Left Americana: The Radical Heart of US History - Paul Le Blanc
Published in 2017 by Haymarket Books, Chicago, IL
400 pages
ISBN: 9781608466825
In our current political climate, it is all too easy to automatically associate America with conservative politics. This is not without good reason. While the country was founded through a bourgeois revolution at its inception, the last 50 years have witnessed a far-right shift in American electoral politics. The Regan revolution ushered in the modern GOP, obsessed with culture wars, union busting, and severe austerity measures while cutting taxes for the wealthy. The neoliberal consensus of the Clinton administration led to the signing of NAFTA, which sent domestic jobs overseas due to cheaper labor costs, further immiserating the American working class through stagnant wages (although it temporarily provided Americans with access to cheaper consumable commodities).
The War on Terror initiated by the Bush administration replaced the former specter of 20th-century Communism with a new scapegoat for the 21st century: the Muslim. The Obama years, despite his promises of hope and change, saw an increasing dedication to the neoliberal status quo, as drone attacks on foreign nations abroad and deportation of immigrants here at home undergirded an administration that gave lip service to progressive causes. Meanwhile, the formation of the Tea Party during these years initiated the beginnings of the far-right organization of the contemporary Republican Party.
In 2016, despite a rising wave of renewed interest in socialism sparked by the Bernie Sanders campaign, Democrats rallied to push him out of the picture. Thus, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, inaugurating a new age of hatred and stupidity in equal measure. In 2020, after once again rallying around the aging Biden to once again edge Bernie out of the primary, the Democrats barely managed to take executive power amid a global pandemic. During his tenure, Biden illustrated the incompetence of the Democratic Party as they alienated progressive voters through their full-throated support of Israel in the war in Gaza. As of writing, Donald Trump has once again taken the reins of power, this time with a fully fascist agenda and cabinet behind him.
In the face of the right-wing dominance and liberal capitalist hegemony of the American political landscape, the average American citizen would be forgiven for thinking that Leftist thought is completely foreign to American history. Yet, this is far from the truth. Radical politics has a long and storied history within American political history, even if it has been largely overshadowed and fragmented over the past half-century.
In his 2017 book, Left Americana: The Radical Heart of US History, veteran Trotskyist activist and historian Paul Le Blanc offers a compelling mosaic of American radicalism and its undercurrents across the long twentieth century. Drawing from his deep immersion in Trotskyist and broader socialist traditions, Le Blanc delivers a collection of essays that are part memoir, part historiography, and part strategic reflection. This book resists the dominant liberal-nationalist narrative of U.S. exceptionalism and instead foregrounds the enduring and persistent, if often marginalized, legacy of working-class and socialist dissent in American history.
Overview:
Left Americana is not a single chronological narrative but a collection of 14 essays grouped thematically around the experiences, personalities, institutions, and moments that define the U.S. radical left over the past century and a half. Le Blanc’s scope spans the Haymarket martyrs of the 1880s, the radical labor colleges of the interwar period, the New Left of the 1960s, and the Occupy Wall Street movement of the 2010s. These chapters combine historical reconstruction with political commentary, guided by Le Blanc’s Trotskyist analytic sensibility that privileges class struggle while acknowledging the uneven terrain of race, gender, and ideology.
One of the book’s central achievements is its act of historical recovery. Le Blanc renders visible those whose contributions have often been buried beneath the sediment of Cold War liberalism and McCarthy-era historiography. By highlighting these vignettes of radical organizing and the successes of challenges of these groups, Le Blanc recovers a radical lineage full of lessons and inspiration for activists currently challenging the dominant powers of neoliberal capitalism in our contemporary moment.
For example, his examination of Brookwood Labor College offers a rare window into early 20th-century labor education as both praxis and ideology, as the College educated a generation of scholars and activists. Similarly, his chapters on Ruth Querio, a lifelong Trotskyist activist, and Albert Parsons and the Haymarket anarchists elevate figures often neglected in mainstream labor histories that focus on institutional unions or top-down political reform. The inclusion of C.L.R. James and Martin Luther King Jr. as revolutionary thinkers positioned them within a broader, often hidden, American socialist tradition. Le Blanc is especially effective in arguing that King’s late-career turn toward democratic socialism was not incidental but central to his politics, which challenges liberal appropriations that all too often sanitize King’s radicalism.
