Destructive Generation

...Now they're uncritical supporters of anticommunist jungle fighters who trample on human rights," and again: "20 years ago they were arrogant, mendacious know-it-alls who trafficked in hysterical hyperbole and diabolized those who disagreed with them...

...I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an' they know supper's ready...

...After all, the authors of Vekhi had been excoriated by the liberal intelligentsia of prerevolutionary Russia no less than Whittaker Chambers had been by their American counterparts for his Witness...

...We pay book rate postage...

...George J. Stigler, University of Chicago Volume I - 412 + cxlvi pages...

...Working Days also contains a section called "Aftermath," which is composed of the diary entries that Steinbeck continued to make in the two years following the publication of The Grapes of Wrath...

...and, in the case of The Grapes of Wrath, made critical comments on the manuscript and found the perfect title for it in Julia Ward Howe's "The Battle Hymn of the Republic...

...The Devil made them do it," as Collier and Horowitz put it...

...It was Humphrey and not Nixon who was the object of the most vicious vituperation and actual physical violence in 1968...

...California, deserts his drastically pregnant wife and disappears...

...Though Berman's observation on the nature of the New Left in his review seems to contradict his main complaint that Collier and Horowitz concentrate far "too little on ideas," it is not without a certain devious logic...

...was correspondingly incapable of plumbing the mysteries of his alter ego's...

...But how dare anyone draw certain conclusions from George Szamuely, a former associate editor of the Times Literary Supplement, is a writer living in New York...

...But it was not their lack of concern for human rights and democratic principles that made them so hateful...

...But for members of the left to accuse their opponents of being like them, while they themselves claim to be the spiritual heirs of the people they used to spit on . . . now, that really is new...

...Essentially, it seeks to show that The Grapes of Wrath is the fictional equivalent of Terkel's alleged transcripts of the voices of downtrodden little people and that that is a wonderful thing...

...This attractive reissue of the splendid Kaye edition of the Fable will make for him a host of warm new friends...

...They haven't lost their touch...

...Preface and index...

...On the dedication page of the novel Steinbeck wrote, "To Carol, who willed this book...

...Name Address City/State/Zip Mail to: Liberty Fund, Inc...

...Yet what was interesting about the response to Collier and Horowitz was that few chose to question the truth of anything they said about the left...

...Roger Michener, Princeton University ernard Mandeville (1670-1733) had a profound impact on economics, ethics, and social philosophy through The Fable of the Bees, one of the most significant English works of the eighteenth-century...

...Please allow approximately 4 weeks for delivery...

...Somoza...

...Hertzberg used such judicious terms as "traitors, liars, and fools" to describe them...

...One can see their point...

...With the next bound we find that whatever we think of as disagreeable about the New Left is not really characteristic of the New Left at all, but of the right...

...Destructive Generation is important precisely because it reveals what's new and what's old about the left...

...And this brings one to the issue critics were so offended by...

...And Ronald Reagan is presumably Angela Davis...

...oversaw his business relations with his agents...

...That it culminated in bombings, murder, senseless riots, black separatism can be blamed on the Vietnam war, on Nixon, on the assassination of Robert E Kennedy, much as Lenin's and Stalin's excesses were once only explicable with reference to the horrors of czarist autocracy, or the treachery of an Alger Hiss or a Kim Philby to the Great Depression, or the Khmer Rouge atrocities subsequently to the American B-52s...

...The contras are the Vietcong...

...An' when our folks eat the stuff they raise an' live in the houses they build—why, I'll be there...

...some of the above deserved it...

...But the question that Steinbeck fails to examine is whether Tom's intentions, as outlined in a farewell speech to his mother, are not an ambiguous mixture of altruism and intoxication with violence for its own sake...

...It is not as though the alternative to George Bush in the 1988 election was a Hubert Humphrey or a Henry Jackson—model liberals on everything from civil rights to welfare, but whom the left has consistently reviled...

...And effective American evacuation began the following year...

...Friends of the United States have been consistently excoriated: Thieu and Diem...

...the contras...

...Apparently, the essence of the New Left was the "notion . . . that you can batter down your own limitations, that conventions are oppressions, that an existential choice can turn you into something better, more heroic, more powerful...

...Hardcover $15.00 each or $30.00 the set 0-86597-072-6 Paperback $ 7.50 each or $15.00 the set 0-86597-075-0 LibertyClassics, 1989 Prepayment is required on all orders for books that are not for resale...

...Yes, the left's utopianism and its hysterical, mindless opposition to the Vietnam war led its radical proponents to nihilism, violence, madness, and self-destruction...

...q Enclosed is my check or money order made payable to Liberty Fund, Inc...

