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From The New International, Vol. XVI, No. 1, January–February 1950, pp. 58–59.
Transcribed & marked up up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Two Friends of Man
by Ralph Korngold
Little, Brown, 425 pp., $5.
The American past has recently been so diluted with liberal water that it begins to seem like a long record of ineffectuality and compromise. It is therefore pleasing to have this book, a full-scale biography of the two leaders of nineteenth century Abolitionism, William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, who were distinguished precisely for their intransigence and readiness to defy popular views. Ralph Korngold has soaked his book in the Abolitionist atmospheres; his sympathies are, in the best sense of the term, Jacobin, and his book shows a tactful use of a materialist approach to American history which, because it does not vulgarize and oversimplify, is extremely welcome.
Korngold has centered his book on the personalities of the Abolitionist leaders, but since the contrast between Garrison and Phillips involves a major cleavage of perspective within Abolitionism, his approach is fruitful. Garrison was primarily what we should now call a, propagandist: he edited the great Abolitionist paper, The Liberator, and served as organizer for the loosely-bound but nonetheless fiery American Anti-Slavery Society. An extraordinarily courageous man who was nearly lynched several times by Boston mobs, Garrison was the first to make popular in America the program of unconditional abolition of slavery. Yet he was a man of decided intellectual limitations, whose anti-slavery feeling lacked any larger or controlling social context and who mixed his Abolitionism with a variety of such semi-crank notions as prohibition.
Phillips was something else. Where Garrison had come from a poor family and had had only a limited education, Phillips was one of the last and best of those Boston patricians who took seriously and selflessly the notion of “public service.” He was capable of serious intellectual generalization and eager, above all, to relate the seemingly isolated problem of slavery to a total pattern of social life. So long as the slavery question was unsettled, the two leaders could work together for their common end, and with regard to some tactical problems Garrison’s greater flexibility of maneuver was perhaps more useful than Phillips’ intransigence. But after the Civil War the distance between the two became clear: Garrison considered the fight for Negro freedom over, while Phillips, who grew more radical with age, insisted that the Negro problem involved more than the juridical abolition of slavery and required for its solution the economic rehabilitation of the Negro on the land. Phillips saw the need for an agrarian revolution in the South during the Reconstruction period; had his “harsh” program been carried out the entire cast of American history would have been changed for the better. But while it was to the interest of Northern capitalism to destroy slavery in the South, it feared the consequences of a fundamental democratic revolution in Southern agriculture at a time when the Northern labor movement was beginning to arise.
Phillips soon moved beyond the bounds of consistent Jacobinism or left-wing Republicanism. In his old age, after he had expended his considerable fortune in almost reckless charity, he joined in the formation of a short-lived Labor Party in Massachusetts and ran as its candidate for governor. To what extent he became a socialist is rather a moot point, not quite clarified by Korngold, but it is clear that he was at the very least moving toward socialism. Most important of all, he had come to understand the interrelatedness of social phenomena: he saw that slavery, low wages, women’s suffrage were problems arising within a common social context and comprehensible only against the background of an expanding American capitalism. The man who could have basked in the popularity of yesterday’s radicalism became universally hated as a dangerous radical – which, indeed, he was.
Perhaps the most interesting section of Korngold’s book is his discussion of Phillips’ position during the Civil War. Unlike Garrison, Phillips was strongly antagonistic to Lincoln, dredging up Lincoln’s unsavory record on slavery, denouncing him for his failure bluntly to proclaim an end to slavery, and calling upon the North to prod Lincoln into transforming an inept military campaign into a dynamic revolutionary-democratic war. (Phillips called Lincoln a “first- rate second-rate man.”) It is interesting to notice the similarity between Phillips’ position and Trotsky’s vis à vis Russia during the period in the mid-1920s when Trotsky put forward the famous “Clemenceau thesis.” When denounced for criticizing Lincoln, Phillips replied, much like Trotsky, that his platform called for a more vigorous prosecution of the war against the South, possible only if it were transformed into a revolutionary crusade against slavery. There can be no question that Phillips’ spirited agitation during the Civil War (he spoke to crowds of 40,000 and 50,000 regularly and was acknowledged the outstanding orator of his day) was a major factor in forcing Lincoln to announce the Emancipation Proclamation.
What impresses one most about these men is their immense courage, their readiness to face mobs and jeers and calumnies with dignity and humor (Phillips’ family tried to have him sent to a lunatic asylum when he became an Abolitionist!). They were, in their day and not only in their day, American radicals; and their radicalism took an uncompromising turn. When the Constitution was invoked to justify the Fugitive Slave Act, Garrison and Phillips publicly denounced the Constitution, and Garrison burned it at a public ceremony. So far as this reviewer can ascertain, Garrison wasn’t even put on a “subversive” list, and since there were then no telephones his couldn’t be tapped ...
Perhaps the only serious criticism a non-specialist can make of Korngold’s book is that in his eagerness to show the immediate actuality of Abolitionism he has not analyzed with sufficient methodological rigor the ideas behind it. For such analysis the reader is urged to turn to the chapter on Phillips in Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition. But Korngold’s book is a bracing tonic for our times, a reminder of the resources of American radicalism.
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