A Radical S America

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ARA $5.00

"Harvey Swados is a rarity, a
writer who thinks before he com
mits himself. His book A RADICAL'S
AMERICA is an empirical discipline.
Moreover, he is sympathetic to his
subjects: work and working men,
people and popular culture,
socialism and the mid twentieth
century. These are hard subjects.
I could only wish we had his own
personal journal."

So writes Harry Golden about a
most provocative and unusual new
book by Harvey Swados, who is
already well known as a novelist
(OUT WENT THE CANDLE and FALSE
COIN) and as a short-story writer
(ON THE LINE and NIGHTS IN THE
GARDENS OF BROOKLYN) .

A RADICAL'S AMERICA is a
collection of essays written over
the last ten years, nearly all
published previously in national
magazines. A major essay "Why
Resign from the Human Race?"
provoked more letters than any
other article in the history of

(Continued on second flap)

973 S9?r 62-06552 15-00
Swados, Harvey

A radical's America*
Boston^ little, Brown [1962]

347p.

MAY

DEC .0 V975

1962

Books by Harvey Swados

Out Went the Candle

On the Line

False Coin

Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn

Years of Conscience: The Muckrakers

A Radical's America

A Radical's America

Harvey Swados

little, brown and company boston toronto

A Radical's America

an atlantic monthly press book

COPYRIGHT 1949, 1953, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962
BY HARVEY SWADOS

COPYRIGHT 1962 BY THE WORLD PUBLISHING COMPANY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRO
DUCED IN ANY FORM WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE
PUBLISHER, EXCEPT BY A REVIEWER WHO MAY QUOTE BRIEF PAS
SAGES IN A REVIEW TO BE PRINTED IN A MAGAZINE OR NEWSPAPER.
LD3RARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NO. 62-9540

FIRST EDITION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Pieces in tihis book first appeared in Antioch Review, Anvil and
Student Partisan, Atlantic Monthly, Chrysalis, Dissent, Esquire,
Mademoiselle, Menorah Journal, Monthly Review, The Nation,
New World Writing, Noble Savage, Partisan Review, Saturday
Review, and Western Review.

ATLANTIC-LITTLE, BROWN BOOKS

ARE PUBLISHED BY
LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY

IN ASSOCIATION WITH
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS

Published simultaneously in Canada
by Little, Brown 6- Company (Canada) Limited

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

There ought to be, behind the door of every happy,
contented man, someone standing with a hammer,
continuously reminding him with a tap that there
are unhappy people.

Anton Chekhov

Introduction

For the first time, I find myself faced with the necessity of ex
plaining something I have written. Supposedly it is the novelist
who shivers most nakedly in the cold light of self-revelation,
forever trapped by the button he himself has pressed; but I
have always found that my fiction, for better or worse, wore its
own disguises and thus absolved me of the necessity of apolo
gizing for its appearance. In a sense, my stories and novels,
once published, were no longer mine. The essays that follow,
however, remain defiantly and stubbornly mine perhaps that
is why they seem to cry out for some explanation for their be
ing placed between covers.

When I ask myself, Why this book?, I begin by recalling my
willful refusal of requests that I "do" a book on labor. The rea
sons for this resistance have slowly become clearer to me, and
their enumeration may give the reader some idea of what this
book is not about.

First, it was troubling to be asked to say more than I had
already said in a book of fiction called On the Line, since I
detected an implication that fiction does not tell a truth analo
gous to and maybe superior to many other truths. Second, I
resented being labeled in the casual American way as an ex
pert on labor when I was in fact no such thing and had no de
sire to become an expert on any problem. Third, while I was
fascinated by problems of work and labor, they did not seem
to me to be "worth'* a book and I become more and more
persuaded that for a writer it is the book that counts, not the
short story, not the article, but the finished book which he him
self has conceived. Fourth, I was at least as fascinated by other
manifestations of American life and liveliness by the ques
tion of "popularity" in books, movies, all manner of things; by
the position of women in our civilization; by the sedulous
avoidance of serious problems in our political debates, discus-

Introduction x

sions and campaigns. All of these matters and more I had al
ready been writing about for years, one sometimes leading to
another, one sometimes growing out of a story or novel in prog
ress or a conversation or argument I had gotten into.

So it seemed logical that if there was to be a book at all, it
had better be a book which would include all of these worth
saving, in reasonable proportions. There arose the logical ques
tion: Why me? What did I have to say about my America that
would be worth the time of others to read, not as fiction, but as
blunt statement or apology or polemic? The novelist needs no
more excuse for his existence than the magician or the juggler;
the essayist, however, and specifically the essayist who dis
claims expertise in any field other than storytelling (and even
that will inevitably be questioned), must establish his claim on
the reader's patience. My claim is my identity:

L I am a novelist. We Americans have had self-educated
novelists and college-professor novelists, reactionary novelists
and Communist novelists. With the exception of Henry James,
none of them to my knowledge has achieved in his nonfiction
the suavity and finesse of the European man of letters, of the
Thomas Mann of Essays of Three Decades. By comparison, our
essays in nonfiction have been jagged, tentative, unsure and
yet enormously exciting. Mann's contemporary, the Fitzgerald
of The Crackup, the notebooks, the letters, can tell and teach
more about the craft of writing than any other novelist or critic
since the splendidly magisterial essays of James. In our own
day, there is more about what it means to be a Negro in this
world in James Baldwin's books of essays, Not es of a Native
Son and Nobody Knows My Name, than in any other single
place outside of a novel; there is a whole new range of in
sights into our literary heritage in Wright Morris's under-dis
cussed essays The Territory Ahead; there is fuel for a roaring
bonfire of argument in Norman Mailer's perhaps over-dis
cussed essays in Advertisements for Myself. These novelists
(and such others as James T. Farrell and Jessamyn West, in
her fascinating To See the Dream) have displayed qualities of
mind that have made them worth listening to, no matter what
they talk about; I hope to be counted among their company.

2. I am a middle-class man of the mid-century, born and
brought up in a middle-sized American city, graduated from a
Middle Western state university, with a wife, three children, a

xi Introduction

house, and an automobile. Although I have worked in factories
of various kinds, have shipped out to sea, and have been asso
ciated with radical movements, I consider myself basically
middle-class in temper and outlook. Like most Americans, I
am of the city but not for it, for the countryside but not of it
(despite the fact that I live in it in preference to the city). Cer
tain segments of American society are as foreign to me as the
warring Congolese tribes: the very rich, the migrant workers,
cafe society. If I have not written of them it has not been be
cause I lacked curiosity, but rather because the opportunity to
learn about them has not come my way any more than it has
come the way of most middle-class Americans. My own Buffalo
boyhood and predominantly white-collar adulthood have been
for the most part as typical as my experiences in World War II,
which I got through, like the majority of my generation, with
out shooting at anyone or being specifically shot at. But I saw
ships go up around me, houses disappear, children die, all in
that impersonal mechanics of destruction which we have been
learning so well in this century, and it was in that war that I,
like many others, really learned the meaning of boredom and
of fear.

3. I am a Jew. My claim that this is another element of my
typicality in mid-century America should not be taken as
whimsicality. In my grandparents* time, at the beginning of
this century, the Jew was thought of as two kinds of person,
each of them "un-American" if not "anti- American": first, as a
mysterious and frightening money-changer, akin to the Wall
Street titans but not of them; second, as a clannish, poverty-
stricken, crime-ridden, disease-infected, unassimilable foreign
element (the magazines of the period included solemn discus
sions of whether, since there were so many Jewish pimps, pro
curers, muggers, and pickpockets, there was not something in
herently criminal in the Jewish character). Now, little more
than half a century later, not only would such formulations be
unthinkable (except in the hate sheets); not only has the Jew
been replaced by the Negro and then by the Puerto Rican as
bottom dog and supposedly congenital criminal; but the Jew
ish workingman has all but disappeared, and the suburban Jew
has emerged in his place as the middle-class man par excel
lence, in a country that prides itself on being solidly middle-
class.

Introduction xii

But this transformation of peddler and proletarian into
P.T.A. member has not (not yet, anyway) completely sub
merged traditional Jewish dedication to learning, to culture, to
education, and to solidarity with the oppressed. It is not acci
dental that the Navy officer who forced a national debate
about the American educational system should have been a
Jewish immigrant (that his notions are eccentric and reaction
ary need not be argued here). No more is it accidental that
avant-garde painting should have been all but dominated in
the past decade by Jews, or that the editorial board of a maga
zine entitled Dissent should be predominantly Jewish.

Furthermore, at a time when America is at long last, if re
luctantly, renouncing the isolationism which was an inevitable
consequence of eighteenth-century geography and nineteenth-
century flight from Europe, it is the twentieth-century Ameri
can Jew who feels most strongly his blood ties to the old con
tinent It was our aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins whose
annihilation forcibly recalled to us, more strongly than to any
other Americans, a sense of the size and shape of the world.

And here at home, it is the Jew, the urban man in a land
now only one quarter rural, who (even if he never lays claim to
the connection) knows the urban Negro as well as a white can
know him not with the pathetically false knowledge of the
patronizing Southerner, but as customer and counterpart, as
the man who has supplanted him in the East Side slum, as the
man who endures what the Jew's father and grandfather en
dured.

There is no plea for the Jew as best American. If there are
any such, they are more likely the handful of practicing Chris
tians who mean business about the most important matters in
the world, peace and racial integration and indeed, Mc
Carthy's Cohn and Schine, and the Rosenbergs and their
executioner, Judge Kaufman, are as representative of the
decade as Catholic layman Bill Buckley or Protestant layman
Nelson Rockefeller. It is rather a recognition that in our coun
try the Jew has moved from a marginal position to one of cen-
trality. In the next generation it may very well be the Negro,
the tenth American, who will come to be regarded by many of
his fellow citizens and by many around the world not
necessarily as Presidential timber (that old Jewish gag is al
ready much too old, even for Irish politicians) but as the most
typical American.

xiii Introduction

4. I am a socialist. I think it incumbent upon me to distin
guish this from either a liberal or a Stalinist bias; perhaps in
the course of making the distinction I may also succeed in
establishing what I hold to be true but have never before at
tempted to articulate: that a socialist attitude is at least as
firmly in the American grain as a liberal or an absolutist stance.
As intellectuals are increasingly polarized, with the nouveau
riche among them drawn to the Washington orbit, the nou-
veau radicals first to Belgrade, now to Peking and Havana,
there seem to be fewer and fewer able to withstand the mag
netic attraction of power and prestige at the one pole or of
absolute self -righteousness at the other.

Those few among the latter who are still attempting to sell
us Moscow as the wave of the future ought to be made to
commit to memory the July 1960 speech of Nikita Khrushchev
to the Soviet Union's writers and artists. "It is only through the
firm leadership of the Communist Party," he told them, "that
Soviet writers, artists and musicians . . . are finding creative
inspiration."

In this perverse parody of a noble doctrine, Khrushchev de
creed that "In a Socialist society, development of literature and
art does not take place spontaneously and anarchically, but is
regularly directed by the party." The fist emerges: 'They may
ask what right did we have to settle matters in that fashion. We
answer: according to the rights of leadership . . . Perhaps it
may sound rude, but in my opinion it is better to grab a man
by the ear and drag him from the abyss than to let him fall
into it."

For one of my convictions the voice of the absolutist bully is
no more the voice of socialism than are those of the self-right
eous terrorists, the neo-Stalinist Chinese chieftains dragoon
ing a continent into industrialism, or the Cubans who appropri
ate the word to describe a social order in which unions are
handed over to the Communist cabal, in which promised elec
tions are first postponed and then abrogated, in which the
crowd in the square shouting up the Maximum Leader is told
that its euphoric chanting represents the democratic validation
of a development program. Perhaps the final irony is that those
of us who supported the Cuban Revolution against the Batista
sadists and their American cohorts should now be accused by
the nouveau radicals of wanting Cuban children to go hungry

Introduction xiv

and unschooled because we cannot close our eyes to the de
formation of that revolution under the pressure of an all but
unbridled American imperialism.

No, I cannot accept the appropriation of mankind's most
precious aspirations by these people. No more can I accept the
intellectual and moral bankruptcy of those who vastly over
balance them in this country: the professors and liberals who
utilize the perversions of socialism as an excuse to capitulate
to the bottomless hypocrisy of American capitalism. The fact
that this polarization takes place does not mean for me that
either pole has any real claim to stewardship of the American
dream. In August 1960 I wrote the following lines for a sym
posium in Liberation on the Kennedy-Nixon campaign:

The argument is already being advanced that it would
be more worthwhile to vote for Kennedy because (a)
Johnson as Vice President will be harmless; (b) Adlai
Stevenson will be given a job; (c) there are important
liberal intellectuals like Schlesinger, Galbraith, Cox, etc.,
in the Kennedy camp; (d) nothing could be worse than
Nixon in the White House. I am not impressed by this
reasoning, which seems nothing more than the usual
speciousness which invariably precedes liberal cries of
betrayal.

In less than the allotted Hundred Days, the betrayal duly
took place. At home, the continuing attempt to placate the im
placable Southern reactionaries who dominate the Congress
meant that millions of underpaid laboring people, mostly Ne
groes, and among them the "thousands of exploited laundry
workers so often cited in the campaign speeches of John F.
Kennedy were sold down the Potomac." So James Wechsler
told the liberals of Americans for Democratic Action, in con
fused convention assembled, even while they were being asked
to support a program of billions for a mad race to the moon
and a madder digging of holes ("shelters") in the earth. Abroad,
Cuba was cynically assaulted in the most shameless maneuver
in modern American history. And not one of the liberal intel
lectuals who had flocked to the fraudulent banner of the New
Frontier had the guts to retrieve his honor or his self-respect
by resigning or otherwise dissociating himself from the arro
gant idiocy of his Administration's invasion attempt.

xv Introduction

It may be countered that, since this is a position which
would be regarded by most Americans as eccentric, if not sub
versive, one cannot simultaneously claim it to be representative
of any central aspect of the American tradition. But the Ameri
can people have not been given an honest choice for a long
time now. If they were to be given such a choice I believe that
their openness and generosity of spirit would reassert itself; for
they are being snowed as deliberately, and very possibly as
ruthlessly and efficiently, as are the peoples of any Communist
country. "We have been so vastly regimented," said Mr. Justice
William O. Douglas in May 1960, "that almost overnight opin
ion is shaped to fit a synthetic image/' To my mind this brain
washing is the most terrible indictment that can be made not
only of Communism but of contemporary capitalism as well:

" 1 wish I had the guts to tell the American people what the
CIA is doing in Southeast Asia/ The speaker," wrote Paul A.
DuBrul, Managing Editor of New America, "was a correspond
ent for a top American network, recently in the States for a
short vacation. He and his listener knew that he wouldn't tell
the American people, however, at least not until another de
bacle of the caliber of the U-2 and Cuban incidents takes
place . . ."

The six o'clock news on TV features a "man in the street" in
terview on the Cuban situation. Only one man speaks critically
of American behavior: the camera lingers long and lovingly on
the newspaper he carries under his arm- the Worker. "You
see, Daddy? You see?" cries the serious-minded schoolboy tri
umphantly to his father.

The same schoolboy turns to World Week, the "National
Magazine of Social Studies and International Affaks" distrib
uted throughout American schools, to read a description of the
American White Paper on Cuba, and is confirmed in what he
has already seen on TV: "The State Department," he reads,
"might have added that Castro had uprooted a friendship be
tween Cuba and the U. S. stretching back to 1898, the year
Cuba won its freedom from Spain." Not one word, nothing, on
what the U. S. had done to uproot the "friendship."

His younger brother, who can make his way through the head
lines, is already being indoctrinated by the mechanism of or
ganized distraction through horror and hatred. "Mommy, what
are tots?" he asks, pointing to the newspaper which features on

Introduction xvi

page one: MOTHER HURLS TOTS INTO RAVINE. He returns from
school to demand in bewilderment: "Isn't Grandpa Russian?
They say the Russians are the bad ones."

The children happen to be mine, but they could be any
one's. The irresponsible appropriation of the pervasive, ines
capable mass media, of the popular arts, of the schools them
selves for the systematic inculcation of a prefabricated attitude
in which smugness is married to sadism this is nothing less
than a crime against humanity. The brutal, self-satisfied words
of Nikita Khrushchev echo plangently in one's ear: "They may
ask what right did we have to settle matters in that fashion. We
answer: according to the rights of leadership."

The rulers of America too have arrogated unto themselves
the right not simply to lead but to "settle matters" by imposing
upon us a bipartisan foreign policy, a bipartisan popular cul
ture, a bipartisan information-propaganda grid, a bipartisan
self-congratulation, a bipartisan cant. This is not the America
of Thoreau, of Emerson, of Emily Dickinson, any more than it
is the America of Golden Rule Jones, of John P. Altgeld, of
Jane Addams; and I hereby reassert that those of us who per
sist in saying No to a society built on worship of the buck for
the things and people it can buy, those of us who persist in
dreaming of a society built on mutual aid and mutual respect,
have just as much right to consider ourselves as representative
of an essential corpuscular element in the American blood
stream as do the Luces, the Nixons, the Kennedys, and all
those who, in appropriating for themselves even the rhetoric of
our common dream, have turned it into a nightmare.

No doubt some will insist that I mislabel myself, that one
cannot be at the same time a skeptic and a socialist, that one
cannot say No and Yes from the same throat, and that if Amer
ica were visited by almost any variety of socialism, from "tip
toe" to "total," I should be as outraged as I now am by the
shrill and malevolent vacuity of American capitalism today.

This may be. It is one reason why, although I am a political
man, I am a novelist, not a politician, and shall never join any
party nor run for mayor of any place. If he is not inconsistent,
the novelist is nothing and I intend to cherish my inconsist
encies as I do my children.

This is also why, as I said at the outset, I have resisted all
efforts to make of me a systematic thinker, or even to make of

xvii Introduction

this a systematic book. The pages that follow were written at
various times over the last decade from a variety of concerns
and in various moods; the temper that informs them and, I
hope, unites them, I have just tried to isolate and describe.

As for myself, I regard this book in a sense as a balancing of
my accounts in order that I may confront new problems, now
that I have turned forty. If I have attempted to maintain a ten
sion between skepticism and idealism, I have also attempted to
secure some kind of personal connection between the writing
of these essays about my America and the creation of fiction.
In the process my kinship has been with those writers who
imply, even when they treat of trouble and terror, that the
world could be better, just as my commitment has been to
those human beings who believe despite every awful evi
dence to the contrary that the world must be better. It is to
them that I dedicate this book, in comradeship and homage.

Harvey Swados
San Francisco
June 1961

Contents

Introduction ix

The Jungle Revisited 3

The Reform Journalism of the Muckrakers 12

The Miners: Men Without Work 24

West Coast Waterfront: End of an Era 45

Labor's Cultural Degradation 65

The Myth of the Powerful Worker 74

Less Work Less Leisure 96

The Myth of the Happy Worker 111

Work as a Public Issue 121

Robinson Crusoe the Man Alone 133

Certain Jewish Writers 155

Italian Cinema y American Audience 177

Three-Penny Opera Three-Dollar Seats 184

The Cult of Personality in American Letters 191

The Image in the Mirror 201

3

Popular Taste and The Caine Mutiny 235

Exurbia Revisited 245

Popular Taste and the Agonies of the Young 251

Popular Music and the New Men of Skill 258

Be Happy, Go Liberal 265

The Dilemma of the Educated Woman 276

Exercise and Abstinence 284

The Pilot as Precursor 302

Work and the Professions 317

Why Resign from the Human Race? 328

1.

The Jungle Revisited

On the first of July, I960, an era came to an end. It was
hardly marked by historians, even by those hasty his
torians who write for the newspapers; but on that day the
federal humane-slaughter law went into effect, and the
nation became a little less hectic. Probably the sudden
quiet was noticed by almost no one but the workers in
the slaughterhouses, where cattle and pigs, calves and
lambs had been shoved, screaming, squealing, grunting,
howling in fear and terror, to be shackled, clubbed,
stabbed, slashed and hacked into edible portions for the
dinner tables of America.

The insensate shrieking of the terror-stricken beasts,
ringing through the old brick walls of the Chicago stock
yards, which could still be heard until the new law of
1960 brought unconsciousness followed by painless death,
was in a sense the final echo of those dreadful days that
you read about in The Jungle. For the visitor to the
Chicago stockyards of today who carried in his mind an
image of the stockyards of The Jungle (which Upton Sin
clair wrote in 1905, "sometimes blinded by his own tears,"
as he says himself) would observe at once that the scene
was changed almost but not quite beyond recognition.

For one thing, Chicago is no longer the "hog butcher of
the world." As automobiles are now being put together
not just in Detroit, but in California, Wisconsin and New
Jersey, so are pigs being killed in great new slaughter
houses in Wichita, Des Moines, Omaha. Those packing
houses still in Chicago are by comparison small and even
old-fashioned, half-forgotten by the teeming millions of

A Radical's America 4

America's second city, who depend for their livelihoods on
other, newer enterprises. The stockyards remain, vast buy
ing and selling marts, as a tumble-down, noisy, noisome
relic of an earlier day, but they too will disappear when
the redevelopers have their way and housing projects
spring up on soil fertilized by many millions of doomed
animals. Then indeed the era about which Sinclair wrote
with such passion will have passed into history.

In the meantime, the curious visitor can still follow the
pigs as they trot, nose to tail, through the pens of a
Chicago packer to their death and their destination on the
breakfast table. He will observe, after his initial surprise
at the comparative smallness of the entire operation, that
90 per cent of the people involved in the killing and
cutting at a typical plant are Negroes. Almost all of the
Lithuanians, Poles, Croatians and Slavs who fill the pages
of The Jungle have moved on to other employment. No
longer immigrants, no longer victimized as greenhorns
by unscrupulous loansharks, foremen, and rental agents,
they have scrambled up and out, leaving the room at the
bottom of the heap to the Negroes.

Not only is the killer, alone with death in his high-
walled, blood-soaked cell, still "a great burly Negro" as
he was sixty years ago; his less-well-paid fellow workers
are too, for the most part. They still work in a building
marked by great shifts in temperature, from the close and
airless to the great freezer storage rooms; they are still
surrounded by blood and stench, entrails and excrements,
death and dissection.

But the conditions of their work are happily better
than those described in The Jungle. Protected against dis
crimination and the grosser forms of exploitation by their
union, the United Packing House Workers of America,
they work and live better than their forerunners just as
the animals now die better than their forebears. Seasonal
employment, the scourge of all laboring people, from the
auto workers of Detroit to the sugar workers of Cuba, has
been all but overcome in the packing industry, thanks to

5 The Jungle Revisited

improved methods of raising, feeding, and shipping; and
unemployment insurance helps to take up the slack when
work does fall off. Electric saws have replaced the axes of
the "splitters" and "cleaver men," and no one need work
at a dangerous or exhausting rate of speed. Killing and
cutting are sometimes done at the same plant by the same
people, who thus learn a variety of operations and vary
their day with different jobs of work. Women workers
need hardly fear that demands will be made on then-
bodies in order that they may continue to sell the power
in their hands and backs. Children are debarred from
laboring alongside their elders, who make enough to be
able to dream that when their offspring come of age, they
will be doing something else, something better.

For, while this is a good job, working in a packing
house, it is only relatively a good job. It is good for some
one whose parents were tenant fanners and never had the
chance for more than a year or two of school, never made
enough to buy a car or decent furniture, or occasional
entertainment, never had the hope of looking forward to a
better future for their children. It is so good that workers
of such a background will come to feel a vested interest
in it it is their job; they have earned it by virtue of
steadiness and skill and loyalty and will fight hard to
hold on to it against the incursions of scabs, as one meat
packer discovered in a recent strike. But it is not a good
job to most Americans. It cannot be challenging or fasci
nating or glamorous or lucrative to anyone much more
sophisticated than a sharecropper, willing to trade away
the dusty cabin for the city flat and the noisy, bloody job
that bespeaks change and opportunity. Inevitably these
people too will come to understand, even from looking at
movies and picture magazines, that what they are doing
to earn a living is not generally considered worthy of a
modern, sensitized human being, no matter how much
union security and how much government supervision
and then the whole cycle will start again. Either new
strata of hitherto submerged populations will move in to

A Radical's America 6

replace the Negroes, as the Negroes moved in on Upton
Sinclair's Lithuanians (and as the Puerto Ricans took over
the bottom-dog jobs formerly held only by Negroes in
New York City), or the character of production will have
to change radically, to make the atmosphere palatable
and attractive to ambitious young people.

Because the truth seems to be that the meat-packing
industry in Chicago has not kept pace technologically with
many other industries. The workers, as we have said, look
different from the way they must have to Sinclair they
no longer have the appearance of creatures moving
through a living nightmare; but aside from the humane
slaughter, the improved cleanliness, the better light, the
careful government supervision, the electric saws, and the
umbrella of their union, what they do does not seem to
have changed so remarkably in these last sixty years. With
The Jungle fresh in your mind, you could still tour a
Chicago packing house today and have a reasonably good
idea of the process of production.

It is worth noting that the packing-house industry was
perhaps the first in the country to adopt modem mass-
production methods. At any rate, Henry Ford was much
impressed by its use of the conveyer-belt system to move
carcasses before stationary workmen who could attack
them with their tools, performing the same set of opera
tions repetitively; thus the disassembling of animals served
as the inspiration for the assembling of automobiles, while
the utilization of "everything but the squeal" may perhaps
have served as the inspiration for Ford's celebrated penu
rious techniques in the design, production, and sales of
the Model T.

But the conveyer belt and the stationary workman in
the packing house were dependent on a gravity operation:
the beast had to be hoisted up as high as possible in order
that his innards skin, blood, intestines, and the rest
could be funneled and channeled down from floor to floor.
Hence the high old buildings, which seem now so hope
lessly obsolescent in an architectural economy whose land-

7 The Jungle Revisited

scape is increasingly punctuated with the dashes and
hyphens of long, low industrial plants housing one-level
continuous-flow mechanized and automated operations;
and which, even with their occasional, up-to-date, made-
in-Germany sausage-stuffing machines, still have the look
of movie sets for a somewhat expurgated and mildly
modernized version of The Jungle.

Is that, however, why we persist in reading this book?
Surely if we want only to find out "what it was like" or
"what it is like now" or to make a mental connection be
tween the two, we could turn as readily to any substantial
reference work. Just as surely, this book does not continue
to live because of its unique literary values or esthetic
virtues.

It must be nearly forty years now since Van Wyck
Brooks blasted Upton Sinclair for coming to the writing of
novels from the wrong set of preconceptions. And nothing
that has happened in the world of fiction since then has
served to weaken Brooks's case. It was his contention that
it is folly, and the death of art, for the would-be novelist to
think that he can only write with full effectiveness about
lumberjacks by becoming one himself, and living in the
woods for years on end. Such misunderstanding of the
author's role can only create one more bad lumberjack
and one more bad novelist. The novelist must maintain a
certain reserve, a certain distance from his characters, in
order to see them and know them most fully; otherwise
he will inevitably collapse into the stammering senti-
mentalism of the overinvolved.

Certainly the subsequent developments in American
fiction have in general sustained the Brooks thesis. The
false identification of writer with class in the proletarian
novel of the Thirties, or of writer with uniform in the war
novel of the Forties, issued largely in nothing more than
flatulent overvaluing of human beings as types or models.
Those novels which, in turn, have stood out from the ruck
have been the products of writers whose primary devotion
was not to their class or their credo but to their craft.

A Radical's America 8

Besides, the more we examine a work like The Jungle,
the more difficult it is to defend its specifically literary
merits and the more it becomes obligatory for the com
mentator to make a pious listing of Sinclair's inadequacies
and exaggerations. Very well. No one could deny that the
style of the book is undistinguished, at best. No one could
deny that he drags out the agony and piles horror upon
horror until we want to cry, "Stop! Enough! No more!"
No one could deny that structurally it is a broken-backed
book, with most of the intensity concentrated in the first
two thirds, which are concerned with the struggle of the
immigrants to sustain themselves in Packingtown, and
most of the propaganda concentrated in the last third,
after the dissolution of Jurgis Rudkus's family and during
his conversion to socialism.

If what the reader wants is a fictional rendering of the
psychological effect of prolonged association with the kill
ing of helpless animals, then he should read the unforget
table story by Pierre Gascar, "The House of Blood." This
tale, which deals with the life of a little boy apprenticed to
a sadistic provincial French butcher, is to be found in
Gascar's Beasts and Men and is in its own way definitive.
If what the reader seeks is an allegorical revelation of
some of the overtones of the endless parade of cattle to the
abattoir, he must read James Agee's stunning story "A
Mother's Tale/' which begins like a bedtime story, com
plete with talking beasts, and becomes a Christian parable
as it grows to encompass a world of millions marching
meekly to death camps.

Still, I should assert that there are certain human values
which do not find complete expression in either of these
stories, and for which one must turn to a book like The
Jungle. And so, as I would hope that the educated person
reads all three, I must now say what it is about this book
that does make us persist in reading it.

For me it is the furious passion with which Upton Sin
clair here apotheosizes the sweat and agony of an essential
generation of Americans, an entire generation without

9 The Jungle Revisited

which this country could not possibly have achieved what
it has. If he had done nothing more, Sinclair would have
justified as one way of functioning the method not of
immolation in the working class but of observation and
creation, which has gone so far out of fashion in recent
years among Western novelists. We need not go through
his entire enormous oeuure, so much of it cranky or banal,
to sustain such a statement about The Jungle, any more
than we should feel compelled to justify all of Zola's im
mense output in order to come to a similar conclusion
about Germinal: Both books were the product of men who
proceeded, notebook in hand, to research a new territory,
and then retired to write, not in tranquillity but in the
heat of anger and hope about the price paid by countless
thousands to build what is known as a civilization.

Zola's brutalized coal miners of northern France and
Sinclair's immigrants of Chicago's Packingtown can never
more be fully forgotten. They take their place in history
as the cruelly used builders of the modern era, along with
all the other untold millions who gave up their lives on
the altar of production in the strange and terrible rites of
the new industrial age.

This was not exactly what Sinclair had in mind. Judg
ing from his own testimony, as well as from the internal
evidence of the book itself, he (and many of his contem
poraries, like Jack London) thought of The Jungle as a
tract that would help win many converts to the ideas of
socialism and to the growing Socialist Party. No doubt it
did at least the years following its serial publication in
the mass-circulation Socialist weekly Appeal to Reason
were the period of maximum growth and influence of
American Socialism but over the generations the book's
impact has been quite different. In fact, as a result of the
disgust and outrage that swept not only this country but
virtually the entire world, once it became clear that The
Jungle was not simply the invention of an overheated
mind, remedial reform legislation was enacted which did

A Radical's America 10

much to halt the revolutionary upsurge that Sinclair had
been hoping to implement.

Indeed, when I came to reread The Jungle I found that
I had forgotten quite completely the lengthy propagan-
distic passages with which the last portion of the book is
so replete, but that I had retained from boyhood an
ineradicable memory of the wretchedness of the residents
of Packingtown and of the horror of the industry in which
they slaved. It is my impression that this is a common
experience, and my guess that no one who reads Tlie
Jungle will ever be able to erase from his memory its
opening chapters.

No writer, not even the most ardent propagandist, can
predict the consequences once he sets his pen to paper.
If Socialist agitation in the United States was to some
degree blunted by the passage of such legislation as the
Pure Food and Drug Act, in large part immediately in
spired by the reaction of Theodore Roosevelt and others to
The Jungle, the ultimate effect of this book on many thou
sands of minds cannot now be measured nor will it ever
be measurable.

It seems to me precisely now, as this country emerges
from the mindless euphoria that has gripped it for at least
a decade, that The Jungle must renew its hold on the
imaginations of an entirely new generation of readers. For
a time, Americans of the vast broad middle range ap
peared hypnotized by the advertising mentality into be
lieving not only that we had it made, but that the Ameri
can standard of living had been achieved at the cost of
certain human expenditures which were at worst a trifle
distressing and at best glamorous, in a liberal-patriotic
kind of way. The sacrifice of millions of lives, of millions
of proud and hopeful and bravely pioneering spirits, to the
accumulation of capital, even though it took place within
the memory of many Americans still alive, and even
though it still continues in certain backward areas of
American society, became something hardly to be be
lieved, to be relegated to obscurity, to be mentioned, if at

1 1 The Jungle Revisited

all, only jocularly as with the abominable exploitation
of women and children in factories, fields, and sweatshops.
But now we are entering a new time. We sense uneasily
that we do not have it made, that with a war-economy
prosperity have come new and staggering problems, and
that there is a vast suffering world beyond our national
boundaries, struggling in a variety of ways to accumulate
capital and thus to move as we have moved up into the
twentieth century. We sense too that, throughout this
world, no matter how the capital is accumulated and no
matter whether it be in the Western sector, in the Com
munist zones, or in the burgeoning new nations of the
formerly colonial areas, it is being done at a stupendous
cost in human suffering. There is a close parallel between
the payment in hunger, blood, and agony of the peoples
of the underdeveloped world and that extracted from the
immigrant builders of the American empire. It is a parallel
that we will neglect only at our own peril; it is one that
should fill us with humility and compassion for all who
must strain like beasts of the field to bring the world to the
next epoch; it is one that The Jungle will help to sustain
in the forefront of our consciousness, which is where it
belongs. To the extent that it fulfills this function, this
book will persist as a force in the spiritual and social lives
of a new and, it is to be hoped, a responsible generation
of readers.

The Atlantic Monthly, December 1961

The Reform Journalism
of the Muckrakers

Something exhilarating happened to American journalism
at the beginning of the twentieth century. For a brief
period a decade, roughly from 1902 to 1912 an extra
ordinarily keen group of editors and publishers made com
mon cause with some of the nation's outstanding novelists,
poets, historians, lawyers, economists, and researchers.
The cause, which changed the course of our history, was
the exposure of the underside of American capitalism.

Ever since the Civil War, there had been plenty of
editors and writers willing and eager to inculcate a credu
lous public with legends of wealth accumulated solely by
thrift and canniness, of progress achieved thanks to com
pletely unregulated free enterprise, and of the natural in
feriority of the lower orders: Ambrose Bierce argued
against the socialists that slums and child labor ought not
to be combated because they were the inevitable lot of
those too stupid and shiftless to raise themselves and their
offspring from the heap. But a new wind blew in with the
new century, reintroducing two qualities which had for
too long been relegated to the wings of the American
scene: honesty and compassion.

Honesty was now defined not merely as "discretion" or
balance" but as unflinching determination to bring to
light the reality behind the convenient myths about the
rulers of America, regardless of whether the rulers' power
lay in the political machine, in the corporate cannibalism
tagged as the trust, or even in the pulpit. Compassion was

13 The Reform Journalism of the Muckrakers

now defined not merely as "charity" or "sympathy" but as
outraged identification with the friendless and the voice
less at the bottom of society, regardless of whether they
were illiterate croppers, sweated newcomers, aggrieved la
borers, or terrorized Negroes.

During this vigorous decade, honesty in pushing the in
vestigation of corporate and governmental corruption to
its nethermost reaches and in arriving at the ultimate logi
cal conclusions was not mislabeled treason, subversion,
lese-majeste or cynicism. Nor was compassion for the suf
fering of the exploited millions as ruthlessly sacrificed in
the frenzy to industrialize as the masses of any contempo
rary Communist ex-colony mistaken for sentimentality
or confounded with the "square."

In fact it was the Square Deal's father who also fathered
the name which has identified these journalists from that
day to this. On April 14, 1906, in the midst of the labors of
this unusual band, Teddy Roosevelt unloosed an attack on
them, taking as his text a passage from Pilgrim's Progress:
". . . die Man with the Muckrake, the man who could look
no way but downward with the muckrake in his hand,
who was offered a celestial crown for his muckrake, but
would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered,
but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor."

The Presidential attack, sanctimonious and largely un
justified though it was, created a permanent label, one
which has entered the language as has the more recent
"egghead"; but it did not succeed in slowing the momen
tum of such men as Charles Edward Russell, Ray Stannard
Baker, Lincoln Steffens, Finley Peter Dunne, and Upton
Sinclair. That did not take place until the end of the Taf t
Administration, when B. H. Hampton, last of the great
muckraking publishers, awoke one day in 1911 to find that
financial control of Hamptons., haven for writers displaced
from other journals, had been maneuvered out of his
hands and that the magazine was going to be scuttled
apparently by underground agreement of some of the fi-

A Radical's America 14

nancial interests which had been plagued by its revela
tions.

Historians differ as to whether muckraking was bought
out and killed off, or whether regardless of what hap
pened to Hamptons it would in any case have died with
the ebbing of the Roosevelt era. Certainly some of the
muckrakers themselves, tired, disillusioned, or disoriented
by American participation in World War I, directed their
energies into other channels: one became a corporation ex
ecutive, another a chronicler of romances, a third a biog
rapher, a fourth a professional reactionary.

But just as certainly, during the first decade of this
century, these writers showed themselves at their best;
and they, together with the editors and publishers who
were bold and idealistic enough to commission and to
print their exposes, showed America at its periodic best.
There is something to be said for the notion that our coun
try recuperates from its greedy decades almost like a re
pentant drunkard recovering from a debauch by trying to
examine the causes of his drinking bout and by making
earnest resolutions to sin no more. The difference between
the nation and the drunkard may lie in the fact that, in its
moods of sober self-criticism, the nation really does redress
many of the wrongs, really does help those who cannot
help themselves, and does thereby renew its world image
as a state concerned not solely, or even primarily, with
self-aggrandizement but, much more importantly, with
dignity, freedom, and decent self-respect.

This is not to say that the national mood during these in
tervals of thoughtful stocktaking is always one of unalloyed
benevolence, any more than were the pages of the muck
raking magazines purely rationalistic or invariably redolent
of Christian brotherhood. Just as the New Deal years were
also the years of the Silver Shirts, the Liberty League, and
the German-American Bund, so can one find in the pages
of the muckraking magazines reams of nonsensical food-
faddism and, worse, occasional articles about semibarbaric
Negroes or aggressively acquisitive Hebrews which should

15 The Reform Journalism of the Muckrakers

have been beneath the contempt of any self-respecting
editor; and it is perfectly true that a humane, passionately
reform-minded editor like B. O. Flower could wax as elo
quent in the pages of the Arena over the virtues of spiritu
alism or Christian Science as over those of civic reform or
public ownership. But we speak here of an over-all tone, a
mood, and it is surely beyond dispute that in those years
such periodicals as Hamptons, Pearsons, Cosmopolitan,
and McClures, to say nothing of Collier's or the Arena, re
flected in their major concerns everything that has been
traditionally largest and noblest in the American spirit.

That may very well explain the twofold reaction to
Theodore Roosevelt's epithet on the part of the journalists
whom he attacked. If Gustavus Myers and Ida Tarbell
were appalled at this parodying of their scholarly re
searches, others Upton Sinclair and Charles Edward
Russell among them responded to the challenge by ac
cepting the label and insisting on wearing it with pride, as
a proof of the force with which their work was striking
home.

Now the Muckrake Men I know [insisted Upton Sinclair in
the Independent in 1908] are all men of personally clean lives
and generous hearts; there is not one of them who would not
have been something noble, if he had felt free to choose. Of
those who come immediately to my mind, one would have
been a metaphysician, another would have been a professor of
ethics, three at least would have been poets, and one would
have founded a new religion. Instead of that they are Muck
rake Men ... not because they love corruption, but simply
because they hate it with an intensity which forbids them to
think about anything else while corruption sits enthroned . . .

As a rule, the Muckrake Man began his career with no theo
ries, as a simple observer of facts known to every person at all
"on the inside" of business and politics. But he followed the
facts, and the facts always led him to one conclusion; until
finally he discovered to his consternation that he was enlisted
in a revolt against capitalism.

He is the forerunner of a revolution; and, like every revolu
tionist, he takes his chances of victory and defeat. If it is defeat

A Radical's America 16

that comes; if the iron heel wins out in the end why, then,
the Muckrake Man will remain for all time a scandal-monger
and an assassin of character. If on the other hand, he succeeds
in his efforts to make the people believe what "everybody
knows" _ then he will be recognized in future as a benefactor
of his race.

History would seem to justify those who gloried in T.R/s
diatribe; for, decades later, the surviving journalists of the
era vied in asserting pride of rank in the muckraking elite
and in reading others out of it. This was to be true even of
those (a majority of the original group) whose political
philosophy had shifted over the years: Mark Sullivan, be
come a spokesman for conservative Republicanism, was to
insist in his later years that he, and not Lincoln Steffens,
had fired the opening gun of the muckrakers* crusade, One
hardly presses his claim to charter membership in a group
which he cannot regard as representative of what is best
in the national character.

It should not be thought that the muckrakers sprang
full-blown from the brows of a handful of editors, any
more than that their spirit was swept from the scene once
and for all by the storm clouds of the First World War,
Their fervor, their passionate denunciation of corporate
aggrandizement at the expense of the individual Ameri
can, their belief in the boundless possibilities of a better
nation, instinct in every line they wrote all these are to
be found in Henry Demarest Lloyd's Wealth Against
Commonwealth, which was published in 1894.

The men and women who do the work of the world [as-
serted Lloyd in his opening chapter] have the right to the
floor. Everywhere they are rising to "a point of information."
They want to know how our labor and the gifts of nature are
being ordered by those whom our ideals and consent have
made Captains of Industry over us; how it is that we, who pro
fess the religion of the Golden Rule and the political economy
of service for service, come to divide our partial existence for
the many who are the fountains of these powers and pleasures.
This book is an attempt to help the people answer these ques-

17 The Reform Journalism of the Muckrakers

tions. It has been quarried out of official records, and it is a'
venture in realism in the world of realities. Decisions of courts
and of special tribunals like the Interstate Commerce Commis
sion, verdicts of juries in civil and criminal cases, reports of
committees of the State Legislatures and of Congress, oath-
sworn testimony given in legal proceedings and in official in
quiries, corrected by rebutting testimony and by cross-exami
nation such are the sources of information.

Indeed, the only thing wrong with this powerful book,
from a journalistic standpoint at least, was that it was too
far in advance of its time, for it anticipated in every area
the main lines of attack of the muckrakers; to a modern
reader its method and its commitment are all but indistin
guishable from those of the muckrakers, and if it was less
widely absorbed than their work, this can only be attrib
uted to the fact that the public was "not ready" for it
which may be another way of saying that it was not made
readily available as an article of mass consumption*

A decade later, however, the public was ready. Or
again, we may put this another way by saying that the
revelations of die muckrakers were made easily available
to the public by a mass medium, the cheap popular maga
zine, If it is worth noting that the traditional American
periodicals whether scholarly, historical, literary, or sim
ply upper-class in general played little part in the tu
multuous activity of the decade, despite the fact that some
of their most valued contributors blossomed as muckrakers
in other journals, it is evei* more important to emphasize
the mass circulation of those other journals. A low-price
magazine which could vault to a circulation of nearly half
a million in a country with, at the turn of the century, little
better than a third its present population, and with a sub
stantial proportion of newly arrived immigrants and native
illiterates, was obviously saying something of value to mil
lions of Americans. When we multiply this by the total
number of magazines whose circulations were zooming
upwards because they were encouraging and publishing
the muckraking writers; when we remind ourselves that

A Radical's America 18

there were at the time no true picture magazines, no tele
vision, no radio, no movies, we begin to sense that we are
here witnessing the birth of the modern mass media. (The
parallel but distinct development of yellow journalism
is one which cannot be examined here.) Isn't it worth pon
dering, the fact that the mass magazine was born of this
arousal of the American conscience by a band of bold edi
tors making common cause with novelists, poets, and lit
terateurs?

In his brilliant early book The Golden Day, Lewis Mum-
ford makes what seems to me a most telling argument
against overvaluing the ultimate impact of the muckrakers.
"In attack, in criticism," he says, "they did able work; but
when it came to offering a genuine alternative, their pic
ture became a negative one: industry without millionaires,
cities without graft, art without luxury, love without sor
did calculation. They were ready to upset every aspect of
modern industrial society except the fragmentary culture
which had brought it into existence/'

Mr. Mumford goes on to point out a truth which the
thirty-five years since he first committed it to paper have
only strengthened that capitalism itself can provide
what it was attacked for not providing, and that the real
indictment of it lies elsewhere:

The essential poverty of America was a qualitative poverty,
one which cut through the divisions of rich and poor; and it
has been this sort of poverty which has prevented us from pro
jecting in the imagination a moire excellent society. Life was
more complicated in America but not more significant; life was
richer in material goods but not in creative energies. These
eager and relentless journalists were unaware of the necessity
for establishing different lands of goods than the existing ones;
they had no notion of other values, other modes, other forms
of activity than those practiced by the society" around them.

Anyone who reads the literature, not the journalism,
produced by the muckrakers, must be persuaded of the
justness of Mr. Mumford's reproach. Those reformers who,
like Brand Whitlock, invested all their indignation, as well

19 The Reform Journalism of the Muckrakers

as all their creative energy, not in journalism but in novel
writing, produced books which, despite the polite refer
ences to them by American historians, are all but unread
able today. Those who divided their energies between
poetry and muckraking Edwin Markham, Ernest Crosby,
Charles Edward Russell produced poetry which is now
hardly recalled even by specialists in the period. Those
who were both storytellers and muckrakers, from novelists
like Frank Norris and Owen Wister and David Graham
Phillips (who did an occasional muckraking piece), to
writers of the volcanic energy of Jack London or Upton
Sinclair (who regarded both their fiction and their polemics
as performing equivalent functions), produced rows of
books which, even at their best, are simply not worthy of
comparison with the great imaginative works of other
epochs.

Writing in Cosmopolitan, in 1906, Upton Sinclair, still
flushed with the fantastic success of The Jungle, spelled
out the reasons why the opening chapters of that bomb
shell of a book were (and still are) so explosively charged;
at the same time he unconsciously exposed the roots of an
esthetic misconception that was to strangulate not only his
own later fiction, but also much of the work of Sherwood
Anderson and of the proletarian writers of the 1930*s :

In many respects I had Uncle Toms Cabin in mind as a model
of what I wished to do ... But now there is a stirring of life
within the masses themselves. The proletarian writer is begin
ning to find a voice, and also an audience and a means of
support. And he does not find the life of his fellows a fascinat
ing opportunity for feats of artistry; he finds it a nightmare
inferno, a thing whose one conceivable excellence is that it
drives men to rebellion and to mutual aid in escaping. The pro
letarian writer is a writer with a purpose; he thinks no more of
"art for art's sake" than a man on a sinking ship thinks of paint
ing a beautiful picture in the cabin; he thinks of getting
ashore, and of getting his brothers and comrades ashore and
then there will be time enough for art ... So far as I myself
am concerned, the well-springs of joy and beauty have been
dried up in me the flowers no longer sing to me as they used

A Radical's America 20

to, nor the sunrise, nor the stars; I have become like a soldier
upon a hard campaign I am thinking only of the enemy. The
experiences of my Me have been such that I cannot think of
them without turning sick; there is no way that I can face the
thought of them at afi, save as being practice for the writing of
The Jungle. I see that it was necessary that some one should
have had such experiences, in order that it might be impossible
for any man to have them again.

Regardless of whether the novelist blocked his own de
velopment by imagining himself a soldier rather than an
artist, or whether he simply lacked the necessary imagina
tive gifts from the very outset, the unhappy fact remains
that the literary efforts of the muckrakers were not on a
par with their journalistic labors.

But what of these labors? Can one go along with Lewis
Mumford when he concludes that: "For all the effect that
these painstaking pictures had in lifting the worker onto a
more active plane of manhood, one would willingly trade
the whole literature for a handful of good songs . . ."?

The best answer is to be found in the course of America's
social progress in the twentieth century, so profoundly in
fluenced for the better by these writers themselves. Sel
dom, if ever, has the craft of journalism more responsibly
served the individual conscience and the national interest.
The ardent American notion of a free society, freely inclu
sive, freely elected, and mutually helpful, had been cyni
cally shoved aside in the closing decades of the nineteenth
century. If it was revivified in the early years of the new
century, to the benefit of every American who has come of
age since then, that must be credited in substantial meas
ure to the ringing voices of the muckrakers, recalling their
fellow citizens to an honest understanding of their respon
sibilities and their potentialities in a democratic society.

There remains the question of whether these high-
minded men and women could really have accomplished
greater things had they foresworn journalism, could really
have become the poets and philosophers that Upton Sin
clair knew them truly to be, had they concentrated on

21 The Reform Journalism of the Muckrakers

belles-lettres. Judging from what they actually produced,
it would seem highly doubtful. In truth, it would seem
more logical to conclude that in these magazine articles
and books, written under pressure and often with a di
rectly propagandist^ motive, they were writing at the top
of their bent and expressing the very best that was in
them.

In our time the rules of the game have apparently
changed, but the questions continue to be asked. Is it pos
sible for the young writer to find his way to the large
American audience, not by producing pap or worse, but
by telling the people strikingly and excitingly what "every
body knows"? Can he do this even while he works in pri
vate at shaping his dreams for the possible pleasure of a
happy few?

The latter question can be answered only by the indi
vidual artist in the living out of his own life; for some it will
be yes, for others no. But the former question is a public
question, and one that should be considered publicly. If
there is a parallel between the decade that opened the first
half of the century and that which opened the second, it is
not between the magazines of both eras; it is between the
mass media peculiar to each. Clearly, television, radio,
the movies, are to the great American public now what the
cheap magazines were then. If we are to understand the
muckrake phenomenon in terms of our own time, and also
to consider the possibility of re-establishing connection be
tween the writer as a publicly useful man and the con
cerned (not merely consuming) public, then we ought to
try to imagine what it would be like if today's novelists
and poets were suddenly to assume leading roles in televi
sion, at the invitation of and with the enthusiastic co-oper
ation of the masters of the medium. We ought to try to
imagine what it would be like if this collaboration were to
exclude the advertisers and their agents from active par
ticipation in programming, and were to aim solely at con
fronting the viewing public evening in and evening out,
forcefully and passionately, with words and pictures of the

A Radical's America 22

American scene, with tributes to the heroic and assaults on
the venal, the cowardly, the exploiting.

Such a conjoining of public-spirited and intellectual
forces would provide us with a modern equivalent of what
happened during the decade of conscience. This is not the
place to consider whether the obvious barriers to such a
conjoining would be too formidable to be surmounted, or
whether our native resourcefulness can muster the in
genuity to brush them aside once there is established a
consensus that the writer and the mass medium ought to
unite for the benefit of the populace at large. Such prob
lems will have to be confronted by the new generation in
the light of the old American experience; if it rediscovers
the muckrakers, it may find in them not only the light,
but the heat as well.

Introduction to Years of Conscience: The Muckrakers
(Meridian Books, 1962)

Footnote: By comparison with the muckrakers, our
current crop of journalists seems to have been born
timid, tired, or disillusioned. The most effective
work today, limited as it is, is being done by the
television journalists, a frustrated group of capable
men perfectly aware that they function as public-
service window dressing for an industry single-
mindedly devoted to the worship and propagation of
mass idiocy. As for the magazines and newspapers,
they have rendered gratuitous before the fact a White
House charge that they trifled with the national se
curity by telling the American people too much. When
President Theodore Roosevelt branded the journalists
of his day as filth grubbers, they responded, as I
have noted above, by redoubling their efforts. When
President Kennedy brands the journalists of our day
as irresponsible, they hasten to demonstrate their "re-

23 The Reform Journalism of the Muckrakers

sponsibility." The Saturday Evening Post proudly
publishes photographs, which it had previously patri
otically suppressed, of guerrillas training for the Cu
ban invasion; the Miami Herald, which like other
Florida newspapers had suppressed news of Cuban
exiles training and recruiting in violation of our laws,
continues to hold back news of post-invasion adven
turers exercising in the area. The Herald, it says,
"feeling that the story is within the sensitive area of
national policy, withheld publication until after the
matter was aired in Washington . . ."

The Miners: Men Without Work

The miners have been called in the past the
backbone of the American kbor movement.
Never yet broken in to the abject life of the
workers in the industrial cities, they have still
a tradition of resistance and a habit of joint
action.

Edmund Wilson, "Frank Keeney's Coal Dig-
gets"

St. Michael, Pennsylvania

It is a strange thing to come to a town and find it full of
grown men. They stroll the narrow, shabby streets, chat at
the corners, lean against the peeling pillars of the town
saloon, the St. Michael Hotel & Restaurant, and they look
more like movie actors than real human beings, because
something is wrong.

Then you ask for one of them by name, in this town
where it is obvious that everyone knows everyone else,
and you get the reply, "Oh, hell be along any minute. To
day's sign-up day." And it is borne in upon you that these
men are subsisting on unemployment insurance checks,
that this is a community where practically all of the able-
bodied men have been out of work for many months.
Where are the children? In school, although most of these
people are older and no longer have small children. Where
are the teen-agers? Looking for work, moved away, trying
their luck elsewhere. Where are the women? Working,
many of them which is a story in itself.

St. Michael is a company town (of the Berwind- White
Coal Mining Company) tucked into one of the many folds
of the mountains of western Pennsylvania. It is as Ameri
can as any town you could want, by any standards you

25 The Miners : Men Without Work

could name. But the menfolk are practically all out o
work, and have been ever since the 24th of April, 1958,
when Maryland Shaft #1 closed down. This may be why
there is not much travel agency business for Caribbean
cruises. In its own way, however, it is a tourist attraction,
or would be if tourists could ever find their way to it over
the winding, rutted, poorly marked roads that tie it to all
the other little mining communities of the region: for it
was here thousands drowned in the Johnstown Flood. To
day the old boathouse, then used by wealthy summer resi
dents from Johnstown and Pittsburgh, stands high and dry
on the St. Michael hillside now a weather-beaten saloon,
it is one of the four hangouts for the miners of St. Michael,
who are proud of the tragic story of the area, just as they
are proud of the tragic history of their calling.

Six hundred and fifty of these men were working at
Maryland #1 when the company started to mechanize.
The number was gradually reduced to four hundred; then,
after two layoffs and six months of part-time operation,
there came a day which none of the miners had believed
could really come, even though there had been signs,
hints, warnings. The mine shut down.

It is not practically relevant whether the closing was a
result of there being too much coal or too many men.
What matters is what is happening to the people. Later on
we shall return to the larger issues of increased produc
tivity resulting from mechanization and concomitant shifts
in fuel usage. For now let us stay with the men.

It was only a couple of years ago that the coal dust
problem was so bad in St. Michael that a civic committee
was formed to cope with it. "I was used to not recogniz
ing my husband, to say nothing of the other men who'd
come out of the mine and wave to me," says one miner's
wife. "But the coal dust got so bad that it lay over the
town like a pall. Everything was covered with it, and we
got worried, not just about silicosis down in the mines, but

A Radical's America 26

about what it was going to do to all of us right out on the
streets/ 5

The dust too was a by-product of mechanization, a re
sult of the automatic miners chewing away furiously hun
dreds of feet under the earth, and the company informed
the committee that there was no point in investing the
large sum that would be necessary to abate the nuisance,
since it was already losing money on every carload of coal
being taken from Maryland #1. All too soon thereafter the
mine closed down, and the dust stopped sifting through
the streets. The committee was disbanded. . . .

Most of the miners have been used to seasonal opera
tions, working winters and taking off summers, and for
quite a long time they assumed that this was to be just an
other layoff. But then the summer was over, fill-in jobs
elsewhere in the area did not seem to be available, and the
company took out its expensive automatic equipment and
moved some of it down to Maryland Shaft #2, half a
dozen miles away at Wilmore. At that point the miners
and their families began to face up to the reality of their
prospects, and habits began to change. The first item to
stop moving at the general store was dog food. After the
dog food gathered dust, it was the bottled baby food in
the little glass jars that stayed on the shelves. A while after
that, the shopkeeper himself gave up and locked his doors
forever.

The saloons are still going in St. Michael's Hotel, the
Workers' Educational & Social Club, the American Legion
Hall, and the old boathouse, but many of the whisky
drinkers have switched to beer, many of the beer drinkers
have switched to Squirt, and even more do not show up at
all nowadays in the saloons.

"I used to spend between forty and fifty dollars every
two weeks in the saloons," says one miner. "Now I never
go any more. It's one thing to be a good fellow when you
have it it's a little different when you have no job."

The town barber, a horn-rimmed young man in a
starched white shirt who is on the school board and looks

27 The Miners : Men Without Work

startlingly middle-class in a community that is overwhelm
ingly working-class, stares at his cigar and muses over his
beer at the Legion bar: "I bear no resentment to the
miners who don't come in any more to have me cut their
hair. I guess if I'd been out of work as long as they have,
I'd ask my wife to cut my hair too."

Some of the miners have managed to get jobs elsewhere.
Hampered by the fact that their skills and such intan
gible assets as courage, fortitude, esprit de corps and in
souciance in the face of continuous danger are not readily
transferable to other trades, they have been absorbed only
in lower-paying jobs. Those who came from other com
munities and only boarded in St. Michael have gone home.
A few have gotten into the steel mills, but not many. A few
more have gotten construction work and jobs with the
State Highway Department, but again not many; the men
point to the million-dollar addition to the high school
plant now going up, with only seven miners among the
construction crew, and they claim that it is impossible to
get such a job without "politics." A number of the miners
are now working, often for a third or less than what they
used to earn, as orderlies in hospitals and institutions, and
as janitors and stockmen in big stores. Some have tried to
relocate at least one man has been back and forth to
California twice, tracking down rumors of steady employ
ment there only to return to home grounds when jobs
haven't materialized.

Practically everyone, they say, would come rushing back
to St. Michael if Maryland #1 were to reopen, even those
few who have gotten good-paying jobs elsewhere (a man
with seniority is allowed up to three weeks to reapply for
his job). Mining is something that gets in a man's blood,
and a coal mine is a man's world in a way that a depart
ment store or a mental hospital can never be.

It is truly ironic that a substantial proportion of these
men, who pride themselves on their ability to live with

A Radical's America 28

danger, to work hard, fight hard, drink hard, love hard, are
now learning housework and taking over the woman's role
in the family.

What happened was terribly simple. When it became
apparent that the mine was not going to reopen, the men
signed up for unemployment insurance and their wives be
gan to look for work. Committees were set up as they
have been, hopefully, sometimes pathetically, in similarly
depressed areas in Kentucky, West Virginia, Illinois, and
Michigan to see what could be done about bringing in
new businesses that could provide employment. The ones
that did come to the western Pennsylvania area were
those that could benefit not only from tax rebates, low
rents, cheap utilities, and other enticements, but also from
a substantial pool of people hungry for work almost any
kind of work at almost any kind of wage. Now there are in
the area a scattering of small garment factories (brassieres,
shirts, shirtwaists, children's wear) all employing not men
but women to bend over their sewing machines.

So the women go out to work in the new factories at
minimum wages and the men stay home, running the
washing machines and the vacuum cleaners, doing the
shopping and the dusting, often babysitting, occasionally
cooking and scrubbing. There are variations. Some wives
hire themselves out as cleaning women to middle-class
homes in other towns while their husbands serve as clean
ing women at home. There are rebellions too. One hus
band sits in the saloon waiting for his wife to finish her
shift and come after him at midnight, which she does,
standing in the doorway in her pedal-pushers, her arms
folded, smiling tiredly but firmly until he shoves back his
chair, finishes his beer, and walks her home. He insists on
playing his role as a man even if he cannot do his work as
a man, and one can only guess as to whether his wife loves
him any less than do those women whose husbands have
taken to drowsing in front of the TV after they have finished
the dishes and await their wives' return from the factory.
But these are for the most part younger women; it is hard

29 The Miners : Men Without Work

for a woman in her fifties to keep up with the production
pace in a factory, and a number of them have had to give
it up and reluctantly rejoin their husbands on the rockers
or the porch steps.

What else does a man do besides keep house and rock,
and hang around the saloon, after he has been out of work
for fourteen months? One miner says, "I've been going
from town to town, city to city, every place within a
hundred miles of here, looking for work. I know it's a
wild-goose chase. I'm too old. My own boy is thirty-two,
or maybe thirty-three, with three kids of his own, and lie
can't find work. One or two places where he could have
had work as a carpenter, he couldn't get a journeyman's
card in the union. So what chance do I stand? Just the
same, I keep trying it keeps me occupied."

Those men who have given up looking, or are working
sporadically here and there, now and then, put in a lot of
time hunting and fishing in the neighborhood. The miners
of this area are as fanatical a lot of fishermen as you will
find anywhere in the United States; and they also like
to come home with deer, pheasant, and sometimes even
bear. This is not the least of the ties that bind these jobless
men to their home place. There are others, which have to
be understood if the men and their problems are to be
fully understood.

The miners of St. Michael have banded together and
purchased (with money borrowed from their local union)
the huge old home of the former mine superintendent, on
a bluff overlooking the valley, and have christened it "The
Sportsmen's Club." Here, in addition to over sixty acres
of wooded recreation and picnic grounds and a boccie
court, they have a big screened-in run that they built
themselves, to hold more than five hundred baby pheas
ants, which they acquired from the state conservation
authorities and will release for hunting when they are
grown. The Sportsmen's Club is one more social center
that is their very own, in addition to the Legion Hall and

A Radical's America 30

the Workers' Educational & Social Club, down the street
from each other and from the St. Michael Hotel. Most of
the big social events are held in the Legion Hall, which
is decorated with blowup photographs of the local boys
all with Slavic or Croatian names who have played foot
ball at the great state universities, some of them in the
Rose Bowl. (The football scholarship is not a joke in St.
Michael: it is a very practical way for miners' sons to get
a college education and so move on and out into another
world.)

It doesn't take much of an excuse to throw a party
either; and whether it is a testimonial for a local hero, or a
blowout with the hundred dollars the company gives
when the mine operates for a year without a fatal acci
dent (not too often, unfortunately), a sheep is roasted, a
pig is spitted, the liquor flows, and, as one miner who has
the scars to prove it says, "You get twenty-six miners
together and you have twenty-seven fights." The oratory
is as pungent as the food. "You women," the toastmaster
is fondly remembered as having said to the wives last
Christmas, "went and voted for Eisenhower. Well, now
you've all got jobs!" Lithuanian slugs it out with Ukrain
ian; Pole battles with Welshman; and they all stick to
gether against owners, outsiders, and union bureaucrats.

Over at the Workers' Educational & Social Club (also
refurbished and enlarged with a loan from the union local)
there are, in addition to the bar and the miniature bowling
alleys, a meeting hall, kitchens, a library, and a parlor,
where those miners are laid out who choose to die and be
buried without the consolation or interference of or
ganized religion.

This is a very special land of life, and a miner knows
what he is missing when he tries his luck in the cities or
the suburbs.

"More than one of our boys has gone off to Pittsburgh or
Cleveland and come back because he couldn't stand those
cement lawns."

"In a big city, you have to pick a fight with a stranger.

31 The Miners : Men Without Work

Here in St. Michael, you can fight with your friends."

"Seriously, here we all know each other, we're clannish,
we stick together, we help each other out. It's a good
place to live/'

It's also a cheap place to live. The company houses, put
up during the depression, are comfortable and have
pleasant yards, even if their plumbing is simple and the
roads around them are sooty and potholed; they rent for
from $9.00 to $14.25 a month. When you consider too that
water and sewage are provided directly from the mine's
pumps at a nominal price, as is 25-cycle electricity (even
with die mine shut down), you can understand why $25.00
a day is a first-class wage for a miner in a company town,
even if the mine only has orders enough to run three or
four days a week. Naturally mine families are reluctant to
trade in all this in addition to fish and game and the
produce of all the farms that checkerboard the mining
country for the inflation of the metropolis and the
suburb.

There is an even more compelling economic reason for
the unemployed miners of St. Michael not wanting to
leave the industry or the community. According to the
United Mine Workers' contracts, a miner must have
worked for twenty years out of the last thirty in order to
be eligible for a $100-a-month pension at the age of sixty.
You can't live, much less support a family, on that sum,
but when it is added to social security, savings and life
insurance, it can make the difference between a comfort
able old age and a miserable one. Seniority leading up to
pension eligibility, however, cannot be transferred from
one company to another, or even from one mine of a com
pany to another, unless there is such a shortage of miners
that you can move onto a panel and directly into another
mine without going to the bottom of the list.

Thus if you are forty-eight years old and have worked
in the mines for thirty years, you are not going to receive
any pension at all unless you can get in two more years
before you reach the age of sixty. It is hard to believe that

A Radical's America 32

somehow, sometime during the next dozen years, you will
not be able to get in two more years in the mines to qualify
for the pension. There are a lot of these borderline men,
desperately hanging on much more desperately than the
younger men who have seen their pension hopes go glim
mering and who are ready to sell out and move away,
even though they discover that their possessions too have
become as worthless as their retirement plans, with their
25-cycle electric stoves and television sets quite unsalable
in a community which may never again use the mine's
power lines. And of course there are quite a few men
safely past fifty, who have the twenty years under their
belts, and now have nothing to worry about beyond sur
viving and supporting their families in one way or another
for the next decade, until they reach pension age.

Meanwhile, unemployment insurance is running out.

As these lines are written, most of the miners of St.
Michael have six more checks (of about $30) coming to
them. When these lines are read, the checks will have
stopped. What then?

"After the last check," says one of the younger men,
"comes the revolution."

Well, maybe. But probably not. In order to hazard some
sort of guess as to what lies in store for these hundreds of
Americans, and for many more thousands like them, from
Illinois to West Virginia, we shall have to leave St.
Michael for a moment and consider the problem of coal
nationally.

For the past decade the coal miner has been squeezed
from two directions: by mechanization and by the intro
duction of increasingly popular substitute fuels. While
output per man per day has almost doubled in that decade
(from 6.26 tons per day in 1948 to 11.3 tons per day in
1958), the number of men employed in the mines has been
more than halved, from 441,631 to 218,600. And as a result
not only of slumps but of competition from gas (whose
production has increased 365 per cent in the last fifteen

33 The Miners : Men Without Work

years) and fuel oils, coal production has receded from a
peak of over 600 million tons in 1947 to less than 500
million tons.

The railroads, once major consumers of coal, have now
practically converted to diesels; household heating, form
erly fueled with the coal-stoked furnace, has lately con
verted so largely to gas or oil that anthracite mining
confined to three Pennsylvania counties is all but mori
bund; when we speak of coal nowadays, for all ordinary
purposes we are speaking of bituminous.

It is electricity (in addition to steel, stationary at about
100 million tons) that is expected to take up the slack.
With the production of energy from mineral fuels and
water power already doubled in the last twenty years, it
is now forecast that coal production will have to increase
by 50 per cent to meet the expanded energy demands of
1975. Does this mean that more men will be needed to
mine coal, or even that most of the currently unemployed
miners will be put back to work? One would have to be a
professional optimist (or a union official) to think so.

For one thing, the development of alternative sources
of energy has not ended. Atomic power may not be
economic at present; that does not mean that it never will
be. For another, the inexorable development of mechani
zation has not yet come to a halt, even though it is true
that it is nearing the saturation point: mechanical mining
machines which can mine up to eight tons of coal per
minute, and other new equipment, now cut about 85 per
cent of all underground coal production. The development
has been truly fantastic, as extreme perhaps as in any other
industry. It would seem a logical inference that those
mines which for one reason or another are not susceptible
of economic mechanization will have to give way to those
which are.

We need hardly be surprised that the National Coal
Association is both proud of its adventure in mechaniza
tion and enthusiastic about the prospects for coal. But it
does seem a trifle unusual particularly in a period of

A Radical's America 34

mass unemployment in the industry that the United
Mine Workers should refuse to yield precedence to the
operators in their eagerness to welcome the man-displac
ing machine and their Rotarian optimism about coal's
future.

Indeed, the visitor to the Mine Workers' somber and
dignified headquarters in Washington is bombarded by
the union's research men with data and statistics arrayed
to buttress what is obviously the John L. Lewis line:
mechanization benefits the miner, and new uses for elec
tric power will vastly increase the need for coal in the
years ahead. One thing is sure: no one can charge Mr.
Lewis with being soft on featherbedding. His aides are
anxious to demonstrate that the union has gone along
wholeheartedly with mechanization. (In 1930 10 per cent
of coal production was mechanically loaded, in 1956 85.4
per cent; in 1930 8.3 per cent was mechanically cleaned,
in 1956 61 per cent; and by now nearly nine tenths of all
mined coal is mechanically cut.) True, facts are mixed
with foolishness, as in current efforts to beat the drums
not only for heat pumps and coal by wire, but also for
electric automobiles and coal-fired home furnaces. And
Mr. Lewis's propagandizing for technical progress seems
to stop short when it comes to projects like the St.
Lawrence Seaway, the economic development of atomic
energy, and the mechanization of competing fuel indus
tries.

Nevertheless the figures pour forth from the Research
and Marketing Department of the UMW. It is only when
the visitor asks for a figure on the number of coal miners
out of work as a result of mechanization and competition
of other fuels that silence suddenly descends.

