe (African American Review, 2000), myself (African American
Review 2005), and others. Foley mentions some of these for specific points but never considers the
authors’ interpretive theses.
Donna Jean Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the
Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
Perhaps no Black organization has received more scholarly or popular attention
over the past fifteen years than the Black Panther Party. Since Hugh Pearson's
controversial work Shadow of a Panther (1994) there has been a steady stream
of memoirs, and scholarly works on this iconic organization; some of which
were written as correctives to Pearson's sensational text, while others were sim-
ply long awaited autobiographies and or academic monographs that sought to
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Barbara Foley, Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

Lynn, Denise

guilty verdict. Brown was undoubtedly doomed from the start, but McGinty
demonstrates how the abolitionist was repeatedly short-changed, especially due
to the haste with which he was brought to trial. Largely stifled in his ability to
obtain the kind of representation he sought, the same haste also undercut the
highly qualified attorneys who finally made it to his side in the last hours of his
short but well-publicized trial.
Notwithstanding his having been rushed to judgment, the reader shares
McGinty’s closing impression that John Brown, however imperfectly, made the
best possible use of his trial in the end. In a kind of inspired declaration,
Brown’s address to the court (which McGinty identifies as a “remarkable” allocu-
tion) was the real moral climax of the trial (226). “Viewed in the long lens of
history,” the author concludes, “it is clear that John Brown was not really on trial
in Charlestown” because “[he] turned the accusation against him into an accusa-
tion against slavery” (287). For the first time, in John Brown’s Trial, we are given a
front row view of Brown the prisoner — not as a victim, but as a thoughtful if
not frustrated defendant, coming to terms with the limitations of justice for
himself as well as the slave. Brown is rushed to the gallows, but not before
turning his own judgment back upon his accusers, many of whom would shortly
lose life, home, and treasure by rushing themselves into a treasonous war against
the federal government.
Louis A. DeCaro Jr.
Alliance Theological Seminary
Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black
Communist Claudia Jones (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
Claudia Jones contributed enormously to the American and British Left, but was
subsequently lost in the historical narrative of American political radicalism for a
number of reasons. First, Jones was a devout Marxist and member of the
American and later British Communist Party who was deported at the height of
anti-Communist hysteria. Second, she was a woman in largely male organiza-
tions. And finally, as a black West Indian living in the United States and
England, she experienced the rampant racism and nativism within the Left as
well as society. In her new biography of Jones, Left of Karl Marx, Carole Boyce
Davies argues that when Jones was deported, the “radical black female subject”
in the American Left was silenced as well (2). Jones embraced her identity and
through her experience expounded on and eventually popularized the under-
standing that a black woman faced triple oppression. This idea, later adopted by
black American feminists in the 1970s, most notably in the “Combahee River
Collective Statement,” arguably should place Jones firmly in the history of femi-
nism and the Left. This is precisely what Davies accomplishes in her text.
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Davies’ title describes both the ideological position of Jones as Left of
traditional Marxist ideology and her literal burial place left of Karl Marx in
Highland cemetery in London, England. Tracing Jones’ prolific writing career
from her early years in the CPUSA, her prison poetry and writing, and even the
FBI files on her, Davies offers an intellectual biography of an important
American Communist and feminist thinker. Davies concludes that Jones com-
bined Marxism with decolonization and gender and class subordination to for-
mulate an understanding of the “superexploitation” of black women (2). Jones’
integration of both gender and race oppression within her Marxist practice
placed her further Left of Karl Marx because traditional Marxism failed to
account for either gender or race. Jones synthesized black women’s superex-
ploitation within the CPUSA’s Marxist-Leninist position. Davies examines some
of Jones’ most influential writing within the Party including her 1949 article “An
End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Women!” In this and other
articles Jones outlined the core of her belief that black women’s emancipation
had to come first in order for any woman to be free. Davies explains that Jones
highly controversial idea that race was “prior to” gender put her at odds with the
white Left (48).
Davies also explores Jones’ intellectual production and reflections dur-
ing her incarceration while awaiting deportation. Jones enjoyed an intimate rela-
tionship with fellow communist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn during the deportation
proceedings. The two women frequently wrote about the injustices of their tri-
als and formed a bond that would only be broken by their deaths within months
of each other in 1964. Davies intimates that Jones also believed that her eventu-
al deportation, despite her ill health, was evidence of the precarious citizenship
of black people everywhere.
Jones is also unique because of her transnational identity as a West
Indian immigrant to the United States. Eventually her radical political position
led to a second migration to England, after her 1955 deportation, where Jones’
participated in the diasporic politics of London’s Afro-Caribbean community.
Here Davies argues that Jones used the medium of journalism to outline her
anti-imperialism and her belief that global capitalism perpetuated the continued
exploitation of black labour globally. Prompted by riots in Notting Hill in 1958
and the 1959 murder of Caribbean immigrant Kelso Cochrane, Jones increased
her political activity engaging in anti-racist work in London, writing for the West
Indian Gazette and Afro Asian Caribbean News and creating the London Carnival
celebration. Eventually her diasporic politics would cut into her work for the
British Communist Party leading it to reprimand her several times. Nevertheless,
Davies notes that Jones’ would spend the remainder of her short life formulat-
ing cultural and political expressions of black people’s freedom and self-determi-
nation all the while remaining devoted to the communist class analysis of
oppression.
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Davies, however, does not offer a complete biographical sketch of
Jones. Instead her interest is primarily in tracing Jones’ intellectual evolution
through her vast writings. While Davies recognizes the intimacy of Jones’ writ-
ing and her understanding of her own subject-position as primary in her political
cosmology, there is no more than passing mention of Jones’ early life in
Trinidad, her immigration to the United States, and her family life in Harlem.
Ultimately, this however is not Davies’ goal. She is first and foremost explicating
the radical political position of an important Left-wing ideologue. Davies suc-
cessfully establishes Jones’ place in the Left historical canon as a leading black
feminist thinker in a text that is a long overdue treatment of an Old Left woman
whose influence on the New Left is only now coming to light.
Denise Lynn
University of Southern Indiana
Frank Kusch, Battleground Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2008).
The 1968 battle between police and anti-war demonstrators at the Democratic
National Convention in Chicago has become a pivotal event in the history of the
1960s, signalling the implosion of the Democratic party, the souring of sixties
activism, and the fracturing of the New Deal coalition. The popular obsession
with what Canadian writer and editor Frank Kusch calls “Battleground Chicago,”
implicitly confirms the belief that working-class white backlash against black and
antiwar radicalism was the source of this implosion. As Kusch demonstrates,
however, the actual sequence of events and police behaviour therein offers a
somewhat different perspective than the common view of Chicago as a “police
riot” by cops who went berserk in the streets.
As Kusch notes in his preface, he aims to move beyond the stereotypes
of Chicago cops as “pigs” and “storm troopers,” showing them instead “as they
saw themselves—men with families, mortgages, and lives” (x). His extensive
interviews with Chicago police veterans provides a valuable window in to the
social, cultural, and political attitudes of some of these key participants.
Viewing the Vietnam war and the wrenching changes of the era from Chicago’s
Bungalow Belt, many police believed they had to defend the city from outsiders,
be they African Americans moving into their neighbourhoods or scruffy hippies
and protesters bent on dishonouring the country. Stung by criticism of his han-
dling of the April riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Mayor Richard Daley gave police the license they needed to fight off and often
physically punish anti-war demonstrators in the streets of Chicago that August.
The three chapters covering the convention are a riveting read. Kusch
provides a blow-by-blow account (literally) from the ruthless clearing of demon-
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Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

