American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation

Feminists, labor militants, civil rights stalwarts, and socialists have captured America%E2%80%99s heart%E2%80%94though rarely its votes%E2%80%94according to this perceptive history of the radical left. Kazin (The Populist Persuasion), editor of Dissent magazine, surveys visionaries, organizers, and rabble-rousers, including abolitionists and free-love communards of the 1830s, Gilded Age utopian novelists and temperance crusaders, feisty Wobblies and avant-garde bohemians, patriotic Popular Front Communists and %E2%80%9960s firebrands. From this tumult of movements and personalities%E2%80%94everyone from John Brown to Naomi Klein, Dr. Seuss to Noam Chomsky%E2%80%94Kazin discerns continuities: radicals, he contends, succeed by influencing liberals rather than winning power, and by championing individual freedom and self-fulfillment; they fail when they attack religion and nationalism, advocate economic leveling, or advance sectarian purity and Marxist dogmas. Kazin%E2%80%99s argument that the socialist economic program was always "stillborn" while the Left%E2%80%99s cultural project%E2%80%94social equality, identity politics, artistic freedom, sexual liberation, and antiauthoritarianism%E2%80%94has triumphed is not new, and it lends the book a tone more of eulogy than of celebration; still this is a lively and lucid synthesis of a vital political tradition. Photos. (Aug.)