How to Remake the World: The Radical Life of Francis Jennings

Abstract

This article places the historian Francis Jennings’ life in political history. Before becoming a professional historian, Jennings was a high school history teacher and a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. The connective tissue that bound Jennings’ high school teaching career to his career as a professional historian was not the history, but the politics. This article argues that Jennings’ experiences with Communism and anti-Communism profoundly shaped the way he understood the relationship between politics and history. Jennings the historian believed in a sharp division between academic history and political action. This perspective was a consequence of his repudiation of something that Communism and Truman-era anti-Communism had in common: the insistence by authorities—governmental and revolutionary—that politics could not be meaningfully separated from any other facet of life. Jennings’ willingness to toe the Party line and his subsequent HUAC testimony led him to see politics as a realm of lies and deceit. This led to an outlook quite different from the “radical historians” of the mid-to-late Cold War years. Rather than espouse a Marxist understanding of historical progress and conflict, or embrace post-structural or Foucauldian ideas, Jennings rejected any positive association between politics and professional history. In making this case, this article thereby complicates standard narratives about both American Communists and the “radical” American historians of the twentieth century who broke with consensus history.