Source of book: Borrowed from the library.
One of the fun things of the last decade for me has been filling in history that I either wasn’t taught at all, or was taught laughable right-wing propaganda about. Most of the 20th Century was that way, in the dreadfully whitewashed A Beka history books. With the exception of the two world wars, the crucial events of the 20th Century were either ignored outright (the Civil Rights Movement) or spun into the preferred narrative of Christianity and Capitalism versus the New Deal and Communism.
So, the Great Depression was….difficult for the curriculum to address. I remember it did describe the stock market crash, followed by the bank runs, mass unemployment, and all that. But then...well....it’s pretty difficult to say anything intelligent when you have the ideology that government has no business helping its citizens in distress. So, the big lie was “the New Deal made the Depression worse, and it was really World War II that ended it.” Which is, to put it mildly, horseshit on a stick. Particularly if you also ignore the battles between labor unions and the giant corporations, the existence of child labor, unregulated safety conditions, and so much more. That anyone is nostalgic for the way things were before the New Deal is astonishing to me. It only makes sense in light of the mass delusion that people would have been living the life of the rich back then, not being ground up by the robber barons. Yes, my ancestors would have lost their farms. Others would have starved to death. And all of them eventually benefited from Social Security, Medicare, and other New Deal programs.
Murray Kempton was primarily a journalist, writing around 10,000 columns for a variety of newspapers and magazines over the course of his long and distinguished career. He eventually won a Pulitzer for his lifetime of work. As this book amply demonstrates, he was an amazingly erudite and polished writer, with both a broad and a deep understanding of events and people. He may not be the easiest writer to read for some - his sentences are complex, and his vocabulary astonishing at times - but for those of us who love intellectually stimulating writing, it is glorious.
Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties is about the 1930s, but more specifically about the Communist movement during that era. In his youth, mostly as a college student, Kempton was a Communist Party member, although not a particularly committed one. He kind of dropped out and went more or less mainstream in the 1940s, as did - as he points out - most Communists. This book, written in 1955, is, to a good extent, a farewell to that part of his life, as well as a retrospective on the impact the Communist movement made on America, for better or for worse. The particular re-publication I read also contains Kempton’s 1967 Afterward, in which he reconsiders a few of his points from 12 years earlier in light of developments such as the Vietnam War and the decline of unions.
The book contains ten fairly long chapters, each dealing with a particular facet of the communist movement. These range from one on Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers to one on literature and the “proletariat novel.” Along the way are chapters on the Pullman strike, the labor movement, the autoworkers, women in the movement, Hollywood, the McCarthy witch hunt, and more.
Tying all of this together is Kempton’s central thesis that Communism was the core myth of the 1930s, and, although it became the bogeyman in the 1950s, this idea was as much of a myth as Communism ever was. I tend to agree with both of these ideas. Kempton also argues persuasively that the New Deal essentially co-opted Communism, addressing the legitimate problems with unregulated capitalism, and in essence eliminating the need for a communist revolution. Kempton is spot on in his view of Marx, which is that he functioned well in describing the present - he accurately described the problems that plagued industrialized societies. He did less well in providing a vision for the inevitable future. As I wrote a few years back regarding Carl Sandburg, the United States could very well have gone Communist during the Depression, but instead shifted in the direction of a Social Democracy, which is eventually what happened in the rest of the First World after World War Two. Unregulated Capitalism failed in the 1930s. Full stop. Communism eventually failed as well, and doesn’t really exist in its pure form anywhere in the world. (No, neither China, with its Authoritarian Capitalism, nor North Korea with its old-school monarchy counts. Even Cuba has moved toward a more capitalistic economy starting in 1991.) Nothing is as simple as the black and white thinking the American Right Wing pushes when it comes to economics and the role of government. That simplicity only works in the comics:
The book is delightfully nuanced, treats all of its subjects with empathy, and avoids the pitfalls of ideologies on both sides. There are, as will be seen, some moments when it seems very much of its time - the 1950s. But Kempton is refreshingly progressive by the standards of our own time, fully supporting the Civil Rights Movement, a living wage, equality, and goodwill toward the vulnerable here and around the world. Kempton was a thoughtful, decent man, and may need to be added to my fantasy dinner party.