Witham, Nick

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Sandwell, Ruth

181
© Left History
15.1 (Fall/Winter 2010-2011)
BOOK REVIEWS
Gerda Lerna, Living with History/Making Social Change (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
Living with History/Making Social Change provides an intellectual and personal biog-
raphy of American historian Gerda Lerner, the author of twelve books in
Women’s History, and one of the scholars responsible for the re-founding of the
field in the 1960s. The twelve essays, six of which have been published before,
provide a delightful description of how the personal and the political, the emo-
tional, the professional and the intellectual, were intertwined in the life of this emi-
nent historian who spent her life working with considerable success towards the
goal of creating social, political and institutional change for the better. The book
is also a social history of the later twentieth century with a thoughtful description
and overview of the time when women were not welcome in the academic world
of historians, either as professionals or as historical subjects. Ranging over a vast
variety of ideas, events, causes and convictions, Gerda Lerner explores the com-
plex collective issues effecting women as a difficult-to-define group inside and out-
side the academy, all the while articulating (somewhat paradoxically) just how one
person made a such a significant impact on the world of history and history edu-
cation. As she puts it, “My passionate commitment to Women’s History was
grounded in my life.” (30)
And what a life! Gerda Lerner was born in Vienna in 1920. As a young
Jewish woman of affluent background and good education coming of age with
the rise of Nazi Germany, she read widely and was involved in the anti-fascist
response to the changing political times. As a teenager she was briefly imprisoned
in a Nazi jail, where she learned “from my cell mates that political action meant
working with others. One could not survive alone.” (2) Her family escaped from
Vienna in the late 1930s, and Lerna later moved to New York, where she experi-
enced sexism, racism and anti-immigrant prejudices as she found work as a domes-
tic, as an office worker, as a salesgirl, and much later, as a medical technician,
“always at minimum wage [or below] and without job security.” (2) In the 1950s
she became a wife and mother, but her political education continued with her work
as community organizer on a variety of issues within her poor, mixed-race neigh-
bourhood. Her husband, like many of her friends, was blacklisted for radical
behaviour during the McCarthy era, another factor which “shaped my mind and
though prior to my embarking on an academic career.” (3) 
That academic career began in 1963, when, at the age of forty-three, she
entered Columbia University. As she explains, it was the only place where the
Chair of the history department was prepared to ‘bend the rules’ so that she could
write her dissertation on her topic of choice: a political biography of the Grimke
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Left History 15.1182
sisters. Asked on her application to Columbia why she wanted to study history,
she replied “I want Women’s History to be legitimate, to be part of every curricu-
lum on every level, and I want people to be able to take PhDs in the subject and
not have to say they are doing something else.”(29) The uphill battles that this goal
entailed occupied much of her academic career, first getting off to a good start in
graduate school, where she “could not accept the content of the curriculum, the
worldview I was being taught.” (29) As she explains when describing her culture-
shock on first encountering women in the academic world, “In one of the best
graduate schools in the country, I was presented with a history of the past in which
women did not seem to exist, except for a few rulers…” (29)
The book is divided into three sections, “Redefining the Profession of
History”, “Doing History” and “Living in History.” Each of them charts the dif-
ferent ways in which Lerner blended theory and practice in her work as a histori-
an and social activist, whether in her work with African American women and
Women’s History in New York, reforming history curricula in the various univer-
sities where she held positions, developing workshops for “deviant-out-groups”,
contemplating the challenges and possibilities of ‘holistic history’ or of women in
world history, or working with historians to lobby for women academic’s inclusion
in national history conferences, in university faculties and in the editorial boards of
scholarly journals (all of which took years of more and less bitter struggle). And
all the while she was working to promote change in a variety of academic and grass
roots communities, she was writing and teaching a history in which women were
integral.
I would strongly recommend this as an informative and inspiring read,
not only for those interested in Gerda Lerner and Women’s History, but for any-
one interested in the myriad ways that historians can play a vital and positive role
in the world.
Ruth Sandwell
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto
Ivana Caccia, Managing the Canadian Mosaic in Wartime (Montreal &
Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010).
Over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century, one of the major pol-
icy issues that confronted the Canadian state was certainly the issue of citizenship.
The most recent manifestation of citizenship policy is the creation of a new
Canadian citizenship guide, “Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of
Citizenship”, published in March of 2010. The guide was notable for what it omit-
ted as much as for what information was included for prospective citizens to
“know.”
Preparing prospective Canadian citizens now mainly involves a certain
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Gerda Lerna, Living with History/Making Social Change (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)

