John Patrick Diggins

• 1. Introduction

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  John Patrick Diggins declared, near the end of his life, "I am left of right and right of left." That phrase captures something essential about a man who spent decades unsettling the comfortable assumptions of anyone who tried to categorize him. A son of Irish immigrants who grew up in San Francisco, Diggins became one of the most provocative voices in American intellectual history. He defended Ronald Reagan to audiences who expected him to condemn the man. He attacked the academic left from inside the academy. He wrote about Mussolini and fascism, about communism's hold on idealistic minds, about the restless theology of Reinhold Niebuhr. The questions his career raises are still live ones: Can a historian's mind genuinely change? What happens when a scholar follows evidence into uncomfortable territory? And what does it mean to belong to no political tribe at all?

• 2. From San Francisco to the Academy

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  Diggins was born on the 1st of April 1935, in San Francisco, to a father who tended the city's parks and gardens as a municipal employee and a mother named Anne Naughton Diggins. Both parents had crossed the Atlantic from Ireland, and the household where young John grew up was firmly Roman Catholic. He attended Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory School, where he graduated before moving on to higher education. His bachelor's degree came from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1957. He then earned a master's degree from San Francisco State College and completed his doctorate in history from the University of Southern California in 1964. His early academic posts kept him close to his origins: he taught as an assistant professor at San Francisco State College from 1963 to 1969, before accepting a position at the University of California, Irvine.

• 3. Fascism, Communism, and the Left

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  Diggins' first book took on a subject that few American historians had examined with care: how Mussolini appeared to ordinary Americans before the Second World War. "Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America" traced the Italian dictator's surprising popularity in the United States and the response it generated, and the book won Diggins the John H. Dunning Prize in 1972. He followed that work with "The American Left in the Twentieth Century" in 1973, later revised as "The Rise and Fall of the American Left" in 1992. In that volume, Diggins was pointed in his criticism of the New Left and even sharper toward the academic left that had helped give it birth. He had little patience for the postmodernist frameworks of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. His subsequent book, "Up from Communism," traced four prominent doctrinaire liberal thinkers who shifted their ideological allegiances toward conservatism, a theme that would echo through his later reassessment of Reagan.

• 4. The Reagan Reversal

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  During the protests that shook Berkeley in the 1960s, Diggins remembered California's governor Ronald Reagan as someone who seemed to stand for "tear gas and police." That memory makes his later book all the more striking. In "Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History," Diggins argued that Reagan had been treated with undeserved dismissiveness, and that his core values were genuinely liberal rather than conservative. Diggins was explicit: he called Reagan "one of the three or four truly great presidents in U.S. history" and described him as "the great liberating spirit of modern American history, a political romantic impatient with the status quo." His account of this change of mind is direct. Reading Reagan's personal writings, released after Reagan's death, convinced Diggins that the man he had once seen through an ideological lens was "far from conservative." Not everyone accepted this reading. Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review, wrote that Diggins seemed "blinded by Reagan's sunniness" and rejected the idea that Reagan sought to rid America of a judgmental deity, pointing to Reagan's anti-abortion tract "Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation" as evidence of deep social conservatism.

• 5. A Career Between Coasts

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  In 1990, Diggins left UC Irvine after more than two decades and joined the City University of New York Graduate Center as a Distinguished Professor, a post he held for the rest of his career. From 1996 to 1997 he served as acting director of the Graduate Center. His academic reach extended well beyond the American continent. For a year he held the chair in American Civilization at the Ecole des hautes etudes in Paris. He was a visiting professor at both Cambridge and Princeton Universities, and a consultant and frequent lecturer at the University of London and Columbia University. He earned a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975, became a resident scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation in 1989, and received a nomination for the National Book Award for History. He also worked as a consultant on documentary films, including projects on Emma Goldman, John Dos Passos, and Reds, and appeared in numerous interviews with C-SPAN.

• 6. Final Work and Legacy

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  Diggins' last book, "Why Niebuhr Now?," examined the shifting political loyalties of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Published posthumously in 2011, it appeared after Diggins died in Manhattan on the 28th of January 2009, following a battle with colorectal cancer. He was survived by his companion of fifteen years, the author Elizabeth Harlan; a son and a daughter; two sisters; and two grandchildren. An obituary caught the governing tension of his intellectual life well. Diggins, it noted, was critical of the anti-capitalist left for believing that abolishing property would end oppression, and equally critical of the anti-government right for believing that dismantling political authority would restore liberty. After his death, Sacred Heart Preparatory School in San Francisco created the John Patrick Diggins '53 Endowed Scholarship in his name, connecting the end of his life back to the neighborhood and institution where it began.