Literature and labor: Harvey Swados and the twentieth-century American Left

My dissertation is an intellectual biography of the novelist, essayist and independent socialist Harvey Swados. This dissertation challenges the historiography of the twentieth century intellectual and labor Left in United States. A former Trotskyist and factory worker, Harvey Swados possessed the same pedigree of many of the "New York Intellectuals" but remained an outsider in postwar intellectual circles. Swados's different line of evolution than the rest of his leftist cohort like Irving Howe, Saul Bellow, Richard Hofstadter, and Daniel Bell exposed fundamental differences in the way former radicals viewed American society through the 1950s and 1960s.; Swados remained committed to work and labor issues in post-World War II America after others in his generational and ideological cohort had shed their socialist convictions and thrown most of their energies behind battling the Soviet threat. I show how the bitter internecine fights that consumed the 1930's and 1940's Left reappeared in the 1960s, affecting both the old cohort of leftists and the newer generation as well. Swados provided an important "third voice" in the bitter debates between his older leftist cohort and New Left radicals. I argue that the experiences of Swados and the Labor Left, and the struggle between capitalist, business unionist tendencies and a more ideologically driven industrial unionism, reflect the very nature of the American "experiment" as a whole. I situate Swados as part of an established American tradition of independent intellectual radicalism that includes, among others, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Adams, and Max Eastman.; Using rich archival materials, Swados's own writings, and existing histories of both the twentieth-century New York intellectual left and American labor, I also argue that Swados's marginalization in his lifetime and neglect by scholars now works to his and our advantage.; It enables us to reexamine mid-twentieth century American life from the perspective of someone with far less invested in the contentious debates and conflicts of the era's public intellectuals. It thus gives us a sorely needed corrective to the existing, conventional interpretations of those decades.