Lin, Lana

Left History 15.1196
lel narratives of personal and broader social transformations.
During its years of operation the community action programs sponsored
by the Fund were able to translate small scale successes, like organizing local clean-
up projects or challenging a particularly delinquent landlord, into larger efforts that
indeed did challenge the power structure. Much of the book’s analysis of these
events relies on organizational records and interviews with leaders. One conse-
quence of this approach is that we are sometimes unable to see how the partici-
pants themselves understood these events and what sort of lasting mark these
confrontations made. That said, the faces and voices of residents are brought into
sharper focus in a series of moving photographs taken by Billy E. Barnes which
appear throughout the book, as well as in the DVD documentary Change Comes
Knocking which accompanies the book.
The radical approach of the Fund meant that by 1968 when it shut its
doors, the work had begun to come under severe attack from businesses and politi-
cians who complained bitterly about the seemingly partisan nature of the effort.
A major strength of the book is its ability to show the interplay between the local,
state and national contexts as this political drama unfolded. The authors adeptly
demonstrate how national debates came into play with conservative powers in the
state and the stark reality of poverty and racial tension on the ground. While the
Fund ultimately failed to realize its grand anti-poverty goals, its work created a net-
work of community agencies that still exists in North Carolina. Moreover, the
story and lessons of the Fund make this an important book for those interested
in understanding the process of social change, and the power and corresponding
threat posed by organizing the poor to demand the nation fulfill its democratic
promise.
Clare Hammonds
Brandeis University 
Scott Laderman, Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
Thanatourism - also known as death, dark, or trauma tourism- is a practice that has
gained increasing attention in the last decade and refers to the attraction to places
or events associated with death, disaster, and suffering.1 Scott Laderman attrib-
utes the motivation for this brand of tourism to “martial fascination” (183). To
the burgeoning literature on this topic, Tours of Vietnam adds a critical analysis of
how travel guides, such as the Lonely Planet series, construct an ideologically
skewed history of Vietnam in the minds of Western tourists and both rationalize
and naturalize US intervention in Vietnam. In addition, as a cross-disciplinary
study, it contributes to the field of memory studies, arguing that tourist literature
shapes American national memory, reinforcing images of heroism as depicted in
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Book Reviews 197
Hollywood movies, and “acting as a salve for America’s wounded collective con-
science.” (122)
In his prefatory note, Laderman acknowledges the degree to which lan-
guage is political, as exemplified in the knotty problem of which term to use in ref-
erence to the conflict that took place in pre-1975 Indochina. “Vietnam war,”
“American war,” “war against Communism,” and “Vietnamese civil war” are
amongst the disputed appellations. (viiii)  His choice of terms signals a political
position and reflects a bias, which goes to the crux of Laderman’s argument. In
perhaps the most resonant section on the War Remnants Museum, Laderman
assesses the internalization of guidebooks’ representations of war and suffering
through visitors’ reactions to the Vietnamese museum. In comparison to guide-
book descriptions of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, he
cogently notes a double standard that prompts accusations of historical bias, and
an implicit assumption of the US as the normative focus of history: “To locate
the Vietnamese people at the center of the narrative was, for many from the West,
to reveal an ideological bias. Yet to locate Americans at the center of this narrative
was perceived as ideologically neutral – indeed, it was perfectly natural.” (165)
Laderman’s fieldwork consisted of over 170 interviews conducted throughout
Vietnam in 2000 and 2002. He concludes that many Americans attributed respon-
sibility for US actions in Vietnam to the abstract and anonymous “horror of war,”
while conversely, the Viet Cong’s amoral barbarity was considered directly respon-
sible for inhumane “atrocities.” (171)  Probably most gripping when he draws con-
nections to our present political situation, Laderman highlights visitors’ comments
that view the “War Against Terrorism” as a continuation of US global ambitions
(177).
The title Tours of Vietnam reveals itself to be especially apropos to the fas-
cinating discussion on the US Department of Defense pocket guides supplied to
servicemen to inform them about the countries where they were to fulfill their
tours of duty. Instruments for indoctrination, the pocket guides provided the
moral justification for overseas missions. Exposing their kinship to commercial
tourist guides, the Pentagon authors astonishingly suggest enjoying opportunities
for hunting and deep-sea fishing. They advise, the “dangers of ambush and raid
will make sightseeing impossible in some places; but, when security restrictions
permit, be sure to see something of the lovely country you are visiting.” (51)
Laderman demonstrates that a binary Cold War logic lingers within contemporary
guidebook accounts, mistakenly and reductively characterizing US motives as
humanitarian in supporting a struggling “South Vietnam” against the global men-
ace of Communism, as opposed to a narrative of reunification and independence
that would configure US intervention as imperialist.
Within this well-written in-depth research, two weaknesses emerge. The
controversial representations of the Hue massacre and the social inequities
wrought by Doi Moi neoliberal capitalist reforms are both interesting and inform-
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Left History 15.1198
ative, however they require long explanatory passages that at times lose their con-
nection to the discursive analysis of travel guides. Commentary addressing the
devices deployed by guidebooks, such as the selection of what constitutes “sights”
worth seeing, the interpretation of local customs, or the evaluation of hotels
deemed suitable or unsuitable to “international standards” could have been
expanded. The perspective of overseas Vietnamese, which is absent except in a
brief reference to the competing narratives surrounding the Hue massacre, would
add another important dimension to the study. How are the impressions of sec-
ond generation Vietnamese, who may have grown up in the West with little knowl-
edge of the war, determined by the guidebooks they potentially carry, or the other
forms of guidance they receive through museum catalogues, tour guides, or tourist
site pamphlets? 
Laderman shows how, particularly in the living and contested memory
symbolized by the War Remnants Museum in H? Chí Minh City, “tourism has
been (and, in important ways, has continued to be) intertwined with the projection
of American power.” (10)  In sum, Tours of Vietnam is a valuable addition to the
scholarship on the larger questions around the US foreign policy and the unex-
pectedly substantial role that presumably apolitical cultural products play in shap-
ing national memory and global imaginations.
Lana Lin
New York University
NOTES
1 See, for instance, Graham M.S. Dann and A.V. Seaton, Slavery, Contested Heritage, and Thanatourism,
1st ed. (Routledge, 2002); Malcolm Foley and John Lennon, Dark Tourism, 1st ed. (Cengage Learning
Business Press, 2000); Richard Sharpley and Philip R. Stone, The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and
Practice of Dark Tourism (Channel View Publications, 2009); and Marita Sturken, Tourists of History:
Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Duke University Press, 2007).
Edward W. Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2010).
Edward Soja states that his point in Seeking Social Justice is not to argue only that
“space matters” in social practices – and especially in theories and struggles over
social justice – but rather “that whatever your interests may be, they can be significantly
advanced by adopting a critical spatial perspective” (2, emphasis in original). When
research and theorizing starts from the ineluctable spatiality of things and process-
es, Soja argues, a quite different way of understanding what justice is necessarily
results. As Soja himself claims, this is an ambitious argument. It is also an impor-
tant one. It is rather disappointing then, that, in fact, it is not the one Soja pur-
sues.
The book begins with a compelling discussion of the Los Angeles Bus
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Scott Laderman, Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009)

