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.
