Queer Places:
222 Main Street, Orange, NJ
Forest Hill Cemetery
Madison, Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Harvey Goldberg (March 13, 1922, Orange, New Jersey – May 20, 1987, Madison, Wisconsin) was an historian and political activist. Harvey Goldberg was an out gay activist, an anti-Viet Nam War activist and what he would call an "hors du parti" (out of the communist party) socialist. Upon return to the University of Wisconsin he gained full tenure, and he used his massive student audience to more stridently speak out on pressing issues of the day. Many demonstrations would start immediately after his afternoon class, e.g. the occupation of the State Capitol grounds by farmer Ed Klessig and his cows in 1977 protesting a freeway through his pastures.[10] As well, protests against the Viet Nam war invariably started after his lectures, just as did later protests against U.S. intervention in Chile. In 1978, he helped form a local chapter of the Mass Party Organizing Committee, which grew out of Sunday morning brunches at the local activist, gay, legislative tavern, the Cardinal Bar.[11] Also out of those meetings (and the Community Union effort) grew the Common Sense coalition which played a role in local Madison mayoral politics for several years. While sympathetic to Trotsky's form of Marxism, his months of unsuccessful union organizing as a youth, and his outsider status as gay, Jewish and socialist kept him away from being a joiner of parties. Goldberg also often took a year sabbatical to research, network, and engage politically in Paris, France, from his longtime walk-up apartment at 13, la Rue du Pont-aux-Choux in the Marais, near his beloved sans-coulotte district and the site of the Bastille dismantled in the French Revolutions. He humorously spoke of an extraordinary encounter at the apartment with nearly-blind Jean-Paul Sartre where Simone de Beauvoir served them boiled eggs (a feminine object) that rolled around on the plates in some kind of post-feminist semiotic revenge. Harvey's apartment and favorite restaurants were the scene of numerous rendezvous not only with historians, but activists and leaders including popular historian Howard Zinn, Chinese scholar and good friend Jean Chesneaux,[12][circular reference] litigator/civil rights activist Arthur Kinoy, esq., anti-poverty activist Frances Fox Piven and internationalist writer Susan George. His networking and support included U.S. war resisters such as Tom Nagel and Jim McKinney who published (under the cover of French exile policies) Zero: Paris American Exile Rock-Bottom Newsletter,[13] leaders of Fight for the Larzac, the Irish Republican Socialist Party and even Breton separatists. Goldberg spoke of his most important speech being at a rally in Paris during the Paris Peace talks led up by Henry Kissinger and the North Vietnamese, where he felt a strong American voice was needed. Another memorable speech for him was in Turkey in the '50s while on an international circuit with the United Nations.
Harvey Goldberg was born in Orange, New Jersey. He earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1943. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1951; the subject of his dissertation Jaurès and French foreign policy, was French Socialist leader Jean Jaurès. A specialist in European social history, Goldberg began his career as a historian at Oberlin College. After three years at Oberlin, Goldberg moved to Ohio State University, where he taught until 1963. His years at Ohio State were marked by extraordinary achievements in both scholarship and teaching. He published widely in journals ranging from The Nation to The International Review of Social History. His books include a biography of the French democratic socialist Jaurès, The Life of Jean Jaurès (1962), which The New York Times referred to as "The definitive biography, as dense with life, character and events as a Balzac novel."[1] Some publications are still only in French, such as his edits with Georges Haupt of the memoirs of Charles Rappoport.[2] Near the end of his book on Jaurès, Goldberg wrote, "He had the integrity to be partisan, the courage to be revolutionary, the humanism to be tolerant, and the wisdom to evolve...".[3] His Ohio State students recognized and honored those same traits in Goldberg himself, as evidenced by his award as Professor of the Year by the Arts College Student Council in 1959 when he was just 36 years old. In 1963, University of Wisconsin President Fred Harvey Harrington invited Goldberg to return to Madison. Goldberg was given the freedom to teach as he wished and the liberty to spend every third year in Paris. As a faculty member, Goldberg carried the history department when it came to attracting large student enrollments that drove departmental budgets. He estimated that during his 40-year career he taught some 25,000 students. He also supervised 49 PhDs. Despite his contributions to the department, however, Goldberg never received a teaching award from Wisconsin. Goldberg taught at the University of Wisconsin from 1963 until illness forced his hospitalization. He died of liver cancer on May 20, 1987. He is buried at Madison's Forest Hill Cemetery.
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