Mitchell, Don

Left History 15.1198
ative, however they require long explanatory passages that at times lose their con-
nection to the discursive analysis of travel guides. Commentary addressing the
devices deployed by guidebooks, such as the selection of what constitutes “sights”
worth seeing, the interpretation of local customs, or the evaluation of hotels
deemed suitable or unsuitable to “international standards” could have been
expanded. The perspective of overseas Vietnamese, which is absent except in a
brief reference to the competing narratives surrounding the Hue massacre, would
add another important dimension to the study. How are the impressions of sec-
ond generation Vietnamese, who may have grown up in the West with little knowl-
edge of the war, determined by the guidebooks they potentially carry, or the other
forms of guidance they receive through museum catalogues, tour guides, or tourist
site pamphlets? 
Laderman shows how, particularly in the living and contested memory
symbolized by the War Remnants Museum in H? Chí Minh City, “tourism has
been (and, in important ways, has continued to be) intertwined with the projection
of American power.” (10)  In sum, Tours of Vietnam is a valuable addition to the
scholarship on the larger questions around the US foreign policy and the unex-
pectedly substantial role that presumably apolitical cultural products play in shap-
ing national memory and global imaginations.
Lana Lin
New York University
NOTES
1 See, for instance, Graham M.S. Dann and A.V. Seaton, Slavery, Contested Heritage, and Thanatourism,
1st ed. (Routledge, 2002); Malcolm Foley and John Lennon, Dark Tourism, 1st ed. (Cengage Learning
Business Press, 2000); Richard Sharpley and Philip R. Stone, The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and
Practice of Dark Tourism (Channel View Publications, 2009); and Marita Sturken, Tourists of History:
Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Duke University Press, 2007).
Edward W. Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2010).
Edward Soja states that his point in Seeking Social Justice is not to argue only that
“space matters” in social practices – and especially in theories and struggles over
social justice – but rather “that whatever your interests may be, they can be significantly
advanced by adopting a critical spatial perspective” (2, emphasis in original). When
research and theorizing starts from the ineluctable spatiality of things and process-
es, Soja argues, a quite different way of understanding what justice is necessarily
results. As Soja himself claims, this is an ambitious argument. It is also an impor-
tant one. It is rather disappointing then, that, in fact, it is not the one Soja pur-
sues.
The book begins with a compelling discussion of the Los Angeles Bus
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Book Reviews 199
Riders Union (BRU) and by arguing that paying attention to successes and failures
of BRU itself and of “the strategic coalition behind” it is vital for those “seeking
to erase injustices wherever they may be found.” (xiii)  The expectation raised for
the reader is that what will follow will be a deep engagement with theories of
social justice and their creative reconceptualization as spatial justice. This is the
dual meaning of the title. On the one hand, Soja seeks to outline how spatial jus-
tice has been sought in a series of struggles in (mostly) the Los Angeles region.
On the other hand, he seeks theories of spatial justice in the works of a lineage of
thinkers that stretches from Lefebvre through Castells, Harvey, and Young, and
beyond.
The book does not live up to its billing on either hand. Instead of real-
ly pursuing the former goal – engaging in a close examination of how spatial jus-
tice has been conceptualized and struggled over in LA-based social movement –
Soja details the (really quite impressive) interventions of various faculty and stu-
dents associated with UCLA’s Department of Planning. There is much of inter-
est here, much to celebrate in the very real (if never easy) success Soja and his
compatriots have had in interdigitating planning program scholarship with social
movements (with UCLA-trained planner-activists often taking leading positions),
and much to lament in the crass political attacks the program has suffered from
campus administrators and state-level politicians. Unfortunately, Soja is mostly
content to list those successes (and attacks) rather than to analyze what has gone
into them. The result is a celebration of UCLA planning by someone who has
devoted his career to it, and who is rightly proud of its accomplishments. Lacking,
however, is a clear sense of what the ingredients of such successes are and thus
how they might be replicated elsewhere. For example, Soja argues that the UCLA
Urban Planning program developed into a “graduate school for activists,” and cen-
tral to this was a commitment to “participatory democracy.” This entailed on the
one hand not “strip-min[ing] communities and localities for empirical data and
ideas that would lead only to career-boosting and academic publication rather than
improvements in the communities studies.” (160-161)  On the other hand, it meant
having “working groups rather than committees” (161) handle admissions deci-
sions, as well as assuring that each working group reported out to the program as
a whole every year. Little, however, is said about the mechanisms or the difficul-
ties of such laudable goals. Many other programs and projects have sought, with
greater or lesser success to achieve similar goals, and much has been written on
their successes and failures: the numerous intro- and retrospective publications of
the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies immediately come to
mind. It is impossible to tell how Soja’s planning program negotiated the shoals
that grounded so many other similarly focused academic enterprises. The result,
then, is we learn little about the actual difficulties and strategies of UCLA Planning
(to say nothing of the wider social movements with which it worked) in seeking
spatial justice. Given the evident successes UCLA Planning has had in this area,
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Left History 15.1200
this is a sadly missed opportunity.
In relation to the latter goal, Soja rightly shows that much spatial theoret-
ical development must be understood as rooted in the insights Henri Lefebvre
developed over his long career (leavened with more than a few dashes of
Foucault). He explains that a robust theory of spatial justice requires an “ontolog-
ical restructuring” (69) that allows the aspatial, liberal, Rawlsian theories of justice
that are dominant in much political philosophy to be transcended by a spatialized
theory of justice that understands uneven development to be a root fact of life and
that gives rise to and supports both the theorizing of, and political struggle for,
what Lefebvre called the “right to the city.” But then things turn weird. Instead
of examining in any depth the work of those theorists who have toiled away on
this project of ontological restructuring (Harvey, Castells, Young, and a raft of
lesser theorists, myself included), critiquing them where necessary and out of that
developing a more robust theory of spatial justice, Soja instead dismisses them not
because their work is lacking (he is in fact frequently generous in his appreciation
of aspects of this work), but because they possess “little inclination to use either
of the specific terms of spatial or territorial justice.” (91)  This complaint – a dis-
missal, really – is repeated over and over again (e.g. 82 [twice], 87, 91, 107), even
as those couple of geographers who have used the terms explicitly are praised. In
neither case, however, does Soja really examine the substance of the arguments he
is examining to see whether or not the arguments at stake in fact contribute to the
project of theorizing spatial justice, even if the explicit term is not used. The
result, intended or not, reads like a blacklist rather than an engaged critique. This
too is a sadly missed opportunity.
Nonetheless Seeking Social Justice possesses much of value. As a chronicle
of Soja’s long and productive career, it is enlightening. The vignettes about organ-
izing in LA of which the BRU is just one example whet the appetite. The biblio-
graphic essay that concludes the book is an excellent resource for anyone seeking
the richness of theories of spatial justice (as long as they are not too worried about
whether the specific term is used or not). And the encomium for the Right to the
City movement that appears off and on throughout the book is particularly wel-
come at a moment when signs of progressive organizing around critical urban
issues are all too few and far between.
Don Mitchell
Syracuse University
Moon-Kie Jung, Reworking Race: The Making of Hawaii’s Interracial Labor
Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
In the United States and other multiracial nations, how do workers from different
races and ethnic groups become a unified class?  According to most labour histo-
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Edward W. Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010)

