Eugene D. Genovese, Historian of South, Dies at 82 (original) (raw)

U.S.|Eugene D. Genovese, Historian of South, Dies at 82

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/us/eugene-d-genovese-historian-of-south-dies-at-82.html

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Eugene D. Genovese at a “teach-in” at Rutgers in 1966. A year earlier he enraged politicians by saying at a similar event that he would welcome a Vietcong victory.Credit...United Press International

Sept. 29, 2012

Eugene D. Genovese, a prizewinning historian who challenged conventional thinking on slavery in the American South by stressing its paternalism as he traveled a personal intellectual journey from Marxism to conservative Catholicism, died on Wednesday at his home in Atlanta. He was 82.

His friend William J. Hungeling confirmed the death without giving a cause.

Mr. Genovese enthusiastically melded politics and academia even as his politics changed. A member of the Communist Party at 15, he had remained firmly on the left when, in 1965, speaking to students, he inflamed politicians by saying he would welcome a Vietcong victory in the Vietnam War.

By the 1980s, however, he had rejected Communism and liberal politics. In 1998 he helped form the Historical Society to combat what he saw as the “totalitarian assault” of political correctness and ideologically tinged research. He also came to support conservative Republicans like Pat Buchanan.

“I never gave a damn what people thought of me,” he said in an interview with The Star-Ledger of Newark in 1996. “And I still don’t.”

Mr. Genovese’s greatest influence, however, was quieter, devolving from his insights into the politics and culture of the antebellum South, expressed in more than a dozen books. Several were written with his wife, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, a noted scholar of women’s studies whose own political transformation, from Marxist-leaning feminist to social conservative, paralleled her husband’s.

Praised for his meticulous research, Mr. Genovese argued that slave life in the pre-Civil War South was not one of continuous cruelty and degradation. Rather, he described a system of “paternalism” in which slaves had compelled their owners to recognize their humanity. This, he said, allowed the slaves to preserve their self-respect as well as their aspirations for freedom while enabling their owners to continue to profit from their labor.

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