The conversation is shifted to the 65,000 men on pen
sion. But no, the visitor insists, that is not what he meant
it is rather the men of working age in the union who
are not now working. Finally, with extreme reluctance,
there comes an estimate of perhaps 50,000 men.

And what is to become of these men?

35 The Miners : Men Without Work

Once again there is great enthusiasm expressed for
electric power, the increasing amounts of coal it will de
mand, and the great proved reserves of coal estimated
at 1900 years' worth waiting to be dug. But by the
unemployed miners?

Probably not. The price of progress. Some must fall by
the wayside as others progress. It's a cruel world.

Several inferences seem inescapable. First, that the
union's estimated figure on unemployment, about which
it seems to prefer not to speak, is very likely as deflated as
its membership figure is inflated. (On the same visit, actual
working members in anthracite were estimated at 30,000-
40,000, and in bituminous at around 300,000 full- and
part-time miners. Both figures bear no relation to those
released by the U. S. Bureau of Mines or by the Bureau
of Labor Statistics, and would seem to be based less on
reality than on the growing need to prevent the UMW
from being tabbed as numerically a second- or third-class
union.)

Second, that Mr. Lewis has more or less decided to cut
his losses, concentrate on consolidating the solid gains of
a steadily shrinking membership while maintaining the
facade of an enormous organization and trust to time
and mortality to resolve once and for all the problem of
the unemployed workers in the coal fields, and so erase
them from the agenda of the union and from the public
conscience as well. Certainly Mr. Lewis has not recently
been devoting himself as passionately to pressing the case
of the displaced miners as he has to furthering such con
cerns of the operators as aiding the career of one of the
most conservative and sanctimonious men in public life:
"Senators of long service," observed Marquis Childs in a
recent syndicated newspaper column, "are saying they
have never experienced such pressures as are being ap
plied to bring about the confirmation of Admiral Lewis L.
Strauss as Secretary of Commerce. The pressures come
from a wide range of sources, indicating an extensive and

A Radical's America 36

thoroughly prepared campaign. Several Senators have had
telephone calls from John L. Lewis . . . Lewis' theme
is that Strauss, as Secretary of Commerce, would be help
ful to the coal interests. . . ."

One long-time critic of the Lewis leadership in Wash
ington is particularly bitter in his condemnation of the
failure of the UMW (which he estimates at little more
than 160,000 actual members) to take positive measures
to protect the interests of the unemployed. With labor
displacement in the coal industry greater per thousand
employed than in any other industry, no program has yet
been proposed for the vegetating displaced miners. He
attributes this in part to the fact that 90 per cent of the
union's executive board are appointees, in part to the fact
that the delegates who attend the union's quadrennial
conventions are working miners, with no substantial griev
ances if they are getting from three to five days' work a
week, and with the laid-off and the pensioners unrepre
sented. At the last convention, a delegate who arose to
discuss the plight of the unemployed and to suggest that
perhaps the shorter work-week might be explored as one
way to spread the work among the membership was very
coolly received by his fellow delegates, and then was
verbally torn to pieces by a buckshot charge of oratory
from John L. Lewis himself.

Not only is seniority meaningless in an aging industry;
in effect, this critic observes, the UMW is being subsidized
in areas like western Pennsylvania by the garment unions,
with their lower wage rates.

It would be unfair, however, to assume that the UMW
is doing nothing at all for the welfare of its unemployed
members. The Washington headquarters is at pains to
point out that the UMW is co-operating with "area devel
opment organizations" wherever they are being set up by
local businessmen and chambers of commerce in the hope
of attracting new industry (including, presumably, more
garment factories) to blighted areas. It is also campaign-

37 The Miners : Men Without Work

ing for revision of mine safety regulations which at
present apply only to operations employing at least fifteen
miners so that they will include all working miners, even
those in the most marginal strip mines; it points with
justified indignation to the fact that these little operations
are by far the most dangerous, with only 2 per cent of coal
production accounting for 25 per cent of all fatalities in
the industry.

What does this matter of safety have to do with un
employment? A lot. In an area which we have not dis
cussed so far, the coal-mining country of Kentucky, West
Virginia, and Tennessee, the operators had leased the land
in which they drilled their mines from local people who
had owned it for generations. As the mines were worked
out, or were proved unsuitable for mechanized operation,
the operators pulled out and turned the land, and the
mines, back to the men from whom they had leased it and
who had often been working for them. These men too
have been existing on unemployment insurance and gov
ernment surplus food. Since the mines are on their land, a
good many of them have gone back to digging on their
own, trying to pull out enough leftover coal to eke out a
living.

In a way, it is as if unemployed steelworkers or auto
workers were to club together to turn out steel or auto
mobiles in competition with the big corporations. In this
peculiarly American form of free enterprise one man can
have as many as ninety-two mines on his property, with
each mine being picked at by from two to four men
scattered along the worked-out mountainside. Naturally
their productivity is terribly low, as low as two tons per
man, and since they are at the mercy of the brokers to
whom they must sell for whatever they can get, they very
often wind up with a couple of dollars for a day's danger
ous and backbreaking work.

These are the men, digging away in the dogholes, as
they are called, who are not covered by mine safety regu
lations, and whom you may read about from time to time

A Radical's America 38

in little newspaper items. (Last spring an entire family of
nine men was entombed in a doghole.) If the UMW is
successful, the dogholes will have to be certified by in
spectors before they can be worked. And what will hap
pen to the men, who will at least be prevented from taking
so many chances in hacking away with pick and shovel
at the only thing they know how to do? Their strange
senseless heroism in the year 1959 can perhaps be seen as
analogous to the bravery of soldiers struggling on in a lost
war which cannot possibly benefit them, their families, or
their heirs to say nothing of the entire social order of
which they are a part.

The office of District 2 of the UMW, which includes the
miners of St. Michael, is located in the county seat of
Ebensburg, Pa., about seventeen winding miles from St.
Michael. It has taken over an old mansion in the better
part of town and it is staffed by Lewis appointees. One
would think, as one gets closer to the workers themselves
than Washington, D. C., that one would find a greater
awareness of their problems and a deeper searching for
possible answers.

A visitor walks into the District Office and asks why so
many men are being laid off in the district. Because they
were unfortunate enough to be stuck in uneconomic low-
seam mines which do not adapt to mechanization as well
as the mines of District 5 or West Virginia. But even with
a 6 per cent increase in tonnage nationally, men are
being laid off everywhere. Then what is the answer?

"I don't really know."

Once again, there is the story of efforts to attract new
industry, with its usually turning out to be light industry,
employing women. As for the men in District 2 who are
still working, with the exception of the captive (steel com
pany-owned) mines, working hard to stockpile metal
lurgical coal in expectation of a steel strike, they are
averaging three days a week, and glad to have jobs, with
the prospect of occasionally picking up a fourth or fifth

39 The Miners: Men Without Work

day of work. The fact is simply that with three days of
work the operators take out all the coal they can sell:
which is one more reason for the cutbacks.

What about the men who aren't working?

"They don't come in here, so we don't get any com
plaints at the office. We're not in touch with them."

And what will happen when the unemployment insur
ance runs out?

"I don't know how they'll get along/'

The truth is that no one really does know. The barber of
St. Michael may be as close to the truth as anyone when
he observes that the men were so stunned by the closing
of the mine that they are still in a state of shock, and
unable to face the reality that they may never again be
able to work at their chosen trade.

Until you go down the pit, it is difficult to sense how
much mining can mean to a man, or how strange and un
likely it can seem that you are not going to work when
others near you are working. The men who work at
Wilmore, in Maryland Shaft #2, are friends and neighbors
of the St. Michael men; they have worked together in the
past, and they still hunt and fish together. But the men at
Wilmore are still working, proud as the miners of St.
Michael are proud of the fact that they take out the
finest coal in the country. At dawn, with the rising sun
on their backs, they straggle into the big grimy locker
room and strip to the skin, depositing their street clothing
in wire baskets, which they then haul to the high ceiling
and secure with long double chains.

The impression is strong that the men have packed
away their humor and lightheartedness with their street
clothes; at any rate, they seem brooding and thoughtful
as they foregather in their dark neck-to-ankle working out
fits, adjusting the lamps on their helmets and the big bat
teries that power them from the wide belts at their waists.
The/ wait in quiet patience for the elevator that will take
them down to the other world. Here danger begins.

A Radical's America 40

As you descend the seemingly endless shaft, you are
assured that the speed of the elevator is regulated by law
to a fraction of that when equipment is being lowered or
coal raised, and that if the chain cable should go, metal
dogs will snap out and lock themselves into the timbers
that line either side of the concrete shaft. Nevertheless
men have died in the elevator; not long ago an engineer's
miscalculation drove them into the ground so hard that
they bounced out of the cage, their bones snapping like
matches.

Down in the mine, the men clamber aboard the hooked-
together cars pulled by electric locomotives, and clatter off
to their separate work centers, starting down the main
heading and then cutting off on the various spurs that dart
away into the darkness like so many veins. You travel for
perhaps a mile, then get off at the end of the line and
plod along in a bent-necked stoop until you come to an
extensible belt conveyer. Here you hitch a ride, stretching
flat on your belly on the rattling leather belt-line, The
increasing roar of heavy machinery tells you that you have
arrived at the mechanical loader, and you move on crab-
wise, the glow of your lamp picking a path through the
thick cloud of coal dust as you squat forward on your
haunches.

You are at the face of the mine. You come alongside the
mechanical miner, and you rest on your knees, watching
the great continuous mining machine chewing its way into
the coal seam with a remorseless roar. There is only the
monstrous machine, and a handful of men. One of them
shouts, "How far to go?" and the answer comes back:
"Twenty feet."

You bend forward to cry into the superintendent's ear.
"How long will it take to break through those twenty feet
into the next chamber?"

"About forty-five minutes."

"How long would it have taken the men, without the
machine?"

He answers laconically, his face already black and pre-

41 The Miners : Men Without Work

occupied as he squirts chewing tobacco. "Three shifts/'
The slate roof sags, and the men swiftly use the machine
to hoist a timber hydraulically into place before they press
on. In this world without light and without women, the
men are quick, daring, decisive. Formerly they could hear
the roof starting to give so that they could quickly install
timber props or run for safety; now the roar of the ma
chine drowns out the little telltale sounds, and they must
watch even more carefully. The dust, too, that used to rise
all the hundreds of feet to the surface and rain down on
the streets of St. Michael is a thousand times thicker from
the slashing machine than it used to be when the men
attacked the seam themselves; you can taste the silicosis
in the air as the thick particles parch your nasal passages
and clog your lungs. Roof falls have been many and seri
ous in this particular mine. They are a delay and a serious
annoyance to the supervision, a challenge to the men, who
must crawl about the too-low passages like dwarfs or
hunchbacks, shoring up the timbers and building cribs to
protect the right of way.

Back on the surface the dirty coal rises in smoking car
loads to the tipple. There you follow its course as it is
cleaned, washed, sorted, through the towers high above the
ground, and there too it seems impossible that the attack
on the bowels of the earth will ever stop. How can a man
who has been a part of it, who still lives within sight,
sound, and smell of the consuming drama, believe that he
will not again be permitted to be an actor in it?

In the saloons, the saying goes, the miners love more
women than they ever did above ground, and dig more
coal than they ever did below ground. At St. Michael, they
brag about their narrow escapes, and about their friends*
past heroism, as well as about the quality of their coal and
the quantity of it they have taken from the mine. And
they wonder whether they will ever do it again. In the
meantime, they wonder about the meantime.

"In 1922," the president of the local says, "I lived

A Radical's America 42

through the winter in a tent on top of that hill with my
family. My father was out for eighteen months and we
had nothing to live on, nothing. I can tell you one thing:
we'll never go back to 1922 again."

"My family will never go hungry," another man says.
He stares down into his glass of draught beer, and then
looks up defiantly. "Not as long as I've got a rifle and two
shotguns at home, they'll never go hungry. Maybe it's not
a nice thing to say, but it's how I feel."

Others say the same, but it does not look as though it
will come to that. When unemployment insurance runs
out, the miners will be eligible to go on DPA (Depart
ment of Public Assistance). They will have to sign over
their property to the State of Pennsylvania, and give up
their insurance, but they will be allowed to keep then-
cars as long as they demonstrate that they are using
them to look for work.

They will do it, an old militant of the area believes, be
cause they will have no alternative. They will cash in their
policies and turn over their property in return for the dole
and the opportunity to go on as they are now, waiting and
hoping, some waiting for the pension, others just for their
social security. They will continue to eat mollygrub, the
federal government food-surplus parcels so weighted with
rice that, as one man remarks wryly, "You can get slant-
eyed from eating so much of it."

"I am not disillusioned," the old radical insists. "But I
am very tired. Even now, with the checks running out,
they are apathetic, and willing to go on DPA. Yet if there
were some leadership . . . Right now the officers of at
least ten locals would come out for nationalization of the
mines. With leadership, many more of the 184 locals cer
tainly would. You heard them curse the old parties they
are looking and waiting for new leadership, and it doesn't
seem to be forthcoming."

Even recognition of their problems does not seem to be
forthcoming. It would seem axiomatic that the future of

43 The Miners : Men Without Work

the miner is tied up with the future of the whole economy,
and that any progress for the labor movement as for the
rest of us will have to come through political action.
The UMW vision of a new coal miner, mobile, no longer
tied to the company town, living in a suburb and driving
forty miles to work in a mechanized mine where he will
be a technician operating a piece of machinery this may
not only be the ultimate reality, it may already be coming
to pass. But surely we must think hard about what values
of the declining generation will be transferred to a young
man who will go into the mines not because it is as thrilling
or challenging as going to sea or riveting a skyscraper, but
simply because it is a job that, although dirty and tire
some, has a good wage scale and a better pension plan;
and about what his relations will be with his fellow work
ers, whom he will not fish with, fight with, or drink with,
but will see merely as anonymous black faces below the
earth and anonymous white faces on the suburban-bound
highways above the earth.

Only a romantic fool, and an ignorant one at that, would
bewail the loss of backbreaking, tortuous, dangerous, poi
sonous drudgery, and its replacement by impersonally ef
fective machinery. But the loss of fraternity, solidarity,
and the comradeship of courageous accomplishment
these are all too precious and rare in the moral landscape of
America, and if we allow their transmitters to rot and fade,
we commit an act even more criminal than the spoliation
of the physical landscape for personal gain.

Dissent, Autumn 1959

Footnote, 1961: Since the above was written, Con
gress has improved the quality of the mollygrub
handed out to the unemployed miners, and appropri
ated some money for retraining and relocation in
depressed areas. Mr. Lewis, too, has gone into retire
ment. There is no word, however, that his fate has

A Radical's America 44

paralleled that of the aged members of his union,,
who discovered not long ago that their pensions
would have to be reduced; the continuing decline of
employment in the industry has meant smaller pay
ments into their pension and welfare fund.

West Coast Waterfront:
End of an Era

One of the first things to strike an outsider about San
Francisco is the respect and esteem in which longshore
men are held by the rest of the community. They are good
credit risks; they are homeowners (yes, some have swim
ming pools); they are pillars of society; Negro members
are deacons and elders of their churches and are regarded
in their neighborhoods as doctors used to be by the newly
fledged Jewish communities. I cannot think of another
part of the country in which, thanks in large part to their
union, laborers are so well regarded and are in turn so
proud of their work and their affiliation.

One reason why these workers and the International
Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, it must be
added are so well regarded and themselves have so
much self-respect is that the union has substantially com
plete control over the labor force (so that worker loyalty
is always to the union rather than to any employer who
buys his services through the hiring hall), and control too
over the way in which the work is done. Everybody on
the West Coast knows that these workers have had a
pretty good life, and a pretty clean union (this is not the
place to probe such minor sores as the alleged job-selling
activities of certain union-elected dispatchers at the hiring
halls). Contractual negotiations have been carried on not
merely in public, but in a "goldfish bowl," with workers
free to observe while Union President Harry Bridges,
surely one of the most adroit, sharp-tongued, and agile-

A Radical's America 46

witted maneuverers in the entire labor movement, spars
with the Pacific Maritime Association's J. Paul St. Sure,
the most universally respected management negotiator
on the Coast (and very possibly in the nation). His political
heresies aside, Bridges has been incorruptible and has
spoken always for the ranks, acutely sensitive to their
voice.

However, contrary to popular opinion, the ILWU is not
a mass-membership industrial union. In fact, its entire
longshore membership (exclusive of Hawaii) is little more
than fifteen thousand. And of these, a number are ships'
clerks. The actual number of working longshoremen is
therefore very small indeed. Nor is the ILWU, as many
believe, a Communist-dominated union. In fact, the Com
munist Party in Harry Bridges's own Local 10 (San Fran
cisco) now consists of one aging stalwart, who turns to
with his little bundle of newspapers and leaflets, and a
handful of his followers. The CP is a foundering hulk on
the waterfront, of no use to anyone as either vote bloc or
whipping boy. Still meaningful, however, are the existence
of a substantial number of sophisticated workingmen in
the union, most of whom received their political education
in or around the CP, and also the unc&mmed passion of
Harry Bridges for the Soviet Union and Communist China,
though he no longer needs the Communist Party.

Now a five-year contract, which has received inter
national attention, has been signed between the ILWU
and the Pacific Maritime Association. This latter is no
monolithic organization of ruthless waterfront employers.
It was born out of the employers' defeat in the 1934
general strike, and exists now solely as a bargaining agent
with the maritime unions; internally its members are
apparently as torn with dissension and wholehearted mu
tual contempt as any labor union, and member employers
have been known to make backdoor arrangements with
particular unions in order to beat out competitor com
panies.

With the ratification of the contract, excited newspaper

47 West Coast Waterfront: End of an Era

reporters and publicity men have been telling us, Febru
ary 1, 1961, marked a new day in the history of men and
machines, a day which was "liistoric" and "epoch-making,"
in that, by mutual agreement, employers and workers
were exchanging the introduction of labor-saving equip
ment for the establishment of a fund to provide for early
retirement, no layoffs, and a guaranteed minimum work
week. The contract is officially titled an "Agreement on
Mechanization and Modernization." It has been described,
I think inaccurately, as an "automation" or a "mechaniza
tion" agreement. Such an interpretation has been fostered
by both union officialdom and employers in their publicity
handouts, with the result that newspapers have been
running leads like that of the San Francisco Examiner of
last October 25: "Harry Bridges' outcast longshore union
showed the Nation's labor organizations yesterday how
to live and prosper with automation." In fact, both parties
are quite frank, in private discussion, in referring to the
contract as a twenty-nine-million-dollar bribe to buy back
certain working conditions that have been in force for a
generation.

In order to understand the terms of this deal, its relation
to the real problem of mechanization/automation, and
what effect it will have on the working lives of the thou
sands of members of the union, we are going to have to go
back and spell out some of the conditions that existed prior
to the new contract conditions that made West Coast
longshoring the most attractive way of life for a casual
laborer in the United States, if not in the entire world.

As a result of the truly historic 1934 strike, the long
shoremen won a jointly operated hiring hall, which freed
them from serflike dependence on the caprice of individ
ual employers or bosses. They also won a set of condi
tions relating to the job itself, which were easily enforce
able by a militant democratic union, particularly one
strongly influenced by professional revolutionists condi
tions which came to be accepted as a way of life by the
flood of new recruits to the waterfront during the boom

A Radical's America 48

days of World War II (in the San Francisco Bay area,
mostly Negroes from the Deep South; in the Port of Los
Angeles area, mostly Latins from the Southwest and from
Mexico).

One of these work conditions, which is not often talked
or written about but which strikes me as both civilized
and unique, has been the longshoreman's relative freedom
of choice as to which days in the week he will take off. The
mechanics of this were worked out by the men themselves
and were democratically defined by union rules for both
"gang" men and "plug" men. This arrangement was made
possible first by the fact that the industry works around
the clock and through the week, depending on the number
of ships in port, and second by the existence of a pool of
casuals always available for work.

When he got to work, the longshoreman who worked
less difficult cargoes light case goods, containers, uni-
tized loads could often look forward to rest periods
equal to 25 to 40 per cent of his work day, depending on
whether he was discharging or loading. The men viewed
this as justifiable, because they were never compensated
in wages for the unpaid hours necessarily spent at the
hiring hall every day or in time off for the necessarily
continuous work on more difficult cargoes.

At work the sling-load limit was set at 2100 pounds,
which meant that large or unwieldy or dangerous loads
would be broken "skimmed" into two or more man
ageable loads within the weight limit, thereby spreading
the work equitably and making it possible for those labor
ing in the hold to work off a four-wheeler. The longshore
man who worked in the port of San Pedro knew finally
that his fairly continuous employment was assured by
multiple handling, a jurisdictional form of featherbedding
which delimited teamster from longshore work and speci
fied that under certain circumstances a cargo load would
have to be moved from pallet boards to the skin of the
dock, put together and taken apart one or two extra times

49 West Coast Waterfront : End of an Era

between its removal from the ship and transport from the
dock by truck.

Aside from this last practice, retained almost solely at
San Pedro and almost universally conceded by the long
shoremen themselves to be ultimately indefensible make-
work, these have been generally the conditions of the
working life of the West Coast longshoreman. They have
given him substantial and unique control over what might
be called the process of production on the docks (that
is, the movement of cargo), and they have now been
amended or altered for a quid pro quo of twenty-nine
million dollars, by membership vote of PMA and by refer
endum among over eleven thousand voting longshoremen
and clerks.

Where does mechanization come into the picture? In
four words: the employers shall be allowed to "utilize
labor-saving devices."

But this does not mean that hitherto no such devices
had been introduced in the maritime transportation in
dustry. It means, quite simply, that, from here on out,
such devices will be manned by the minimum number of
longshoremen needed to carry out the operation, rather
than by contractually specified six- or eight-man gangs.
In short, while it has already been profitable for certain
of the larger shipping companies to mechanize their ships
and their port facilities even while they had to pay men
to serve as "witnesses" (the term is Harry Bridges's), it will
now be much more profitable under the new contract for
those companies that can afford the capital investment to
proceed with mechanization and thus compete more ad
vantageously with foreign operators. To this extent, and
to this extent only, is the new contract a "mechanization"
agreement.

There are an infinite number of gradations of mecha
nization taking place on the waterfront ("automation" as
such is not really at issue, since what is being replaced is
not brain power but back power), from the blowing or
pumping of sugar, like oil, into ships' holds, to such seem-

A Radical's America 50

ingly petty (to the outsider!) refinements in unitizing car
goes as mounting fuel drums, strapped in units of three,
on a board at their place of manufacture, rather than
having them handled and stowed singly on the waterfront.
The most impressive of these conversions to date has no
doubt been Matson's transformation of the SS Hawaiian
Citizen into a fully containerized vessel, together with a
parallel transformation of the yards and cranes in the ports
of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Honolulu.

When you climb aboard the Hawaiian Citizen you are
no longer entering the swaying world of the seafaring
man. It has become an ingeniously designed mobile ware
house, floating between the states of Hawaii and Cali
fornia and rapidly filled and emptied at either end. Cargo
is packed in huge twenty-four-foot aluminum cubes, which
are picked up by a monstrous four-legged device known
as "Christine" (because it looks bisexual, or asexual) and
coupled to yard tractors driven by ILWU men who used
to drive fork-lifts and jitneys. The tractors haul them to
an enormous gantry crane, which picks them up and de
posits them in the hold, where they fit, one atop the other,
like the blocks of a Chinese puzzle. What is more, a two-
way cycle is constantly in operation: as a load is placed in
the ship, another load is removed from it; the entire ship
can be emptied and reloaded in a fraction of the time
required by traditional methods.

On the day that I watched the loading of the Hawaiian
Citizen, during the waning hours of the old contract,
several of the "witnesses" were snoozing and chatting just
aft of the number two hatch. They will no longer be there,
on the company payroll, under the terms of the new agree
ment but this is hardly the most striking aspect of this
mechanized vessel. After all, at workplaces with cost-plus
contracts all over the country, from Anchorage to Miami,
a small percentage of men are sleeping on the job, whether
they are workers curled up in a dark corner or executives
with their feet up on the desk. Since I do not have to meet
a payroll, I am so far from feeling that there is anything

51 West Coast Waterfront : End of an Era

shocking about this that I incline to the belief that maybe
we would all live longer if there were more of it.

What is shocking, though, is the cold gray impersonality
of the containerized shipping operation represented by the
Hawaiian Citizen. Not only will nobody be sleeping
nobody will be daydreaming, or arguing politics, or even
getting a personal lack out of the cargo that he pats after
he stows it properly in the hold. For anyone who, like
myself, has ever followed the sea, the Citizen is no longer
a freighter. The cargo is not visible: it is simply a ranked
series of metallic cubes locked into place. One man, alone
on his tractor, drives the cube to the gantry; a second man,
alone at the controls one hundred fifty feet above the pier
apron, picks up the 46,000-pound cube and guides it onto
the trolley; a third man, alone at the hatch, wiggles his
fingers to indicate that it is being properly lowered into
the rack that will hold it rigid until it is discharged in the
same way some days later.

It is too early to say whether new challenges will de
velop which will make working on a fully containerized
shipping operation as varied, or as much fun (I use the
word advisedly), as more traditional waterfront work.
Perhaps; but one wonders. One man described it to me as
"ulcerating" work. Another said that it was "cold and in
human."

In any case, we must be quite clear that this wave of the
future is not battering at the docks. Harry Bridges, at
sixty, does not envisage anything approaching complete
mechanization of the waterfront in his lifetime. Neither do
a number of younger men at the executive end. The water
front is not a coal mine, where you can swiftly calculate
whether it will pay to install automatic equipment: if it
won't, you shut down the uneconomic mine; if it will, you
buy the equipment and throw out the men, and in a
decade you have mechanization.

No, the infinite variety of objects shipped, from nails to
locomotives, together with the conflicting aims of shippers
and the infinite variety of conditions prevailing in various

A Radical's America 52

ports, is going to preclude rapid conversion of our mer
chant fleet to Hawaiian Citizens or of our docks to full-
scale mechanization for many decades. You can't even
blow coffee into a hold the way you can sugar or oil: as of
now, there are too many grades of coffee, and too many
orders for one bag of this and three bags of that. Besides,
shipping is a two-way business. For every Matson Line
auto ship, specially designed so that cars can be driven
aboard at California (instead of pushed aboard by the
traditional eight-man gang), loaded like sardines, and
driven off at Hawaii, at such a saving that it pays to send
the ship back empty from Hawaii, there are a hundred
ships plying between here and the Orient that will be
dependent for decades on the individual products of Asia
and the individual toil of its thousands of straining dock
workers. Mechanization, total mechanization, of our ship
ping industry like so many other problems that tax hu
man ingenuity is going to have to be globally resolved.

What about the meantime? In the meantime Harry
Bridges will spend his declining years as leader of a stead
ily declining work force. His fully registered membership
will have job security, an eventual guaranteed minimum
work week, and a fairly comfortable and secure old age,
with $7,920 coming each man's way after twenty-five years
of service, in addition to his pension and social security.
In return, he will yield up those conditions for which he
fought, not only in 1934 but for a decade and a half there
after, in a series of over twenty major port strikes. As his
social life becomes more and more middle-class in all of its
values, so will his union become more and more of a
tightly enclosed job-protective association, as Bridges
himself conceded to me; and his working life will become
Jess and less spontaneously rhythmic, and more and more
rigidly routinized as mechanization creeps in and pro
ductivity studies are utilized to standardize output and
to housebreak the longshoreman.

One way of looking at it is to say that, in order for the
longshoreman to maintain his privileged place in the

53 West Coast Waterfront : End of an Era

general community, he is going to have to yield up his
privileged place on the waterfront. The first area of free
dom that I mentioned, that of deciding for yourself
whether you want to work on any given day, will be one
of the first to go. Man-hour requirements are going to be
substantially reduced, perhaps as much as 35 per cent
(they will have to be, if the employers are going to make
back that twenty-nine million dollars). In order to make a
week's pay, the longshoreman will really have to scuffle.
To get his minimum-wage guarantee (the new agreement
calls for a floor under earnings, with the minimum tenta
tively established at thirty-five hours), he will have to
accept any work offered work, like bananas or freezers,
that he would formerly have left to the casuals. Of course,
it can be argued that what he is getting in exchange is a
much more complete security than he ever had before
(although most observers are skeptical that the minimum-
wage guarantee will ever go into effect, since it will prob
ably be computed annually); nevertheless it remains true
that, in the course of obtaining this security, he will be
transformed. He will become more like other American
workers, whether manual or white-collar: he will go to
work more regularly, more steadily, more habitually, he
will do what he is told and in consequence, I suspect,
he will come to like it less.

Now whether or not this free hand in management that
employers now have, for the first time in a generation, is
going to result in severe exploitation of the longshoremen
is a question that can only be resolved on the docks in the
months ahead (and by PMA, to whom individual employ
ers wishing to introduce changes will have to make appli
cation). Several things can be said at the outset, however.
First: It should not be taken for granted that all of the
work practices which the union has bartered away were
simply boondoggling. True, no one can defend the busi
ness of insisting that every single little piece of cargo be
placed on the skin of the dock, and then picked up again,
one at a time that is, not unless he is arguing for the

A Radical's America 54

principle of make- work as an employer contribution to the
struggle against rising mass unemployment (a defensible
principle, by the way, for a radical union which sees it as
a holding action). Nor can anyone defend some of the
other practices, such as four hours on and four hours off,
when they were abused as a means of goofing off by irre-
sponsibles who had no trade-union background and were
not indoctrinated by the ILWU in the honorable traditions
of trade unionism. In the most notorious instance, a dead
man was carried on a San Pedro walking boss's time sheet
for two days before it was discovered that he had died in
a brawl in Tia Juana. That these practices have, by and
large, been eliminated in recent years is symbolized by
the enforcement of a "performance and conformance"
clause in the 1959 agreement.

It is also true that many men never abused these prac
tices, but utilized them as part of a natural work rhythm,
in the course of which they spelled each other, equalized
their burdens, and lightened the load for the older men in
the gang; it has to be remembered that, unlike the forest
ranger or the lighthouse keeper, the longshoreman is en
gaged in a highly co-operative enterprise, one in which
the goof-off artist as much as the eager beaver can not
only disrupt the work rhythm but jeopardize the lives of
the other members of his working gang.

In these circumstances it does seem somewhat unusual
that it should be the union officialdom which is giving
the loudest assurances that, to quote the Dispatcher, "Ac
tually, the only situation where men will work harder is
where they haven't been working at all."

This may turn out to be true. But there are no guaran
tees of it embedded in the agreement. And if it is true,
it will only be because the men themselves are vigilant and
the union itself is militant in supporting their "beefs." The
contract is, as I have indicated, terribly complex, and is
susceptible of a variety of interpretations as to the appli
cability of smaller gang sizes or larger sling-load limits, on
the part of both workers and employers. In addition to the

55 West Coast Waterfront : End of an Era

traditional grounds of safety violation, in what is still one
of the most hazardous occupations in the United States
today, the workers are entitled to object to changes on
grounds of "onerousness." No doubt even the 10 to 20 per
cent of the San Francisco longshoremen who are function
ally illiterate will soon be arguing the nuances of that
word with at least as much fervor as their children in high
school and college. Whether they will be able to do any
thing about it is another matter.

For the union has a psychological and a financial stake
in the success of this agreement. This despite the fact that
Max D. Kossoris, director of the Western Regional Office
of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, argues that the shoe is
on the other foot, since PMA will be pouring five million
dollars a year into the union treasury, regardless of how
well the members co-operate in living up to the terms of
the new agreement. It is true that the agreement, as orig
inally contemplated, called for the adoption of a system
whereby, instead of the work rules being bought out, em
ployers' gains would be measured and the employees
would be paid only for the actual man-hours saved. (Mr.
Kossoris himself was engaged for a year by PMA, with the
consent of the ILWU, to devise such a system of measure
ment.) In the midst of negotiations, the measurement-of-
gains concept to which the union had agreed was
dropped, because, the employers claim, it was too cumber
some and technical, and the idea of an annual lump-sum
payment was substituted. Nevertheless I think that this
interpretation underestimates those pressures on the union
leadership which I mentioned at the beginning of this
paragraph.

Harry Bridges is in the anomalous position of being an
internationally known labor leader (notorious or distin
guished, depending on the angle of vision), with an actual
membership of only a few thousand, and shrinking at that.
With this new agreement he has re-entered the agreeable
limelight, and, what is more, he has thrown down a chal
lenge to those who threw him out of the official labor

A Radical's America 56

movement, the Meanys and the Reuthers, whom he con
tinually excoriates for being more concerned with "re
spectability" than with "militancy," to come up with new
agreements which will be as far-reaching and as "respect
ably" received as has been this agreement which he has
maneuvered so shrewdly into existence. (This seems the
most satisfactory explanation of why Bridges pressed for
the new agreement in 1960 rather than waiting until the
expiration of the old contract in 1962 to bargain off the
work rules. The explanation of his opponents, that he sold
out, is unsupported by evidence; his own explanation, that
he was anticipating further restrictive legislation by the
new administration, has its own flaw: while it is true that
John F. Kennedy asserted last September in Salt Lake City
that "An effective attorney general under present federal
law could . . . depose Harry Bridges as head of the long
shoremen," and that this is one campaign pledge that the
Kennedy brothers may earnestly attempt to fulfill, it also
seems apparent that PMA would hardly have been will
ing, and in fact eager, to part with twenty-nine million
dollars to junk restrictive work rules if it were certain that
Congress would go ahead and do the job for free.)

Furthermore, Bridges is discharging an obligation to
those who built the union and fought the good fight. This
is an old man's contract. The immediate beneficiaries will
be the old-timers with twenty-five years of seniority, who
will be able to retire with up to $7,920 cash money.
Bridges's home base, Local 10, San Francisco (which voted
up the contract five to one), has an average age of fifty-six.
The center of his opposition, Local 13, San Pedro (which
voted down the contract two to one), has an average age
of thirty-six. In an aging union, I think it can be fairly
said that the proposed immediate beneficiaries were all
but unanimous in their decision to "go along with Harry,"
while the younger men were split in their reactions.

It is rather unlikely that Bridges will insist upon the
union's grimly supporting "beefs" to the limit if they, no
matter how justified, interfere with his generation's getting

57 West Coast Waterfront : End of an Era

its due. He has already assured me that he is not going to
stand for "phony militants" upsetting the smooth function
ing of the new agreement; and his vice-president, Bob
Robertson, struck an ominous note in the Dispatcher on
January 13, 1961: "No fast operator, on either side, should
start thinking of cutting a fat hog for himself, or making
a name for himself, by disrupting the orderly process of
change that will be necessary ... if any sharpy on either
side tries to create dissension, there will be plenty of sin
cere people to do some yelling. Are there people who don't
want to see this plan succeed? I'm afraid so. Some of our
own members don't want it to get off the ground." In such
an atmosphere, it will be a hardy union member who will
persist in pressing a grievance or in asserting that the new
agreement works an "onerous" hardship.

Two additional safeguards in the new contract will
serve to reinforce worker compliance with PMA-union
leadership interpretations. For one thing, in clause after
clause it is specified that changes will be agreed on not at
the Local level, but at the coastwise level. Here again,
Bridges was quite frank with me in granting that this can
be, and probably will be, used to whittle down Local
autonomy and concentrate more power in the hands of
the international leadership; and the people with whom I
spoke in San Pedro, from President George Kuvakas on
down, are bitterly agreed with Bridges that the new con
tract will be a knife to gut their dissident Local, to render
it powerless to protest, should the new agreement not only
knock off an anticipated eight hundred jobs, by eliminat
ing multiple handling^ but also impose a harder working
life on the membership. For another thing, the contract
provides that "payments into the Fund shall be abated"
up to the maximum employer obligation of $13,650 per
day, "in the event of a work stoppage in any port or ports
in violation of the provisions of this document." Here is a
five-year built-in insurance that hotheads and militants,
whether "phony" or not, will think twice before depriving
their older union brothers, the men who built the organ-

A Radical's America 58

ization, of the negotiated rights of their declining years.

But supposing that everything works out beautifully,
that the longshoremen go along with the agreement in
good faith, and that their employers exercise self-restraint
in utilizing their new-bought domination of the work situ
ation. The elderly men will retire, either voluntarily at
sixty-five, or mandatorily at an earlier age, with a cash
payment to speed them on their way, if lessening man-
hour needs should require a shrinking of the labor force
beyond the normal 4 per cent annual attrition. The
younger men will be absolutely assured of a vested inter
est in their jobs and will be able to look forward to the
same deal as the older men. If it works out this way,
couldn't it be described as a millennial labor-management
accord, one which frees management for the job of mod
ernization and mechanization while it protects the old
worker who has given his life to the industry and the
young worker who is committing his life to the industry?

It could but there is a fly in the ointment. This fly
is the group of dock workers known as "B" men, about
1500 workers up and down the Coast, who are specifically
excluded from the benefits of the new agreement. There
is no question but that a substantial number of these men
no one knows how many, and it will vary from port to
port will be squeezed out of the bottom end of the
industry, so to speak, even while the older men are being
squeezed out of the top end into retirement. Therefore
men will be losing their jobs under this new agreement,
and it seems to me a piece of semantic legerdemain on the
part of union and management publicists to insist that this
is not so, simply because "B" men are not "fully registered"
union longshoremen. The fact is that these are men who
are committed to the shipping industry and are presently
essential to it. (They now do most of the hold work in San
Francisco, Stockton, and other ports.)

Who are they? This is insufficiently known, and repre
sents one of the most fascinating and illuminating if
depressing -aspects of the whole West Coast waterfront

59 West Coast Waterfront: End of an Era

story. Take the case of Bridges's Local 10, which for
some years filled out the labor needs of management by
supplying "permit" or "work card" men, in effect ap
prentices or postulant members, in addition to the "cas
uals" or "Social Security" men, like policemen or firemen
or the unemployed, who came down to the waterfront to
earn a day's pay. In the spring of 1958 the Local decided,
in conjunction with PMA, to replace the members it was
losing by attrition. It ran an ad in the local papers and
received about fourteen thousand applications for mem
bership such was the attractive power of the union and
of longshore work in the Bay area. The following spring
some 570 of die applicants were accepted after interview,
and shortly thereafter the figure rose to nearly 800.

PMA was anxious for a more stable and reliable work
force than that available from the pool of casuals; it con
fined its investigation of applicants pretty much to ques
tions of their responsibility and possible existence of a
criminal record. The union was anxious for new members
who would be loyal and union-conscious; the leadership
hoped that the great number of Negro applicants would
behave like many of their relatives and friends, who al
ways went down the line for Harry; furthermore, in open
ing its books to members with union background or mari
time experience, it welcomed a substantial number of DP's
from other unions which had also been expelled from the
CIO on charges of Communist domination, or from unions
which had themselves ousted substantial numbers of al
leged Communists.

Thus both management and labor stood to gain by this
influx of new blood: the former, because it was obtaining
the services of men eager to enter the industry, ready to
turn to every day, and more than willing to work all the
dirty cargoes that the fully registered men handled only
reluctantly; the latter, because it was going to be able to
replace the retiring and the dying with men who were, by
and large, devoted to Harry Bridges and his kind of trade
unionism.

A Radical's America 60

But then negotiations got under way for what was
eventually to emerge as the five-year mechanization and
modernization agreement and the "B" men, who had
first been told frankly that they were being taken on to
get extra work, and then promised at a series of special
meetings that they would become full-fledged union mem
bers in six months to a year, found that, by mutual agree
ment, a freeze had been clamped on the industry. Save
for a handful who had squeezed into full membership,
some 615 "B" men in the Bay area now await the end of
the freeze and, what seems most likely, their gradually
being starved out of the waterfront. (Ironically, the "B"
men of San Pedro may be in better shape, even though
more work will be lost there, because the Port of Los
Angeles, unlike San Francisco's waterfront, is growing so
rapidly that in a few years it will become one of the great
ports of the world; it is also ugly, with its omnipresent
oil-pump levers pecking away like monstrous insects, in
precise inverse ratio to the beauty and charm of San
Francisco.)

There are optimists who believe that economies result
ing from the new agreement may revive coastwise ship
ping, now virtually moribund because of highway truck
ing; there are even those who expect an impending revival
of the China trade, once the mainstay of West Coast
shipping. Either could absorb the cut in man-hours and
even make necessary the permanent employment of the
"B" men as members of an augmented labor force. But a
hardheaded economist like Max Kossoris, in an article in
Monthly Labor Review for January 1961, speaks not of
"whether" but of "after": "After most of the Class B long
shoremen and the casuals have been eliminated from the
industry, how will the rest ... of the cut in man-hours
be absorbed?"

These men are not a statistic. As I have already indi
cated, it is the fact that they exist that should matter
not how many of them there are. When I asked an execu
tive of PMA whether it wasn't really true that most of

61 West Coast Waterfront : End of an Era

these men would be losing their livelihoods as a result of
a contract publicized as a job-saving agreement, he re
plied, "The *B' men are a matter for Hany Bridges's con
science."

So I asked Harry Bridges, and he replied, "Although the
'B* men are not considered a part of the industry, they're
better off working here two or three days a week than
they would be now in industry at large. In our opinion,
they'll be all right for the next two or three years."

The "B" men themselves just don't know. Some are still
inclined to trust Harry; most, however, are increasingly
bitter and vengeful. A few, with no trade-union back
ground, may become so vengeful that they will attempt
to sue the union: this may be why the union is once again
holding special meetings for them, meetings which had
not been called since the beginning of the freeze. I am
more concerned, however, with the dedicated militants
than with the anti-union. These are men, many of them,
who entered the working class voluntarily and who, after
rough years in the NMU or the MCS or the UAW, fight
ing for the Communist Party line because that line hap
pened to coincide with their own idealism and socialist
principles, are now at the end of their rope, at the end of
the line. Finally fed up with Stalinism in '52 or '56 or when
ever, they turned to the ILWU because Harry Bridges
seemed still to be leading a democratic working-class
anticapitalist force. Many of them carried the ball for
Bridges in other unions when he needed bail money, or
legal aid in fighting jail and deportation; they were will
ing to do just about anything for him, and in fact some of
them did do just about anything for him. Now they find
that they are expendable. An injury to one, they discover
very, very late, is no longer an injury to all.

The terrible disillusionment of these idealists finds its
parallel among the scattered opposition to Bridges in the
fully registered union members, including some of the
older men. Again, I am not speaking primarily of the
opposition on the right, which ranges from white-superi-

A Radical's America 62

ority workers frustrated by Bridges's automatic bloc vote
from Negroes (some of whom have been getting theirs
back by "Crow Jimming" the whites) to "professional
Catholics" who wear the cross but have been known to
wheel and deal with the Communists. I have in mind those
dissidents who, because they are socialists or Trotskyites
or ex-Wobblies or ex-Stalinists, persist in operating as
though the principles of solidarity and brotherhood were
antecedent to self-aggrandizement, the accumulation of
power, or the captivating glare of publicity. I number
these among the finest men I have ever had the privilege
of getting to know, but I must in all conscience report that
their prospects in the ILWU are dim indeed.

Not only do they have little, if any, contact with the
"B" men, the ones who will be frozen out of the industry
by the contract; from fear or distrust, they have almost
nothing to do with each other. Being reasonable men,
they are not always certain that Bridges is automatically
wrong on every issue; and so, as each operates with his
small band of followers, they gradually lose heart and
turn their intelligence to the resolution of other problems,
whether personal or social "What are all the old lefties
doing?*' I asked one of these disillusioned men, and he
replied with a weary smile, "They're sitting home nights."

Although it is entirely possible that he now has more
in common, intellectually and temperamentally, with Paul
St. Sure than he does with his own rank and file, Harry
Bridges has in the past given great leadership to the work
ers of the West Coast. And although he has also done
them some very questionable services indeed, it is a brave
man who will rise to oppose him, knowing that he is op
posing not only the leader's record, not only his practic
ally unanimous support in the Negro ranks which have
always been accorded scrupulous equality and now form
a majority of the membership of the San Francisco Local
but also his caustic tongue and his skill at both oratory
and demagogy. When I asked him how he intended to
educate his membership to the subtleties of the new agree-

63 West Coast Waterfront : End of an Era

ment and to the necessity for self-discipline if it is to work,
he replied readily, "Well give it to them Castro-style, at
our meetings." And at least a half-dozen longshoremen
have reported to me, with shame or fury, the meeting at
which Bridges rose with his cold grin to taunt the fully
registered men for their qualms about dumping the "B"
men: "You want to play politics with the *B* men? Then
bring them in and give them equal working rights. But
you're not going to do that. You know it and I know it."

And they didn't. Whether they would have, if Bridges
had appealed to their best instincts that afternoon instead
of their worst, is doubtful. It is doubtful too whether he
has guessed wrong about the temper of his people during
the 1960's, that they (including the leaderless and aimless
young redhots of San Pedro) will settle for what he has
won for them in the new contract and will not yearn or
struggle for that which he has yielded up in return.

A leading PMA official, recently traveling in the Soviet
Union, was closely questioned at the Ministry of Marine,
where he paid a courtesy call, about capitalist reaction
to the new "mechanization and modernization" agree
ment. The official replied that most of the American press
had received the agreement favorably, that many edi
torials had hailed it as an epoch-making solution to some
of the human problems posed by automation and mechan
ization for industry at large, but that the Wall Street
Journal had condemned it as "Communistic" because it
paid hard cash for buying back prerogatives that should
always have been management's. The Minister ruminated
for a moment, and then murmured to his translator, "Tell
the gentleman that I agree with the Wall Street Journal!'

This story may reveal more about the nature of the
Soviet Union, or of its bureaucrats' conception of commu
nism, than it does about this new contract. But it may
serve to remind us too that a way of life is passing from
the scene. Already men are working harder on the water
front and are grumbling, but impotentiy, as they come to
realize once again the meaning of the practices they voted

A Radical's America 64

out of existence. When the new contract expires in 1966,
the men who have lived under it will be a lot less easily
distinguishable from the rest of the American workers
than they are today. Not only will the radical dissidents
of whom I have been speaking be harder to find; so will
the other oddballs, the men with brains who liked to work
with their hands, the occasional novelist, painter, or phi
losopher whom one encountered on the waterfront because
it was as loyal union member Eric Hoffer put it to me
"a good place to talk and a good place to think, a mixture
of physical and intellectual stimulation." By 1966 Eric
Hoffer will have retired with his pension, and both the
union and the waterfront will be far less hospitable havens
for whatever Hoffers this nation may be fortunate enough
to produce in the future.

Dissent, Autumn 1961

Labor's Cultural Degradation

Those of us who persist in clinging to certain archaic no
tions about the human degradation attendant upon capi
talism, and who in consequence cannot shake off the
suspicion that this might be a better world with the arrival
of something we call socialism, are often taxed with the
lack of foresight of Karl Marx. Not only is Marx held
posthumously accountable for all the crimes committed in
his name or in the name of socialism from the Stalinist
slave-labor camps to the Socialist management of im
perialist pacification in Algeria but he is also charged
with having failed to foresee that capitalism would be able
to provide not less and less, but more and more and more
of the good things of life for its proletariat. It is true that
in recent months these sardonic cries have become some
what muted, as the unemployed are once again arrested
for stealing food and display other signs of reluctance to
proceed quietly from overemployment to home relief; but
still the claim is made that the working class under capi
talism (especially in Magic America), far from being in
creasingly exploited and degraded, is living at least as well
as anyone else in the world, if not better.

Well, what about it? Are we to deny that the packing
house worker and the auto worker can and do buy color
television, three-taillight automobiles and Chris-Crafts to
go with their fishing licenses? And if we admit it, shouldn't
we also admit that capitalism is after all capable of satis
fying all the wants of the underlying population, allowing
for occasional recessions?

I for one do not think so, I for one think that the work-

A Radical's America 66

ing class is not having its basic emotional wants and psy
chological needs satisfied. I for one think that the working
class regardless of whether it is envied by other proletar
ians who would like to drive cars instead of riding bicy
cles, or would like to ride bicycles instead of walking is
being cheated, swindled, and degraded as ferociously as
ever its English counterparts were a century ago when
Marx and Engels were anatomizing them. The fact that it
may not be aware of its exploitation does not alter the
reality of its situation. The fact that, even with an ap
preciable portion of it presently subsisting on unemploy
ment insurance, its material status is still light-years ahead
of its European (to say nothing of its Asian or African)
counterparts is relevant only as it sheds a little light on
the potential of plenty that would be available to all man
kind if industrialization and the accumulation of capital
were to take place at a rational pace on a world-wide basis.

Consider the condition, say, of the Chicago slaughter
house worker at the turn of die century. Upton Sinclair
railed magnificently, and with ultimately telling effect, not
only at the economic subjugation of workers forced to toil
sixty and seventy hours a week for a pittance, but also at
the conditions under which they worked, at what they had
to do for a living, and at how they were ruthlessly cleaned
out in the saloons when the long day's work was done. It
was his contention that the workers were being degraded
and enslaved not only during their working hours, but
afterward as well, when they turned to the consolation of
booze to help them forget how they were spending their
lives.

Let us grant at once that these workers are no longer
forced to toil (not even the moonlighters) sixty and seventy
hours a week. Let us grant at once that they are now
paid much more for working much less than they did at
the turn of the century, and that, thanks to their union,
their conditions of employment have been immeasurably
improved. What they do does not seem to have altered as

67 Labor's Cultural Degradation

appreciably. Since Chicago packing houses no longer offer
public guided tours, let us note what was said not long ago
by one of America's most distinguished women, who felt
impelled, in her ninth decade, to address a letter to the
New York Times (April 30, 1958):

I have been horrified within the last few weeks by learning
that the old cruel way of slaughtering animals for food is still
being widely used, and that still, just as in my youth, there is
no law to forbid it This is to me absolutely incomprehensible
because we are not a cruel people: we do not want to eat what
comes to us through pain and suffering. And yet, as I know of
my own knowledge, the facts about the slaughterhouses were
investigated and publicized well on to sixty years ago. . . .

Miss Edith Hamilton does not dwell in her letter on the
effects of this cruel work on those hired to perform it, nor
need we linger here over the question, beyond observing
that it is not one currently asked by those engaged in pro
mulgating the myth of the happy worker.*

As for how workers are gulled and mulcted in the hang
outs which Sinclair described as traps designed to stupefy
the worker, and which we today might characterize as the
liquid television of half a century ago, only those who live
in the dream world of official mythology imagine that they
no longer fulfill the evil function they did in the days of
The Jungle.

An armored truck [A. H. Raskin tells us in the New York
Times Magazine of May 4, 1958] stood outside the unemploy-

* Footnote, 1961: The passage of the federal humane-
slaughter law in 1960, to which I refer on page 3, re
sulted from the agitation of concerned people like
Miss Hamilton; I have not visited a slaughterhouse
since the mandatory change-over from the bone-
crushing sledge hammer to gas or needle, but I
should think it would mean a much less painful day
for man as well as beast in the new packing house.

A Radical's America 68

ment insurance office in a down-at-the-heels neighborhood five
minutes ride from Detroit's glistening civic center. On the
truck's side was a sign: "Charge for cashing checks. Up to $50
15 cents. Over $50 20 cents/' Two-thirds of the workers
streaming out of the office thrust their checks through the slot
and paid tribute to the man in the truck. . . . Inside the office
the manager frowned: "That armored truck is violating the
law, but the cops don't bother the owner. And the wives like it,
it keeps their men out of the beer gardens to cash their checks."

But new techniques for the inducement of oblivion have
far outstripped the traditional saloon, with its check-cash
ing window and its soft-sell technique of simultaneously
taking the worker's money and enabling him to forget that
he has just spent his day hitting screaming animals on the
head, tightening bolts on auto bodies, or seeking the op
portunity to find such employment. Indeed, the new tech
niques of merchandizing both "leisure" and forgetfulness
have now developed to the point where they can be said
to play as large a part in the degradation of the worker
as does his actual employment. The English writer Rich
ard Hoggart puts the matter quite succinctly in his The
Uses of Literacy:

Inhibited now from ensuring the "degradation" of the masses
economically, the logical processes of competitive commerce,
favored from without by the whole climate of the time and
from within assisted by the lack of direction, the doubts and
uncertainty before their freedom of working people themselves
(and maintained as much by ex-working class writers as by
others), are ensuring that working people are culturally robbed.
Since these processes can never rest, the holding down, the
constant pressure not to work outwards and upwards, becomes
a positive thing, becomes a new and stronger form of subjec
tion; this subjection promises to be stronger than the old be
cause the chains of cultural subordination are both easier to
wear and harder to strike away than those of economic subor
dination. . . .

What is perhaps ugliest about the whole process, how
ever, is that competitive commerce is now meshing the

69 Labor's Cultural Degradation

chains of cultural subordination with those of economic
subordination. The worker is not simply lulled into forget-
fulness of his daily idiot routine by the TV western: he is
simultaneously pressured into permanently mortgaging
himself by acquiring the objects manufactured by the
sponsors of his daily ration of opiates. The peddlers of per
suasion have now developed such techniques of sophistica
tion and grown themselves into such large-scale enterprise
that they engage the talents and the creative passions of a
substantial segment of young college graduates in the fields
of sociology, psychology, economics, and the English lan
guage itself. They regard the worker-consumer as a ma-
nipulatable object, rather than as a human being with
individual needs and aspirations; they address him, in con
sequence, with a cynicism that can only be described as
shameless, and they exploit him culturally as ruthlessly as
he was exploited economically a generation ago. Thus Dr.
Ernest Dichter, president of the Institute for Motivational
Research, recently informed the Sales Executives Club of
New York and the Advertising Federation of America:

A year ago it was correct to advertise the purchase of air-
conditioners under the slogan, "You deserve to sleep in com
fort." Today, it may be psychologically more correct to shift to
a moral approach, utilizing spartan, work-oriented appeals
such as, "You can't afford to be tired all day," or "You work
better and produce more after a refreshing night." Dr. Dichter
termed this one approach for giving the consumer "moral per
mission" and "a rational justification" for buying products that
represent the "good life." . . . Motivation research's view on
price cuts, according to Dr. Dichter, is that they must be ac
companied by advertisements that explain to the consumer the
reasons for the change. Otherwise, "there is a grave danger
that the consumer will become more than ever convinced that
he was being cheated during a period of prosperity," Dr.
Dichter also urged that salesmen become philosophers as well.
To help dispel the sales lag, "he has to sell us not only a prod
uct but the desirability, the correctness of purchasing the prod
uct" (New York Times, March 19, 1958.)

A Radical's America 70

Those who manage to accommodate themselves to a
lunatic order of things have in general reacted to observa
tions like those in the preceding paragraphs in one or a
combination of the three following ways:

(1) They assert that the great virtue in our social order
is that, in addition to providing the working class with the
necessities and the amenities of a secure and civilized ex
istence, it also provides the worker for the first time in
history with an unparalleled variety of cultural possibili
ties, ranging from the great thinkers in inexpensive paper
back books to the great composers on inexpensive LP's.

(2) They claim that the manufacturers of distraction
are giving the public what it wants, and that if the pro
letarian turns in his off-hours not to Plato but to Spillane,
not to Beethoven but to Alan Freed, this is no more than
a reflection of the traditionally abominable taste of the
masses, which preceded and will endure beyond the cur
rent American order.

(3) They point out that - if it is indeed true that we are
the victims of an unremitting, concerted commercial as
sault on our nerves and our senses this degrading and
relentless battering affects not just the working class but
all of us, and that it is therefore romantically inaccurate
to single out the proletarian as the particularly exploited
victim of the mass-media panderers.

All three defenses are interconnected; a response to all
must start with an insistence upon the lately neglected
fact that it is the man on the bottom of the heap, the man
who does the dirty work, who has the fewest defenses
against the unending barrage of sex and violence and the
propaganda of commerce. He is the particularly exploited
victim of the mass media; he is not given an honest pos
sibility of developing an individual taste for individual
works of the human imagination; he does not have the
range of cultural choice available to college students,
white-collar people, and middle-class citizens of the re
public.

71 Labor's Cultural Degradation

As Daniel Bell observes of the work situation itself, in
his Work and Its Discontents, "a tension that is enervating
or debilitating can only produce wildly aggressive play, or
passive, unresponsive viewing. To have 'free time' one
needs the zest of a challenging day, not the exhaustion of
a blank one. If work is a daily turn round Ixion's wheel,
can the intervening play be anything more than a restless
moment before the next turn of the wheel?"

The man who leaves the packing house or the assembly
line is neither physically nor psychically prepared to ap
preciate the quality paperback or the classical LP. Nor are
they readily available to him in any case; the merchan
disers of the mass entertainments reserve the right to re
strict certain of their wares, or conversely to cram others
down the gullets of their victims. It is no more accidental
that the only civilized TV programs are presented on Sun
days, when the average viewer is either sleeping it off or
visiting relatives, than it is that the much-touted book
racks are packed in the poorer neighborhoods not with
Plato but with anonymously mass-produced borderline
sado-pornography.

It is not only that the mass-media exploiters are capi
talizing on the cultural backwardness of the great ma
jority of the American people. Worse: they are actively
engaged in the creation of new types of subliterature (see
the paperback racks), submusic (radio and jukeboxes), and
generally subhuman activities (television), which they
dump on a defenseless public in saturation quantities. No
demand can be said to exist for such products of greedv
and distorted minds until they are first created and then
reiterated to the point of nausea or numbed acceptance. In
the process of production and reiteration, whatever re
mains of an independent, traditional working-class culture
as Mr. Hoggart spells it out painstakingly in The Uses of
Literacy is gradually eroded.

The middle classes and the intelligentsia can at least be
said to have alternative choices for their leisure hours.
Thanks to the numerical increase of the college-educated

A Radical's America 72

and to their steadily increasing purchasing power, the
masters of mass consumption have made available to them
the cultural treasures of the ages through the media of
books, records, and even FM stations. But these have not
been, nor will they be, addressed to the working class, to
the vast inarticulate masses, who are deemed by their bet
ters to have lower tastes than the primitive Africans and
Asians to whom the State Department exports Marian
Anderson and Louis Armstrong. What could be at once
more patronizing and more bankrupt than the claim that
the flood of swill daily pumped through our cultural pipe
lines fairly represents all that the ordinary man can ever
be expected to appreciate? If it is true that this capitalist
society has all but wiped out economic degradation and
oppression, why can it produce only consumers assertedly
hungry for cultural products as degraded as those of any
previous epoch of human history? The fantastic techno
logical and scientific advances of recent years not the
singular product, we see now all too clearly, of American
capitalism do not merely call for an accompanying cul
tural advance, up to now unobservable among us; they
will be positively insupportable without such an advance,
without a new definition of the meaning of culture and of
the individual human potential.

Meanwhile, the fact of the apparent hunger for cultural
rubbish combined with the salesman's pitch, and their ap
parent mass acceptance, should not blind us to the basic
shabbiness of the degradation and the exploitation of those
who, all too unaware of what is being done to them, may
even be asking for more of the same. I must turn once
again to Richard Hoggart, who speaks to the point on this
matter:

If the active minority continue to allow themselves too ex
clusively to think of immediate political and economic objec
tives, the pass will be sold, culturally, behind their backs. This
is a harder problem in some ways than even that which con
fronted their predecessors. It is harder to realize imaginatively
the dangers of spiritual deterioration. Those dangers are

73 Labor's Cultural Degradation

harder to combat, like adversaries in the air, with no corporeal
shapes to inspire courage and decision. These things are en
joyed by the very people whom one believes to be adversely
affected by them. It is easier for a few to improve the material
conditions of many than for a few to waken a great many from
the hypnosis of immature emotional satisfactions. People in
this situation have somehow to be taught to help themselves.

It should not be discouraging that there are few voices
like Mr. Hoggart's on this side of the Atlantic. Surely it
is better to speak late than not to speak at all, and by one's
silence ensure the continuing and intensified exploitation
of those least able to resist its seductive and ultimately
corrupting effects. Every voice which says No is itself a
demonstration of the existence of an alternative to the cul
tural degradation of the masses.

The American Socialist, July- August 1958

The Myth of the Powerful Worker

Winchester, Virginia

A small group of unhappy and bewildered Americans is
gathered musingly about a little table in a trailer parked
beside a gas station on the outskirts of this quiet, pleasant
Shenandoah Valley town. The town, called the Apple Cap
ital by its boosters, is the home place of Senator Harry F.
Byrd, who owns something like 2 per cent of all the apple
trees in the United States. The Americans, seated uncom
fortably on a broken-springed couch and three kitchen
chairs, beneath a couple of girlie calendars and a scrawled
reminder of an impending meeting of their local union,
munch on hamburgers and Southern-style beans (the
trailer is mostly a cookhouse, with a refrigerator and a lit
tle rotisserie), and ponder the fact that a trial examiner for
the National Labor Relations Board has just ruled that
they are violating the Taf t-Hartley Act. They have been
on strike against the O'Sullivan Rubber Company for over
two years, and after having been disenfranchised in a de
certification election, they are now advised that they can
not continue picketing the plant down the road, and that
their international union, the Rubber Workers, which has
been giving them twenty-five dollars a week strike benefits
so that they do not go hungry or lose their homes or pos
sessions, must cease and desist from its nationwide boy
cott of O'Sullivan products.

While they stare at each other, lined-faced family men,
toothless oldsters, motherly widows, and shy young women,
wondering how it came about that all the power of the
federal government seems to be invoked against them sim-

75 The Myth of the Powerful Worker

ply because of their desire for decent relations with their
employer, a professor of economics from Harvard Univer
sity is testifying in Washington before the subcommittee
on labor of the Senate Committee on Labor and Public
Welfare. The nation's capital is only two hours to the east,
across a green and lovely Virginia countryside dotted with
baronial estates devoted to the raising of fine horses and
fine cattle; but those who sit in die high-ceilinged commit
tee room just down the hall from Senator Byrd's office
might be on another planet, a million light-years from the
baffled strikers in Byrd's home town. Senators Kennedy,
Goldwater, Ives and Morse are listening quietly and po
litely to a parade of academic and professionally interested
witnesses from both sides of the fence expounding their
ideas on new legislation affecting the NLRB and the Taft-
Hartiey Act.

The economist, Professor Edward H. Chamberlin, is
telling them that "Organized labor is on the whole rather
well up the income scale, yet the anachronism that labor is
downtrodden and deserving of some special kind of public
sympathy carries on. It derives, in part, from a cultural
lag."

The professor may not have the sympathy of all his lis
teners in the committee room, but there are others besides
the National Association of Manufacturers (which com
mends him to the readers of the NAM News) who hold to
his position: indeed there are times when one might sus
pect that he speaks not only for the conservative Right,
but also for the host of former friends of labor, and ex-
radicals who smile wearily when they are informed that
there are still embattled strikers in this golden land. And
the casual visitor to Washington who pads from one
marble palace of labor to another, through the acres of
broadloom, from the incredible Teamsters Union Taj
Mahal to the hardly more credible temple of the Union of
Operating Engineers to the plushy International Associa
tion of Machinists building to the well-appointed Philip
Murray building to the quietly luxurious AFL-CIO build-

A Radical's America 76

ing, might be pardoned for thinking unless he troubles
to discover that there are still some dedicated and worried
men working for their ideals amid all the opulence that
the professor is right and that "labor" that great abstrac
tion has reached the Promised Land after all.

The O'Sullivan strikers of Local 511 do not think so, but
even though they have a clothing depot set up to receive
gifts from those who care, they are not pressing the point
that they are "downtrodden and deserving of some special
kind of public sympathy." They do a lot of hunting for
deer and small game, a lot of fishing for everything from
herring to trout, a lot of odd jobs around the town; they
hold bake sales to raise money for things that the union
can't afford to provide, like schoolbooks for the kids; and
although it is hard to find steady work (always the osten
sible reason is that they would be only temporary until the
strike ended), nobody is going hungry. But people like
Mrs. Martha Webster, a gentle, tired widow who went to
work for O'Sullivan with her brother and her brother-in-
law twenty-seven years ago, and who had never heard of
unions until she joined the one that she now supports ar
dently, as an embattled striker; Mrs. Carrie Boyd, a jolly
widow who is mostly Cherokee, seldom reads the papers
but knows what she is fighting for after some fourteen
years as an O'Sullivan worker; Arthur and Asa Smith, who
helped build the plant back in the Twenties and put in
about thirty years of their lives there before going on
strike; Charles Rittenour, who when he went on strike was
making $1.30 an hour after eleven years at O'Sullivan, and
whose face is a little more lined now because his oldest
boy (he has five children) has leukemia; and Bruce Muse,
who started in at O'Sullivan twenty-five years ago at fif
teen cents an hour, making $1.87 for a twelve-and-a-half-
hour day, and going around to his friends' homes evenings
to try to talk union after the twelve and a half hours were
over these people are the victims of a piece of legislation
most of them had never heard of. After having voted 343
to 2 to affiliate with their union, and 355 to 2 to strike,

77 The Myth of the Powerful Worker

they found themselves the targets not only of an intransi
gent company, but also of an apparently implacable and
vindictive government as well. What is more, they are not
merely the fluke victims of an accidental legal clause
(which the new Kennedy bill would repeal)*: millions of
American workers are now being victimized in one way or
another by the Taft-Hartley Law, which is now being ap
plied so rigorously by the Eisenhower-appointed NLRB
that even back in 1954 Business Week was saying, "from a
practical standpoint, it's obvious that T~H has changed in
operation."

To understand why, it is necessary to recapitulate a bit
of the Winchester experience, as weU as that of workers in
other places and other industries who are suffering as a
result of legislation and administration which had hitherto
engaged their attention less deeply than had the private
life of the Prince of Monaco. It is difficult even for a more
sophisticated individual than a Virginia worker-housewife
to understand what Section 9(c)(3) is going to mean per
sonally until the paychecks stop.

In April 1956, the NLRB certified the United Rubber
Workers as exclusive bargaining agent for O'Sullivan
workers, after the 343-2 election. Negotiations followed,
but there was disagreement on the question of a general
wage increase (the company average was forty cents to
sixty cents an hour below similar organized shops), and
the employees struck the plant on May 13 after the 355-2
secret strike vote. The company immediately began to re-

* Footnote, 1961: The Landrum-Griffin Law does now
allow, at long last in 1961, that workers striking for
economic reasons may vote alongside the strike
breakers who have replaced them, in proceedings
such as attempted decertifications of previously rec
ognized unions.

A Radical's America 78

emit strikebreakers from the West Virginia hills (it is a
commentary on conditions in the area that people were
willing to scab on their neighbors for $1.25 an hour), and
to pepper the strikers with telegrams urging their immedi
ate return on penalty of job forfeiture.

At this point the strikers the vast majority of whom
had never before belonged to a union, paid much atten
tion to politics, or even voted had their first collision
with the majesty of the law. The State of Virginia, not or
dinarily noted for its social pioneering, had been one of
the first to pass a "right-to-work" law. Under its terms, the
strikers were hardly allowed so much as a frown as they
stood at the gates, surrounded by state police, and watched
the sheltered newcomers going in to take over work that
they had been doing for upwards of a quarter of a century.

"We never thought that it would last more than a day
or two," says one of the lady strikers, "or that the company
would be so glad to be rid of us after all those years we put
in for them. Actually, we should have given the scabs the
same reception that Nixon got down in South America
but then, there was the right-to-work law, and those state

T

police.

From that point on the company was in the driver's seat.
It prolonged negotiations, broke them off, rejected the as
sistance of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Serv
ice, resumed negotiations, stalled again, meanwhile hiring
about 200 new employees. In January 1957, the United
Rubber Workers inaugurated a consumer boycott of O'Sul-
livan, the first such boycott ever undertaken by the union
in all its history. The company, which had obviously been
reading the fine print, filed a new election petition with
the NLRB in April and a decertification petition in May.

Now, according to Section 9(c)(3) of Taft-Hartley, "No
election shall be directed in any bargaining unit or any
subdivision within which, in the preceding twelvemonth
period, a valid election shall have been held. Employees
on strike who are not entitled to reinstatement shall not be
eligible to vote. . . .** Thereupon, the year having elapsed

79 The Myth of the Powerful Worker

and the strikers having been replaced, the NLRB disfran
chised the O'Sullivan strikers and, with majestic imparti
ality, proceeded to poll the strikebreakers, who voted 288
to 5 against the union.

This may seem a little unfair. Indeed, this peculiar pro
vision in a law ostensibly designed for "encouraging the
practice and procedure of collective bargaining and by
protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of asso
ciation, self-organization, and designation of representa
tives of their own choosing," was so designated by Presi
dent Eisenhower. He pledged an A. F. of L. convention in
1952 (six weeks before Election Day, to be sure): "I know
the [Taft-Hartley] law might be used to break unions.
That must be changed. America wants no law licensing
union-busting. Neither do I."

Even if the President were to strain every nerve and
sinew to keep this pledge, which is not exactly what he has
done, it is an open question whether the Congresses which
have followed his noble words would have contented them
selves in their labor legislation with simply striking out the
ineffable Section 9(c)(3), which had distressed even Sena
tor Taft himself.

