TAKE HOLD OF OUR HISTORY – Harvey J. Kaye

A world where Harvey J. Kaye was in charge of civics education in the United States would be a sight to see.  We heard about the “radicals” that led the American Revolution back in grade school. This historian wants you to track that radical tradition all the way to the present day.  Conservatives complain that people on the left aren’t proud of American history. They claim the left doesn’t see anything glorious in the promise of our civic creed.  Harvey J. Kaye will definitely tell you they’re wrong, and that he sees plenty to be proud of.

This is a book of essays and speeches, most of which Kaye has delivered or published elsewhere, then collected here. He maps out a path for rediscovering a left-leaning, radical, American historical tradition.  His argument?  Yes, American history is full of injustice, from abuse of Native Americans to enslavement and immoral wars. Yet many people also struggled toward justice, freedom, and a vigorous pursuit of peace. Kaye argues we must honor and remember them.

Some of these are essays, so they often don’t go that far in-depth.  Others are speeches, meant to be rousing and uplifting. They invite us to discover more on our own rather than have it fed to us.  In that sense, they’re effective, but they don’t always cohere in the way Kaye seems to hope. In many places, the speeches and essays here begin to repeat one another.  Harvey J. Kaye has a point of view, to be sure. While it’s compelling, you also start to expect his moves.

The book’s point of view is still limited by its desire to be positive about American history from a left-leaning perspective.  I’m of many minds on it, to be honest.  On the one hand, Kaye’s right that the left had success stories. They can claim elements of the American Revolution, the Civil Rights Movement, the New Deal, the social revolution of the 1960s and more. It all can form part of a path to progress that we want to continue taking.  But does this risk gliding past the brutality of policies that ravaged indigenous people? Does it shortchange history behind actions that oppressed millions of enslaved Africans? Does it end up over-glorifying the American Revolution or New Deal? The Revolution helped preserve a slave system that we could have abandoned. The New Deal propped up capitalism when we had a choice not to carry it forward with us. What does “taking back our history” mean in light of the roads that we could have taken, and those that lie before us?

Much like A People’s History of the United States, this is a book to explore what interests you, then use that as a springboard to read further.