Tomchuk, Travis

Left History 15.1218
Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism
(Oakland: PM Press, 2010).
Peter Marshall’s Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism is a well-researched
and in-depth study of the history of anarchist thought and practice, written not
only to demonstrate the existence of a “profound anarchist tradition” but also to
show that this political philosophy “offers many ideas and values that are relevant
to contemporary problems and issues.” (xiii)  The breadth of the book is impres-
sive. Marshall begins with the Taoists of ancient China and ends with contempo-
rary forms of anarchism such as the green anarchists of the late twentieth centu-
ry. In Demanding the Impossible, Marshall outlines the key tenets of anarchist philos-
ophy, traces the history of European and American libertarian thought, and dis-
cusses the theorists who tend to populate the anarchist canon such as Godwin,
Stirner, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, and a few others — Reclus,
Malatesta, and Goldman — who usually do not make the cut. Marshall then pro-
ceeds to explore the anarchist movements in Europe, the United States, Asia, and
Latin America, and explores the continual development of anarchist thought in
the second half of the twentieth century from Paul Goodman to John Zerzan.
Marshall identifies himself as an anarchist and his enthusiasm for the
material is more than apparent. However, there are some serious flaws with
Demanding the Impossible. The first stems from Marshall’s very broad definition of
anarchism. According to the author an anarchist is “... one who rejects all forms
of external government and the State and believes that society and individuals
would function well without them”, which reads more like a definition of libertar-
ianism than anarchism. (xiii)  As a result of such a sweeping definition, some very
strange individuals fall under the anarchist umbrella — for example, the so-called
“anarcho-capitalists” who believe the state is a hindrance to free market capitalism
and that all public services and spaces should be privatised. (559)  Given Marshall’s
own conviction that such a society would be no less exploitative than our present
day world, and one’s own sense that capitalist societies are going in this direction
without in any way embodying the other ideals of anarchism, the reader is left to
wonder about the coherence and usability of his underlying conceptualisation of
his subject.
Yet another odd inclusion in the book, and there are many, is Albert
Camus. Camus’s link to anarchism is so tenuous as to be almost non-existent. He
may have left the French Communist Party and trumpeted rebellion and syndical-
ism in The Rebel but so what?  Camus was a French nationalist and an apologist for
French colonialism in Algeria by any means necessary, hardly an anarchist position,
a fact that Marshall openly admits. Nor did Camus proclaim himself an anarchist.
So why include him?
Marshall would have been better served to define anarchism more clear-
ly at the outset of Demanding the Impossible. Had he defined the term more closely
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Book Reviews 219
-as a leftwing political philosophy that is not only against the state and government,
but for the freedom of individuals who in turn respect the freedom of others; not
only against hierarchy and capitalism, but for a society of free producers- there
would have been no need to include such questionable figures and tendencies. It
might have made more sense for Marshall to write two books — one on anarchism
proper, and another on libertarianism, in all its left- and right-wing permutations
and combinations.
A second problem with Demanding the Impossible, and this is a problem of
most general histories of anarchism, is its focus on Europe and the United States.
In a book of over 700 pages of text, there are roughly thirty pages dedicated to
regions outside of Europe and America, those being Latin America and Asia. Part
of this problem is due to a lack of English-language sources on the anarchists and
their movements in China, Korea, Argentina, and Brazil. In light of the ever
increasing number of studies on anarchism and its importance in these typically
ignored regions, Marshall could have struck a better balance between Europe and
the United States on the one hand and the rest of the world on the other.
As a history of anarchism, Demanding the Impossible is, in many ways, a
great improvement over previous works by James Joll and George Woodcock
because it treats anarchism as much more than an old millenarian movement that
died in Spain in 1939. However, Marshall’s broad definition of anarchism, which
leads to the inclusion of many individuals who were not anarchists, and his nar-
row focus on Europe and the United States, will leave many readers scratching
their heads — and waiting a far more coherent and international history of the
movement.
Travis Tomchuk
Queen’s University
Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, Opium: Uncovering the Politics of the Poppy
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).
Despite almost 100 years of US-led opium prohibitionist policies, the poppy plant
and its drug derivatives have witnessed an explosion of growth. The political and
economic factors that led to this increase is the subject of Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy’s
Opium: Uncovering the Politics of Poppy. He answers important questions about the
efficacy of the last 40 years of the War on Drugs. He provides compelling evi-
dence on the failings of policies that are implemented on drug-producing nations.
His most convincing arguments detail why programs currently in place (primarily
poppy eradication and crop substitution) have proven counter-effective.
Chouvy presents a coherent and detailed narrative on the evolution of
Papaver somniferum, the poppy. Before discovery of its soporific effects became
apparent, its flower attracted early agriculturalists. The plant thrived for thousands
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Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (Oakland: PM Press, 2010)