Le Blanc’s unique contribution lies in the dialectic between the personal and political. In chapters such as “A Reluctant Memoir of the 1950s and 1960s,” he situates himself as both subject and scholar, narrating his coming-of-age in a “red-diaper” household during the Cold War. These autobiographical interludes are not mere indulgences but rather exemplify how radical traditions are lived, transmitted, and contested across generations. They also reveal the deeply fragmented nature of Leftist groups within the mid-late twentieth century, as intraparty fighting and personal grievances tore apart any sense of unity among the broader Left. Le Blanc contends that future radical organizations must be democratic, inclusive, grounded in mass participation, disciplined, theory‑informed, without authoritarian hierarchy, and attuned to specific contexts, as they build strategies tailored to America’s specific political and racial dynamics.
Deeper Dive:
In the Preface, Le Blanc introduces his core argument: American radicalism isn’t marginal. Rather, it is deeply interwoven with the nation’s social and political fabric. He frames “Left Americana” as a tradition characterized not by loud revolutions, but by persistent grassroots energy and democratic impulses.
In the First Chapter, Le Blanc explores why socialism remains “latent” in U.S. history, primarily utilizing the works of Marxist theorist Karl Kautsky. Though often overshadowed by capitalism, socialist thought and action periodically surge during crises. Such moments challenge the assumption that radical ideas are foreign to America.
As such, Le Blanc analyzes why U.S. radical movements have struggled to sustain momentum. These are due to three major factors. First, American capitalism’s co‑optation of working-class energies, which leverages moderate prosperity, racism, and militarism to undercut class solidarity. Second, structural and organizational challenges, including internal factionalism and parties failing to evolve (especially in the Trotskyist formations with which Le Blanc is so familiar). Finally, there’s a tendency among the Left to default to fatalist orientations that passively wait for the inevitability of revolution, rather than actively working to shape socialist movements that build working-class power.
To remedy this, Le Blanc offers three potential remedies to the stymied American Left. First, he promotes an “activist” view, which sees history as shaped through conscious, democratic action, to overcome the overly deterministic “fatalist” tendencies of the Left. Second, he argues that socialism has a latent presence in American life, and it is up to socialists and other Leftists to raise consciousness and organize this latent energy. Finally, he argues that strategies must be developed and tailored to the specific realities of the American context.
In the Second Chapter, Le Blanc presents a portrait of working-class revolutionaries, anarchists, and the early Marxists of the 1880s, focusing on Albert Parsons and his fellow Haymarket martyrs in Chicago. Le Blanc emphasizes their radical vision for labor rights, such as the eight-hour workday and the international working-class holiday of May Day. He highlights their unwavering commitment to the labor movement and organizing, as well as how the forces of capital responded to the violence at the Haymarket Affair on May 4, 1886, by unjustly hanging four anarchist leaders, Engel, Fischer, Parsons, and Spies.
The Third Chapter explores the significance of the Brookwood Labor College, a pioneering labor-education initiative led by Christian socialist A.J. Muste. Widely known as “labor’s Harvard,” it served as an incubator for worker-leaders from 1921 to 1937, combining intellectual rigor with radical activism. He highlights how Muste’s pacifist Christian Socialism influenced the founding principles of the school, documents the curriculum, faculty, and student activities, and how the school contributed to the upsurge of labor activism in the 1930s.
Accordingly, in Chapter Four, Le Blanc profiles key radical labor currents during this era of the Great Depression, including various Trotskyists and Communists. Le Blanc highlights their militant organizing and visions for socialist transformation amid economic collapse. He discusses the fragmentation of these groups over sectarian divisions, their views on Stalin’s leadership in the USSR, the recognition of African American struggles, and the need for education, all of which Le Blanc argues the US Communist Party fell short, leading to their marginalization.
In the Fifth Chapter, Le Blanc provides a moving personal essay on Ruth Querio, a longtime, low-profile local Trotskyist organizer. He reflects on connecting with her, a seasoned organizer in her fifties, while he was in his twenties, and he recounts his regret for not keeping in touch with her. He highlights her committed dedication to labor organizing and peace activism, as she provided a guiding light to younger activists such as Le Blanc. Through his reflections, Le Blanc shines a light on Queiro and her committed activism, utilizing her activism as a revealing portrait of grassroots radicalism, emphasizing the quiet but essential work of rank-and-file radicals.
In Chapter Six, Le Blanc assesses the radical ideas of C.L.R. James, including his integration of race, anti-imperialism, and democratic Marxism. Le Blanc underscores James’s challenge to orthodox Leninism, critique of the vanguard party, and emphasis on race‑class interconnection. While acknowledging James’s contributions to Marxist discourses, he also critiques James’s egocentric behavior and belief that socialism is an inevitability. Le Blanc, as a committed Trotskyist, also debunks several of James’s interpretations of Trotsky’s thoughts, especially as James began to separate himself from the Trotskyist idea of the Vanguard Party.