But this was only the beginning of the education of the
O'Sullivan strikers. In October 1957, the O'Sullivan com
pany returned to the NLRB to charge that the union, by
conducting its picketing, and engaging in its consumer
boycott of O'Sufiivan products, was in violation of Section
8(b)(l)(A). This section reads: "It shall be an unfair labor
practice for a labor organization or its agents to restrain or
coerce employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed
in Section 7. . . ."

So, in February 1958, the NLRB issued a complaint and
on May 15, the trial examiner, finding no merit in the
union's claim that it was no longer seeking recognition,
but was simply exercising its right of free speech by dis
playing such picket signs as

A Radical's America 80

WARNING

PENALTY FOR STRIKEBREAKING
A LIFETIME OF SHAME AND

REGRET

URW ON STRIKE AFL-CIO
ON STRIKE MAY 1956 to ?
DON'T BUY O'SULLIVAN

PRODUCTS

HEELS MADE BY A COMPANY
WITHOUT A SOUL

recommended that the union cease and desist from "re
straining and coercing employees of O'Sullivan Rubber
Corporation in the exercise of rights guaranteed by Sec
tion 7 of the Act by picketing said Company for the pur
pose of obtaining recognition and a contract . . . ," cease
and desist from "conducting a boycott campaign against
the Company's products . . . ," post in conspicuous places
a formal notice that they are so ceasing and desisting, mail
such notices to the NLRB for posting on O'Sullivan bulle
tin boards as well, publish in the United Rubber Worker a
notice that the boycott is over, and notify the Regional Di
rector of the steps taken to comply.

In Winchester, the strikers drift in and out of their
trailer on their way to go fishing or to look at the picket
line down the road in front of die plant where they had
put in so many years, and they wonder aloud why their
noses are being rubbed in it.

"I never was one for politics," muses a gray-haired lady
as she bends over the icebox to get out some food for the
menfolks. "It's a little hard for me to understand why the
whole government seems to be so determined to be against
us. I know the company would do most anything, but the
government . . ."

But by and large the strikers are more sophisticated
now. They know that the trial examiner's recommenda
tions must go to the NLRB in Washington, that their

81 The Myth of the Powerful Worker

union will appeal, that the case will probably wind up in
the courts, and that precedent is against them. They know
that all they can do is grit their teeth and hang on; they
are caught in a box, and thank God for the union. They
also know that in a sense they have themselves to blame
for never having bothered all their lives to pay their poll
tax.

"What for?" demands Maurice Miller, president of the
Local. "To vote for Byrd and his boys? We never had a
choice, so we never bothered with the head tax. But now
we've learned the hard way I'd say we're close to a hun
dred per cent registered, and we're paying our COPE dol
lars so the unions can get into politics and see if we can
scare up a couple pro-labor men to run in this neck of the
woods."

Framed in the doorway of the trailer, a long-faced
striker stares up at Miller and says, in the deliberate way
of men in these parts, "I swear to you, I'd soona vote for
the blackest nigga in the State of Virginia than for a Byrd
man. Hope to die if that ain't true. They took us for
granted because they could ignore us, and we took them
for granted because we didn't know any betta."

With all due respect to the O'Sullivan strikers, they
could win no more than a footnote in any balanced ac
count of contemporary America if they represented only
themselves. But in January 1956, the employees of Ma
chinery Overhaul Corporation at Palmdale, California,
voted 65-28 to be represented by the International Asso
ciation of Machinists. After protracted negotiations the
union struck, and after the required year's wait, the com
pany, having in the meantime hired a shop full of strike
breakers, demanded decertification of the union: all too
predictably, the strikebreakers voted 90-1 against the
union. Again all too predictably, the NLRB found there
after that the IAM, by continuing picketing, had com
mitted unfair labor practices in violation of good old Sec
tion 8(b)(l)(A). In April 1958, the strikers were ordered by

A Radical's America 82

the NLRB to cease and desist from picketing the shop
where they had formerly constituted two thirds of the em
ployees. All of these strikebreaking decisions, it should be
noted, stem from last year's startling Curtis Brothers deci
sion, which reversed past precedent favorable to unions,
and which dissenting NLRB member Murdock character
ized in these words: "The majority's erroneous interpreta
tion of Section 8(b)(l)(A) seems to be prompted in large
part by its desire to censure the union's conduct and find
some section which can be utilized to ban it."

It is plain fact that thousands of organized (and count
less unorganized) workers all over the country are suffer
ing from the Taft-Hartley law and its interpretation by the
Republican-appointed NLRB.

Forty-five million unorganized workers in the United
States can never better themselves through organization
by such unions as the Textile Workers, Retail Clerks and
the white-collar unions as long as Taft-Hartley remains as
law and is interpreted as it is being interpreted by the
NLRB. These workers are simply not organizable; and the
lawyers and union staffers in the plush Washington offices,
whose job is to thread their way through the mazes of
NLRB decisions and administrative rulings, are by and
large almost as frustrated and furious as the workers of
Winchester, Virginia. Let us examine some of the reasons
why.

First of all, there are the provisions of Taft-Hartley it
self. We have already seen how some of these have changed
the hitherto quiet lives of the people of Winchester and of
Palmdale, California. In Toledo, Ohio, the Retail Clerks
International Association had been bargaining with four
stores together, which called themselves Retail Associates.
In November 1957, the union struck one of the stores,
Tiedtke's, which promptly withdrew from the employer
group and settled with the union. Thereupon the union
struck a second member store, LaSalle & Koch (an R. H.

83 The Myth of the Powerful Worker

Macy affiliate); this strike continues, but the store is open
and, as in Winchester, grandmothers walk the picket line,
cherishing their new-found militancy but wondering what
goes on inside the store and inside the government.

For now the maneuvering had begun. Retail Associates,
acting for its three remaining members, asked the NLRB
to hold an election among the employees of LaSalle's,
Lamson Brothers, and Lion Dry Goods, arguing that the
bargaining unit had changed. The strategy was obvious:
with the unionized employees of Tiedtke's excluded from
the vote, with the 400 striking employees of LaSalle's ex
cluded from the vote, and with the 350 strikebreakers of
LaSalle's included in the vote, the Retail Clerks union
couldn't possibly win. The union thereupon withheld its
technically necessary non-Communist affidavits in an effort
to keep itself off the ballot and thus forestall an election. It
went before the NLRB and argued that it had the same
right to withdraw from bargaining with the multi-store
group that one of the store group did; and it asserted its
right to bargain with the three stores individually.

With extraordinary rapidity, the NLRB ruled against
the union, thus condemning it in advance to what the
Rubber Workers had already been going through in Vir
ginia. As Joseph A. Loftus narrated the story in the New
York Times of April 11, 1958, the board "took the unusual
step of notifying the parties by telegram of its decision less
than forty-eight hours after it had heard oral argument"
In so doing, the board overturned its own ten-year-old
precedent, which forbade a union not technically in com
pliance with filing requirements from participating in an
election; it opened the door to employers who would like
to force their employees belonging to such powerful unions
as the Mine Workers or the Typographers to submit willy-
nilly to an NLRB election; and it drove the infuriated Re
tail Clerks to the courts, no less, to seek an injunction
against the NLRB election. Sol Lippman, union counsel,
bluntly called the decision "a naked effort to break a strike,"

A Radical's America 84

and went before U. S. District Judge Edward M. Curran
to demand injunctive relief.

The NLRB attorney actually pleaded that LaSalle's was
losing money because of the strike a strange argument
for a government official in a quasi-judicial position. The
Associated Press story of April 22 gave another interesting
sidelight on the reasoning of the NLRB attorney:

Mr. Come argued that it was not certain how the election
would come out if held on schedule on a multiple-unit basis.
He said some of the LaSalle employees who have replaced
strikers might vote for the union.

"You don't think they are going to vote themselves out of a
job, do you?" the judge asked.

Thereupon the judge issued the preliminary injunction
sought by the Clerks, and the case will now be fought
through the courts, while the middle-aged ladies march
the picket lines in downtown Toledo.

If it seems strange today that labor unions should go to
the courts to demand the aid of what has been for genera
tions one of the most dreaded weapons used against labor
the injunction that can only be taken as a measure of
the extent to which the labor movement has become
alarmed, not just about Taft-Hartley itself, but about the
erosive effect of recent NLRB rulings.

While some of the most deeply entrenched unions have
been howling the loudest in outrage (the International
Typographical Union, operating for generations under
what have amounted to closed-shop conditions, says Taft-
Hartley has already cost its members $30,000,000),* the
truth of the matter would seem to be that it is the workers
in the less powerful unions, and even more so the not-yet-
organized workers, who are affected most directly by the

* Footnote, 1961: Finally, in 1961, the Supreme Court
ruled against the NLRB and for the Typographical
Union.

85 The Myth of the Powerful Worker

anti-labor bias of what one lawyer refers to as the National
Labor Reversals Board. It costs from $3,000 to $10,000 to
pursue a case through the circuit court, with the result
that some unions simply cannot afford to contest what this
lawyer calls "board law, not worth the paper it's printed
on," in a court of law; indeed, he finds it currently so diffi
cult to get a complaint issued by the board that he dis
courages his clients from filing charges with it at all. It
should be noted parenthetically that corporations are le
gally entitled to list as business expenses the cost of fight
ing unfair-labor-practice court cases.

What is this "board law"? Here the layman finds his feet
sinking into legal quicksand, and as he reaches out franti
cally for solid objects to cling to in the morass of opinions,
precedents (some with names like the "Orion the Rat
Man" case), and administrative responses to changes in the
political climate (i.e., the board's swing from a New Deal
to an Eisenhower stance), he finds himself grasping at the
straws of Latin phrases and at footnotes in which numbers
outnumber words. Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon had a
go at it on the floor of the Senate back in 1956, delivering
himself of a ninety-page oration based in large part on a
paper by Mozart G. Ratner, formerly Assistant General
Counsel of the NLRB, entitled "Recent Changes in Na
tional Labor Relations Board Policies." Both of these docu
ments are well worth reading, and one may surmise that
the only reason for their not having a greater impact at the
time was their lack of sex appeal as well as general public
apathy toward labor problems at a time of full employ
ment.

It would be tempting at this point to narrate some of the
cases cited by Ratner and Morse, but a good deal has hap
pened since then, and a good deal continues to happen.
Let us mention only the case of the B.V.D. strikers, cited
with good reason in both monographs. At Pascagoula, Mis
sissippi, a group of women workers had organized them-

A Radical's America 86

selves into a homemade union and then sought out the In
ternational Ladies' Garment Workers' Union for help. The
NLRB denied reinstatement and back pay to thirty-seven
strikers on the ground that they had continued to picket
after acts of violence had been committed against the
B.V.D. property by unidentified third parties. There was
no attempt to prove that the women strikers instigated or
even participated in the acts of violence; there was no evi
dence of conspiracy on the part of the strikers or of their
having any control over the perpetrators. The board held
that these ladies, some of whom were putting their chil
dren through school and were the main family breadwin
ners, were not entitled to get their jobs back because they
should either have stopped picketing or dissociated them
selves from the violence by "admonishment, denunciation
or public pronouncement." This astonishing assault upon a
group of innocent women, with all it implied not just for
their right to their jobs but for their basic right to picket
(and how can you conduct a strike without picketing?),
forced the ILGWU to take the case to the courts. No won
der Professor Willard Wirtz, writing in the Northwestern
University Law Review, commented that "the new NLRB
. . . has proceeded to 'reinterpret' the [Taft-Hartley] Act
in such a manner as to change its practical application sub
stantially beyond anything seriously considered in recent
Congresses."

We have to bear in mind, too, that the layman's notion
that you can simply go to court (if you can afford it) and
get everything straightened out that has been done to you
administratively is more than a little simple. The courts
are most reluctant to overrule the NLRB, and because of
the "substantial evidence" rule, it is extremely difficult to
get the board reversed in court on a question of fact. If
you are not prepared to argue law rather than fact against
the board, the chances are you will only waste your time
and money in the courts. One Washington labor lawyer
told me flatly: "If I were an employer lawyer, I could

87 The Myth of the Powerful Worker

break any union just by using Taft-Hartley and the
NLRB/'*

In this connection, we might take note of a Washington
story in the New York Times of May 27, 1958:

The Supreme Court held today that an employee kept out of
a plant by the threats of striking union members might sue the
union for damages in the state courts instead of going to the
National Labor Relations Board for relief.

Chief Justice Warren, joined in dissent by Justice Doug
las, asserted:

There is a very real prospect of staggering punitive damages
accumulated through successive actions by parties injured by
[union] members who have succumbed to the emotion that
frequently accompanies concerted activities during labor un
rest. ... By reason of vicarious liability for its members' ill-
advised conduct on the picket lines, the union [the United
Automobile Workers, already defending some twenty-nine
other suits totaling $1,500,000 as a result of the Decatur, Ala
bama, strike] is to be subjected to a series of judgments that
may and probably will reduce it to bankruptcy.

This brings us to the tricky question which some Wash
ington attorneys regard as the greatest drawback of the
present NLRB: its narrow definition of its own jurisdic
tion. Without going into the complex details, we may say
only that several years ago the board drew an arbitrary
line and refused presumably for reasons of budget and
work load to take jurisdiction in cases where the em
ployer was basically "local" in character, as determined
partly by the dollar value of business inflow or outflow.
NLRB member Murdock promptly pointed out that there
was neither a pressing shortage of funds, nor inability to
handle case load (which was no higher than it had been

* Footnote, 1961: The unions had hoped for sub
stantial changes for the better under the new Kennedy
Administration; so far, however, improvement seems
highly dubious in 1961.

A Radical's America 88

five years earlier), nor any serious backlog of cases. He be
lieved that the new jurisdictional standards would elimi
nate between a quarter and a third of the board's jurisdic
tion. It was his judgment, fortified by quotations from his
more conservative colleagues, that the slash in jurisdiction
was motivated by what you might dignify as philosophi
cal considerations: the desire on the part of the board ma
jority to cut back on "federal bureaucracy" and return to
the states (most of which, if they have troubled to enact
labor legislation at all, have adopted only "right-to-work"
laws and similar employer aids) as much authority as pos
sible on labor questions.

Labor lawyers like Arthur Goldberg and Elliott Bred-
hoff, counsel for the Steelworkers Union, claim that by
thus taking itself out of the picture in such a substantial
proportion of cases, the board has cut off the application
of federal labor law from those working for hard-core em
ployers and from marginal areas where workers are most
in need of government protection. If you have been won
dering where the individual human being re-enters the
picture, think for a moment of the saleslady in a store or the
chambermaid in a hotel, neither of whom can now turn to
her government for protection if she wants to unionize
unless she happens to work for a "big" employer.

However, it must be noted that the Supreme Court has
complicated matters by refusing to grant the states juris
diction over some of these cases, thereby creating a "no
man's land" for several million workers; that the Florida
hotel cases are currently before the Supreme Court; that
Congress is very likely going to have to do something
about the no-man's-land area; and, indeed, that some labor
lawyers in Washington are currently far more exercised
about matters other than the board's refusal to take juris
diction in many cases.*

* Footnote, 1961: The board is now required to take
any cases it formerly took; in other words it can no
longer disavow previous jurisdiction in 1961.

89 The Myth of the Powerful Worker

What are these other matters? Some of them are pretty
ugly. Plato E. Papps, attorney for the International Asso
ciation of Machinists, in a bitter article in the University
of Detroit Law Review, entitled "The Aluminum Workers
Revisited/' charges that:

. . . It is hardly risky speculation to ferret out the true mo
tives of the presently-constructed National Labor Relations
Board. . . . It is patently obvious that NLRB changes in policy
have invariably been in favor of management. The cumulative
effect of the many small shifts has been considerable. Curtail
ment of the economic power of labor organizations is but one
of a categorized array of anti-labor policies. And even where
no explicit change in policy can be garnered from administra
tive rulings, the "Eisenhower Board" analyzes facts in such a
way as to find fewer violations of the Act by employers in con
trast to unions. It is necessary to explore only the dissenting
opinions of Member Murdock to ascertain how "Republican
political facts of life" form the keystone of board persuasion.
The recent expiration of Member Murdock's term on the board
brings to an end, incidentally, the irritable reminders that Con
gress did not intend the Taft-Hartley Act to be the manipula
tive bauble of the National Association of Manufacturers.

In support of these conclusions, Mr. Papps quotes the
following comments from articles in the Utah Law Re
view, the Labor Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review,
and the University of Chicago Law Review: ". . . Sub
stantial changes have been made in the NLRB decisions
since the advent of an Eisenhower majority. . . " "The
recent decisions of the board have tended ... to favor
the employer's interests over the union. . . ." "The recent
major policy decisions reveal a total disregard for the fact
. . . that Congress declared it to be the policy of the
United States to encourage unionization for the purpose of
restoring equality of bargaining power between employers
and employees/*

The most comprehensive and devastating summary of
what these changes have actually involved is to be found

A Radical's America 90

in an article called "Labor Law Upside Down: The NLRB
and Member Rodgers," written by Joseph E. Finley and
published as a pamphlet by the Public Affairs Institute.
Mr. Finley, a labor lawyer who makes no bones about his
bias, traces the turnabout in labor law to the appointment
to the board in 1953 of Philip Ray Rodgers, a Taft protege.
Most particularly since then, he claims, the NLRB has
been curtailing union organization, resorting to injunc
tions, making inexcusable rulings against unions, suppress
ing union activities over broad areas, and making a feeble
defense of its pro-management rulings.

For one thing, in the minds of the NLRB a threat has
now become a prediction. If your boss tells you that hell
have to close down his plant if you vote for a union, or if
he tells you that he won't bargain with the union, he's not
threatening you he's merely "predicting" what he may
be forced to do, and therefore is not guilty of an unfair
labor practice. The lawyers call this "prediction of a legal
position."

Moreover, sophisticated employers, thanks to the new
board, have now discovered that the realm of permissible
campaign propaganda has been vastly enlarged. Finley
cites the case of the Zeller Corporation, which, after bom
barding its employees with mailings and anti-union publi
cations, sent them a copy of a letter from one of its
customers which inquired about the company's labor rela
tions. Employees, the company pointed out to its own
workers, "can readily see how we can retain customers and
secure new business without the presence of a union."
This, although it was a misrepresentation, was ruled by
the board to be permissible propaganda.

Worse than either of these at least in the opinion of
this writer is the extraordinary latitude given to em
ployer "expressions of opinion" in the sacred name of "free
speech." The cases that Finley cites are bad enough, in all
conscience; but there are others he does not cite, particu
larly in the backward areas that the Textile Workers

91 The Myth of the Powerful Worker

Union has been trying almost fruitlessly to organize, that
are so heartbreaking as to make anyone except the most
case-hardened want to weep.

These are not the Thirties, we are reminded over and
over. These are the Fifties, unions are strong (too strong,
even some liberals are saying), workers are not deserving
of any special sympathy. Yet today women who earn
eighty-five cents an hour waiting on you in stores vote
against having a union to defend their rights because they
are frightened by their employer, or lied to by him, and
have no government agency which will defend them
against threats or lies made in the name of free speech. To
day, throughout the South, thousands of men and women
who work in textile mills at below-standard wages, in be
low-standard conditions, vote against unions because they
are showered with racist propaganda of the lowest kind.

For some weeks now, John W. Edelinan, Washington
representative of the Textile Workers Union, has been
fruitlessly appealing to Senator McClellan, chairman of
the Select Committee not on Labor Racketeering, as it
has become known but "to Investigate Improper Activi
ties in Labor-Management Relations." He has asked for
the opportunity to show that in Gaffney, South Carolina,
in Alexander City, Alabama, in Tallapoosa, Georgia, in
Stuart, Virginia, and in other towns throughout the South,
there exists a pattern of anti-union violence and obstruc
tion.

Back in 1950 a Senate subcommittee found that:

The extent and effectiveness of the opposition in the South
ern Textile industry is almost unbelievable.

In stopping a union-organizing campaign, the employer will
use some or all of the following methods: surveillance of or
ganizers and union adherents; propaganda through rumors,
letters, news stories, advertisements, speeches to the employ
ees; denial of free speech and assembly to the union; organiz
ing of the whole community for anti-union activity; labor es
pionage; discharges of union sympathizers; violence and gun

A Radical's America 92

play; injunctions; the closing or moving of the mill; endless
litigation before the NLRB and the Courts, etc. . . .

It is Edelman's claim that substantially the same condi
tions prevail today, in 1958, but so far Senator McClellan
has shown no desire to divert the committee's attention
from the more eye-catching exposures of venal union offi
cials. We may legitimately ask what has happened to the
national sense of proportion, and the fitness of things,
when the misdeeds of a handful of loathsome slobs are
deemed more worthy of our moral indignation than the
deprivation of millions of Americans.

How do Taft-Hartley and the NLRB fit into this pic
ture? Between 1943 and 1946, almost 50,000 Southern tex
tile workers were brought under Textile Workers' labor
agreements; since Taft-Hartley, this union's organizing
drives have been for the most part dishearten in gly unsuc
cessful. Take the case of the Burlington chain. Burlington
is the largest single textile company in the United States,
employing about 50,000 workers in about a hundred plants
in this country alone. This is no backwoods outfit. It is also
not above being involved in the distribution of anti-Semitic
and anti-Negro propaganda, in having its supervisors tell
employees that the union is 100 per cent for racial in
tegration, in having its plant managers tell employees
that the union has given large sums to the NAACP, in
informing its employees that white workers would have
Negro shop stewards if the union got in. Why not? The
NLRB has already ruled that employers have the right to
"free speech," and that if employer-subsidized Chambers
of Commerce and clergymen peddle anti-union race hate
during organizing drives, there is no "proof that the em
ployers are using them as anti-labor "agents" to commit
unfair labor practices.

But free speech seems to be a one-way street. In the
T.W.U.'s futile effort to organize the workers of the Chat
ham Manufacturing Company in EUdn, North Carolina, all

93 The Myth of the Powerful Worker

meeting places within an area of thirty miles were denied
to Chatham workers: the Elkin YMCA, the local movie
theaters, the Elkin school, the Benham school, the Boon-
ville school, the Boonville movie house, the Surrey County
Court House. Meanwhile, the workers were being bom
barded not only by the local clergy and the local press, but
by a hate sheet called Militant Truth. The Elkin Tribune
was not above reprinting such paragraphs as the f ollowing
from this hate sheet:

The boys who head the CIO and would control the policy
go under such names as Rieve, Baldanzi, Belanger, Shupka,
Jueter . . . Rosenberg, Rubenstein . . . Stetin, Tullar, etc.
Where do you think these men come from? Are their back
grounds, their beliefs, their faith anything like yours and ours?

The union lost the election. The union is still losing elec
tions. Let me repeat that there are forty-five million unor
ganized workers in the United States. As Joseph Finley
points out in his pamphlet, there are by now "numerous
cases where unions have gone into election campaigns
with far more than a majority of the employees signed to
membership cards, then have received the brunt of an em
ployer's predictions/ 'opinions' and permissible propa
ganda/ and have come out losing by margins of three and
four to one."

I only wish it were possible for me to elaborate on some
of the other points made by Finley his charges that the
NLRB has been suppressing union activities over a broad
area, including secondary boycotts, on~the-job union rights,
seniority rules, union security, collective-bargaining rights
and protection against discriminatory discharges. But space
permits mention only of his final pages on the record of
NLRB member Philip Ray Rodgers, who voted against
unions in every single case cited by Finley, including those
labeled by federal judges as "farfetched," "irrational" and
"unjust and intolerable," Finley has compiled a little chart
of the voting record of Mr. Rodgers which reveals that, in

A Radical's America 94

1955, he cast sixty-six votes for management and two for
labor; in 1956, forty-nine for management and one for la
bor; in 1957, forty-five votes for management and none for
labor: "When a man votes for management 98 per cent of
the time over a three-year period in critical cases, the con
clusion is inescapable. He is no longer a judge, but a par
tisan adversary."

Well, the conclusion would seem inescapable, too, that
if we are going to have investigations of union skuldug
gery, we ought to have an investigation of whether honest
unions are getting a fair shake at the tribunal of the Na
tional Labor Relations Roard.* The NAM is deeply im
pressed by the fact that complaints to the NLRR of work
ers against their unions have zoomed upward recently,
spurred no doubt by the recession and the anger of laid-
off workers at all officialdom; the rest of us ought to be
deeply concerned whether the rights of unorganized work
ers to form unions and bargain collectively are being
adequately protected by a board which has been so zeal
ously protecting employers' rights of "free speech," "per
missible propaganda," and "predictions" of catastrophes in
the event of union victory.

Meanwhile, the observer who compares the lean and
quizzical faces of the O'Sullivan strikers with the some
what better-fed faces in the sleek halls of labor in the na
tion's capital, may be pardoned for wondering just how
much American workers, and the American people in gen
eral, have gained from the labor leaders' ostentatious effort
to keep up with the Joneses in Washington, only to find
themselves a minor vote-trading power bloc in a city of
really big power blocs. Perhaps the leaders really belong

* Footnote, 1961: Representative Pucinski (D., 111.)
now heads a House Subcommittee investigating
charges that the NLRR has deliberately discriminated
against unions.

95 The Myth of the Powerful Worker

back with the led from which independent base they
might begin to understand for the first time what the po
tentialities of power really mean.

The Nation, June 28-July 5, 1958

Less Work Less Leisure

I regard the five-day week as an unworthy
ideal . . . More work and better work is a
more inspiring and worthier motto than less
work and more pay ... It is better not to
trifle or tamper with God's laws.
John E. Edgerton, President of the National
Association of Manufacturers (1926)

Akron, Ohio

Times have changed since the gentleman quoted above
invoked the Deity in opposition to Henry Ford's revolu
tionary five-day week. Not that hard-pressed executives
ceased thereafter to cite divine guidance as the source of
their labor relations. A decade after Mr. Edgerton pointed
to the Lord, sit-down strikers at the largest rubber plant in
the world, Akron's Goodyear plant, provided one of the
first tests of the new CIO, and in a nineteen-below-zero
St. Valentine's Day blizzard, the scraggly crowd of deter
mined workers marched up Market Street into the teeth
of the gale. Little more than a year later, in March 1937,
the 10,000 workers of the Akron Firestone plant struck
after four years of futile effort to get the company to rec
ognize their union. Harvey Firestone was at his estate in
Miami Beach. The teletype from Akron to Harbel Villa
kept Mr. Firestone informed, but, we are assured by the
authorized Firestone biographer, it "did not alleviate his
feeling of distress at this cleavage. When the strike broke
out in Akron it jarred me for a day or two. Then I con
cluded there must be some reason for it and that we could
not help it, but the thing we should do was not to fight it
but to stand on what we thought was right and then let
matters stand, as it was God's will we were to have a strike

97 Less Work Less Leisure

and there was a good reason for it, and it would be righted
in the right time. . . / "

In the Akron of today, it is hard indeed to realize that it
was only twenty years ago that Harvey Firestone sent
that philosophical message to his son, that it was only
twenty years ago that the Firestone strikers threw up
shacks of canvas, wood, and tin as picket shelters at the
freezing factory gates. Now this industrial city is clean,
prosperous and not slum-ridden, and to the casual visitor
the workers themselves are transformed, too; they are no
longer the grimly huddled proletarians of those terrible
and dramatic days. At a glance, they seem to epitomize
the publicity ideal of the smiling middle-class American.
And the union that helped to lead them out of the pit of
the depression, the United Rubber Workers, is today not
merely a well-housed and comfortably situated fraternal
organization; it is a democratically operated, decently
administered labor union, properly and profoundly con
cerned with the naggingly complex problems of its mem
bership, and still so proud of its militant origins that it dis
putes with its big brother union, the Auto Workers, the
claim to originating the weapon of the sit-down strike.

Just as it is hard to realize that the affable, self-assured
workers cruising Akron's streets in late-model cars are
often the same men who pounded up those streets as de
fiant strikers two decades ago, so it is hard to believe that
much of the present leadership of their union, from Presi
dent L. H. Buckmaster on down, consists of the very same
men who founded the union and endured beatings and
imprisonment in the course of their early struggles. Yet
you will bump into them as you travel around town
George Bass in the International Office, Joe Childs at a
restaurant, Jack Little at a meeting of his local; men whose
names are already lengendary, but who give the impres
sionalong with the union's rank-and-file activists and
"politicians'* of being more worried about the immediate
future than proud of their accomplishments in what is
already the remote past. Indeed, one might almost be

A Radical's America 98

tempted to characterize this mood, particularly among
the rank and file, as one of uncertainty, of tentativeness of
direction, of lack of confidence in whatever the ultimate
goals may be. It is a mood strikingly different from the
explosive elan of those who went out and built the CIO
because they were convinced beyond question that they
were going to convert the rotten life of the American
worker into the good life.

Ever since those dismal depression days, a portion of
Akron's rubber workers have worked a six-hour day and
a six-day week. The six-hour day was first instituted by
the companies as a work-sharing (or poverty-sharing) de
vice, but soon became so popular with the workers that
they wrote it into their union constitution (one of their
constitutionally enshrined objectives is "To establish the
six-hour day and the thirty-hour work-week with wage
increases to compensate for the shorter time so that there
will be no reduction in weekly earnings from such action"),
and into their contracts with the Big Four of the rubber
industry. Today it is an emotionally charged article of
belief, and even the most cursory inquirer in Akron soon
becomes convinced that the delegate from Local 101 to
the union's 1956 Los Angeles convention was hardly exag
gerating when he cried from the floor: "We in the six-hour
plant regard it as almost a religion/'

It is this unique long-time experience with the shorter
work-day that has lately made Akron a focus of interest
as a possible forecast of what all America will be like in
the era of the less-than-f orty-hour week, an era that pres
ently seems inevitable even if the Deity should once again
be invoked by those who oppose its arrival. Already the
town has been researched and written up by Fortune and
the Wall Street Journal, and it is increasingly referred to
by those who write about and ponder the problems that
will attend the shorter work-week: Will people use the
increased leisure wisely? Will workers tend to hunt up
second jobs? What will the social effects eventually be?

Unquestionably, the outlines of the social pattern of the

99 Less Work Less Leisure

future are here to be seen. But the first thing the visitor
learns is the complexity of that pattern, and certainly be
fore we are so brash as to generalize from this unique
industrial instance we should at least note some of the
special factors that must be taken into consideration in
any speculation about the uses of leisure.

First, although about 30,000 rubber workers do work a
six-hour day, six days a week, with the plants operating
four shifts a day, they represent only about 15 per cent of
the employees of the rubber industry. Most rubber work
ers, by special contractual agreements, are now on a
straight eight-hour day with premium pay if they work
the sixth day.

Second, even in some of the six-hour shops there are
departments or divisions (mostly the crafts) which work
eight-hour shifts.

Third, in only two cities outside Akron do Rubber
Workers' locals have six-hour contracts.

(These first three points acquire a special significance
when you realize that the hourly rate for the eight-hour
man is contractually lower, even for the same work, than
that of the man in the six-hour plant but that he may
take home somewhat more money if his plant regularly
works a sixth or overtime day. To put it mildly, the union
membership is not united on the question of which work
ing day is better.)

Fourth, Akron cannot be regarded as a typical American
industrial city, if only because its population is virtually
homogeneous with a relatively small percentage of immi
grants. They call Akron "the capital of West Virginia/' It
would seem obvious that people who have come up by the
thousands out of the hill country to make steady money
building tires are going to use their leisure somewhat
differently from those who came over from Europe to
make ladies' garments or pig iron, but also to escape op
pression and to build a future for their children.

Fifth, the city is relatively characterless partly be
cause the Southerners are still so deeply rooted in their

A Radical's America 100

home country that they return at every opportunity, and
partly because the rubber barons have not seen fit to
dispense largesse in any considerable amount in the com
munity which produces their wealth.

Sixth, it seems most unlikely that any general shorten
ing of working hours across the country will follow the
unique Akron pattern. More probably we are going to see
unions pressing for work- weeks like the Garment Workers*
seven-hour, five-day week, or the Auto Workers' momen
tarily abandoned but very much alive proposed eight-
hour, four-day week. The difference in effect of each sys
tem is almost incalculable. For example, who is going to
be more willing and able to work at a second job: the
man who works a six-hour, six-day week, or the one who
will work an eight-hour, four-day week?

Seventh, there has been no large-scale, careful study of
the ways in which Akron rubber workers make use of their
leisure. With the exception of a cursory union survey,
there has not been an attempt to find out exactly how
many of them hold down a second job. Therefore, given
the complexity of the six-hour-eight-hour pattern, no one
can say with confidence that the man who works shorter
hours does in fact lead a measurably different life in
terms of what he does with his off-hours than his fellow
on the more traditional eight-hour day. In all honesty we
must be limited at this point to impressionistic hunches
and conjectures, which in the present instance are based
on observation and on conversation with workers.

What can we learn from the experience of these Ameri
cans who have been living with the short work-day for a
generation? Quite a lot. First of all, some 60 per cent of
the Akron working women are married. Thirty thousand
housewives in this area are not only housewives but wage-
earners too, and not on an emergency wartime basis but
as steady industrial workers, accumulating seniority, look
ing for paid vacations and working toward retirement
pensions alongside their men.

101 Less Work Less Leisure

Not exactly alongside, however. The wife in Chicago or
New York who works will probably leave home with her
husband in the morning and meet him at home for supper.
Not so in Akron, where the four six-hour rubber-plant
shifts make it easier for the wife to work a shift which will
still enable her to keep house, and for the husband to work
one which will enable him to baby-sit while his wife
works. If, in addition, he has a second job, which as we
will see is often the case, he is going to be able to spend
only a few hours a week alone with his wife. Their chil
dren, often looked after by Grandma or by baby-sitters,
are causing heads to shake anxiously over increasing juve
nile delinquency. Togetherness is never going to penetrate
very far into the household where the adults are holding
down multiple jobs; for every three marriage licenses
issued here last year, there was one suit filed for divorce.
And we have to bear in mind that this looks more and
more like a permanent phenomenon, as working wives
strive not just for that extra pay check (the federal govern
ment takes a healthy bite out of it every year), but for
security, for hospitalization, medical care, vacations, pen

sions.

We might note parenthetically at this point that a
Gallup poll taken last year indicated that, on a national
basis, women were opposed to the idea of a four-day week
by a three-to-one margin. No reasons were given, but it
seems only logical that a housewife who normally puts
in a twelve-hour day and must continue to do so (like the
farmers, who were predictably opposed to the four-day
week by a four-to-one margin) would resent such a light
ening of the burden of others. Besides, there is the fear
that the husband who is off for three days may become less
responsible, drink more, run around more. Nevertheless, I
should be very much surprised if a poll were to show
anything like this feeling among the women of Akron,
who have learned from experience that the shorter day
gives them more of what they want even if it is only the

A Radical's America 102

opportunity to go out and become wage-earners them
selves.

What else have the Akron rubber workers been doing
with those extra hours? The stroller down South Main
Street on a Monday evening, when the stores are open
late, will get one or two "ideas, provided he isn't run over
(per capita auto registration here last year was second
only to that in Los Angeles). Husbands and wives are
clustered in the brilliantly lit do-it-yourself supermarkets,
picking over wall coverings for the bathroom and floor
coverings for the rumpus room. Home ownership is high

seven out of ten Akron families live in their own homes

and men who work only six hours a day can put in a
good deal of time fixing and repairing, building a garage,
paving a driveway, adding an extra room.

The bowling alleys are jammed, the poolrooms do well,
the neighboring waters are stocked with power boats, and
last year Summit County sold the fantastic number of
67,400 hunting and fishing licenses to local residents (there
are a little over 300,000 people in Akron).

The churches can't complain, either. The people up
from West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee take their
religion seriously, many of them tithe as a matter of course
and of conscience, and they go in heavily for revivalism
and fundamentalism. The Temple of Healing Stripes has
free bus service to its Divine Healing Services; evangelists
hold Old Fashioned Brush- Arbor Revivals and show Signs!
Wonders! Miracles! every night in the summertime; and
Rex Humbard is supervising construction of the Cathedral
of Tomorrow, Calvary Temple, The Largest Church Audi
torium Built In This Generation.

Other cultural manifestations are somewhat more
muted. Living theater is practically nonexistent, there
is no professional symphony, and although the Public
Library is good, one can search the city in vain for a
bookshop devoted to selling new books. (There are, to be
sure, several which specialize in ecclesiastical tracts of
various denominations, and a shop in the very shadow of

103 Less Work Less Leisure

a rubber plant which, despite the protestations of its
owner that he caters to a steady clientele of "bookworms,"
seems to attract primarily young workers looking for what
the proprietor calls "strictly legal" sex and girlie books.)

At this level, then, Akron rubber workers do not seem
to spend their extra off-hours very differently from then-
brothers across America. What the others are doing, they
are doing and then some. We can even say this of the
one big question not touched on thus far, the second job.
A Federal Census Bureau survey published in the summer
of 1957 found some 3,700,000 persons to be multiple job
holders. This figure is about double what it had been six
years before, and it works out to about 5.5 per cent of the
country's total employed.

Now there cannot be a single person in Akron who
would claim although everyone is guessing that the
percentage of rubber workers holding down two jobs is
that low. Best guesses seem to agree that anywhere from
one in seven up to one in five rubber workers holds a
second full-time job, with a small fraction even managing
two jobs on different shifts at different rubber plants. In
addition, something like 40 per cent engage in some sort
of part-time outside work. With such a discrepancy be
tween the Akron picture and the national picture, the
inference would seem obvious, although there are many
rubber workers who heatedly deny it: the shorter day,
even with a higher pay scale, increases the number of
men who obtain second jobs as garage attendants, taxi
drivers, bellhops, grocers, butchers, clerks, insurance sales
men, realtors, brokers, barbers, repairmen, bakers yes,
and engineers too.

I am afraid that what I have said thus far will leave
the reader feeling cold and clammy; but the general pic
ture must be clear before we can attempt to understand
its meaning in the lives of the individual actors the
workers themselves. It is to be expected that Time, sur
veying the "moonlighting" (two-job) situation, should
point out that there are those who "hail moonlighters as

A Radical's America 104

heirs to the spirit of the nation's founders and insist that
hard work never hurt anybody/' But when Arthur Schles
inger, Jr., asserted last fall that "The most dangerous
threat hanging over American society is the threat of
leisure . . . and those who have the least preparation for
leisure will have the most of it/' one wonders whether he
realized that it was the enforced leisure of the layoff that
was soon to threaten American workers, and that all too
often it was the memory of previous enforced leisure that
was driving them into moonlighting, into destroying their
leisure by racing from one job to the other while the jobs
were still there to be had?

It is unlikely that Mr. Schlesinger was thinking in these
terms. One can agree with his warning only if one takes a
long-term view; it can hardly be immediately comforting
to those workers who have not accumulated sufficient
seniority to avoid being laid off in the current slump, like
the two ladies with fourteen years' seniority who sat biting
their lips, jobless, in an Akron coffee shop. Or (to cite a
perhaps less suspect source) like Kenneth Marxmiller of
the Caterpillar plant in Peoria. "It affects my wife more
than me/' said Mr. Marxmiller to a Life reporter (January
27, 1958). "She just sits and cries. . . ."

Nor is it likely that Mr. Schlesinger could foresee how
rapidly his analysis would be vulgarized into the grossest
sort of caricature. The Saturday Evening Post of January
11, 1958, has a short story entitled "Holiday for Howie"
and subtitled: At first glance it seemed terrific, a four-day
work week! But then he found there was a catch in it.
. . . The catch, it turns out, is that Howie rapidly gets
bored with all that leisure. He takes to sleeping late on
those long weekends, and when his wife declines to go
gallivanting around the country with him (her responsi
bility to house and children continues on his days off),
he looks up an old school friend, now a rich bachelor lead
ing an idle, dissolute life. They drink together, which is
what Howie had been looking forward to, but the friend
reveals that he is not really happy or free; he is drinking

105 Less Work Less Leisure

himself to death from boredom and loneliness. Shocked,
Howie goes to the beach to Think Things Out:

He hadn't learned to handle time. All he could do was try to
Mil it. ... And all the while, crazily, more time being made.
Household gadgets to save time for the housewife, for what?
So that she can spend the afternoon playing cards? And all the
freeways built to save time, for what? So that people traveling
at breakneck speed can get home ten minutes earlier to have
an extra cocktail before dinner? And science adding years to a
man's life, for what? So that at eighty he can learn to dance?
. . . Speed, and time to be filled, is that all our civilization has
contributed? He felt like crying and he didn't know why.

Lying there, Howie discovers the secret Time opens
out for him into Eternity. He hurries home to explain this
to his wife a large order and to tell her that he has
decided to take a second job, one which will fill two of his
three free days, because:

". . . Time is not for me. Some people can handle it. I
can't * * *

"Oh, Howie." There was love and admiration in her muffled
voice. And vague regret.

"Cheer up, Doll. Think what we can do with the extra
money lots of things. Think what we can get a new car,
with all the gadgets! Color TV! Air conditioning! Well really
be living! Smile, DoU! M

THE END

It is characteristic of the corrupt subliterature of the
mass media, as it used to be of Fascist propaganda, that it
is thoroughly capable of seizing on some of the most
agonizing and centrally important human problems and
distorting them into grotesque and semicomic horror
stories, which relate only weirdly to the way people really
think and feel.

Then what do the workers believe? Every Akron worker
with any consciousness of his position in society starts with
one unalterable and clearly understood premise: he is a
member of a declining labor force. On November 1, 1951,

A Radical's America 106

the Goodrich plant in Akron had 11,475 employees on its
rolls; on May 4, 1956, it had 8500 employees. It is true
that the company moved some of its operations to more
modern and hence more competitive plants elsewhere, as
well as to plants working eight-hour shifts (with lower
hourly rates); but this only serves to sharpen die worker's
realization that automation, rationalization, and continu
ally developing industrial technology are, before his very
eyes, cutting down on the number of human beings
needed to manufacture goods.

He sees himself in a situation not unlike that of the
farmer. With productivity steadily increasing at the rate
of about 3 per cent a year, he will be able to protect him
self and his family only by moving from the manufacture
of goods to the delivery of services, as the farmers have
gradually moved to the cities, or by spending fewer hours
per week producing goods. The two-job situation can be
partially interpreted as the beginning of such a shift
very often the second job is a service job, whether it be
cutting hair or selling real estate. I was not too surprised
to hear several workers say that they believed eventually
the government would have to subsidize labor as it has
subsidized the farmer. "You can call this socialism if you
want/' one added aggressively. "The point is the problem
is bigger than we are and it has to be solved in a big way."

Here again is something the Akron worker has come to
see: the problem of the shorter work-week, of increased
leisure versus a second job, is bigger than he is, it is bigger
even than his 220,000-member union. It has implications
that may make it too big even for his senior partner, the
million-member Auto Workers Union, whose lead he has
traditionally followed (although the development of the
plastics industry and of such products as foam rubber
and pliofilm are making Akron somewhat less directly de
pendent on Detroit's prosperity). And he is badly split.

He is split not only when an eight-hour local opposes
a six-hour local (the international union, which has been
seriously trying to achieve work-week uniformity so that

107 Less Work Less Leisure

it can bargain across the country for pay-rate uniformity,
presented its program clumsily to the last convention and
was voted down by the six-hour men and the abstainers).
He is split in discussions within his own local. And most
serious and pregnant of all, he is sorely split in his own
mind.

Every rubber worker with whom I spoke was agreed
that the rising unemployment in Akron would vanish at
once if all men working second jobs were to leave them.
Were they therefore agreed that all two-jobbers should
be compelled to give up the second job? No.

Again, no one knows for sure, but there seems to be
a consensus that the men who are out moonlighting are
mostly in the thirty-five-to-fifty age bracket. Men older
than that often have their homes paid off; their wants are
more modest; they are looking forward to retirement and
pension. They are over the hump. The youngsters in the
six-hour shops have never worked any longer hours; this
seems plenty long enough to spend in a filthy, noisy place
where the acrid stench of hot rubber is never absent. And
some of them can and do go to Akron University while
they are working. It is the men who remember the de
pression who apparently comprise the bulk of the two-
jobbers they and the young men with wives and chil
dren who have concurrent payments to meet (sometimes
of staggering amounts) on house, car, TV, furniture, and
appliances. And, as the very men who oppose the two-job
frenzy demand: "Can you blame them?"

What is wrong, then, with a man going out and getting
a second job? In reply the workers themselves will tell you
horror stories far more shocking than any dreamed up by
a slick fictioneer. They will tell you of a Negro worker
found to have twelve years of seniority at one rubber
plant and thirteen at another, and finally forced to choose
between them, when the fact that he had been working
seventy-two hours a week not for a few months, but for a
dozen years, was brought to light. They will tell you of
workers taking second jobs at small independent eight-

A Radical's America 108

hour rubber shops and being told frankly by their new
boss that he had secured contracts on the basis of their
working for him for less than the union scale in the Big
Four. They will tell you of two men splitting an eight-hour
shift at a gas station in their "leisure" time, and thus de
priving one job-hunter of full-time work. They will tell
you of their brother union members driving cabs for scab
wages, cutting hair for scab wages, painting houses for
scab wages. They will tell you of their terrible shame
when a member of their union's policy committee was
found working a second job as a salesman in a department
store even while the store was being picketed by the Re
tail Clerks' union for not paying a decent minimum wage.
They will insist that the rubber companies themselves look
the other way when a worker takes a second job (unless his
efficiency is drastically lowered), because they know that
the man with two jobs will be less likely to attend union
meetings, that he will more easily accede to downgrading,
that in general he will be far less militant than the man
who relies solely on the income from his job in the rubber
plant.

And then, almost in the same breath, they will say that
this is a free country; that you can't stop a man from trying
to get ahead; that if a man wants to drive himself to death
for the privilege of sleeping in a $30,000 house it is his
privilege; and that it is only reasonable for a man still as
basically insecure as an industrial worker to make it while
he can, to catch up while times are still good, to acquire
some of the luxuries while they are still within his grasp.

Is this a preview of America's (and indeed the industri
alized world's) future? As the work- week shrinks, will we
be treated to the spectacle not of thousands, but of mil
lions of workers scrambling to undercut one another, pro
tected in the primary job by their union and bidding their
labor for secondary employment at ruinously low rates?
Will leisure become a term of mockery covering longer
hours spent in working to obtain, and then to replace,
household objects carefully engineered for rapid obso-

109 Less Work Less Leisure

lescence? On this point, at any rate, some of the workers
mix faith and optimism. They tend to agree, although they
put it differently, with the magazine Factory Management
and Maintenance (November 1956), that the "Crux of the
matter, on either a four- or five-day week, is whether
general economic conditions and the worker's pay scale
would put pressure on him to carry a second job for the
added income, or allow him to enjoy the added leisure of
a four-day week with a single job."

But the road toward that happy day is going to be, and
is now, hard, rocky, and painful. "Certainly it should not
be expected that there should be eight hours of pay for
six hours of work," Goodyear's Board Chairman P. W.
Litchfield and President E. J, Thomas told their employees
in 1953. Despite the fact that they did not invoke the
Deity, they were not fooling. Employers generally are
going to resist the better-pay-fewer-hours onslaught with
everything they've got; unions will be forced by the logic
of the situation to carry that onslaught forward with
everything they've got.

When the dust has settled and a good many human
beings have suffered in the struggle to achieve it we will
probably find ourselves in the era of the shorter work
week. Then Mr. Schlesinger's warning of a populace
trained to work but not to live will be seen in all its force
and in all likelihood it may be too late to do anything
about it in a missile-maddened, consumption-crazy society
premised on lunacy and built on hypocrisy. It is not to be
expected that the unions, deeply absorbed as they are
in daily grievance wrangles and protracted contractual
fights, are going to devote themselves to thoroughgoing
studies and forecasts of the leisure hours of their member
ship. Besides, as one tough but weary old militant put it
to me ruefully: "WeVe been so worried these past years
about subversives that we haven't hired or inspired any of
the young hotheads. The banks and the law firms aren't
afraid of the independent-minded lads they snap them
up but we've been scared of radicals here in the union

A Radical's America 110

and as a result we're not attracting the kind of minds who
could help us plan for a different future, the way we used
to attract them when we were first organizing."

The problem of what two hundred million of us will do
with our increasing leisure time and just as we have
been watching Akron, so two billion will be watching the
two hundred million is so awesome in its magnitude as
to be terrifying. Isn't that all the more reason for it to cap
ture the imagination of our younger generation of social
scientists, as the conquest of other worlds is supposed to
be capturing the imagination of the physical scientists?

We must persist in the confidence that the best of the
new intellectuals will break free of the internal isolation
ism, the exclusive concern with career and family, which
has preoccupied them in common with most Americans
for the past decade and more, and will undertake auda
ciously the task of outlining a social order in which both
work and leisure will be rationally based. What is needed
is a social order in which, most important of all, the masses
of man will be protected against the swelling flood of "en
tertainment" opiates in order that they may be energized
to search freely for new patterns of spontaneous living for
themselves and their children.

The Nation, February 22, 1958

The Myth of the Happy Worker

"From where we sit in the company," says
one of the best personnel men in the country,
"we have to look at only the aspects of work
that cut across all sorts of jobs administration
and human relations. Now these are aspects of
work, abstractions, but it's easy for personnel
people to get so hipped on their importance
that they look on the specific tasks of making
things and selling them as secondary . . /*
- William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man

The personnel man who made this remark to Mr. Whyte
differed from his brothers only in that he had a moment of
insight. Actually, "the specific tasks of making things" are
now not only regarded by Ms white-collar fellows as "sec
ondary," but as irrelevant to the vaguer but more "chal
lenging" tasks of the man at the desk. This is true not
just of the personnel man, who places workers, replaces
them, displaces them in brief, manipulates them. The
union leader also, who represents workers and sometimes
manipulates them, seems increasingly to regard what his
workers do as merely subsidiary to the job he himself is
doing in the larger community. This job may be building
the Red Cross or the Community Chest, or it may some
times be as the Senate hearings suggest participating
in such communal endeavors as gambling, prostitution,
and improving the breed. In any case, the impression is
left that the problems of the workers in the background
(or underground) have been stabilized, if not permanently
solved.

With the personnel man and the union leader, both of
whom presumably see the worker from day to day, grow
ing so far away from him, it is hardly to be wondered at

A Radical's America 112

that the middle class in general, and articulate middle-
class intellectuals in particular, see the worker vaguely, as
through a cloud. One gets the impression that when they
do consider him, they operate from one of two unspoken
assumptions: (1) The worker has died out like the pas
senger pigeon, or is dying out, or becoming accultured,
like the Navajo. (2) If he is still around, he is just like the
rest of us fat, satisfied, smug, a little restless, but hardly
distinguishable from his fellow TV- viewers of the middle
class.

Lest it be thought that (1) is somewhat exaggerated, I
hasten to quote from a recently published article appar
ently dedicated to the laudable task of urging slothful
middle-class intellectuals to wake up and live: "The old-
style sweatshop crippled mainly the working people. Now
there are no workers left in America; we are almost all
middle-class as to income and expectations." I do not be
lieve the writer meant to state although he comes peril
ously close to it that nobody works any more. If I un
derstand him correctly, he is referring to the fact that the
worker's rise in real income over the last decade, plus the
diffusion of middle-class tastes and values throughout a
large part of the underlying population, have made it in
creasingly difficult to tell blue-collar from white-collar
worker without a program. In short, if the worker earns
like the middle class, votes like the middle class, dresses
like the middle class, dreams like the middle class, then he
ceases to exist as a worker.

But there is one thing that the worker doesn't do like the
middle class: he works like a worker. The steel-mill pud-
dler does not yet sort memos, the coal miner does not yet
sit in conferences, the cotton mill-hand does not yet sip
martinis from his lunchbox. The worker's attitude toward
his work is generally compounded of hatred, shame, and
resignation.

Before I spell out what I think this means, I should like
first to examine some of the implications of the widely held
belief that "we are almost all middle-class as to income

113 The Myth of the Happy Worker

and expectations/' I am neither economist, sociologist, nor
politician, and I hold in my hand no doctored statistics to
be haggled over. I have had occasion to work in factories
at various times during the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties.
The following observations are simply impressions based
on my last period of factory servitude, in 1956.

The average automobile ^worker gets a little better than
two dollars an hour. As such he is one of the best-paid fac
tory workers in the country. After twenty years of militant
struggle led by the union that I believe to be one of the
finest and most democratic labor organizations in the
United States, he is earning less than die starting salaries
offered to inexperienced and often semiliterate college
graduates without dependents. After compulsory deduc
tions for taxes, social security, old-age insurance and union
dues, and optional deductions for hospitalization and as
sorted charities, his pay check for forty hours of work is
going to be closer to seventy than to eighty dollars a week.
Does this make him middle-class as to income? Does it rate
with the weekly take of a dentist, an accountant, a sales
man, a draftsman, a journalist? Surely it would be more to
the point to ask how a family man can get by in the Fifties
on that kind of income. I know how he does it, and I
should think the answers would be a little disconcerting to
those who wax glib on the satisfactory status of the "for
merly" underprivileged.

For one thing, he works a lot longer than forty hours a
week when he can. Since no automobile company is as
yet in a position to guarantee its workers anything like
fifty weeks of steady forty-hour pay checks, the auto
worker knows he has to make it while he can. During peak
production periods he therefore puts in nine, ten, eleven,
and often twelve hours a day on the assembly line for
weeks on end. And that's not all. If he has dependents, as
like as not he also holds down a "spare-time" job. I have
worked on the line with men who doubled as mechanics,
repairmen, salesmen, contractors, builders, farmers, cab-
drivers, lumberyard workers, countermen. I would guess

A Radical's America 114

that there are many more of these than show up in the offi
cial statistics: often a man will work for less if he can be
paid under the counter with tax-free dollars.

Nor is that all. The factory worker with dependents can
not carry the debt load he now shoulders the middle-
class debt load, if you like, of nagging payments on car,
washer, dryer, TV, clothing, house itself without family
help. Even if he puts in fifty, sixty, or seventy hours a
week at one or two jobs, he has to count on his wife's pay
check, or his son's, his daughter's, his brother-in-law's; or
on his mother's social security, or his father's veteran's
pension. The working-class family today is not typically
held together by the male wage-earner, but by multiple
wage-earners often of several generations who club to
gether to get the things they want and need or are pres
sured into believing they must have. It is at best a precari
ous arrangement; as for its toll on the physical organism
and the psyche, that is a question perhaps worthy of fur
ther investigation by those who currently pronounce them
selves bored with Utopia Unlimited in the Fat Fifties.

But what of the worker's middle-class expectations? I
had been under the impression that this was the rock on
which socialist agitation had foundered for generations: it
proved useless to tell the proletarian that he had a world
to win when he was reasonably certain that with a few
breaks he could have his own gas station. If these expec
tations have changed at all in recent years, they would
seem to have narrowed rather than expanded, leaving a
psychological increment of resignation rather than of un
bounded optimism (except among the very young and
even among them the optimism focuses more often on bet
ter-paying opportunities elsewhere in the labor market
than on illusory hopes of swift status advancement). The
worker's expectations are for better pay, more humane
working conditions, more job security. As long as he feels
that he is going to achieve them through an extension of
existing conditions, for that long he is going to continue to

115 The Myth of the Happy Worker

be a middle-class conservative in temper. But only for that
long.

I suspect that what middle-class writers mean by the
worker's middle-class expectations are his cravings for
commodities his determination to have not only fin-
tailed cars and single-unit washer-dryers, but butterfly
chairs in the rumpus room, African masks on the wall, and
power boats in the garage. Before the middle-class intel
lectuals condemn these expectations too harshly, let them
consider, first, who has been utilizing every known tech
nique of suasion and propaganda to convert luxuries into
necessities, and second, at what cost these new necessities
are acquired by the American working-class family.

Now I should like to return to the second image of the
American worker: satisfied, doped by TV, essentially
middle-class in outlook. This is an image bred not of com
munication with workers (except as mediated by hired in
terviewers sent "into the field" like anthropologists or en
tomologists), but of contempt for people, based perhaps on
self-contempt and on a f eeling among intellectuals that the
worker has let them down. In order to see this clearly, we
have to place it against the intellectual's changing atti
tudes toward the worker since the Thirties.

At the time of the organization of the CIO, the middle-
class intellectual saw the proletarian as society's figure of
virtue heroic, magnanimous, bearing in his loins the
seeds of a better future; he would have found ludicrous
the suggestion that a sit-down striker might harbor anti-
Semitic feelings. After Pearl Harbor, the glamorization of
the worker was taken over as a function of government.
Then, however, he was no longer the builder of the future
good society; instead he was second only to the fighting
man as the vital winner of the war. Many intellectuals, as
government employees, found themselves helping to cre
ate this new portrait of the worker as patriot.

But in the decade following the war intellectuals have
discovered that workers are no longer either building so-

A Radical's America 116

cialism or forging the tools of victory. All they are doing
is making the things that other people buy. That, and par
ticipating in the great commodity scramble. The disillu
sionment, it would seem, is almost too terrible to bear.
Word has gotten around among the highbrows that the
worker is not heroic or idealistic; public-opinion polls
prove that he wants barbecue pits more than foreign aid
and air-conditioning more than desegregation, that he
doesn't particularly want to go on strike, that he is reluc
tant to form a Labor Party, that he votes for Stevenson and
often even for Eisenhower and Nixon that he is, in short,
animated by the same aspirations as drive the middle-class
onward and upward in suburbia.

There is of course a certain admixture of self-delusion in
the middle-class attitude that workers are now the same as
everybody else. For me it was expressed most precisely
last year in the dismay and sympathy with which middle-
class friends greeted the news that I had gone back to
work in a factory. If workers are now full-fledged mem
bers of the middle class, why the dismay? What difference
whether one sits in an office or stands in a shop? The an
swer is so obvious that one feels shame at laboring the
point. But I have news for my friends among the intellec
tuals. The answer is obvious to workers, too.

They know that there is a difference between working
with your back and working with your behind (I do not
make the distinction between handwork and brainwork,
since we are all learning that white-collar work is becom
ing less and less brainwork). They know that they work
harder than the middle class for less money. Nor is it sim
ply a question of status, that magic word so dear to the
hearts of the sociologues, the new anatomizers of the
American corpus. It is not simply status-hunger that makes
a man hate work which pays less than other work he
knows about, if more than any other work he has been
trained for (the only reason my fellow workers stayed on
the assembly line, they told me again and again). It is not
simply status-hunger that makes a man hate work that is

117 The Myth of the Happy Worker

mindless, endless, stupefying, sweaty, filthy, noisy, ex
hausting, insecure in its prospects, and practically without
hope of advancement.

The plain truth is that factory work is degrading. It is
degrading to any man who ever dreams of doing some
thing worth while with his life; and it is about time we
faced the fact. The more a man is exposed to middle-class
values, the more sophisticated he becomes and the more
production-line work is degrading to him. The immigrant
who slaved in the poorly lighted, foul, vermin-ridden
sweatshop found Ms work less degrading than the native-
born high school graduate who reads "Judge Parker," "Rex
Morgan, M.D.," and "Judd Saxon, Business Executive," in
the funnies, and works in a fluorescent factory with ticker-
tape production-control machines. For the immigrant la
borer, even the one who did not dream of socialism, his
long hours were going to buy him freedom. For the factory
worker of the Fifties, his long hours are going to buy him
commodities . . . and maybe reduce a few of his debts.

Almost without exception, the men with whom I worked
on the assembly line last year felt like trapped animals.
Depending on their age and personal circumstances, they
were either resigned to their fate, furiously angry at them
selves for what they were doing, or desperately hunting
other work that would pay as well and in addition offer
some variety, some prospect of change and betterment.
They were sick of being pushed around by harried fore
men (themselves more pitied than hated), sick of working
like blinkered donkeys, sick of being dependent for their
livelihood on a maniacal production-merchandising setup,
sick of working in a place where there was no spot to relax
during the twelve-minute rest period. (Someday let us
hope we will marvel that production was still so wor
shiped in the Fifties that new factories could be built with
every splendid facility for the storage and movement of
essential parts, but with no place for a resting worker to sit
down for a moment but on a fireplug, the edge of a pack
ing case, or the sputum- and oil-stained stairway of a toilet.)

A Radical's America 118

The older men stay put and wait for their vacations. But
since the assembly line demands young blood (you will
have a hard time getting hired if you are over thirty-five),
the f actory in which I worked was aswarm with new faces
every day; labor turnover was so fantastic and absenteeism
so rampant, with the young men knocking off a day or two
every week to hunt up other jobs, that the company was
forced to overhire in order to have sufficient workers on
hand at the starting siren.

To those who will object fortified by their readings in
C. Wright Mills and A. C. Spectorsky that the white-
collar commuter, too, dislikes his work, accepts it only be
cause it buys his family commodities, and is constantly on
the prowl for other work, I can only reply that for me at
any rate this is proof not of the disappearance of the
working class but of the proletarianization of the middle
class. Perhaps it is not taking place quite in the way that
Marx envisaged it, but the alienation of the white-collar
man (like that of the laborer) from both his tools and what
ever he produces, the slavery that chains the exurbanite to
the commuting timetable (as the worker is still chained to
the time clock), the anxiety that sends the white-collar
man home with his briefcase for an evening's work (as it
degrades the workingman into pleading for long hours of
overtime), the displacement of the white-collar slum from
the wrong side of the tracks to the suburbs (just as the
working-class slum is moved from old-law tenements to
skyscraper barracks) all these mean to me that the
white-collar man is entering (though his arms may be
loaded with commodities) the gray world of the working
man.

Three quotations from men with whom I worked may
help to bring my view into focus:

Before starting work: ^Corne on, suckers, they say the
Foundation wants to give away more than half a billion
this year. Let's do and die for the old Foundation/'

During rest period; "Ever stop to think how we crawl
here bumper to bumper, and crawl home bumper to

119 The Myth of the Happy Worker

bumper, and we've got to turn out more every minute to
keep our jobs, when there isn't even any room for them on
die highways?"

At quitting time (this from older foremen, whose job is
not only to keep things moving, but by extension to serve
as company spokesmen): "You're smart to get out of here.
... I curse the day I ever started, now I m stuck: any
man with brains that stays here ought to have his head
examined. This is no place for an intelligent human being."

Such is the attitude toward the work. And toward the
product? On the one hand it is admired and desired as a
symbol of freedom, almost a substitute for freedom, not
because the worker participated in making it, but because
our whole culture is dedicated to the proposition that the
automobile is both necessary and beautiful. On the other
hand it is hated and despised so much that if your new
car smells bad it may be due to a banana peel crammed
down its gullet and sealed up thereafter, so much so that
if your dealer can't locate the rattle in your new car you
might ask him to open the welds on one of those tail fins
and vacuum out the nuts and bolts thrown in by workers
sabotaging their own product.

Sooner or later, if we want a decent society by which
I do not mean a society glutted with commodities or one
maintained in precarious equilibrium by overbuying and
forced premature obsolescence we are going to have to
come face to face with the problem of work. Apparently
the Russians have committed themselves to the replenish
ment of their labor force through automatic recruitment of
those intellectually incapable of keeping up with severe
scholastic requirements in the public educational system.
Apparently we, too, are heading in the same direction: al
though our economy is not directed, and although college
education is as yet far from free, we seem to be operating
in this capitalist economy on the totalitarian assumption
that we can funnel the underprivileged, undereducated, or
just plain underequipped, into the factory, where we can
proceed to forget about them once we have posted the

A Radical's America 120

minimum fair labor standards on the factory wall.
If tliis is what we want, let's be honest enough to say so.
If we conclude that there is nothing noble about repetitive
work, but that it is nevertheless good enough for the lower
orders, let's say that, too, so we will at least know where
we stand. But if we cling to the belief that other men are
our brothers, not just Egyptians, or Israelis, or Hungarians,
but all men, including millions of Americans who grind
their lives away on an insane treadmill, then we will have
to start thinking about how their work and their lives can
be made meaningful. That is what I assume the Hungar
ians, both workers and intellectuals, have been thinking
about. Since no one has been ordering us what to think,
since no one has been forbidding our intellectuals to frat
ernize with our workers, shouldn't it be a little easier for
us to admit, first, that our problems exist, then to state
them, and then to see if we can resolve them?

The Nation, August 17, 1957

Work as a Public Issue

. . . youTI be old and you never lived, and
you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and
to never have lived, to have been a job chaser
and never have lived.
Gertrude Stein, "Bretcsie and Willie'

We have come by insensible stages to die point of denying
that serious problems still exist in this nation. With the
single exception of juvenile delinquency (all too often con
sidered not as a problem demanding solution but as a con
venient theme for comic books, cheap novels, worse
movies, and self-satisfied head-shaking), we have resolutely
determined influenced perhaps more than we realize by
the ceaseless cajoling of an advertising culture to look
only on the sunny side of things, to believe indeed that if
there is a dark side it exists only in the shadow cast by the
Iron Curtain, or in the pathetically underdeveloped lands.
The surface statements are so much easier to live with.
Thus, in regard to daily labor: Workingmen are now pro
tected by powerful industrial unions; in any case, their
employers have become more sophisticated and less ruth
less; they are covered in sickness by Blue Cross, in unem
ployment by insurance, in old age by Social Security; they
earn enough to purchase an array of commodities never
before available even to Oriental potentates. How then
can they be wretched or ashamed of what they do? How
much more pleasant to believe that those who testify to the
contrary are as extreme and out of touch as those who
plead for recognition and consideration of such problems
as the menace of mutual annihilation, the international deg
radation of popular taste, or the despoliation of the land-

A Radical's America 122

scape by "developers/' at the rate of three thousand acres
every twenty-four hours.

Yet there is something more to this middle-class reluc
tance to face certain unpleasant realities, or to permit their
legitimization as public issues. In the case of work, if we
grant the possibility that millions of American workers
may in truth be terribly discontented with their jobs,
doesn't this arouse a consequent suspicion: that the grow
ing white-collar classes are reluctant to admit this likeli
hood not only because it would disturb the comfortable
mass-media concept of America as a land of blissful to
getherness, but even more importantly because it would
do violence to their own self-esteem by calling into ques
tion the basic worth and individuality of what they them
selves are doing to earn a living? No one likes to be re
minded that he is not in some way important as a con
tributing member of society. A restless young architect
may very well tend to reject any picture which portrays
the American mass-production worker as profoundly dis
satisfied with his lot. While this architect may be regarded
by his family and neighbors as a "professional man," he
himself is all too sharply aware that he is doing nothing
more than the most dull and deadening draftsman's work
in a vault ranked with his similars, who know him to be
nothing more than they are all-but-anonymous units in
the fimfs labor force. In short, it is painful for him to be
confronted with the evidence that the difference between
him and the factory worker may be only one of degree. It
is a pun that can hurt.

Nor is the young architect unique. Surely we must now
realize that the young attorney, clerking in a huge law fac
tory, or the young business administration graduate, dis
appearing into the paternal embrace of the giant corpora
tion, can rarely get from his daily work the satisfaction to
say nothing of the thrill that his father did. The fact that
Americans are spending billions annually on lobbies"
does not mean to me that they are living richer lives, but
rather that they are seeking elsewhere the satisfactions

123 Work as a Public Issue

of personal fulfillment that formerly came from the job of
work itself.

The hidden bonds of boredom and frustration that link
the lives if they only knew it of the professional man
and the workingman are close to the surface in the work
ing pattern of the burgeoning millions of clericals and
technicians, which is so similar to that of the numerically
declining working class. The typist in the clattering cavern
of a typical insurance office, indistinguishable from her sis
ters who tap the machines at their serried desks, the file
clerk punching her Hollerith cards under the fluorescents
in any of a dozen labyrinthine bureaucracies, the stock
clerk running off labels in the automated shipping depart
ment of a rationalized department store aU these may
have their half-attentive ears filled all day with Strauss
waltzes piped in by solicitous employers, their mouths
filled with coffee piped in twice a day at the insistence of
their union or their personnel supervisors. But what are
their minds filled with? Year by year, day by day, what
they do becomes increasingly routinized in the interest of
production and efficiency, just as does the labor of the
assembly-line worker.

I think we can confidently expect that more will be said
of this problem in the years ahead, particularly as it be
comes more apparent that the labor of the white-collar girl,
or the technical man, is growing increasingly routinized
and difficult to distinguish from assembly-line labor, both
in its lack of relation to the finished product and in its ulti
mate effect as alienated labor on the self-respect and the
mental responsiveness of those performing it.

At this point, however, it might be wise to attempt to
distinguish the principal tendencies among those who
have been so seriously concerned with work as to consider
it a basic problem.

It has been grappled with on the one hand by techni
cians and on the other by social theorists. The technicians
have not only conducted a considerable number of impor
tant experiments designed to measure such things as the

A Radical's America 124

relation of fatigue to boredom and the introduction of
various incentives in a humanized work situation; they
have also exercised considerable influence on the manage
rial classes. The reason for this influence is obvious enough:
if you can show a plant manager that productivity will
increase if he refines his techniques of handling his em
ployees, you are going to have his ear. By the same token,
I do not wish to act as a promoter in these pages for
schemes based on the manipulation of working people
with the end of maximizing profits. No doubt the techni
cians and the business administrators would fervently
deny that their aim is to manipulate people; but to me
such a conclusion is the inescapable end product of an ap
proach which begins not with human beings and their as
pirations but with productivity and techniques for increas
ing it.

