Paul Buhle and Edmund B. Sullivan, Images of American Radicalism (Hanover, MA: The Christopher Publishing House, 1998, 451 pp. plus indices, $60).

This is a genuinely beautiful book--rich in illustrations (including 100 color plates) that include drawings, cartoons, photos, broadsides and posters, campaign pins, sheet music, and every conceivable "image" of a host of radical movements from colonial days to the present. If it were not also an expensive book, I would insist that all of my students of movements, causes, and politics in general run out to buy it, and would hope that all of us "radical" readers of Peacework would display it on our coffee tables, if only to provoke an interesting conversation with our more conservative friends.

Images is well organized, in five major chapters, with a focus on early utopian communities; the labor movement; the rise of socialism, populism, the IWW, and bohemian lifestyles; the old left from the twenties to the witchhunting era of Joe McCarthy; and finally the post war movements (with particular emphasis on civil rights, other liberation movements, and the protests against the Vietnam war). The pictures speak for themselves, but are beautifully supplemented by both a highly readable account of the events of the period, and a series of sidebars that focus on individuals (some prominent, others previously unknown, at least to this reviewer).

Having said all that, I find it almost embarrassing to complain about omissions. The subject is, after all, a vast one. The authors give no definition of "radicalism" as a guide to their self-set boundaries of relevance, but their opening sentences assert that radicalism is "given shape by the radicals themselves: egalitarians, feminists, environmentalists, rebellious non-whites along with their white supporters, unionists and other lower class (or upper class) dissidents, enemies of authoritarian state rulers and military-imperial schemes..." This is indeed a comprehensive list. I am sad to report, however, that the great bulk of the text that follows, and most of the illustrations, seem to be devoted, in Chapters 2 through 5, to socialist and communist organizations, fronts, and splinter groups. There is no mention, for example, in the sections on anti-war protest (both World Wars and Vietnam) of Quakers, Mennonites and Brethren, or of the sanctuary movement during Vietnam; no mention in the final chapter on recent movements of the Plowshares activists, the anti-Trident campaigns, the campaign against the White Train, tax resistance, the Pledge of Resistance, and the like. (There is, however, solid treatment of A.J.Muste and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, passing mention of Dan Berrigan having been influenced by Dorothy Day, attention to Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin, and others.) Early Quakers are also omitted in the chapter that covers the earliest period (no mention of Mary Dyer, although there is the usual forbidding photo of Lucretia Mott in the context of a discussion of abolitionism and women's suffrage). I pulled out my copy of Cooney and Michalowski's The Power of the People: Active Nonviolence in the United States, a far less comprehensive treatment of some of the same material (and the only book that I see as remotely comparable to Images) and found relatively little overlap between the two: the authors are simply looking at a different universe.

These omissions are troubling, but it could be argued that I am overly sensitive to a neglect of the religious/pacifist left (of which I am a part) when in fact the authors may not consider this branch of peace protesters to be true radicals. That explanation does not hold for some other key omissions: we are given a few photographs of the Clamshell Alliance, but very little textual discussion and no mention at all of the larger anti-nuke movement (large protests at Diablo Canyon, in California; the Trojan reactor in Oregon; and others). There is passing mention (and a few photographs) of Greenpeace and Earth First! but no discussion of the bioregional movement or the Green Party. The text is quite strong on visual images (and there are enlightening explanations about the development of lithography and then photography; the consolidation of the publishing conglomorates and the like) but less strong on music (except for a large number of photos of popular sheet music and songs from the Yiddish theatre). We are not told, for example, that the I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World) was a singing movement, nor is the Little Red Songbook mentioned, except in passing connection with Greenpeace's Lil Green Songbook. (Every "wobbly" was given a copy of the Little Red Songbook with his union card; singing at meetings was the start of a proud union tradition.) The Almanac Singers are mentioned briefly with no discussion of their union and Spanish civil war songs; the Weavers (a reincarnation of the Almanacs) are ignored.

The book is a valuable resource--not just for its photos and drawings, but for the amount of information it conveys. I learned a great deal, and in a delightful and painless fashion. The inclusion of anti-radical images--from Nast's cartoons to an anti-CIO broadside by the Chamber of Commerce--was a brilliant stroke as well. I wish, however, that the authors had given a clear definition (and their reasons for inclusion or exclusion) of radicalism. I state this with some pain, as a teacher who has struggled to make her students understand the breadth and depth of movement life in America. Too many have learned (from their parents or from the media's neglect) to dismiss movements as a hopeless fringe or an alien importation by Marxists. While Chapter 1 goes a long way to dispel that stereotype, Chapters 2-4, and to some degree Chapter 5 play into it. Our movements deserve better than this.

--Betty H. Zisk is a Quaker and environmental activist professor who teaches at Boston University. Her latest book is The Politics of Transformation: Local Activism in the Peace and Environmental Movements.