In Chapter Seven, Le Blanc reminds us that Martin Luther King Jr. was a committed Christian socialist whose economic justice vision was integral to his activism. More than merely a civil rights icon, King was firmly rooted in the Christian Socialist tradition, which is informed and heavily influenced by liberation theology. Le Blanc recounts these left-wing influences on King’s thought and activism, as well as how Christian values and democratic principles can be combined with socialist insights to great effect.
Co-authored with Michael Yates, Chapter Eight reframes the 1963 March on Washington as not merely symbolic, but organized by socialists with a serious economic justice agenda. They credit the event as a politically radical, labor‑civil rights coalition between a wide swath of socialist organizers. Despite intense opposition, the event succeeded far beyond the organizer’s imagination, although some Leftists were disappointed in sacrificing hardline principles and rhetoric for the sake of building coalitions (and thereby numbers). Le Blanc and Yates celebrate the March’s success, but acknowledge its compromises and short-lived radical gains.
In Chapter Nine, Le Blanc’s analysis turns inward, as he offers a deeply personal reflection on growing up in a “red‑diaper” family during the Cold War of the 50s and 60s. He recounts his early experiences of developing a radical consciousness amid anti‑Communist hostility, as well as the disappointment and disillusionment that his parents’ friends expressed after the Khrushchev Revelations. He also discusses his own trajectory toward socialist ideas, as he absorbed leftist folk songs, took inspiration from civil rights movements, and began to read theory more deeply.
He also reflects on his disillusionment with center-left politics during his time as a camp counselor at Camp Henry, where he witnessed the “unconscious paternalism and elitism among the top white administrators--a belief that a primary responsibility of Camp Henry was to introduce these kids to superior forms of culture, as reflected in the tastes and sensibilities of these white, urban, liberal-Democrat, largely Jewish public school teachers from New York City who were proud members of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT)” (159). This led him to pursue more radical politics, eventually taking a job with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a student activist organization that was a representative of the New Left. While he learned much about radical politics during this time, he also realized that this emerging New Left lacked the rootedness in class solidarity that defined the Old Left. Additionally, he was also a witness to the group’s chaotic organization and how the various sectarian divisions eventually led them to dissolve.
In Chapter Ten, Le Blanc analyzes the rise of the conservative counter-movement from McCarthyism to Reagan, explaining how they systematically undermined radical reforms and pacified class-based movements. Formatted as an extended book review of Kim Phillips-Fein’s 2009 book, Invisible Hands: The Making Of The Conservative Movement From The New Deal To Reagan, the chapter takes stock of the activities of the political right from the 1940s to the 1980s and how they organized to take the reins of power in American politics and society.
In Chapter Eleven, Le Blanc examines the vibrant 1960s New Left, connecting it back to Old Left roots and delving into how socialist ideas permeated student and anti-war activism. Once again originally formatted as a book review of the books “Takin’ it to the Streets”: A Sixties Reader by Alexander Blooms and Wini Breines and Max Elbaum’s Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che, Le Blanc finds both of these volumes imminently useful, especially for younger activists. He writes, “Hopefully, the young and maturing comrades of today and tomorrow will absorb the best of what we were, will learn from our sad mistakes, and will draw as well from those who came before us” (194).
In Chapters Twelve and Thirteen, Le Blanc offers a comprehensive overview of Trotskyist influence on the SWP, from Trotsky’s exile-era impact to the factional struggles of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. As an active participant in the Trotskyist movement and the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), Le Blanc examines both its hopes and organizational challenges during the 70s. He utilizes three memoirs of former SWP insiders, Peter Camejo’s North Star: A Memoir, Leslie Evan’s Outsider’s Reverie: A Memoir, and Barry Sheppard’s two-volume memoir The Party: The Socialist Workers Party 1960-1988 to recount the disintegration of the party amidst internal schisms and the cult of personality that developed around Jack Barnes, who led the charge to expel over a third of the party’s members in the early 80s to consolidate his power. Le Blanc emphasizes the importance of younger activists to learn from their failures, avoiding factionalism and hierarchical structures that lend themselves to abuse by authoritarian figures.
Finally, in the Fourteenth Chapter, Le Blanc traces Occupy Wall Street back to radical predecessors, underscoring its lessons on horizontalism, economic critique, and participatory democracy, along with its limitations in achieving systemic change. By connecting the threads from the 1960s to recent iterations like Occupy Wall Street, he argues for the importance of participatory democracy and ongoing radical experimentation that challenges the structures of global capitalist powers that dominate our lives and fights for the working class.
