Which Side Are You On?
Higgins', George G.
about his political effort as Mary Kerr is about her dancing, and he ends up taking a route that forces him underground, hence the Night Travelers of the title. By night and by stealth they...
...In almost every bookstore," he writes, "there would be a whole section for 'Labor' the way there is today for 'Self-Help' or 'Sex.' And if you go down to the old used-bookstores around the University of Chicago, and climb the creaky wooden stairs to the basement, and keep from fainting over the mold and mildew you can still see some of these 'Labor' books...
...Hundreds...
...All of them, the whole bunch, are middle-class Emersonian individualists...
...How times change...
...Beguiled, however, by Geoghegan's literary style (he writes like an angel, albeit a bit too preciously at times), I swallowed hard and read the book from cover to cover in two long sittings...
...Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back Thomas Geoghegan Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $19.95, 287 pp...
...Given the title and the ongoing national debate over the issue, that is only to be expected...
...This is a veritable tour de force...
...Hooks, now cast in the role of the dissenter, was very nearly last on the bill and his testimony against the nomination got relatively little public attention...
...Silencing debate solves no problems...
...I think so myself...
...I remember vividly one remark that Hooks made during our preliminary conversations...
...49.95 Hard cover $29.95 Soft Cover Add $5.00 ahil~ng.Oa~r~as: add auar~as postal rate...
...8a.m.- 4:30 p.m...
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...He can think of nothing, he says, "no law, no civil rights act, that would radicalize this country more than to make this one tiny change in the law: To let people join unions, as their right, freely and without coercion, without threat of being fired, just as people are permitted to do in Europe and Canada...
...Geoghegan, who tends to exaggerate, observes that once upon a time (meaning, of course, in the mythical thirties) there were many labor books...
...Hundreds, I'd say, that were published in the thirties and forties during labor's Golden Age...
...Tumed off by this kind of condescending yuppie rhetoric, I was tempted to stop reading the book then and there...
...Ambrose University Bookstore, 518 W. Locust St., Davenport, IA 52803 Phone Orders: (319) 383-8870 or (319) 383-8930...
...A "dialogue," in our staff jargon, referred to an edited transcription of separate interviews with individuals on opposite sides of a current issue, each responding to the same questions...
...And Stephen Carter considers that a tragedy...
...Yet, he says, that is precisely the luxury in which the black community---or at least its traditional leadership--insists on indulging...
...She must resist her mother in everything, since her mother would take away her profession, her husband, her child ---her very soul if that were possible-- but for all of Mary Kerr's resistance, there are times when she wants to give in, when the child's longing to be loved by her mother overcomes her...
...The power of Elizabeth Spencer's telling of it is extraordinary, and though the mother-daughter relationship is at the periphery of the story of the young girl growing up and marrying, it is at the center of the novel's effect...
...Whatever the events of her life, she returns to the struggle with her mother, a struggle that cannot be resolved any more than life can be...
...The fact is that, even at this late date, black conservatives and leaders of the black establishment don't talk to each other very much, if at all...
...By night and by stealth they travel--to Canada for a time, where Mary Kerr has a baby and a depression so profound it leads her to a thwarted suicide...
...He is enough of a realist, however, to understand that without unions, warts and all, there is little if any hope that the American economy will ever be democratized...
...Looking back romantically to what he thinks of as labor's Golden Age, he says on page one of his exciting book that organized labor "was a cause in the thirties...
...Now it is a dumb, stupid mastodon of a thing crawling offto Bal Harbour to die...
...One way that they did so was to avoid engaging in public debate--or private discussion--with them...
...Some will think Geoghegan puts too much hope in labor law reform and has an overly romantic view of labor-management relations in Europe and Canada...
...It will add further to historical focus to note that Geoghegan's own book is being more widely and more favorably reviewed than all but the best of the labor books that came out in the thirties...