As for the social theorists, here too I think we can dis
cern two main tendencies. The first, perhaps best articu
lated by David Riesman, concludes that it is impossible to
build a modern industrial society, with an indefinitely ris
ing standard of living, without the concurrent phenome
non of more and more people working at more and more
standardized tasks. Nevertheless it perceives several rays
of light: one, automation, which at least will reduce brute
labor and repetitive work to a minimum, and at best will
bring forth factories and offices in which workers will find
their tasks more complex and hence more challenging; an
other, a vast increase in leisure with an inevitable four-day
week and a consequent shifting of primary human interest
from the job to the leisure-time activity.*

* Footnote, 1961: Thanks to die generous invitation
of Dr. Fred B. Wood, I was enabled not long ago to
observe the research and systems development divi
sions of the International Business Machines complex
at San Jose, California. I may not have made the
grand tour quite as had Nikita Khrushchev, but I did

125 Work as a Public Issue

The second theoretical tendency, led by men like Erich
Fromm, Erich Kahler, and Daniel Bell, is unwilling to
grant the inevitability of a social order in which sensibility
is blunted and individual creativity stifled by forcing men
and women to spend all their adult lives at tasks beneath
their human dignity, tasks made palatable not by their so-

lunch with some very keen and cultivated people in
deed, and I was suitably impressed by the blank but
many-eyed outsides and the staggeringly intricate in-
sides of RAMAC, surely the most elegantly complex
automatic device ever designed by man to free him
self from laborious drudgery for the solving of com
plex problems: the machine rents for two thousand
dollars an hour, a reasonable price when you consider
that in one hour it will do computations that would
keep a Ph.D. in mathematics busy eight hours a day
for five years. But it was when I came to the assembly
line itself that I was really amused, impressed, and
flabbergasted. There sat long rows of women thread
ing and weaving bits of wire together, and perform
ing other handwork tasks essential to the construction
of IBM's RAMAC. These nonunion ladies, sur
rounded by Muzak, muted sunlight, and the THINK
signs of the great paternalist and individualist Thomas
Watson pere > are apparently still as essential to the
mathematician who wants RAMAC to do his dirty
work for him as they used to be to those of our grand
mothers who could afford egrets on their hats or lace
on their undergarments. Until someone figures out a
way to make the marvelous machines without the
skilled and busy fingers of the women workers, the
machines will continue to rent for two thousand dol
lars an hour and it will be a bit premature to insist
upon the worker's having disappeared with the egret

A Radical's America 126

cial utility or their relation to any existing human desire, but
solely by their wage. It searches for a way out by posing
certain questions. Can people who work in factories be edu
cated to participate in decision-making affecting their own
working lives? Can productive facilities be decentralized
to the point where their management can be at least par
tially controlled by the workers themselves? Can the ex
periences of small, Utopian communities and small nations
be profitably assimilated by highly industrialized coun
tries?

Clearly there are soft spots in both theoretical positions.
In the case of the "realists/' can they expect us to embrace
automation as a panacea simply because in certain specific
industrial instances it introduces the necessity of a more
highly trained work force? Is the supermarket clerk who
from his hiding place stocks the gravity-fed shelves of
canned goods going to be any happier than his father, who
at least used to look his customers in the eye, and even on
occasion talk to them? Will the operator who turns a dial
at the prompting of a flickering oscilloscope feel any more
warmth toward his work than the assembler who pounds
an endless stream of truck doors into place with his mal
let? And can we really believe that workers who increas
ingly hate what they do will make intelligent use of their
increasing leisure time? Is it not more likely that, half
numb on the job, they will settle off the job for those mass
opiates which render them wholly numb?

And as far as the idealists are concerned, who seriously
claims that the efforts of the Yugoslavs or the Israelis can
be translated into the American industrial experience?
Who has demonstrated that the time clock its very exist
ence an insult to anyone who presumably looks forward to
his work can be eliminated from assembly-line factories?
Who is convinced that production can be democratically
scheduled in a steel mill as in a communal jewelry-design
ing workshop? Who is sure that we are really so rich as to
be able to afford a decline in productivity, if that should

127 Work as a Public Issue

be a demonstrable result of putting people before produc
tivity?

But to ask these questions, let us realize, is not to scoff at
those who conscientiously address themselves to matters
urgently important in the lives of millions of us. It is,
rather, to indicate the terrible breadth of the chasm that
separates those who think from those who do, those who
ponder problems of power from those who wield power.

Inevitably, the existence of this chasm gives rise to im
probable, often ludicrous situations. Paradox piles upon
paradox in the land of opportunity, where millionaire can
didates can vie for the favor of immigrant workers, and
where the leader of Soviet communism, denied the ear of
organized labor, can appear before capitalist politicians
and businessmen, an honored guest gotten up in an Italian
suit and handmade shoes, and assert, "As a former worker
I extend particular greetings to the toilers who create the
wealth of society."

Surely not the least of the paradoxes is the fact that
while we know perfectly well what is wrong with the rest
of the world, we are hard put to it to arrive at a consensus
on the American way, which is supposedly synonymous
with the right way. We are perhaps more democratic than
any other nation, we have certainly been more productive;
does this mean we are any happier? At the moment there
is no way of knowing, for while we pride ourselves on our
ability to determine to the decimal how our neighbors will
vote, or how many of them can be mesmerized into buying
a dentifrice that looks like a candy stick or an auto that
looks like a beached whale, we simply don't know yet
another paradox whether they are happy, whether they
truly enjoy doing the things they have had to do to make
this the most productive land on earth.

This observer suspects that they do not, that by and
large they are more likely to lead lives of quiet desperation
than of quiet satisfaction with work, family, and acquisi
tions. Let me concede at once that among those who argue
the matter this is a minority view (which for some reason

A Radical's America 128

often provokes anguished outrage) and that it is based on a
mixture of observation and hunch; but no more can be
said, can it, in support of the common contention that
Americans are a people who take pride and pleasure in
what they do?

It is only in recent years that this subject has begun to
be discussed. Before that, for something more than a dec
ade, the national mood had been one of self-congratula
tion. Ordinary people seemed to be devoting their lives
more or less pleasurably to the accumulation of an endless
stream of commodities; even the intellectuals were com
mencing to confess in their house organs that America was
more beautiful than they had previously conceded. But
then the Russians sent up Sputnik, and the economic
bubble burst at home. And it began to be legitimate to ask
not only what had happened to American technology, and
whether American education was capable of turning out
more than mediocrities and juvenile delinquents, but who
was responsible for recessions, why we permitted our mag
nificent landscape to be irremediably defaced with jerry-
built, split-level slums, and how it had come to pass that
although our foreign policy was not only invariably right,
but heaven-inspired, we were increasingly mistrusted and
feared by our former admirers. And, finally, there were
those who posed the question as to whether our working
lives actually yielded sufficient satisfactions to compensate
for the eroding sacrifices demanded by the work. In short,
a few of us have at last begun, haltingly and often not
without embarrassment, to state publicly that this nation,
far from having solved anything beyond certain compara
tively simple production-distribution problems (which are
currently being solved at least as thoroughly by other na
tions too), now confronts problems awesome in their mag
nitude and demanding not merely an easy patriotism but a
steadfast humility and a willingness to go to the heart of
the matter. The question I am considering here is whether
one of those problems the meaning of work can be
brought forth from the philosopher's study and placed

129 Work as a Public Issue

where it belongs in the political arena as a public is
sue in the widest sense of that term.

So now we can return to the implications in the title
of these remarks. Surely the questions I have just raised
must indicate that in this country today the problem of
satisfying work is indissolubly linked with that of fruitful
leisure. The problem of leisure is interlocked with that of
the content and control of the mass media; which problem
in turn cuts to the heart of a commercially oriented cul
ture. In short, the probing of what at first consideration
may seem a comparatively limited problem is actually
nothing less than a revolutionary act, calling into question
our very social structure.

It need hardly be added that there are no present indi
cations of public readiness for revolutionary acts of this
order, any more than for placing on the agenda as pub
lic issues some of the other social problems referred to
earlier. Nonetheless, those of us who believe that Ameri
can democracy derives its continuing vitality from people
rather than from things, and from the people's response
to the conditions of their lives, must remain confident that
the inexhaustible reserves of rebelliousness of the willful
human spirit will one day assert themselves against the
stultifying vegetativeness of the modern American work
routine.

Saturday Review, December 12, 1959

2.

Robinson Crusoe the Man Alone

Gladly he gives this tale to all mankind

To tread the hills and shores with countless feet.

Henceforth the globe itself swims in his mind,

The last unknown and insular retreat.

from Crusoe, by Karl Shapiro

Tough-minded journalist that he was, Daniel Defoe would
have blanched if he had known that future generations
would classify him snugly as the Father of the Novel.
Indeed it was precisely in his greatest works of fiction that
he was at pains because the temper of his time de
manded it to claim that he was only setting down the
unvarnished facts, and that he had no intention of con
cocting romances or other questionable works of the im
agination. But if this is a historical oddity it is hardly the
most remarkable paradox psychologically of this com
plicated man: one must be particularly struck by the
disparity between the materials he sought out so method
ically and the literary uses to which he put them. This
disparity is most intriguing in the case of Robinson Crusoe;
an examination of it may perhaps reveal to us a little more,
not just about the personality of Defoe, but about the
vaster problem of human loneliness, which spreads like a
stain as more and more of us are pressed closer and closer
together.

In the spring of 1944 I was cycling along the North Sea
coast with several companions, equipped with neither
map nor guidebooks, only with a turkey and other picnic
necessities borrowed from the merchant ship on which
we were employed. One of the most pleasant occurrences
of that delightful day in peaceful County Fife was our
sudden discovery of a statue about the size of a cigar-store

A Radical's America 134

Indian standing fortlirightly on the front lawn of a modest
row house in the town of Largo. There was barely room
for the statue, and when we saw that it had been erected
in memory of Alexander Selkirk, we nodded wisely, ex
changed some comments about Robinson Crusoe, and
continued on our way.

But that statue remained in a corner of my mind, obsti
nately, as such tilings will. The world is full of statues of
all sorts, and I have stared at my share: statues of authors
and statues of their creations, statues of Montaigne and
Balzac in Paris and of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in
Hannibal. But I am not aware of many statues erected to
the memory of those who have inspired the authors of
great works, or who have served as the models for their
characters. Is there a statue of Gogarty in Dublin, of Mrs.
Wolfe in Asheville, of Thalberg in Hollywood, or of that
little piece of madeleine in Paris?

I knew rather vaguely, I suppose, that Alexander Selkirk
had been a seafaring man, that he had been shipwrecked
for a time, and that Defoe had somehow made use of his
adventure, but it was not until, browsing through Walter
Wilson's rambling three-volume Life and Times of Defoe
(1830), I came upon a hair-raising footnote that I began
to sense what kind of fellow Selkirk had been. After he
was rescued from his desert island, he returned in 1712 to
Largo. There, says Wilson casually, "His parents, who
were still living, received him with joy; but his recluse
habits induced him to shun the haunts of men, and he
constructed a cave in their garden, where he sought repose
in solitude. . . ."

The fact is that, far from having been shipwrecked, he
had had himself put ashore on a desolate island at his own
request and there he remained alone for four and a half
years before being taken off and returned to happy little
Largo, his parents' garden, and the cave which he
hastened to dig. This voluntary commitment has been
amply commented on (although I don't think it has been
interpreted quite as I interpret it), but I am unaware that

135 Robinson Crusoe the Man Alone

any modern writer has so much as mentioned the cave in
the garden, with the exception of Walter de la Mare, in his
wonderfully engaging Desert Islands.

Thomas Wright, in his Bicentennial Edition of The Life
of Daniel Defoe, does have a fairly thorough account., sans
cave, of this peculiar man. Alexander Selkirk had been
born Selcraig (just as Robinson Crusoe had been born
Kreutznaer, and Daniel Defoe, for that matter, had been
born Foe), the seventh son of a cobbler, like Hans Ander
sen, as Walter de la Mare points out, and so many folk
tale heroes. "Wild and restless/' he ran off to sea for six
years after creating a disturbance in church at the age of
nineteen. He returned only to beat up his brother for
giving him salt water (it was a mistake), and to beat up
another brother, and his father, and finally even his
mother, for trying to stop him. On Sunday morning, the
30th of November, 1701, he was obliged to stand up in
church in front of the pulpit and acknowledge sin, be
rebuked in the face of the congregation for it, and promise
amendment in the strength of the Lord.

Understandably, this passionate young man went to sea
again the following spring, with Dampier, the celebrated
buccaneer, who had two ships to plunder French and
Spanish vessels. Thomas StracQing, "a man of ferocious
and quarrelsome temper/' was master of Selkirk's ship,
the Cinque Ports, and Dampier himself commanded the
St. George. Arrived at the Juan Fernandez Islands off the
coast of Chile early in 1704, the two men quarreled and
separated; but Selkirk too became embroiled with Strad-
ling and had himself and his effects rowed ashore to Mas
a Tierra, an island roughly twelve by three miles.

When, however, he saw the boat returning, the horrors of his
situation vividly presented themselves; and, rushing into the
surf up to the middle, he stretched out his hands towards his
comrades, and implored them to come back and take him on
board again. The only answer was a jeer. The boat reached the
ship, the ship spread her sails, and Selkirk was alone on his
island.

A Radical's America 136

Unable to abandon the hope that Stradling would relent and
come back for him, the unhappy Selkirk found himself chained
to the beach; and, even when gnawed with hunger, rather than
go in search of fruits and other products of the woods, he con
tented himself with shell-fish and seal's flesh, and whatever else
he could obtain without removing inland. He hated even to
close his eyes. Often he cursed the folly that had brought him
to this terrible solitude, and sometimes, starting up in agony, he
would resolve on suicide. Voices spoke to him both in the
howlings of the sea in front and in the murmur of the woods
behind. The shore was creatured with phantoms. Then cool
ing his fevered brain came sweet visions of his childhood,
the home at Largo, his mother, the fields he had rambled in,
the words he had heard in the old kirk, thoughts of God.

After eight long months of melancholy and horror, in
which he was "scarce able to refrain from doing himself
violence/' he vanquished his blues, as De la Mare puts it,
and set to work. He burned all-spice wood, fed on fish,
turnips, and goats' meat, and came gradually to cope
creatively with life on Mas a Tierra. He had a couple of
narrow escapes, once from a fall of a hundred feet, an
other time from marauding Spaniards, and when his am
munition ran out he raced barefoot after the island's goats
and their kids, capturing and lolling no less than five
hundred of them.

On the 31st of January, 1709, lie was picked up, scarcely
articulate but otherwise healthy, by two more marauding
ships, the Duke and the Duchess, on one of which was no
other than Dampier. Selkirk was made mate of the Duke,
and subsequently master of one which the marauders
captured, and returned home with about eight hundred
pounds of prize money, or plunder. As De la Mare notes,
this "prince and prototype of all castaways" was "not so
happy, he said, as when he hadn't a farthing." Selkirk
enjoyed considerable notoriety after his return to England
in October of 1711. He was interviewed by Richard Steele,
was made the subject of a paper in The Englishman, and
had several narratives of bis life written, as well as four

137 Robinson Crusoe the Man Alone

published accounts of his adventures. In De la Mare's
words, Steele, who saw Selkirk quite often,

believed that even if he had been ignorant of Selkirk's story, he
would still have detected the ravages of solitude in his "aspect
and gesture." He "showed a certain disregard to the ordinary
things about him, as if he had been sunk in thought."

After a few months* absence Steele met him again "in the
street, and though he spoke to me I could not recall that I had
seen him. Familiar discourse . . . had taken off the loneliness
of his aspect, and quite altered the air of his face/'

It was after this that Selkirk made his way home and
constructed the cave which De la Mare oddly glides over
(I say oddly because it was one of the charms of the late
poet that he could seize on an item like this and expatiate
on it at great and pleasant length). The cave could not
contain Selkirk either, however. This "unsociable" man
emerged to fish and to wander around: it was thus that he
met a girl named Sophia Bruce, whom he found tending a
cow. They eloped to London, but when it was all over,
Sophia was left alone and Selkirk continued on his lonely
way. He drifted back to Largo, got into another scrape
there which sent him packing, and after knocking around
Bristol and Liverpool, he went to sea once again. All too
fittingly, he died at sea in 1723. "He is said," De la Mare
adds, "to have bequeathed his effects to 'sundry loving
females* including two who claimed to be his widows.
But of this episode Defoe made no practical use/' In 1885
his brooding statue went up on his front lawn. Had I
known about the cave when I stared at the statue of Mr.
Selkirk, I would certainly have gone around back and tried
to discover if any vestiges of it remained, these hundreds
of years later.

Now what strikes one immediately is that this man, who
had himself put ashore on a desolate island in a moment of
anger, who hid in a cave in another moment of anger,
who estranged himself from his family and was kicked
out of town in another moment of anger, was if not psy
chotic certainly what we would nowadays term a seriously

A Radical's America 138

disturbed personality. Tempting as it may be to analyze
the components of the disturbance, I must resolutely dis
claim either the skill or the desire to undertake such an
analysis. I am content to point out that the disturbance
existed, and would rather have you return with me to the
period of Selkirk's fame, when journalists chased him for
his story much as journalists of the 1950's chased the
skipper of the Flying Enterprise, Captain Carlsen, who
refused to abandon ship after it cracked in a hurricane,
but remained aboard alone in a vain effort to save it. One
of those journalists was an aging Cockney hack named
Daniel Defoe.

Scholars are apparently still arguing as to whether Sel
kirk and Defoe actually met. Thomas Wright says cate
gorically that Defoe "made a journey from London to
Bristol apparently for the express purpose of seeing" Sel
kirk at the house of a Mrs. Damans Daniel, and that
Selkirk "placed in Defoe's hands all his papers." On the
other hand, back in 1916 William P. Trent was arguing in
his Daniel Defoe (an intelligent and enlightening book,
but so steeped in the dying genteel tradition that its au
thor could not bring himself to reproduce the full subtitle
of MoU Flanders, much less to quote from it or to recom
mend it to general readers) that "the makers of myths have
not hesitated to affirm that Defoe made use of the papers
of the returned sailor who has not been shown to have
had any and cheated him into the bargain. A meeting
with Selkirk has also been affirmed by some, and the
house where the supposed conference took place has been
pointed out in Bristol."

Well, whatever the truth as to the possible encounter,
we do know that Defoe was thoroughly up on the adven
tures of the Scottish sailor, that he was a careful re
searcher, and that in many, many of its details Robinson
Crusoe does parallel Selkirk's story. I would prefer to think
that they met, if only because I enjoy imagining the con
frontation, in the comfortable home of the lady with the
elegant name, of the dour adventurer and the dapper,

139 Robinson Crusoe the Man Alone

elderly word-slinger; but I must admit that it really doesn't
matter. What counts is that this profile-writer, who was
in journalism for money as he had been in half a dozen
other enterprises to support his wife and six children, from
hosiery to jobbing to spying to editing, worked up yet
another in his incredible series of true-life romances, with
no other purpose than to pick up some quick cash, and
that from his re-imagined version of the travail of the
neurotic castaway came one of the great pure classical
tales of all time.

We might pause for just a moment here to glance at
Defoe's own life in order to sharpen our perspective on the
man who became a great novelist almost in spite of him
self, and who won immortality by transforming an ab
normal episode into a saga of man's conquest of nature.
I think the use he made of Selkirk's adventure, or rather
his transformation of it, will be somewhat clearer if we
locate Defoe and see him as he was when he emerged
into the great creative outburst of his sixties.

Defoe's Presbyterian parents trained him for the min
istry, and although as a young man he decided that he
was not fitted for it, he received a comparatively good
education. Apparently he got a good grounding in science
too, and he says of his Colonel Jack at the age of fourteen:
"I loved to talk with seamen arid soldiers. ... I never
forgot anything they told me . . . young as I was, I was
a kind of an historian; and though I had read no books,
and never had any books to read, yet I could give a toler
able account of what had been done, and of what was
then a-doing in the world. . . ."

He became a commission merchant, lived in Spain for
a time, married (not happily, it is important to note), wrote
poor poetry on the side, and by 1692 had failed in busi
ness to the extent of about a quarter of a million dollars.
Thereafter he was never really out of financial trouble. He
got off by making a deal with his creditors; he went into
the brick and tile business, became a prolific Journalist and
pamphleteer, and started to mix in politics. He found

A Radical's America 140

and so did his readers that he had the ability to write
about current issues in a style that was direct, simple, and
clear. But with the death of his patron, King William, and
the accession of Queen Anne in 1702, Defoe, although an
enormously popular Dissenter, became a hunted man. In
1703 he was arrested, thrown in jail, tried, and sentenced
to pay a fine, to stand three times in the pillory, to be
indefinitely imprisoned, and thereafter to be paroled. The
extraordinary thing about this ugly episode, aside from the
public humiliation of a man who had already earned cer
tain claims to distinction, was that Defoe himself managed
to turn it to good account: the mob treated him as a hero;
instead of being mocked and jeered in the pillory, he was
cheered and feted in the midst of his exposure, and his
Hymn to the Pillory was very well received indeed.

Thereafter Defoe devoted himself more and more to
political journalism. The politest word that can be found
for much of his life and work in these middle years is that
both were unsavory. He sold his skills to the highest bid
der, spied for those in favor and sneered at those out of
favor, and year after year churned out economic essays,
unsuccessful poetry, humorous tidbits and political corre
spondence, feverishly accumulating dowries for his mar
riageable daughters. The act of writing, apparently of
writing anything as long as there was money in it, became
as ingrained and habitual with him as it has ever been
with any hack. Not infrequently he wrote semifictional
biographical puffs for quacks or odd birds, and he seemed
to delight in working up quasi-factual accounts of the
lives of unusual characters.

Such was the man who, at the age of sixty, sat down to
knock out a lively account of the adventures of a cast
away, and who, in the incredible five years that followed,
unburdened himself of the three parts of Robinson Crusoe,
Duncan Campbell, Memoirs of a Cavalier, Captain Single
ton, Mott Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Jear, Colonel
Jack, Roxanna, and A New Voyage Round the World. No
wonder that Trent comments, "It becomes still more

141 Robinson Crusoe the Man Alone

astonishing when we are reminded that during these years
Defoe's bibliography must be credited with at least six
other volumes . . . that his journalistic labors ... re
mained considerable . . . that he wrote at least a score
of pamphlets . . . and finally that it seems highly prob
able that he spent several of his summers taking horse
back journeys in order to secure materials for his interest
ing and valuable Tour Thro 9 the Whole Island of Great
Britain. . . /'

If we think of Daniel Defoe as a typical Englishman, a
typical Londoner, perhaps a typical Cockney (he was even
bom within hearing of Bow Bells), and of his tale of a
man on an island as a typical English novel, with its
emphasis on factuality, fortitude, and optimistic common
sense, we find that we are cheered on by English critics
of all persuasions, from Sam Johnson to Virginia Woolf to
V. S. Pritchett (let us except Macaulay, who said coldly of
Defoe: "Altogether I don't like him"). Indeed, it is pre
cisely those writers who one might think would harbor
reservations about Defoe's genius who are most fervent
in their adulation, who support most fervidly Daudet's
estimation of Defoe as England's national author and
Robinson Crusoe as "the typical Englishman par excel
lence, with his adventuresomeness, his taste for travel, his
love of the sea, his piety, Ids commercial and practical
instincts," and so on and so on. Thus Virginia Woolf writes
of Defoe: "He belongs, indeed, to the school of the great
plain writers, whose work is founded upon a knowledge
ol what is most persistent, though not most seductive, in
human nature. . . /*

But it is Walter de la Mare who phrases most precisely
this English pride in Defoe's normality, his rationality, his
lack of neurotic undertones. Speaking of Robinson Crusoe,
he says shrewdly,

It is not so much in spite of its limitations as to a large extent
because of them that it remains one of the most famous books
in the world. It taxes no ordinary intelligence. There is nothing
delicate, abstruse, subtle to master. It can be opened and read

A Radical's America 142

with ease and delight at any moment, and anywhere. Its
thought is little but an emanation of Crusoe's seven senses and
of his five wits. Its sentiments are universal.

I have no intention of calling these verdicts into ques
tion. There is no point in forcing a reading of Robinson
Crusoe which would see it as something other. But I keep
harking back to that odd Scotch sailor who hid himself in
a cave, and I cannot but suspect that one of the greatest
of Defoe's achievements is one which has hardly been
touched on by all his admirers in the last few centuries. It
is De la Mare, once again, who comes closest to it, and so
I must quote him once again:

. , . if Defoe had really faced, as he might have tried to face,
the problem set in Crusoe his solution could not have been in
that book's precise terms. All praise and thanks that it is what
it is, a triumph in its kind; and yet one may pine for what,
given a more creative imagination and a different Crusoe, the
book might have been if the attempt had been made to reveal
what a prolonged unbroken solitude, an absolute exile from his
fellow-creatures, and an incessant commerce with silence and
the unknown, would mean at last to the spirit of man, A stead
ily debasing brutish stupidity? Hallucinations, extravagances,
insanities, enravishment, strange guests?

Selkirk after but four years* silence was scarcely articulate.
Crusoe after his eight and twenty years, addresses the three
strangers who he finds trussed-up on the beach with the ur
banity of a prince, the courtesy of an Oriental, and in faultless
Spanish. . . .

Well, this touches more closely on what seems to me at
any rate one of the most intriguing facets of both Robinson
Crusoe and its author: his ability to normalize the ab
normal, to write of extreme experience in terms of sensi
ble human reaction to it, to describe the lives of extraor
dinary people in ordinary language and in readily com
prehensible but not patronizing terminology. Parentheti
cally, those who are curious as De la Mare was curious
as to how a different Crusoe might have reacted might
consult an eighteenth-century narrative in the form of a

143 Robinson Crusoe the Man Alone

journal kept by a sailor who had been put on the Island
of Ascension in May 1725 by the commodore and cap
tains of the Dutch fleet "for a most enormous crime."
The castaway, who lasted apparently until mid-Septem
ber, left his incomplete journal lying beside his skeleton,
where both were found later by Captain Mawson of the
Compton. He describes in most affecting and horrible de
tail his inability to catch the island goats, which both
Selkirk and Crusoe had captured and killed, and his being
forced to drink turtle blood mixed with his own urine. It
is to be found in Charles Neider's anthology Man Against
Nature, and is worth examining as one instance of the suf
ferings of a man on an island who was not blessed with
the good fortune, skill, and ingenuity of Crusoe.

To return to our theme. What strikes me as extraor
dinary is Defoe's instinctive ability to take the grue
some self-immolation of an antisocial drifter and convert
it into the intriguing and uplifting tale of a healthy-
minded, practical fellow. Indeed, the very opening chap
ters inform us of Defoe's intention: instead of demanding
to be put ashore on the desolate isle in a fit of rage, as had
Selkirk, Crusoe is shipwrecked and thus at the outset
absolved of any direct responsibility for his plight. Isn't
this almost the exact opposite of the working method of
many modern poets and novelists, who start with the
seemingly normal, the deceptively ordinary, and proceed
to reveal to our horrified but fascinated gaze (and to the
disgust, let it be added, of those trained to appreciate an
older, more "positive" kind of writing) that what lies be
hind the smiling facade is a cesspool, a jungle, or a desert
strewn with bleached bones? When we give our children
Robinson Crusoe for their birthdays we are tacitly con
curring with Defoe's estimate of himself as a moralizer
and purveyor of unexceptionable sentiments, based on
splendidly factual narratives which we now see have
been culled from sources as neurotic as the moralities and
sentiments of any modern novel.

"The reappearance of Selkirk into the civilized world,"

A Radical's America 144

De la Mare comments, "was certainly for Defoe a stroke
of luck, but then, Selkirk, for full seven years before Defoe
made use of him, had been e a common prey to the birds
of literature/ It was sheer ability that not only recognized
the literary value of this nugget, but prevented Defoe
from being too clever in his tale though clever in all
conscience he could be."

This is so, but it remains to point out that Defoe's seiz
ing upon Selkirk's tale was hardly unique in his literary
life, either in the character of the'tale itself, or in the use
he made of it. Defoe seems to have long been fascinated
with those who were cut off from the world either through
force of circumstance, by a quirk of nature, or from their
own willfulness. In the midst of one of his most prolific
journalistic periods, he was, it is important to bear in mind
(the description is Trent's),

a shunned bankrupt and turncoat, living in chambers in Lon
don or with his wife and children in a large house in Newtng-
ton, seeing little or nothing of the gay society of the epoch, not
even acquainted with the fellow men of letters who with him
self give the age its chief luster, but, none the less, in no sense
a recluse, rather the keenest observer of his day, the most intel
ligent, alert, and well paid of the prime minister's secret agents
and the most accomplished journalist England had produced
perhaps the most remarkable the world has ever seen.

This is the man who in 1719 published a pamphlet en
titled Dumb Philosopher; or, Great-Britain's Wonder, sub
titled "Surprizing Account how Dickory Cronke, a Tinner's
Son in the County of Cornwal, was born Dumb, and con
tinued so for 58 years; and how some Days before he died,
he came to his Speech."

This is the man who, maintaining his special interest
in the plight of those cut off because they were deaf and
dumb, became rather dismally embroiled with his beloved
daughter Sophia's suitor Henry Baker, a specialist in the
training of those so afflicted; and who, in April 1720,
brought out The History of the Life and Surprising Ad
ventures of Mr. Duncan Campbell, subtitled, "A Gentle-

145 Robinson Crusoe the Man Alone

man, who though born Deaf and Dumb, writes down any
Stranger's Name at First Sight; and their Future Contin
gencies of Fortune. . . .**

This is the man who in 1726 brought out Mere Nature
Delineated, about a boy who had been found running wild
in a German forest and had been brought to London for
medical examination. It is interesting to observe how De
foe describes this Peter the Wild Boy:

, , . they tell us, he was found wild, naked, dumb; known to,
and knowing nobody. That he lived a vegetative life, fed on
grass, moss, leaves of trees, and the like; that he acted below
brutal life, hardly a sensitive, and not at all a rational.

They hardly allow, that he walked or stepped erect, but
rather creeping on hands and knees, climbing trees like a cat,
sitting on the boughs like a monkey, and the like; tho* in that
part we must not carry our fancy beyond the fact, because we
see him at present standing upright, as the soul-informed part
of mankind do. . . .

This is the man, then, who wrote Robinson Crusoe. It
is true that my listing of and quotation from his works has
been highly selective. But for one thing, others of his
works can be interpreted as paralleling, so to speak, those
remarked above; for example, it is hardly stretching the
story line of a masterpiece like Mott Flanders to see it as
Mark Schorer does: "Like Robinson Crusoe, this is a desper
ate story of survival, a story that tries to demonstrate the
possibility of success through unremitting native wit/* For
another, I have wished not to analyze Daniel Defoe ex
haustively, but only to indicate that certain personalities
and themes fascinated him if not obsessively, at least
recurrently, and that this may have been because these
people and these notions echoed certain tormenting prob
lems in his own personal life the problems of the man
alone. It is true that Defoe was a busybody, a progressive-
minded money-maker, and in many ways a representative
man of his time; but it is also true that he was unhappily
married, that he was deprived of many of the stimulations
he sorely needed, and that he died wretchedly, an old man

A Radical's America 146

hiding out from his creditors and abandoned by his un
grateful children.

The theme of Robinson Crusoe parallels, in its duality,
the life of its author (which is why, I feel, Defoe seized
with such sure instinct on the handy facts of the Selkirk
experience). Crusoe on the one hand in the classic posture
of human extremity: loneliness; on the other, an unsenti
mental, hardheaded chap learning to make do with what
he salvages from the wreck of the ship and manages to
acquire on the island. So Defoe was, as we have seen, at
times ostracized and cut off from the best society of his
time; and yet, as the judicious biographer James Suther
land observes, he "enjoyed the mere variety of human life,
the bustle of active people, the shopkeeper scratching his
head with his pen, the fine lady cheapening a piece of silk,
the beggar limping by on his crutches, the stir and com
motion of market-day in a small town, the forest of ship
ping on the river at Gravesend." It is no wonder that his
readers were "the small shopkeepers and artisans, the
publicans, the footmen and servant wenches, the soldiers
and sailors, those who could read but who had neither the
time nor the inclination to read very much."

The most recent biographer of Defoe, Brian Fitzgerald,
writing from what is apparently a Marxist orientation, puts
it this way:

He could compensate himself for all the failures of his life
for his bankruptcy, for the degradation of his imprisonment,
and the claustrophobic fear of confinement that haunted him
ever afterwards by becoming the captain of his soul and the
master of his fate on an imaginary uninhabited island in the
North Atlantic. He could compensate himself for the humilia
tions he had suffered in public life by doing the actions of gov
ernment he had never been able to perform in reality, by
showing Ms capacity for ruling and directing and colonizing.
No longer need he concern himself with the remote and more
abstract problems of human society; he could, through the
power of his imagination, become the monarch of all he sur
veyed. . . .

147 Robinson Crusoe the Man Alone

Whatever our reservations about the manner of Mr.
Fitzgerald's expression, we must grant that this does make
sense, as does his description of Robinson Crusoe as "the
great allegory of the capitalist system. Crusoe/' he says,

who was Defoe projected, was the supreme affirmation of the
individual. Like the lively, enterprising merchants and trades
men, the middle class, the bourgeoisie, then in the full flush of
revolutionary triumph, Robinson Crusoe renounces the past
and prepares to make his own history. . . . Crusoe triumphed
as did the bourgeois capitalist by his faith in himself, his
naive optimism, which enabled him to overcome both his own
folly in risking his fortune and the cruelty and the savage
hostility of his fellow-men, and to found his ideal colony be
yond the seas. He was the empire-builder, the man who chal
lenged nature and won; his reward was calculated down to the
last threepence, and it was well earned. But Robinson Crusoe
is not only a paean in praise of capitalism. It, too, has revolu
tionary implications. Crusoe (as Professor Kettle has reminded
us) sets off on his Me of adventure and uncertainty against the
advice of his middle-class father; and if in one sense his story
is one in praise of the bourgeois virtues of individualism and
private enterprise, in another and more important sense it
celebrates the necessity of social living and the struggle of
mankind through work to master nature. . . .

This fits in rather comfortably with Sutherland's asser
tion that "if Defoe's public was drawn chiefly from the
middle and lower classes, that public had got an epic
entirely after its own heart, with a hero it could under
stand and admire because he was taken from its own
ranks. Crusoe may be all Mankind in difficulties, but he
is first of all an Englishman of the lower middle classes
making the best of things." His story is told in "the prose
of democracy, a prose which in modern England with its
inhibitions and its class consciousness has almost been
parsed out of existence."

It may be objected that all this accounts, if it does that,
for Crusoe's popularity in his own day, but not necessarily
thereafter the easiest kind of post-factum analysis. It
may be objected that it borders on the obvious to assert

A Radical's America 148

that Daniel Defoe, like so many other creative minds
throughout the ages, was piqued (if not tormented) by the
problems of loneliness and isolation, but that he turned
them to account for the cash customers of his day by pre
senting them as healthy problems, as susceptible of solu
tion as the problems of trade or empire. The real question,
it may be argued, is why Robinson Crusoe has persisted in
its popularity in the several hundred years since its first
printing, down through a time when interest would seem
more likely to center not on what this ingenious islander
does with his goats and his salvaged tools, but rather on
his dreams and nightmares, on what he substitutes for fe
male companionship for more than twenty-eight years,
and on the symbolic richness of his punishment and re
demption.

I have no answers to this question beyond those which
have already been given by time and by scholars and
critics whose equipment I, as a common reader, obviously
lack. Before the beginning of the twentieth century, we
know, there had already appeared at least seven hundred
editions, translations, and imitations of the story. In our
time their number has multiplied, perhaps beyond count
ing. In the eighteenth century, Sheridan wrote a popular
pantomime, with David Garrick playing Crusoe; in the
nineteenth, Offenbach composed the music for an opera
based on the adventures of our hero; in the twentieth,
Luis Bunuel, the gifted Spanish surrealist movie-maker,
was intrigued enough with Robinson Crusoe despite
the fact that he claims not to have liked the book to make
from it a thoroughly absorbing movie, one which has mo
ments of incandescence, with Daniel O'Herlihv as a per
fectly right Crusoe. In the eighteenth century Crusoe was
used as the basis for lectures in classical political economy;
in the twentieth, as we have seen, as ideal fuel for Marxian
analysis.

But now, in our own day, something does seem to be
happening. The book which Maxim Gorky characterized
apothegmatically as "The Bible of the Unconquerable'* is

149 Robinson Crusoe the Man Alone

being turned over to the kiddies. It is not being shared
with them, like Mice in Wonderland or even Huckleberry
Finn; in an age in which hillbillies gape at the Sadlers
Wells Ballet on their barroom screens and intellectuals
leaf desperately through their expensive paperbacks in
search of entertainment which will not be entertaining,
Robinson Crusoe does not seem to be often read by those
past the age of confirmation (even BunueFs intriguing and
sensitive film is recommended for the impressionable
young alone).

The reader who has been patient this long may now
begin to suspect, with reason, that what I have been at
tempting to do is to push Robinson Crusoe for the adult
trade. (Children have as yet no need to be so instructed
although even that audience is becoming so violently
sophisticated that one may tremble for its future capacity
to be enthralled by the doings of a single man, neither
bubble-headed nor space-gunned, who teaches a parrot
to talk and learns by trial and error how to bake bread and
fire pottery.) To be sure, there are many ways of awaken
ing, or re-awakening, reader interest in a classic work.
We may rhapsodize over the plot, or story development,
but only, it seems to me, if we can be reasonably certain
as in the case of a Portuguese or Tibetan classic - that it
has remained generally unknown. We may linger admir
ingly over the author's periods and cherish the subtleties
of his rhythmic ebbs and flows, but not, it seems to me,
when the author wields the serviceable but uninspiring
"prose of democracy." We may fall in with the current fad
of playing locksmith, fumbling among the unwieldy bunch
of keys that constitute our critical armory for the one that
will magically unlock the work and reveal the symbolism
presumably hidden within -but Thomas Wright, who
maintained stoutly for years (basing himself on an offhand
remark of Defoe's) that Robinson Crusoe was a deliberate
allegory, a direct reflection of Defoe's own life, and that
Defoe for nearly twenty-nine years had led a life of silence,
was at length forced to admit that he had been the victim

A Radical's America 150

of his own theorizing; and I have no desire to lay the
foundations for such a future admission,

We may finally which is what I have attempted
look to see if, how, in what way, the passions and problems
of the author have paralleled ours so many years later. If
we then find Defoe to be contemporary not in manner
necessarily, nor even in outlook, but in preoccupation
then surely he merits pride of place alongside those in our
time who have been preoccupied too with loneliness and
isolation but who, much more torn than he with the agony
of doubt, have hesitated to address themselves to the Un
conquerable and so have become the tribunes of the
Unsure.

Here, however, we enter other realms. I would not
contest the obvious truth that Robinson Crusoe has been
read over the years not primarily because of what it says,
or omits, about loneliness, but because it appeals to tie
busy child in us all, because it is a practical and entertain
ing manual in the domestication of nature, and because
it is a painless and unfrightening guide to the exotic. To
the extent that it continues to be read, it can be seen as
still providing the same kind of refreshment to the same
kind of people. But I have been addressing myself in
these lines I suppose to the Unsure, to those who increas
ingly attempt to distinguish themselves from the masses
(among other ways) by ignoring escapist literature, even
classical escapist literature, in favor of those books which
do grapple with the problems of loneliness.

In the emerging mass society, the angst of the solitary
intellectual is now being experienced, if confusedly, by
ever-lengthening lines of bumper-to-bumper megalopoli-
tans trained to dread nothing more fiercely than lone
liness. Will Robinson Crusoe, with its cheery accent on the
positive, still find acceptance among either the hyper-
sophisticated or the great ordinary anonymous mass who
have been its cherishers, as they have been the cherishers
at least until the coming of the mass society of most
great writings throughout the ages? One can only guess. It

151 Robinson Crusoe the Man Alone

is entirely possible, for example, that it may be on the
verge of yet a new wave of popularity for just these rea
sons, that now it will be read not as an epic of man's
indomitability, but as a nostalgic reverie of those old days
when it was possible to conceive of the vanquishing of
loneliness and the disappearance of doubts, when it was
possible to conceive that by conquering nature you had
conquered all.

"He who wants to escape the world translates it,* 7 said
Michaux. If by his translation he conquers, if only for an
hour, "the last unknown and insular retreat," has he not
earned all over again the honor of our rapt attention, as
well as that of our invincible oif spring?

The Antioch Review, Spring 1958

Footnote, 1961: The ancient terror of loneliness
seems to be getting more and more confused in the
popular mind with a dread of ever being alone. I
wonder whether this latter may not have more to do
with the much noised-about population explosion
than is generally allowed. If people are not inculcated
with an understanding of the necessity to arrange
for the preservation of human privacy on our planet,
to say nothing of opportunities for solitude and con
templation of an undefiled natural order, or for the
maintenance of wilderness areas and respect for the
balance of nature, they are apparently going to con
tinue to ignore appeals no matter how frantic or
Low well-reasoned that they limit the number of
their offspring. Of course this is hardly the only
reason for the phenomenon, but the fact that millions
of "liberty-loving" Americans and Europeans (whose
populations are exploding too) seem to take positive
pleasure in jamming themselves into crowded hous
ing developments, beaches, parks, and highways

A Radical's America 152

ought to be taken into consideration by the demog
raphers and the planners.

(Similarly, we are bombarded with baloney about
our "peace-loving" nation and our "peace-loving"
people, when there is no substantial evidence that
the American people would react with any emotion
other than horror if peace were to break out. Not
only does a forty-seven-billion-dollar annual arms
budget barely suffice to stabilize our unemployed at
five million in a land that has never known devasta
tion, but we are psychologically goaded to hate, to
fear, and to need the presence of an external menace.
Some psychologists describe the violent American
and, it must be added, Western European "comic"
books, "mystery" books, movies, and television as an
"escape valve/' meaning that passive exposure to a
broad spectrum of consistently sadistic and brutal
behavior may inhibit, rather than incite, antisocial
activity, by relieving the consumer of his aggressions.
Even if this is so, the waxing horrors of the mass
media must be characterized as an "immoral equiv
alent" for war, and we are still left with the prob
lem of finding William James's "moral equivalent" if
we expect the desire for peace to well up in the
bosoms of mankind. I believe with James that a
socialist reconstruction of our value system is essen
tial.)

Thanks to the fantastic increase in mobility made
possible by the automobile and the airplane, even
those who pride themselves on getting away from it
all are enabled to find solitude and in the process
to despoil hitherto untrammeled areas. In Wyoming,
I was assured by a ranger that "sportsmen" boldly
chewing jeep roads up the steep sides of previously
inaccessible fastnesses have gullied out thousands of

153 Robinson Crusoe the Man Alone

acres of wilderness land. It is neither melodramatic
nor cynical to observe that we are moving toward
the erasure of privacy even in areas formerly con
sidered sacrosanct, and that this tendency is strength
ened by powerful forces in modern society. If for
merly the church was regarded as providing refuge
from worldliness and sanctuary for contemplative-
ness, today it becomes yet another monument to
Togetherness, a headquarters for Bingo and basket
ball. In the San Antonio Express of July 2, 1959, I
read of the Reverend John E. Weir's new church in
Louisville, Kentucky:

It will include a swimming pool, tennis court, snack bar,
an unloading ramp for motorists, and the largest outdoor
church bulletin board in the city . . .

Churchgoers traveling by car wiH be able to unload on
the second-floor level just outside the chapel. The park
ing lot becomes a playground with a touch of a button.

Concrete slabs open to reveal a 40 by 60 foot swim
ming pool. Swings and a slide come out of their under
ground hiding places along with tennis net posts and
basketball goal posts. The snack bar will be attached to
the social hall . . . The bulletin board will be 16 feet long,
8 feet high, and 4 feet deep. It will include a miniature of
the Holy Land, with a mirror on the back of the board re
flecting the scene for passing motorists . . .

Marriage too, whether in or out of the church,
becomes not a union of two human beings, but an
occasion and an excuse for herding together in ab
solute contradiction of all that marriage has presum
ably implied throughout the bourgeois era. From the
San Francisco Chronicle of April 3, 1961, I learned
of the situation at the popular British honeymoon
resort of St. Helier, Jersey, one of the GhanSoel Is
lands:

A Radical's America 154

A thousand brides bounced down to breakfast today
with not a blush on their faces.

"The modern bride," explained hotelman Alex Aston,
"does not blush. She's far too busy running a quizzical eye
over the rest of the girls."

This phenomenon is part of a growing British develop
ment the honeymoon en masse. As hotelman Aston ex
plained: "The last thing a bride wants these days is to be
left alone."

The thousand brides, equipped with a thousand bride
grooms, came to Jersey in the annual marriage rush set
off by a British institution known as the tax man's wed
ding . . .

A pretty young bride who asked to be nameless con
fessed:

"My main honeymoon worry was being lonely. I mean
you could easily get bored with no one but your fiance
(she meant husband) to look at all day. But we have al
ready chummed up with some very friendly couples,"

One hardly knows whether to laugh or to weep for
the pretty young bride, who has anticipated her
similars in 1984 by several decades. Is it beyond the
bounds of probability to consider that it may become
not merely socially acceptable, but de rigueur, for her
to be delivered of her offspring in public just as now
slie enjoys her honeymoon en masse? Then there will
remain only the ultimate experiences of coitus and
death, and if population growth continues at its
present rate, it may become an unacceptable luxury
for either of these events to take place without the
presence of other human beings similarly engaged.

Certain Jewish Writers

The original version of this essay was written
in collaboration with Irving A. Sanes, who is
responsible for most of its insights but not for
the revisions I have made, and to whom I am
most grateful for permission to reproduce here.

Of late there has been an extraordinary increase in the
number of arguments advanced to demonstrate the human
superiority of the Jew. They are based on the Jew's sup
posed "alienation" from general society. The very termi
nology of those who accept pat formulations of "Jewish
alienation" is open to question. "Rootlessness" and "alien
ation" may readily be seen as romantic terms if one
substitutes the more realistically descriptive terms in
security and rejection. And although it may seem invidious
to assert that material reasons compel the Jew to engage
himself, to compete in the world of art, there is reason
to believe that for the Jew the production of works of art
is one means of gaining recognition, love, and a sense of
community with other craftsmen. Surely it is important to
note that during the Thirties, when it was practically pos
sible for many Jewish intellectuals to identify with the
militant working class (regardless of the ultimate effects
on them of this; alliance), there was little talk of "alien
ation." There was no need for the concept itself; and if
there was self-pity, it was of a different order; for the
intellectual could think of success, recognition, and inte
gration as being bound up with the struggle to supersede
the class and the system that denied him those rewards.

If today the artist no longer bases his hope on a class
in society, he by no means has given up hope of being
accepted by society. Although his high seriousness and

A Radical's America 156

faithfulness to the demands of his art make it appear that
his means are irrational and contradictory, it is true only
in the sense that all attempts to deal with emotional situ
ations are so. The desire is a sensible and worthy one. As
it concerns the Jewish artist the answer is more compli
cated only in that he has greater hopes for the saving
process of art because he is more effectively rejected by
society; he is most concerned with love and respect be
cause he feels himself most excluded from it.

The reader who does not approach these Jewish writers
with romantic preconceptions finds himself continuously
stumbling over their ill-concealed self-hatred, despair, and
masochism. It does not follow at all that Jewish writers
ought to adopt Wealthier" attitudes; but surely one can
expect of their critics that they recognize masochism and
evaluate it honestly. By romanticizing the Jew as the figure
at the center of art they have only created one more
stereotype: the Jew as Alienated Artist.

II

The natural tendency of minority groups to defend them
selves from the sneers of the conforming majority by
parodying their own differences has provided material for
several generations of sociologists and folklorists. Although
it may seem a far cry from the malapropish Greek restau
rateur to the avant-garde Jewish poet, once either one is
abstracted from the society that has formed him and is
considered as a hothouse type, he becomes a cliche; and
we can expect no increase in our understanding of Greeks
or Jews. This is true no matter with what degree of sophis
tication the cliche-specimen is examined. In the context
of our discussion the end product is all too often an over-
sharp evaluation of the centrality of the Jew in the domain
of the intellect.

Consider the gross btit striking correspondence between
the Jew as Artist and the Jew as Entertainer. Certainly,

157 Certain Jewish Writers

with such metropolitan comedians as Milton Berle, Morey
Amsterdam, and Myron Cohen, a form of Jewish partic
ularism is joined to a striving to stand somewhere above
the audience and criticize the culture that has formed it
and that pays its way. Every popular subject is immersed
in the "destructive element"; what is most highly valued is
the verbal gift. Very little use is made of the traditional
comic techniques because the single device is cruelty to
one's audience, based on the obvious superiority of the
comedian's mind, with an occasional admixture of self-
cruelty.

These comedians are furthermore the highbrows of
popular culture, speaking a special language to a special
audience. 1 One feels in watching them that they consider
their minds to be weapons, developed in the struggle
against an inferior society which scorned them. And again
one feels that their superiority is based, not on what the
intellect can accomplish, but on what it can see: corrup
tion, self-interest, the material drive behind ideals. The
scorn that passes for comedy is aimed at everyone who
is so naive as to think in other terms.*

x lt might also be asserted of this audience, by those interested in
creating yet another stereotype, that because of its background of ex
clusion, it seeks to relieve its intense malaise in the bitter intramural
anti-Semitism of the nightclub comedians. But accent and intonation
aside, is riiig audience not part and parcel of the large and anxious
American bourgeoisie, whose pursuit of fun is only one more indication
of Me alienated from value and meaning? If, to some, the Jewish night-
clubber seems more intense in his pleasure habits, we are justified in
pointing out that hatred, mockery, and fear limit hfm to a smaller play
ground, from which his concentrated and typically American cries ring
loudly in our ears.

* Footnote, 1961: It would be instructive to interpret
the new generation of metropolitan comedians, so
many of them Jewish Mike Nichols and Elaine
May, Mort SaU, Shelley Berman, Lennie Bruce, Milt
Kamen against the background of these remarks.

A Radical's America 158

The comedian too has become a kind of pathic observer.
But what he observes has lost its value of perspective; he
laughs at himself as much as he does at others; all the
world follows the main drift, and he who would attempt
to counter it is a "schmo." Yet, at the same time that he
insults his audience, he sees himself as victim of the audi
ence making himself the butt of laughter, telling a story
in a Yiddish accent, describing his family life as both a
center of sentiment (Mama's cooking) and a grasping unit
(the innumerable sponging relatives), and presenting a
portrait of himself as somehow a misfit in a world whose
normality, dull as it may be, is yet above him.

Life in America has done much to produce this kind of
Jew. But the emphasis must be placed on the American
half of the proposition. Of alienation there is plenty; there
is even a kind of complex vision; certainly the comedian,
like the intellectual, has developed the habit of living on
his wits and his art. But what has formed this Jew has little
or nothing to do with the Jewish ethical tradition. If the
extent of his severance from society is more severe, it
stems from the degree of hatred that is turned against him.
Acting as though one were the pet victim of the world
does not lead to a better understanding of the world; it
can only lead to a false evaluation of the importance of
one's suffering, and the creation of one more false stereo
type. Hence, the danger of identifying all Jews with the
immigrant Jew who settled in the New York or Chicago
ghettos, or with his child, whose struggle to realize his
independence led him to the hope of mastery by the con
trol of art almost, by a need to monopolize art.

Ill

The alienated man as subject and object of literature, and
as the image through which one experiences the outer
world, can be followed in the central figure of Delmore

159 Certain Jewish Writers

Schwartz's family chronicle. 2 The Jewish family becomes
the symbol of the historical forces that moved westward
to America. The Jews are the chosen people in the sense
that they are foreordained, "Chosen for wandering and
alienation/iii every land of life, in every nation . . "
From the flight to America, from the impact of industrial
civilization and the crassest expression of modern exist
ence upon the "people chosen for pain" emerges the new
cultural hero. The long history of suffering has torn illu
sion from his eyes; he is born with a cry of agony, almost
immediately aware of the contradictory forces of Europe,
America, capitalism, and Israel, all of which are embodied
in his name. 3 It is invariably a name that sums up the
tensions which he must resolve in loneliness and pain, one
which has in itself, and from the beginning, "the basis of
the art of poetry/the hard identity felt in the bone/*

Born alienated, there is no progression for the protago
nist from innocence to wisdom; we encounter him in Mr.
Schwartz's later short stories as the lonely man, whose
exile is the source of his strength, who turns inward be
cause of his heritage of suspicion and rejection, a prey to
"innumerable anxiety feelings which had their source in
events which had occurred some twenty-five years before."

The strength of evocation of the symbolic Jew lies in
the implication that, separated from Gentile society, he
is still adequate to deal with it so long as his disillusion
and craft are kept intact; its inadequacy is projected in the
names that Mr. Schwartz gives to his protagonist. The
ridiculous conjunction of a "Christian" Christian name
with a Jewish family name warns the hero of the im
possibility of ever crossing over to Gentile society. At the
same time it sums up the imbalance of the alienated man

2 Mr. Schwartz has not written a chronological narrative. The story o
the hero and of his ancestors is to be found in In Dreams Begin Responsi
bilities (1938), Skenandoah (1941), Genesis (1943), and most recently in
The World Is a Wedding (1948).

3 The naming of the hero-child (Shenandoah Fish, Belmont Weiss,
Hershey Green, etc.) recurs throughout Mr. Schwartz's work.

A Radical's America 160

generating within himself a hatred for the Jewish name
(himself), and the Christian name (society).

Nevertheless, and necessarily, society must be entered.
The means adopted by the Jewish intellectual are reminis
cent of the procedure Henry James thought necessary for
becoming an English citizen: one is introduced into so
ciety and vouched for, as it were, by one's intellectual
ancestors, the cultural heroes of the ages. But here the
question of entering society, with even the best creden
tials, takes on an added difficulty. It can be summed up in
these words of T. S. Eliot: "For the expression of im
aginative reality, for truths of poetry and of religion,
a man is best equipped when he uses the language of his
ancestors, shaped by a particular racial sensibility and
capable of conveying the messages of the inherited imagi
nation/*

If the Jewish artist subscribes to such a point of view
he can only turn his creative energies to Hebrew forms of
expression. That the American Jew recognizes the falsity
of Eliot's statement is evident in his insistence on working
in the idiom of his country and drawing upon the inter
national experience. But his efforts are weakened by his
refusal to believe that the Jewish problem is a social one.
The tension of his work is apparent in the double image
he constructs for himself, as both the victim and the heir
of the ages. The difficulty lies in the inability of the artist
to reconcile the advantages of being an alien with the
necessity of being a member of society. His statement of
malaise is a romantic and stereotyped one not because he
does not utilize the elements of his difficulty in his work,
but because he attempts to armor himself morally against
the reality of his situation by abstracting the virtues of
alienation on the one hand, and tradition on the other, and
uniting them in his own person.

The effort of the complex personality to escape the
stereotype mold into which he is cast is evident in both
the prose and the poetic styles of Mr. Schwartz, who has
spoken of his versification as having a "deliberate flatness,**

161 Certain Jewish Writers

a heavy and slow quality "to declare the miraculous char
acter of daily life and ordinary speech/" But has he really
succeeded with this device in regaining "the width of
reference of prose without losing what the Symbolists
discovered"? In Genesis, when the intensity of the de-
claimer's suffering (always in the passages of poetry)
reaches a point that cannot be controlled within the "mor
bid pedestrianism" of his prose and bursts into an indul
gent lament, the reader suffers, between prose and poetry,
the same kind of embarrassment that the juxtaposition of
Jewish and American names ("Shenandoah Fish") caused
the protagonist. When an equilibrium is finally regained
one returns to the modest language of daily statement
with the feeling that it is a false exterior, a disguise whose
aim is not to increase our awareness by enlarging our
experience, but to shelter the poet, to save him from ex
posing his private emotions to a world that might not
understand.

The relationships of tenderness and mutual sexual satis
faction, rare enough anywhere, it is true, are nowhere
mentioned in Mr. Schwartz's extended autobiography.
What is mentioned is their opposite: the discovery of be
trayal and guilt in marriage, the implication that those
possessing beauty and energy are certain to betray, that
their potency is coupled with insensitiveness, while those
who are sensitive are apt to suffer from a kind of "psychic
impotence." Here again there is the example of T. S. Eliot,
whose hollow men are incapable of making love because
"there is a shadow which falls between the desire and the
spasm." But with Mr. Schwartz the statement turns in
ward, the emphasis turns on the protagonist instead of on
the poem, and we are again reminded of the artificial use
that is made of disguising poetic form: if the personal and
poetic idiom has been evacuated of high-flown language,
it is only to hide the highly charged nature of the poet s
feelings.

The Jewish artist's ambiguous social aspirations, his un
conscious reluctance to interpret his self-hatred as a re-

A Radical's America 162

flection of the discrimination that keeps him outside of
general society, create a tension within the body of his
work that is cramping in its ultimate effect. The literature
itself becomes dull; philosophic generalities are substi
tuted for social density, for an acting out of manners and
morals that are peculiar to the time in which we live.

IV

In Isaac Rosenfeld's novel Passage From Home (1946), 4 we
encounter once again the rootless Jewish intellectual, this
time in embryo, in the process of discovering that his fu
ture lies outside the home. Once again we meet the self-
conscious protagonist, his attention centered upon him
self as the seer who carries Europe, his ancestors, and
industrial America within himself. His hope for escape
from Irving Howe's "tragedy of the family relationship"
is accompanied by a gradual disillusionment with the
means of escape, a sharpening of his vision that leads him
to expect betrayal and misunderstanding as a condition
of life. True, the communal forms of love still exist, we
see them in Mr. Rosenfeld's Passover scene; but they are
fleeting and anachronistic, just as are the ethical and
scholastic precepts of Jewish life, even while they carry
with them a sense of dignity (as in the Talmudic disputes
of the aged rabbi and his friends). There emerge only the
forms of tradition, implying dignity in adversity. Here too
dignity is seen as another side of the coin of alienation,
maintained with the most absolute and critical - intel
lectual integrity.

As Daniel Bell has pointed out, the novel ends with an
assumption of alienation. The young protagonist, Bernard,
unable to confess to his father, confesses to himself; but
"Now it was too kte. Now there would only be life as it
came and the excuses one made to himself for accepting
it" F *

4 Reprinted (Meridian Books) in 1961.

163 Certain Jewish Writers

There must have been, for Mr. Rosenfeld himself, a
stopping-off place somewhere between the discoveries of
the adolescent Bernard and the attitudes of the adult
protagonist of his later Kafkaesque stories which have
been appearing in Partisan Review and Kenyan Review
both before and after the publication of Passage From
Home. But no trace of the leftist political adherence of
Mr. Rosenfeld and his contemporaries during the Thirties
can be found in their creative works. We may surmise
that it was only a minor disturbance in the lifelong proc
ess of discovering their own loss of love a loss which
is incarnated in Mr. Rosenf eld's short stories and of
rooting out every pose, attitude, rationalization that might
tempt the spirit to hope.

In Mr. Rosenfeld s (and also in Saul Bellow's) prose it
self there is a desperate flight from tricks, from any styliza-
tion, from a signature that might differentiate their lan
guage from another writer's. In this anonymity exists the
lonely man, the self-denigrating hero who, like the "private
eye," does not like this world but accepts it as necessary
and livable if he can take his beatings and reject his
bribes, living his life as though his own peculiar form of
integrity were the only valuable thing in the world; it
is an integrity implying a complete knowledge of the
corruption that can be fought only by craft, cunning, self-
knowledge, and a limitless ability to "take it.* 7

But like the "private eye" the modern indefinite sym
bol of everyman's loneliness and dignity the 'lonely
man" too becomes stylized. He lives in a world that many
intellectuals have already charted with an ambivalent
dread. Thus the short stories of Isaac Rosenfeld compose
a land of political parable pointing to the extreme devel
opments of authoritarian states; and, as in the earlier
poetry of Auden, the location of the battiefronts and the
customs of the people have grown so confusing that one
cannot discover which side the hero is on. He has rejected
not only self-pity but self-value. It can no longer be, as
Daniel Bell claims, that such a writer "still retains a deep

A Radical's America 164

critical sense regarding the inequalities, injustice, oppres
sive nature of an exploitative society/' Any such reaction
has become too unsophisticated: young Bernard himself
passed that point in his "true Bar Mitzvah"

Like the "private eye," our new hero (on a higher plane,
to be sure) takes corruption for granted; he is interested
in different matters: understanding his own reactions and
maintaining a quiet dignity, carving by his craft and his
art some quiet corner in which he can examine his own
guilt. But, of course, the analogy cannot be carried too
far. The artist is too complex to be compared to the detec
tive, for he is a deeper adventurer, with a harder mind,
and neither the wish nor the hope to clear up the case. To
eliminate the danger of coming to a conclusion he has
constructed a world in which there are no conclusions. It
is a world from which moral choice has been eliminated:
only the facts of color, stature, language, and religious
affiliation are known. The only proper attitude left is that
of alienation: the suffering has become too deep to share.

In Dangling Man (1944), 5 the first novel of Saul Bellow,
we find a prose style similar to that of Mr. Rosenfeld and
a good deal of the same self-mockery. 6 Mr. Bellow^ book

5 Reprinted (Meridian Books) in 1960.

6 Interested readers may want to compare the striking stylistic similari
ties between two early first-person stories, Mr, Rosenfeld's "The Hand
That Fed Me," and Mr. Bellow's "Two Morning Monologues'* (both
included in the Partisan Reader, 1947). In the latter story, the narrator,
whose name is Mandelbaum, speaks in the bitter accents of Delmore
Schwartz's young Jew: *T didn't want my name in the paper. I've always
avoided parading it. I can't stand that. I can't remember a time in my
life when I didn't swallow before saying it." (The "poor New York
Jew," by the way, now appears in the pages of the literary magazines
with a regularity which is becoming monotonous. See, for example,
Wallace Markfield's story, "Ph.D.," in the September-October 1947
Partisan Review: "Auerbach, little Jew of C.C.N.Y. . . ." his "thesis to
be HISTORY AND ALPHABET OF AGONY.")

165 Certain Jewish Writers

details, in the form of a diary, the anxiety of a young intel
lectual who has been placed in 1A but is never drafted.
There is a cafeteria scene in which Joseph, who is keeping
the diary, recognizes a Communist with whom he had
been friendly in his own party days. When the Commu
nist (a crackpot who sticks pins in maps, each pin a pos
sible barricade) insults Joseph by refusing to acknowledge
his greeting and why did he try to force recognition if
not to be victimized again? Joseph creates a scene. As
a result, he succeeds in embarrassing his companion, who
was going to get a job for him.

The effects of Joseph's explosion of temper cause us to
wonder if Joseph is not as much an "addict" as the Stalin
ist. And does he too not see himself in those terms, pro
foundly self -aware as he is? The question then arises: does
Joseph demand to be recognized by the Stalinist as a hu
man being, or is the scene more subtly contrived to show
that he does not take himself with any greater seriousness
than he does the Stalinist? Do we not have here, in short,
a man who has looked deeply into himself and come up
with mocking laughter; does not this inward irony, indeed,
comprise the sum of the dignity of the hero in a world that
leads from depression to war?

Joseph, Mr. Bellow's lonely protagonist, sharing with
the characters of Delmore Schwartz and Isaac Rosenfeld
the same hero-attitudes of introspection, disillusion, and
rootlessness that are so recognizable and attractive to the
modern reader, reflects on the war and says, "... I would
rather be a victim than a beneficiary." It is this choice
which finally identifies the Jewish stereotype.

VI

Art begins at the irrational, that subterranean area where
the most important parts of our lives are rooted. The artist
who plunges in brings forth to our consciousness some of
the richness, ordered and illuminated, of his own experi
ence. He who dares to make the perilous descent is usually

A Radical's America 166

tortured by the disparity between his separate vision and
the naked world. In that sense the artist has always been
alienated from his society; his art has been his life, open
to those who similarly dare, closed and dangerous to the
rest of mankind.

For the most part, the struggle that has led the artist to
the depths has been engendered by the search for good in
the labyrinths of evil. Since the decline of the Roman
Church, this search has been conducted largely by crea
tive and speculative protestant minds. Even today, when
categories of good and evil, sin and salvation, despair and
loneliness, have lost their original frame of reference, they
still retain their power of evocation and are interpreted in
terms of guilt, anxiety, rootlessness, and alienation.

From one point of view, the writers we are discussing
are the descendants of the religious artists, whose psy
chology reflected the inner struggle over such conceptions.
This struggle, intensified by the collapse of a' monolithic
intellectual structure, has deepened the contemporary
thinker's skepticism and sapped his confidence in the re
flective process to the point where he doubts even his own
thought His understanding of history as science is over
whelmed by his sensitiveness to the imponderable and
fortuitous.

The "wandering Jew," at home nowhere, rejected every
where, has become the deep symbol of rootlessness and
chance. It is not strange that his lonely search for a com
munity of love, his hard and necessary wiseness (almost,
like art, a weapon for self-preservation) should occupy a
central position in the creative work of contemporary
Jewish writers.

But here we encounter a difficulty, an examination of
which may disclose a measure of the inadequacy of these
writers. The work of the religious artist was directed from
its beginnings toward a religious goal; that work took on
richness of meaning because art and goal had the same
concrete content. Viewed with this unity of content in
mind, the history of suffering and loneliness could be seen

167 Certain Jewish Writers

as both personal and impersonal a part of the larger
scheme that was compelling enough to reconcile man to
his insignificance.

The authors whom we are considering, however, have
scrapped the religious goal of the religious writers and
have maintained only their tradition of alienation.

There is no Church for these Jewish writers. (Can they
even dream of substituting the ethic of the Talmud?) They
have come too far; the wisdom of disillusion has been
too profound. Having accepted, in the Thirties, the con
solation of socialism and the less imaginatively satisfying
solace of materialism, they cannot now turn to an accept
ance of Eliot's ethos. And so, with the hope of socialism
dead in their minds, they have seized upon alienation as
a positive value, thereby asserting that they are the heirs
of all the great alienated writers of the last century. The
argument can be reduced to this: alienation is a virtue;
its reward is complexity of vision: the Jew is peculiarly
alienated; therefore his complexity of vision is peculiarly
great. If one but proclaims his alienation insistently
enough, the proclamation itself will in time be accepted
as artistic creation.

In a review of Dangling Man, Delmore Schwartz wrote:
"Here for the first time I think the experience of a new
generation has been seized and recorded." The experience
is that Joseph, the narrator, has been forced "stage by
stage, to even greater depths of disillusion ... he is
gradually stripped of the few pretenses and protections
left him." That, generally, is the experience and the im
portance of all the work of the writers under discussion.

VII

Here in America a handful of artists, thrown together by
the unending Diaspora, have recorded in diaries and sto
ries, reviews and poems, their naked vision. They are the
members of the "colony of the spirit" who shape their art

A Radical's America 168

so fiercely that talk of hope and beauty is gratuitous; art
itself is all-encompassing.

But they are also the heirs of another, later tradition,
whose methodology was designed to remove man from
the realm of the peripheral and subjective, where the
meaningful life was considered to have its inception within
the subject, to an objective contemplation of the world.
This new discipline insisted that the world could be
changed by including as much material as was possible in
the realm of the rational and bringing it under administra
tive control.

The conditions that made it possible for American Jew
ish writers to share in this new, materialistic tradition (the
effects of which are still evident in the realism of their
style) were most favorable in the Thirties. These were
the years when they were shaping their thought and art,
when hopes were high for an experimental and revolution
ary solution of the problems of mankind. There was a real
demand for the "relatively classless stratum" of intellec
tuals (as Max Weber has defined them) to develop an ex
perimental outlook for the working class. This alignment
was possible because, as Karl Mannheim has pointed out,
the unattached stratum of intellectuals could adapt them
selves to any point of view, "and because they alone were
in the position to choose affiliations."

Open to them were the techniques of Marx and Freud
with which they were able, on the one hand, to probe the
conservative ideology of their society and, on the other,
to embrace the vision of its opposite. Problems of good
and evil lost some of their personal depth and were re
placed by the esthetically less interesting concepts of class
history, scientific method, and psychological realism. The
danger was that they would no longer construct meaning
ful interpretations of human experience but would, rather,
merely demonstrate in their writings the validity of those
categories that were being forced into the intellectual
foreground by thinkers like Freud and Trotsky.

