1939 Radical American History Textbook

Allan Seager, They Worked for a Better World. 1939. The People's Library, Macmillan: New York. Hardcover 16-mo with original dust-jacket.

 

This book was published by an imprint called 'The People's Library', ironically a subsidiary or sub-imprint of the Macmillan corporation, or perhaps distributed through it; further research into it is required, but the flavour of its publications can be gleaned from the notices on the back of the dust-jacket. It represents a thinly-veiled attempt to introduce an awareness of the non-conformist tradition into the overwhelmingly reactionary historical education of American youth in the 20th Century. Written in the tone of a standard, triumphalist history textbook of the period, it subtly shifts the emphasis of the 'American spirit' away from benevolent state power to protest and agitation. The roots of American colonisation in the formation of Capitalist joint-stock companies is emphasized, and the effects of this orientation followed through. The story of America since then is organised through biographies of five examples – none of whom ever held state power (no presidents, no war heroes), all of them activists, most of them having served prison terms for their efforts: the Free Thought & anti-racist heretic preacher Roger Williams, the radical polemicist and professional revolutionary Thomas Paine, the Pacifist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Feminist organiser and some-time abolitionist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the Socialist theorist & novelist Edward Bellamy. (One would wish for a representative of full-blown abolitionism and one of indigenous resistance as well – but, racial equality is repeatedly promoted in the book and overall, this is not bad at all for a book aimed at mainstream readers in 1939.)

The explicit lesson urged on students is that political freedom depends upon critical thought and continual activism: 

"If you believe that the work these five people did is valuable – and you cannot disbelieve it any more than you can deny your eyes or teeth or anything that is a part of you – then it might be a good idea if Americans looked around and tried to identify the real benefactors of our own time. Admittedly, this is hard to do  . . . From the lives of these five examples, the 'good' seems to mean the right of people to live together with decency, freedom, and dignity. All people, that is. Black or white, Jew or Gentile, Catholic or Protestant, mere humanity should be enough to guarantee the right . . . It would not have been a bad thing to have helped them in their work, and it would not be a bad thing to hunt out, recognize, and help the men and women like them who are living now."

This copy was found in a thrift shop in Roanoke, Virginia.