Special Collections and University Archives UMass Amherst Libraries Theodore W. (Ted) Allen Papers 1890-2017 (Bulk: 1940-2005) 47 boxes (64 linear feet) Call no.: MS 1021 About SCUA SCUA home Credo digital Scope Overview Series 1. Correspondence Series 2. Writings and speaking Series 3. Research Series 4. Biographical and personal Series 5. Photos and media Series 6. News clippings and Articles Inventory Series 1. Correspondence Series 2. Writings and public speaking Series 3. Research Materials and Notes (partially processed) Series 4. Biographical and personal Series 5. Photos and Media Series 6. News clippings and articles Admin info Download xml version print version (pdf) Read collection overview Theodore W. "Ted" Allen (1919-2005) was an anti-white supremacist, working class intellectual and activist who researched and wrote outside of the academic community for almost seventy years. He developed his pioneering class struggle-based analysis of "white skin privilege" beginning in the mid-1960s; authored the seminal two-volume "The Invention of the White Race" in the 1990s; and in his writings and speaking consistently maintained that the struggle against white supremacy was central to efforts at radical social change in the United States. Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, Allen grew up in Paintsville, Kentucky and Huntington, West Virginia where he was "proletarianized" by the Great Depression. After hurting his back in the mines, he moved to New York City and taught at the Jefferson School of Social Science, did research with the Labor Research Association, and worked various jobs including factory work, teaching, the post office, and the Brooklyn Public Library. In the 1960s, after breaking from the Communist Party, Allen set out on his own independent research course, launching forty years of work that focused on white supremacism as the principal retardant of class consciousness among European-American workers and on the importance of the left and working class and progressive movements struggling against white supremacy. The Theodore W. Allen Papers are a comprehensive assemblage of correspondence, published and unpublished writings, audio and video materials, books with important marginalia, and research by one of the major theorists on race and class of the twentieth century. The Papers also include poetry and correspondence by Allen's wife, Marie Strong Allen, a radical feminist poet, who died tragically in 1962. Overall the collection is a rich and unique body of materials on the Old and New Left and on the labor, Civil Rights, and Black Liberation movements and it will appeal to students, scholars, researchers, activists, and interested readers worldwide. Background on Theodore W. Allen By Jeffrey Perry, with additions by Susan Creighton. Theodore W. "Ted" Allen (1919-2005) was an anti-white supremacist, working class intellectual, and activist who researched and wrote outside of the academic community for almost seventy years. He developed his pioneering class struggle-based analysis of "white skin privilege" beginning in the mid-1960s; authored the seminal two-volume "The Invention of the White Race" in the 1990s; and in his writings and speaking consistently maintained that the struggle against white supremacy was central to efforts at radical social change in the United States. Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, Allen grew up in Paintsville, Kentucky and Huntington, West Virginia where he was "proletarianized" by the Great Depression. He joined the American Federation of Musicians, worked in the coalmines, served as a United Mine Workers Union Local President, and joined the Communist Party. After hurting his back in the mines, he moved to New York City and lived his last fifty years in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. During those years, he taught at the Jefferson School of Social Science, did research with the Labor Research Association, and worked various jobs including factory work, teaching, the post office, and the Ted Allen Brooklyn Public Library. In the 1940s, he wrote probing analyses of conditions and struggles in the coal mining industry. In the 1950s, he wrote on radical political economy and produced critical analyses of U.S. capitalism, U.S. imperialism, and the Communist Party USA's analysis and program (which he thought was not radical enough), sometimes writing under the pseudonyms "Molly Pitcher" or "Milton Palmer." In the 1960s, after breaking from the Communist Party, Allen set out on his own independent research course. He sought to address the question of "Why No Socialism in the United States?" and how to explain the relative lack of class-consciousness by U.S. workers as compared to workers in other capitalist countries (what was referred to as "American Exceptionalism"). Inspired by Black Reconstruction by W. E. B. Du Bois, he analyzed and wrote about the "white blindspot" and "white skin privilege" (in such articles as "White Blindspot" and "Can White Workers Radicals be Radicalized") and began forty years of work