Commendations:
There are many significant strengths to Le Blanc’s work. First and foremost, Le Blanc’s career as both a scholar and participant in radical politics informs every chapter. Drawing from over 40 years of activist scholarship, he interweaves his own activist journey with broader radical traditions throughout each essay. From being a “red diaper baby,” through the New Left and the Students for a Democratic Society, to his decades of scholarship and organizing in the Socialist Workers Party, Le Blanc deftly combines theory and practice, making each of these essays imminently applicable to young and seasoned activists alike. For historians of labor and the Left, this book functions less as a comprehensive account than as a rich and provocative entry point into debates around political memory, organizational form, and revolutionary continuity.
One of the book’s most important contributions lies in its recovery of marginalized histories of U.S. labor and leftist politics. In chapters such as “Brookwood Labor College” and “Haymarket Revolutionaries: Albert Parsons and His Comrades,” Le Blanc emphasizes the role of educational institutions, radical newspapers, and working-class intellectuals in sustaining anti-capitalist traditions during periods of repression and political backlash. His profile of Ruth Querio is a particularly striking and deeply intimate example of bottom-up historical recovery that brings attention to the everyday labors of organizing and the long arc of ideological commitment.
By interweaving such biographical narratives with complex political theory, Le Blanc’s approach is both compelling and pedagogically useful. He humanizes radical politics through figures like Querio, Parsons, and C.L.R. James, making theory legible through lived experience. This method resonates with a key Marxist insight that is important for us all to remember: that history is made by people under concrete circumstances. This biographical grounding works to demystify ideology and make abstract socialist concepts feel urgent and accessible to the average reader.
Furthermore, Le Blanc brilliantly challenges the liberal hegemony of U.S. historical narratives by centering socialist, anarchist, and Trotskyist voices. His recovery of the radical context behind events like the 1963 March on Washington and Martin Luther King's economic agenda is invaluable. Le Blanc's framing of key figures such as C. L. R. James, M.L.K. Jr., and A. J. Muste within an explicitly socialist tradition counters dominant liberal portrayals that often depoliticize their more radical commitments.
For example, in reframing King not merely as a civil rights leader but as a Christian socialist, Le Blanc reinforces the class foundations of his later political vision, particularly his opposition to the Vietnam War and his support for the Poor People's Campaign. In recentering the radical edge of these figures, he shows that American radicalism has not been imported from external sources. Rather, it’s deeply rooted in the fabric of American political tradition. This is critical in challenging Cold War-era historiography that erased or distorted the role of class and socialist thought in shaping U.S. reform movements.
Additionally, Le Blanc writes not merely as an observer of history but as a participant in the struggle to shape it. His analysis of Trotskyism is both personal and scholarly, even as he reveals the more unsavory and messy aspects of its organization and evolution. He neither whitewashes its sectarian flaws nor dismisses its theoretical rigor. Instead, he attempts to extract lessons from its limitations, especially around party-building, democratic functioning, and movement strategy.
As such, one of the book’s central strengths is its engagement with the theoretical and organizational questions that have long animated the U.S. left. Le Blanc offers both sympathetic and critical analyses of Trotskyist formations in the mid-twentieth century, and he reflects on the limits of sectarianism, the challenges of democratic centralism, and the potential of revolutionary organization under American conditions. His account is particularly effective in addressing the difficulties of building durable movements in a context dominated by racial capitalism, imperial hegemony, and anti-communist ideology.
This strategic orientation is also evident in his analysis of more recent political moments. In the final chapters, Le Blanc critiques the strengths and shortcomings of the Occupy Wall Street movement, praising its horizontalist energy while questioning its lack of structural coherence. Here, the author’s decades of experience within left organizations give him a grounded perspective on the perennial tension between spontaneity and structure, which is a debate that continues to animate contemporary organizing efforts, from DSA chapters to tenant unions.
In his critique of Occupy Wall Street, I found Le Blanc particularly generous and incisive. He admires the movement’s democratic impulses and economic clarity, but questions its aversion to organization and programmatic direction. For contemporary organizers, these reflections serve as both caution and encouragement. We must always remember that there will always be a day after the revolution. Mass spontaneity is not enough to sustain effective change. Structure and vision must follow and be implemented to reorganize and reorient our social, economic, and political lives.
