Harold Laski
Kramnick, Isaac & Sheerman, Barry
Reading about the Left Book Club in Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman's Harold Laski: A Life on the Left took me back to forty years ago. From 1936 until the club folded in 1948, Laski,...
...Laski came to upper-crust socialism as an outsider...
...James Earl Ray...
...Take Laski's famous addiction to lying...
...He gets mentioned in memoirs, often smilingly, but most often with references to his lifelong habit of lying—which Kramnick and Sheerman charitably call "myth-making...
...Yet embracing constitutional Marxism clearly involves one in a form of self-deception...
...Of course, they are going to highlight the occasions when Laski's fibs turned out to have some basis in truth...
...Finally, building our liberal world was a decisive one...
...Crackpot writers, many with a strong political agenda, and zealous conspiracy buffs have offered us quite a list of suspects and co-conspirators, including Lyndon Johnson...
...Kramnick and Sheerman don't even ask such questions—let alone offer an answer to them...
...Sam Giancana, the Chicago Mob Boss...
...Fidel Castro...
...Now Penguin Lane is publishing the life of one of the founders of the Left Book Club...
...And it was members of that second post-Laski generation that came to power with Bill Clinton last January...
...Frank Sturgis...
...A.J.P...
...In describing to his friend, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the moral impression Lord Robert Cecil, for example, made on him, he said: "I went John Muggeridge teaches history at Niagara College in Welland, Ontario...
...All his friends noticed he was afflicted by it...
...In a world hard-pressed for ideological consistency, its unabashedly fundamentalist approach may be just what is needed...
...Meanwhile, the Westminster Review published his "The Scopes of Eugenics" which urged governments to promote fertility in clever, healthy couples and sterility in stupid, sickly ones...
...Even his pro-Communist stand, now that the Cold War is over, no longer hurts...
...at Oxford, under the tutelage of H.A.L...
...Laski himself made the same move in the 1930s...
...Like the movie Dead Again, Harold Laski: A Life on the Left is about reincarnation...
...Kramnick and Sheerman hark back to a time before the far left went anti-American...
...By 17, he had moved on to birth control and women's rights...
...In their eyes Stalin simply went too far, or, as Laski put it, made mistakes...
...It might even be argued that Laski's claim that you could stop people from wanting to acquire property and make money out of it simply by getting a Labour government elected to pass the necessary legislation represented an even deeper descent into unreality than his invention that Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had summoned him to 10 Downing Street to help end the foreign debt crisis...
...David Ferrie and the Civil Air Patrol...
...Corsican mercenaries (or were they Corsican missionaries...
...They joined the suffragettes, in whose interest he tried unsuccessfully to blow up a suburban railway station...
...He more than held his own...
...Taylor, in English History, 1914-1945, makes three brief references to Laski, the longest and least scathing of which includes him among "the new enthusiasts for communism" in the thirties, who, "whatever their background . .. were highly educated intellectuals whose ideas and writings appealed to others of the same sort," while in The Age of Roosevelt Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., though admitting the importance of Laski's influence on Marxist thought in America, banishes him to the unvital periphery...
...In other words, they mean to rewrite modern British history...
...Jimmy Hoffa and the Central States Pension Fund Board of Trustees...
...Revisionist history is always exciting, however meagerly the record supports it, but the 600-plus pages of Harold Laski revise nothing...
...Laski hasalready appeared to approving reviews in England...
...Speaking of lying puts one in mind of the Soviet Union...
...They're eager for change (unlike all other North Americans), but one big problem continues to dog them: what William B. Murchison, in a recent Human Life Review, calls their formlessness...
...Laski himself, who once claimed that FDR's gift for leadership was second only to that of Lenin, put his money on the New Deal...
...Constitution did not just guarantee the rights of individual Americans but gave their government a passport to socialism...
...But all of this belongs to a forgotten past...
...They had flame-colored dust jackets and tocsin-sounding titles such as The Coming Struggle for Power, The Battle for Peace, Forward from Liberalism, and, most famous of all, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, minus the question mark Sidney and Beatrice Webb had originally ended it with...
...Weatherman-like, he fled abroad until the incident blew over...
...Santo Traficante, the Florida Mob Boss...
...All of them were apparently well-connected members of the upper middle class...
...If pro-Communist leftists are reasonable, then anti-Communist ones must be unreasonable...
...I also remember coming across some of their authors...
...More than 2,000 books (forget about magazine and newspaper features) have been published about the events in Dallas in November 1963...
...They say of the .Cold War that "ideological excesses by the Stalinist left and the anti-communist Right allowed no breathing space for the democratic socialist alternative," as if socialism, not freedom, had been its central issue, and it had ended badly...
...E. Howard Hunt...
...But according to Kramnick and Sheerman, Taylor and Schlesinger have got Laski wrong: he isn't peripheral...
...His father, an anti-Zionist Jewish textile millionaire from Manchester, had Harold educated with local gentiles to prove that he could hold his own among them...
...A year later, he secretly married a new woman who had gone to Sweden to study physiotherapy and discuss free love...
...Its readers are to be the third post-Laski generation of American students...