that focused on white supremacism as the principal retardant of class consciousness among European-American workers and on the importance of the left and working class and progressive movements struggling against white supremacy. Noel Ignatiev was a close collaborator during this time period, and the two of them corresponded frequently as well as reviewing each other's work and co- authoring articles. In the early 1970s, while involving in many of the debates of the New Left, he began twenty-plus years of research in Virginia's colonial records and in probing analysis of Irish history as he developed an analysis that racial oppression was a form of ruling class social control not determined by phenotype or skin color. This research resulted first in the unpublished The Kernel and Meaning (drafts written between 1969 and 1976) that dealt with the development of white skin privilege, its relationship to land acquisition and use, and problems with U.S. historiography. Next followed drafts of the unpublished book Peculiar Seed: The Plantation of Bondage (drafts written circa 1976) that addressed the subject of class struggle and the origin of racial slavery in continental Anglo-America. Written between 1985 and 1997, Allen's exhaustively researched The Invention of the White Race was published in two volumes in 1994 (Vol. 1) and 1997 (Vol. 2), and republished in a two volume set in 2012. With its focus on racial oppression and social control, The Invention of the White Race is one of the twentieth-century's major contributions to historical understanding. Allen's major thesis -- that the "white race" was invented as a ruling class social control formation in response to labor solidarity as manifested in the latter (civil war) stages of Bacon's Rebellion (1676-77) was reinforced by two important corollaries: 1) that the ruling elite deliberately instituted a system of racial privileges to define and maintain the "white race" and to implement a system of racial oppression, and 2) that the consequence was not only ruinous to the interest of African Americans, it was also disastrous for European-American workers. In developing these theses Allen challenges the two main ideological props of white supremacy - - the notion that "racism" is innate, and it is therefore useless to struggle against it, and the argument that European-American workers benefit from "white race" privileges and that it is in their interest not to oppose them and not to oppose white supremacy. Over his last thirty years, Allen wrote hundreds of published and unpublished articles and letters challenging white supremacy, capitalist rule, sexism, and U.S. Imperialism as well as numerous poems. In his last few years, he wrote an important philosophical piece "On the Individual and the Collective" and a major unpublished work, "Toward a Revolution in Labor History" (drafts written between 2002 and 2004). Ted passed away early in 2005 from deteriorating health issues. His friends and colleagues hosted memorial services for him both in his home city of New York, and in Virginia near the site of Bacon's Rebellion. Particularly significant in Allen's work is the full-scale challenge it presents to what he refers to as "The Great White Assumption" - - the unquestioning acceptance of the "white race" and "white" identity as skin color-based and natural attributes rather than as social and political constructions. His thesis on the origin, nature, and maintenance of the "white race" and his understanding that slavery in the Anglo-American plantation colonies was capitalist and enslaved Black laborers were proletarians, contains the basis of a radical approach to United States labor history. Scope of collection The Theodore W. (Ted) Allen collection documents the life and work of the historian and author of the groundbreaking book, The Invention of the White Race. The collection provides extensive records of the drafts of both volumes of The Invention, along with numerous drafts of other related works: The Kernel and Meaning, A Peculiar Seed, and Towards a Revolution in Labor History. Together with Allen's profuse research notes and background materials, his correspondence, and information on his social and political commitments, the collection is a major resource for study of the development of the concept of whiteness and white privilege in historical studies and for study of a working class white radical engaged in racial justice struggles. Series descriptions Series 1. Correspondence 1948-2016 The correspondence series includes materials ranging from the 1950s through the end of Allen's life, and includes both personal and professional communication. It includes a number of letters and cards from family members, including nieces and nephews for whom he was a much-loved uncle. Allen was close to both the Ed Peeples family (including Ed's daughter Cecily) and the Remco van Capelleveen family. Correspondence with these friends includes letters, poems, wedding invitations, birth announcements and family news to and from Ted and those families over a number of years.