LIFE...

Mattson was born just inside the Beltway (Washington, D.C.) in 1966 – meaning that he was ultimately born into the liberal elite.  Well, his father was a Republican, his mother a Democrat, and they wasn’t rich folks, but you get the idea. 

Mattson lived a normal life until he “got punk rock” in the 1980s.  He played in numerous bands – Hate from Ignorance, Onto Gel, and Subtle Oppression – in the Washington punk scene.  Today the scene’s mostly known for bands like Fugazi, but Mattson remembers a time way before then, when kids used to “slamdance” with wild abandon.  And dream big dreams. 

Then Mattson “got politics” and started a youth organization at his high school – the Student Union to Promote Awareness (SUPA).  From that sprang a D.C.-wide youth organization called Positive Force, which worked on issues of homelessness, United States intervention in Central America, the nuclear arms race, and other issues.  Mattson helped produce a political “fanzine” (Off Center), fed poor people, organized protest marches and educational events.  Positive Force wound up finding mention in Maximum Rock n’ Roll, the Nation, City Paper, and the Washington Post.  Mattson remembers these days wistfully, the way the actors in Jonah Who Will Be Twenty Five in the Year Two Thousand remember their heyday.  He has considered writing a movie script along the lines of the Return of the Secaucus Seven but then remembers how much he hated movies like the Big Chill.

Mattson soon got tired of activism when he “got ideas.”  He started to educate himself, reading all sorts of weird things like Situationist International tracts, anarchist philosophy, the Frankfurt School, and Hegel.  He went to the New School for Social Research in New York City where he studied German philosophy, social thought, and some other bizarre stuff.  Here he “got argument.”  Then he decided to pursue graduate studies in American history and went to the University of Rochester to study with Christopher Lasch.  It was cold in Rochester, which made it easier to read books. 

After this, Mattson “got unemployment.”  He slogged it out in the ranks of the underemployed, adjuncting at various colleges, teaching college courses in modern American history, the civil rights movement, radicalism, liberalism, etc.  But Mattson got tired of little pay for hard work.  So he decided to return to activism of a different kind, becoming the Research Director and then the Associate Director at the Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy – a non-profit center at Rutgers University (New Joisey) begun by Benjamin Barber.  Here Mattson worked on projects aimed at enhancing participatory democracy.  He counseled public service organizations on how  to enhance the way young people thought about civic obligation and politics, developed web sites that nurtured public deliberation, oversaw the work of graduate students who did research projects into participatory democracy, helped community organizations work on planning and civic space, and other things that non-profit organizations require (like the mundane task of fundraising and organizing events).

Then he “got Hemingway” and started to learn how to ski (his wife Vicky taught him), raft rivers, and backpack on long trips through the wilderness.  He also wound up adopting a rather cool kid named Joseph.  And a cat and a dog and another cat along the way.

He decided in 2001 to move to Ohio University where he became the Connor Study Professor of Contemporary History and a faculty associate at the Contemporary History Institute (http://www.ohiou.edu/conhist/)..  He continued to work on projects that examined the intersection between politics, culture, and history.  His books include Liberalism for a New Century (2007); Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century (2006); When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism (2004); Engaging Youth: Combating the Apathy of Young Americans Towards Politics (2003); Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement (2003); Intellectuals in Action (2002); Democracy’s Moment (2002); and Creating a Democratic Public (1998).  All of these books share a theme in common: They are all historical works of political criticism that examine the connection between ideas and public life.

Presently Mattson is working on two book projects: a brief history of the American conservative movement entitled Rebels All!: A Short History of the Conservative Mind in Postwar America.  This will help explain why conservative writers have become so, well, rude and belligerent (you know, the permanent psychosis of Ann Coulter).  The second book project, to be published by Bloomsbury USA, examines Jimmy Carter’s famous 1979 “malaise speech” as a historical, political and intellectual event.

He also writes on a range of topics in both scholarly and popular publications.  His writings have confronted American politics, the legacy of centrism and liberalism, the use of movies to teach history, the abuses of historical knowledge in public debate, the filmmaking of Michael Moore, the cultural ramifications of 9/11, the Iraq War, the rise of “rock star” intellectuals, the dumbing down of American debate, and other topics he considers interesting and important.  He has written for the New York Times Book Review, the Nation, the American Prospect, Commonweal, the Baffler, the Common Review, the Washington Post Book World, Academe, and other publications.  Some of his writings are posted at this site.

He has even crashed the exulted gates of the punditocracy by being interviewed on NPR, Fox News (you bet!), Radio Nation, the Tony Trupiano Show, the Gary Null Show, German Television, Canadian Radio, the New York Times, and even ESPN. 

He is a fellow at the Center for American Progress (http://www.americanprogress.org/) and active at the national and local level of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) (http://www.aaup.org/).  He serves on the editorial board of Dissent magazine (http://dissentmagazine.org/), a publication with historical connections to the democratic left and that gang known as the New York Intellectuals.