The materialist-scientific tradition, on the whole, led

169 Certain Jewish Writers

to the rejection of religion as reactionary and anachro
nistic. But once again the Jewish intellectual assumed for
himself a symbolically central position in the scheme. Mr.
Schwartz's protagonist is seen, buffeted through history,
suffering the fate of the subjective hero; at the same time
he views questions of nationalism, imperialist war, capital
ist competition, and the sources of psychic impotence with
the eyes of Marx and Freud. The question was: Who else
but the agonized Jew has such vital need to change so
ciety?

Art is the form which the intellectual has chosen to
resolve the tensions of these two contradictory currents
of thought. And indeed, the literary tradition can be
viewed as a third current that integrates the other two into
a consistent and almost adequate resolution. In an impor
tant sense, the style has become the artist. But, as we have
seen, beneath the style the necessary inconsistencies re
main. These writers have created a bastard and transitional
form that has loosened the restriction of both the novel
and the poem. For, if the subjective view remains, the
religious goal to which it was formerly linked has dis
appeared; if new techniques of rational investigation make
it impossible, as Philip Rahv has pointed out, ". . . to re
turn to pre-political modes of expression," these same
techniques (always a danger to the artist who must make
his solitary dive into the irrational) 7 are not adequate to
ground the artist, with no role in social production and
therefore no pervasive ideology, in a disintegrating so
ciety.

It is beside the point, of course, to speak of a solution
to this problem. The artist's role is determined by his so
cial position between the classes, by his intellectual her
itage, by the state of the society in which he lives. He has
usually been able to understand the nature and the inter
est of the classes between which he functions; paradoxi-

7 Arthur Koestler is the best example of the writer who falls into the
trap of using knowledge as a substitute for art.

A Radical's America 170

cally he has been unable to understand his own role.
Living on the brink he has only been able to view the
disaster. It is small wonder that alienation has become,
for him, the perspective of art,

But yet, since hope does not die easily, we continue to
search for some other road, for some new artist who
possesses the seriousness and craft of the group we have
discussed and who, at the same time, touches on the rela
tionships that exist between men; someone who will be
capable of the act of creation implicit in Malraux's state
ment: "The greatest mystery is not that we should have
been thrown up by chance between the profusion of
matter and the profusion of stars, but that, in that prison,
we should produce from ourselves images sufficiently
powerful to deny our insignificance/*

VIII

In his second novel, The Victim (1947) 8 , Saul Bellow has
made a solid beginning in the direction of bringing light
to his "colony of the spirit": but only by means of leaving
the colony.

At first glance one is struck by the closeness with which
Mr. Bellow follows the narrative of Dostoevsky's The
Eternal Husband, and impressed with the artistry with
which he makes it his own. Indeed, a comparison of the
characters in the two novels would show how Mr. Bellow
reinterprets and intensifies the questions of guilt and
responsibility, earlier posed by Dostoevsky, that lie at
the heart of his novel.

Following Dostoevsky, Mr. Bellow creates, on the most
obvious level, the stereotyped images of victim and vic-
timizer. There is Asa Leventhal, the Jew, cranky and
suspicious, whose efforts to establish himself in a hostile
world are intensified by his fear that security even men
tal stability - rests in precarious balance, liable to be

8 Reprinted (Viking Compass) in 1956.

171 Certain Jewish Writers

toppled by chance misfortune. Opposed to him is the
Gentile, AUbee, his personal fury. Because of Allbee's New
England background, his early easy success, his loyal
friends, and his beautiful wife, we think of him as the
counter-stereotype, the irrational, taunting figure of so
ciety, symbolized as the enemy.

But soon the relationships between the two men un
dergo a change. We notice with surprise that even on the
surface level of the novel, the roles of victim and victim-
izer are reversed. We discover a Jew who is employed,
respected, married, and in love even taking for granted
the fact that he is capable of being loved! and a figure
of importance in his family, for which he feels a sense of
responsibility and affection. AUbee, on the other hand, is
the dispossessed: a drunkard who has lost his wife, jobless,
friendless. He even assumes some of the traits of the liter
ary Jew: beyond shame and pity, he is not afraid to strip
himself of every pretense and illusion. I am what I have
become, he says, due to evil circumstances, due to forces
beyond my control; if I tell you all this it is because I have
nothing to lose; and yet, in the end, I don't blame you for
my misfortune, I just want you to see what you have done
to me and give you the chance to undo it; I might still be
capable of living like a man.

But there, deeper yet, in the heat and crush of New
York, in the narrow streets, the stifling rooms, the jammed
subways, the inhuman restaurants, Asa Leventhal, the
man too busy to read or think, feels that he is, after all,
only a part of mankind, and his haunting misery reaches
out to embrace others. On a trip to Staten Island he sees
a tanker and thinks, ". . . it was terrible on a day like
this . , . the men nearly naked in the shaft alley as the
huge thing rolled in a sweat of oil, the engines laboring.
Each turn must be like a repeated strain on the hearts
and ribs of the wipers, there, near the keel, beneath the
water." And immediately after, looking up to the build
ings on shore, seeing the light over them, wild and savage,
he reflects that a speck of such inhuman light exists in all

A Radical's America 172

men responding to "the heat and glare ... or even to
freezing salty things, harsh things, all things difficult to
stand." Joined with sympathy is an understanding of evil,
deep in all men, and for which all men are responsible.

What gives the book depth is not that Asa Leventhal is
a Jew but the author's insistence that we are all respon
sible for the community and must reside in it, aware of
chance and the yellow light, but also of the men toiling in
the tanker beneath the waters. We are no longer faced
with the image of the unique Jew. And from the words of
Allbee, uttered at the close of this novel, we can perhaps
sense a new spirit, wider than the colony from which the
artist seems to have emerged: "When you turn against
yourself, nobody else means anything to you either."

The Menorah Journal, Spring 1949

Footnote, 1961: Since these lines were written, the
American Jewish writer has taken extraordinary
strides forward. If Isaac Rosenfeld died tragically
young, Delmore Schwartz became the youngest poet
ever to be awarded the Bollingen Prize, and Saul
Bellow went on after The Victim to make a deliber
ate break with his earlier style, manner, and preoc
cupation, and soon won a new kind of recognition
with The Adventures of Augie March. And a whole
new generation of Jewish writers Norman Mailer,
Bernard Malamud, Herbert Gold, Mark Harris, Ernst
Pawel, Alfred Grossman, Philip Roth, Grace Paley,
and others of varying gifts but a common vivacity
and appeal for the intelligent common reader of no
matter what background have attracted interna
tional attention as serious American writers.

Writing in Western Review in 1958 on Mr. Mala-
mud's The Assistant, I said:

173 Certain Jewish Writers

While Jews have had an honorable place on the Ameri
can literary scene since the 19th Century, that place has
for the most part been marginal. It would hardly be un
fair to say that while their brothers were busily engaged
in Americanizing themselves and making the giant stride
from sweatshop and tenement to office and suburb,
American Jewish writers achieved prominence primarily
as either bestseller sentimentalists or genre painters of
ghetto and immigrant life. They were never able, not
even after World War I, to conquer the ramparts of high
art in the world of fiction; there were no Jewish writers
to rank with Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Heming
way. Really it is only since World War II that the Ameri
can Jew has battered his way (as all writers must batter
their way in this country) into the front rank of serious
American fiction.

But if this development has been belated, it has been
extraordinarily rapid too. Already it is impossible to call
the roll of outstanding imaginative novelists and short
story writers in this country without including the
younger Jewish talents who have come to the fore in the
last decade. This unusual development (I omit mention
of the parallel and more predictable success of Jewish
commercial writers in the movies and television) can be
seen as analogous to the sudden emergence of Jewish
painters concurrently with the great sweep of School of
Paris painting of the last seventy-five years. From Pis-
sarro to Pascin, Soutine, Modigliani and Chagall, it is im
possible to imagine what that great creative upsurge
would have been like without the participation and in
deed the imaginative leadership of the Jewish graphic
artists newly freed from centuries of proscription of
brush and palette.

So too I venture to suggest that one day it will be impos
sible to conceive of what course American literature
would have taken in the Fifties and Sixties without the
active leadership of those American Jewish creative fig
ures who turned from their fathers* conquest of business
America to the conquest of the demon of Art

As I see it now, this conquest has paralleled the
very recent shift of the Jew as American from a

A Radical's America 174

marginal position to one of centrality a phenome
non I noted in my Introduction. In such a location
there is little room for self-pity on the one hand or
pride in uniqueness on the other. We might measure
the distance that has been traveled by contrasting
Hemingway's Jewish athlete of the Twenties, Robert
Cohn, the boxer, forever attempting with fists or
flattery to join the club, the expatriate Americans
who exclude him, to Philip Roth's Jewish athlete of
the Fifties, Ronald PatimMn, who hangs his jockstrap
from the shower faucet while he sings the latest pop
tunes, and is so completely the self-satisfied muscle-
bound numskull that notions of Jewish alienation
are entirely "foreign" to him.

The writer who has covered the territory most
completely in his own work (and is, perhaps in con
sequence, the most consistently forward-thrusting
and imaginative) is Saul Bellow. I find it fascinating
to observe how some of his "Jewish" characters, like
Augie March and Tommy Wilhelm, are in many as
pects as un-Jewish as their names, while some of his
non- Jewish heroes, like Henderson, sometimes lapse
into what can be regarded as Jewish speech manner
isms and reflective modes too. And I do not think it
has been remarked elsewhere how the notion of the
crank, the obsessive man, runs throughout his fiction,
starting with the Communist crackpot topographer
of Dangling Man. He uses the crackpot-invention
idea not just as an indication of screwiness but as a
common denominator of the old human urge to
break the mold, an urge which is wacky and comic
but also helps to differentiate us from the other
members of the animal kingdom.

It will be remembered that the ship's carpenter
with whom Augie March is cast adrift after they

175 Certain Jewish Writers

have been torpedoed is a logical nut obsessed with
the idea of the ideal colony he is going to set up
when they are flung ashore in a remote place.

In the title story of Mr. Bellow's collection of
stories, "Seize the Day/' the glorious swindler Dr.
Tarokin also has more to him than can be measured
by his gambling other people's money in futures and
his fake psychologizing.

"An electrical device for truck drivers to wear in their
caps/' said Dr. Adler, describing one of Tamkin's pro
posed inventions. "To wake them with a shock when they
begin to be drowsy at the wheel. It's triggered by the
change in blood-pressure when they start to doze." . . .
Mr. Perls said, To me he described an underwater suit
so a man could walk on the bed of the Hudson in case of
an atomic attack. He said he could walk to Albany in it"

To which the hero of the story replies defensively:
"... I get funny ideas myself. Everybody wants to
make something. Any American does."

In the next story of the collection, "A Father-to-
be/* the hero is daydreaming in the subway: ". . . as
a chemist, he asked himself what kind of compound
the new Danish drug might be, and started thinking
about various inventions of his own, synthetic albu
men, a cigarette that lit itself, a cheaper motor fuel."

Nor is that all. The hero of "Looking for Mr.
Green" "sat and listened while the old man unfolded
his scheme. This was to create one Negro millionaire
a month by subscription. One clever, good-hearted
young fellow elected every month would sign a con
tract to use the money to start a business employing
Negroes. This would be advertised by chain letters
and word of mouth, and every Negro wage-earner
would contribute a dollar a month. Within five years

A Radical's America 176

there would be sixty millionaires. "ThatTl fetch re
spect/ he said , . ."

Even in the final story, "The Gonzaga Manu
scripts," the little Spanish banker who supposedly
holds a great poet's last papers is more interested in
the title to a pitchblende mine in Morocco than in
the poems: ". . . Pitchblende has uranium in it.
Uranium is used in atom bombs."

It might almost be said that the daydreamed
scheme, the cockeyed money-making device, replaces
the nocturnal dream as a technique of rounding and
deepening his people. Later on, Henderson, of course,
is the "Rain King," the most grandiose schemer of all,
the millionaire with screwball ideas on extracting
frogs from an African well; and Herzog, tenderly
ruminative hero of Mr. Bellow's novel in progress,
composes mental letters of solace and stimulation to
Dr. Carl Jung, Sir Winston Churchill, President
Eisenhower . . .

All these can be interpreted in a way as typical of
the familiar Jewish luftmensch, in quite another way
as typical of the familiar American schemer. But
what really raises them to a different level is that,
because they are susceptible of being interpreted
both ways, they are revelatory and refreshing to
readers who may in fact know little of either tradi
tion. Here is where art emerges from self-absorption,
and here I suppose is the point of these remarks.

Italian Cinema,
American Audience

Despite the misshapen form of the globe of the 1960 s,
there have been a significant number of positive achieve
ments in the Western world since the degrading and
hideous years of the 1940's. Any American observer would
have to include among these achievements such parallel,
if apparently unrelated, phenomena as the European in
dustrial-technological resurgence (particularly in Germany
and Russia) and, on the cultural scene, the explosions of
American abstract art and of Italian neo-realist films.

It cannot be pure accident that it was in the United
States perhaps even more than in their homeland that the
striking accomplishments of Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio
de Sica, Cesare Zavattini, and Federico Fellini have been
swiftly appraised at their true worth. We are proud of the
American contribution to the short story over the last
century, as are the Italians of seven centuries of imperish
able masterworks of painting; and if the cinema be taken
at its best as a happy fusion of the arts of the storyteller
and the painter, it is only natural that America the home
not only of Hollywood (where technique and commerce
had combined to overwhelm creativity) but also of the
modem short story and of the absolutely free modern
painting should have taken these movies to its heart.
It was only natural that we should have been quick to
grasp not merely what was moving and what was pictorial
about Italian moving pictures, but also what was new
about neo-realism.

A Radical's America 178

The cannonading and the tortures of World War II had
scarcely stopped when we were bowled over by the art
istry and intensity of Open City, which came like a hammer
blow, forcibly recalling us to an agonizing awareness of
what we were already eagerly preparing to forget. And
as soon as we call up the titles of the great movies which
followed Open City Paisan, Shoe Shine, The Bictjcle
Thief., Miracle in Milan, Umberto D, La Strada, Nights of
Cabiria, I Vitelloni it becomes apparent that the whole
hearted appreciation of our response has been aroused by
more than merely an intellectual appreciation of esthetic
problems well met.

For what we found, and continue to find, in these
movies, is a quality of compassion ominously lacking in
the scramble of the other Europeans to rebuild and catch
up, and shamefully absent from our own postwar exist
ence, which seemed dedicated to obliterating from the
national consciousness what we had done to Hiroshima
and Nagasaki and the fact that our land had not been
devastated. Even in painting, the one area of the arts
in which it is all but universally acknowledged now that
postwar America gained pre-eminence, we evacuated first
the human form and then any reference at all to the
natural world. The rest of us, perhaps as deeply affected
as the painters by the course of events, or perhaps merely
numbed by fear, selfishness, and ambition, gladly turned
from our generous impulses of the Thirties to an exclusive
preoccupation with personal advancement. By insensible
degrees we arrived at a point of practically denying that
there was any social warrant for, much less artistic poten
tial in, concern for the poor, the suffering, and the help
less.

Others made the effort sporadically, but only the Italian
movie makers of the postwar decade consistently con
tinued and persisted in recalling us to our inseparable
connection with the underlying peoples who comprise still
the great bulk of mankind. Only their films, unreeled to
us throughout the years of international concentration on

179 Italian Cinema, American Audience

political rigidity and personal aggrandizement, shamed us
out of our selfishness not (with the exception of a num
ber of inevitable failures) through the manipulation of
cheap sentimentality or the platitudes of the pulpiteer or
the propagandist but with a remarkably consistent art
istry which in retrospect is as humbling and impressive as
any other accomplishment in the arts in the modern era.

If any one figure can be taken as representative of the
spirit with which the neo-realist movies have been infused,
surely it is the orphan-hero of Miracle in Milan. This
young man, so idiotically and purely innocent as to be
lieve (and to live out his belief) that we must all love
one another, becomes the natural leader of his shantytown
because he limps when he encounters the cripple, shrinks
to a hunch when he encounters the dwarf, and speaks
from the side of his mouth when he chats with the man
with the deformed jaw. In hurling himself so spontane
ously into a sharing of the agonies and even the deformi
ties of his friends and neighbors, this Prince Myshkin of
the slums acts for us all, he acts out what we feel that we
ourselves ought to do in actuality, or at least perform
symbolically.

For in these movies, not one of which has been in color
or on a wide screen, we enter the black, white, and gray
landscapes and lives of the poor and they in turn enter
our emotional landscapes, our inner lives. As I have had
occasion to mention elsewhere, the neo-realist cinema is
essentially a cinema of poverty; we can suppose that the
prefix has been added because a considerable gap in time
separates these movies from Chaplin's earlier comic mas
terpieces about the poor, The Gold Rush, City Lights, and
Modem Times. During that period, even though it was
an era of wars and convulsions, the cinematic norm was
and still is one of pompous inflation, the costume drama,
the war epic, the Western saga,

But the fact, grasped by tie Italians from bitter first
hand knowledge, is that the anonymous figures who popu
late their rubble-strewn landscape are universal as poverty

A Radical's America 180

is universal and glamour is not. Most people in the world
do not live on an infinitude of endlessly mounting se-
quined MGM staircases, nor do they gaze each evening
at a Technicolored sunset, filtered through nodding palm
trees. We may on occasion be charmed by the dancers on
the sequined staircases, or transported by the lovers fading
into the tropical sunset, but these can never make the hair
rise on the back of our necks as can the sight of the poor
simpleton girl in La Strada trudging through the dirty
melting snow, past the lonely Esso sign, or of the little
boy in The Bicycle Thief waiting in the biting rain for his
father before another such sign: for this is the landscape
not of the tourist but of the poor.

It can be argued that the very best motion pictures of
all time have been in the main not those seduced by the
sweep of the camera's eye into grandiosity, but rather
those which have focused like Chaplin's and the Ital
ians' on the lives of the poor and the anonymous. How
ever, it does not at all follow from this that there has been
a narrow concentration in Italy on filming wretchedness
and misery, or a view of life bounded by the canons of a
strict, soulless, humorless realism. Quite the contrary.
Even among the films already enumerated, without even
a passing glance at the Italian movies (some of them very
good and very amusing) that have given us close-up views
of such buxom charmers as Gina, Sophia, and Sxlvana, we
encounter a variousness of method, of approach, of styles
of seeing life, as broad and many-faceted as that of many
other artistic developments of the era which were not so
handily labeled.

Indeed even within the framework of one movie we
can observe how ironic contrast is gained by permitting
the same landscape to be variously interpreted, in accord
ance with the gradations of sophistication of the viewers.
In the case of La Strada, for example, we the audience
see the world of carnival shows and strange towns, tied
together by the bare highways and bleak roads of Italy, as
sleazy and poverty-stricken. To the artless peasant girl,

181 Italian Cinema, American Audience

who is being initiated into this world, it is wondrously
glamorous as well as tenifyingly new. This simultaneous
revelation of the pathetic poverty of the scene and of its
exotic glamour to the simple girl is in fact one of the
uniquely cinematic achievements of this film.

Nor is the neo-realist film or the comedy of poverty,
as I should prefer to think of it confined to a "realistic"
interpretation of theme or character. The films of which
we speak have ranged from tragic fable (La Strada) to
comic fantasy (Miracle in Milan). More, they have not
focused blindly on the plight of the urban proletariat or
the rural peasantry: they have presented to us the tribu
lations of small boys (in Shoe Shine and in The Bicycle
Thief), of old men (Umberto D), of prostitutes (Nights of
Cabiria), of young men without prospects (I Vitettoni).

The bond that unites these films is neither theoretical
nor narrowly ideological. To take the case of the last-
named movie, it is not the fact (in itself questionable) that
I ViteUoni could be categorized as neo-realist that makes
it singularly affecting. It is rather that the film's artistic
statement about the misery of being young and aspiring,
but not needed or utilizable in a provincial society, is one
which could, one suspects, be as terribly understandable
to the educated but unemployable young Indian as to the
Italians who are portrayed.

La short, we return to the matter of universality. The
love of a lonely man for his dog, of a boy for his hard-
pressed father; the need for a woman to be personally
wanted, for a man to be socially needed; the absolute
necessity for compassion if we are not all to founder in
the seas of swinish self-absorption these have been the
simple stuff of artistic accomplishment in the storytellers
of all ages, whether in printed words or in moving pic
tures. They are not and can never be confined within na
tional boundaries or political categories. At our own best,
we as Americans have represented these qualities to the
rest of the world; in one art form, the cinema, the Swedes
and the French and the Japanese (most especially in the

A Radical's America 182

neo-realist masterpiece Ikiru) have in recent years suc
ceeded in translating them to the screen in a number of
notable productions. But it is above all the Italian movie
makers who have rediscovered for us the beauty and the
pity and the terror in the hearts not of the eccentric or the
great or the highly placed, but of the ordinary man; and
in so doing they have revivified the perennial artistic
paradox that once the ordinary man is so anatomized he
becomes no longer ordinary, but Everyman. It is for this,
finally, despite shortcomings, failures, and painfully abor
tive careers so painfully akin to those of our own Ameri
can artists, that we must pay them honor as dedicated and
gifted carriers of the Italian and the Western cultural
tradition.

Chrysalis Review, Autumn 1961

Footnote: American movie makers attempt sporadi
cally to distill film drama from the unspectacular
lives of ordinary people. Most of these movies have
been failures of heart, just as (oddly enough) the
deaths of most of the great screen lovers have come
from failure not of the liver or lights but of the heart
John Garfield, Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power, Clark
Gable, Gerard Philippe, Henri Duval . . . The most
recent of these attempts, which might be labeled as
an American version of neo-realism, is the independ
ently-made The Savage Eye, a recounting of the sex
ual and spiritual starvation of a newly divorced young
woman. The theme is surely valid, and could be
taken as an American equivalent of the sufferings of
Gelsomina in La Strada; the setting, Los Angeles,
misery capital of the Western world, is as apt for the
theme as are the Italian roads for the tale of Gelso
mina; and the fact that the movie was made as an
"art" film, on weekends, without stars, economic pres-

183 Italian Cinema, American Audience

sures, or big budgets, must have ensured its freedom
from the deformations imposed by the profit-takers.
Yet the picture is not an honorable failure of a group
of aspiring artists who overreached themselves. It is
actively vulgar, and for that reason it is ultimately
depressing, despite the fact that in the end the hero
ine presumably learns to 'live with herself/' The
City and its Citizens are seen by the savage eye of the
camera as one undifferentiated, unadulterated horror;
and while it is carefully explained that this is the
view of the disturbed and shocked heroine, we are
given no refraction through the gaze of a compassion
ate heart. In consequence the viewer comes to feel
that this lingering on distorted faces and gross bodies,
on piteous, hideous ludicrousness, grotesquerie, and
horror, must reflect a prior attitude of contempt on
the part of the manipulators of the all-seeing eye.
What is disturbing about this above all and the
pseudo-poetry of die sound-track commentator, far
from eliminating it, only serves to reinforce it is the
implication that the manipulators (and by extension
the ticket-buying patrons) are superior to the damned
souls who are seen gambling, whoring, gourmandiz-
ing, reducing, faith-healing, and writhing in the
flames of the American Inferno. But this is a superi
ority which has not been earned. Therefore at bot
tom it has nothing in common with the art of men
like De Sica, Rossellini, FeJIini, Zavattini, who, while
they may see people as horrible, weep at them, laugh
at them but never smirk over them.

Three-Penny Opera
Three-Dollar Seats

A visitor to the Theatre de Lys in Greenwich Village can
hardly fail to be impressed by the odd contrast between
play and audience, by the sight of well-dressed middle-
class folk gratefully applauding a bitter denunciation of
bourgeois morality. The production of the Bert Brecht-
Kurt Weill Three-Penny Opera is, it seems to this occa
sional theatergoer, in every respect admirable it is pun
gent, electric, crisply staged theater. It is also profoundly
subversive. (I think this latter characterization is true of
both the staged Blitzstein translation and the printed Bent-
ley- Vesey version in Eric Bentley's The Modern Theater,
Volume One.)

One cannot, of course, disentangle and weigh in abso
lute proportion all the various elements of a popular suc
cess. It would be hard enough to separate out the acciden
tal factors (timing, accessibility, publicity, stars) from those
more basic to public acceptance (theme, music, staging,
and so on). But it is impossible to forget that The Three-
Penny Opera is a revival; in a sense it is a revival of a re
vival. First performed in the United States in 1933 during
the depth of the depression (when one would indeed have
expected It to be a smash hit given enough people with the
price of admission), it had crossed the ocean from Berlin,
where, with its mixture of jazziness, exoticism, and cyni
cism, it had been a characteristic theater success of that
international headquarters for the disillusionment of the
Twenties. And of course Brecht had based his play on

185 Three-Penny Opera Three-Dollar Seats

John Gay's The Beggars Opera and the poems of Francois
Villon, both of which have proved their viability in their
own right, over the centuries.

Why should such a play, popular in an era seemingly so
different from ours, be so rapturously received in the New
York of the Fifties? It is worth bearing in mind that in re
cent years we have had other revivals of comedies and
musicals of other eras by authors ranging from Shake
speare to Wilde which have simply failed to attract a sub
stantial public, despite the fact that money and good taste
(sometimes even in combination) have been lavished upon
their production.

One should be able to conclude fairly from this that at
least a portion of the relative popularity of the Brecht play
must be attributed to its theme, its mood, its underlying
attitude toward society. Of course one cannot assume that
everyone who vociferously applauds this play would join
the Peachum family in singing, "There's nothing we can
do, For the world is rotten through and through! 77 any
more than one can imagine General Eisenhower holding
to the anarchism of Eric Hoffer, even though the press re
ports him so moved by Hoffer's iconoclastic The True Be
liever that he is presenting copies to the members of his
official family. Nonetheless we may infer a correlation be
tween the temper of a play, particularly when it is forth-
rightly and even brutally expressed, and the temper of its
audiences, when they are large and enthusiastic.

It is the view of the Brecht play, mordandy if somewhat
tinnily set forth, that bourgeois life is a swindle; that the
crook, the cheat and the hypocrite are the true men of dis
tinction in a world ruled by crookedness, cheating, and
hypocrisy; and that the only man worth admiring is the
picaresque hero who earns his pleasures by pimping, theft,
and murder, who cheats on his bride and double-crosses
his gang, and who sings "The Ballad of Comfort":

. . , Poverty makes you wise but it*s a curse
And brav'iy brings you fame but it's a chore

A Radical's America 186

And so not to be great's a bloody bore

But being great my friends it must be worse

Here's the solution inescapably:

The life of comfort is the life for me.

But even though Captain MacHeath's sensuality brings
him down (his former lady love Jenny tells us in "The Song
of Solomon" that "So long as he was rational, And stuck to
highway robbery, He was a Great Professional"), and even
though he is betrayed by his whores, we are not spared
the final irony. A ridiculous messenger enters on horse
back bearing the Queen's pardon for Mack the Knife as he
stands on the very gallows. What's more, he is raised to
the nobility and given a ten-thousand-pound pension. To
make sure that there should be no misunderstanding,
Peachum steps forward to explain: "Mounted messengers
from the Queen come far too seldom, and if you kick a
man he kicks you back again. Therefore never be too
ready to oppose injustice."

The play then closes with the words:

Do not defend the Right with too much boldness
For Wrong is cold: its death is sure though slow
Remember all the darkness and the coldness
The world's a vale of misery and woe.

It is easy to imagine the impact of The Three-Penny
Opera on Germans living in a defeated capitalist state,
where, under the shadow of a feeble and anemic democ
racy, there strutted the same old George Grosz caricatures
the profiteers and bemedaled goosesteppers and all their
whores and hangers-on who had brought their country
down in the first place.

But what is the magnetic attraction of the drama's vi
ciously ruthless philosophy for well-meaning and liberal-
minded playgoers in a country where, and at a time when,
so everyone is constantly being assured, poverty has been
all but abolished, discrimination is on the way out, and
soon work itself will be a thing of the past in this best of
all atomic worlds? One can only speculate on the inner

187 Three-Penny Opera - Three-Dollar Seats

state of mind of the New York audiences who fill the little
Theatre de Lys night after night to cheer The Three-Penny
Opera, corrosive as acid as it gnaws its way past the com
fortable pleasantries with which theatergoers are usually
regaled, the paeans to gray-flannel-suited resignation and
suburban garden-tending, or the hymns to up-and-at-'em
South Pacific liberalism. This play undercuts the plati
tudes of playwrights and politicians alike. It goes so far
underneath that it comes very close to home.

I would submit therefore that no audience which is
stirred by The Three-Penny Opera can be stirred solely by
what it reveals of the mentality of Berliners under the
Weimar Republic or Londoners of the eighteenth century.
I would submit further that customers who are well-heeled
enough to pay three or four dollars for an evening's enter
tainment and then discover that the very basis of the so
ciety in which they have been earning that money is being
called into question are undergoing a genuinely cathartic
experience. Certainly it is true that many thousands more
spend twice as much for an equivalent evening's entertain
ment on Broadway; but they do not come with the expec
tation of having the very source of their income under
mined, so to speak. They do not wish to have their lives
disturbed and they sure as hell are not disturbed by
what they are fed on Broadway.

The "cool" young intellectual of today, who, as I am
given to understand, prides himself on his aloofaess from
emotional involvement in matters political and cultural,
and who apparently feels that there is an important dis
tinction which must be made between commitment and
excitement, may have more in common than he suspects
with those who are somewhat older and hence still subject
to agitation over public questions, whether of engagement
or disengagement For both have reacted in common to
the theatrical representation of the loathsomeness of a
commercial society in decay, most particularly of the spine
less and soulless hypocrisy of its ruling members. It would
seem that this reaction is not confined to the young and

A Radical's America 188

prematurely disillusioned, or to the older, who one would
have thought had mostly made their peace with the world
as it is; but how would The Three-Penny Opera be re
ceived by union audiences, say, or by Southern farmers, i
they were to encounter it at their local drive-in theater in
Detroit or Montgomery?

Never fear. This "non-affirmative" play will not find its
way to a really mass public. If anything is certain in this
constantly surprising world, it is that Three-Penny Opera
is one musical comedy that will not be translated by
Hollywood into a Technicolor Cinemascope production
starring Kathryn Grayson as Polly Peachum and Howard
Keel as Captain MacHeath. Despite the huzzahs for Amer
ican national culture now being emitted by those liberal
intellectuals who have taken to rallying 'round the flag,
there are still things which cannot be said except to the
relatively restricted publics of off-Broadway theaters or to
the relatively few readers of books. And The Three-Penny
Opera says a good many of those things.

Let it be accounted cause for optimism that this play
has found an audience not a huge, mass audience, but
an audience. It is an audience whose very existence had
been called into question, bombarded as we have been
with depressing accounts (whether favorable or unfavor
able) of the mass taste of the middlebrow public. We may
justly hope that it could spontaneously foregather if there
were offered to it equally well-mounted native works of
the theatrical and literary imagination, works which hesi
tated no more than this remarkable play to slash through
the treacly morality of bourgeois society and to reveal yet
one more aspect of that inner truth that is the heart and
function of all art worthy of the name.

Anvil and Student Partisan, Winter 1957

Footnote, 1961: The matter becomes more complex
when one considers, not a ghostly revival from the
Twenties like the Brecht-Weill play, but the new

189 Three-Penny Opera - Three-Dollar Seats

generation of comedians and their relationship with
the new audiences. The most mordant and the most
directly political of the group, Mort Sahl, still returns
to the Thungry i 9 in San Francisco in the sweater and
slacks which were his trademark when he first gained
his reputation; presumably his audience is still basi
cally the same and yet the connection between the
two has altered and most importantly the perform
er's conception of himself has changed. Inevitably. It
is one thing to stand up in a smoky cellar and estab
lish a sense of communion with a small band by punc
turing the inflated inanities of Eisenhower-Dulles-
McCarthy and all the rest of the gasbags of the
unlamented Fifties; the small salary paid for delight
ing the intimates is an honorable symbol of disaffilia-
tion. It is quite another to poke fun at Kennedy and
the liberals of the New Frontier to an audience of
salaried liberals, of young academics from Berkeley
and Palo Alto whose little Triumphs sport Kennedy
stickers on the bumpers (to distinguish them from
their students with the Nixon and Goldwater stickers),
of snug young couples from Sausalito and Belvedere,
on whose Danish teak coffee tables repose the latest
analyses of Mort Sahl and his bank balance. No mat
ter how hard he fights it, Sahl has become a success
which means in our American terms that his salary
must be measured in four and five figures weekly,
that he thereby assumes a new identity and enters
into a new land of relationship with his audience, and
that willy-nilly he becomes accepted as one of their
own by the veiy masters of mass culture whom he
must regard as beneath contempt. The strain tells on
his face as he returns to the scene of his early tri
umphs, but more important, as one observes his three-
dollar audience queuing up to be "entertained," is the

A Radical's America 190

evidence of the increasing unlikelihood of there being
any room in our society for the long-term existence of
an independent dissenting stance in the popular arts.
Worse, the more venomous one's opposition to the
master trends in American life, the more certain it
becomes that one will be taken up, popularized, im
perceptibly assimilated, and finally defanged. It is
disconcerting to think that if you attack, say, popular
magazines vigorously enough, your chances are good
for winding up on the cover of Time you may even
become the Man of the Year.

What this boils down to is a rueful admission that
the assessment in the article above was probably over-
optimistic.

The Cult of Personality
in American Letters

Practically all judgments of recent American fiction seem
to take as their implicit (and often explicit) benchmark
the 1920*s. Our postwar novelists are measured against the
postwar novelists of the earlier era and found wanting,
sometimes because supposedly there are not as many in
teresting novelists practicing today as there were a quarter
of a century ago, sometimes because not one of our current
novelists has managed to achieve the supposed universality
gained by the giants of the preceding generation.

When we inquire who it was that achieved this univer
sality we are usually referred to our Nobel Prize winners,
or more specifically to our male Nobel Prize winners,
Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Sometimes a
third is added the gifted and doomed Scott Fitzgerald.
These are the ones who are considered to have outlasted
Cabell, Hergesheimer, Lewis, Buck, yes, and Caldwell,
Steinbeck, and OUara too.

I think it could be demonstrated, however, that only one
of this trio became, at the crest of his career, not simply
internationally renowned, but the incarnation of the Euro
pean conception of the American as artist. This was Ernest
Hemingway, and while it can probably be said that he is
still so regarded abroad, it must also be observed that in
recent years his reputation has undergone a severe decline
in his own country. And so we are left with William Faulk
ner, whose Nobel Prize address is regularly quoted by
those who are now so proud of him as an award-winning

A Radical's America 192

American, but who we may be permitted to suspect
seldom take the trouble to read the actual novels, and
were hardly to be found among his fans during those years
when Faulkner was writing his best books and not selling
them to any but a handful of admirers.

Obviously extraliterary factors have entered into these
evaluations, as they have all too obviously in the case of
Scott Fitzgerald, who has become in a way the modern
equivalent of the velvet-jacketed tubercular attic artist of
nineteenth-century bohemia. For the sake of clarity let me
add that I am not attempting to belittle the product of
these men (since my teens Fitzgerald has been one of my
personal literary heroes, and as for Faulkner I do not see
how it can reasonably be denied that he is our greatest
living writer) but rather to insist that nowadays it is all too
often not the novel which is placed in time, but the novelist.

We are suffering from what might be called the cult of
personality in American letters. No doubt it will immedi
ately be objected that this is mere obfuscation, confusing
popular acclaim of middlebrow spokesmen (who as Lou-
ella Parsons serves the movie-going public serve their
public with news of Hemingway's chest measurements
and William Faulkner's alcoholic propensities) with genu
inely serious appraisals of established literary critics. Let
us anticipate this objection by examining some of the cur
rent enthusiasms of our literary critics, and contrasting
them with several omissions.

If there are any two American writers of the current
generation who have been more written about in recent
years than any others, they are surely J. D. Salinger and
Norman Mailer. It seems to me not at all irrelevant that
the first of these has so sedulously avoided publicity that
he has inevitably aroused the liveliest curiosity about him
self; and that the second has frankly and unremittingly
sought to gain what the metaphysicians of advertising
would define as maximum exposure to his reader-potential,

Salinger, the Greta Garbo of American letters, is now in
his early forties and is the author of one novel, Catcher in

193 The Cult of Personality in American Letters

the Rye, and two books of short stories, mostly dealing
with the travails of the Glass family. That is all we are
supposed to know, and in all conscience it should be
enough. Unquestionably he is a clever and knowledgeable
writer about a somewhat restricted segment of American
society, with an absolutely first-rate ear for certain man
nerisms of American speech, particularly those peculiar
to the young. Once this has been said, we find ourselves
shifting, so to speak, from one foot to the next. And yet
such has been the outpouring of articles, essays, and spec
ulations on J. D. Salinger that the Salinger bibliography
might lead one unfamiliar with his work to think that it
consisted, not of one bittersweet novel and some short
stories, but of an oeuvre comparable to William Faulkner's
twenty-odd books.

What is more, this outpouring has come not so much
from the middlebrows as it has from the groves of academe,
and from those not accustomed to trifling with merely
popular writers although surely Salinger is popular with
the younger set. Can there be a college literary magazine
in the land which has not had its Salinger piece? By now
it has become as obligatory as the Pound exegesis or the
James explication. Why?

For one thing, these critics seem much impressed with
Salinger's increasing popularity abroad as a spokesman
he begins to approach the universal acceptance of Hem
ingway, which in itself is awesome. Yet we have not been
subjected so far to a spate of studies of Dashiell Hammett
simply because he is much admired in France, or of Jack
London simply because he is adored in Russia. We must
be led to believe therefore that other considerations are
involved. In addition to the fact of his popularity abroad,
these critics are apparently much moved by Salinger's
manifest and continuing appeal to youth, and by the evi
dence in his work that he is attempting to compose a
Christian parable.

Both of these factors, the touching appeal of his work
to the young and his painfully self-conscious effort to be

A Radical's America 194

Deep, are of course closely interrelated. But those of us
who can, if we are honest, recall all too easily our own
adolescent infatuation witli Thomas Wolfe because he
seemed to be speaking directly to us, and speaking too of
the really profound things in Me must, I am afraid, be re
duced in our maturity to stammering embarrassment for
the author and for his apologists when we are asked in all
seriousness to consider Salinger, like Wolfe, as a profoundly
reflective philosophical novelist. No, it seems more likely
that there exists in the minds of those who make such
claims a connection between Salinger's supposed pro
fundity and his tantalizing physical inaccessibility. The
legend of mysterious private suffering cohabiting with a
singularly Christian literary morality is self-generating and
self-perpetuating; it is also conducive to excited appraisals
of a writer s importance based finally on what must be
regarded as extraliterary considerations.

Salinger's opposite number, Norman Mailer, has been
so unabashed at exposing his private problems, both liter
ary and psychological, and so adept at gaining attention
for this exposure, that we need not dwell on the details of
his biography further than to note that he is some years
Salinger's junior, and that he is the author of three novels,
some briefer pieces, and the recent omnium-gatherum Ad
vertisements for Myself. It is this last which has given
Mailer his breakthrough from the ordinary book buyers to
the highbrow critics.

For months now it has been virtually impossible to pick
up a magazine - The Reporter, The Nation, Commentary,
Partisan Review, on and on through the spectrum with
out coming upon an assessment of Norman Mailer. We
have had Norman Mailer on Mailer, Norman Podhoretz on
Mailer, Alfred Kazin on Mailer, Irving Howe on Mailer,
F. W. Dupee on Mailer, Leslie Fiedler on Mailer, Gore
Vidal on Mailer, Robert Gorham Davis on Mailer, Gran-
ville Hicks on Mailer, and certainly not least, Seymour
Krim on Mailer in that organ of the itinerant poets, the
Evergreen Review. The last-named is noteworthy in that

195 The Cult of Personality in American Letters

it is in the nature of a reassurance to Norman that, though
he may be neglected or misread by the squares, he is cher
ished by those who dig him the most.

This is a strange kind of neglect! Reeling under this
flood of assessments (and there are of course many more
than those itemized), one would think that Mailer had
come forth, at the very least, with a big new novel. What
he has come forth with instead, however, is an assertion
that he will one day come forth with a big new novel . . .
and an extended apology for the delay.

I do not mean to belittle Mailer. If any contemporary
novelist has the audacity, the courage, the inventiveness,
and the bite to do something really new, it is Norman
Mailer, whom I have read with respect ever since he first
appeared in print. But, while this has also been acknowl
edged by a number of his many critics, one gains the im
pression that this is not why they are impelled to write
about him. It is rather that they are stunned by his nerve.
Uninspired by his novels none of which, it seems to be
generally conceded, has been successful on its own terms,
or as a wholly realized work of art they are overwhelmed
by his personality, and they are driven through a series of
logical gyrations to vote for him as the most likely succes
sor to Ernest Hemingway which is precisely what Mailer,
by his own confession, has been dying to be told.

In the course of these odd intellectual exercises, some
strange things get said. Several of the critics are so taken
with Mailer's intensity and honesty in arguing for himself
that they are persuaded that there must be more to his
novels than first met the eye as though they cannot de
cide for themselves, without the author's help, just what
they do think not of him or his intentions, but of his
lonely, naked, published work. Others, impressed (as any
one must be) by Mailer's candor, are driven to recall that
earlier searing confession, The Crackup, in which Scott
Fitzgerald laid bare his inmost agonies and the bitter frus
tration of his aspirations. A strange analogy! One would
think that The Crackup had been written by the clever

A Radical's America 196

young man who had turned out two glib novels, This Side
of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, and a collec
tion of bright and catchy short stories, rather than the
mature and exhausted artist who had gone beyond that
early work to complete his greatest novels. Surely it will
be time enough for such comparisons when Mailer has
given us his Gatsby and his Tender Is the Night.

Norman Podhoretz, in his eagerness to have his say too,
has even been driven to post hoc justification of Mailer's
naivete in becoming associated first with the Henry Wal
lace presidential campaign and then with a peculiarly doc
trinaire variant of Marxism: this belated infatuation with
causes long since cast aside by other intellectuals, explains
Podhoretz, is proof of Norman Mailer's refusal to be
guided by the experience of others and of his insistence on
finding things out for himself as though this argument
could not be adduced to excuse, not mere eccentricity, but
any kind of extreme antisocial behavior on the part of a lit
erary figure. Apparently anything will do, even if it is
manifestly unfair to Mailer and to what he himself thinks
of himself, in this haste to create a new myth and to en
shrine a new personality in the pantheon of synthetic
American literary giants.

This massive concentration on a handful of writers (for
reasons all too often nonliterary), coupled with a massive
exclusion of most other writers from consideration, can re
sult in a ludicrously distorted picture of the American lit
erary situation. Recently a leading editor observed at a lit
erary symposium that the past decade s fiction had been
"dominated by adolescents." Presumably what he meant
was that the beats had made the most noise and had there
fore drowned out such writers as Baldwin, Bellow, Mala-
mud, Ellison, Bourjaily, Morris, and other serious novelists
whojhave come to maturity during the Fifties. But who
did "dominate" the fiction of the decade? If it was the
beats, as the editor implied, and not the really serious
creative people, then we may be justified in asserting that
the editors and critics are, as Norman Mailer has shrewdly

197 The Cult of Personality in American Letters

observed of American audiences in general, "incapable of
confronting a book unless it is successful."

Before adducing the names of some writers whose books
have been neglected, as I have instanced the names of
some who have been written of so widely, it should be
emphasized that I am not directing my primary objection
to the amount of attention that J. D. Salinger and Norman
Mailer have been receiving. I have, in fact, learned a good
deal from some of these articles as indeed I would hope
that Salinger and Mailer have themselves. What I am ob
jecting to, and as strenuously as I know how, is the imbal
ance on the part of the magazines which have printed
them and the critics who have written them. Some of these
magazines have been protesting that they lack space to in
clude a regular examination of all current fiction although
they seem always to have space for the current sensation;
some of their editors and some of these critics have
been heard to murmur that there is nothing much worth
while coming out anyway in serious fiction, perhaps be
cause we are in a period (how critics love to generalize
about periods!) that is simply not grateful to the creation
of important novels. In consequence they do not trouble to
acquaint the reading public with what is going on.

I offer as evidence two books which were published in
the last two seasons. One was a novel, the other a book of
stories. The novel was Crazy in Berlin, by Thomas Berger;
the story collection was The Little Disturbances of Man,
by Grace Paley. Each book was an ornament to its pub
lisher and to the season in which it appeared. Both books
were brilliant, original, insightful, and exciting not, to
be sure, to consumers of best-sellers, but surely to those in
search of the new and the stimulating. Both books were
utterly ignored. We need not call the roll of the magazines
already mentioned, other than to note that the only one to
review either of these books was Commentary (which ran
a notice of Mrs. Paley s book some six or eight months after
publication). But where were the Messrs. Podhoretz, Kazin,
Howe, Dupee, Vidal, Krim, etc., etc.? (I specifically exempt

A Radical's America 198

Granville Hicks, the only literary journalist aside from
those affiliated with daily newspapers who has attempted
week in and week out to fulfill his obligations with con
scientiousness and dignity.) One could hardly expect all
of them to have reviewed, or even been aware of, both of
these books. But surely one critic, among a group so pro
fessedly concerned with American fiction, might have re
viewed one of these books.

The truth, however, is that neither of these two authors
is a "personality." They are simply writers. They were not
born with, nor did they acquire, funny first names. They
are not in their teens. They are not addicted to drugs or
exhibitionism. They are not sexual inverts. They do not
write about how hard it is to write, or how hard it is to
become a Great Writer. (We might note, parenthetically,
how startled, shocked, thrilled, the critics have been at
Norman Mailer's perfectly straightforward assertion that
he is trying to become a great writer as if every line that
every serious novelist writes were not instinct with this
very desire to become great.) There are other good young
writers being neglected, but for now these two will do, a
novelist and a short-story writer, neither of them profes
sors of writing or adepts at grantsmanship or members of
literary sets. Because these writers simply mind their busi
ness, which is writing, they are ignored. What is more,
they are insulted or I should think they would be by
having to read time and again that nothing worth while is
happening in American fiction.

We have here a situation in which it is possible for very
good writers to be soured and warped through no fault of
their own. It is all very well to say comfortably, In time
they will find their place, in time they will make their
name, in time they will be known to us all. But there is
also die meantime. What if, heaven forbid, Berger and
Paley, Mailer and Salinger, were all to die tomorrow?
Would it be easy for the reader of tomorrow to make a
just estimation of their relative merits? Could he readily
discover for himself, uninfluenced by the cult of person-

199 The Cult of Personality in American Letters

ality which has set off an avalanche of publicity for one
group, and consigned the other to oblivion, that the au
dacity and intensity of a Thomas Berger, the wit and vir
tuosity of a Grace Paley, represented something as new
and exciting in American fiction as the highly touted work
of those public personalities, the O.K. writers?

It takes a very strong spirit indeed, a dedicated and
courageous one, to turn one's back on the entire matter, to
ignore being ignored. We need not look far to see the ef
fects of the star system in American letters on those des
perate for recognition. There is more than one genuinely
talented writer, like Herbert Gold, who, in his anxiety to
be regarded as a personality, writes obsessively about the
accidents of his autobiography, and defaces a lively style
with adolescent puns and verbal cutenesses in an effort to
ensure that he will be heard above the others.

This, it may be objected, is precisely what separates the
sheep from the goats. True. But do we really need to make
it so hard on the sheep?

The fault does not Ke alone with the critics: Last spring
there was published a first novel, The Coming of Fabrizze,
which for all its weaknesses (would the critics who con
tinually beat contemporary writers with the greatness of
the Twenties seriously defend the literary merits of the
first books of Hemingway, Faulkner, or Fitzgerald?) was
obviously the work of a sweetly gifted young storyteller.
When I wrote as much to the publisher, he replied that
this manuscript had been making the rounds of other pub
lishers unsuccessfully for eight years. I do not know the
author, Raymond de Capite, so I cannot be sure what
went on in his mind during those eight years, but I can
guess. I can guess, and I do not thereupon feel my heart
warming to those publishers who make much of their cul
tural dedication and their nineteenth-century ethics, when
in actuality they are all too often aping the behavior of the
buccaneers of the mass media in everything but the ability
to catch the eye of the mass public.

It should not be thought that this is a nostalgic plea for

A Radical's America 200

a return to a past in which novelists were all seriously con
sidered, earnestly discussed, and warmly appreciated dur
ing their lifetimes. Such a past never existed. But surely
we have the responsibility to plead for a better future. I
speak now not as an occasional critic, but as a novelist con
cerned about his fellow writers as well as his fellow read
ers, when I propose that the critics and the publishers who
regard themselves by definition as the caretakers of our
culture, but function in reality as drumbeaters for an arbi
trarily limited galaxy of stars and hence as vulgar huck
sters for the cult of personality, be required to assume
what should be their true responsibility: to make more
accessible and more profoundly revealing to us all, those
writers who do not "look for adventures," in the words of
Manes Sperber, "but for an encounter with consciousness;
not for the dream, but for the awakening."

Saturday Review, October 1, 1960

The Image in the Mirror

May fiction not find a second wind, or a fiftieth,
in the very portrayal of that collapse? Till the
world is an unpeopled void there will be an
image in the mirror.
Henry James, The Future of the Novel

The pages that follow are an appeal to the intelligent
reader, whoever he may be, to put aside the prejudices
about the American novel that he has been accumulating
over the years, fortified, perhaps even inspired, by the
critical pronouncements of his favorite journals. What I
propose he accept in their place is at least a willingness to
grant the hospitality of his hearth to the American novel
ist, with all his reputed eccentricity, tediousness, feeble
ness, and senility; and if what I am going to say has any
validity, he will hopefully find not only that American lit
erary productivity is considerably less abysmal than he has
been led to believe, but also that the contemporary novel
ist still has the power to speak to him, to touch his heart,
to open for him, even in his own house, doors the keys to
which he thought had been lost and which could not be
forced by other locksmiths. In his turn he may discover
that if all too many current novels' insights seem devoid of
centrality or indeed of any significant relationship to his
own inner life, this may not be due unqualifiedly to the
willfulness of the novelist, but in some measure to the situ
ation of that novelist, to the critical hostility which greets
not the end product alone, but even the presumptuous act
of creation, and finally to the indifference of the general
public, himself included, toward the problems of the
novelist

It is not without significance that some of the severest

A Radical's America 202

fire with which the novelist has been raked comes from
just those quarters where one would expect to find, if not a
last-ditch defense of the artist, certainly a receptivity to
his work in a time of more than ordinary confusion and
difficulty. Naturally both the novelist and the intelligent
reader whom he presumes to be waiting somewhere as his
putative audience are taken aback by this phenomenon:
the novelist can only begin to wonder where his friends
are and whether they really exist, the reader to wonder
whether he is not a fool for caring at all about what is in
the new books that are still (despite everything) being
published, when it would be so much less demanding to
turn to the consolations of the popular entertainments.
Since it is my contention that the current attack on the
American novel is based on false premises and faulty rea
soning, I shall have to devote more space in the following
paragraphs to a consideration of its expression in certain
periodicals than might otherwise be considered profitable.
In the summer 1956 number of Partisan Review, Mr.
Steven Marcus concludes an appreciation of Evelyn Waugh
with some observations on "why writers in America have
shown so little capacity for development. It is a truism of
our culture that the majority of serious American novelists
are c one book' writers; they either write one large good
book and then almost nothing else, or spend their careers
writing the same book over and over again. . . . What we
sense in the typical American 'giants* who fail is an enor
mous talent that is dying unexpressed, a latent richness
that can find no means of articulating itself. We regularly
produce novelists who seem just on the point of writing
really first-class works, while what we get from them are
large, unwieldy failures, evidences of an inability to har
ness or express themselves with any kind of grace or econ
omy. . . . Until the conventions of the written language
have become more accessible to our daily speech, America
will continue to present us with writers who, though of the
highest talents and intentions, are largely brilliant and in
spired amateurs . . ."

203 The Image in the Mirror

Let us pass over the question of why an essay in praise
of the virtues of an admittedly minor English novelist
should conclude with two pages devoted to minimizing
the virtues of admittedly major American novelists. Let
us pass over Mr. Marcus's apparent unawareness that the
problem of lifelong fecundity versus repetitiveness or early
silence crudely, Titian versus Rimbaud cannot be ex
plained by contrasting European fertility and American
sterility. It is an unsolved and perhaps insoluble prob
lem in the relation of artistic productivity to psychic
energy, still puzzling critics, historians, and psychiatrists.
Let us even pass without comment the question of taste
involved in mentioning by name such writers as William
Faulkaer, Mary McCarthy, Thomas Wolfe, Robert Penn
Warren, and Saul Bellow just prior to the above-quoted
lines with no attempt to document the attack or to remove
the implication that at least some of them are "one-book"
writers, "failures," or "amateurs/' Let us note rather that
as we turn the pages of the magazine we come immedi
ately upon another assault on the novelist, this time in
what purports to be a review of current fiction by Leslie
Fiedler, which opens like a direct extension of Mr. Mar
cus s closing remarks, and which I should like therefore
to examine in some detail.

"To read a group of novels is these days a depressing
experience. . . , after the fourth or fifth, I find myself
beginning to think about The Novel,' and I feel a desper
ate desire to sneak out to a movie." In its fashionableness
this complaint is characteristic of a certain group now
busily proclaiming to all who will listen its disaffection
and disappointment with the modern novel. Mr. Fiedler
is depressed by the novel because (1) it is "respectable"
and "predictable"; (2) "the consumption of novels has be
come a dull public observance like going to church"; (3)
"the avant-garde novel has become a tradition"; (4) "the
novel of the last twenty years remains largely sterile" and
"there has been no general sense of a new breakthrough**;

A Radical's America 204

(5) "the First Novel has become so rigid and conventional
in form that it seems an icon."

By his own testimony, Mr. Fiedler belongs to what
Henry James called "the group of the formerly subject, but
now estranged, the deceived and bored, those for whom
the whole movement too decidedly fails to live up to its
possibilities. There are people," James went on to add,
"who have loved the novel, but actually find themselves
drowned in its verbiage, and for whom, even in some of
its approved manifestations, it has become a terror they
exert every ingenuity, every hypocrisy, to evade."

If James could render such judgment at the turn of the
century, what would he say today, after the great novelists
of the fifty years succeeding him have told us at least as
much about ourselves and our world as any comparable
international body of philosophers or social scientists?
Those who turn from the novel for Mr. Fiedler's reasons
are exerting more than hypocrisy, they are actuated by
precisely that "deep-seated contempt for literature" with
which Granvifle Hicks has sternly but, I believe, justly
charged Anthony West, book reviewer for the New Yorker.

Mr. Fiedler assures us that he admires the achievements
of the twentieth-century masters, that indeed what he is
objecting to is that "our novelists in general fight the old
fights" and that the contemporary first novel is dismaying
"by its bondage to the accidents of biography, its exploita
tion of the tenderness the young feel toward themselves,
its dissolution of form into feeling." But this sighing over
a falling-off is nothing more than the stock response of
those who always oppose the trivia of the present to the
glories of the past, those who assure us that they were,
like the hypocrites of James's day, formerly subject, but
are now estranged.

The crude conception of culture as consisting simply of
a chain of triumphant avant-garde masterworks, and the
consequent conception of the critic's task implicit in Mr.
Fiedler's remarks, rings strangely in the columns of a
literary review that has earned a reputation both for sen-

205 The Image in the Mirror

ousness and literary hospitality. For Mr. Fiedler what lies
below the peaks is fit only to be ridiculed because the old
fights are still being fought, or haughtily ignored: "I have
decided not even to discuss any of the current first novels."

It seems never to have occurred to him that, as Andre
Gide put it, "if there were no names in the history of art
except those belonging to the creators of new forms there
would be no culture. The very word implies a continuity,
and therefore it calls for disciples, imitators and followers
to make a living chain; in other words, a tradition/'

If Gide's words are true, does it not follow that one of
the primary responsibilities of the critical intelligence
should be the conscientious examination of the living
chain? This entails not simply a bibliographical listing of
the new novels, but a consideration without supercilious
ness or patronizing of what is being done that is most
interesting by the disciples, imitators, and followers if
it is true that no one else is producing anything worthy of
note. It would seem an elementary rule of critical conduct
that one not make unfulfillable claims on what one exam
ines; the critic who approaches the work of others with
venom and envy rather than with love and devotion (not
necessarily for the work under discussion, but for the cul
ture of which it is a tiny link) is not only going to be un
able to infect us with the enthusiasm which should arise
from the discovery of a moving artistic achievement, he is
going to be unable to tell us precisely why a new work is
overvalued or valueless, because inevitably he will con
fuse his own passion for fashion with a historical sense of
the continuity of culture.

Harold Rosenberg put the matter succinctly enough
when he wrote (in Art News, February 1956), "Admiring
inherited masterpieces in order to saddle contemporaries
with the responsibility to equal them is a trick of totali-
tarians and busybodies." The statement is applicable to
book reviewers, even though Mr. Rosenberg was writing
about the situation in painting, and was concerned with
the attacks on contemporary painting by vulgarians in

A Radical's America 206

Congress and in other seats of power and influence, and
even though the novelist, unlike the painter, has not been
the object of Congressional attack, nor has the exportation
of his work been questioned by Presidents or State De
partment officials or envious fellow craftsmen working in
an earlier, more conservative tradition.

Perhaps it would have been simpler if the attack on the
novelist had come primarily from such quarters rather
than from within the ranks of his "friends," for then the
novelist would at least have felt that he could call upon
his allies to support him in a battle for cultural freedom
instead of discovering that the bricks heaved at his head
come from those who continue to protest that they love
him most. Nevertheless it remains his responsibility to
identify and dissociate himself from the totalitarians and
busybodies who would prescribe for him, whether their
voices are raised in the Congressional Record, the New
Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, or the quarter
lies.

But when we examine the stylish attitude toward fiction
expressed in Mr. Fiedler's essay, we cannot merely reject
his strange conception of the critic's function. I would
submit also that what he has to say specifically about the
recent first novel in America is quite simply not so.

We have heard before the charge that our writers were
obsessed in their first novels with formless, overemotional,
sentimentalized autobiographical material, and if we look
back at the period when many young writers, reacting
against the proletarian formula, embraced the mood of
Thomas Wolfe, we should have to agree that there was a
time when there was a basis for such a charge. But for a
supposedly serious critic to make such a statement in 1956
betrays either ignorance or the kind of malice with which
noisy ignoramuses attack abstract art by characterizing it
as indistinguishable from children's and lunatics' scrawls.

I have myself done considerable reviewing of fiction,
and can recall without difficulty a substantial group of
first novels of the past few years which were in no way

207 The Image in the Mirror

sentimental portraits of the artists as young men. In no
particular order, I should list Herbert Gold's Birth of a
Hero, about a middle-aged Cleveland businessman; Wil
liam Styron's Lie Down in Darkness, chronicle of a South
ern family; A. M. Klein's The Second Scroll, allegorical
drama of Jewish exile and fulfillment; Stephen Becker's
The Season of the Stranger, a picture of China in transi
tion; Ernst Pawel's The Island in Time, a study of Jews
in an Italian D.P. camp; Bernard Malamud's The Natural,
mythical saga of a baseball hero; James Baldwin's Go Tell
It on the Mountain, the story of a Negro family seen
through a poet s eyes; William Caddis's The Recognitions,
a symbolic panorama of counterfeiting in the worlds of
art, money, and religion.

And those are only books which I myself have reviewed
for various publications. Readers who follow new fiction
with any degree of attentiveness can of course add to the
list at some length.

No one would claim that these first novels are all ex
traordinary (although certainly two or three of them are
just that), that they are all of equal merit, or that they are
sure to be read fifty years from now. What can be said is
that for one reason or another they stand out from the
ordinary, and that in not one case do they correspond in
intention or execution to the absurd conception of the
American first novel as an adolescent portrait of ado
lescence. They move in space from the Orient to the
Middle East, in characterization from the Chinese peasant
to the American businessman to the Israeli pioneer, in
style from neo-realistic to fanciful to frankly experimental,
in tone and temper from passionately affirmative to un
yieldingly pessimistic. Their very existence in print casts
an interesting light on Mr. Fiedler's solemn warning that
"if one is looking for even the hint of something new, he
must avoid the First Novel."

Staring at himself through Mr. Marcus's spectacles, the
novelist sees himself as the endless experimenter, hope
lessly attempting to achieve compression, grace, and fa-

A Radical's America 208

cility in a language that is not really his; turning to squint
through Mr. Fiedler's bifocals, he sees himself alter
natively as a traditional teller of dull tales, or as a second-
rater feebly imitating the innovations of his predecessors.

(While with one hand Mr. Fiedler deplores the undocu
mented prevalence in the first novel of gratuitous auto
biographical data, with the other he submits to the readers
of Perspectives USA his own autobiography. This is in an
article about Partisan Review, and the curriculum vitae
is presented as the credentials of a more or less typical
Partisan Review reader and/or contributor. He tells us
that he is Jewish, an ex-Trotskyite, a professor of English,
and the father of six children. He does not tell us that he
is writing although the inference seems likely a novel
not, Heaven forbid, a first novel, but a novel neverthe
less; nor does he tell us how he would react if and when
his own book were published and went unnoticed in
Partisan Review because its book reviewer took nose be
tween thumb and forefinger at the very sight of a pile of
new novels and hurried out instead to his neighborhood
movie house.)

What I have said thus far has been intended primarily
not as an attack on Leslie Fiedler, but rather as a criticism
of the mood of which I think he is not unrepresentative
and as an examination of the kind of writing about novels
that is currently all too common. Of course, it is always
tempting to think that it was not ever thus, that there was
a time when book reviewing and literary criticism stood in
a somewhat closer relationship, just as book reviewers
think back nostalgically on a nonexistent time when much
of what was published was new and exciting and little of
what was published was dull and worthless.

But if Henry James conceded in 1900 that fiction Tias
been vulgarized, like all other kinds of literature, like
everything else today, and it has proved more than some
lands accessible to vulgarization/' if he asserted that "the
high prosperity of fiction has marched very directly with
another 'sign of the times/ the demoralization, the vulgar-

209 The Image in the Mirror

ization of literature in general, the increasing familiarity of
all such methods of communication, the making itself
supremely felt, as it were, of the presence of the ladies
and children by whom I mean, in other words, the
reader irreflective and uncritical/' he also wrote about
criticism: "The review is in nine cases out of ten an effort
of intelligence as undeveloped as the ineptitude over
which it fumbles. . . /*

This is not merely to say that the more tilings change
the more they remain the same, but to indicate that pres
ent problems are not always unique but can often be seen
as grotesquely magnified versions of older problems. Fifty
years and fifty million tons of paper pulp after James's
comment, concurrently with the remarkable discovery of
a new public for good novels in cheap reprint editions,
there is a certain weariness with the novel among the
formerly subject, now estranged, and if the disillusioned
are not all turning to the movies (the disconsolate captains
of Hollywood surely wish that it were so), it may be that
they are turning to television, inspirational texts or per
sonal gossip for the values and satisfactions formerly ob
tained, supposedly, from the novel. We do know that in
recent years, even while new thousands have been eagerly
buying everything from Faulkner to Spillane in paper
covers, the published total of hard-cover fiction titles has
been diminishing; we do know that the sales of these titles,
even while paperback fiction proliferates, have hardly
risen in proportion to the zooming population curves.

Why? Has the writer really failed the reader?

I do not think so. Since the turn of the century mankind
has been subjected to a series of cataclysmic shocks un
paralleled since the great plagues. It has been tricked and
trampled by totalitarian tyrants. It has been dragged into
a series of catastrophic wars which have dwarfed in their
destructiveness and annihilation the combined effects of
all previous military adventures, and which have culmi
nated in the planned and methodical murder of some six
million human beings. Obviously the novelist has now to

A Radical's America 210

deal with the human heart pushed to such extremities as
would have been beyond the most horrid imaginings of a
Jane Austen or an Anthony Trollope, or even a Henry
James. Can we honestly charge that the novelist has
funked his obligation, or that he has utterly failed in its
execution? It seems to me that in comparison with what
the poet and the playwright have managed to say about
the twentieth-century world, the novelist comes off very
well.

I must confess that I am baffled by V. S. Pritchett's asser
tion that novelists "have not observed and defined a char
acteristic man of these years." If he means a characteristic
Nazi, one might perhaps agree. But who has told us more
about the characteristic Italian peasant, the characteristic
Spanish peasant, the characteristic Russian Communist,
the characteristic American expatriate, than Ignazio Si-
lone, Ralph Bates, Victor Serge, Ernest Hemingway? Can
we not say that we have learned as much of what we
know of twentieth-century man from the novelist as from
any other single source, historic or scientific? And if we
have suddenly stopped learning about post-Hiroshima,
post-Dachau man, may it not be for reasons other than a
sudden inexplicable failure of the novelist to come to
terms with his world?

Presumably Mr. Pritchett is referring mainly to British
and American novelists of the postwar years. Without
involving ourselves in the cisatlantic literary scene, we
may point out that novelists like Wright Morris have been
doing as much to present us with a gallery of characteristic
Americans as have any other creative artists on the Ameri
can landscape. Without claiming that Wright Morris is a
supremely gifted innovator, we can say that he has a
unique vision of American life and of the American char
acter which is in the nature of a pleasurable revelation. If
he goes virtually unread in the United States today, after
having published ten or eleven books, this can hardly be
laid solely to his own inadequacies, but must be a func
tion of (a) the attitude of the reading public, (b) the failure

211 The Image in the Mirror

of the critic in an age of criticism, and (c) the topsy-turvy
situation in the publishing business.

A public which ignores a novelist like Wright Morris in
favor of its drive-ins or its television screens is hardly in a
position to protest that its writers are giving it nothing
nourishing to feed on. We are not yet faced with a situ
ation like that which prevailed in Russia under Stalin,
wherein all writers but the foulest sycophants were si
lenced, wherein those capable writers who remained at
large had to devote themselves to translating the classics,
wherein the public turned in disgust from the trash au
thorized by the regime to the great writers of the past.
The American public is not turning from officially spon
sored "affirmative" propaganda to the great voices of the
nineteenth century; it is turning from or passing by
the Wright Morrises in favor of the Paddy Chayef skys.

The reading public, much of it "new" and consequently
self-conscious, is being ill-served by even the most "ad
vanced" critics. (I have no intention here of discussing the
New Critics, who are often either determinedly soporific
or unintentionally comical, and who in any case rarely
stoop with honorable exceptions to the textual exam
ination of current fiction.) We know that the readers of the
nineteenth century were mostly leisure-class ladies, many
of them producers as well as consumers of fiction. We
know that these ladies are still the backbone of the book
clubs and the circulating libraries; in short, that they are
still the principal steady buyers of novels, although they
are being joined each year by increasing thousands of
young college graduates of both sexes anxious to keep up
with what is new and thus be considered in some sense as
intellectuals (these are apparently the big new market for
paper-cover novels, about which I shall have something to
say a little later).

The new novel-reading public grows daily more sophis
ticated. Yet this is not always to the good, for since like
most new audiences it is unsure of its developing tastes, it
tends to turn for guidance to those book reviewers who

A Radical's America 212

express their supposed sophistication, like the New York
ers stable of reviewers, by parading their own erudition
and unintentionally revealing the depth of their own con
tempt for the novel and for what it sets out to do. The
review of current fiction which I am afraid I have already
treated at unpardonable length concludes, after some
highly unflattering remarks about John Hersey and Nelson
Algren, with a favorable notice of a new novel by Iris
Murdoch, young English writer. The tone of the favorable
comment is so guarded and dispirited in contrast to the
vigor with which Hersey and Algren are demolished that
one may legitimately doubt whether a single reader will
remember the name of Miss Murdoch's novel much less
be set aflame to read it or horror of horrors to buy it.

Those few critics who, like Alfred Kazin and Granville
Hicks, are secure enough in their own taste to be able to
praise a new book (the woods are full of critics who know
how to appreciate old books, particularly when the au
thors are dead and incapable of disrupting considered
judgments by bringing out something else) without com
municating a feeling of acute embarrassment and unease
are unfortunately rare indeed. As an example I would
point to Mr. Kazin's brief but highly laudatory review in
the New Republic of J. F. Powers's collected stories: I
mention this particular review precisely because, in addi
tion to the fact that I am not always an admirer of this
critic's manner, I do not share his enthusiasm for the work
of Mr. Powers. Nevertheless, Mr. Kazan's intensity of feel
ing and his generous warmth moved me to re-examine my
own response to the Powers stories; had I not already read
them, the review would certainly have impelled me to do
so. In short, Mr. Kazin was here exercising one of the basic
functions of the critic of fiction, one currently ignored
when it is not scorned.

"When a literary journalist comes upon a good novel,"
Granville Hicks commented recently in reviewing Adele
Wiseman's The Sacrifice for the New Leader, "his first
obligation is to say so. Afterward he can try to explain why

213 The Image in the Mirror

it is good and, if he sees fit, why it is not so good as it con
ceivably might be. These are important matters, but they
are not so important as that an act of creation has taken
place."