...Collier and Horowitz circa 1980s are the same Collier and Horowitz circa 1960s...

...For the weakest link in the Joad family chain is Rose of Sharon's youthful husband, the androgynously named Connie, who, when the Joads finally reach C hould one have occasion at times 1...3 to doubt the need for yet more books of the I-have-seen-the-futureandit-doesn't-work genre, then the critical reaction to Peter Collier and David Horowitz's Destructive Generation will surely relieve one of them...

...dollars...

...And there is something amusing about the idea that the only alternative to "Nixon and Vietnam" was Tom Hayden and Bobby Seale...

...For members of the contemporary left to use terms suggestive of sociopathology to describe 1960s radicalism is a variant on the customary tone of lyrical lamentation...

...An author given to sexual guilt and paranoia might well have created such a character as Connie, out of a terrible premonition of how he intended to reward the woman who had done so much to bring his greatest book into being...

...I'll be all aroun' in the dark," he assures Ma Joad...

...Kaye's beautiful edition and masterful commentary is again available for the first time in years...

...He anticipated Oscar Wilde in choosing his enemies with great care, and within his own century they included David Hume, Adam Smith, and Francis Hutcheson...

...One could go on and on with such a list...

...In so doing, he elevated the individual and offered a new view of morality that contained the seeds for our contemporary understanding of human freedom and the good society...

...That socialists in America go around pretending to be liberals is hardly new...

...And just in case we did not quite catch that: "The transformation that these two men have undergone should not . . . be overestimated...

...Please allow approximately 4 weeks for delivery...

...7440 North Shadeland Ave...

...So far so traditional...

...q Please send me a copy of your NEW 1989 catalogue...

...Fulsome praise has been lavished on Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ho...

...With a bound, then, responsibility for whatever we think of as disagreeable about the New Left is ascribed to the right...

...even the arrival of the fanatically antiAmerican regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini was welcomed in a number of quarters...

...Price Amount Hardcover set $30.00 each $15.00 Paperback set $15.00 each $ 7.50 Subtotal Indiana residents add 5% sales tax Total We pay book rate postage...

...But then, that's the general idea, isn't it...

...others did not...

...Following that debacle, the Soviets, believing the United States was now out of it, went on such an offensive worldwide that today they feel they have to offer their apologies if they want improved relations with the West...

...Collier and Horowitz frequently use the term "Fifth Column" to describe the left...

...The point was that the issue of "Vietnam" was bogus...

...Echoing this line, Hendrik Hertzberg in the Washington Monthly sneered: "Twenty years ago they were uncritical supporters of communist jungle fighters who trampled on human rights...

...Both Nixon and Humphrey committed themselves in 1968 to bringing the American involvement in Southeast Asia to an end...

...But "anti-Communism" has always been the worst kind of degradation one can succumb to...

...Wherever they's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there...

...the Shah of Iran...

...Just as there is something grotesque about people like Hayden and Paul Berman pretending to be well in the tradition of a Hubert Humphrey...

...In a piece of no more than 800 words' length in the New York Times Book Review, someone called David Burner managed at least seven times to equate the two authors' ideas today with the bizarre notions they once held and which they now totally repudiate: "The two have not recovered their senses," "the delirium of half-sleep remains," "they sound like their previous selves of the 1960s," "their likenesses exist today . . . in the legions of the right," and on and on...

...Preface...

...He could afford even such enemies because his friends and admirers have been legion...

...Thanks to the efforts of the left, its program was finally realized in 1975, when promised assistance from the non-Communist government was not forthcoming...

...To question them is still a sign of reactionary proclivities, malign motives, or bad etiquette, or a combination of all three...

...Marcos...

...q that, and cease to regard themselves as belonging to the left...

...Department AA101 Indianapolis, IN 46250 Hertzberg has any qualms about accusing the two men of complicity in murder...

...Just as weakness of the senior male Joads can be linked to Steinbeck's sense of his own weakness and to memories of his weak father, whose mismanagement of a store ended in bankruptcy (the diarist wrote on June 16: "I dreamed a confused mess made up of Dad and his failures and me and my failures"), so Ma Joad's indomitability was a reincarnation of Carol's...

...I'll be ever'where—wherever you look...

...As a matter of fact, this was also the officially stated position of the Soviet Union at the time...

...That their document was met by a torrent of abuse was only to be expected...

...If this all makes Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Mark Rudd, and Bernadine Dohrn sound more like members of the Stefan George Circle, or perhaps of the Cambridge Apostles, or simply pupils of Martin Heidegger, then there is good reason for that...

...What particularly riled commentators was the political position the two adopt today, especially their support of Ronald Reagan...

...Park of South Korea...

