Duberman Martin B. - The Martin Duberman reader: the essential historical, biographical, and autobiographical writings

The

MARTIN

DUBERMAN

Reader

ALSO BY MARTIN DUBERMAN

NONFICTION

Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left

A Saving Remnant:
The Radical Lives of Barbara Deming and David McReynolds

Waiting to Land

The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein

Left Out: The Politics of Exclusion: Essays 19642002

Queer Representations (editor)

A Queer World (editor)

Midlife Queer: Autobiography of a Decade, 19711981

Stonewall

Cures: A Gay Mans Odyssey

Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (co-editor)

Paul Robeson: A Biography

About Time: Exploring the Gay Past

Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community

The Uncompleted Past

James Russell Lowell

The Antislavery Vanguard (editor)

Charles Francis Adams, 18071886

DRAMA

Radical Acts

Male Armor: Selected Plays, 19681974

The Memory Bank

FICTION

Haymarket

The

MARTIN
DUBERMAN

Reader

The Essential Historical, Biographical,
and Autobiographical Writings

Martin Duberman

NEW YORK
LONDON

2013 by Martin Duberman

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form,

without written permission from the publisher.

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Published in the united States by the new Press, new York, 2013

Distributed by Perseus Distribution

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Duberman, Martin B.

[Works. Selections. 2013]

The Martin Duberman reader : the essential historical, biographical, and autobiographical writings / Martin Duberman.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-59558-890-6 (e-book) 1. Duberman, Martin. 2. United StatesHistory. 3. United StatesSocial conditions. 4. United StatesPolitics and government. 5. Gay rightsUnited StatesHistory. 6. GaysUnited StatesHistory. I. Title.

HQ75.8.D82A25 2013

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Composition by dix!

This book was set in Janson Text

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

Charles Darwin, Voyage of the beagle

To Ellen Adler

my brilliant publisher
my fine friend

Coda: Acceptance at What Price?
The Gay Movement Reconsidered

To keep this Reader at a reasonable length, Ive omitted the many footnotes that accompanied the original texts. Since those notes often cite archival sources and contain clarifying content, readers interested in confirming my statements should consult the full-length books themselves.

Im grateful to Julie Enszer for her expert advice during the process of cutting down my original manuscript to manageable size, to Maury Botton for shepherding the manuscript through production, and to Ben Woodward of The New Press for fielding my many questions.

In order to preserve the integrity of the historical moment, Ive had to bite my tongue and retain the usage current at the time these pieces were written. Thus, I havent changed Negro to African American or black, nor men to men and women, him to him and her, etc. Its precisely the social movements I write about that subsequently brought about these changes in vocabularywhich is really to say, changes in consciousness. The use of men to cover men and women is especially jarring in the first essay (The Northern Response to Slavery) because so many women were active in the abolitionist movement, and quite a few held leadership positions.

T he abolitionist movement never became the major channel of Northern antislavery sentiment. It remained in 1860 what it had been in 1830: the small but not still voice of radical reform. An important analytical problem thus arises: why did most Northerners who disapproved of slavery become nonextensionists rather than abolitionists? Why did they prefer to attack slavery indirectly, by limiting its spread, rather than directly, by seeking to destroy it wherever it existed?

On a broad level, the answer involves certain traits in our national character. Any radical attack on social problems, suggesting as it would fundamental institutional defects rather than occasional malfunctions, would compromise our engrained patriotism. And so the majority has generally found it necessary to label extreme any measures that call for large-scale readjustment. Our traditional recoil from extremism can be defended. Complex problems, it might be said, require complex solutions, or, to be more precise, complex problems have no solutionsat best, they can be partially adjusted. If even this much is to be possible, the approach must be flexible, piecemeal, pragmatic. Clear-cut blueprints for reform, with their utopian demand for total solutions, intensify rather than ameliorate disorder.

There is much to be said for this defense of the American wayin the abstract. The trouble is that the theory of gradualism and the practice of it have not been the same. Too often Americans have used the gradualist argument as a technique of evasion rather than as a tool for change, not as a way of dealing with difficult problems slowly and carefully but as an excuse for not dealing with them at all. We do not want time for working out our problemswe do not want problems, and we will use the argument of time as a way of not facing them. As a chosen people, we are meant only to have problems that are self-liquidating. All of which is symptomatic of our conviction that history is the story of inevitable progress, that every day in every way we will get better and better whether or not we make any strenuous efforts toward that end.