If the book reviewers for such magazines as the New
Yorker and the Partisan Review think it vulgar to betray
enthusiasm even for those few novels of which they ap
prove, can we expect their readers to step out in advance
of them? Those readers are aware that Marjorie Morning-
star, for example, does not advance their understanding of
themselves or their contemporaries but instead of mov
ing from Mr. Herman Wouk to other novelists who are
digg^g deeper and coming up with purer ore, they dis
miss the medium as moribund or obsolete, fortified by the
obiter dicta of the reviewers. Can it be that this audience's
very desires are ambiguous, that even while it eagerly
absorbs the more easily assimilable products of our cul
ture, as purveyed by slick-paper weeklies and book clubs,
that major portion of it which is mass-oriented nervously
rejects without examination those more searching state
ments of the individual mind, because it senses that the
best-written and least-sold novels of recent years would
raise questions of identity and purpose upon which it is
unprepared and unwilling to reflect in the fat years of the
Fifties? *

In any case, we can observe the spectacle of more than
one very young man "going into" literary criticism as years
ago they would have gone into medicine or law, Seeking
quick access to the attention of the new audience, they
direct all of their newly acquired vocabulary of invective
and derision at those novels whose merits they are, if not
blind to, firmly determined to ignore. They have learned
that critical names are made not by praise, not even by
judicious appreciation, but more commonly by hatchet
jobs on the work of their betters.

"In a world in which criticism is acute and mature,"
wrote Henry James, **. , . talent will find itself trained, in
order successfully to assert itself, to many more kinds of

A Radical's America 214

precautionary expertness than in a society in which the art
I have named holds an inferior place or makes a sorry
figure. A community addicted to reflection and fond of
ideas will try experiments with the 'story' that will be left
untried in a community mainly devoted to traveling and
shooting, to pushing trade and playing football." One is
tempted to add that talent will not find itself trained, nor
public taste elevated, by careerists who treat literary
criticism as another means of pushing trade.

As I have indicated, I do not think that the novelist's
external problems end with an uncultivated and unrecep-
tive public and a body of venomous or disappointed men
serving as his critics. There is also the situation in the
publishing world, so ludicrously stacked against the writer
that one may marvel that there are still young men and
women with the temerity to write and submit first novels.
The publisher tells us that he must charge four and five
dollars for a novel because of his economic position, that
the novel today must sell from five to ten thousand copies
if it is to show any profit at all, and that it is becoming
increasingly more difficult to publish a novel with a pre
dictably smaller market. But he does not tell us where
there is to be found a steady market of ten thousand
Americans who will spend four or five dollars at frequent
intervals for the best fiction he can find to publish.

The position of the New York publisher is becoming
more and more like that of the Broadway producer. He is
gambling on smash hits, and he can less and less afford to
take chances on a newcomer whose work is merely prom
ising, or is more than promising but less than commercial.
What is more, in many cases he is frightfully sorry, but he
can no longer afford the luxury of carrying on his list a
writer who no matter how highly regarded he may be
by critics, editors, and a small but faithful body of read
ers does not make money for the firm. He can still pub
lish as a gamble or an investment a prestige book by a
promising new writer; but that new writer's next book had
better give proof that it shows some understanding of the

215 The Image in the Mirror

requirements of the larger literary market, or in all likeli
hood it will be politely but firmly rejected.

The effect on the American playwright of this unreal
istic cost-price situation is already painfully apparent.
Except for one or two Big Names, who are still almost
as much box-office draws as the Hollywood stars regu
larly co-opted to help insure Broadway success for their
new shows, the American playwright is now little more
than a minor member of a collective, endeavoring to
manufacture a product salable to the largest possible
public; his function may be compared to that of the speech
writer or idea man on the team of the campaigning politi
cian. By the time directors, producers, and play doctors
have finished processing his work, he is only a name in
small print on the advance advertising, to be dropped and
all but forgotten during the run of the play.

This can hardly be predicted as the inevitable fate of
the novelist But surely the pressure on him to create a
marketable product acceptable to those on whom the
publisher is increasingly dependent, the book-club and re
print firms, if not the Hollywood producers, is bound to
increase. Just as the young dramatist nowadays bends
himself to the task of pleasing not himself but the grimly
harried real-estate manipulators who may award him an
option, so the apprentice novelist, faced with the choice of
publication or oblivion, may very well tend to adapt and
adjust himself by gradual stages to the needs of his pub
lisher and to what that publisher assures him are the tastes
of the waiting public. After all, is he not currently assured
from all sides that commercial success and literary
achievement are no longer mutually exclusive, but posi
tively complementary in this "affirmative" age?

The publisher who perceives and perhaps fosters the
emerging parallel between his speculative endeavors and
those of the Broadway producer may not stop to think
that the unrealistic economic state of the theater, unlike
that of the publishing world, is underpinned by one of the
peculiarities of our tax structure. The double factors of the

A Radical's America 216

expense account and the entertainment allowance actually
represent a concealed federal subsidy of the preposterous
Broadway ticket system in which fifty or seventy-five dol
lars is gladly paid for a ticket to a hit musical show be
cause "nobody" is actually paying such a ridiculous price
out of his own pocket. According to Fortune magazine,
between 30 and 40 per cent of all theater seats are sold to
expense-account customers. There has not yet been a com
parable generosity on the part of the Internal Revenue
Bureau toward fiction consumers, nor has anyone yet even
claimed a deduction for his annual expenditure on novels,
so publishers cannot, like producers, count on the cushion
of an assured minimum of expense-account customers.

While doubling the price of their product, they have
not doubled their authors' royalties. They cannot afford
either, so the story goes, to pay substantial salaries to their
younger editors. Although this does not result in their
having to make do with inferior help apparently there
is always an adequate supply of young men of private
means and of young ladies from female colleges for whom
the glamour of the publishing world is an adequate sub
stitute for a living wage it does effectively close off for
most writers an avenue of comparatively undemanding
employment that was formerly frequently utilized by writ
ers on their way up.

Caught in the inflationary squeeze, the writer whose
books do not sell at least partly because they are priced
too high, who cannot support a family in New York City
on the salaries paid by publishers, who no longer finds a
low-cost bohemia or indeed any interstices of a daily more
highly organized society in which he can nest, is being
pushed into the college towns in increasing numbers as,
we are told, his British cousin has been forced into the
employment of the BBC. There has been a good deal of
worried discussion about this recently, to which I hesitate
to add, but which is so intimately bound up with the cur
rent situation of the novelist that I cannot pass it by with
out comment.

217 The Image in the Mirror

Some of the complaints that security-minded writers are
fastening themselves like barnacles to university faculties
come from people who are themselves attached to univer
sities or who have private means, and who seem genuinely
perturbed that writers who have in the past lived as
splendidly enviable bohemians are now concerned with
such vulgar problems as making both ends meet. Their
perturbation has not as yet taken such a constructive turn
as the issuance of suggestions for the solution of these
problems without resort to the consolations of college
salary checks and their concomitant insurance and pension
funds, tenure and long vacations. What is more, the fear
that writers who have been drifting back to the campus
will cut themselves off from the main currents of Ameri
can life would appear singularly inappropriate when meas
ured against the background of the writers: depression,
war, world-wide cataclysms often lived through at first
hand. Those writers who have lived in the world for the
kst thirty or forty years need have no shortage of usable
experience for their individual undertakings, no matter
how they earn their livings.

But there is a situation in which these fears for the
insulation and isolation of the American writer do have a
good deal of point. We do see now the beginnings of a
trend which can only be reinforced by the economic fac
tors already touched on. A good many young men who are
determined to become writers are already going directly
from college to graduate school, from graduate school to
teaching and writing, in many cases without ever discover
ing at first hand the existence of any world other than
the academic with the occasional exception of a Euro
pean Fulbright year, and that all too often lived through
in a little American community scarcely distinguishable
from the college town back home. They seem not merely
content at spending their lives in such a predictable man
ner, but terrified at the idea of spending them in any less
predictable manner (if envious of those who do somehow
manage to). Hie cult of experience, so castigated as one of

A Radical's America 218

the literary fallacies of the Thirties, is apparently being
replaced in the Fifties by the cult of inexperience.

A sheltered existence, from undergraduate adolescence
to emeritus retirement, may be a matter of indifference
(or indeed of positive benefit) to lecturers in topology or
medieval history; to storytellers, romancers, writers of
novels, may it not prove disastrous?

We are not speaking here of individual cases, for ob
viously there may be imaginative writers who will mature
and flourish in a cozy academic environment, who will
find in it materials for anything they are impelled to cre
ate; we are speaking of a tendency. We need never worry
about the individual genius, whether he sits in a wheat
field or a seminar; but we have already noted that a cul
ture is more than the sum of its geniuses, and we may
wonder as to the prospects for a literature emerging from
the universities in the next decade that will not be in
grown, precious, or desiccated, that will evoke in some
way the spiritual climate of two hundred million Ameri
cans far removed from the academic atmosphere.

The new writer may with justification retort that the
economic situation already described makes it almost im
possible for him to play, read, and dream (all of which it
would seem that a novelist must do, in his youth if not
later) without the sheltering arm of the university, the
meal ticket of the Ph.D., and the security that will alone
free him to write unprofitable novels. This complaint has
already been answered far better than I could by the bril
liant young journalist Dan Wakefield, in an article in the
June 23, 1956, number of The Nation entitled "Sailing to
Byzantium: Yeats and the Young Mind/' Replying to those
members of his own generation who opt for security, cry
ing that it is no longer possible for those now coming of
age to go forth and encounter the reality of experience as
it was, for example, after the First World War, Mr. Wake-
field asserts: "But it has always been impossible. It was
just as impossible when Hemingway lived on potatoes

219 The Image in the Mirror

in Paris. The difference today is that the young are so
willing to accept the impossibility."

Without attempting to dictate to my juniors, I should
like to conclude my own brief consideration of this prob
lem by noting that just as the problem is different for men
of twenty and men of forty, so it assumes different aspects
for single men and married men. No aspiring young writer
has yet given convincing reasons why it is impossible for
him to exist marginally, from one job to the next, while he
learns something of the world, nor an incontrovertible
statement of the absolute necessity for digging in at a
university before marriage and dependents ultimately
force the issue of security and stability.

Obviously, however, if young writers are obsessed with
security, that obsession is a function of the society in
which they live as much as their choice of theme, com
parative unpopularity, consequent separation from their
audiences, exploitation by publishers, and mishandling or
neglect by critics more ambitious than devoted; and it
can no more be wholly exorcised by exhortation than can
the other ills we have been compelled to categorize.

If it were possible for the novelist to take his place as a
productive and accepted member of society, most of the
complaints we have been analyzing thus far would doubt
less recede into their properly trivial proportions. It was
not Karl Marx but Henry James who asserted that "the
future of fiction is intimately bound up with the future of
the society that produces and consumes it" In a society
which babbles interminable platitudes about battling for
the minds and hearts of men even while it demonstrates
in a thousand ways that it values the football coach and
the sales engineer above the novelist and the poet,* we

* Footnote, 1961: On August 16, 1959, both Admiral
William F. (Bull) Halsey and Wanda Landowska
died. Admiral Halsey had been responsible for the
World War H slogan, "Kill More Japs," and Mad-

A Radical's America 220

can expect nothing but a continuation of the circumstances
which drive the novelist not only into a marginal position
bad enough in itself but into marginal utterances. So
arise the false dichotomy between "affirmative" and "nega
tive" writing and the vicious spiral of neglect, in turn
isolating the writer even further and forcing him yet fur
ther to feed on himself and his similars instead of on the
social body for his material. The impossible economic situ
ation resulting from his isolation forces him into the insu
lated little world of the university, from which he pro
duces work received by the critics not with interest,
attention, or even compassion, but with envy and malice,
treated as an object of scorn and seized on as an oppor
tunity for self-aggrandizement.

In these circumstances it would seem all the more
creditable that such works as those I have mentioned by
name have recently appeared, testimony to the vitality of
the form and the unlikelihood of its absorption by new
mass media or of its dwindling into a hobby of hyper-
intellectual academicians. Mr. Gore Vidal, a novelist as
well as a television playwright, has expressed (in the New
York Times Book Review) an honest fear: "After some
three hundred years the novel in English has lost the gen
eral reader (or rather the general reader has lost the novel)
and I propose he will not again recover his old enthusi
asm.

It is Mr. VidaTs thesis that "the general reader" is now

ame Landowska had been responsible for the revival
of the harpsichord and for a severe interpretation of
the work of J. S. Bach. Presumably, it would be an
easy task for a moderately well educated American
to assess the relative permanence of the contributions
of these two people. Yet in the newspaper of record,
the New York Times of August 17, 1959, Admiral
Halsey's death was announced on page 1, and Mad
ame Landowska's death on page 23, ...

221 The Image in the Mirror

the general looker, and that "the fault, if it be a fault, is
not the novelist's (I doubt if there ever have been so many
interesting and excellent writers as there are now working)
but the audience's," which has turned from the mediocre
novel to the television play. The mediocre novelist, says
Mr. Vidal (more gracefully than my paraphrase), is al
ready in the process of retooling for the better-paying
production of television plays, leaving to the genuinely
creative men the miniscule audience that has been the
poet's in recent years.

Mr. Vidal's question is a fair one: are we witnessing the
decline of an individual art form concomitantly with the
birth of a collective art form? Is the highbrow novel des
tined to join the poem as the property of a handful of
intellectuals while the journeyman novelist hastens to
provide the mass audience with speaking shadows for
their twenty-one-inch screens?

This is somewhat different, and surely of more moment
than, say, Frank O'Connor's assertion that with D. BL
Lawrence "the period of the novel has gone by," since
technical definitions which would exclude from the realm
of the novel some of the greatest fictional achievements
of the past thirty years are however entertaining and
provocative hardly germane to the broader problems
under discussion here.

Mr. Vidal bases his somewhat depressing conclusion on
his interpretation of the tastes of the mass public today, as
expressed in the purchase of paper books, "consuming hap
hazardly rather than reading." But can we not come to an
opposite conclusion on the basis of a different interpreta
tion of the same evidence? Just as it is difficult to share Mr.
VidaFs optimism about the future of the television drama
("ten new live' plays a week: from such an awful abun
dance, a dramatic renaissance must come" but must it?
What came from the awful abundance of radio but the
sonorous dramas of Norman Corwin and Arch Oboler, and
an enormous increase in the power of the detergent manu
facturer and the advertising agency to corrupt and debase

A Radical's America 222

the public taste? What has come from this new abundance
thus far but a gluey, patronizing portrait of the "Tittle guy"
acclaimed as bold and courageous playwriting because it
is couched in a liberalese rhetoric at once defiant and
meaningless?), so it is difficult to share his pessimism about
the future of the novel and of the public which consumes
it in its new paperback format.

The fact is that the novelist has not lost his audience.
The paperback industry has demonstrated incontrovert-
ibly that the public for the modern novel is from ten to
twenty times as large as one would have gathered from its
hard-cover sales: good novels which sell from five to
twenty thousand copies at three or four dollars sell from
fifty thousand to five hundred thousand at thirty-five or
fifty cents. This is not simply because the reprinted novels
are disguised with misleadingly vulgar covers for people
who haphazardly consume rather than read, for many of
them do not have such covers, and many could not com
pete textually with those leafed through by consumers on
the prowl for titillation. Nor is it simply because they
form part of an undifferentiated mass of westerns, myster
ies, and science fiction, for we know now that certain
paper books do not sell, and that certain others draw
appreciative correspondence from readers who would
never write letters about hard-cover novels and perhaps
never read them.

It would seem elementary that good modern novels sell
in large quantities in paper covers to a public of hitherto
unsuspected size for two perfectly good and obvious rea
sons: first, they are within the price range of people who
want to fill their shelves but cannot afford to spend fifty
dollars a year on novels; second, they are available. The
well-stocked bookshop is in all seriousness one of the
glories of Western civilization but there simply are not
enough of them to fill the vast American spaces, nor are
the twelve-hundred-odd that we do have accessible to
fast-moving, suburban-spreading commuter Americans.

Granted that the, say, 300,000 actual readers of Saul

223 The Image in the Mirror

Bellow or Carson McCullers in paperback editions are
scarcely a fraction of the millions who are nourished solely
by the television playwrights; granted even that a portion
of these thousands are haphazard buyers who consume
rather than read; nevertheless we can fairly assume the
existence of a substantial fraction as regular readers of
serious novels provided that these novels are easily ac
cessible and cheaply priced. In absolute numbers they
may be small, indeed tiny in comparison with the agency-
estimated millions who watch any given television play;
still, they are more than the two or three thousand who
buy four-dollar novels (if they were not, both the novelist
and his audience would truly be disappearing and undis-
coverable in a country of one hundred and seventy million
people).

What is more, their number is increasing. Just as Amer
ica has more autos every year, more electric blankets, more
people, so also it has more intellectuals. Of course, most
of these are going to be mass-oriented and in that mood
for liberal self -congratulation already noted, but a by no
means negligible number of the rising total are demon
strating their receptivity to what is new and upsetting:
if the number of buyers of Van Gogh prints rises in direct
ratio to the number of college graduates, so does the
number of those disturbed and excited by abstract-ex
pressionist American painters, although these latter are
few in comparison with the Van Gogh discoverers; so with
the new publics for the Bction of both the best-seller and
the more ambitious varieties. It is the responsibility of tibe
intelligent reader to determine which public to identify
himself with, and having determined, to broaden its base
among those he likes.

The more rational approach, it would seem therefore,
would not be to consign the novelist and his reader to the
ranks of a radical and hopelessly shrinking minority, but to
begin to attempt (as Knopf, Doubleday, Ballantine, and a
few other publishers have already done somewhat abor
tively) to connect the new writer and the new reader by

A Radical's America 224

making the economic leap and bringing out new novels
in cheap editions of twenty-five and fifty thousand rather
than in expensive editions of twenty-five hundred and five
thousand.

We have to consider, in addition, and finally, just what
it is that this rather special public expects of the novel
which raises the question of the position of the novelist in
our society. One of the first critics to place this question
in its contemporary context was Van Wyck Brooks, who,
in an essay entitled "The Silent Generation" (in his The
Writer in America), has opposed "curative" to "diagnostic"
writers, and has pleaded with American novelists to "break
the evil spell that weighs upon their minds."

Mr. Brooks asks:

Do not most contemporary tastes suggest that people read now
for help in the solution of their problems, their predicaments
and plights, rather than for the objective interest that readers
in so-called normal times found in Shakespeare or Moliere or
Goethe or Dickens? ... In short do not people nowadays read
mainly for aid in the quest for security, which has become the
general quest of our time in a world that has come to seem as
irremediably evil as the post-Roman world of the early Middle
Ages?

I trust that by now my own attitude toward these ques
tions has become clear, if only by implication. The best
American novelists today are not invariably the least
popular, but they are surely not the most popular, and
the odds are that most of them cannot earn a living from
their books. The most popular novelists in the United
States today, the Sloan Wilsons and the Herman Wouks,
are the "curative" writers, the novelists who do in striking
fashion "offer aid in the quest for security." A critic as
extraordinarily erudite and sensitive as Mr. Brooks would
surely not take Mr. Wouk and Mr. Wilson as his literary
examplars in preference to some of the writers I have
mentioned earlier. But it is the Wouks and the Wilsons
who are not even aware of a spell weighing upon their
minds, who are deliberately engaged in offering their

225 The Image in the Mirror

readers a "solution of their problems"; these, and the
television playwrights who, as Gore Vidal implicitly con
cedes, are destined to be the purveyors of the second-rate.

If jour best writers are "diagnostic" rather than "cura
tive," it is not because an evil spell weighs upon their
minds (at least, no more than other creative minds have
always been oppressed by an evil spell), or because they
deliberately choose to write for the coterie rather than for
the mass audience, or because they are turning their backs
on their historic function. It is rather, I am profoundly
convinced, because they are paying the penalty for work
ing in a society which has never granted the creative artist
a legitimate place in its communal life.

The unfortunate truth is that the novelist in America has
never been either an accepted member of a closely knit
intellectual elite, as has his English counterpart, or a cul
ture hero and intellectual leader, as has his French coun
terpart. There are no American novelists who speak regu
larly on radio and television to their fellow citizens as, for
example, V. S. Pritchett does in England. There are no
American novelists who write regularly on matters of
national and international interest for the daily news
papers as, for example, Francois Mauriac and Albert
Camus do in France. When Robert Penn Warren speaks
his mind as a novelist and a Southerner on the question of
segregation, the publication of his remarks is regarded as
a special coup by Life magazine instead of as a logical
part of the literate and intelligent intercourse on the
question, and must be placed between covers before it
can be soberly evaluated. When William Faulkner is in
vited by Dwight Eisenhower to form a committee of writ
ers to propose ways of making the United States better
liked, the invitation is not taken for granted as would be a
similar request to a network executive or an advertising
agency official: questions of motive inevitably arise. Even
those writers who have agreed to participate in the pro
gram must wonder whether William Faulkne/s name
would ever have occurred to Mr. Eisenhower's advisers

A Radical's America 226

(that it is unthinkable that it would ever have occurred
independently to the President is only another symptom of
the condition I am describing) if Mr. Faulkner had not
received international publicity attendant upon his accept
ance of a foreign award.

There is no logical reason why American novelists
should not be invited to participate in the formation of
public opinion as they are in other countries; nevertheless
they are not. There is no logical reason why the pro
nouncements of novelists on such questions as the control
of international waterways, the control of atomic energy,
or the control of race prejudice would be any more ridicu
lous than similar pronouncements by industrialists run
ning military establishments, generals running industrial
establishments, financiers running scientific establish
ments, and lawyer-theologians running diplomatic estab
lishments, all of them eagerly sought after on all occasions
and reproduced in all mass media; nevertheless novelists'
opinions even on cultural and humanitarian matters are
sought after only when a propaganda point is to be
scored.

The novelist in America is not only negatively regarded
as a man unfitted by background or training to contribute
to the formation of intelligent attitudes on public affairs;
he is positively regarded as a kind of freak unless he re
treats to the university or hits the jackpot in the mass
media. Inevitably what he does., too, is regarded as freak
ish, unless his book strikes it rich.

In a commercial culture in which the writer is held in so
little esteem, in which his craft is not respected, in which
there is no sense of kinship between writer and reader, we
can hardly expect that his will be the loudest in the chorus
of affirmative voices.

I hope that what I have said in the foregoing pages is
not interpreted as either a cry of pity for the poor novelist
or a plea for absolute indulgence for every piece of fiction
he publishes in this country. In actuality if we view his
task with eyes unclouded with ennui, venom, or anger that
he is not repeating the work of the eighteenth- and nine-

227 The Image in the Mirror

teenth-century masters, we must see that he is faced in
America with the most dreadful obstacles and the most
challenging raw materials, the most clamorous competi
tion and the most singular expectations, the most danger
ous pitfalls and the most extraordinary potentialities. I
venture to suggest that the coming decade's frenetic rate
of technological development, mass-media expansion, and
suburban growth will make the novelist's America of the
Sixties more different from Scott Fitzgerald's America
than Fitzgerald's America was from Edith Wharton's. In
crease in difference will mean increase in difficulties, but
we have no reason to fear that the artist of the future will
prove any more cowardly than the artist of the past.

With every passing year there will be not less, but more
people anxious to learn what he has to say. With every
passing year there will be an increasing conviction that
all of the answers are not necessarily to be gotten from the
findings of groups, committees, boards, and teams, or
from punch cards fed into machines, or even from the
efforts of men pooling their crafts and skills in the theater,
the movies, and television, but that awareness and under
standing of doubt, complexity, anguish, and triumph may
still be gained as one man listens to another, as one man
reads the words that another has written to him and to all
his kind.

If the novelist clings to that most unselfish (in its ulti
mate effects) of all selfish beliefs, faith in himself, then
even in a world seemingly more than ever aimless, irreli
gious, and trapped in its own confounding contradictions,
his voice will have to be heard. In the confused meantime,
let him inscribe on his banner the words of the great artist
whose lines inspired and hence are to be found at the
beginning as well as at the close of these reflections:

The more we consider it the more we feel that the prose pic
ture can never be at the end of its tether until it loses the
sense of what it can do. It can do simply everything, and that
is its strength and its life.

New World Writing #12, 1957

A Radical's America 228

Footnote, 1961: Since the above was written, the
situation has changed considerably in the publish
ing industry, in some ways for the better, in others
for the worse. For writer and reader of fiction, it has
altered too. "An average first novel that once sold
3,500 copies/' the New York Times Book Review
quotes Evan Thomas of Harper's as saying, "now
maybe reaches 2,000/' A Chicago bookstore is quoted
as saying that it "can't even give away a novel." A
year or two ago the sour joke used to be that if
William Faulkner were to come in to a publisher,
unknown, with The Sound and the Fury, he would
be thrown out of the office. This year I think it can
be added that if, through some fluke, The Sound and
the Fury were accepted, its publisher would "de
cline" the writer's subsequent unsalable novels. I
would not myself have admitted several years ago
what I now know to be true: that, in addition to the
published writers who can no longer feel any sense
of commitment by their publishers unless they show
signs of becoming big winners, there are good young
writers who find it difficult or impossible to find
publishers, even after years of submissions.

But even while the market for serious novels is
shrinking to the size of the poetry market, the pub
lishing industry is booming as never before. Thanks
in large part to a swelling school-age population and
a concomitant surge in the demand for textbooks,
publishing has been transformed from small, digni
fied, family-owned enterprise to Big Business. Its
stock has been put on the public market, it is attract
ing substantial investors, mergers are proceeding at
a dizzying pace. The novelist John Brooks, discussing
these matters in the Authors Guild Bulletin, and
noting that textbooks rather than trade books have

229 The Image in the Mirror

been traditionally the big moneymakers, finds that
"it is perfectly obvious that trade departments are in
danger of suffering under the impact of public stock-
ownership. The investors who buy publishing stock
and thereby enter the publishing business may
or may not be 'gentlemen/ but in either case, as
investors they have no opportunity to share in the
pleasures and satisfactions of trade-book publishing,
and are concerned only that their investment pay
dividends and appreciate in value. They are bound
to ask the question, 'Why not curtail or eliminate
entirely the unprofitable trade department? 7 and the
firm's management is bound to listen to them and
give them some kind of answer." Mr. Brooks goes on
to ask a pregnant question: "Is the quality of trade
books destined to decline because of a stockholder-
induced tendency to play safe, avoid introducing
risky new talent, and stick to frankly commercial
items and established best-sellers?"

In this uneasy situation, editors, publishers, and
booksellers close ranks. The villain of the piece is
once again the novelist. Mr. Harold Strauss of Knopf,
according to the Times Book Review, says that "the
mature people aren't writing fiction, and the young
sters have retired to some private world of their
own." Though I am painfully aware of the amount
of bad fiction being written and even published, I
must say that this strikes me as somewhat broad.

And the bookstores, the supposed link between
writer and reader, all assure us, so we are informed
by the Times Book Review, that "they could sell good
fiction, if they had it." But the unhappy truth is that
90 per cent of the bookstore proprietors wouldn't
know good fiction if they saw it. They refuse even
to stock it; surely they do not read it, any more than

A Radical's America 230

do the publishers' representatives, the traveling book
salesmen, read most of the fiction that they attempt
halfheartedly, with less and less success, to peddle
to the bookstores. The notion of the bookstore pro
prietor as dedicated to the life of the -mind and to
urging his clientele forward on the pathways of cul
ture bears about as much relation to reality as does
the AM A public relations image of the modern physi
cian, that competent technician-businessman, as a
simple, selfless, small-town Albert Schweitzer. I have
met bookmen who were such dedicated culture-
bearers in unexpected places like Colorado Springs,
and I salute them. Unfortunately there are not very
many of them in the thousand-odd American book
stores, which are doing so well on sick greeting cards,
cookbooks, dictionaries, and other items which sell
themselves and need not be read before being pur
veyed. When these merchants say they could sell
good fiction, they mean they could sell best-sellers,
a task which could as readily be discharged by an
illiterate as by a lover of fine prose.

The fact is that the bookstore no longer has a
significant role to play in the dispensing of serious
fiction. With the exception of the occasional good
book that "catches on," serious fiction simply does not
sell in bookstores in hard covers. Nor is there any
reason why it should, when under a rational order of
things one ought to be able to buy any decently
recommended new novel in a perfectly substantial
paper cover for about a dollar and a half.

Those of us who retain our belief in the vitality of
the novel and our confidence that there is an audi
ence for it larger than that represented by those few
thousand who pay five dollars for a novel must turn
our attention from the traditional trade-publisher-

231 The Image in the Mirror

bookstore channel to the potential of the paperback.
There are now available to us, it is true, more good
titles in reasonable paper editions than anyone could
read in a lifetime; but no one in this country has
yet successfully published serious original fiction in
cheap paper editions, The reasons are complex:
paperback originals are often ignored in the review
ing media; display space is all but unavailable in the
new paperback bookshops; trade-book publishers
who venture into the field are defeated too by their
lack of experience with the distribution problems
involved in merchandizing this different kind of
commodity.

What is more, the inexorable pressure of our econ
omy is exerted on the paperback industry as it is on
every other section of the mass-entertainment indus
try, which is dominated by the cult of numbers and
the hunt for the lowest common denominator. Robert
Alan Aurthur, the television playwright and pro
ducer, recently described to the readers of The
Nation how several ambitious and successful tele
vision programs were forced off the screen because
it was found that they were reaching only ten mil
lion viewers, and not the twenty, thirty, and forty
million who were staring at competitive programs.
Similarly, a novel or a paperback magazine may be
well received and even critically acclaimed, but will
be considered uneconomic by the new magnates of
paperback publishing because it will predictably sell
"only" a hundred thousand copies in contrast to
other, inferior books which can be fed into the pipe
line in larger quantities at a larger profit.

As a result, all too many good novels are still not
being made available in cheap editions. If it took
fifteen years for Jean Stafford's Boston Adventure to

A Radical's America 232

be made available in paper, it may very well take
that long for a number of unusual novels of the last
few seasons to be reprinted in cheap editions. (And
let us bear in mind the feedback: inevitably, the un
likelihood of a trade publisher's being able to realize
his 50 per cent of the reprint rights to a serious novel
is going to color his judgment as to whether he
should accept the book for his list in the first in
stance.) Mass paperback editions of good new fiction
therefore still seem out of the question.

I suspect that solutions to this dilemma will be
found only by men bold enough to bypass com
pletely the obsolete trade-publisher-bookstore road
block, and imaginative enough to make use of newly
evolving techniques in both quality paperback and
book-club publishing. The novelists are here, and
more good ones are on the way; so are the readers.
It may very well be that a book-club kind of distribu
tion of good new fiction in paper, in editions of ten
or fifteen thousand and priced at a dollar or two,
could succeed in making the connection which is
essential if writer and reader are to profit mutually.
I think we are at the threshhold of an age of intense
literary productivity; the extent to which it will
flourish may quite possibly be determined by what
we do to forge new links between those who write
and those who are refreshed and stirred by what
they read.

3.

Popular Taste and
The Caine Mutiny

In the months that have passed since the publication of
Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny, it has become some
thing of a phenomenon in the publishing business by
climbing slowly to the top of the best-seller lists without
fanfare or ballyhoo, and then staying there week after
week, month after month, until it begins to look now like
another Gone With the Wind. Why?

I should like to suggest that the answer will reveal a
good deal about the changes that have recently taken
place in the reading taste of the American public as well
as in what is known as popular culture. The best-seller, un
like the movie or even the musical comedy, is still the work
of one man, a creative craftsman of greater or lesser skill
responding directly to his sense of the public taste. In
the case of Mr. Wouk, this skill is pressed into the service
of a mythmaking that more or less corresponds to certain
ideas currently dominant in American middle-class life.
The Caine Mutiny is in every aspect a faithful reflection
of the morals, fears, and intellectual aspirations of the new
middle class, that proliferant white-collar segment of
the American community that is basically responsible for
"progressive" movies praised because they deal no mat
ter how with the problems of minorities, musical come
dies praised because their songs are filled with "social
significance/' and radio programs praised because in the
recent past, before television, they evolved a kind of
rhetorical statement that passed for poetry.

A Radical's America 236

This new middle class, many of its members the success
ful sons and daughters of struggling and bewildered im
migrants, is yearly producing larger and more avid audi
ences of high school and (increasingly) college graduates
with more leisure time than working people ever had
before. Impatient with traditional pulp stories, Western
movies, and show-girl musical comedies, they want to
feel that their intelligences are engaged by the programs
they hear, the movies they see, the books they read; and
they take it as an act of social piety and, by extension, of
artistic integrity, when these media feature favorable
stereotypes of minorities once represented by unfavorable
caricatures. At the same time they participate in a kind of
mass snobbery of which they are all but unaware, on the
one hand rejecting in angry frustration those whom they
instinctively fear and admire aristocrats, millionaires,
and serious-minded intellectuals and on the other hand
patronizing the underlying population with pseudo-demo
cratic verbiage about the "average Joe" and the "common
man.'* To a large extent they are responsible for the new
trends in popular taste because they are themselves the
very begetters of our leading practitioners of popular cul
ture, the Dore Scharys, the Stanley Kramers, the Irwin
Shaws.

Consider how The Caine Mutiny meets the needs of
this great audience. The American wartime experience is
refracted through the eyes of Willie Keith, who might be
described as the average American rich boy whom we
have come to know from the writings of J. P. Marquand
and even F. Scott Fitzgerald (there is in some ways a
remarkable similarity between Amory Elaine or Anthony
Patch and Willie): a home on Long Island, another house
in Palm Beach, four years at Princeton, a small talent for
versifying and piano playing, a domineering mother, a
love affair with a poor but honest Italian nightclub singer,
and finally a leap into Navy officers' school to avoid the
draft. In the Navy, however, he is simply a reserve officer,
a member of that middle segment of wartime society that

237 Popular Taste and The Caine Mutiny

lords it over the enlisted man and lives in fear, admiration,
and bewilderment of the regular Navy career officer.
Willie accepts assignment to a rusty old minesweeper, the
Caine, which is commanded by Captain Queeg, an Annap
olis man. It is soon apparent to everyone that Queeg is
at best a tyrannical martinet and at worst a psychopath.
A series of small but nasty incidents, described in lengthy
and convincing detail, persuades Willie and his fellow
reserve officers that Queeg is a coward, an unbalanced
disciplinarian, and finally a madman.

In some of the most interesting pages of the book, the
officers of the Caine discuss Captain Queeg in an attempt
to decide whether he is mad or simply vicious. It is
Lieutenant Thomas Keefer, intellectual, playwright, and
budding war novelist, who first discovers the obscure
naval regulations providing for the replacement of men
tally or physically incapacitated commanding officers
through a land of legal mutiny. He plants in the mind of
Lieutenant Maryk, a stolid and competent peacetime
fisherman, the seed that grows into a conviction of Queeg's
insanity. But when Maryk gets Keefer to accompany him
to Admiral Halsey's office to plead for Queeg's replace
ment, Keefer begs off at the last possible moment with
the explanation that their proof is insufficient and subject
to misinterpretation. Neither Willie nor any of his fellow
reserve officers from whose point of view Captain Queeg
is observed can think of him apart from his role as Navy
officer. A fine line divides them from Queeg and his An
napolis clubmates, who are described as either fantasti
cally tyrannical (Queeg) or infinitely wise, experienced and
compassionate (Queeg's superiors).

No effort is made to portray the enlisted men of the
Caine, except in so far as they advance the story and play
their little supernumerary roles in the mutiny. We see
them vaguely, through a veil of sympathy, although a
good deal of the action takes place in the confined quarters
of the Caine. As for the messmen, who appear only to
pour coffee, they are simply good-humored, yassuh-ing

A Radical's America 238

Rastuses. Not that there is anything of vulgar anti-Negro
prejudice in this. Here is a different kind of vulgarity,
not unlike the blind "liberalism" of the Hollywood movie
makers who attempt to represent a cross section of Amer
ica by showing us Army companies composed of bragging
Texans, tough but sentimental Brooklyn Jews, quiet and
brave Westerners, oversensitive but essentially courageous
rich men's sons, and Negro boys who are almost like every
body else. . . .

When the Caine is caught in a violent storm and seems
doomed, Queeg freezes on the bridge, unable to issue the
orders that would save the ship. At this crucial point
Maryk takes command and does save the ship, with the
passive consent of Keefer, Willie, and the other officers.
After the storm the ship returns to the United States and
Maryk is court-martialed for his unprecedented behavior;
and Willie, knowing that he, too, must stand trial if Maryk
is convicted, supports his fellow officer to the best of his
ability. Keefer protects his own career by equivocating
and refusing to swear to Queeg's madness. But Maryk is
finally acquitted, thanks to the brilliant courtroom tactics
of his counsel, Lieutenant Commander Barney Green-
wald, a crack Jewish lawyer from Albuquerque, who is
recuperating from severe burns received on active duty
as a carrier fighter pilot. Greenwald is convinced that
Maryk and his mates are guilty, but he is equally con
vinced that he can get Maryk off, and he finally succeeds,
by harping on Queeg's instability and by appealing to the
Navy's pride in its officer caste.

Keefer throws a champagne party to celebrate the sale
of his novel together with Maryk's acquittal. Greenwald
is invited, comes in drunk, and stays just long enough to
deliver an impassioned speech to the shocked officers of
the Caine and to throw his champagne in Keefer's face.
In his speech Greenwald indicates that for him the war
has been a struggle to save his grandmother from being
melted down into soap like the Jewish grandmothers of
Europe; in that struggle the Queegs regardless of their

239 Popular Taste and The Caine Mutiny

brutality or stupidity have played an essential role by
contributing their skill to the maintenance of a vital core
of defense in the years when military people and military
expenses were belittled. The Keefers have sabotaged these
defenders of freedom with their mocking cynicism, says
Greenwald, and in Captain Queeg's case, Tom Keefer not
only incited Maryk to an irresponsible, if well-meant, act
of disloyalty (for he could simply have covered up for
Queeg during the storm and then returned the ship's
command to him), but compounded his guilt by his cow
ardly testimony at Maryk's court-martial.

Here we must be struck by the correspondence between
what Mr. Wouk is saying and what the public wants to
hear. It is his thesis that the Second World War was worth
while if only because it put a stop to the enemy's slaugh
ters; that it was won by a devoted and previously trained
officer caste, despite the incompetence of individual mem
bers; and that the most insidious enemy is the man who
works to destroy confidence in his country's military lead
ership.

It must be noted first that this is a thesis which can be
and has been upheld by fascist as easily as by demo
cratic theorists. Second, and perhaps even more important,
is the identification of the intellectual as the villain of the
piece, with his cowardice and his shameful sniping at the
regular officer class. Here again it is necessary to point
out that the middle-class reading public would almost
certainly reject such a brutal assault on the intellectual
(against which one might have expected intellectuals to
rally, just as undertakers or chiropodists rally to meet
unfair representations of their professions in the movies)
if it were made by a boor or an obvious philistine. It is
symptomatic of Mr. Wouk's shrewdness that he puts his
assault on the intellectual in the mouth of Barney Green
wald, who speaks with the voice of authority, from the
"inside." For in addition to embodying civic virtue as a
wounded hero, he gained enormous financial success in
the law, a field popularly associated with the regular

A Radical's America 240

exercise of the higher faculties; he is also a member and
fighting representative of a minority group, and a passion
ate defender of an even smaller minority, the American
Indian! And it follows, therefore, that Greenwald's op
posite number, the cowardly intellectual who conceals
his inadequacy beneath a surface charm that temporarily
captivates the susceptible Willie Keith, should not be a
shabby Greenwich Village Jewish bohemian but a hand
some and successful playwright named Thomas Keefer.

If we reverse the roles, conceiving of a clean-cut Tom
Keefer charging a degenerate and decadent Barney Green-
wald with being an irresponsible intellectual whose writ
ing and preachings have had a devastating effect on Amer
ican youth, we can imagine the justified protest that The
Caine Mutiny would have aroused.

After he returns to the Caine, Willie, who had admired
Keefer, is forced to concede that Greenwald was right.
Keefer is now captain of the Caine and Willie his execu
tive officer. In the closing weeks of the war, the ship is
hit by a Kamikaze, and Keefer, to his own shame and dis
gust, hastily abandons ship, leaving Willie to save the
Caine and the men who have remained aboard, and re
turns only when the danger is past. Willie is given com
mand of the Caine after Keefer leaves the ship in Japan,
and he sails home to New York a man, a hero, prepared to
cut loose from his mother and to fight for the hand of the
Italian girl who had seemed beneath him at the beginning
of the war.

It must be noted that Mr. Wouk is an exceptionally good
storyteller. Willie Keith's adventures, travails, and loves
are handled with a directness and a swiftness that bear
the mark of the practiced professional writer. But this is
true of a good many other novels, even novels dealing with
the Second World War, that have not had a tenth the
success of this book. What we must consider is the special
quality that has made The Caine Mutiny seem important
to so many people.

It is a quality not to be found in many best-sellers that

241 Popular Taste and The Caine Mutiny

depended for their popularity simply on romance, sword-
play, decolletages, and civil wars. For those books, despite
obvious attractions, cannot possibly involve the modern
middle-class reader's deepest feelings about sex, war, and
society, in a way that flatters him into the belief that he
is participating in a thoughtful intellectual experience.

Let us turn to Willie's love affair. It is one of the novel's
main themes and also serves technically both as counter
point and relief. When Willie first meets Marie Minotti
they fall in love, but are kept from intimacy by the bitter
sweet realization that their social backgrounds are worlds
apart, for he is still under his mother's domination and she
is only the daughter of a Bronx immigrant. So far their
relation has a certain comfortable familiarity tragedies
have been written on just this theme and innumerable
soap operas, too. There is, to be sure, a certain flavor of
the archaic in tracing the difficulties of a love affair be
tween two young people who come from utterly different
milieux; when J. P. Marquand treats it, as he does so
often, he removes the love affair a generation or two from
the current reality, presenting it as part of the recollections
of an aging man. Furthermore, the liberal-minded middle-
class reader is well aware of the impediments that have
been removed from the path of true love by the withering
away of the uppermost and nethermost classes in Ameri
can society and the consequent expansion of the middle
sector. Nevertheless he is also reminded by his parents and
by columnists, whose sensible advice to the lovelorn is
increasingly spiced with modern psychiatric lingo, of the
dangers inherent in romance between young people whose
family backgrounds are "incompatible."

In any case, Willie cannot bring himself to break off
with Marie, and when he returns to the West Coast from
his first Pacific cruise, he impetuously goes to bed with
her. Here the reader is brought from the world of im
possible romance into a world that he knows perfectly well
exists. The author makes it quite clear that the couple

A Radical's America 242

have transgressed, although they are young, healthy, and
heedless; thus the reader has the double advantage of
feeling that the love affair is realistic while protecting
his moral sense. Marie, however, refuses to repeat the
experience with Willie, who appreciates her new-found
reserve, but begins to wonder if he can possibly love a girl
who has given herself to him so easily, even if only once.

Although the reader knows that Willie is still rationaliz
ing his snobbishness, Willie goes on torturing himself until
his naval experiences bring him maturity and the need
for permanent companionship. When he returns to New
York in command of the Caine at the end of the war, he
finds Marie singing for a prominent dance-band leader,
and apparently living with him too. But now Willie is no
longer a boy. He stands his ground and announces to
Marie that he is going to take her away from the band
leader and marry her; she, fearing that Willie is simply
feeling sorry for her, reveals that she has not realty been
sleeping with the bandleader, although everyone thinks
so. At the close of the book it seems fairly certain that
Willie will win the girl.

Here I think is an almost perfect correspondence be
tween current sexual morality and the realities of the
American experience. For a reading public caught be
tween Sunday school training and exposure to the Kinsey
Report, the dilemma of Willie Keith, although it can add
no new dimension to their lives or depth to their experi
ence, must seem completely "true to life" and overwhelm
ingly poignant. Even the falsity of his hard-won "matu
rity," which enables him to assert his love by suddenly
disregarding the profound social differences between him
self and Marie, is accepted by an audience eager for a
description of love more meaningful than moonlight and
roses but which still does not deprive them of the con
solation of a happy ending. Virtue must still be rewarded;
it is only that the rules defining virtue have been modified
by the economic necessity for delayed marriages and by
the back seats of forty million automobiles. Willie's virtue

243 Popular Taste and The Caine Mutiny

in loving Marie despite her affair with the bandleader is
rewarded with the revelation that she has not really slept
with the man. It is as though Mr. Wouk were subcon
sciously attuned to the precise degree of sexual liberation
which the popular mind is ready to grant to American
youth, as well as to the exact amount of traditional
romance with which the depiction of the liberation must
be leavened.

Indeed, any analysis of the most successful components
of popular culture would compel us to refer to the ability
of men like Mr. Wouk to let us have our cake and eat it,
to stimulate us without unduly provoking us, to make us
feel that we are thinking without really forcing us to think.

Just as Willie's virtue is rewarded with the revelation of
his girl's purity, so are his heroism and his steadfast sup
port of Maryk rewarded with a medal, a command, and a
hero's return. Keefer, on the other hand, is punished for
his sophistry, irresponsibility, and cowardice, not by offi
cial action, but what is worse for him by the con
sciousness of his ineradicable inadequacy despite his liter
ary success. And Maryk, in what is perhaps the neatest
touch of all, is formally acquitted of the "mutiny/' thanks
to the brilliant defense of Greenwald, but suffers for his
presumption in deposing Queeg by being deprived forever
of the possibility of realizing his life's ambition a career
as an officer in the regular Navy. Thus, the lives of all the
principals are composed in accordance with their just de
serts, i.e., with accepted standards of reward and retribu
tion.

What the new middle class wanted and found in The
Caine Mutiny was an assurance that its years of discom
fort and hardship in the Second World War were not in
vain, and that its sacrifices in a permanent war economy
and its gradual accommodation to the emergence of the
military as a dominant element in civil life have been not
only necessary but praiseworthy. More than this, it re
quires such assurance in a sophisticated form, allowing it
to feel that alternatives have been thoughtfully considered

A Radical's America 244

before being rejected: in The Caine Mutiny ample space is
given over to consideration of "psychoanalytic" motiva
tions in Queeg and in Keefer too, and even the Cain-Abel
analogy is mentioned as evidence that the title is not an
unmotivated slip of the pen.

The taste of the middle-class reading public is condi
tioned by an increasing prosperousness in a military econ
omy, tending to reinforce conservative moral concepts
and to strengthen a traditional envy and distrust of intel
lectuals and dissidents. But its taste is modified by an in
debtedness to its European forebears, New Deal heritage,
and continuously higher level of education. Thus it is in
clined toward a sophisticated and hospitable acceptance
of those entertainments of the vanished European aristoc
racy which have flowed into the mainstream of Western
liberal culture through the channels of mass production
and distribution. Witness the phenomenal increase of bal
let audiences and the number of people buying "classical"
records. Writers like Herman Wouk will inevitably arise
directly from this class to verbalize its inchoate and often
contradictory attitudes. Indeed Mr. Wouk's background
he has combined a faithful adherence to Orthodox Juda
ism and a career as a radio gag writer with no apparent
discomfort has prepared him admirably for his task as a
practitioner of popular culture.

Partisan Review, March- April 1953

Exurbia Revisited

SALES MGR

Intangible exp, must be able to move effectively
at top mgmt level & effectively understand "Big
Business" problems. Should be able to handle

12 martinis 12,000

Advertisement in New York Times,
February 5, 1956

I looked up recently after a sojourn abroad to find that a
new word had sneaked into the language while my back
was turned, like the 8:55 crawling into the station at Wee-
hawken. The word is "exurbanite," and unlike the West
Shore Railroad it is probably here to stay, since it fulfills
what the social workers call an unmet need. Its coiner,
A. C. Spectorsky, like Sinclair Lewis before him, has used
it to title his book.

Mr. Spectorsky's The Exurbanites is both a good and an
exasperating book. It is good because it is a pioneering in
vestigation into the mores of the new middle class who
have spilled out of their city apartments into the country
areas beyond the suburbs and who have become com
muters but remain big-city types. Mr. Spectorsky casts a
wide net and inevitably comes up with many an interest
ing specimen. His territory includes Bucks County (Pa.),
Nassau, Westchester, and Rockland Counties (N. Y.), and
Fairfield County (Conn.), which means that he has under
examination a variety of New York City-based salary-
earners, ranging from $75,000-a-year network executives
close to the seat of real power if not actually warming it
themselves, downwards to impecunious young agency
men desperately anxious to look as though they are on the
way up. Since New York is the center of the "communica-

A Radical's America 246

tions" industry, the exurbanites are inevitably associated
with it in one way or another.

Mr. Spectorsky has been to these exurbs indeed, he is
frighteningly knowledgeable about the minutiae of daily
life in all five localities and he has taken the trouble to
gather some figures on income, railroad commutation, and
the like, so that his study is grounded in reality, even
though highly impressionistic. What is more, he is not
afraid to say that exurbanites are manipulators rather than
producers, husbands rather than lovers, providers rather
than fathers, urban-focused rather than rural-focused,
middlebrow rather than individual in their tastes, ambi
tious rather than visionary in their aspirations, enslaved
rather than liberated by their incomes. For his boldness
alone, Mr. Spectorsky would be entitled to our respectful
attention. The Exurbanites is a more original and provoca
tive description of what is going on around us than the
pronouncements of many another commentator with more
impressive academic qualifications.

But I said that it is an exasperating book. This is partly
because it has been hoked up to sell, although I for one
prefer my reading matter about the American scene in a
lively style rather than in the tone of a monograph for the
American Sociological Review. No, what is disturbing is
that although Mr. Spectorsky has lifted the curtain on a
desolate new landscape, he himself insists (when not busy
cheerily minimizing the desolation he has described for
278 pages: "Not only do they do the best they can at the
difficult and exciting job of living, but the job they do is,
under the circumstances, often remarkably good") that the
desolation is limited to the five areas named above and to
those people who work in mid-Manhattan between 42nd
Street and 57th Street, between Lexington Avenue and
6th Avenue. I am not merely raising the petty objection
that Mr. Spectorsky has deliberately narrowed his sights.
Of course, when he says that an exurbanite "cannot or will
not remember the time when he did not grind his pepper
fresh from a small mill" he is abstracting snobbisms as

247 Exurbia Revisited

common to certain Greenwich Villagers, Detroiters, Buf-
f alonians, and San Franciscans as to exurbanites witness
the mail-order advertisements for "smart" household ob
jects in the New Jorker, Far more important is the fact
that this book includes a clinical analysis of certain devel
oping traits in the national character, traits which if
there is any substance to the analysis add up to a con
demnation of the entire way of life which is producing
them, while its author persistently denies that these traits
are anything more than the sadly amusing characteristics
of a severely restricted group.

This insistence I find unacceptable. It is of course per
fectly true that a special kind of tension is engendered
within families when the husband is bound to a train
schedule and the wife is forced back on her own resources
twelve hours a day. But Mr. Spectorsky would have us be
lieve also that only in exurban families is one day a week
given over to the children by fathers relieving their guilt
at not having participated in their offspring's lives for the
other six days; or that "fear, insecurity, living beyond one's
means, drinking too much" are peculiar to "life in exurbia";
or that it is only exurban wives whose "most frequent com
plaint" is that "their husbands are sexually inadequate."

One would assume that the principal reason for Mr.
Spectorsky's determination to pin these, and many other,
miseries like so many badges of dishonor on the breasts of
the exurbanites is that it sustains a salable thesis: outland-
ers which means all other possible book buyers will
predictably read with pleasure books exposing the heart
break behind the glamour that is Manhattan and environs;
while exurbanites themselves, always eager for self -anato
mizing (the advertising men among them, Mr. Spectorsky
justly points out, are pathologically sensitive to criticism
and hence addicted to gratuitous self-justification), wall
also search out anything that analyzes their life-patterns.
And indeed The Exurbanites is a commercially successful
book.

But there is also a negative reward for Mr. Spectorsky in

A Radical's America 248

his special approach. Since he disclaims any general va
lidity to his survey beyond the confines of those in the
communications industry in the New York area, he is
thereby absolved from the necessity of commenting even
in passing on the implications of his picture of exurban life
for American society as a whole. He can end on the jocu
lar, things-aren't-really-that-bad note that I have already
quoted, and he can even invite us to grin wryly at this col
lective portrait of a group of sad sacks, to take it not as a
descriptive analysis of a snowballing tendency but simply
as a compendium of lively anecdotes. And of course if
that's all we're after . . . Mr. Spectorsky is a first-rate
case-history teller, and he stimulates us to circulate others
that he has not included: one hears, for example, of exur-
banite wives in Nassau County who have formed a car
pool to commute to their Central Park South psychoana
lysts . . .

But some of us may be stubborn enough to go on believ
ing that social problems demand social solutions rather
than individual solutions, or at least consideration of pos
sible common avenues of progress. Implicit throughout
Mr. Spectorsky's book is a recommendation of the course
he appears to have followed himself: "If you don't like it
where you are, why don't you go back to the City? 5 ' Which
is like saying: "If you don't like what you see and hear on
television and radio, why don't you turn them off?*' The
drift from City to Suburb and beyond is not confined to
the New York area; it is nationwide. The drift is not tem
porary; it is irreversible. The new stratum of white-collar
technicians and idea men is not confined to the New York
area; in the Los Angeles and Chicago areas, and indeed in
every sizable American community, the communications
industry is burgeoning branch offices as well as local ad
vertising agencies, TV stations, newspapers, department
stores, public relations outfits are claiming an ever-larger
proportion of the ever-growing white-collar community. If
these people do not live like the New York exurbanite it is
not for lack of trying.

249 Exurbia Revisited

What is more, there is an intimate interrelationship be
tween the problems of the exurbanites and those of the
proletariat. Just how much difference is there between the
worker enslaved to the time clock he must punch twice
daily and the exurbanite enslaved to the train he must catch
twice daily? Between the worker alienated from his tools,
his craftsmanship, and a genuine relation to what he pro
duces, and the communications industry operator dealing
in "intangibles," able to handle twelve martinis but with
no more proof than the worker at the end of the weary day
that he has actually produced anything at all? Between
the debt-burdened worker, oftener than economists know
shouldering two jobs at once or relying on a second family
wage-earner to help pay the freight on his mortgaged TV,
car, washer, house, and kids, and the living-beyond-his-
means exurbanite, taking his work home at night and
swearing that he could break even on just three thousand
more a year? Between the worker's prematurely aged
wife, with her backaches and her notorious lack of sexual
fulfillment, and the exurbanite's isolated and overworked
wife, with her fifteen-hour day and her (according to Mr.
Spectorsky, at any rate) notorious lack of sexual fulfill
ment? Between the worker who has become, as we used to
say, bourgeoisified, whose main conversational topics are
the soldier's staples of cars, women, and spectator sports,
who is becoming transformed into a TV-passive mass man,
and the exurbanite who mistrusts, envies, and ridicules the
"egghead," who is ahead of the highbrows "in everything
but the most intellectual aspects of life," and who lends
himself so easily to caricature as a faceless type?

What I am suggesting is that, even as the sheer numeri
cal mass of the proletariat or at least its percentile propor
tion to the rest of the population is shrinking, its stigmata
are perhaps being transferred to the swelling millions
of suburbanites and exurbanites. Are we actually be
coming a nation of tense, anxious, and wretched white-
collar proletarians, with nothing to lose but our uninsured
TV antennas? I am grateful to Mr. Spectorsky for having

A Radical's America 250

provoked me, through his trenchant and admirably or
ganized book, to raise this question, even though he him
self has thus far backed off from considering it.

Dissent, Spring 1956

Popular Taste and the
Agonies of the Young

Within recent months, the Leopold-Loeb murder case has
served as the theme of a movie by Alfred Hitchcock;
novels by Meyer Levin, James Yaffe, and Mary-Carter
Roberts; a paperback case history; and a Broadway dram
atization of Mr. Levin's most successful and fascinating
Compulsion.

Superficially, it would seem obvious that this terrible
murder and its aftermath a sensational courtroom trial
involving two wealthy, brilliant, wayward boys, the most
successful criminal lawyer in the country, and a battery of
conflicting psychiatrists should prove magnetically at
tractive to writers. But thirty-three years have elapsed
since the kidnap-murder, and we are surely entitled to
wonder why the novelists of the Twenties, the Thirties, or
the Forties did not seize on the drama. Inevitably, too, a
parallel question arises: why now the Leopold-Loeb case
rather than the Sacco-Vanzetti case?

The answers to these questions are interrelated. For
many of us, both Leopold-Loeb and Sacco-Vanzetti have
come to represent two crucial illuminations of American
life in the Twenties. And if numerous writers and their
publics are currently intrigued with that era (for reasons
beyond the scope of this brief discussion), the fastening on
one sensational trial rather than on the other should be
fairly clear to us in the Fifties.

The Sacco-Vanzetti trial was an ending; the Leopold-
Loeb case a beginning. It is not just that Sacco and Vanzetti

A Radical's America 252

were in all likelihood completely innocent and were re
vered as martyrs throughout the civilized world, while
Leopold and Loeb were admittedly guilty and were the
universal objects of fascinated loathing although that is
not irrelevant. It is not even that Sacco and Vanzetti were
poor and Leopold and Loeb were rich although that,
too, bears on the problem.

It is, most importantly, it seems to me, that the Sacco-
Vanzetti case is the last instance in recent history in which
the American people were stirred in great numbers to pro
test an apparent and gross miscarriage of justice. The is
sues were clear-cut, the verdict appalling.

Just so, the Leopold-Loeb case may be viewed as one of
the first instances in contemporary American history in
which official cognizance was taken of the vast murky
areas beyond such deceptively simple words as guilt and
insanity. The issues were as clouded as the motives of the
boys, the trial heard by a single judge an admission of
the inadequacy of jury democracy, the judge's verdict an
uncomfortable compromise between revenge and therapy
dictated by psychiatric testimony.

It is just this ambiguity, just this realization indeed, at
times this reveling in the fact that there are no simple
answers, that has proved so appealing to readers and writ
ers of the Fifties. In an age which prides itself on its so
phistication, its appreciation of complexity, even, at times,
on its impotence, it is only natural that Sacco- Vanzetti
should be scanted in favor of Leopold-Loeb as a key to
understanding the Twenties.

Perhaps one day our bolder novelists will see in the
Rosenberg case the usable tragedy of still another famous
pair whose travail illuminates certain aspects of American
life not revealed by the two earlier trials, each of which
might be said to expose one side of the Rosenberg coin,
counterfeit as it was for both accusers and accused.

I mean by this that questions accepted as given, or at
least questions accepted by both parties in the America of
the Leopold-Loeb and Sacco- Vanzetti trials, became in

253 Popular Taste and the Agonies of the Young

the America of the Rosenberg trial public relations ma
terials, to be manipulated by counsel for both the accused
and the State:

The question of race and religion. There was no felt
need in the Twenties to prosecute Leopold-Loeb with
Jewish lawyers, or Sacco-Vanzetti with Italian lawyers, or
to hear the trial of either pair with a Jewish or an Italian
judge. Nor was there a concomitant necessity for either
defense counsel or the various defense committees to pro
claim the loyal Jewishness or Italian-ness of the defend
ants of the Twenties, as was done with such nauseating
thoroughness in the case of the Rosenbergs.

The question of politics. There was no felt need in the
Twenties to deny that Sacco and Vanzetti were committed
and dedicated anarchists. Nor was there a concomitant
necessity for the defense to portray the two as innocent
liberals who preferred not to spell out their beliefs because
the climate was currently somewhat unfavorable to an
archists, because nobody had the right to ask them such
personal questions, and because they weren't anarchists at
all but just patriotic liberty-loving Americans.

The hypocrisy or the counterfeit, as I have called it
of att sides in the Rosenberg case, from the sanctimonious
judge who heaped on the heads of the wretched couple
the onus for Korea and World War III, to the advisers of
the defense show, insistent on portraying the two (with
their solemn approval) as flag-waving, Sabbath-observing
innocents who had never heard of international Stalinism,
was so horrifying as to make the Leopold-Loeb case seem
in retrospect a model of well-balanced jurisprudence and
honest grappling with presently insoluble problems.

The American mass public, however, is not currently in
trigued with Meyer Levin's presentation of the Leopold-
Loeb case solely because of the honest bewilderment of
the judge, or the impassioned humanitarianism of old
Clarence Darrow. If the symbolic attitudes of these men,
and the fathomless depths they attempted to plumb, help
to account for intellectuals* fascination with Leopold-Loeb,

A Radical's America 254

there is another aspect, not so far touched upon in the pre
ceding paragraphs, that may explain the rapt attention
given by a wider audience to productions like Compulsion.
I refer to the fact that Nathan Leopold and Robert Loeb
were what we call in the Fifties teen-agers. A special land
of lost teen-agers, in fact: juvenile delinquents.

The lost souls whom the readers, the general public, of
the Twenties cared about were the Jake Barneses and
Lady Bretts, the Jay Gatsbys and Daisy Buchanans. The
youngsters were busy, as always, having fun; it was the
adults who were in deep trouble. (It is interesting to ob
serve in passing how stolidly the audiences of the Fifties
gaze upon the spectacle of a thick-waisted Tyrone Power
and a wrinkled Erroll Flynn earnestly and capably por
traying those doomed young comedians of The Sun Also
Rises, in contrast to the enthusiasm with which they greet
movies of, by, and about teen-agers.)

What has happened in the intervening thirty years is
that the country has been turned over not to the wives, the
widows, and the moms, but to the young. Reading Life
magazine and the slicks, from Woman's Day of the A&P to
McCalFs, The Magazine of Togetherness; seeing the mov
ies of the Fifties, from the big-screen Technicolor jobs like
Rebel Without a Cause to the modest black and white
films like The Young Stranger; glancing at the frightened
newspapers, one cannot but be struck by the emphasis
placed on the dress, the doings, die designs for living of
the young.

It is understandable that manufacturers and distribu
tors should concentrate on the fastest-growing market in
the country. What is somewhat more worthy of considera
tion is why in the Fifties the one big problem whose exist
ence is universally admitted and discussed in the United
States is that of adolescent disturbance. More than dis
turbance, domination of the American scene.

In the Twenties, Leopold and Loeb were exceptional:
their comfortable situation, their college cleverness, their
social ease, were in themselves so striking as to aggravate

255 Popular Taste and the Agonies of the Young

the passions directed against the boys and their crime. To
day those qualities could be described as almost typical of
a substantial segment of American youth.

Is it not extraordinary that during the very period when
immigration to the United States slowed to a trickle, dur
ing the very period when the last immigrant generation
was frantically assimilating itself into the American way, it
should have been the immigrant attitude toward children
which triumphed over the traditional Yankee attitude?

The immigrant faith, often the first article of that faith,
was that one must sacrifice all for the children. One came
to America in the first place for the children; one labored
in sweatshops, coal mines, steel mills., in order that the
children might have the American opportunity. One broke
one's back, burned out one's eyes, even yielded one's ideals,
in order that the children might have the chance at a col
lege education, a firm grip on the success ladder.

So today the first article of faith is that everything that
carries contemporary sanction, from togetherness to reli
gious revivalism, is being done for the sake of the children.

The parents move from city to suburb not for them
selves but for the sake of the children (I speak now of
explicit justifications and rationalizations which may not
always coincide with actual reasons); the father commutes
to work not from choice but so that his children can grow
up in the fresh air; the mother becomes a chauffeur not to
fulfill a secret desire but because there is no other way,
even with the car pools, for the children to get to and from
public school, Sunday school, ballet school, music school;
and finally the parents hand over their inner selves to the
ministration of the community church, not because they
believe, or because they expect the act of capitulation will
help them, but because they think the children must have
"something" in which to believe, even if they themselves
need not.

The kind of children emerging from school, church, and
station wagon in the Fifties would seem best exemplified
by their heroes and the heroes of their parents too: Elvis

A Radical's America 256

Presley, Sal Mineo, Natalie Wood, even James MacArthur,
and the apotheosis of the entire generation - the late
James Dean. The face of each is eloquent of the torment
ing discontent of an American youth for which everything
is being done, to which everything is being given except
a reason for living and for building a socially useful life.

The face of each is one facet of the composite faces of
the rich, handsome, gifted, doomed Leopold and Loeb.
The sullen sulkiness of the speed-hungry Presleyan, whose
motorcycle is his religion; the liquid-eyed wretchedness of
Mineo, the immigrant's son, who cannot belong; the
bouncy emptiness of Natalie Wood, who would die like
Joan if there were an ideal worth dying for; the clean-cut
loneliness of the unloved MacArthur, whose Dad has a
closetful of suits but no time for Son; and the astonishingly
tortured and grief-ridden countenance of the Dean of
them all, dead in his Porsche at twenty-four these speak
more eloquently of the essential quality of American life
in the Fifties than once did Andy Hardy, Harold Teen,
Our Gang, or Shirley Temple for their day.

Is it any wonder that the terrible story of Leopold and
Loeb should return to challenge us more potently today
than ever before, a ghost returned to haunt our uneasy
consciences?

Dissent, Spring 1958

Footnote, 1961: Depending on the angle of vision,
there have been head-shaking and huzzahing in com
ment on the San Francisco student riots, the young
Freedom Eiders, and the student demonstrators
around the U. S. protesting the Bomb, capital punish
ment, segregation, Cuban aggression. But all of these
students taken together constitute a mere fraction of
those who were engaged this spring in a different
land of coast-to-coast protest movement. In Fort
Lauderdale, Florida, in Galveston, Texas, in Santa

257 Popular Taste and the Agonies of the Young

Monica, California, thousands of college students
have battled police, not for the dignity of their fellow
men or the inviolability of human life, but for their
own inalienable right to invade these beach areas
during their vacations, to carouse, to neck en masse
in public, to litter the ground with the beer cans that
are the vessels of their ambition, their esthetic sensi
bility, their rebellion. So far there have been no
newsreel propaganda films made of these riots, nor
have any Congressional committees announced their
relentless determination to get to the bottom of this
violent defiance of constituted authority. As long as
it is possible for thousands of young people to call
themselves college students, and to demonstrate to
the world that they have nothing more important to
do with their time, nothing more important to do
with their lives, than to foregather for weeks on end
at public playgrounds in order to commit a public
nuisance for just that long our society will stand
condemned as one which, as I said above, gives
American youth everything except a reason for living
and for building a socially useful life.

Popular Music and the
New Men of Skill

Not long ago there took place in my neighborhood a most
exasperating and illuminating debate on the effects of
popular music on musical standards, between Donald Wax-
man, an uncompromising young composer, and Mitchell
Miller, the distinguished oboe virtuoso, and presided over
by Robert Rice, who had written a profile of Mr. Miller
for the New Yorker.

Mr. Miller's remarks and the attitude toward popular
culture that they reveal are deserving of a wider audience
than that afforded by the roomful of his neighbors and
admirers whom he addressed in Rockland County, and I
should like to make them available here in somewhat ab
breviated form. Mitch Miller has not been content to be a
"working classical musician," his own modest description
of a career that has won him international recognition as
one of the great oboists of our day. He is also "A & R
Man" (Artists and Repertoire) for Columbia Records,
which means that as director of that company's popular
music recording division he has been responsible for the
phenomenon of Johnny Ray and for a considerable amount
of the music that we hear over the radio and on juke
boxes.*

* Footnote, 1961: Mr. Miller has since, of course, gone
on to become a familiar star and personality in his
own right. Those who do not Sing Along with Mitch
have surely seen his smiling countenance in the vodka
ads.

259 Popular Music and the New Men of Skill

It was perhaps unfortunate that Mr. Waxman chose pri
marily to demonstrate how popular music has declined in
basic melodic themes since the Twenties and Thirties. Mr.
Miller was consequently freed from the necessity of ad
dressing himself directly to the subject. He countered
Mr. Waxman's playing, with acid comments., of such rec
ords as "The Little White Cloud That Cried;' with his
own company's recordings of popular hits, also punctuated
with irreverent and amusing remarks.

But to Mr. Waxman's complaints that everything is now
geared to the juke box, that artificiality has replaced spon
taneity, and that current musical sentimentality is a hybrid
of Salvation Army brass and youngsters screaming for
more, Mr. Miller had a seemingly endless variety of glib
and picturesquely worded retorts.