...I have no memory of lunching with Harold Laski...
...Now it has crossed the Atlantic...
...Kramnick and Sheer-man list six books and a dozen learned articles about Laski that have appeared since his death forty-three years ago...
...Who even remembers Laski, let alone his political philosophy...
...Aristocrats in particular brought out the vassal in him...
...At least one of them had a butler...
...Richard W. Carlson is president and chief executive officer of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting...
...From 1936 until the club folded in 1948, Laski, together with his two Oxford classmates and fellow Marxists, John Strachey and Victor Gollancz, had had the job of deciding which manuscripts it would publish, and I vividly remember coming across their selections among my father's old review copies...
...They have an agenda but no theology...
...He belongs at center stage, and Kramnick and Sheerman, as they tell us in the prologue, mean to put him back there...
...He must have summered in a different county, for, as Kramnick and Sheerman make clear, he was a faithful participant in the rituals of gentlemanly far leftism...
...Tippit...
...Their approach is too reverent...
...Kramnick and Sheerman have set themselves the task of proving that on both sides of the Atlantic, Laski's role in out feeling cleaner by contact with him...
...Clay Shaw...
...Fyvel—who, as literary editor of Tribune, Britain's reddest newspaper after the Daily Worker, necessarily moved in their circle—once asked my sister and me to his daughter's Hunt Ball...
...Officer J.D...
...three tramps in a boxcar near Dealey Plaza (some claim E. Howard Hunt was one of them, which puts him on this list twice...
...What more useful prophet could Clinton Democrats come up with than this scholarly Marxist-feminist moderate for whom the U.S...
...Fischer, the most famous liberal historian of the day, Laski became what he remained for the rest of his life, a believing Marxist Whig...
...Also modern U.S...
...This is the subject on which Kramnick and Sheerman are at their worst...
...Hence, perhaps, the earnestness with which he propounded it...
...In Laski's day it was perfectly acceptable, even fashionable, for British radicals to admire the United States and believe that the prospects for socialism were brighter there than in their own country...
...Nor can one blame them for putting it in the best possible light...
...Jack Dragna, the Los Angeles Mob Boss...
...The young men and women he helped at that time to radicalize were in their turn the parents of the sixties "rebels...
...No wonder, then, that they defend Laski's "reasonable" approach to Stalinist Russia...
...One thing they never do is quote left-wing critics of Laski's softness towards Moscow...
...This is why Kramnick and Sheerman either dismiss them as "cold warriors" or pretend they don't exist...
...Jack Ruby...
...What its authors give us is not new insights but old clichés...
...When the Left Book Club folded thirteen years later, it was Penguin that took over at the cutting, i.e., socialist, edge of literary and academic / saw a T-shirt recently that said, "ELVIS KILLED JFK," an explanation no more far-fetched than others I've seen'in print over the years...
...history...
...He championed the 1919 Boston police strikers, supported Sacco and Vanzetti, agreed with the New Deal, defended FDR' s decision to pack the Supreme Court, and favored an undivided Palestine...
...S o the question remains: Why dredge up Laski's outdated and exploded leftism...
...His first non-Jewish headmaster, a Victorian campus leftist, converted him to socialism...
...Certainly not the makers of modern history...
...Was there something about having to hold his own for so long among gentiles which drove him to resort to fantasy...
...Harold Laski is connected with Laski in one other interesting way: through its publishers...
...writing...
...Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans Mob Boss...
...Bunker and Nelson Hunt...
...He fulminated against capitalism and delighted in the company of rich men, blasted privilege and fawned on those who dispensed it with an assiduity that few of his fellow country-house Communists could match...
...Alas, they don't develop it...
...the Mormon Church...
...looks just right...
...I feel certain that Poli Sci departments across the continent are even now putting copies of it on reserve in their college libraries...
...What they never do, however, is relate this habitual mendacity to his politics...
...Thus, they reprint a paragraph by the anti-Communist Labourite Leonard Woolf commenting on Laski's intellectual prowess, while omitting without benefit of asterisks the following last sentence: "Harold's mind, when properly used, was a wonderful intellectual instrument, though as years went by he was inclined to take the easy way and misuse it both for thinking and writing...
...Ray Patriarca, the New England Mob Boss...
...Why did he lie so adamantly both to and about himself...
...A fascinating thesis, and one would think, what with Kramnick being an American political scientist and Sheerman a Labour M.P., they would be ideally suited to develop it...
...We used to drive over to lunch with them, and they with us, at our respective summer places...
...in other words they are not true leftists...
...J. Edgar Hoover...
...Allen Lane founded Penguin Books in 1935...
...Saint Harold might just be the •person to provide them with one...
...Moreover, unlike most of them, he really does seem to have looked up to his social superiors...
...Certainly his C.V...
...Their book is the life of a saint, lovingly and painstakingly told, but having in it nothing to stimulate the reader's historical imagination or even get him wondering what Laski was really like...
...even so, since most of them are dead and their books out of print, one has to give Kramnick and Sheerman some credit for not having covered it up...
...the CIA...
Vol. 26 • December 1993 • No. 12