...As Professor DeMott aptly observes, the motif of self-doubt is still prominent in these entries, but is compounded by guilt and tempered by foreshadowing, as though Steinbeck felt himself to be hovering on the brink of some enormous catastrophe...

...Quite conceivably...

...Mandeville is the wittiest and shrewdest philosopher ever to make a significant impact upon economics...

...What the left wanted, and what it was ready to commit violence on behalf of, was immediate, unconditional American withdrawal— in other words, the international, public humiliation of the United States...

...T here is of course something very amusing about the critics of Collier and Horowitz donning the mantle of moderation...

...All orders from outside the United States must be prepaid in U.S...

...Their friend David Rieff thoughtfully and in a thoroughly nonpartisan way recently spat at David Horowitz in public...

...19.95 George Szamuely 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 NEW FROM LIBERTY FUND TEE FAILLE OF TEE 111) EIS OR PRIVATE VICES, PUBLICK BENEFITS By Bernard Mandeville With a Commentary Critical, Historical and Explanatory By F. B. Kaye "Mandeville is able to offer possibly the first systematically derived account of politics and social order based on 'interests,' both rational and irrational...

...Although Carol Henning was a fairly talented poet, prose writer, and painter, as well as being more deeply involved in radical politics than Steinbeck ever was, she gave up her career when she got married...

...At excruciating length —7,000 words or more—he drummed the message home: Collier and Horowitz were the "sole militants of the '60s still good for a shocking gesture, a finger in the air, a coast-to-coast f--you...

...Working Days serves, in sum, to make The Grapes of Wrath and its author more complex and more interesting...

...All orders must be prepaid in U.S...

...The neoconservatives are the fanatical Berkeley radicals...

...Wherever they's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there...

...Carol does so much," Steinbeck said of his wife in the entry of August 2. Indeed she did...

...If the intimations of dark fatality are not fully articulated, it is because Steinbeck was fearful that the watchful Carol would discover the secret of his love affair with a 20-year-old showgirl named Gwyndolyn Conger, whom he began seeing in the summer of 1939 and whom he would marry in 1943...

...It's very confusing, of course...

...But the nastiest and most scurrilous review—clearly the influence behind both Hertzberg and Burner—appeared in the New Republic and was written by Paul Berman...

...lb order, or for a copy of our NEW 1989 catalogue, write: Liberty Fund, Inc...

...The New Left is still fundamentally all right as far as its original intentions go...

...Department AA101 7440 N. Shadeland Avenue Indianapolis, IN 46250 ••n••"111n1 Please send me: The Fable of the Bees Liberty Fund edition, 1989 Quan...

...typed and edited his manuscripts...

...But the effect is the same...

...The left has always been able to live with the notable absence of such features in Communist regimes...

...Studs Terkel's introduction to the fiftieth anniversary edition of the novel accomplishes the reverse...

...Through a series of character-studies, autobiographical essays, and reflective pieces, the two former editors of Ramparts and ex-supporters of the Black Panthers trace the consequences—both personal and national—of the left's hijacking of the American liberal movement during the 1960s...

...Neither Berman nor DESTRUCTIVE GENERATION: SECOND THOUGHTS ABOUT THE SIXTIES Peter Collier and David Horowitz/Summit Books/338 pp...

...Thus we have the idiotic equation...

...If you happen to think, as I do, that Communism is the worst misfortune in recent times to have befallen people (befallen, moreover, without anyone actually asking for its fall), then you support those who are trying to clear the rubble...

...q THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 43...

...Was he already dreaming of betraying Carol while he was still writing The Grapes of Wrath—and did that dream, too, get into the novel...

...Really...

...At worst, during the 1960s the Soviet Union was labeled "bureaucratic," just as the worst thing about the Sandinistas is that they are "stupid...

...Since, according to Berman, "nothing about that idea . . . inherently tied it to socialist or liberal ideals," guess who will turn out to be today's two chief purveyors of this "existential" notion...

...Thus for Collier and Horowitz now to admit to having voted for Ronald Reagan and to be giving vociferous support to anti-Communist fighters in Nicaragua and in Afghanistan is like . . . well, it's like . . . it's like supporting the Black Panthers...

...Don't know why...

...But here is the new twist...

...dollars...

...The emergence of Ma Joad as a far stronger person than her husband and the other older men in the Joad family is another notable aspect of the novel on which the diary bears...

...still others did and did not in varying degrees...

...Sadat...

...In addition to assuming all the domestic duties of the household, the strong-willed, tough-minded Carol did her best to shield her shy and easily stampeded husband from intrusions on his privacy...

...Volume H - 481 + v pages...

...The diarist who but slenderly understood his own raw emotions ("My whole nervous system is battered...