The Martin Duberman Reader

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 1964–2002

Queer Representations
(editor)

A Queer World
(editor)

Midlife Queer: Autobiography of a Decade, 1971–1981

Stonewall

Cures: A Gay Man's 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, 1807–1886

DRAMA

Radical Acts

Male Armor: Selected Plays, 1968–1974

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.

Requests for permission to reproduce selections

from this book should be mailed to:

Permissions Department, the new Press,

38 Greene Street, new York, NY 10013.

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 States—History. 3. United States—Social conditions. 4. United States—Politics and government. 5. Gay rights—United States—History. 6. Gays—United States—History. I. Title.

HQ75.8.D82A25 2013

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Composition by dix!

This book was set in Janson Text

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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

Author's Note

HISTORY

     
The Northern Response to Slavery

     
Black Power and the American Radical Tradition

     
Black Mountain College and Community

     
On Misunderstanding Student Rebels

     
The Stonewall Riots

     
Feminism, Homosexuality, and Androgyny

BIOGRAPHY

     
Paul Robeson

     
Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine

     
Howard Zinn

     
Donald Webster Cory: Father of the Homophile Movement

     
Kinsey's Urethra

     
Masters and Johnson

MEMOIR

     
Calgary

     
Education

     
Life in the Theater

     
Bioenergetics

     
Feminism and the Gay Academic Union (GAU)

     
The National Gay Task Force

     
AIDS

POLITICS AND ACTIVISM

     
Racism in the Gay Male World

     
Cuba

     
On the Death of Ronald Reagan

     
Pleasuring the Body: Reflections on Gay Male Culture

     
The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies

     
Queers for Economic Justice

     
Class Is a Queer Issue

Coda: Acceptance at What Price?
The Gay Movement Reconsidered

Permissions

To keep this
Reader
at a reasonable length, I've 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.

I'm 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.

 

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 solutions—at 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 way—in 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 problems—we 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.

Before 1845, the Northern attitude toward slavery rested on this comfortable belief in the benevolence of history. Earlier, during the 1830s, the abolitionists had managed to excite a certain amount of uneasiness about slavery by invoking the authority of the Bible and the Declaration of Independence against it. Alarm spread still further when mobs began to prevent abolitionists from speaking their minds or publishing their opinions, and when the national government interfered with the mails and the right of petition. Was it possible, people began to ask, that the abolitionists were right in contending that slavery, if left alone, would not die out but expand, would become more, not less, vital to the country's interests? Was it possible that slavery might even end by infecting free institutions themselves?

The apathetic majority was shaken but not yet profoundly aroused; the groundwork for widespread antislavery protest was laid, but its flowering awaited further developments. The real watershed came in 1845, when Texas was annexed to the Union and war with Mexico followed. The prospect now loomed of a whole series of new slave states. It finally seemed clear that the mere passage of time would not bring a solution; if slavery was ever to be destroyed, more active resistance would be necessary. For the first time, large numbers of white Northerners prepared to challenge the dogma
that black slavery was a local matter in which the “free” states had no concern. A new era of widespread, positive resistance to slavery had opened.