There was the incontrovertible assurance that the rec
ord companies are giving the public what it wants. That
this may evoke memories of similar pronouncements by
bordello operators and publishers of sado-masochist "mys
tery" books should not consequently render it nugatory.
For, more than that, thanks to LP> the record companies
are now giving the public everything it wants, from wail
ing balladeers to Beethoven's chamber music. The manu
facturers, men of taste though they are, simply grapple
with reality when they proceed from the incontestable
truth that the public prefers Johnny Ray to the Budapest
Quartet. They are consoled in this unhappy situation by
a keen awareness that the sales of pop recordings are a
thinly disguised blessing in so far as they make it possible
to produce recordings of classical or modern music which
will predictably be unprofitable ... or comparatively so.
(Here again the similarity of the argument to the suave
Sunday-supplement press releases of paper-book publishers
and movie producers indeed of all businessmen who
seem to conceive of themselves as colossi with one foot in
mass media and the other in class media should not be
interpreted as necessarily weakening its validity,)

But Mitch Miller's most sophisticated defense of the

A Radical's America 260

kind of music now being manufactured for mass consump
tion was almost lost in die shuffle of those who wanted the
floor to air their own prejudices and confusions. Music, he
observed, is the most transitory of all the arts; it whizzes
past the ear and is gone. Those who play classical records,
as well as those who drop their nickles into juke boxes,
often do not even listen to it, but merely allow it to fill the
air while they drink, dance, eat, talk. Obviously, then, the
general response to music is basically emotional. The lis
tener who does not know counterpoint can only respond
emotionally to Beethoven's Great Fugue, regardless of
how much more highly he may value his response over
that of the hillbilly-music enthusiast. Even the musically
educated listener, technically trained to follow Beethoven's
fantastically inventive convolutions of counterpoint, is in
the end having an emotional experience too, for what else
is an intellectual appreciation that is so deeply felt as to
be moving in itself?

Having thus aroused the guilt feelings of the entire au
dience (all of whom must surely at one time or another
have listened with only half an ear to good music, or re
gretted the lack of training which effectively precludes the
higher appreciation), Mr. Miller was able to press forward
unchallenged to another level of discourse. Who is to say
whether one type of emotional response is superior to an
other? In a free society, no one has the right to deprive his
fellows of a variety of emotional experience which he may
disapprove of or find distasteful. Popular music serves the
masses who work for a living; the novelty hit enables the
workingman to "have a ball" after a hard days work; the
lyrics of "I Believe" put into singable words the philo
sophical banalities which the proletarian feels but cannot
express (and is therefore, we are assured, the biggest hit in
the world, even played in churches); the recording of
"Ebb Tide/' complete with sea gulls and flowing water, is
released during the hot weather, and makes stifling hu
manity feel cool; Miss Doris Day's singing of "Secret
Love" appeals not only to adolescent lovers but to reminis-

261 Popular Music and the New Men of Skill

cent ones as well, to all who are receptive to a nostalgic
evocation of their first inarticulate romance.

One cannot help but suspect that such a leveling, "demo
cratic*' defense of meretricious music, when made by a re
nowned performer of discriminating musical taste, must
conceal a boundless contempt for the mass audience. Es
sentially it is the semiaffectionate contempt for the sucker,
of the pitchman for the rube, of the procurer for his cus
tomer; here we find it extended to encompass not only
the lowbrow, but the middlebrow and highbrow as well
all, in short, who consume music but are not so fortunate
as to make it ... or to promote it.

One of the promoters happened to be in the audience, a
prominent disk jockey who took irate exception to Mr.
Waxman's pointing out that in current popular music the
melodic line is thin and the emphasis is on audio-tech
nology. Himself a musician, trained at several of our lead
ing institutions, he had left WQXR (America's outstanding
middlebrow radio station) because, as he put it, he could
no longer bear to listen to the endless repetition of the
same forty albums of classical music. (There was no men
tion of money. Nor had there been by Mr. Miller.) He was
satisfied, however, when he heard Mr. Waxman admit that
he did not listen to the radio (although he too had once
been associated with it professionally) and then utter the
heresy that he did not believe unqualifiedly in recordings,
that Mr. Waxman had thereby disqualified himself as a
commentator on the musical scene. The implication was
that departure from the intolerable middlebrow world was
morally sanctioned if it took one to the democratic (and
profitable) precincts of the lowbrow, but had to be con
demned as an atrocious manifestation of snobbism if it led
to the segregated area of the highbrow.

The arguments of the disk jockey, undoubtedly a man
of sensibility and taste, paralleled those of Mr. Miller.
Both defended popular music against the attacks of those
who had no right to attack it. Why no right? Because they
expressed reserve as to the inherent value of phonograph

A Radical's America 262

records, because they could not listen to popular music on
the radio without becoming ill and hence could not be
au courant, or simply because as laymen they were intimi
dated by the superior technical qualifications of the de
fenders. After all, you can't buck success in the U.S.A.,
whether in business or in high art and Mitch Miller has
it both ways.

But the appearance of the disk jockey served as a re
minder that Mr. Miller is not merely a successful middle
man, peddling a commodity already in existence and
already in demand. He is an important part of a vast appa
ratus devoted to the manufacturing of public taste and to
the conditioning of that taste through constant reiteration
(the disk jockey and the juke box), and he cannot escape
responsibility for his share in the creation of a mass de
mand for mediocrity and worse.

The salesmen of popular culture are anxious for the
aware and the educated to believe what they would ap
parently like to believe about themselves: that they are
merely filling a need. The exigencies of mass production
of the mass media and the attendant necessity for carefully
calculated programs of saturation must surely compel
them to devote an increasingly large part of their business
lives to the stimulation of a desire for junk among the im
pressionable young and among millions of ordinary citi
zens who, while they may be receptive, have not been ob
served taking to the streets in demonstration of their
demand for greater quantities of that junk. They would be
less than human if they did not readily subordinate this
aspect of their activities in favor of an emphasis on the
obvious proposition that their junk finds a market.

But this is an old complaint. It has been brought against
the popular-culture merchants with depressing regularity,
and there appear to be no grounds at present for hoping
that it may be safely abated as the cultural level rises. Yet
the terms of the complaint may have to be revised as the
ranks of the culture businessmen are infiltrated by the new
men of skill, who are more adept at the art of self-justifica-

263 Popular Music and the New Men of Skill

tion without the aid of a corps of public relations experts
hired to mediate their case to an increasingly knowledge
able public. Mitch Miller can be seen as the musical coun
terpart of Dore Schary; as Schary supplanted Louis B.
Mayer, so Miller has supplanted an earlier generation of
cigar-chewing Tin Pan Alley vulgarians and additional
examples could be adduced from fields other than popular
music and Hollywood movies.

With the gradual shift of control of the mass media to
the hands of educated technicians there is a concomitant
shift in the defensive rationale of the culture merchants,
and in their resentful mistrust of the egotism and super
ciliousness of those who still proclaim their belief in the
primary importance of the individual, self-centered crea
tor in the arts. The most heartfelt attacks on the "irrespon-
sibles" and the "esthetes" as subverters of the democratic
diffusion of culture are coming not from those who have
traditionally sought the honor of sniping at highbrows, but
from the new men of skill, who regard themselves not
without a certain justification as both hberal-minded
and cultivated.*

It was hardly to be expected that these new men of skill
would seek to justify their conduct in the terms of their
predecessors, who could speak bluntly about being in busi
ness to make money. What was not foreseen, however, was
the contempt for the consumer that would lurk behind
every platitudinous protest of faithful service to the mass

* Footnote., 1961: Such an educated mass-media ex
ecutive of the new generation as Robert Sarnoff, writ
ing for the Saturday Evening Post and testifying
before the Federal Communications Commission, be
lieves that a good offense is the best defense: Televi
sion, it appears, is if anything too intellectual and too
far ahead of the masses. The argument must be read
to be believed.

A Radical's America 264

spectrum of mass taste. Can it be that this contempt serves
to screen from the very ones who harbor it a self-contempt
so deep that to reveal it would be unbearable?

Dissent, Summer 1954

Be Happy, Go Liberal

In recent years there has been an increasing tendency on
the part of certain of my contemporaries (roughly, those
who were undergraduates in the Thirties) to regard interna
tional communism as one vast scheme designed solely to
make them look ridiculous. Indeed, they sometimes give
one the impression that their resentment against Stalinism
was originally aroused not by oppression, violence, and
subversion, but by shame at the temporary success of the
Communists in hoodwinking them during the Thirties. This
resentment, far from resembling the dull anguish of the
East European directly overborne by Communist tyranny,
seems more akin to the anger of the man who finds out'
after he has bought it, that the Brooklyn Bridge was not
for sale. And since ours is an age when political judgment
becomes more acceptable when couched in the vocabulary
of theology, we find those who have been "had" describing
their common experience not as gullibility, early error, or
youthful naivete, but in terms of guilt, penitence, and
absolution.

There are two principal aspects to this concern with the
question of political guilt, particularly as it is being codi
fied in the writings of critics like Diana Trilling and Leslie
Fiedler (An End to Innocence). First, it is not stated per
sonally, in the manner of those who feel impelled to re
pent their youthful sins before Congressional committees,
but instead aims at including an entire social category
(e.g., the liberal intellectuals) in its denunciation of past
guilt Second, it is circular to the point of effectively para
lyzing any legitimate social action on the part of the con
demned group.

A Radical's America 266

Since the imputation of guilt is seldom personal, it
would seem a primary duty to make it quite clear who is
being whipped for the "great evil" (the words are Mr.
Fiedler's). Mrs. Trilling, in an essay on "The Oppenheimer
Case" (in Partisan Review, November-December 1954),
underlines the absurdity of Dr. Oppenheimer's having
been granted clearance when he was a pro-Stalinist and
refused clearance when he was just as demonstrably an
anti-Stalinist. "In effect/' she says, intimating that just the
opposite course should have been followed, "this tragic
ineptitude . . . constitutes a projection upon Dr. Oppen
heimer of the punishment we perhaps owe to ourselves for
having once been so careless with our nation's security."

Granting Mrs. Trilling the saving "perhaps," who are
the "we" who are hereby charged once again with sinning?
The American people? Surely not all of them. Surely not
the FBI? Surely not the Republican Party? The Demo
cratic Party, then? Or perhaps only its "left" wing? And
with that "left" or "liberal" wing, the liberal-intellectuals
who were so pro-Soviet throughout the Thirties?

One can only guess. Just as one can only guess at what
is meant by "our nation's security." The context would
lead one to conclude that Mrs. Trilling is not referring to
questions of the United States Army's being either too
large or too small, nor to bombers being contracted for at
the expense of fighters, or vice versa, nor even to the man
ufacture of atomic bombs being carried forward at the
expense of research into the possibility of hydrogen bomb
construction. No, the apparent meaning of this deadly
charge, meriting "punishment," is that the liberal attitude
of pooh-poohing die Russian Communist danger led di
rectly to the employment in government and in scien
tific research laboratories of men who were either, like
Dr. Oppenheimer, temporary dupes of the Stalinists, or,
like Rosenberg, Greenglass, and the rest, deliberate for
eign agents. If this interpretation is correct, Mrs. Trilling
is asking us to assume with her that "our nation's security"
was so endangered by these termites that punishment

267 Be Happy, Go Liberal

must be assigned even to those not formally guilty of legal
crimes.

But there are other voices than Mrs. Trilling's, voices
which seem with a little reflection to present a more bal
anced picture of recent history. There is for example the
eminent mathematician Norbert Wiener, who, speaking
(in The Human Use of Human Beings) of the demand for
"the utmost of secrecy for modern science in all things
which may touch its military uses," noted: "This demand
for secrecy is scarcely more than the wish of a sick civiliza
tion not to learn of the progress of its own disease." It may
be disappointing to those seeking to relate crime and
punishment to science and research, but Professor Wiener
summed up without so much as a nod to the question of
liberal guilt, pointing out that "the dissemination of any
scientific secret whatever is merely a matter of time, that
in this game a decade is a long time, and that in the long
run, there is no distinction between arming ourselves
and arming our enemies/'

These words were first published in 1950, a remarkable
tribute to Professor Wiener's prescience, given what we
now know and did not know at that time about hydrogen
bombs. But since there may be those who feel that Pro
fessor Wiener has disqualified himself as a commentator
by virtue of his very standing as a heterodox scientist, it
may be illuminating to consider what the distinguished
conservative observer Walter Lippmann has learned from
recent scientific developments.

It is in connection with "the spying out of secrets,"
wrote Mr. Lippmann in his column of August 28, 1955,
"that informed opinion is changing. The Geneva con
ference on nuclear energy has proved conclusively what
scientists have long been saying that scientific secrets
do not last long because what one scientist can discover,
others since they deal with the same natural world
will discover too. It is also plainer than it was a few years
ago that what you can hide temporarily from the Russians,
you must hide also from your own scientific community.

A Radical's America 268

The net of it is that the preservation of scientific secrets
is not nearly so important as it once seemed because there
are so few real scientific secrets/'

This statement would seem not merely a triumphant
vindication of Norbert Wiener's warning, but a practically
incontrovertible statement of the spying-science-secrets
question vacating the whole liberal-guilt mythology of any
practical significance. Seen in this light, Mrs. Trilling's
argument seems probably untrue, and certainly foolish
and unimportant.

Let us return therefore to the question of the identi
fication of the liberal "we" and to the further guilt of this
group. Mr. Fiedler is somewhat more precise than Mrs.
Trilling: "I use the word liberal' (and Intellectual' is, for
better or worse, historically synonymous with it in Amer
ica) to mean all those who believe or believed Sacco was
innocent, who considered the recognition of the Soviet
Union not merely wise strategically but a 'progressive'
step, and who identified themselves with the Loyalist side
during the Spanish Civil War."

It is worth pointing out that Mrs. Trilling, who comes to
conclusions somewhat similar to Mr. Fiedler's, uses differ
ent criteria in defining her "liberal-progressive" or her
"intellectual." Mr. Fiedler will have his Sacco, while Mrs.
Trilling tells us that in the days of Sacco and Vanzetti
"nothing could be more typical of [Dr. Oppenheimer's]
time than the intellectual's separation from the concerns
of his nation and the world." I mention this not to prove
that two literary critics have different conceptions of who
belongs in the liberal-progressive-intellectual grouping
that is still so poorly aware of its guilt that it must be
continually reminded of it, but to demonstrate the ulti
mate irrelevancy for them of all liberal attitudes other
than that toward the Soviet Union. There is where the
guilt lies, we are told over and over, not in how "we" felt
about Sacco or Haywood or Mooney or Dreyfus or other
ultimately secondary concerns. The Soviet Union is the
touchstone; the international Communist conspiracy is the

269 Be Happy, Go Liberal

arch-menace; those who at any time harbored illusions
about the Soviet Union or co-operated in making the Com
munist agents respectable are guilty as hell and must
acknowledge their guilt before they can make so bold as
to present themselves again to the public as worthy of
serious consideration.

Mr. Fiedler drives the point home in a reduction that
must be quoted precisely if one is not to be accused of
misinterpretation: "The unpalatable truth we have been
discovering is that the buffoons and bullies, those who
knew really nothing about the Soviet Union at all, were
right stupidly right, if you will, right for the wrong
reasons, but damnably right/' Who were wrong, and there
fore guilty? "We."

What Mr. Fiedler is saying here can hopefully be made
more clear by analogy. Suppose that a heterogeneous
group of citizens, all cigarette smokers, were gradually to
become convinced that cigarettes cause lung cancer. These
citizens, idealists of one sort or another, had previously
been identifiable primarily on the basis of their enthusi
astic enjoyment of cigarettes and on their insistence that
their fellow citizens learn to enjoy the weed. Now, how
ever, a series of medical studies appears demonstrating
irrefutably that the cigarette is a deadly poisonous enemy
of mankind even more deadly when one considers its
smiling disguise. The basically reasonable idealists, con
vinced some sooner, some later by the evidence, give
up cigarettes, in accordance with their individual capaci
ties urge others to stay away from the deadly poison, and
concern themselves with other pressing problems.

Surely this is enough? Not so, says Mr. Fiedler. It is not
enough to condemn the cigarette manufacturers and the
advertising agencies, and to dissociate ourselves from
them. We must recognize that each of us who ever of
fered a friend or, worse, a stranger a cigarette, shares
in the guilt. More: Before concerning ourselves with other
pressing problems, we must publicly affirm, painful as it
may be, that every crank and health nut who ever thun-

A Radical's America 270

dered against tobacco as an agency of Satan was right
stupidly right, accidentally right, right for the wrong
reasons, but damnably right. Never mind that Satan has
very little to do with lung cancer. Never mind that the
cranks had centered their fire on tobacco precisely be
cause it seemed to many mistaken people to offer pleasure
and relief from tension, nor that "we" had touted tobacco
for just those generous but mistaken reasons. What counts
is that they warned against it and "we" didn't.

Well, maybe. Some of us can remember a time, after
"we" ourselves had gotten good and scared of tobacco,
when the cranks suddenly began selling it on a tremendous
scale because it had become politic to do so not for
long, and from the highest of motives, but still . . .

They were "right" and we were "wrong." The Hearst
press was "right" when it condemned the Soviet Union, if
somewhat inaccurately, as a pesthole of nationalized
women run by bearded bomb-throwers; and the liberal
press was "wrong" when it presented Stalin's Russia with
varying degrees of sympathy, based on wishful thinking,
misinformation, and occasional distortion of the facts. Is
that all we have learned from the Thirties, the Forties,
and the Fifties? Is that the sole lesson the liberal must
draw from the Moscow Trials, the Spanish betrayal, the
Nazi-Soviet pact, World War II, the Berlin blockade, and
the atom-hydrogen bomb race that "we" were wrong,
wrong, wrong, and they were "damnably right"?

Small wonder that for Mr. Fiedler other problems, such
as the behavior of the liberal (read: ex-Communist) on the
witness stand, inspire a knowing grin at the stupidity of
the "we" who persist in being shocked when one of them
names friends of a generation ago as Communists. "When
such a witness . . . identifies for the investigators the
utterest scoundrel in the pro-Soviet camp, he finds him
self scorned and ostracized by the kind of 'sincere 3 liberal
who gasps horrifiedly: 'He named names!' as if to Vat'
were the worst of crimes. It is not, however, really the
boys' code of not squealing which is at stake, but the

271 Be Happy, Go Liberal

whole dream of an absolute innocence." Mr. Fiedler is so
enamored with this little conceit that he uses it also in his
essay on "Hiss, Chambers, and the Age of Innocence":
"Hiss, sensing his inestimable advantage in a society whose
values are largely set in boyhood when snitching is the
ultimate sin, had traded on his role as the honest man
confronted by the Vat/ "

Let us set aside the question which seems never to have
so much as occurred to Mr. Fiedler: "From where is the
boys' code received, from Heaven or from the adult
world?" and consider instead a more important matter.
This political moralist, so concerned with guilt and shame
and ambiguities and ambivalences, dismisses airily, as un
worthy of consideration nowadays, the problem of "snitch
ing," "squealing," "ratting." Apparently it is more congen
ial to mull over other nuances than to define the motivation
of the man who saves his own career and earns the
praise of a Congressman Walter at the expense of those
who were his comrades in the Thirties and may now be no
more Communists than he ...

Just so, the man who persists in using such old-fashioned
expressions as "selling out" is nowadays regarded as hope
lessly naive and behind the times after all, selling out
would imply that there is still an enemy to sell out to
(other than the perpetually useful Communists, who if
they no longer existed would surely have to be invented);
but "we" should all know by now that the enemy has been
"damnably right" about the central problem, that he is
therefore not really an enemy any more when we are all
menaced by Stalinism, that the real enemy is probably the
"we" who have been so damnably wrong.

One finds more understanding of what is going on in
America on any page of Louis Kronenberger's Company
Manners than in the whole of Mr. Fiedler's collected
prose, for all of the latter's praise by his fellow authority
on liberal guilt, Mr. Irving Kristol, as a "brilliant and
imaginative" social critic. Mr. Kronenberger observes that
there is a logical result of our outgrowing such gaucheries

A Radical's America 272

as selling out: the new breed "don't sell out at 40, they
sign up at 20. One can even at moments understand why
there are now, along with so many shameless young ca
reerists, so many tight-lipped young prigs: they are sitting
full-time, in judgment on a society that cries out to be
judged/'

I should like to make only one further comment on Mr.
Fiedler's method of political analysis. In each of his politi
cal essays he assumes what is presumably the standard
liberal posture: in "Afterthoughts on the Rosenbergs," he
argues that these spies should not have been executed; in
the Hiss piece that "there is no magic in the words left 7 or
progressive' or 'socialist' that can prevent deceit and the
abuse of power"; in "McCarthy and the Intellectuals," that
Joe McCarthy is a scoundrel and McCarthyism "a psycho
logical disorder/* Obviously, however, there is no flavor
to such dull stuff; and so the spice of neo-Iiberalism is
added the running condemnation of the liberal "we,"
the discovery that it is "we" who are as much to blame as
anybody for what Hiss did, for what the Rosenbergs did
and what was done to the Rosenbergs, and for what Joe
McCarthy has done. That being the case, since "we" are
partially responsible not only for how far the Communists
managed to get before they were stepped on, but also for
such consequent excrescences as McCarthyism, what is the
point in our going on at all? Why not turn the whole show
over to those who were "damnably right"?

"The fight against McCarthyism," Mr. Fiedler informs
us with a turn of phrase that might well leave Arthur
Koestler writhing with envy, is among other things "a war
for the truth we cannot help betraying even as we defend
it . . ." Elegant; but will it do for those who really want
to fight against McCarthyism and not against the straw
men of the Thirties? Let it be noted that practically every
anti-McCarthy statement is qualified (or "balanced") with
an attack on his liberal critics, that the condemnation of
the death sentence for the Rosenbergs is stretched to in
clude those who protested that death sentence before it

273 Be Happy, Go Liberal

was carried out: why on earth should a man still want to
consider himself as a liberal after reading these exercises
in self-scorn, unless he wishes to gain happiness through
the purifying flames of suffering?

"It is not necessary that we liberals be self-flagellants."
The words are Mr. Fiedler's their denial is his book.
Since he has been joined in this denial by Mrs. Trilling
and a host of others to whom abasement before the
errors of the past and acknowledgment of the wisdom of
those who rule at present seem to obviate any possibility
of their concern with our future, perhaps it may be as well
for the impatient to leave them in full possession of their
liberalism.

For there are problems demanding the attention of
serious and articulate idealists, people who are not satis
fied with the world in which we exist so precariously and
who believe that the expression "a better world" is neither
sinister nor old hat. Let those of us therefore who are go
ing to be grappling with these radical problems call our
selves radicals, and leave liberalism to those who claim
possession, but warp its militant elements to fit a passive
literary pattern of fashionable nuances serving only to
conceal their own utter emptiness and prostration before
the status quo.

Anvil and Student Partisan, Fall 1955

Footnote, 1961: It is unfortunate that the questions
discussed above should still be live in 1961 how
much better for us all had this piece become thor
oughly dated and irrelevant. But our tragedy is that
we have not learned from the McCarthyite era that
reaction must be aggressively countered, not with
groveling or penitence, not with liberal rhetoric, but
with programmatic realism. The ailment is upon us

A Radical's America 274

again in the Sixties as it was in the Fifties; in fact,
McCarthyism never died, as the liberals wishfully
thought it was only comparatively dormant until
new demagogues could arise. Inevitably they do arise
to service those who live in a nightmare world of
impotent frustration, their real or imaginary posses
sions homes with green lawns, daughters with fair
hair menaced by bearded Cubans, boorish Rus
sians, exotic Chinese, uppity Negroes, violent Puerto
Ricans, and slippery intellectuals.

What is more, the demagogues and their allies, the
rightist generals whom Senator Fulbright now charges
with politically indoctrinating young Americans at
public expense, do exercise an effective veto over the
feeblest efforts to revamp foreign, domestic, or mili
tary policies. They and their subalterns, the cool
young characters who call themselves conservatives,
in State Department, Pentagon, and extremist wings
of both parties, may not themselves take power in
this decade; nevertheless they inflict a creeping pa
ralysis on those who do hold power, by their black
mail ability to empoison the very air at the merest
suggestion that the United States may attempt to
accommodate itself to reality. To take but two ex
amples, one foreign and one domestic: The Kennedy
Administration dares not recognize Communist China,
much less support its admission to the United Na
tions, even though both courses are regarded as
vitally necessary by our allies and by our own lead
ing foreign-policy students, because the rightist
cranks threaten to befoul with renewed charges of
treason those whom they force to deny repeatedly
any thought of revising our China policy. As a conse
quence of this cowardice, the extremists are embold
ened, and the nation drifts nearer to isolation and

275 Be Happy, Go Liberal

ultimate catastrophe. At home the Kennedy Admin
istration declines to present civil rights legislation to
the Congress in the vain hope that the minority
Southern demagogues who still dominate that body
will reciprocate by supporting other legislation
deemed more essential to the public welfare. As a
consequence of this kowtowing to the worst elements
in American public life in the name of that kind of
political "realism" which always proves illusory, the
know-nothings and the hysterical defenders of a dy
ing order of things are encouraged, and the Negro is
driven to believe that there is no place for him in a
hypocritical white world. So at home too we drift
nearer to the most terrible land of racial warfare, and
no one comes forward with anything more than
liberal mush horridly combined with a continued
cringing before those animated by nostalgia for the
past, hatred of the present, and fear of the future. No
one comes forward with a radically rationalist pro
gram which would respond invigoratingly to the real
problems of the real world, and would thereby finally
isolate and render impotent the neo-McCarthyites in
their nightmare world.

The Dilemma of the
Educated Woman

One of every three college graduates in the United States
today is a woman. Of these hundreds of thousands of girl
graduates, 92 per cent enter the labor market immediately
after getting their degrees.

Anyone who glances at such statistics, and penetrates
no further, might assume that the millennium has arrived
at least for those women who yearned and fought for
absolute equality with men. It is true, to be sure, that,
like our college graduates, one of every three American
workers is a woman, and that more than a third of all
women of working age are to be found in the ranks of
the labor force. But intelligent women are asking perti
nent questions about home and career in the overorgan-
ized society, questions which imperiously demand an
swers; and those answers which are forthcoming are both
misleading and inaccurate. If we reframe some of these
questions we may succeed in clarifying the problem and in
focusing public attention upon a variety of proposals, the
implications of which have not been carefully examined
even by ardent feminists.

The most cursory glance at the Labor Department's
figures on women at work suffices to destroy the more vul
gar of the petulant plaints that ours has become a republic
of women, with the cowed and castrated males dominated
by mindless moms with big busts and bigger portfolios.
What percentage, for example, of the coeds who will be
receiving their B.A/s this June will go on with the men to

277 The Dilemma of the Educated Woman

the graduate schools where the real intellectual digging
goes on? What percentage of the girls who major in
philosophy or math or history or science will wind up with
a lifetime career in their chosen field? The fact is that it is
the new white-collar proletariat which is overwhelmingly
female (68 per cent of all clerical and kindred workers are
women, 97 per cent of all stenos, typists, and secretaries
are women), just as are those industrial drudgeries tradi
tionally dependent upon the meticulous repetitive labors
of a docile work force (canning, wiring, sewing, and the
packaging of everything from foodstuffs to antibiotics).
Turn the matter around: what percentage of the com
manding positions in the arts and sciences, in college
teaching, research, medicine, government, is occupied by
women?

It should not be surprising that this question is still met
with bland generalizations about the mental, physical, or
biological inferiority of women as if the Scandinavian
and Russian women who play leading roles in their respec
tive technical and medical communities were creatures
from another planet. What is perhaps surprising is that so
many otherwise intelligent American women, "emanci
pated" though they may be in other areas, will passively
accept or even themselves participate in the perpetuation
of a pernicious and degrading myth. Nevertheless, we
need not assume that when they are silent, or confused,
their particular problems do not really exist.

Their dilemma is not like that of their nineteenth-
century New England great-grandaunts that in a man's
world they cannot find men. Almost any woman who so
desires whether she is thin or fat, young or old, beauti
ful or homely can usuaEy find herself a husband. Their
dilemma is not like that of their mothers during the
Great Depression that in a society dedicated to work
they cannot find work. Almost any able-bodied woman
can usually find some sort of work, more readily in fact
than her unemployed husband or brother. Their dilemma
is rather, quite simply, that they cannot combine satis-

A Radical's America 278

factory work with a satisfactory marriage in such a way
as to lead truly fruitful and harmonious lives.

The irony is that instead of its being ameliorated, the
situation is becoming more aggravated, as year by year
more and more bright girls are exposed temporarily,
tantalizingly to the exciting vistas of the life of the mind.
Anyone who has taught at a girls' college cannot but be
moved by the intensity and eagerness with which the best
of them hurl themselves into the world of books and ideas:
they fervently believe that they can learn anything, that
they can achieve any goal; they take pride in the swiftness
with which they can absorb new ideas, unhampered by
the distraction of male classmates. But anyone who meets
these girls as ten- or twenty-year alumnae will also be
moved . . . but very differently. Here, all too often, are
women who reveal in their faces the wretched uncer
tainty of those who feel they have somehow been be
trayed, or have themselves betrayed their own best possi
bilities; or who expose the utter and absolute dissipation
of their adolescent intellectual enthusiasm and its replace
ment by a supposedly mature, but really mindless, busy
ness.

Some who speak for our women's colleges claim that it
is an absolute positive good for the community, as well as
for the individual woman, that she be exposed for four
years to the noblest reaches of the human spirit, regard
less of whether thereafter she benefits personally from
this exposure beyond gaining the confidence to propa
gandize effectively for the Community Chest or for the
regular and persistent exercise of universal suffrage. This
may be so; perhaps it is good in the most general sense
that the generality of housewifery be leavened with those
who at one time were personally involved with Thucy-
dides, Dante, and Tolstoy. But that in itself will not elimi
nate the frustrations engendered in the bosoms of all those
who dreamt briefly of great things.

Suppose that all discriminatory barriers, whether racial
or financial, were to be removed from all of our colleges

279 The Dilemma of the Educated Woman

and universities so that any young Negro who desired
might attend them. Suppose also, however, that the bar
riers to his subsequent useful employment in the arts,
industries, professions, and sciences, were simultaneously
maintained and intensified. It is quite possible that we
would thereby produce a generation of thoughtful Pull
man porters, redcaps, and janitors, better equipped to
exercise their sacred prerogatives as citizens, and leading
richer inner lives than earlier generations of porters, red
caps, and janitors. But isn't it also possible that we should
have bred a caste of discontented and embittered intel
lectuals, as has happened in some of the less developed
nations?

The analogy is not necessarily farfetched. One need
hardly be a research sociologist to determine that Ameri
can women and most particularly those who have been
to college are restless and dissatisfied, that in fact many
thousands of them feel cheated of the bright promise that
glowed so briefly in their teens and early twenties. Our
periodicals are flooded with articles on the "disenchant
ment syndrome," our library shelves are stacked with bad
novels (and even a few good ones) about the miseries of
the college-trained housewife, which supposedly range
from melancholia and alcoholism to promiscuity, and even
the TV networks are running programs with titles like
"The Trapped Housewife/' When the mass media put
their paws on the trap, we can be reasonably sure that it
exists, in one form or another.

The young woman in the trap is typically in her early
thirties, with a commuting husband, several small chil
dren, and some happy memories of undergraduate days
when teachers and classmates treated her as something
more than an ambulating cookbook, with more on her
mind than formulas and feeding schedules. Most likely
she worked at an office job for several years after college
and after marriage, until the down payment was in hand
and the first baby was on the way. Now she discovers,
some years later, that she is hideously bored, that the

A Radical's America 280

babies do not fill her life, that the coffee sessions with her
female neighbors consist not of intelligent discourse but

Generally of inane babble, and that while she may look
)rward to the day when she can return to the labor
market, she is not prepared to take a job which will com
pensate her decently or make worthy use of her college
training or her atrophied mental equipment. A few years
ago the New fork Times ran a series of promotional adver
tisements in suburban newspapers; one, soliciting sub
scriptions from culture- and conversation-starved house
wives, asked shrewdly whether they weren't sick and tired
of having no one taller than three feet high to talk to day
in and day out.

Many of these women do go back to work, or hang on
to their jobs after all, almost twenty-three million Amer
ican women hold down jobs, and about an eighth of these
have children under six (almost half of our working wives
have children of school age). But when they do they must
set up makeshift arrangements for the care of their chil
dren, and thereafter they are often as uncertain that they
are doing the right thing, and as filled with guilt about
their maternal and wifely responsibilities, as are their
nonworking sisters about the gradual degeneration of their
intellectual faculties. Who has not had to listen to the
laughing -but not very funny complaints of working
mothers that they are paying practically as much for baby
sitters, servants, carfares, and clothes as they are bringing
home in their pay envelopes?

So the debate rages; suburban symposia are held, with
both working and nonworking wives protesting too much
in support of their particular individual solutions; ax-
grinding lady educators and earnest male psychiatrists
leap into the fray, all too often with pseudo-psychoanalyti
cal claptrap about the traumatic effect on American males
of involvement with intellectually superior women; and
the house organ of the educated housewife, the ' New
Yorker, has developed an entire subculture of wearisome
jokes about the servant problem.

281 The Dilemma of the Educated Woman

In all of these endless discussions, the solution to the
dilemma of the educated woman is invariably posed in
individual, and usually in hortatory, terms: Recognize
your psycho-environmental problems. Glory in mother
hood. Teach your husband not to fear brainy females.
Prepare for the nonchildbearing years. Take extension
courses. Join book clubs and reading groups. Adjust to
reality.

It is worthy of note that these adjurations and entreaties
are not addressed to matriculating coeds, perhaps because
those who fill the air with them are dimly aware of the
depressing effect that they would have on girls still so
naive as to believe that they are stretching their minds to
become useful members of the intellectual community at
twenty-five and not (doubtfully) at forty-five.

In short, what is basically a nationwide social problem
is treated as though it were a private or a family matter,
susceptible of resolution by each woman in her own way,
in accordance with her own personal dictates.

This is a peculiarly American habit. Already over half
a century has passed since Herbert Croly observed, in
The Promise of American Life: "The way to realize a
purpose is, not to leave it to chance, but to keep it loyally
in mind, and adopt means proper to the importance and
the difficulty of the task. No voluntary association of in
dividuals, resourceful and disinterested though they may
be, is competent to assume the responsibility. The prob
lem belongs to the American national democracy, and its
solution must be attempted chiefly by means of official
national action."

The observation is even more pointed today than it was
in 1909. We are still so reluctant to concede the objective
external social reality of supposedly personal problems
that, advanced as we are technologically, we lag behind
much of the rest of the world in an entire spectrum of
public concerns. Instead of recognizing that individual
health is inseparable from public health, we assume the
eternal nature of nineteenth-century customs of medical

A Radical's America 282

care and content ourselves with makeshift family insur
ance schemes; we are only now beginning to concede the
necessity of public responsibility for the medical care of
even a restricted segment of the populace. Instead of
recognizing that the education of our own children is
inseparable from the education of all American children,
we move our families from place to place in search of
better schools, or put them in debt to send our children
to private schools, or dissipate valuable energies in the
mothers* clubs ludicrously miscalled Parent-Teacher Asso
ciations. Instead of recognizing that the American land
scape belongs to us all and should be tampered with only
by those who can be socially accountable, we settle for
family havens on 60' X 100 7 bits of grass separated one from
the other by wire fencing. Indeed, we are even reluctant
to conceive that peace may be attainable by common
national and international action: we throw up our
hands at the enormity and complexity of the problem and
allow ourselves to be persuaded to invest in family bomb
shelters so that we may bury not just our heads but all of
our beings beneath the ground.

Is it to be wondered then that we should flinch from the
admission that the locus of the dilemma of the educated
woman is in the nation at large and in the nature of our
social organization, and not just within the confines of
her own family?

But suppose we were to concede that we must go be
yond the family situation to the very structure of Ameri
can society in grappling with this as with other problems.
What good would it do the intelligent American girl? For
one thing, surely it is in itself salutary to arrive at an
understanding that one's problems are not always unique,
not always the result of some peculiar twist in one's
psyche, but may very well be grounded in the earth of our
common social landscape.

In addition, it would release for reasoned discussion
and debate an entire series of possibilities. Once it is ac
cepted, even for the purposes of argument, that the cur-

283 The Dilemma of the Educated Woman

rent family unit-supermarket complex (personal shopping,
cooking, child-raising) is neither divinely ordained nor
necessarily ideal in promoting both the general welfare
and the individual's realization of his full potential, then
a number of lively questions pose themselves.

Would it be in the national interest, and in that of a
generation yet unborn, to establish a uniform network of
infant, child-care, and family cooking centers so that the
girl undergraduate could prepare herself for a profession,
secure in the knowledge that she would not have to post
pone practicing it until her middle years? Would it be
feasible to establish in the midst of the tract houses, the
subdevelopments, and the housing projects, a decentral
ized parallel system of adult education so that the young
mother could pursue directed graduate studies? Would
it be worth while to extend the scholarship and graduate
assistantship programs of our universities to provide young
professional women with assistance in the care and feed
ing of their babies as they arrive on the scene?

I can anticipate the objections which would be raised
to the implementation of such suggestions; and I believe
that there are as valid responses to the inevitable objec
tions as there are to all the resistances to concerted public
attack on the other social problems already instanced. But
this is not the place to detail the arguments pro or con.
I shall be satisfied if these lines will serve to stimulate
the recognition even if agonized or outraged that the
pressing problems of living human beings, of unfulfilled
and underutilized American women, are at least as urgent
public concerns as are the problems of our highways, our
food surpluses, and our water shortages.

1961

Exercise and Abstinence

At ten twenty-five on the rainy tumultuous evening of
June 26, 1959, Constantine D'Amato, manager of the
heavyweight boxing champion of the world, clambered
into the bleak white ring at Yankee Stadium and disposed
himself casually in the champion's corner. With his arms
outspread along the ropes on either side of him, he crossed
one leg over the other and paid no attention as Floyd
Patterson was eased into the ring and fussed over by his
seconds. He was as serene and contemptuous of his sur
roundings as he had assured me a week earlier that he
would be.

Ten minutes later D'Amato, tears in his eyes, was assist
ing the beaten, helpless, and dazed Patterson from the
ring, and 25,000 shrieking spectators were congratulating
each other on having been present at a minor historic
moment the defeat of a 5-1 favorite, the consequent
collapse of D'Amato's alleged aspirations to take over the
entire boxing business, the emergence of a new kind of
fight promoter in Bill Rosensohn, an inexperienced but
personable young Ivy League publicist, and the enthron
ing of a most unorthodox young Swede, Ingemar Johans
son, as the first European heavyweight champion since
the days of Camera and Schmeling.

It was my first impression that the crowd was happy
primarily because they would be able to say that they had
been there. People always like to recall that they were
themselves present at a great triumph or catastrophe. And
as far as I could tell, the historic event in this case had
no racially symbolic overtones, as did the knockout of

285 Exercise and Abstinence

Joe Louis by Max Schmeling, or the victory of Jesse
Owens in the 1936 Berlin Olympics with Hitler furious in
the audience. If there was tragedy this evening at Yankee
Stadium, it was a personal tragedy for two strange part
ners a shy and intelligent young Negro athlete, and a
supremely confident and ambitious Italian student of hu
man nature.

When Joe Louis knocked out a challenger, the black
belts of New York, Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago, went wild.
Their boy was better than any white man, he was blasting
away for all of them and the whites knew it. I remember
the summer night in 1937 when Tommy Farr, the Welsh
white hope, stood him off for fifteen rounds. I was work
ing the night shift in a Michigan radio factory with several
hundred hillbillies, and we all had little radios at our
workbenches, courtesy of the management. The tension
whipped through the three floors of that factory, con
veyed by electricity they were dying for the black bas
tard to be beaten and when he triumphed once again
the frustrated fury of my fellow workers was close to
terrifying.

I remember too going to the fights in New Orleans some
five or six years later as a member of an all-white audience,
watching an all-Negro card of fighters pummel and bruise
each other to the savage delight of their supposed racial
superiors. It was so vile that I never went again (and rarely
watched the fights even on television) until the rainy
humid evening of the Patterson-Johansson match in New
York.

What has happened in the intervening years is that
the position of the American Negro has changed so greatly
that it is no longer necessary for a Negro heavyweight
champion to be a hero to his people; when he is beaten
it is no longer inevitable that the defeat will be regarded
by Negroes as a racial setback (or by whites as a white
conquest). Those Negroes who still crave athletes as
heroes have likely gotten more satisfaction out of the ball
players who have moved into a formerly forbidden sport

A Radical's America 286

traditionally dominated by small-town boys and Southern
ers, and out of the exploits of Althea Gibson on the tennis
courts of the international leisure class (Dr. Ralph Bunche,
reputedly regarded as something of an Uncle Torn, Nobel
Peace Prize and all, by more aggressive Negroes, hit the
headlines last year when he revealed that he had been
denied admittance to membership in a posh tennis club).
But more and more the Negro appears to look for leader
ship, or for heroes to worship, among those who have been
conquering newer worlds in Hollywood, on Broadway,
or on the civil-rights front to the Sidney Poitiers, the
Harry Belafontes, the Martin Luther Kings, and Daisy
Bateses.

Things haven't reached the point where fighting is no
longer attractive as a quick and comparatively easy way
for a poor Negro boy to make a buck. But the boy who
makes good at it nowadays, like Floyd Patterson, is no
longer under the obligation to regard himself as a kind of
Walking Symbol. He can simply be a man who has chosen
a particular method of getting rich, given the right physi
cal equipment and sound management. And with sufficient
progress on the economic front, it is conceivable that fight
ing will one day seem as senseless a way of getting rich
to the poor young Negro as it has come to seem to the poor
young Jew and to the youth of other minority groups for
whom new doors have opened in the last twenty years.
When that day comes, the Puerto Ricans will probably
dominate the fight racket until such time as they too are
supplanted at the bottom of the economic heap. Or, when
the roughest edges of poverty have been worn off for
everyone in this country, something entirely different may
come to pass something foreshadowed by the momen
tary appearance of Bill Rosensohn and the triumph of
Ingemar Johansson.

I have been thinking about the fight, and about those
three unusual men, Cus D'Amato, Floyd Patterson, and
Ingemar Johansson, for some time now, and I begin to
suspect that Johansson's victory may indeed symbolize

287 Exercise and Abstinence

the beginning of a new era in more ways than those I
enumerated at the outset. More of this a little later.

Like most readers of the sports pages, I was sucked in
by the expertise of the boxing writers, who were positive
practically to a man that Patterson would beat hell out of
Johansson, a big bulky playboy and very possibly a coward
(as an amateur he had been disqualified and disgraced
at the 1952 Olympics for refusing to fight). So I didn't go
up to Grossinger's, where the dimpled young Swedish
sportsman had installed himself and his entourage in a
one-hundred-thousand-dollar ranch house to prepare for
the championship fight. Instead, I went out to Jersey to
watch the champ work out and to have a nice quiet talk
with Cus D'Amato.

Ehsan's Training Camp has seen better days. Great
fighters have trained there in the past, and the champ
had chosen it as his headquarters, but still the cluster of
buildings at the side of the road had the seedy aspect of
a run-down Catskills summer colony. The white clap
board could have used some fresh paint, the grass was
more trampled than barbered, and a very motley crowd
was hanging around as I drove up. There was an ex
pensive-looking woman with dark glasses in a Cadillac,
there was a uniformed New York cop chatting with
D'Amato in the driveway (wherever there are fighters
there seem to be cops), there was a fellow in a wheelchair.
A colored girl relaxed near a wooden playpen as her
youngster toddled tentatively on the lawn. Cooks sang in
the kitchen.

D'Amato himself is a compact, bullet-headed little man
of fifty-one. He wears his thinning white hair so closely
cropped that from a slight distance his crew-cut head
appears shaven; his cheeks are as smooth and unscarred
as those of a man twenty years younger, and he has a
humorous and piercing eye. He is also or was on that
relatively innocent day a hugely self-confident and
persuasive human being. A lot of fools run around loose
convinced of their own profundity and intellectual superi-

A Radical's America 288

ority the man Kke D'Amato who can persuade others of
it is worth taking seriously.

I asked him to reveal to me the background of the na
tional fight picture from his angle of vision. He was happy
to oblige, It is his view that fighting, like any other profit-
making business in this country, has come to be domi
nated by the men with the most money. The monopolistic
combination of multimillionaire Jim Norris, the Inter
state Boxing Club (the I.B.C. was broken up several years
ago following an extended antitrust court action), resulted
from a power vacuum into which moved the money of
Norris, D'Amato's arch-enemy. D'Amato is convinced that
he would have beaten Norris even without the aid of the
Supreme Court: "I almost felt sorry for Jim Norris -he
was so rich he never had to think, whereas I was so poor
that I had to exercise my mind. In consequence I always
knew exactly what Norris and Truman Gibson would do
next I knew them as a man knows his own brother. It
was pathetically easy for me to foresee their every move."

D'Amato disdains to conceal his belief that Norris the
only member of his set not indicted last fall when the
federal government moved in on lawyer Truman Gibson
and hoodlum Frankie Carbo and charged them with in
timidation and blackmail of fighters and managers has
a warped mind. "How else could you characterize a man
with all that money and background who chooses to oper
ate as he does and to associate with gangsters and hood
lums? I know that they call me a psychopath they're the
ones I would characterize as psychopaths."

He has been called not only a psychopath, but a man
himself hungry for the monopolistic power he attacks in
the hands of others. In his eyes, however, he has been a
poor man crusading for the right of the horde of nameless
fighters to earn a living without paying tribute to a cartel.
And what about the gangsters?

"I have pity for those men. They're ignorant, they grew
up in bad environments, they never learned how to get
the good things out of life. They're cowardly, dominated

289 Exercise and Abstinence

by fear, and worshippers of force. And they're only hang
ers-on, on the fringe of the fight business, as they are in
almost every business in the United States/'

This is not exactly the way New York District Attorney
Hogan sees it; Hogan has spent a lot of time interviewing
gamblers and others supposedly involved behind the
scenes with the allegedly clean-cut and innocently in
experienced Bill Rosensohn in his promotion of the Patter
son-Johansson title bout, a promotion now revealed to
have been more farcically complicated than a Wodehquse
novel. But then if Hogan were to investigate with equal
assiduity the relationship of gamblers and mobsters to
other varieties of business enterprise, he would no doubt
be the most exhausted district attorney in American his
tory.

And D'Amato himself proved somewhat less than eager
to philosophize about immorality in his profession when
he was invited to do so, some months after our conversa
tion, by the New York State Athletic Commission. Instead,
he betook himself to Cuba under the name Carl Dudley,
to look after the affairs of another fighter, and did not
return in time for the commission's deadline to refute
accusations of improper finagling, because of what his
attorney explained as an aversion to flying. His pal, one
Charley Black, a former fight manager, did turn up, and
volunteered the interesting information that "Cus is a lot
smarter than I am." He also admitted that he was ac
quainted with such types as Fat Tony Salerno and Trigger
Mike Coppola, as well as with D'Amato. "But he said,"
according to the New York Times, that "he never had told
D'Amato of his associations with Salerno and BecHey
[a gambler also involved in the Runyonesque Patterson-
Johansson fight arrangements]. Had he done so, he said,
'D'Amato would have had nothing to do with me.* "

Be that as it may and D'Amato may already have had
something to say about it by the time these lines appear,
if only to contest his suspension as a fight manager in New
York State and his own subsequent indictment the mat-

A Radical's America 290

ter of fear brought us to one of D'Amato's favorite topics.
He said to me: "I love fighting, despite all this dirty busi
ness, for the same reason that you love the profession of
writing: I am a student of human character as you are,
and fighting enables me to see people raw, with their emo
tions on the surface. Where else would I see fear so
readily exposed as in fighters?"

From here on he spoke in the accents of the thoughtful
military man. Indeed he tends to think of himself as would
a staff officer in a military academy or a staff sergeant in a
combat situation. This self-image is fortified by his bache
lor's dedication to his profession (the cooks behind the
screened porch where we stood were teasing him, and he
remarked, mildly amused but still sharply: 'Women are
tormented by the idea of a single man") and by his Prus
sian hairdo and positive address.

"I can stand at the head of the stairs in my gymnasium
in the city and watch a new boy climbing up the stairs for
the first time, and from the way he mounts those steps I
can form a pretty good estimate of his character. Of
course, he is afraid everyone who fights is afraid but
what I am interested in is the quality of his fear and how
it expresses itself. I tell every single one of those boys that
I have fears too, as every intelligent human being does,
but that I consciously train myself to overcome those fears,
and that part of my job as a manager is to teach fighters
how to overcome their fear by facing it and learning to
live with it"

I got the impression that he conceived of himself as a
molder of men. I asked him about this, and he glanced at
me quizzically, surprised, as if the answer was self-evident.

"Yes, I can change a man's personality and his char
acter, definitely I can. I studied just that for twenty-five
years, I had to in order to be successful with fighters. If
I changed my own I can change others*. I was the calmest
man in the crowd the night that Floyd took the title from
Archie Moore I was so calm I remember being worried
for an instant that I didn't feel any other emotion and

291 Exercise and Abstinence

then I realized that it was only a matter of logic, it was
only because I had known all along that the victory was
inevitable."

Maybe so. Up until June 25, 1959, D'Amato believed
and proclaimed that if one of his fighters didn't win it
wouldn't be the fault of the fighter but of D'Amato: "It
would be because I had miscalculated. It would mean that
I'd have to recalculate/'

The moment of recalculation has arrived. Because with
all the talk and all the publicity and all the lectures on the
psychology of fear, the fact remains that D'Amato's power
and distinction rested on his being in the corner of the
world's heavyweight champion. Now he has been driven
into another corner. Without a champion as proof of his
shrewdness, with his friends testifying to having been the
friends of gangsters, he now has the opportunity to demon
strate how much he himself has absorbed of his own lec
tures. It seemed to me that day that he had very nearly
hypnotized himself into a belief not only in his own
prescience, but also in his fighter's greatness.

He has a number of stories about Floyd Patterson that
he likes to tell, as illustrative of the qualities that attracted
him to the boy and convinced him of his mettle. One is
particularly charming, even if almost as pat as an incident
in an authorized campaign biography. Floyd Patterson
was a troubled Brooklyn kid, and was finally shipped off
for rehabilitation to the Wiltwyck School for disturbed
boys at Hyde Park, the same institution depicted in James
Agee's beautiful movie The Quiet One (Patterson not only
knows the movie well, but is a faithful old grad of Wilt
wyck, which he supports in a variety of ways, as does
D'Amato). There he was taken under the wing of a teacher
who invited him one evening to her home in recognition
of his improvement in behavior. At the end of his visit
she presented him with a box of candy and said: "Floyd,
this is for you. But I want you to promise me to keep it
just for yourself and not to pass it around among the other
boys, because they're not supposed to have any. 7 * The boy

A Radical's America 292

replied: "Then I guess I'd better not take it. Because my
buddy and I talked about my coming here, and about
your giving fellows candy when they visit you, and I
promised him if there was any I'd share it with him. Now
I'd have to lie and hide it from him, and I'd rather not do
that."

'When the woman herself told me that story," D'Amato
said, "I was confirmed in the opinion that this was a
remarkable boy. IVe had it demonstrated to me since in
many ways, and we're going to prove to the world that
Floyd Patterson is the greatest champion in the history of
the ring. Come on, it's nearly time for his workout."

Things were livening up when we went outside to head
for the gymnasium. A clot of neighborhood high-school
boys bunched before the closed doors waiting for the
champ and peering hopefully at the arriving autos in
search of celebrities. Two men behind me were greeting
each other in French. A pink-cheeked English reporter in
bell-bottomed slacks joined two ruddy young Swedes in
asking D'Amato for prognostications, prophecies, and an
opinion as to the prowess of Johansson.

D'Amato smiled slowly. "We have the utmost respect
for Johansson. We have never believed those stories about
his refusing to fight at the Olympics. If Floyd has never
seen movies of Johansson or studied accounts of his style,
it's only because that's his principle, to train and prepare
himself for anything, so he won't be surprised the night of
the fight."

Now the limousines were rolling into the driveway.
Big-stomached men in dark suits with summer straws
shading their white faces and their long cigars emerged
to greet and be greeted. They comported themselves with
the ponderous dignity of men accustomed to respect and
flattery. Invariably they were addressed by title, "Com
missioner," a rich word that rolls off the lips with the
luxurious grandiloquence of "Your Excellency" or "Mr.
President." These were members of the New York State
Athletic Commission, and I refrain from identifying them

293 Exercise and Abstinence

by name because they were such peerless specimens of
the politician presenting himself to the populace.

Finally the press, sport-jacketed and cynical, arrived
together in a rented limo. They had come to watch Patter
son work out, but until the champ was ready to feed their
remorselessly hungry typewriters, D'Amato was there to
be baited. It is easy to see why D'Amato and the sports
writers should rub each other the wrong way. Although
he does not strike you as an essentially humorless man,
D'Amato does combine a fanatic's devotion to his trade
with an unswerving conviction of his own eternal recti
tude. It is a conviction that is going to need substantial
reinforcing after last fall's testimony by the seedy and
sheepish crowd that surrounded D'Amato in his back
room deals, and it is obviously irritating to men who are
paid not only to collect statistics for adults about basically
juvenile activities, but to be oracular themselves about
those games. In consequence they tend to characterize
him in print as a nut, an egomaniac, or a would-be monop
olist; while interviewing him, they addressed him as if
he were the not quite balanced Governor of Louisiana
and they were needling him in an effort to produce quot
able copy for Time, The Weekly Newsmagazine.

When the doors opened we trooped in and disposed our
selves around the ring, which all but filled the gym
housewives in cotton dresses, boys playing hooky, floozies,
stage-struck would-be pugs, commissioners, sports writ
ers with dead cigars, excited foreigners on the home
stretch of an athletic junket. Ralph Cooper, who broad
cast nightly tidbits to Harlem direct from training camp,
took the center of the ring to introduce everybody to
everybody else, requesting applause for and bows from
commissioners, sports writers, transatlantic visitors, and
nonentities. It was just starting to get embarrassing when
Cooper ran out of names, and the champ came out to box
five rounds with a variety of sparring partners.

Patterson was solemn, unsmiling, and ferociously con
centrated on his work. His slim long-muscled body, dart-

A Radical's America 294

ing and glistening as a porpoise's, but darker and more
menacing, was the most perfectly conditioned I had ever
seen. Some of the men who opposed him in the ring were
well built and husky, some even handled themselves with
a certain grace, but all looked incompetent and pathetic
in the same ring with Patterson, who labored grimly, with
inhuman intensity, on defense, on footwork, breathing,
timing. He danced, snorted through his nostrils like a
stallion, grunted every time he let go with a punch.

All the while Dan Florio, his little gray-haired trainer,
stood leaning against the ropes in T shirt and slacks, also
unsmiling, thumb between his teeth as if he were a danc
ing master observing the premier danseur at the barre,
occasionally murmuring through his thumb: "Lift your
head. Hands up. Break."

When the five rounds had been duly tolled off, Floyd
pranced alone around the ring in a lunatic's pantomime of
passion, bobbing, weaving, stabbing, grunting, flashing
here and there like an animal suddenly released from a
cage, almost incredibly fast. He cooled off slowly before
his shower by punching the little bag for the benefit of the
photographers and exhibiting himself in various other
ways touching his toes in sit-ups and doing bending
exercises.

It was only when I went into his little dressing room
with the sports writers that I saw him as a human being
and began to sense the conditions of his life. He sat almost
huddled on the side of his bed, wrapped in a torn and
stained white terry-cloth robe, and sipped at a mug of
sorry-looking broth while he attended politely to the tire
some questions asked of him by the reporters.

"The whole art of training," William Hazlitt wrote in
1822 in his classic piece of reporting, "The Fight," "con
sists in two things, exercise and abstinence, abstinence
and exercise, repeated alternately and without end."

I had seen the exercise, and now I was looking at the
abstinence. Patterson sat at bay, picking at the towel he
held in his hands, separated from his wife and family, in

295 Exercise and Abstinence

this grubby little room furnished with one chair, army
blankets on the twin beds, and a rosary hanging from a
corner of the bureau mirror, as he waited patiently for the
questions, and for the fight from which he was to earn
half a million dollars. Always there lurked the shadow of
a smile at the corners of his mouth, and his gentle and
intelligent features revealed to me a man who was willing
to put up with all this not because he was incapable of
imagining anything else (which might have been said of
Joe Louis), or genuinely enjoyed it, or was a sharp oper
ator with an eye to die main chance (like Sugar Ray
Robinson), but simply because he wanted the amenities of
a quiet middle-class life badly enough to suffer fools and
undergo physical indignities.

And yet, even with the sparkle of self-awareness that
glowed in his eyes as he smartly parried the reporters'
probes, his solemn and mystical belief in his own future as
a great champion seemed unwarranted by his record (he
had been defending his title against second-raters, some of
whom had at least succeeded in dropping him to the can
vas). When I got home that evening, I jotted down the
following question: Patterson seems almost hallucinated
by his own ability has he been mesmerized by D'Amato
into believing not only in his own supremacy, but also in
his historical position as a great athlete?

The next time I saw him was on the night of his title de
fense. It had been raining ferociously, steadily, for some
hours, and as it tapered off, the air, instead of cooling,
steamed muggily. The preliminary fighters went through
the motions mostly unnoticed by a listless crowd that
milled moodily about the vast spaces of Yankee Stadium;
the Stars and Stripes and the World Series Championship
flags hung draggily like worn-out dishrags; behind every
thing the Eighth Avenue train slid by every few moments,
gliding in and out of the wet vaporous fog that billowed in
and out of center field, half-illuminated by the batteries of
night lights.

The people who had paid anywhere from five to a him-

A Radical's America 296

dred dollars for tickets didn't look very different from the
crowd you'd find at the Stadium watching a ball game:
ordinary stiffs for the most part, salesmen, plumbers, re
pairmen, guys who would like to be big spenders on occa
sion; very few women. Two priests heading for the expen
sive seats (separated from the cheaper ranks on the infield
by bright red cloth) stood out naturally, as did the young
sports in Bermudas and their lady friends attempting to
look crisp on a wet wilting night. All through the final
half -hour before the main event they wandered with ap
parent aimlessness while the prelim boys pushed each
other around.
The ring in the center of the ball park, hooded overhead

I was reminded of a chuppeh, a Hebrew bridal canopy

was adorned with flags at each of its four corners, and
focused on by three TelePrompTer cameras. The ceremo
nial aspect of the show was heightened by the stately
parade around the ring at the end of each round of a gentle
man bearing a numbered card above his head in the man
ner of a Ziegfeld showgirl. There are all kinds of ways of
making a living.

It wasn't until Patterson came up out of the visitors'
dugout and Johansson from the Yankee dugout, each sur
rounded by their retainers and a cordon of cops to ward
off the shouting horde of well-wishers, that the evening
came to a focus. Then, as I said, D'Amato disposed himself
first of all of them in Patterson's corner, almost as if he
wanted to show his man how cool it was possible to be on
this night of all nights.

At the end of the uneventful first round the Stadium
lights were extinguished, and thousands sucked in their
breaths at the suddenness with which the ring sharpened
to dead white and the two fighters were so keenly sil
houetted. Patterson looked as I had expected him to,
poised, quick, and beautiful; as he darted around the big
ger Johansson like a speedboat buzzing a steamship his
swift tension was accentuated by the Swede's bulk and air

297 Exercise and Abstinence

of stolid reserve. Johansson did little but hold his right fist
cocked and wait for the moment he had predicted: he had
been referring to his right as though it had a frightful
power of its own, but had not once displayed it in training,
as though again it were a beast whose vicious strength he
had to curb. Now it seemed almost ludicrous in its ponder
osity. Surely it was only a matter of time before Patterson
would break through and pulverize the meaty facade of
his challenger.

Then the third round began, and the Swede's right
flashed sharply through the air directly into Patterson's on
coming mouth. The magnificently tempered champion tot
tered, exactly as though he had ran full tilt into a massive
wooden mallet, and fell straight backwards, sickeningly.
When he arose from the canvas it was apparent that he
was half senseless. Thereafter, as all of us arose screaming
and howling with the pure frenzy of disbelief and delight
at our own presence, Patterson was systematically beaten
into helplessness by the bigger man. Moments later, his
carefully nurtured career in ruins, he was assisted from the
mobbed ring by his tearful manager.

The middle-aged, ruddy, shirt-sleeved Englishman on
my left, who had remained throughout as silently unac-
knowledging of my existence as if we had been fellow pas
sengers on the L.M.S. Railway, leaped up and down, slash
ing delightedly with his rolled-up air-mail edition of the
London Telegraph and shouting at me: "You didn't be
lieve it was going to happen, did you? Well, I did! I did!"

He was right, I hadn't believed it. And it wasn't just be
cause I had been conned by the sports pages into thinking
that Johansson was hardly any better than the others who
had challenged Patterson that was true enough. Mainly
it was because, hardly realizing it, I had identified with
both the bemused champion and his obsessed manager.
Both men had been straining, each in his own way, after
goals I could understand.

And Johansson? He was an enormously popular con
queror that night, and not merely because the modest and

A Radical's America 298

manager-dominated Patterson had never succeeded in
capturing popular favor as a champion. He is a popular
champion, too, in demand as a passable singer on TV and
a hopefully charismatic actor in Hollywood. But in addi
tion to his dimple (he is the kind of man girls call "cute")
and his aplomb, he has what is basically an amateur's atti
tude toward the sport. I say this despite the patent fact
that this hardheaded young man, already worth a reported
quarter of a million dollars from other enterprises, is in
boxing solely for what he can haul out of it, and is the
kind of person who, as one admirer has it, "counts his own
money ? What matters is his utter lack of hesitation in in
dicating that for him there are other things in the world
besides boxing.

People thought that the stories of Johansson's high life
were hoked up to heighten public interest in the fight.
They may very well have been, but what is more signifi
cant is that the young Swede's unprecedented training
routine in the luxurious atmosphere of Grossinger's, sur
rounded by mother, father, brothers, girl friend, brother's
girl friend, and Platonic friends, and punctuated by rich
smorgasbord dinners and periodic excursions to the pleas
ure domes of Manhattan, represents the hidden dream of a
very new generation not for fleshpots and houris, but for
the private pleasures, before it is too late, of a substantial
middle-class existence.

Johansson had, now, the things that Patterson was de
nying himself in hopes of having later on. And he had
them because his attitude toward his temporary profession
was and is that of the middle-class man of our era
toward his work, whether it is medicine, engineering, or
athletics: it's one way to earn a living, but it mustn't be
permitted to stand in the way of life's real pleasures.

It is true that Johansson comes from comparatively
humble people in Sweden, but there are really no poor in
Sweden as there are in Africa, Asia, or Latin America.
Sweden represents what America and therefore the
world wants to be. It was only fitting that a Swede with

299 Exercise and Abstinence

no noticeable feelings of inferiority or inadequacy to over
come, and who photographs like an ad agency's beau ideal
of the young middle-class man about town, should have
been the one to bring into question not only centuries of
accepted practice in the conditioning of an athlete, but an
entire attitude toward work and discipline.

Lest it be thought that I am trying to construct a fancy
theory out of one brutal evening's brutal entertainment,
consider the reaction of Rocky Marciano, who retired un
defeated as world's heavyweight champion. Marciano, the
son of poor Italians in Brockton, Massachusetts, could
have earned another million dollars if he had gone on
fighting, but he couldn't see the sense in indefinitely defer
ring a comfortable life in favor of leading a wretched celi
bate existence as a dedicated athlete. When he visited Jo
hansson on the night of his victory, he told him: "I wish
you would have been my trainer when I fought. I'd still
be fighting."

Marciano (or his ghost undoubtedly, but no matter) in
formed the readers of the New York Journal-American
that the Patterson- Johansson fight was "the most radical
thing to happen to boxing in this country. I don't mean
the K.O. There have been bigger upsets. I mean in what it
will do to our attitude toward conditioning a fighter. I
said Ingemar trained all wrong. He never boxed hard. He
lived with his family, particularly a lovely, but distracting,
fiancee. Floyd did everything correctly, while Johansson
was the worst, take-it-slow training camp fighter I've ever
seen. . . . All I could think of was me waking up in Gros-
singer's when I trained. I'd see Charley Goldman before
he shaved and Allie Columbo, and then go out on the
road. When I'd get back from running, Al Weill, also with
out a shave, would be up and ready to give orders. . . ."

Am I wrong in thinking, then, that we may possibly be
on the verge of a new era in boxing, in which the sport will
come to be dominated, not by poor boys drawn into it
from an inability to conceive of themselves as proportion-

A Radical's America 300

ately successful in other fields, but by that new breed of
cool young men who see all forms of human endeavor sim
ply as alternate modes of buying leisure?

I realize that particularly at this moment, with the first
Patterson- Johansson shindig being fine-toothed by the law
for evidence of malefaction, and with more slobs exposed
to public contumely in every sports final that hits the
streets, it may seem ludicrous to suggest that boxing will
become more rather than less respectable. But since when
has the periodic apprehension of embezzling bank tellers
in Buenos Aires or Bahia deterred an ambitious young man
with a head for figures from going into the banking profes
sion? We tend to be amused, rather than indignant, at the
crooks and sharpshooters in other areas of American enter
prise (at least in all except labor unions), and it may very
well be, may it not, that when the gold dust blows away,
our institutions of higher learning, which have been re
placing the moribund minor leagues as a training ground
for professional baseball, basketball, and football players,
will also replace the slums as breeders of rich and respect
able fighters?

In that case, the tragedy of Floyd Patterson will be seen
in his having been needlessly and regardless of his im
pending return bout one of the last figures of a dying
era, rather than as one of the first of the new. And that of
Cus D'Amato, in his overweening ambition, single-minded-
ness, and pride finally being unavailing, simply because
they were outdated and hence overmatched against the
button-down-collar boyishness of a far more relaxed bach
elor manager, Ingemar Johansson. I suspect that it is the
man who manages himself, Johansson, who will be seen
together with whatever temporary buddies he may gather
about him as successors to the in-too-deep and already
sunk-from-sight Bill Rosensohn as riding the wave of the
future.

The Noble Savage, No. 1, March 1960

301 Exercise and Abstinence

Footnote, 1961; Since the above was written, Floyd
Patterson has whipped Ingemar Johansson, not once
but twice. All too obviously I am no expert on the
fight game. Those who criticized me for this, or for
not writing with the knowledgeability of an A. J.
Liebling, mistook my intention.

The article tries to point up a tendency for which
there would seem to be evidence throughout Ameri
can life, even though one ought not to bear down on
it too hard only the sports writer, making bum
guesses about his play world, can stand the strain of
being wrong year in and year out!

For another thing, it was Johansson, after all, and
not Patterson, who really capitalized on his tide. It
was Johansson who became the crooner, Johansson
who became the movie actor (in a war movie, with
Mort Sahl, of all people), Johansson who became the
dimpled TV personality alongside America's Current
Sweetheart, Dinah Shore. No matter how long he re
tains his title, no matter how many plump and pas
sive playboys he knocks cold, Floyd Patterson will
never be able to sell American youth on his life as a
model of exercise and abstinence not as long as the
living is easy, and there is no longer anything much
worth fighting for.

The Pilot as Precursor

If you want to talk to a pilot today, you have to make an
appointment. He does not frequent bars. He cannot drink
anything alcoholic for twenty-four hours before he flies.
He does not congregate at the union hall. He regards it
not as a hangout but rather as a technical headquarters.
And you cannot watch him at work, because nowadays it
is easier to watch a surgeon performing a brain operation
than it is to check in with a flight crew and follow them
through a routine run, say, from Salt Lake City to New
York.

The "typical" pilot, seen through the spyglass of a sur
vey, is a white man of about thirty-seven, who owns his
own home and has a wife and two children. He has had
three years of college, belongs to a union (the Air Line
Pilots Association), and earns about fourteen thousand dol
lars a year.

Fourteen thousand dollars a year is a lot more than the
ordinary union member makes. For pilots' salaries to aver
age out to this figure, many of them have to earn up to
$25,000 a year, and do. But high earnings are only one of
the factors which mark the pilot as different not only from
his AFL-CIO brothers, but also from the vast middle class,
of which he considers himself to be a fairly representative
member. These differences are really more suggestive than
superficial similarities.

For one thing, pilots represent an elite group psycho
logically as well as physically. Drawn for the most part
from the high-standard Air Force (45 per cent, with per
haps 35 per cent coming from the Navy and the Marines),

303 The Pilot as Precursor

they have to start all over again through a battery of ex
aminations in order to qualify for the big new jets. Only
one applicant in sixty makes the grade. The man who is
cleared at last to fly these planes is not merely an A-l
physical specimen; he is, as Ed Mack Miller, who teaches
him how to fly them at United Air Lines' Flight Training
Center in Denver, puts it, "a very highly developed hu
man being."

This human being, whose vision and reflexes and heart
and blood pressure and nervous system must be such as to
place him in the top 1 per cent of the population, can
never rest on his good fortune at having once passed both
government and private examinations, like the doctors and
dentists who can coast after their state boards, or the pro
fessors who can vegetate after acquiring their Ph.D/s, He
is subject four times a year to a test of his flying skill and
twice a year to a severe review of his physical condition.
At any time he may be debarred forever from air line fly
ing. This boils down to the fact that a pilot of sixty has to
meet the health and proficiency standards of a pilot of
thirty. Obviously, only a selected group of a selected
group can stay on the job until sixty. His union itself fig
ures the average rate of attrition to be about 3 per cent a
year. Of a given group of one hundred copilots all twenty-
five years old, only 10 per cent have a mathematical
chance of flying until age fifty-five. Of the group, 89 per
cent will have been separated before sixty years of age.

