A Phi Beta Kappa talk: Nelson Lichtenstein on how radicals understand history

Upon induction into the Dartmouth chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in June 2016, Nelson Lichtenstein offered the following remarks. He is Distinguished Professor in the Department of History at UCSB and director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy. He received his B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1966 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1974.

     Better late than never. It’s a great honor to become a member of the Dartmouth Phi Beta Kappa chapter even if it has taken 50 extra years to make it. Indeed, it would have been a travesty had I been inducted when I was an undergraduate because I just didn’t have the grades. Among other things, I was terrible at languages, a debility compounded by the French department when some primitive computer there scheduled my language lab at 8 a.m. during the Winter Quarter. After hiking across a snowy green with hardly any breakfast, I just could not get my mind or mouth working on those verbs.

     When I graduated from Dartmouth in 1966, the “Sixties” were just reaching Northern New England. As a member of the editorial board of The Dartmouth, I took part in many furious debates about the pros and cons of the U.S. war in Vietnam. The resultant editorials were therefore a mess, exceedingly painful to read should you stumble across a yellowing copy. 

     So naturally I took off for Berkeley, California, ostensibly to go to graduate school.  I had other motives, which turned out to be just as important to the academic career I would eventually pursue. First off, I got a five-year deferment from the draft, a dubious entitlement given the mass round up of working-class kids, many Latinos and African-Americans, who in northern California, were bused into the Oakland Induction Center every morning at 6 a.m. for the physicals that would start the process that a few months later would put them on a chartered airplane to Vietnam. I did not feel much guilt in avoiding their fate, but it did give me a better moral and mental framework in which to understand that academic catch phrases, some deployed by PBK, like the “pursuit of excellence in the liberal arts and sciences” or the “life of the mind” and “freedom of thought,” were not available to everyone.  

    While I had failed to find a political home at Dartmouth, there were plenty to choose from at Berkeley, and I soon found myself spending a lot of time writing leaflets rather than term papers, attending Marxist study circles rather than doing the seminar readings. Administrators, trustees, some professors, and many parents usually think that if you spend a lot of time doing the former than the latter will be neglected, but they are wrong. Politics, indeed any passionately held set of explanatory convictions, be they aesthetic, religious, athletic, or even entrepreneurial, animate the learning experience and give it the intellectual context and moral weight in which one can flourish in a fashion useful in our own life and that of others.  Unless you have such a mental frame, a structured set of ideological understandings, you’ll miss a lot. You won’t know how to organize that flood of information in which you are drenched every day. 

    This came crashing home to me two decades ago when I gave a lecture here at Dartmouth to the History Department. Sitting in the back row was F. David Roberts, an historian of 19th century Britain and one of my teachers as an undergraduate. When I took his courses I had no idea that he had been a pacifist in World War II and a socialist for many years thereafter, nor was I able to truly grasp his lectures, all of which had a subtle but unmistakably radical flavor that explained how democracy struggled to emerge out of a rigidly class bound society.  But I could not “place” him or his lectures, because I had not yet “placed” myself. However, during the Q and A following my talk, which was about the American labor-left, Roberts mentioned that he had voted for the socialist Norman Thomas during the 1948 presidential election.

    Bingo! In a nanosecond his long-ago lectures and even some of the assigned readings flashed through my mind. Of course! He had been using the history of Britain, aristocratic and proletarian, to explicate his own deeply held beliefs on how modern America should be transformed and reformed. I had been a youthful idiot not to grasp the historical lessons he sought to advance: not because I was unintelligent, but because I had not armed myself with the larger worldview that would enable me to absorb the actual purpose of this scholarship. The point here is that real learning cannot be divorced from the political and social commitments, the moral worldview, held by teachers, students, and activists alike.  Only those who truly try to change the world can grasp it.