> Max B. Sawicky wrote:
> > Genovese's subsequent erratic path is well known.
>
> I have a dim childhood memory of Genovese becoming an issue in the NJ
> gubernatorial campaign, after he said he would welcome a Vietcong
> victory. As I recall, the issue was whether he should be fired or not.
Right. He gave a speech where he said that,
tho he had said as much before, but it became
a media event. His last year at Rutgers was
66-67, right before I arrived, so all my info
on him is second hand from radical grad students
in the history dept. I was told he
was not fired outright, just made to feel
extremely unwanted. I believe his next
stop was Yale, so one could imagine worse
forms of punishment.
> Back in '92, though, a friend of mine had dinner with him and he
> sounded off about how he was going to vote for Bush, his only regret
> being that Bush stopped Powell & Schwarzkopf from going onto Baghdad.
> He also denounced the abortion clinic defenses that were big at the
> time. A couple of years ago, Genovese had offered some effusive
> remarks to the neo-confederate journal Southern Partisan on the death
> of the reactionary literary scholar M.E. Bradford. Is that "erratic"?
> Doug
Seeing as how he had been a CPer, then a PLer, then an
independent Stalinist who started and crashed a number
of projects, yes I would say erratic is a reasonable
summary of his trajectory. His wife -- Elizabeth Fox
Genovese -- has had an equally fascinating intellectual
journey. On the plus side, I am told
he was very generous and non-elitist with young profs.
I met him briefly after a talk he gave at the American
Enterprise Institute. Told him I knew some marxists
he had nurtured back in the day. He was amiable enough
and seemed to balance the positives of his own brand
of marxism and conservatism more or less equally. How
he rationalized it is beyond my powers of comprehension.
The best I can say is that there were some things he
hated so much about some or maybe most of the left
that it drove him all the way to the other side.
My best & only Genovese story. After he had launched
and then blew up another organizing project of some sort,
his wife was quoted as saying, "Well, Gene wrapped
up another one."
mbs