I think I will stop there at describing the book, and get into some quotes. I wish I could quote the entire introduction, which is a tour-de-force. Here are just a few of the lines.
The bearers of the myth of every decade seem to carry in their hands the ax and spade to execute and inter the myth of the previous one.
It is a perilous thing for any generation to misjudge its immediate past.
Given their [the communists’] view of the matter, it might be expected that they would do society some damage. A few of them did. It might also be expected that, almost by chance and against their own judgment of what they were doing, some might do society a measure of good. A few of them did; we owe them, to a degree at least, the government planning and the strong unions which many people think are our best insurance against a repetition of the storm of 1932.
These are fascinating and perceptive ideas. One of the things that Kempton brings out is how much many Communists loathed FDR, considering him a sellout and corporate shill, not noticing how he managed to implement many of their own ideas. Some of this is fleshed out more in the chapter on literature of the time. A few quotes from there seem better placed here than later in this post. Edmund Wilson made a fascinating observation that seems very appropriate to our own times.
“Why,” he asked himself, “do the American progressives have to be so tongue-tied with inhibitions? . . . The surest way to shake an American reformer and make him back down has always been to accuse him of socialism.”
Hey, that’s still happening! Any attempt at social reform that benefits anyone other than the ultra-rich gets tarred as “socialism.” Hmm, the more things change…
Another Wilson gem:
“In the presence of the Communists today, the representatives of our ‘Republican form of government’ seem conspicuously lacking in either moral force or intellectual integrity.”
It is weird to see so many people I know openly defend minority and undemocratic rule, since it is their side that is ruling against the will of the majority of Americans. And yes, that appeal to “republican form of government” is seriously disingenuous. What they mean is “we matter more than you.” That is indeed an argument lacking either moral force or intellectual integrity.
And, one more from the introduction, which particularly resonated in light of my reading of Wild Swans recently.
The eye which I bring to this inquiry is neither as cold nor as detached as I might wish it to be. I cannot conceal the sense that those of my subjects who became Communists were terribly flawed by their acceptance of a gospel which had no room in it for doubt or pity or mercy, and that, clutching its standard, it was inevitable that some many would set out to be redeemers and end up either policemen or the targets of policemen.
One thing I have come to realize the last few years is that ideologies are really very similar. They are characterized by their hostility toward doubt, pity, and mercy. The ideology, whether Maoism or Trumpism, puts dogma before people, every single time.
Moving on, Kempton’s take on Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers is fascinating. He starts with the belief that their respective lives were strongly influenced by their backgrounds. In the case of Hiss, and to a lesser extent Chambers, they came from “shabby genteel” families, they had social status, but were losing ground. He explains the dilemma:
By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and the poets, and they travel a difficult path to peace.
In our times, and in the circumstances of my own family, “shabby genteel” isn’t as much of a thing, but there is something very close. I think the ongoing decline (and more recently implosion) of “respectable Christian society” is a close parallel. The white middle class culture of the 1950s (which is what white Evangelicals worship) is dying, and doesn’t really match the reality that my generation or my kids’ generation faces. For some, they are able to live in the real world without disappointing their mothers. I have not, so I guess I am a freak or a (musical) poet. It is indeed a difficult path to peace. Ironically, the 1950s of legend came about precisely because of the Communist agitating that led to the New Deal...
On a kind of related note, once again, I see so many parallels between the religion of fundamentalist communism and the fundamentalism I grew up in.
And the conduct of Communists, which is at least as dreadful as that of ordinary men, is the conduct of people most of whom once had an active conscience and most of whom now feel a particular virtue. Until the dark falls upon them, they are immune to the insinuations of the sense of sin.
