Eugene Genovese

Eugene Dominic Genovese (May 19, 1930 – September 26, 2012)

At the 1969 convention of the American Historical Association, radical historians Staughton Lynd and Arthur Waskow, speaking on behalf of the Radical Caucus, introduced and later withdrew a resolution demanding an end to not only to the war in Vietnam but also to an “immediate end of all harassment of the Black Panther Party”. A substitute resolution introduced by the radical scholar Blanche W. Cook "deplored and condemned" the war and urged withdrawal of all American troops. It was Cook's resolution that eventually came to a vote.

During the discussion on the resolution, Genovese gave a speech, saying that although he opposed the Vietnam war, if the radicals' resolution passed, the bulk of historians in the AHA, who favored the war, would be forced to resign from the group. Noting that the majority of Americans also supported the war, Genovese said that those citizens were as moral and deserving of being heard as the war's opponents. The Radical Caucus, he said, were a bunch of "totalitarians." Genovese ended his speech by saying that the time had come for historians to isolate and defeat the New Left and "put them down, put them down hard, once and for all."^{[10][failed verification]} When the vote was finally taken, the resolution lost, 647 to 611.^[10]

Slavery studies

In 1968, Genovese wrote a critical historiography of the major studies of slavery in the Americas from a hemispheric perspective. He considered the demand by Marxist anthropologist Marvin Harris in The Nature of Cultural Things (1964) for a materialist alternative to the idealistic framework of Frank Tannenbaum, Stanley Elkins, Gilberto Freyre, and others. Tannenbaum had first introduced the hemispheric perspective by showing that the current status of blacks in various societies of the Western Hemisphere had roots in the attitude toward the black as a slave, which reflected the total religious, legal, and moral history of the enslaving whites. Tannenbaum ignored the material foundations of slave society, most particularly class relations. Later students have qualified his perspectives but have worked within the framework of an "idealistic" interpretation. Harris, on the other hand, insisted that material conditions determined social relations and necessarily prevailed over counter-tendencies in the historical tradition. Harris' work revealed him to be an economic determinist and, as such, ahistorical. By attempting to construct a materialism that bypassed ideological and psychological elements in the formation of social classes, he passed into a "variant of vulgar Marxism" and offered only soulless mechanism.^[11]

In the 1960s, Genovese in his Marxist stage depicted the masters of the slaves as part of a "seigneurial" society that was anti-modern, pre-bourgeois and pre-capitalist. In 1970, Stampp reviewing Genovese's The World the Slaveholders Made (1969) found fault with the quantity and quality of the evidence used to support the book's arguments. He took issue with the attempt to apply a Marxian interpretation to the Southern slave system.^[12]

In his best-known book, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), Genovese examined the society of the slaves. This book won the Bancroft Prize in 1975. Genovese viewed the antebellum South as a closed and organically united paternalist society that exploited and attempted to dehumanize the slaves. Genovese paid close attention to the role of religion as a form of resistance in the daily life of the slaves, because slaves used it to claim a sense of humanity. He redefined resistance to slavery as all efforts by which slaves rejected their status as slaves, including their religion, music, and the culture they built, as well as work slowdowns, periodic disappearances, and escapes and open rebellions.^[13]

Genovese applied Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony to the slave South. As Dennis Dworkin expresses it, "Like [E.P.] Thompson... Genovese deployed Gramsci's ideas. For Genovese, the slaveholding society of the Old South was rooted in exploitative class relationships, but most important was the cultural hegemony of slaveholders, their paternalistic ideology establishing both the potential and limits for a semiautonomous slave culture of resistance."^[14]

Genovese placed paternalism at the center of the master-slave relationship. Both masters and slaves embraced paternalism but for different reasons and with varying notions of what paternalism meant. For the slaveowners, paternalism allowed them to think of themselves as benevolent and to justify their appropriation of their slaves' labor. Paternalist ideology, they believed, also gave the institution of slavery a more benign face and helped deflate the increasingly strong abolitionist critique of the institution. Slaves, on the other hand, recognized that paternalist ideology could be twisted to suit their own ends by providing them with improved living and working conditions. Slaves struggled mightily to convert the benevolent "gifts" or "privileges" bestowed upon them by their masters into customary rights that masters would not violate. The reciprocity of paternalism could work to the slaves' advantage by allowing them to demand more humane treatment from their masters. Religion was an important theme in Roll, Jordan, Roll and other studies. Genovese noted that Evangelicals recognized slavery as the root of Southern ills and sought some reforms, but from the early decades of the nineteenth century, they abandoned arguing for abolition or substantial change of the system. Genovese's contention was that after 1830, southern Christianity became part of social control of the slaves. He also argued that the slaves' religion was not conducive to millenarianism or a revolutionary political tradition. Rather, it helped them survive and resist.^[15]

King (1979) argued that Genovese incorporated the theoretical concepts of certain 20th-century revisionist Marxists, especially the ideas of Antonio Gramsci and his construct of hegemony. Genovese's analysis of slavery, the blacks, and the American South elicited criticisms of various portions of his work, but historians agreed on the importance of his contributions. Areas of criticism included Genovese's placing of the master-slave relationship at the center of his interpretation of the American South, his views on southern white guilt over slavery, his employment of Gramsci's construct of hegemony, and his interpretations of southern white class interests, slave religion, the strength of the slave family, the existence of slave culture, and the theory of the generation of black nationalism in the antebellum years.^[16]

In his 1979 book From Rebellion to Revolution, Genovese depicted a change in slave rebellions from attempts to win freedom to an effort to overthrow slavery as a social system. In the 1983 book that he co-wrote with his wife, The Fruits of Merchant Capital, Genovese underscored what he regarded as tensions between bourgeois property and slavery. In the view of the Genoveses, slavery was a "hybrid system" that was both pre-capitalist and capitalist.

Shift to the right

Starting in the 1990s, Genovese turned his attention to the

• Genovese, Eugene D. (1965), The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and the Society of the Slave South, Middletown, Connecticut: Weslayan University Press. Second Edition.
• Genovese, E. D. (1968), "Materialism and Idealism in the History of Negro Slavery in the Americas", Journal of Social History, 1 (4): 371–94,
  ISSN 0022-4529
• Genovese, Eugene D. (1971), In Red and Black: Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History
• The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation, 1969
• Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, 1974 Winner of the Bancroft Prize in History.
• Fox-Genovese, E.; Genovese, E.D. (1976), "The Political Crisis of Social History: A Marxian Perspective", Journal of Social History, 10 (2): 205–220,
  doi:10.1353/jsh/10.2.205
  (with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese)
• From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World, 1979
• Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism, 1983 (With Elizabeth Fox-Genovese)
• The Slaveholders' Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820–1860, 1992
• The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism, 1994
• The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Cultural War, 1995
• A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South, Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures, 1998
• The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview, 2005 (with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese)
• Miss Betsey: A Memoir of Marriage, 2008
• Slavery in White and Black: Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders' New World Order, 2008.
• Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011 (with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese)
• The Sweetness of Life: Southern Planters at Home, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017 (edited by Douglas Ambrose)