Conrad, Margeret

contributors have now largely displaced the original enunciation of the thesis,
and that perhaps there is no one key to all mythologies as George Eliot’s Mr.
Casaubon would have it.
Nancy Christie
University of Western Ontario
Christopher Dummitt and Michael Dawson, eds., Contesting Clio’s Craft:
New Directions and Debates in Canadian History (London: Institute for
the Study of the Americas, 2009).
As one of only a few essay collections since the publication of Carl Berger’s
Contemporary Approaches to Canadian History (1987) to claim to bring together
“new” directions and debates in Canadian history, this volume marks an impor-
tant milestone in Clio’s craft. Berger concluded The Writing of Canadian History
(1986) with the warning that Clio has “an alarming habit” of devouring those
who follow her charms (320). Although young historians may well build upon
the work of their predecessors, he implies, they are reluctant to admit doing so,
preferring to emphasize their break with the tired approaches of their deluded
mentors. It is instructive, then, to reflect on what a new generation of historians
understands as cannibalism.
Unlike Berger’s volume, which reprinted review articles on “the new
history” in such sub-fields as ethnic, regional, women’s, and working class histo-
ry, this collection of essays emerged from a single conference, convened at the
University of London in 2007. Those invited to present papers were junior
scholars identified as charting new directions in theory and methodology. In
addition to the editors, the essayists published in this volume include Michel
Ducharme, Catherine Gidney, Stephen High, Adele Perry, Katie Pickles, and
Andrew Smith. Instead of offering overviews of emerging sub-fields, the arti-
cles, we are told by the editors in the introduction, are meant to encourage
debates that move beyond dated discussions about the failure of Canadians to
know their own history; the role of social history in undermining the national
narrative; and the nature of historical knowledge and claims to truth. While few
academic historians would disagree with the need for more substantive debates
on the form, content, and import of Canadian history, it is unclear from most of
these essays what needs to be debated. The trends in historical inquiry promot-
ed here — transnational, comparative, post-colonial, public/oral, narrative, and
Atlantic world  — to amend practices of earlier unworthies are timely sugges-
tions and unlikely to generate much debate. Surely, such approaches co-exist
comfortably with national and social understandings of the past, neither of
which can or should be abandoned. Although the editors suggest that there are
divisions among the authors of this volume on whether the attempt to write a
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more inclusive Canadian history is now intellectually bankrupt (Dummitt) or is a
promise yet to be achieved (Perry), such a debate will not cause most historians
many sleepless nights.
Having just retired after forty years of teaching Canadian history/histo-
riography, I am, perhaps, just an old grump and I would be churlish not to admit
that I actually like this book and would use it as a text if I were forced under
pain of death to return to the classroom. The articles are accessibly written,
they raise useful questions for our current generation of graduate students, and
several – in particular, Magda Fahrni’s exploration of the place of Quebec in
Canadian historical writing, Stephen High’s use of oral history as a vehicle for
interrogating authority in historical practice, and Michael Dawson and Catherine
Gidney’s questioning of periodization in English Canada’s twentieth century –
are genuine contributions to the Canadian historiographical canon. What I most
miss here (and it suggests that I have lived too long) are the progressive politics
that inspired me and many of the other authors who contributed to Berger’s
anthology (E.R. Forbes, Gerald Friesen, Bryan Palmer, Roberto Perin, for exam-
ple). No doubt, it is timely to question an inclusive approach to the study of
Canada, to lay claim to the positive legacy of British and other imperialisms, or
to situate the study of Canada in a transnational post-colonial framework, but I
am reluctant to relinquish truth claims to past oppressions of empires, near or
far, or to bow to a research agenda that dilutes the focus on the specific nation-
state, which still has the capacity to exert influence for good or ill. So, I will
keep my black arm band – Andrew Smith’s reference to Geoffrey Blainey’s com-
ment on critical approaches to Australia’s past (75) – indeed, I will double its
width in the current political climate.
The editors suggest that Ian MacKay’s article on the “The Liberal
Order Framework” is the kind of scholarship that might generate worthy aca-
demic discussion and it is to be hoped that another conference will be held in
which historians, new and old, can move beyond intergenerational devourings to
further explorations of the daunting historiographical challenges that face us in
the twenty-first century.
Margaret Conrad
University of New Brunswick
Place and Practice in Canadian Nursing History, eds. Jayne Elliott, Meryn
Stuart and Cynthia Toman (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008).
The first Hannah Conference on Canadian Nursing History held in Ottawa in
June 2005 occurred amidst many ‘firsts’ in nursing history. These included the
launch of the Nursing History Research Unit at the School of Nursing
(University of Ottawa), with funding from Associated Medical Services, Inc., and
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Christopher Dummitt and Michael Dawson, eds., Contesting Clio’s Craft: New Directions and Debates in Canadian History (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2009).