This is exactly what is playing out before our very eyes at this moment. For Evangelicals who support Trump, they literally have this sense that they are “particularly virtuous,” whether that is because of abortion or a conflation of whiteness with godliness. They are immune to their own consciences.
One of the unexpected facts I ran across in the chapter on Gardner Jackson and Lee Pressman (fascinating characters both of them!) is that Gardner Jackson was related - sort of - to Helen Hunt Jackson (who I really need to read one of these days.) Apparently, he was the product of his father’s third marriage, the second of which was to Helen Hunt Jackson. So there you have it…
While technically the chapter is about Pressman and Jackson, union badass John Lewis (not the late Congressman, who was a badass in a less crazy way, but the union founder) plays an important part. I have to at least recount a couple of the anecdotes. One is where Lewis is negotiating with K. T. Keller, operational VP of Chrysler, who was condescending and contemptuous.
At last, while every CIO man present except Lewis shuddered under his stare, Keller turned to Lewis and said, with total contempt, “Mr. Lewis you haven’t said a word about this situation. Do you happen to have any comment or contribution?”
Lewis arose and fixed his baleful eye and answered very quietly:
“Yes, Mr. Keller, I have. I am ninety-nine per cent of a mind to come around this table right now and wipe that damn sneer off your face.”
As Pressman recounts it, Keller went white and had to strike a more conciliatory tone. Just badass. But even better, if that is possible, is what Lewis said to Governor Frank Murphy, after Murphy indicated he would call out the troops to clear the factories of union workers. Lewis responded:
“I shall personally enter General Motors’ Chevrolet Plant Number Four. I shall order the men to disregard your order, to stand fast. I shall then walk up to the largest window in the plant, open it, divest myself of my outer raiment, remove my shirt and bare my bosom. Then-n-n, when you order your troops to fire, mine will be the first breast that those bullets will strike.” The great voice marched down near a hush. “And, as my body falls from that window to the ground, you listen to the voice of your grandfather as he whispers in your ear, ‘Frank, are you sure you are doing the right thing?’”
Again, the Governor left the room white and shaking. And backed down. It is a reminder that our fight against the robber barons of our own day will require this kind of nerve. The rich have never given up a sliver of wealth or power until it was demanded of them. Those protests for BLM are hated by the Right because they are effective. That line of women in yellow shirts fighting off tear gas from government thugs was a fucking disaster for the Feds. There will be more and more of this until things change, and change they must. One lesson of this book and the history it tells is that change only comes because the oppressed make things uncomfortable for those in power. This will be particularly crucial since we are likely to have a strongly anti-worker Supreme Court for the next generation, and any progress will need to be made - as it was during the New Deal - by insisting on human rights and making the regressives fear enough to grant them.
Hmm, I wouldn't mess with John Lewis either...
The chapter on literature was particularly fascinating to me, not least because John Dos Pasos - who I finally read - gets a good bit of play as the literary counterpart to Kempton. He too flirted with Communism, before shifting to a more Social Democratic viewpoint. More on that in a bit. But first, the opening few sentences of the chapter are so good.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., said once that every man should take part in the actions and passions of his time or else risk being judged not to have lived. A serious writer has less choice about that risk than the rest of us. To take responsibility for expression is to accept many perils but at least to escape that detachment from the passions of one’s time which Holmes thought was the worst fate in life.
This is one thing that just pisses me off about so many (mostly white) people from my past. They so very much want politics to go away, so they don’t have to deal with uncomfortable truths about the world...and themselves. They will be remembered as Holmes notes: as people who chickened out of actually living, of dealing with reality. They wanted the bubble of their own comfort, and refused to be bothered with the great issues of their time.
In this chapter, Kempton gives the best explanation I have ever heard for why there is no “Great Proletarian Novel.” The problem with writing a Communist novel, or indeed making Communist art, is that the real resonance of all art is internal, individual, and emotional. Substituting an exterior struggle for an internal one is just terrible art that will not survive the test of time. I mean, does anyone really read The Iliad to find out who killed whom and who won the Trojan War? Puhleeze. The Iliad is great because of the universal human struggles and relationships. Achilles and Agamemnon. Achilles and Patroclus. Hector and Paris. And so on.
