This study poses the question as to why Marxism never developed in the United States as a method of historical analysis until the mid-1960s. In this regard, the only publication attempting to fully address this question was Ian Tyrrell's book The Absent Marx: Class Analysis and Liberal History in Twentieth-Century America, in which he argued that the lack of Marxist historical analysis is only understood after one examines the internal development of the profession. This internalist argument is incomplete, however, because it downplays the important impact external factors could have had on the development of Marxism within the profession.
Keeping this in mind, the purpose of this study is to construct a new argument that takes into account both the internal and external pressures faced by historians practicing Marxism preceding the 1960s. With Tyrrell as a launching pad, it first uses extensive secondary source material in order to construct a framework that takes into account the political and social climate prior to 1960. Highlighting the fact that Marxism was synonymous with Communism in the minds of many, it then examines the ways in which the government tried to suppress Communism and the impact this had on the academy. It is revealed that the government, with the help of academic officials, effectively rooted out Communist scholars from the academy and as a result kept Marxism on the fringes of academic life. Using primary source documents, it ends with a case study focused on American historian Herbert M. Morais, through which it is shown not only that Morais was forced out of the academy because of his association with the Communist Party, but also that he was an early practitioner of Marxist historical analysis.
The findings of this study show that it was a combination of both internal and external pressures that contributed to the failure of Marxism to take hold as a valued method of analysis within the historical profession of the United States. Moreover, additional case studies are needed if we are to ever understand the full impact of these pressures. As a result, it is advised that historians use the framework presented in this study as a template from which to conduct research of their own, so that one day we will have a complete answer to the question as to why there was no Marxist historical analysis in the U.S. prior to the mid-1960s.