But there is something about these pilots that is even
more special than their physical and psychological qualifi
cations: They love their work. By and large it would seem
(although it can hardly be proved) that fewer and fewer
of us are happy with our work. When you come upon a
group of men who are fanatically devoted to what they do
for a livelihood, it is a remarkable phenomenon. There are
so few pilots who have voluntarily quit the air lines that
they can be called up by name by their fellow fliers, as
eccentrics or misfits.

This is worth a little examination. Some years back we

A Radical's America 304

might have waved it away by writing off the pilots as per
petual adolescents who loved to court danger, who craved
glamour, easy dough, and the thrill of thumbing their
noses at death, like racing drivers or soldiers of fortune.
But now that air line operations have become as routin-
ized as railroads or buses, pilots can buy life insurance at
the same rate as office workers. These healthy, responsible,
cautious men are a good risk.

Then why? What is there about flying that continues to
enthrall them? The answer has to be divided into three
parts. First, what they are doing is necessary. Second, it
can be performed only by a highly selected elite group.
Third, it is fascinating.

In inverse order: Every pilot with whom you speak in
sists that he likes to fly because every flight involves a se
ries of swift and important decisions. Even the most rou
tine and presumably boring milk ran must have a takeoff
and a landing; the slightest shifting of wind can make
either the takeoff or landing a singular and dramatic ex
perience. The closest analogy might be to the riverboat or
harbor pilot or to the master of an ocean liner, whose job
may often be boring or exhausting but also has the poten
tiality at any moment of intense excitement and rapid
decision-making. It is this potential of great demand on
the individual's skill, ingenuity, and resourcefulness that
is the source of the enormous pull of commercial flying for
pilots, replacing the old charge that the daredevils used to
get from contact flying in planes made by hand. This po
tential has not been at all diminished by the development
of the jet airliners. Quite the contrary. The technical work
in flying the new airplanes, despite (or perhaps because of)
the fact that they are actually easier to fly than the old
piston aircraft, is awesome to a layman. As Ed Miller ex
plains it, the new pilot has to be "a computer with legs/*
Miller, who trains pilots in the simulators, and who is him
self a successful writer as well as a pilot with twenty years*
experience, details a dizzying series of computations and
decisions that have to be made almost automatically, and

305 The Pilot as Precursor

with split-second precision, by the pilot of the jet as it is
leaving the ground or returning to it.

The pilot takes a natural pride in the fact that not many
men can qualify to fly a commercial jet. There are thou
sands of competent pilots, in the military services as well
as civilian holders of various classifications of licenses, who
would not be permitted near the flight deck of a DC-8 or
a Boeing 707. Inevitably the fraternity remains closely
knit a fact of which the Air Line Pilots Association has
taken intelligent advantage. The air line pilot has a highly
developed sense of exclusivity as well as of command.

He knows too that what he is doing becomes increas
ingly important, increasingly essential, with every passing
hour. If it was hair-raising fun to fly the mail thirty years
ago, letters could always be delivered by rail if you were
killed or went on strike. But all passenger travel today is
practically dependent on the scheduled air lines; if all of
the 15,000-odd air line pilots in the country were to walk
out at once (a situation which is not practically possible)
the country would be in the grip of a national emergency
more immediate and far more irksome than that gradually
brought on by a strike of half a million steel or auto
workers.

The pilot is different from other Americans in some
other ways that are even more interesting, perhaps be
cause they are unexpected. He is more worldly and some
what more sophisticated than the average citizen, particu
larly if he is flying an overseas route. He tends to read
more newspapers and magazines than his neighbor, and by
virtue of the fact that one day he is in Karachi and another
in Bangkok and another in Berlin, he is more aware than
are most Americans of the true size and shape of the world
and of his native land's place in it. At its best, this concern
can issue in the kind of constructive selfless action taken
by Captain Charles C. Dent, who donated all of the $5500
bonus awarded him for a safe crash landing to the United
States Committee for the United Nations to help promote
its program.

A Radical's America 306

If he is a more concerned American, the pilot is also a
more stable one. It should hardly be surprising that his
home breaks up so infrequently that most people in the in
dustry find it hard to name offhand any pilot who has been
recently divorced. (He is not always a model husband. One
learns from ex-stewardesses that the '"key game" flourishes
as a weekend diversion among flying families in the upper
Midwest. Although there is no corroboration of this gossip
that in certain communities blase pilots and their wives
play switch, like other bored suburbanite couples, there
are others to assure you that when one air line based its
pilots and stewardesses in the same Honolulu hotel a few
years ago, the shack-up incidence and the subsequent mar
riage breakup rate were so high that sexual segregation
had to be instituted.)

In the main, though, the pilot does tend to participate
more wholeheartedly than his neighbors in somewhat
more respectable neighborhood activities, such as scout
leadership and civic affairs, maybe because he has more
free time at home than they do. Surely most surprising
about this middle-class man so jealous of his position in the
community is the extent of his active participation in a
tough union, the Air Line Pilots Association. But of this,
more later.

There are pilots who in their free time are insurance
salesmen, aviation consultants, travel agents, ski instruc
tors, novelists, sail-plane enthusiasts and fliers-for-fun,
teachers, cattlemen, cow-punchers, farmers (from potatoes
to oranges, depending on locale), dog fanciers, aircraft
brokers, ministers, parachute jumpers, woodworkers and
furniture makers, real estate brokers and property man
agers, executive recruiters, big-game hunters. At a guess
only 5 per cent have income-producing sidelines, but
many of them do become passionately interested in avoca
tions which may possibly become full-time jobs in the
event of grounding or retirement. Pilot after pilot will tell
you that he goes into those sidelines not at all because he
dislikes flying but because he has considerable free time

307 The Pilot as Precursor

and does not get tike variety of satisfactions from his work
or his relations with his employers that he comes to feel
life ought to hold. One suspects that he is merely antici
pating all of those Americans who will sooner or later be
going on a four-day week, or a six-hour day, or both, and
who, whether or not they like their work, will find them
selves unable to spend their long lives simply staring at
television or building barbecue pits.

The future pilot usually goes to college for several years
and then, bored and restless, signs up for a four-year tour
of duty and is sent, say, to Lackland Air Force Base. He
discovers that not everyone can strap the bird to his back,
not everyone can fly a hot jet. So he is proud when he
earns his wings, but like most of us he chafes under rigid
military discipline, and he turns to the civilian career pos
sibilities of the commercial air lines.

Here, however, he is taught that while there are bold
pilots and old pilots, there are no bold old pilots. So he
becomes, if he was not to start out with, a technically
minded and very careful man. In his mid-twenties, he
learns to forget hot jockeying, and to value stability and
the ability to avoid even involvement, if possible, in emer
gency situations.

He learns too that the very size and speed of the big jet
has shrunk more than distances. It has also shrunk job pos
sibilities for the men at the controls. Aside from the fact
that it is a simpler plane to operate, it can take more peo
ple from one coast to the other in half the previous time.
This means that the pilot who is supposed to fly eighty
hours a month has to make more flights, and that as the
air lines turn to jets, pilots with less seniority are being
laid off. Many of those who manage to hang on find that
promotion has become very sluggish indeed; in an indus
try from which the romance has disappeared, some are
coming to terms with the idea that a man can make a life's
career out of being a copilot. (If he shrinks from the
thought of what will happen in the coming decade when

A Radical's America 308

supersonic flight becomes a reality and the ocean is
spanned in an hour and a half, he knows that his work-week
will have to be shortened again and that only his union is
currently doing any substantial research in the multiplicity
of problems that will accompany the supersonic age.)

Nevertheless, as an American he is an optimist, even if a
worried one. He is more aware than are most people that
although flying is as popular in this country as reading, it
is just as restricted to a special segment of the population.
Three out of every four Americans have never flown with
the air lines. Only 2 per cent of the peoples of the world
have ever been off the ground. More of them are going to
want to fly, and, as living standards rise, are going to be
able to; and the pilot looks forward to flying them. Far
more important is the potential in the air cargo business,
which can only increase, with fantastic possibilities in
store not merely for inventories and business in general,
but for pilots. If we reach the point in this country where,
with the development of modified jets and all-cargo
planes, even 2 per cent of all cargo is shipped by air, there
will have to be a threefold increase in aircraft personnel.

This is why the hopeful pilot believes that the em
ployment slump brought about by the jet age is only tem
porary, and that great days lie ahead, probably in the lat
ter part of the Sixties. If right now there is a surplus of
pilots, despite the substantial attrition rate, he thinks that
in a few years there will be a shortage, as the older men re
tire and the youngsters are not attracted to the industry in
sufficient numbers from the military or from no-longer-
star-struck high school boys. He is convinced that it is go
ing to be necessary to train pilots in the universities, per
haps under government subsidy, since, as the missile age
develops, the services will simply not be giving flight
training to many young men. He points to England and
France, where the corporations themselves, while state-
owned, already sponsor nonmilitary flight-training pro
grams.

The pilot, who knows that it takes better than four

309 TJie Pilot as Precursor

crews to keep one airplane operating efficiently around
the clock, sees the air lines like the automobile manu
facturersmerging and consolidating; and he is aware
too that the top money is in the Big Four, where average
first-pilot earnings in 1958 were better than eighteen thou
sand dollars. Since he loves to fly, he is stimulated far
more than he is annoyed by new developments. There is
nothing like novelty, challenging one's adaptability, to
keep a job interesting. As one veteran pilot turned execu
tive says, "Even the transition from the DC-3 to the DC-4
was comparable in complexity to that from piston to jet.
Every technological advance is an added insurance that
flying will continue to be fascinating/'

Nevertheless, although he is almost unique in having a
job that pays well, that is highly respectable, and that he
loves, the pilot is going to be bucking in years to come
like his friends and neighbors in the ranch houses across
the country for more pay and shorter hours. Which
brings us back to the intriguing question of his union.

Captain C. C. Spencer, who flies for Pan American in
addition to having served as Regional Vice-president of the
Air Line Pilots Association (in effect running the New York
office of ALP A), estimates that there are some seven hun
dred pilots who are active on a day-to-day basis in the
operation of the union. Tins is particularly remarkable
when you consider, first, that these are solid homeowners,
the majority of whom probably vote Republican (or at
least did until General Eisenhower appointed their bane,
General Elwood Quesada, as head of the Federal Aviation
Agency) and have neither a family tradition nor a com
pelling personal interest in a militant labor movement; and
second, that their union has but two salaried full-time offi
cers, the President and the Executive Vice-President : all
of the other officials are unpaid and fly for a living. The
Local Executive Council of the ALPA, its basic unit of or
ganization, varies in size, depending on the size of the air
line it represents, from six hundred down to ten members.

A Radical's America 310

The councils pretty much run their own affairs. (There are
fifty-two air lines in this country having separate union
agreements, all separately administered.)

Naturally, you will find griping about the union, mostly
apparently from the younger men who feel that they are
being frozen out or ignored by their seniors who have their
own cliques and their own political machine. The union's
official response to this is not merely its constitution and
its carefully democratic table of organization, or its well-
advertised freedom from corruption and collusion, but also
the practical evidence that each Master Executive Council
generally has two new members serving on it during any
given election period, and that there is always an active
search for new-member participation in the rotating posi
tions.

How are we to explain the fact that these individualists,
who like to think of themselves as professional men, and
who feel no particular bonds with the main body of
the organized labor movement, participate so actively
in the running of their union? The answer is not to be
found by approaching this union as basically a trade or
professional pressure group like the American Medical As
sociation, primarily engaged in such monopolistic prac
tices as locking up existing jobs, restricting entry into the
field, and boosting income to astronomical heights. Other
unions and associations behave like this and do not as a
necessary consequence elicit from their membership the
kind of voluntary effort so impressively in evidence at the
ALPA.

In the union's handsome Midway Airport headquarters
in Chicago, President Clarence H. Sayen, the forty-two-
year-old former Braniff pilot who has headed the union
since the expulsion in 1951 and subsequent death (in 1953)
of its first president and charter member, Dave Behncke, is
voluble on this matter. The contrast between the two is
almost too pat a lesson in recent American history.
Behncke was a swashbuckler out of the Roaring Twenties,
a barnstorming stunt man from the hazardous early days,

311 The Pilot as Precursor

with a hairline mustache and a flair for theatrics, but with
no administrative ability or the faintest notion of the func
tions of a union in the second half of the twentieth cen
tury. Sayen is an academically oriented young man with a
master's degree in economics, who has been a college in
structor, is sensitive to the new political and social cur
rents, and gives speeches substantial ones, too with
titles like The Cultural Impact of Jets, to commerce and
industry associations. Sayen has his own theories about the
wide extent of member participation in ALPA and its im
plications for AFL-CIO organizing efforts, abysmally un
successful so far, among the millions of technical and
white-collar people.

His union has been so successful in engaging not only
the attendance but the freely given aid of its members
(some 10 per cent of whom, by his reckoning, are actively
engaged in union work at any particular time) that other
unions, all much larger numerically than ALPA, have
been coming to his ofBce for advice and suggestions on
matters of white-collar organization. Sayen is proud of this
and attributes it by strong implication to several factors.

First would be the enormous concentration of union at
tention to problems of safety. About five hundred pilots, or
enough to operate a medium-sized air line, are engaged in
union safety projects on a part-time basis. The projects are
both voluntary and nonprofit. Pilots involved in them are
reimbursed only for lost flight time. A brief listing may
give some idea of the well-nigh fanatical dedication with
which the pilots concentrate on safety work: (1) Investi
gating crashes. (2) Flight evaluation. (3) Aircraft evalua
tion. This includes at-the-factory examination of designs,
mockups, etc. (The DC-6 and DC-8 have 112 design modi
fications made as a result of ALPA suggestions.) (4) Surveil
lance of airport facilities. (5) Air traffic control improve
ments. An ALPA group worked on airborne radar. (6)
Physical standards. ALPA is a corporate member of the
Aero Medical Association. (7) Special projects. One ex
ample: the centerline approach fight system, enormously

A Radical's America 312

important for obscured landing conditions; one pilot has
worked on this problem for over ten years.

This is where the second factor of member involvement
enters the picture. The ALPA has apparently discovered,
whether deliberately or through a series of fortuitous
events, how to capture the interest of its membership, or
at least of a substantial enough fraction so that it can rely
upon their varied backgrounds for much of its own neces
sary work. Air line pilots are in all likelihood the most
safety-conscious group of people in the United States; sig
nificantly, it is not their employers so much as their union
which has channeled that consciousness into serious and
productive achievement.

"Safety not only in the workplace but in the product as
well is surely a proper prerogative of the union," Sayen
says. "If the United Auto Workers were to insist on build
ing safer cars, and to show how it could be done, not only
would the public benefit, but the union would be drawing
even more than it does now on the intelligence and in
genuity of its members."

The ALPA has been encouraging a number of pilots to
go on to graduate school, secure in the knowledge that it
can tap the brains and skills of these men when necessary.
ALPA is able to set up committees of members who have
degrees in law, physics, etc., and who can, as Sayen con
cedes, "offend the hell out of people with a more leisurely
approach. They are aggressive because of what they know
and want, and can experience a lot of frustration." It is his
union, he feels, which is doing the job abrogated by man
agement. "Really, we run a big management-training
school."

The implication is that other unions might well do like
wise. While all of the full-time ALPA staff, from legal
counsel to public relations men, is professional, they co-or
dinate their work with pilot committees. Pilots themselves,
often with a background of study in economics or account
ing, negotiate their own contracts side by side with the
professional staffers. "The pilot's horizon," says Sayen with

313 The Pilot as Precursor

a sententiousness reminiscent of Walter Reuther (with
whom he obviously has a good deal in common), "expands
to total responsibility."

Maybe. Nonetheless it is true that one ALPA member
has done a Ph.D. thesis on the control of air space, another
a thesis on the 1950 reorganization of his union, a third, in
psychology, on full-field vision (a problem allied to avia
tion). In each case, as well as those where pilots have been
encouraged to study writing, commerce, business adminis
tration, the union has benefited from the pilot's avocation.

It is an avocation which may do more than aid the
union: it may become a livelihood. Few people need a sec
ond string to the bow more than a pilot only one out of
ten air line pilots flies to age fifty. And while ALPA spon
sors an excellent insurance program against grounding, it
is a fact that most men are grounded whether for a
heart murmur, high blood pressure, failing vision, or what
evernot toward the close of their careers but at then-
very peak, during their thirties and forties. "If we can get
our members through the male menopause," Sayen says
wryly, "they're usually set until retirement."

Not only are pilots under the constant pressure of know
ing that they may be grounded at any moment by one of
the two physicals and four proficiency checks to which
they are subject annually, but they are now compulsorily
retired by government edict at age sixty younger to my
knowledge than almost any other trade or profession in
the country.

I sat in the suburban Oak Park living room of a sixty-
year-old pilot shortly after his involuntary retirement and
listened (it was all the consolation I could give) while the
grounded pilot returned again and again to his obsessive
bewilderment at having been forced out by fiat.

"One minute I was entrusted with bringing that plane
into Midway with eighty passengers, all those lives and
millions of dollars' worth of property. The next minute it
was past midnight and I was a menace. I was forbidden to
do what I can do as well as any man living. Why?"

A Radical's America 314

It is humiliating for a skilled man to be put to pasture at
the peak of his performance, particularly when it is done
arbitrarily and when he has demonstrated year after year
his physical capability to perform like a thirty-year-old,
and with an accumulation of incalculable experience and
judgment simply unavailable to any thirty-year-old. But
more than this, he is cut off from his livelihood just as he
has gained the uppermost earning bracket of those top-
seniority chief pilots in command of the new jets and, at
sixty, five years before his social security checks will start
to arrive.

In the next two years about two hundred and fifty pilots
will reach age sixty and compulsory retirement. Their try
ing situation is coming about not as a result of attempted
economies by their employers, but by virtue of a non-
reviewable administrative regulation presumably promul
gated in the interests of aviation safety (a particularly bit
ter pill to men who have been seriously concerned with
safety all of their working lives).

Indeed, the battles over retirement and flight inspectors
between the union and the FAA, together with the maze
of government regulations with which every working pilot
must be intimately familiar (his union participated in the
drafting of the legislation which set up the FAA), have
been cited as contributing along with the broadening
effect of travel to the pilot's high degree of sophistica
tion. These struggles with the government over "techni
cal" matters might, one would suppose, be taken as one
more factor setting him apart from the general run of the
population.

But here we may begin to draw the pilot back into the
general community once again. We have been enumerat
ing the peculiarities of his craft which tend to make the
pilot special and to differentiate him sharply from the mil
lions in the American labor force. But won't virtually every
one of those peculiarities (with the possible exception of
his extraordinary need for exceptional physical fitness) be
increasingly true of Americans in general in the coming

315 The Pilot as Precursor

decades? Even that final element, the increasing tendency
for resentments and consequent strikes and litigation to be
located not so much between labor and management as
between specialist and bureaucrat., is coming to be charac
teristic of the American scene, as more and more of us
either work directly for the government or find our work
ing lives and our working benefits (regardless of which
party is in power) dependent upon decisions made by ap
pointed officials of the federal government.

This holds true even in the seemingly smallest areas of
the pilot's working life. Not long ago the FAA promul
gated another regulation, forbidding pilots to leave the
flight deck except for emergencies or bodily necessities.
Aside from the fact that it struck the pilots as one
more slap in the face, it served to put an end to company-
encouraged fraternization between flight officers and pas
sengers. It emphasized the godlike remoteness of the pilots
in their now inaccessible control room and threw the air
lines' public relations burden on two of the most unstable
occupational groups to be found anywhere sales person
nel and stewardesses.

If the pilot is increasingly isolated from the passengers
whom he flies, isn't this too a condition of working life
which he holds in common with all those who find diem-
selves, thanks to rationalization, mechanization, and auto
mation, more cut off than were their fathers from patients,
customers, clients in short, from human beings? Stew
ardesses, incidentally, tend to look upon the pilots of their
planes either as tyrants who treat them like slaveys, or as
distant but kindly figures, daddies away from home; their
efforts to achieve autonomy, though, for the Air Lines
Stewards and Stewardesses Association, have been frus
trated not only by the brevity of their employment, but
also by the ALP A, which insists that it knows what is best
for these less-skilled sister-unionists, apparently because it
fears being outvoted under conditions of equality.

If the pilot is increasingly isolated, too, from the other
members of his craft, except for those few with whom he

A Radical's America 316

shares the flight deck, and those with whom he is asso
ciated in union committee work, this is a condition already
true of many others, and one that can only be accentuated
as work place and living place become more widely sepa
rated in decades to come. His friendships, like those of his
fellow Americans, will be formed less as a consequence of
shared work patterns; more likely they will come from
community involvement, shared hobbies, or common so
cial or political beliefs and behavior.

Today many pilots who have the seniority to bid on the
best flights, the long-distance runs, instead pick the worst,
the milk runs or the up-and-down runs, only because then
they can remain based near their homes. But there are
many who want it both ways, and hence commute by pri
vate plane or by sports car hundreds of miles to the air
ports* They would seem to be the vanguard of all those
yes, even coal miners who will continue to flee the
megalopolis, but will have to come back to it for their live
lihoods, and will, when commutation flying has caught up
with high-speed flying, be traveling fifty and a hundred
miles to work within our own lifetimes.

The consequences of all this for ordinary living, from
friendships to family relationships, are incalculable and
perhaps best left to the trend spotters and the sociological
columnists. But one thing is sure: the daredevil flyboy of
recent memory has died. In his place we have a splendid
physical specimen, true, but also a skilled technician, an
active unionist, a community-minded hobbyist and a con
cerned parent who whether you think of him as a para
gon of the American virtues or as a square caricature of
responsible respectability is as close as you can get to a
living exemplar of the American workingman of the fu
ture.

Esquire, October 1961

Work and the Professions

One of the great ironies of our time: The country that
achieved pre-eminence in considerable part through an al
most religious dedication to work has become the land
where leisure and fun are enthroned as the new gods. We
Americans were so fanatically devoted to work not only as
the source but as the end of life that we became the butt
of jokes to our own writers, from Sinclair Lewis to H. L.
Mencken, as well as to European hotelkeepers and boule-
vardiers, who tagged our menfolk as people who didn't
know how not to work. But in a few short years we have
not only picked up the fallen flag of the aristocrats and
faineants we have emblazoned on it our current national
motto, in the international neon language of the mass
media: Work is for squares.

One day we awoke to the discovery that we had de
veloped the capacity to produce more than we could con
sume with less expenditure of effort than is required in
other nations simply to stave off hunger. More, we dis
covered that more and more people could get more and
more by working less and less or by not working at all.
Fortune magazine was not kidding when it called "not
working" the fastest-growing occupation in the United
States. Consider: Between thirteen and fourteen billion
dollars a year in personal income is now going to individ
uals in the form of stock dividends, three times the amount
paid in dividends twenty years ago. Over twenty-five bil
lion dollars a year is being paid as interest income, and
over twelve billion as rental income. If you take into ac
count the twenty-eight billions going to individuals as

A Radical's America 318

"transfer payments" (which means payments not resulting
from current production that is, mostly social-insurance
benefits and veterans 7 payments), this boils down to the
fact that, as Sylvia Porter, a syndicated financial columnist,
puts it rather excitedly, "18 to 20 per cent of all the per
sonal income being paid in this country today is going to
Americans who are NOT WORKING for the income."

Inevitably, the news of this spreading stream of gravy
seeps through even to those who aren't getting any of it. If
the message is not plain even to the dullest, the mass
media are in there punching to drive it home. What other
conclusion can we draw from the unlamented quiz shows,
their wild proliferation checked only when its cancerous
nature became a national shame? The sick fascination was
not in any display of brains (patent nincompoops and mut-
tonheads shared in the swag) but in the demonstration
that absolutely anyone could lay his hands legally on enor
mous sums of money without lifting a finger or shedding
one drop of honest sweat. If the quiz shows are gone,
"Queen for a Day" remains, and in the supermarkets you
can now enter contests without so much as writing one
jingle or completing one sentence in twenty-five words or
less. To jet to Paris for two on a detergent manufacturer
or retire with a lifetime tax-free income on a dog-food dis
tributor, you need labor no longer over rhyming diction
aries. In keeping with the times, such intellectual trials are
often dispensed with, and the loot is passed out on a
no-sweat straight lottery basis.

Why work? You don't have to be beat to be ruefully
aware that, increasingly, middle-class occupations are as
phony as the title to an acre of land on the moon. I believe
that not one person in a hundred who "works'* in advertis
ing, merchandising, public relations, radio, television, mass
circulation magazines or movies is engaged in what was
once known as honorable, socially useful labor. A growing
proportion of the new middle class is being paid for put
ting in the hours between amusements at tasks that can-

319 Work and the Professions

not be justified by traditional standards in terms of either
public utility or personal satisfaction.

Those who are indignant at the irresponsibility of label
ing practically all careers related to the mass media as non-
work or fake-work jobs might think about some of the im
plications of the following excerpt from an undelivered
speech by an advertising agency official, as reported in the
New York Times of February 17, 1960: "As long as the
object of the mass communications industry is to deliver
a maximum audience at a minimum cost, cultural factors
must take a back seat. Entertainment, art, culture and en
lightenment are only means toward fulfilling the economic
objectives of the mass media. . . . Artistry, morality and
religion are permitted as part of the public relations of the
field. They provide a means of avoiding serious criticism
and legal action. ..." I wish only that there were space
to quote further from this confession, about which the
Times goes on to explain, "When the official learned to his
horror on last Friday that his speech was not to be private,
but was to be publicized, he telephoned the school and
canceled the engagement."

There are others just as frank and apparently even more
shameless about what the new middle class is perpetrating
to earn its fun and games. In a paper in the Harvard Busi
ness Review entitled "The Dangers of Social Responsi
bility," Dr. Theodore Levitt, marketing and economic con
sultant and advisor to Standard Oil of Indiana, has opined
that "If what is offered can be sold at a profit (not neces
sarily a long-run profit) then it's legitimate. The cultural,
spiritual,, social, et cetera, consequences of his [the seller's]
actions are none of the businessman's business."

Significantly, the hucksters and their hired hands, the
boating enthusiasts and barbecue experts, who should be
the last to complain about the laziness or the dishonesty of
others, are the very people who are most vociferous at
their watering holes coffee breaks, lunch dates and cock
tail parties in their annoyance that the lower orders are
not putting out as they used to.

A Radical's America 320

Certainly it is true that, as millions of toaster owners
have discovered to their dismay and outrage, it is almost
impossible to get a small appliance honestly and reason
ably repaired. And it becomes less and less likely that the
instinct of workmanship will have found vital expression
either in the original construction or in the repair of such
enormously expensive items as a Detroit automobile or a
development house. No argument here. The real question
is whether this decline in pride of craft and standards of
honest dealing comes about as a result of union-enforced
slackness and the unlikelihood of being fired simply for
sloppiness or whether, as I believe, it reflects an economy
increasingly dedicated to planned obsolescence (read:
short-lived junk) and dominated by types who have no
aim in life beyond making a bundle (ponder the case of
the recently deposed president of one of our largest cor
porations, currently under stockholder suit for allegedly
having knowingly purchased, on personally profitable
kickback terms, inferior parts for his company's product).

In our understandable frustration at struggling with a
national situation dominated by lack of respect for the
"pro" the man who cares enough about what he pro
duces to work long and hard at making it both handsome
and satisfying we find it easier to refer our irritations
with bad service, rudeness, sloppy workmanship, and in
ferior products to a few large, easily identifiable, malign
bodies. But it simply will not answer to attribute all these
maddening and shameful annoyances to Big Unionism on
the one hand or Madison Avenue on the other.

The unions cannot be seen as either parent or midwife
to these iniquities; they are rather a mirror, reflecting a
disturbed awareness on the part of their members that as
their tasks are made increasingly minute and differenti
ated, they themselves become separated from any vital
relationship to the finished product, and that in many
cases the finished product is hardly worth making anyway.
Not only does the same hold true for the advertising-
agency employee (who is additionally burdened psycho-

321 Work and the Professions

logically with the manufacture of personal enthusiasm for
products of dubious utility); his organization reflects the
enormous pressure in our society to move goods and conse
quently to brainwash consumers into believing that they
want or need these goods without real regard to their
quality or indeed the very necessity for their existence.

Given this dual deification of production and the con
tinuous movement of goods (no matter what kind), we
should not be too surprised that an increasingly uneasy
public tends to blame unions, or any other easily labeled
entity, in preference to the harder task of analyzing the
impersonal forces that create our new national hypocrisy.
Nor should we be quite so unprepared for the personality
deformations occurring as a result of grown men being
bribed to spend their waking hours at tasks that mock the
very possibility of a serious, professional achievement with
one's hands or brain.

Not least among these deformations, along with the
blind, pot-and-kettle, middle-class complaint about the
falling-off of working-class performance standards, has
been a virtual disappearance of our concern for those
whose lives are not overmastered by the forty billion dol
lars which Life magazine happily assures us are now spent
annually on "nonworking." Last year Albert Whitehouse,
who runs the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-
CIO, described to a public-relations seminar of the Har
vard Graduate School of Business Administration "a
gathering of polite people in an upper middle-income
suburb. The locale could have been outside any large city
in the U. S. A. The group was all-professional, of middle
age and upward doctors, lawyers, government career
ists, and their wives. To hear these good people, organized
labor is to blame for virtually everything from the Berlin
crisis to nationalist outbursts in Nyasaland. What bothered
me most was that all the disagreement was virtually as
polite as the agreement. . . . These professionals seemed
to have forgotten the past. ... A strange myopia afflicted
the crowd, or so it seemed to me. . . ."

A Radical's America 322

Mr. Whitehouse went on, "Something seems to have
gone out of American life. It's a sense of sympathy for
one's fellow man, a sense of integrity, an understanding of
the other fellow's right to human dignity. There was a day
when the picket line of underpaid textile workers com
manded sympathy. There was a time when the plight of
the farm worker was of national concern. There was a day
even when the nation cared about its poor, and that wasn't
so long ago."

The nature of the complaint is already known. What is
infinitely depressing is that, as Mr. Whitehouse indicates,
the infection has spread from the much-pummeled admen
to such presumably unassailable areas of selfless endeavor
as the learned professions. I am particularly sensitive to
the conduct of the new generation of medical men be
cause my grandfather, my father and a number of uncles
and cousins have acquitted themselves with a certain dis
tinction in the field; and I fear that some of them would be
hard put to justify the action lack of action would de
scribe it more accurately of a number of their contempo
rary colleagues. Surely no one will begrudge a hard-work
ing medico an undisturbed day off such as he used never
to be able to enjoy or two days off, for that matter. But
now it becomes increasingly difficult to obtain the per
sonal services of any physician after five o'clock on any
afternoon, particularly if you need to have him come to
you, and not vice versa.

We have all read hair-raising stories about silly women
jabbering on a party line and refusing to get off so that a
frantic father could reach his family doctor in an emerg
ency. What we haven't been told is whether, when the
idiots finally ran out of breath, the doctor finally conde
scended to come to the phone. There are doctors now who
will speak to you, all right and will subsequently bill you
two dollars for having taken up a moment or two that
might otherwise have been spent at the lake or on the putt
ing green. The after-me-the-deluge attitude of some of
these practitioners, together with the unrepudiated last-

323 Work and the Professions

ditch Bourbonism of their union, the A.M.A., may very
likely serve to give impetus to the passage of a national
medical insurance program; in the meantime, however, it
helps to carve out one more stone in the monument to
greed and laziness now arising in our midst. The same has
to hold true for the lawyers who are so busy making
money and having fun that they cannot spare a moment
to restrain the American Bar Association from sniping at
the Supreme Court of the United States, simply because
that body has been taking seriously the upholding of con
stitutional liberties.

I would hold no group immune. The college teachers, of
whom I have been one in recent years, have let it be
known that they are overworked and underpaid. This is
generally true, just as it is true that they are entitled to
more time and money for travel and research. But the hot
pursuit of the gravy train of grantsmanship and the chase
after cushy overseas deals must arouse suspicion as to how
much these selfless scholars actually intend to accomplish
in the unsullied realm of free thought and to what lengths
(or distances) they will go to escape from the American
classrooms they claim to be so concerned about. The effect
on graduate students of the antics of these goof-off artists
of academe cannot be estimated here. What we can say is
that college kids smarten up in a hurry, and that by the
time they graduate they know as many angles as a five-
percenter or an influence peddler. You still have to work
in graduate or professional school, but more often than not
you labor now not to extend the boundaries of human
thought but to gain admission to the club or the club-car
of the gravy train.

Now if these things are true, as I believe them to be, in
such rarefied areas as the learned professions, consider
how much more depressing they are when we encounter
them, swollen to ugly proportions, in the population at
large. The counterman or waitress who cannot be troubled
to remember that you asked for tea instead of coffee, the
cook who cannot be bothered to drain the water from a

A Radical's America 324

plate of lukewarm spaghetti before dumping it in front of
you, the optometrist who sells you harlequin glasses when
in fact you do not need any glasses all are demonstrating
in their particular ways the deformations wrought on pride
of performance and the integrity of a job well and honestly
done by a culture that no longer puts any premium on
such accomplishments, but glorifies instead the "instant,"
the "magic/' the "ready mix," all euphemisms by and large
for the quick, the sloppy, the careless buck.

The effects are perhaps most acutely painful in the field
of popular entertainment, partly because they are most
pervasive and hence most unavoidable, and partly because
they catch kids future doctors, lawyers, professors, coun
termen, cooks, optometrists at their most vulnerable,
and inculcate them with values (whether they accept them
or rebel against them) that must color their adult lives.

For quite a while one of the handsomer attributes of the
American public performer, the real pro, was grace under
pressure, which might be more closely defined as a care
fully developed faculty of making the difficult look easy
and effortless. This kind of grace helped to endear Crosby,
Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, and Ted Williams to their fans.

But now we find many young athletes motivated less by
an urgent desire to do, with grace, what has never been
done before, than by an expectation of doing what has al
ready been done by many around them. The dream of the
talented as well as the hopelessly untalented athlete is to
clean up in a hurry.

As for the popular singers, we can in all truth regard a
number of them not as human beings aspiring to impart an
air of effortlessness to their performances but, rather, quite
simply, as manufactured objects, with neither more nor
less relationship to the rest of the human race than the
juke boxes whose glassy insides they feed with an assort
ment of noises. One of the current favorite singers was
found, by an ambitious agent, at age fifteen with his guitar
on a tenement stoop. The agent gave him a name, a ward
robe, a hairdo, some recording tests and singing lessons.

325 Work and the Professions

These were soon given up as hopeless because the boy was
tone-deaf; but this made no difference the agent had
guessed correctly that the boy would be attractive, or
could be rendered attractive, to young girls, no matter
what sort of noises he made. As a result, this adolescent,
who will not be of voting age for some years and who is
more of a concoction than he is a developing human being,
is already more "successful" than Szilard, Waksman or
Salk. And although he will be more quickly forgotten, his
life story (such as it is) and its implicit moral is to be found
not in the sociological journals but in the daily papers and
the fan magazines, and is being digested by millions of
youthful Americans.

Even the modest but at least honorable ambition of
learning to sing popular tunes pleasingly, an ambition
which implies the development of a professional attitude
of respect for one's craft and for the people at whom it is
aimed, now goes by the board in favor of a willingness to
be shaped into a commodity that will sell phonograph
records to fill empty hours and empty heads. The test is
solely in the speed of the payoff, since neither the per
former nor his handlers nor, in the final analysis, his fans
have any image of him as a man building a career; they
see him instead as an ambulatory bank account. Inevi
tably, this shambling dollar sign is taken by millions of the
impressionable young, both here and abroad, to be the
true Voice of America.

Are we all getting worse? Were Americans actually bet
ter human beings back in the Thirties, that decade which
seems to grow more noble in our eyes as it recedes in
time? I don't think so. As one who is grateful that he grew
up in that exciting period, I believe that we ought to be
cautious about overestimating the extent to which most
young people were caught up by unselfish and idealistic
movements. After all, even in the collegiate hotbeds of
radicalism at the pitch of the depression, the great ma
jority of the student body went about their single-minded
business, ignoring public problems, studying commerce

A Radical's America 326

and accounting, trying to pass civil-service examinations.

What differentiated the intellectually aspiring young
people of the Thirties from today's was, it seems to me, that
the best of them found a relationship between their pri
vate aspirations and the public needs. The boy who
wanted to go into electrical engineering knew that the Ru
ral Electrification Administration was in the process of
bringing the modern era to millions of farm homes; the
young law student saw that Washington needed him and
wanted him; the youthful visionary felt not only that the
world could be remade but that he had a vital part to play
in that remaking, whether in the skill of his hands or in
the exercise of his mind.

Today the best of our young people find no such relation
ship and in consequence are so quickly corrupted that it is
horrifying. Those who do not turn their backs on the whole
sell and go beat, refusing to work except at odd jobs in odd
moments, abdicate by settling for those values embodied
in the editorial columns and the advertising pages of the
upper middlebrow magazines: a blenderized liberalism, a
deep cynicism about what they do for a living and about
the entire possibility of achievement through work and an
intense desire for nothing more than the trips to Europe,
the little cars, the liqueurs, the collecting of paintings or
other objects.

It does not follow that this is what the millennium must
look like. These are the people who spend about seven
hundred thousand dollars every single night of the year on
tranquilizers to still uneasy consciences and to bring on
the oblivion of sleep after days spent in unwork. Every
study that I am aware of indicates that man is a creature
who thrives best on work and (at least until now) has not
found means of deriving continuous personal satisfaction
in a society from which work has been outlawed.

This does not mean that we need ever go back to a so
cial order built on the backbreaking toil of millions of
drudges; we are on the verge of an era in which it will not
be necessary or lawful for a single human being to be so

327 Work and the Professions

ill-used. But I would deny with all my strength the notion
that young people now are so rotten with soft living that
they shun work as they would the plague. From my own
experience as a teacher and a writer whose work has
brought him into correspondence with many young peo
ple, I must assert that the flame of idealism burns as
brightly as ever, that the search for fruitful work to which
one can dedicate one's life is as strong as ever. It is just
that it is choked off all too soon by the cynics of a culture
built on corporate profit and dedicated to the principle
that nothing counts but the fast buck.

This is not the place to spell out the kinds of work that
could still pick college kids up by the throat and instill
them with that sense of purpose we all recognize as having
disappeared from the national scene. I would only note my
personal conviction that it will have to be found abroad, in
friendly partnership with the new nations; and I will ask
only what the effect would be if, instead of sitting around
and making cheap jokes about revolutionary leaders, a few
thousand trained young Americans were to pitch in and
try to help these revolutions achieve their professed goals,
to see if they really mean business about public health,
housing, literacy, agricultural diversification, full electri
fication, full employment. The answer to our American
dilemma, as to those different problems faced by less-
developed countries, cannot be found in happy hobbies or
even in the most high-flown leisure. It must still be sought
in fruitful work, applied to the great and greatly challeng
ing tasks that still confront the human race.

Mademoiselle., March 1961

Why Resign from

SJ

the Human Race?

I am speaking in these lines directly to the young people
of college age with whom I have been having such spirited
arguments in recent months. With some of you the discus
sions have been face to face, with some they have been by
correspondence, with yet others they have been, I confess,
only in my own mind and occasionally, I hope, in yours.
I admit freely now that there is real point to your com
plaint that I offer you nothing positive, not a single con
crete suggestion as to what you and your contemporaries
might do to make this a better world. Well, I believe that
now I do have a suggestion. But first suppose we review
the terms of our argument.

You have always been most generous in your appraisal
of "my generation"; in fact, you have been envious of the
turbulent fifteen or twenty years we have on you. In your
opinion life was exciting and worth while for those of us
who were in college in the Thirties because there were
causes worth fighting for and because the ideals with
which we identified ourselves so passionately did seem not
only worthy but realizable. You who are in school in the
Fifties claim that those causes have either been won or are
no longer worth fighting for and that any more up-to-
date ideals, no matter how splendid, are in any case un
realizable. This is a consequence, you say (and with a good
deal of reason), of the centers of power political, social
and cultural power having moved so far away from the
grasp of the average citizen as to be unreachable and
hence uncontrollable.

329 Why Resign from the Human Race?

Therefore those of you whom I care most deeply about,
the ones who resent the assumption that young people
should unquestioningly and unhesitatingly take their
places as little cogs in the big power machinery of politics,
mass communication or the production of trivia, are em
bracing cults which attempt to turn their backs on such
ugly realities. In consequence you demand that I should
not take a superior attitude toward your successive in
fatuation with funny motorcycles and funnier automobiles,
noisy poetry and prolix prose cagily characterized as
"beat," offbeat religious revivalism running the gamut
from A to ZEN, folk songs and guitar players, cold-
water flats and J. D. Salinger, and a host of unrepaid loans
from the white and Negro jazzmen of " c my" generation,
ranging from jive talk to marijuana. Believe me that I am
not listing these enthusiasms merely in order to poke fun
at them, and that I am attempting to place them in their
proper context; indeed, they are in many ways preferable
to those major love affairs of the Thirties, Stalinist politics
and popular-front "art." In trying to evaluate them, I think
in terms of the over-all view expressed by Erich Kahler in
The Tower and the Abyss:

The impossibility of drawing any meaning from the mass of
material and reasoning assembled in our age has given rise to
desperate movements, like futurism, Dadaism and surrealism,
which ... in order to start afresh, attempted first of all to
destroy all meaning wherever it could still be found in the
conventional uses of language and action. The existentialist
experience and ensuing theory is another consequence o
analysis and despair. Thus, loss of meaning produced dis
illusionment with illusory meanings, weariness of meaning,
intentional destruction of meaning and ultimate crumbling of
meaning and coherence in the very texture of daily life. AH
these movements herald a panicky mood which looms under
ground in people's minds and may one day break down the last
barriers of civilization if developments are left to drift the way
they are.

A Radical's America 330

Professor Kahler's warning in that last phrase is the nub
of my own worry. I am perfectly prepared to grant you
your esthetic satisfactions, even though the best of them
may strike me as minor and the worst as ugly and antihu-
man. But I continue to ask: After your pleasures, what?

So far your response has been, "Better these pleasures
than the others. For now, better to say no than to conform,
better Jack Kerouac than Herman Wouk, better the poetry-
cwm-jazz sessions and the folk-song kicks than the as-ad-
vertized-in-Li/e-magazine teen-age parties. For those who
are sick of guff, better Mort Sahl than Senator Dodd;
for those seeking love, better J. D. Salinger than Norman
Vincent Peale. For those who want to be counted out, not
in, better the cold-water flat than the split-level suburb."

I could not agree more. But the road to the suburb is
paved with your pleasures. For every girl living rebel-
liously in the Village with cats and slacks, there are two
who have tired of it and settled for a commuting husband,
with kiddies and station wagon. For every boy reciting
bad poetry and talking of shipping out to sea with his
guitar, there are two who have called it a day and gone
back to graduate school or on to motivation research. You
must understand that I am not mocking you or your con
temporaries; realism is not necessarily ridicule. After all,
the woods (or rather, the bars) are full of my contempo
raries with potbellies and too many belongings men and
women who swore when they were in college that they
would never rest until Spain was free or the Negro was
equal.

And so we come back to my question and to your taunt:
What else is there for you to do today?

I am going to begin my attempt at an answer with an
other question, addressed to you, and if it in turn leads to
yet other questions, I must beg you to bear with me. My
query is this: Why are your contemporaries in such a rush
to settle down?

Perhaps that is an innocuous question, but isn't it true

331 Why Resign from the Human Race?

that the mad dash of young people nowadays to have not
only a home and children, but a job with built-in old-age
security and possessions piled on possessions is pre
cisely what repels you about your own generation? Isn't it
the fear that you too will turn out that way (as I assure
you that you will one day, other things being equal in this
commercial culture of ours) that drives you to despair?
Isn't the fear that you too will turn out that way what
causes you to overvalue the idealism and selflessness of the
Thirties? How many times have I heard you cry that you
didn't want to be stuck in the rut of senseless job, deadly
commuting, and monotonous organized-community exist
ence!

If you are going to be honest about it, it seems to me,
you must start by conceding that your generation, dissi
dents and conformists alike, has been sold a bill of goods.
The quest for security and personal certitude has been
converted by the unremitting pressure of advertising, as
well as by the exigencies of a culture which places a pre
mium on the acquisition of goods, into a convulsive rush
on the part of people barely out of their teens to live as
their parents would rarely have dreamt of living after a
decade of marriage.

Hand in hand with this insistent demand for air-condi
tioned apartments, washer-dryers, stereo-TV, and all the
rest of the apparatus which many young people today
seem to think they must have in order to begin married
life, there goes an absolute, unthinking disregard for the
conditions of daily life under which the vast majority of
the human race is struggling to exist. For all he knows or
cares of the rest of the world, the average American col
lege student today might as well be living in Borneo. If a
ragged and half-starved Egyptian schoolboy takes to the
streets and, by howling up a demagogue, consigns the rest
of the world to hell, we can make allowances, we can un
derstand why he should not understand or care about the
consequences of his actions. But what are we to say of the
overfed and overdressed American collegian who, exposed

A Radical's America 332

to first-rate minds, and with every wonderful facility at his
elbow for stretching his horizons, can think only of his
creature comforts to the complete exclusion of other mat
ters, and can dream only of creating a cocoon for himself
and for his wife and his children thereby yielding the
future of the human race by default to the manipulations
of a handful of shrewd ideologues half a world away?

I know you will point out that this absorption with self,
this pre-Copernican notion that the world (if there is one)
must revolve around the American, is not confined to the
college student. That is unfortunately true. Some months
ago, the New York Times ran a dispatch from Madrid by
Benjamin Welles describing the lives of young Americans
attached to SAC air bases throughout Spain. Never mind
why those bases are there, or what they are costing us.
Hear how our compatriots live:

. . . For newly arrived families, never before out of the
United States, lugging baggage and children, speaking no
Spanish and worried, the shortage of housing has depressed
most of them. ... To check this morale problem it spreads
like wildfire if unchecked the United States Government is
now building about 1,200 standard, bungalow-type homes.
. . . All the houses contain three or four bedrooms; two bath
rooms; living room-dinette; central heating; carport; modern
kitchens with electric ranges plus washing-drying machines.
Each is completely furnished. . . . The overwhelming major
ity of United States officers, airmen, and their families will live
together, eat together, worship together, shop together at the
base commissaries and post exchanges and, in short, exist
cheek by jowl. Their contacts with the Spanish people will re
main at a mirtirnum.

Mr. Welles concludes this obscene forecast with the
mild observation that "the military-base program has been
an object of hatred among the Spanish left-wing oppo
nents of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. They see it as a
device for shoring up an inefficient, paunchy dictatorship.
The right-wing "in/ on the other hand bankers, indus
trialists, monarchists, high clerics, machine and bureauc-

333 Why Resign from the Human Race?

racy bosses and military chiefs accept, even if they do
not like, the presence of the United States forces. It in
sures peace and order in their time."

Not long after this, the Times printed a dispatch from
Seoul, Korea, in which Robert Trumbull observed:

The New American military housing, which the aid mission
will also share, will be on more or less secluded military
reservations behind barbed wire. Since no unauthorized
visitors will be admitted by the guards without a special pass,
relatively few ordinary Koreans besides servants are likely to
see how the Americans live in these centrally heated, fully
electrified duplexes.

While you are pondering the spectacle presented by
these barbed-wire oases of togetherness, mindlessness, and
gluttony scattered from Spain to Korea across the parched
desert of the underdeveloped world, let me at last put to
you my concrete proposal. It is very simple: that you and
your friends launch an immediate campaign for the estab
lishment of an international volunteer work force of at
least 100,000 young people annually. This work force
would be recruited from the recent college graduates of
universities in the United States, Canada, England, West
ern Europe, the Scandinavian countries, the U.S.S.R., and
the highly developed nations in the Russian orbit such as
Czechoslovakia.

Under the auspices of the United Nations, this profes
sional and technical force would place itself at the disposal
of underdeveloped lands throughout the world. Instead of
imposing itself with missile bases on sullenly reluctant
populations, it would come only at the express invitation
of the host nation. Instead of living like conquerors, more
luxuriously than garrison troops, it would live on the econ
omy of the host nation: in temporary pioneer barracks, if
necessary, for the single men and women; in simple quar
ters like those of its opposite numbers among the indige
nous population, for the married couples and their babies.
Instead of isolating itself from the life around it, it would

A Radical's America 334

conceive of a very part of its function as being to partici
pate as widely as possible in that scientific, social, and cul
tural life for the duration of its stay.

You already know of the existence of such organizations
as CARE and the American Friends Service Committee,
and of their small staffs working devotedly in many areas
distributing food, medical supplies, and other basic neces
sities to peoples desperately in need of them.

And I am sure that you are familiar, if not from your
own summer experiences, then from those of your friends,
with the Experiment in International Living, which super
vises vacations spent fruitfully in the homes of families in
many European, African, and Oriental nations.

But you may possibly be unaware that the UN recently
voted into existence die "United Nations Assistance in
Public Administration Plan," which will go into effect
early in 1960.

This plan, which was viewed very dimly during the de
bate on it not only by the former big colonial powers such
as Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and the United
Kingdom, but also by the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., has been
outlined by Jane Stolle in an article entitled "Experts for
Hire" in The Nation. Miss Stolle describes how the scheme
to assign experts in public administration to some of the
newer nations for at least next year (and hopefully longer)
was devised by those nations in conjunction with the UN
Secretariat, and how it is in a sense an outgrowth of the
United Nations Technical Assistance Administration,
which for years has been spotting experts in various coun
tries where their skills can be most helpful. She cites as an
example the thirty-seven men who came from thirteen dif
ferent countries to give India a hand last year. They ar
rived from the Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom,
Denmark, the United States, the U.S.S.R., Belgium,
Canada, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, El Salvador, and
Burma: they included statisticians, geologists, demogra
phers, physiotherapists, hydroelectric engineers, chemical
and mining engineers, insecticide experts, ceramicists,

335 Why Resign from the Human Race?

economists, six computer technicians (all from the
U.S.S.R.), and a lighthouse expert from England.

I ask you to imagine what the effect on our moral stature
in the Far East would have been if those thirty-seven re
sponsible technicians had been joined by 10,000 young
Americans when they came home to take up their careers.

Is there any compelling reason why 50,000 American
college graduates cannot postpone for periods of from
one year to three years the immediate commencement
of their careers in this country? If they are eager to marry
at once, is there any reason why they cannot spend a truly
adventurous honeymoon in a new country, learning some
thing about other people while they are learning about
each other?

Is there any compelling reason why a twenty-one-year-
old American man has to rash, diploma in hand, to a large
corporation which is expected to provide him an old-age
pension complementing his social security? Wouldn't the
corporation, and the pension, be waiting for him on his re
turn from foreign service in an international volunteer
work force? Is there any compelling reason why a twenty-
one-year-old American woman must dash from college to a
publishing house, museum, or little theater to fill the inter
val between college and marriage? Isn't it possible that
she would find at least as much of an outlet for her ad
mirably selfless idealistic impulses in a year or two spent
in the service of a young nation struggling to move up into
the twentieth century and achieve its identity?

Let me see if I can anticipate some other possible ob
jections. There may certainly be a very understandable
hesitation on the part of people who have barely reached
voting age to expose their own lack of experience, or to
proclaim that they do in fact have some knowledge worth
imparting to others who may be their own age or older.
You may remind me, furthermore, that your friends are
not all majoring in public administration or hydroelectric
engineering, and that those who have been hopefully
studying dramatics, English, or education may feel that

A Radical's America 336

they really have nothing to offer the youth of a foreign
land. To both of these objections, I can only reply that it is
hard for me to conceive of a situation in any underde
veloped area in which there could be no benefit from the
presence of numbers of recent college graduates. If a girl
presumes to have gotten enough out of her college educa
tion to teach my children in either primary or secondary
school, I should think she would be capable of teaching
children in Ghana, Pakistan, or Colombia. It might turn
out to be even more satisfying to teach the rudiments of
English to the youngsters of Nigeria than to those of Levit-
town.

It is true that statistically (what a commentary on the
realities of our social order behind the flood of cant about
raising our educational level!) we have been turning out
almost as many college graduates in the areas of com
merce and business administration as in all of the sciences,
including engineering. Am I wrong in suspecting that our
economy might stagger along without the infusion of new
blood from five or six hundred of these graduates while
they spend several seasons sharing their learning with
peoples truly desperately in need of instruction in current
commercial and business-administration practices? Indeed,
it is even possible that numbers of these budding execu
tives might return from abroad with their sights raised and
their inner lives enriched as they commence their climb up
the corporate ladder.

I can hear you saying, But haven t we already exported
more than enough Ugly Americans to the far corners of
the earth? No matter how noble our motives, wont our do-
good invasion be as hotly resented as any other imported
pestilence?

This will be in your hands. If you come in humility to
people who need and request your services; if you come
with the hope that you may learn as much as you can
teach; if you come without trainloads of face creams and
footwarmers, but with love and devotion for your new
friends and your new job, it is just possible that you will

337 Why Resign from the Human Race?

be as well liked abroad as you are when you stay at home.
Remember too our insistence from the outset on the inter
national character of the volunteer force you will have
to start working for it where you are, but ultimately you
will aim for an effort that must override national bound
aries and nationalist identifications.

There is already in existence a nonprofit, nonsectarian
outfit known as Volunteers for International Development,
which is making up a file of people from all over the world
"who are willing to serve one or two years in a volunteer
service corps at subsistence pay. They will work in inter
national teams in a crusade against hunger, illiteracy, poor
health, and misunderstanding." (If you want to know more
about VID, which Dean Howard Thurman of Boston Uni
versity has called "one candle burning against the dark
ness," you can write to VID File Office, Box 179, Cam
bridge 38, Massachusetts.)

There remains the question of who would foot the bills
for a really large-scale, subsidized international operation
the only kind of operation that would make sense in our
world. I honestly do not believe that a people which is
quite content to spend some forty billion dollars every
year for weapons of mass annihilation (to say nothing of
homey accommodations all around the globe for the fami
lies of those who man the weapons) can quibble about
allocating a minute fraction of that sum for a project
which could be considered at worst as a form of mass tour
ism and at best as renewed evidence of our potential for
constructive leadership of the headlong rush to progress of
the newly awakening areas of the world. The Hudson
River at Tomkins Cove is lined with moth-balled Liberty
ships waiting to transport you everywhere in the world, as
fifteen years ago they carried me and my friends every
where in the world; the new nations that have emerged in
those years are ready to house you and feed you at least
as well as they are attempting to do for the most advanced
elements in their own populations.

But with arguments of this nature we move into the realm

A Radical's America 338

of organized agitation and propaganda to gain support
from those who would in the last analysis be respon
sible for the program's success not only the Congress
men who would vote the funds, not only the administra
tors and planners of the State Department, not only our
delegates to the United Nations, but our gifted and frus
trated youth.

You do not, in the new age we are entering, need a set of
ideals worth dying for. You do need certain values worth
living for, beyond those of cynical nihilism on the one
hand and greedy grabbing for gadgets on the other. Those
values can only be found, I contend, beyond yourself, be
yond your family, beyond your community, beyond your
country; they can only be found in a recognition of our
common responsibility for what happens to the entire
globe in the coming generation as it strains massively to
attain the level of human development, indeed to earn the
right to face the new problems of a leisured society, which
are today uniquely ours here in the United States.

If you do in truth mean business I am suggesting one
small avenue along which you and your friends can move,
from the morass in which you now confess you are floun
dering into a future which is as incalculable to me as it is
to you, but which you now can help to shape as no other
young people could before in human history. All of you,
from ambitious graduate students in nineteenth-century
French poetry to ambitious graduates of our high schools
in printing trades, automotive trades, aviation trades, have
it within your grasp to renew the old image of America as
a nation of pioneers and freely co-operating men, to dem
onstrate in action the meaning of responsible democratic
endeavor, and to learn with your hands and in your souls
what it means to live well by living for others.

Esquire, September 1959

Aftermath

Again the unexpected has happened. In the September
1959 issue of Esquire I let fly a shaft at those par
ticularly among the young who have been skating along
on the congealed American fat of the last decade, instead
of exerting themselves to build some moral muscle by par
ticipating in the growth of the newer nations of the world.
The shaft found its mark, but not quite the one I had ex
pected: apparently it struck an ethical nerve in some
hundreds of Americans, young and old, who took the
trouble to write, for the most part not to attack me or de
fend themselves, but to ask if there really was something
worth while they could do to prove that they cared
enough about their heritage to renew it.

The volume of mail was absolutely without precedent in
my own experience as a writer. And the letters did not
come from creeps or crackpots; they were written by and
large by intelligent, serious, educated men and women
who honestly wanted to dedicate themselves for a year or
more to an overseas job that would make use of both their
skills and their idealism. I got letters from girls at radio
stations, advertising executives, wives of Marine Corps
officers, young administrators, retired professors; letters
from San Francisco, Montreal, Key West, Guam. They all
asked about specific opportunities to cut loose if only for a
while from a grabby society in order to purge themselves
of a feeling of personal waste.

There were letters (and calls and visits too) from friends
and former students, and these did not so much ask as tell
me what they were doing, and in some cases plead with

A Radical's America 340

me for help in publicizing their cause. A young man who
has worked these last two years for CARE in Colombia
read the article in the middle of the Nechi River jungle,
on "an inspection trip to the group of colonists who are
clearing land and building a road to a new world in the
jungle of Colombia." He was there with a CARE Mission
Chief (an American girl) and a Colombian physician, ex
amining new needs for CARE tools and settling a dispute
between the social-service association for the area and the
leader of the co-operative of colonists. He was excited, as
were his Colombian friends, by my article, and here is the
nub of his three-page, single-spaced letter:

I ask for forty-five young American volunteers to work in
Colombia, ones who would have volunteered to fight Franco
or Hitler in a time lost now. Hate will be lacking as a motive
for these young people, unless one can learn to hate the gen
eral horrors of starvation and ignorance. But love will come to
them as they work and understand. How much have I wanted,
and begged, to be given the opportunity to take an ax down
from the rack and pitch in with those Pato colonists who have
just completed another six kilometers of jungle road. How I
have wanted to live with them, to know better their problems,
to speak for them when necessary, where their simple words
would not be understood. That is one job we would like to
offer a young American. ... In my area alone, the large State
of Antioquia, where in the one million rural population (total
population two million) sixteen and a half per cent of the
people have water in their houses and five per cent have bath
rooms, and 7,000 children under five die annually without ever
receiving medical attention, I could cite at least ten places
where a young American could work miracles.

A somewhat older American, an educator friend, had
just returned from a visit to the educational facilities of
some sixteen countries, all around the world, when he read
the piece in Esquire. He was moved to tell me something
about World University Service, the mutual-aid organiza
tion sponsored in this country by all the denominational
student associations, and praised by Nehru. India, in fact,

341 Why Resign from the Human Race?

was one of the countries that hit my friend hardest. He
found that 40 per cent of Indian university students came
from homes with a monthly income of about fifty dollars,
and that it is not surprising that eight of every ten college
students suffer from some physical ailment: 84 per cent of
them are not getting enough to eat.

Perhaps most significant, and startling, are the hundreds
of people who have been impelled by the Esquire piece to
write to the Volunteers for International Development, the
UN-related organization which I mentioned in the article
and which has been compiling a register of skilled persons
ready to serve at sacrificial pay in international projects.
Many of the first three hundred letters "seem to indicate/ 7
as Raymond Magee, the Executive Secretary, wrote me,
"that the article resulted even in some persons going
through an experience which, in the old days, would be
called Repentance/ "

Be that as it may, the correspondence ranged from "let
ters from professors with experience in technical fields and
very qualified for some of our projects, to students who
are merely curious."

Within a matter of weeks Mr. Magee was able to tell
me that over six hundred letters had come in, with more
arriving daily, and to give some detail on the kind of peo
ple who were responding. One person sent in four hun
dred dollars for the fare of an engineer to be sent to Ghana
the engineer may be one of those who volunteered as a
result of the article.

Two people with TV experience have written in, and
have in consequence been consulted about a current liter
acy program in Egypt: Three V.I.D. volunteers (an Ameri
can, a Lebanese, and an Egyptian) in Manoufia, Egypt,
have been working with the UNESCO Fundamental
Education Center in regard to the plans of the Egyptian
government to execute a mass literacy program in 1960
with the aid of TV; in the poor village areas, the govern
ment will provide TV sets to coffeehouses and community

A Radical's America 342

meeting centers, which will be used for basic reading in
struction.

In addition to people like these, several artists have
offered their help, a physician has written in, and among
the letters from all over the United States (there have also
been inquiries from Germany, England, France, Vietnam,
South Africa), there have been a good number expressing
willingness to query local chambers of commerce, univer
sity officials, and the like about the possibility of financing
a qualified person from the individual community in a
V.I.D. project.

There are a number of reasons why this last is a good
idea, beyond the obvious one that it conforms to our tradi
tion of working from the grass roots and involving our
friends and neighbors in those public activities we believe
worth doing. For one thing, it spreads the idea as well as
the responsibility much more widely, and the news of it
may even reach those who need the help abroad. For an
other, it is going to bring home to a lot of Americans what
some of us have been learning as a result of the original
article.

Surely there is no question now but that there is an enor
mous reservoir of idealism in young Americans and in a
lot of older ones; surely we know now that they will not call
us squares or cornballs if we offer them substantial and
practical avenues of action, and that they will not, by and
large, flinch or jeer if we use words like "moral" or "ethi
cal" or even "political" to characterize some of the things
they can do with their lives. We have found out too that
there is work available abroad for many of these people
in some instances their services are desperately needed
but because of a shortage of funds they may have to wait a
long time before their offers can be taken up.

It may seem ludicrous, but there it is. The richest nation
on earth, which cannot afford new schools, or decent sal
aries for teachers, or proper housing for all its people,
cannot afford either or so it would seem to pay the pas
sage and the bare subsistence for all of those who are will-

343 Why Resign from the Human Race?

ing and eager to share their knowledge and technical skills
with the people of the newer nations.

But wouldn't there be more occasion for discourage
ment if there had been no visible response to a piece en
titled "Why Resign from the Human Race?" I am confi
dent that Americans who want very badly to do something
worth while are going to find the money or find ways of
getting the money to do it. V.I.D., for example, would
very much appreciate suggestions from college people (as
well as from the rest of the population recently retired
people are registering, and should register, with V.I.D.) as
to how they might help finance a volunteer from their own
institution in a V.I.D.-UN-related project, an important
step toward a UN Voluntary Service Corps.

Mr. Magee stresses, too, that "some of the people writ
ing would do well to have the experience of working a
summer in a college work-camp such as those sponsored
by the American Friends Service Committee in Mexico
and other lands or by International Civil Service in Eu
rope, Africa, and India. They should, of course, also learn
a foreign language. And some might want to take courses
in technical assistance at Montana University, Syracuse
University, or the American University in Washington,
D.C."

This is something that might be borne in mind not only
by college students, but by the faculty people who exert
such a strong influence on undergraduates. Dean Harlan
Cleveland of Syracuse University, who is conducting a
world study for the Carnegie Foundation on the question
of training Americans for working abroad, has expressed
the hope that within the next decade a year's immersion
in a foreign culture abroad, perhaps spent during one's
college years, would become a requirement for all persons
planning to work overseas.

Which brings me to a final suggestion. UNESCO Publi
cation Center (801 Third Avenue, New York 22) puts out a
trilingual volume called Vacations Abroad, at $1.25. More

A Radical's America 344

than simply a listing of vacations, it is a compilation of
courses and seminars, hostels and holiday camps, study
tours, scholarships, and international voluntary work
camps.

Esquire, February 1960

Footnote, 1961: Many people have asked whether I
I do not think that President Kennedy's Peace Corps
derived from this article, and if so, how I feel about
it. The source of such ideas is of no particular impor
tance; this one, like most, was in the air. More inter
esting is the fact that even when politicians turn
ideas into gimmicks, good may come of them. During
his first campaign for the Presidency, General Eisen
hower was led by one of his writers to promise that
he would "go to Korea." In due course, after his elec
tion, he did make the promised ceremonial visit; and
while the ensuing truce may not have been hastened
by the General's ambiguous tour, it was certainly not
retarded by it. A net gain for some thousands of sol
diers, therefore, from a tricky political ploy.

Just so, Senator Kennedy's discovery, late in his
Presidential campaign, that much of American youth
was both discontented and idealistic, and ready for
an appeal to its altruism, was very likely of the same
order as his reiterated appeals to young people to
increase their knee-bending and deep breathing.
Nonetheless the impact of the program upon the few
thousand young men and women who will serve in
the Peace Corps can only be salutary. And this
despite the fact that the whole scheme was jeopard
ized at the outset by the idiocy of the Cuban invasion
and of the proposal to subject the eager volunteers
to a "security" check.

345 Why Resign from the Human Race?

What is disturbing is the possibility that the Peace
Corps may ultimately become merely one more ele
ment in the whole rickety structure of institutions
which serve further to isolate the intellectual and
moral elite of American youth from the great mass
of self -centered and materialistic adolescents. There
is no substantial evidence as yet that the idea of a
period of sacrificial foreign service has penetrated to
these latter. One gets the impression rather that it is
only those who were already idealistic, those who
would otherwise have turned to any of a dozen
private organizations, who have been galvanized to
apply. As for the bulk of American youth, they have
not been galvanized by the New Frontier they are
simply hanging around.

One of the most depressing memories of a recent
drive across the country is that of the uniformly ugly
emptiness of the evening life of young Americans.
Whether in Afton, Wyoming, or La Crosse, Wiscon
sin, the boys are either slopping it up in the juke
joints or howling and honking up and down the
streets in their convertibles, radios blaring and beer
cans sloshing. If you can stand on one corner long
enough, you will see the same cars with the same
boys cruise past you four, five, six times. They are
not tuning in on moral exhortations, not when every
thing in their daily existence assures them that sacri
fice is for the birds and the true national purpose
is pleasure.

If the boys in La Crosse had troubled to pick up
the paper, as I did that evening when I tired of their
hoarse cries, they could have read in the Milwaukee
Journal an account of the way in which other young
Americans were being amused. The youthful wife of

A Radical's America 346

their high-minded President was the guest of Paul
Mellon at a debutante party for his stepdaughter,
Eliza Lloyd, attended by about seven hundred per
sons, including some two hundred college men who
must surely have had their own sense of national
purpose.

These young men spent the night "in the tent city
which looked like a medieval tournament site with
pennants flying from every ridge pole."

Besides sleeping areas, the tent city included a big
cellophane sided plastic tent where snacks and drinks
were served around the clock, plus sanitary tents, guard
tents and service tents where white dinner jackets could
be pressed and evening shoes shined.

The tents were connected by a network of "perma
nently laid" roads just in case it should rain and so no
man would muddy his shoes. And already this intricate
system of hard surfaced roads is being taken up and be
ing replaced with old dirt trails.

The tent city alone cost more than $100,000, it was
learned . . .

Those who helped create the tent city and pavilion
said they believed there had never before been such a
party in the United States. They computed that final bills
for this one evening would total more than one million
dollars.

Nevertheless, beyond the overstuffed, the blow-
hard, the bravo, and the prematurely cynical, thou
sands of young people are reading, writing, arguing,
waiting, across the face of a supremely beautiful
country, in the kitchens of back-street houses in the
small towns, in reading rooms, dormitories, and quiet
libraries in the college towns, in coffee houses and
crowded hangouts in the big cities they can be led
to do wonderful things. And they will be, not by the
phony rhetoric of professional speech-writers and

347 Why Resign from the Human Race?

calculating politicians, but by the hard proof which
must be forthcoming that we have turned our backs
on the pleasure hunt and set our faces to the tasks
of the future.

(Continued from first flap)

Esquire when it appeared in
September 1959, and it may very
well have been the first sug
gestion for the Peace Corps.
"The Myth of the Happy Worker/'
another essay, received the
Sidney Hillman Award in 1958.

Harvey Swados is concerned that
today, when many people believe
that labor has grown too powerful,
many Americans work for sub
standard wages and workers are
terrorized by employers into vot
ing against the unions. He is
concerned that not only has no
attempt been made to raise the
cultural standards of the workers,
but that now, when there is ample
time for leisure, every effort is
being made to keep them at a low
cultural level. He is concerned
that most Americans work at
meaningless jobs, that most edu
cated women find their lives after
marriage circumscribed by the
split-level and the station wagon
and the supermarket, and that
American youth is rushing out of
schools and colleges to get
married and towards the company
that promises the biggest
retirement pension.

The demand that the radical
makes of America is this: that
each man may have the opportunity
to live in freedom, honor, and
dignity. Harvey Swados presents a
powerful case in very human
and meaningful terms.

Jacket design by Edith Allard

Photograph of Harvey Swados by
Jupp Winter

LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY

IN ASSOCIATION WITH
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS

110385