The subjects of this chapter, the buried ones at least, had a different view; they believed that to be a great writer one needed to simply be on the side of the future and to substitute outer reconciliation for interior quarrel. The lesson of their failure is literary and not moral. For the writer is lonely even in fantasy, and, try though he will, it is very often his fate to damage no one but himself.
Later, Kempton gives a truly devastating critique.
The proletarian novel was thus rooted in the American tradition of bad literature. Its formula was: boy sees vision of exploitation, boy goes on strike, boy finds vision of freedom. It stood the popular short story on its head, but, like that story, it preached that success is material and that its rewards are to the strong and the assured, not the weak and the doubtful. The proletarian novel’s hero was an Alger boy who had learned that the road upward is blocked and that the future is with him who looks to his own class. On occasion, he has the chance to live with the daughter of the bourgeoisie and chooses to die with the daughter of the toilers.
Oh, so very much so. The comparison with Horatio Alger is perfect. Of course, people who haven’t read an Alger story tend to get it wrong. Alger’s hero doesn’t triumph by working his way up; rather, he has good “character” and thus is discovered by a filthy-rich benefactor. The stories aren’t about opportunity, but karma. And yes, Alger has aged as well as the proletarian novel.
In discussing writers such as Dos Pasos who later rejected communist ideas, Kempton notes that, like so many who believed (and believe) the myth of the 50s, they failed to appreciate that it was all that agitation that brought about the change and the society they see as a repudiation of communist ideas, rather than a successful implementation of them.
The thirties had been many things, some good and some bad, but it had been most of all a great economic revolution at whose end children no longer worked in factories and assembly hands spoke unafraid to their foremen. It had not changed the souls of men - no economic revolution could - but nothing entirely evil could have produced the healthiest generation of children that America had raised in a century.
Writer J. B. Matthews, first a Communist and pacifist, then later an ardent anti-communist, gets a whole chapter. He was a really complex character, driven, in Kempton’s view, by a restlessness and a tendency to be a true believer who burned white-hot for a short time, before moving on to a different religion. This is pretty plausible, I must say. The chapter was also interesting to me, because a number of things resonated with my own religious journey.
Dying dreams sometimes last longest in hearts they have broken; hate, after all, can be the strongest of memories. That may be why so much of whatever pain and passion is left to the myth of the thirties is carried by its lost lovers, its apostates, and its armed disenchanted.
That truly is me, when it comes to my former tribe. My heart has been broken, and the hate I felt when I challenged the worship of Trump and the Republican Party is my strongest memory now.
This is a book about believers and what the consequences of belief were for them. One of those consequences can be apostasy. J. B. Matthews among so many other apostates has come, after so much, to explain himself away as a pure professional, just as his enemies do. But money as an explanation for apostasy seems to me like lechery as an explanation for infidelity; it is a substitute for a lost, earlier passion and it is dross to the truly committed. It is what men take when the salt has lost its savor.
Damn. Mic drop. I can’t improve on that, so I will let it stand.
The chapter on women in the Communist movement was interest, but seems more dated than the others. Although, to be fair, Kempton might be entirely right both about the way it felt in the 1930s and the way it was perceived in the 1950s. I will note a few good lines, however, like the opening one. (In general, Kempton’s opening of chapters is phenomenal - which is why I have quoted so many in this post.)
The language of love was seldom on the public lips of most of the persons in these studies. Their rhetoric held little room for its lights and shadows. They at least talked as though the passions of love and hate were not important to them. The passions are particular and their superficial concerns were for the general.
Theirs was a movement which offered a new place to woman. It was the place of partner and equal, and the surface of its image was sexless. The thirties promised a final triumph of feminism. And they buried - or thought they buried - forever the woman of the genteel tradition.
