“Pluralism” and American History  

FEW SCHOLARS HAVE INFLUENCED our thinking about “extremism” as much as Seymour Martin Lipset, professor of social relations at Harvard. The first writer to apply the concept of a “radical Right” to American social movements (in 1951), he later proposed …





Promise Keepers on the Mall  

Many readers of Dissent may associate mass demonstrations in Washington with liberal or radical gatherings such as the 1963 civil rights march or later protests against U.S. intervention in Indochina and Central America. But political and cultural conservatives have an …







McCarthyism Revisited  

Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective by Richard M. Fried Oxford University Press, 1990, 229 pp., $22.95 Senator Joseph R. McCarthy described McCarthyism as “Americanism with the gloves off,” but few students of this century’s second red scare …



The FDR Tradition: Shadow Boxing  

Franklin D. Roosevelt led the United States through the Great Depression and World War II, the worst crises any contemporary voter remembers. During his 12 years in office, moreover, Democrats and Republicans sorted themselves into the ideological pattern that still …



Monkey Trials, Past and Present  

Contrary to nearly universal expectation, the suit against the State of California’s Board of Education by Kelly Segraves, a fundamentalist foe of evolution, did not turn into a repeat performance of the Scopes “monkey trial” of 1925. Nevertheless, systematic comparison …



B Minus  

My minimal sense of kinship with the historical profession expands substantially whenever it is glibly attacked by journalists. America Revised provokes unprecedented solidarity with teachers of history at all levels. This lapse from detachment, frankly confessed, has advantages for a …





Panthers and Bulldogs Revisited  

Compared to Harvard or Chicago, not to mention Berkeley, Columbia, or Wisconsin, Yale was a remarkably placid campus during the late 1960s. Most students opposed the Vietnam War and felt an amorphous commitment to racial equality but few stood to …



Watergate & Mugwumps  

As a former Connecticut resident who voted against Lowell Weicker, I was particularly fascinated by his conduct during the first phase of the Watergate hearings, and by the favorable impression he made among liberal commentators. No one seems to remember …