Mishler, Paul C.

data before they include it in their works. Belshaw does not present his work as
either exhaustive or definitive, rather he offers “A, not The, Population History of
BC” (5). This is not a textbook on how to construct demographic studies, but
rather an extensive discussion on the significance of demographic discourse using
British Columbia as its focus.
Kathy McKay
University of British Columbia
Sharon Wall, The Nurture of Nature: Childhood, Antimodernism, and
Ontario Summer Camps, 1920-55 ( Vancouver: UBC Press. 2009).
Summer camping for children in the United States and Canada is one of features
of twentieth century childrearing. Summer camps could only develop when urban-
dwellers were far enough removed from “the countryside” as a site of agricultural
production and hard work, and it could be seen, increasingly as a site of leisure
and self-development. Historians have begun to turn their attention to these insti-
tutions both as educational sites and as prisms though which we can understand
how adults expressed their own cultural goals, aspirations, and ambivalences
through for children’s’ development away from the day-to-day life of the city.
Sharon Wall has framed this book about the summer camps of Ontario,
as they expressed an increasing unease with urban life. The framework she uses
throughout the book is the seeming contradiction of a rural (or wilderness) ideal
as an expression of both modernity, and a disquiet with that very modernity. This dis-
quiet, or antimodernism was one of the key features of all the camps she examines.
The first group whose unease with the culture they themselves had creat-
ed, was the urban upper-middle class. Like in the US, well-to-do Canadians
mourned the loss of rugged self-reliance among their boys, now spending so much
of their time in schools, and watching their fathers go to work in offices. This
group promoted summer camps with a focus on making these elite boys more
rugged. (Wall mentions that with the creation of some elite summer camps, par-
ents of boarding school boys wouldn’t have to ever be around their children for
long periods of time).
Soon a second, very different group of summer camps was developed as
part of the concern among social reformers with the “unhealthy” qualities of
childhood among the poor and working classes. Although many of the activities
were similar, the job of these “fresh air camps” was to cure working class children
of socially disruptive behaviour they learned from living in the city, in families
either over-worked or vulnerable to poverty, if they were not. Like the elite camps,
these camps emphasized activities like canoeing and learning to swim, but also
were notable for the care taken to provide good food (sometimes in short supply
at home) and regular physical examinations. If the children gained weight while at
camp, their experiences were deemed a success.
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The two most interesting chapters, to me, were those that discussed the
role of the idea, and sometimes the reality of First Nations, as well as Wall’s dis-
cussion of single-sex camps and the development of gender identity. In both
Canada and the US summer camps promoted a camp culture that can only be
called faux Indian-ness. Nightly camp-fires, costumes drawn from multiple native
traditions and cultures, and rituals thrown together from vastly different peoples
were common at camps. In Canada, however, there were individuals from native
communities either in nearby communities, or as workers at the camps. One can
only guess at whether these First Nations peoples were insulted or amused by the
ways their multiple cultures were appropriated to create summer camp culture.
What is clear is that there was only a short historical moment between the actual
expropriation of the land of Canada’s indigenous peoples, and the appropriation
of their cultures as play for white Canadians.
Most camps Wall discusses were single-sex camps. As the first camps
were devoted to combating “softness” among urban boys, the first camps were for
boys only. The increasing influence of women on boy’s lives was seen as part of
the problem. Even after girl’s camps were organized-since both middle-class and
working-class girls seemed to need a reformation of character as well, the goals of
the girl’s camps were not so clear. Both boys and girls camps developed strong
ideologies of separateness as they became institutionalized, and each camp’s gen-
der-specificity was proclaimed as one of the strong arguments for the camp. In
the single-sex camp there was always some concern with the “dangers” of homo-
sexuality, and special steps were taken to intercept relationships that were seen as
“too” close or exclusive. The girl’s camps were somewhat more tolerant, and
“crushes” between campers or between campers and counsellors were viewed with
more amusement than fear. When “brother-sister” camps developed in close geo-
graphic proximity stern efforts at separation were often accompanied by formal
efforts to inculcate “healthy” heterosexual behaviour through formal dances and
other such activities. While the campers seemed not to be that enthusiastic about
these efforts, there was usually enough pairing off among the counsellors to pro-
vide for some concern and much gossip. Interestingly, the Jewish camps were
notable for developing coeducational experiences. Wall interprets this as having to
do with promoting marriage within the community, but I think this is probably
more complicated.
This book is an important examination of what has become a significant
part of childhood for both Canadian and US children. Her analysis of antimod -
ernism coming from deep ambivalence about urban life allows us to see many dif-
ferent camps and many different camp programs as part of a culture-wide project.
As the history of childhood develops will be many new questions and this is an
important contribution.
Paul C. Mishler
Indiana University
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Sharon Wall, The Nurture of Nature: Childhood, Antimodernism, and Ontario Summer Camps, 1920-55 (Vancouver: UBC Press. 2009).

DeCaro Jr., Louis A.