This too matches up with Wild Swans and the sexless and feminist Maoist ideal. In practice, one cannot completely uproot the previous tradition. Truly good reform usually ends up finding a balance. In our own times, feminists like my wife (and myself, as much as a man can be) have no problem being “feminine” when they want, and ignoring the pressure to do so when they want. One can be partners and equals without becoming sexless or jettisoning love.
Here is another unexpected gem. So, Anne Moos Remington was married to a Communist radical, and was active for a time in the party. Her mother was a socialist for years before that, and kind of became more radical later in life, which is interesting. Apparently, however, there wasn’t much love lost between the two, particularly once Anne left the party after the war and the divorce from her husband. Testifying before the congressional panel as to whether she hated her mother:
“I wouldn’t say that. I don’t like her. When she couldn’t boss me around, she lost interest.”
This isn’t true about my mother, just to be clear. It is, however, very much true about another person in our family.
I also really liked the chapter on the Reuther family, a father and sons active in the labor movement. Particularly fascinating was a description of Detroit in 1932, when the auto industry basically fell off a cliff. It seems rather pertinent today, with a looming depression - and potential mass evictions.
There were whole city blocks without light or artificial heat. Families missed their rent or mortgage payments. But no bank or landlord dared evict them; to leave a house vacant was to risk its being stripped of its wires, its plumbing, and even its woodwork for fuel.
Just a warning to landlords in our own day...
The last chapter is about the author’s own youth, and the Young Communist movement in general. On the one hand, he felt that very few actually cared that much. It was more of an aspiration, not a serious fight. The real battles were carried on by the unions, and the people who were desperate and had little to lose, not the middle class white kids at the universities. Sure, there were some who went to Spain, only to die or become disillusioned by being made cannon fodder. There are a few great quotes here to, backed by Kempton’s own experience.
The time of being very young and madly hopeful comes to many men and deserts them all, and the lessons they take from its loss are very different.
This is true. I probably clung to my idealism longer than most - and some of it remains, tattered as it is. But the disillusionment has been devastating too. As it is for all “madly hopeful” people. I think we do take different lessons from it. Many, particularly many of my parents’ generation, have gone down the nostalgia trap, seeking a return to the mythic past (the myth of the 1950s, but without being willing to commit to the socialism necessary to return there…) Others have turned to hatred of those different from them, the ones that they see as ruining their idealism. Some of us hope that we get to the other side of this still committed to the common good, to fighting for equality for all, despite our disillusionment with humanity.
Finally, the afterward is particularly fascinating. Kempton recognizes that he was too hasty in being ready to declare post-war America as a utopia of sorts. He cites the Vietnam war, unpopular, but seemingly impossible (in 1967) to get out of. He also notes that “we are a society into which every day children are born for whose lives the economy has no productive use.” Which is what you get when pursuit of profit at all costs - including human lives - is allowed to rule. Kempton concludes that the Communists entertained a utopian illusion that the Soviet Union was either “already perfect, [or] moving that way,” and admits that he, twelve years ago, had the “same illusion about the United States.”
And that, perhaps, is a good place to end this post. One of the great delusions of our time was that the United States has, somewhere, a time when it was “Great” - a Utopia. Racist demagogues like Trump tap into this, particularly for religious white people who are, whether or not they admit it to themselves, yearning for a time when they were culturally dominant, when women and minorities knew there place, when gays were in the closet, and being a Christian gave you an automatic boost in social status. But really, the social struggle, the struggle for equality, the struggle for human rights, is never ending. Kempton points out that Communism was no panacea - but neither is Capitalism. Those with money and power will always cling to it, and those oppressed by them will need to continually struggle to gain a better world - or they will lose ground as we have over the last 40 years.
Part of Our Time is really a fascinating book, and I very much enjoyed reading it. It is good to see it back in print again. It is both a record of history we should never have forgotten, and thoroughly relevant to the times we find ourselves in now.
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