As such, Le Blanc's long engagement with revolutionary socialist organizations gives him insight into why movements rise and fall. He does not romanticize the left. He’s honest about Trotskyism’s factionalism and the missed opportunities of the New Left, and he encourages strategic re-evaluation. This reflective orientation is a welcome corrective to the frequent mythologizing of past movements. His critique of Occupy Wall Street’s "horizontalism without program" exemplifies how historical insight meets contemporary strategy, and how we can learn from past mistakes to more effectively organize and effect change.
Critique:
On the other hand, despite its many virtues, Left Americana is not without its limitations. The book’s format as a collection of discrete essays often results in overly repetitive themes and a fragmented, uneven reading experience. As such, readers seeking a sustained theoretical engagement or a linear, comprehensive historical narrative of radicalism in American history may find the format somewhat scattershot and disorienting. As such, the work is best understood as a highly curated political archive of selected texts rather than a conventional historical monograph.
Additionally, while certain figures and periods are explored in depth (such as the 1930s Trotskyist movement, the 1960s New Left), others are under examined (particularly movements led by women, Indigenous organizers, and queer labor activists). Although Le Blanc acknowledges the intersection of race, gender, and class, his treatment of gender and sexuality is cursory. Moreover, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian American radicalisms are peripheral or completely absent in his narrative.
Although he devotes space to King and C.L.R. James, and notes the intersection of race and class, the book generally treats gender, race, and sexuality as secondary to class. Given the depth of intersectional labor struggles—from the laundry workers of the 19th century to queer labor organizers today—this feels like a missed opportunity. For example, while Ruth Querio is profiled, there’s little analysis of how gender shaped her activism. Similarly, the exclusion of major feminist labor organizers like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn or the role of women in the UFW movement leaves a significant gap.
This reflects a broader tendency within certain strands of Marxist historiography to privilege class struggle at the expense of multi-dimensional liberation movements. Le Blanc’s Marxism remains largely economistic, and while he includes thinkers like C.L.R. James, he tends to filter their contributions through a class-first lens. An engagement with more contemporary frameworks, such as intersectional Marxism or decolonial thought, might have enriched his analysis of movements like the Black Panthers or the feminist labor insurgencies of the 1970s.
Furthermore, Le Blanc’s lifelong association with Trotskyist traditions (especially the Fourth International) provides depth, but it can often narrow his analytical scope. While he's critical of sectarianism, his assessments of other tendencies (e.g., anarchism, Maoism, democratic socialism) are occasionally superficial and overly glib. A broader theoretical lens that incorporates insights from Black feminism, Indigenous resistance, or abolitionist Marxism might have enriched his discussions, particularly when examining race and colonialism in the U.S. context. This is all the more important considering that one of Le Blanc's main contentions is that Marxist movements should be attentive and adapt to the American context to succeed. Yet, when it comes to his own analysis, it often remains stubbornly and narrowly focused on a Trotskyist perspective.
Finally, while Le Blanc attempts to recount the failures of the past in order to learn from these mistakes, the long list of petty grievances and deep philosophical disagreements that led to fragmentation within the American Left ends up being a bit demoralizing. Le Blanc dives deep into the weeds of intra-party infighting, especially among the SWP, which, unless you are deeply invested in these debates, will likely have little impact.
Conclusion:
Overall, Left Americana is a passionate, historically grounded exploration of the American radical tradition. While outdated in places, lacking in wide intersectionality, and narrowly focused from a Trotskyist perspective, this work offers a necessary corrective to liberal erasure and a reminder of the labor movement’s revolutionary roots. It succeeds best as a provocative, accessible primer and memoir from a seasoned scholar and activist, but stops short of providing a comprehensive labor history. For serious students and scholars of labor and the U.S. left, it offers insightful starting points, moral clarity, and strategic reflection, but should be read alongside broader and more diverse accounts of radical history.
Left Americana is both a historical recovery project and a strategic provocation. It succeeds in excavating and honoring the radical heartbeat of U.S. history that has pulsed beneath the surface of liberal democracy and capitalist development. Despite a long series of setbacks, the Left has begun to show some renewed signs of life over the past decade. While it was dealt a few major blows with the defeat of the 2016 and 2020 Sanders campaigns, the genocide that Israel has been committing in Gaza has become a catalyzing force for organizing against America’s complicity in aiding and abetting war crimes in the Middle East.
For these young scholars and organizers alike, Left Americana is an invitation to see the United States not merely as a bastion of capitalist liberalism but as a terrain shaped by recurring insurgent struggles for economic and social justice. Le Blanc successfully documents the turbulent achievements and enduring limitations of American radicalism, while challenging contemporary leftists to build better, more democratic, and effective movements As such, this book is a valuable resource, not as a definitive history, but as a set of tools and provocations for those committed to building a more just and democratic future.