tion of race in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, moving from a biological essential-
ism to cultural and geographical environmentalism to social construction. Lastly,
Dorothy Roberts’ essay on Margaret Sanger and the role racism and eugenics
played in propelling forward the birth control movement gives one pause to the
pervasive role race has played in everyday American life.
In many ways this collection of essays crosses familiar ground, histori-
ans of American political thought have long connected racial and gender exclu-
sion to the nation’s ideals of liberty and democracy. Moreover, two essays –
Gwendolyn Mink’s and Gary Gerstle’s – date from 1986 and 1999 and one won-
ders if the editors could have drawn from more recent scholarship. What Racially
Writing the Republic does add to our understanding of the American political lega-
cy is the way in which multiple identities outside of the white/black paradigm
have had a lasting effect on the nation. By “re-writing” race into the United
States’ historical and political narratives, Baum and Harris have given us the tools
to examine the ways in which race and racism continue to define the core beliefs
of American identity and society. As George Lipsitz’s excellent afterword on the
troubling legacy of school segregation makes clear, racism continues to dog
everyday life for all Americans. In the end, Baum and Harris’ collection of
essays makes us wonder who are the race rebels of today and why are there not
more of them?
Nathan C.A. Cardon
University of Toronto
Brian McGinty, John Brown’s Trial (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2009).
It may be typical to laud a praiseworthy biography as “the standard for judging
the literature,” but in the estimation of this biographer there is little exaggeration
in saying that John Brown’s Trial by Brian McGinty is a singular and unparalleled
standard for the study of the most important chapter in the life of the abolition-
ist. McGinty, an attorney and a seasoned historian, has provided the first fully
developed study of the trial of Brown in Jefferson County, Virginia. Brown has
been widely misrepresented and frequently misunderstood by historians, but he
is popularly remembered for his failed effort to initiate a slave liberation move-
ment by seizing a federal armoury in the town of Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, on
October 16, 1859. Brown scholars have usually sampled aspects of his trial, but
no writer has provided a full examination of the legal character of the story. Yet
McGinty does so in a manner readable and at times quite enthralling. The reader
may sense some admiration for Brown too, but the author holds both him and
his Virginia prosecutors up to the light of a cool, balanced, and reasoned analy-
sis.
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McGinty’s treatment of the trial draws upon newspaper and journalistic
accounts as well as previous research dating as far back as the post-Civil War era.
There was no transcript prepared in Brown’s trial, so the author has skillfully
culled accounts of the trial and related themes from all available sources, includ-
ing most of the significant archival collections. The book features an extensive
bibliography of sources and many illustrations by contemporary newspaper
sketch artists. McGinty makes a number of biographical errors and misstate-
ments in the initial chapters of the book, but these are easily forgiven since the
stated purpose of the book is so masterfully accomplished.
In addressing the question of whether Brown received a fair trial by his
Virginia captors, McGinty provides both overview and fine detail. For instance,
one of the ongoing themes he addresses is what the state prosecutor called
“Count One” (110), the charge that Brown’s invasion constituted treason against
Virginia. Although one might assume the count of treason untenable because
Brown was not a resident of Virginia, the author demonstrates that his prosecu-
tors had a reasonable basis for the charge in Article III, Sec. 3 of the US consti-
tution, which declares treason can be applied to aliens who violate allegiance
based upon a government’s protection, even “temporary” allegiance (78-79).
The US, being a literal union of states, was thought to have provided the benefit
of the rights and privileges of a citizen to white men like Brown while in
Virginia; it could be thus argued that he had committed treason against the alle-
giance from which he had benefitted (202). However unlikely, Brown could not
have been pardoned by the governor without the agreement of the State’s
General Assembly due to the treason conviction. A lesser theme of the book,
though still important, is the legal history pertaining to issues of jurisdiction
relating to the federal armoury, and whether Brown would be tried by the US
government or by the State of Virginia for having invaded both the town and
the federal facility at Harper’s Ferry. Captured by US marines, he and his men
were handed over to Virginia and thereafter bound under the authority and law
of the state (83, 242).
McGinty is clear that from onset to conclusion, Brown’s trial was
flawed. Although officials prided themselves on having given him a fair trial, the
author observes that “dignity and decorum do not translate into fairness when the
accused is rushed to judgment and denied the effective assistance of counsel,”
when the verdict is not sustained by proof, vital legal issues are left unresolved,
and even the defense’s appeal is dismissed as an annoyance (286). Clearly, Brown
and his men were rushed through trial in keeping with the calendar of the circuit
court; even the most reasonable requests for delay were thus opposed by the
prosecutor and denied by the judge. Given the prisoner’s clearly enunciated pur-
pose of coming to Virginia to free slaves, it is impossible to ignore the fact that
he was tried within a system presided over by slave holders and judged by a jury
of slave holders, the latter having deliberated only 45-minutes before returning a
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guilty verdict. Brown was undoubtedly doomed from the start, but McGinty
demonstrates how the abolitionist was repeatedly short-changed, especially due
to the haste with which he was brought to trial. Largely stifled in his ability to
obtain the kind of representation he sought, the same haste also undercut the
highly qualified attorneys who finally made it to his side in the last hours of his
short but well-publicized trial.
Notwithstanding his having been rushed to judgment, the reader shares
McGinty’s closing impression that John Brown, however imperfectly, made the
best possible use of his trial in the end. In a kind of inspired declaration,
Brown’s address to the court (which McGinty identifies as a “remarkable” allocu-
tion) was the real moral climax of the trial (226). “Viewed in the long lens of
history,” the author concludes, “it is clear that John Brown was not really on trial
in Charlestown” because “[he] turned the accusation against him into an accusa-
tion against slavery” (287). For the first time, in John Brown’s Trial, we are given a
front row view of Brown the prisoner — not as a victim, but as a thoughtful if
not frustrated defendant, coming to terms with the limitations of justice for
himself as well as the slave. Brown is rushed to the gallows, but not before
turning his own judgment back upon his accusers, many of whom would shortly
lose life, home, and treasure by rushing themselves into a treasonous war against
the federal government.
Louis A. DeCaro Jr.
Alliance Theological Seminary
Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black
Communist Claudia Jones (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
Claudia Jones contributed enormously to the American and British Left, but was
subsequently lost in the historical narrative of American political radicalism for a
number of reasons. First, Jones was a devout Marxist and member of the
American and later British Communist Party who was deported at the height of
anti-Communist hysteria. Second, she was a woman in largely male organiza-
tions. And finally, as a black West Indian living in the United States and
England, she experienced the rampant racism and nativism within the Left as
well as society. In her new biography of Jones, Left of Karl Marx, Carole Boyce
Davies argues that when Jones was deported, the “radical black female subject”
in the American Left was silenced as well (2). Jones embraced her identity and
through her experience expounded on and eventually popularized the under-
standing that a black woman faced triple oppression. This idea, later adopted by
black American feminists in the 1970s, most notably in the “Combahee River
Collective Statement,” arguably should place Jones firmly in the history of femi-
nism and the Left. This is precisely what Davies accomplishes in her text.
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