...As a Harvard law graduate who got interested in organized labor almost by accident during his student days in Cambridge but has stayed the course ever since, he knows from firsthand experience with a variety of unions that the movement is far from perfect...
...By indirection and by secret they communicate when Jeff leaves again to take on his own kind of war work...
...During the Senate Judiciary Committee's initial hearings on Clarence Thomas's nomination to the Supreme Court, it was the black conservative nominee who commanded the spotlight...
...Anyone who doubts that characterization need only reflect on the experience of Clarence Thomas...
...For the black establishment, I wanted-and got--Benjamin Hooks, the head of the / NAACP, but only after an enormous amount of wheedling and cajoling and flattering...
...Blacks, Carter says, are particularly in need of internal discussion and debate...
...But Just Arrived...
...I conceived the idea of a "dialogue" on black conservatism...
...Nevertheless, it is hard to be critical of a Johnny-come-lately, middle-to-upper-class suburbanite who, at great personal sacrifice, is willing to go on as a lawyer representing the American labor movement now that it's flat on his back and who, to repeat, writes like an angel...
...This is not to say that Geoghegan is blind to labor's imperfections or its crimes...
...In other words, to judge from the reception the book has had, Geoghegan is not alone in thinking that, with labor flat 658: Commonweal on its back, now is the time for decent men and women to stand up and be counted on labor's side...
...The bulk of the attention paid to Carter's book so far has focused on Carter's heterodox position on affirmative action...
...My first choice on the conservative side was Thomas Sowell, the economist...
...LABOR WILL RISE AGAIN--MAYBE WHICH SIDE ABE YOU ON...
...it is subtle, and it is constantly changing...
...I went to a second choice, Walter Williams, another economist, who readily agreed to participate...
...But this really turns out to be a case in which the more things change, the more they stay the same...
...We've tried," he said, referring to himself and the other establishment leaders, "not to give them [black conservatives] too much attention...
...Critics of all ideological persuasions-right, left, and center--are vying with one another to promote Which Side Are You On...
...The power of the relationship between Kate and Mary Kerr Harbison is eerie, lifelike...
...He is decidedly on the side of the angels--i.e., of a strong and effective labor movement--and has had it up to here with "American liberals, even American radicals, [who] have more in common with the Reagan Right than with us...
...8 November 1991:659...
...M-E Proceeds from salea benefit Catich Gallery...
...And in fact labor books are still being published in significant numbers in the nineties--though many if not most of them are decidedly bearish about the future of the American labor movement...
...But he, as was his practice, declined to talk to the press...
...George G. Higgins homas Geoghegan has been aptly described by one sympathetic reviewer as "a child of the sixties reliving the social struggles of the thirties in the Chicago of the nineties...
...Emerson, Thoreau, all of these guys are scabs...
...May his tribe increase, i I THE "BEST BLACK" SYNDROME REFLECTIONS OF AN AFFIRMATIVE ACTION BABY Stephen L. Carter Basic Books, $23, 286 pp...
...Not quite...
...Loneliness and loss and hope share unequal places in Mary Kerr's full heart...
...I]n an era in which a third of black people still live in poverty, when the inner cities are besieged by drugs and crime, when nearly a quarter of our children are themselves having children, we cannot afford the luxury of insisting, in the name of solidarity, that any of our problems has a single, unchallengeable answer...
...All too few new ideas are being generated, and some of the old ones--such as the need for widespread systems of racial preference in college admission and employment--seem increasingly irrelevant, yet are defended with a desperation that often turns to virulence...
...Ronald Reagan had been recently installed in the White House...
...More power to him...
...A reprint of the definitive work on the Trajan Roman alphabet by the world-renowned scholar on Calligraphy & Trajan Inacription, Edward M. Catich...
...At least as interesting and as poignant, however, is Carter's discussion of how dissent and dissenters are suppressed in the black community--and what happens to the community as a result...
...Thomas had not gone out of his way to ingratiate himself with the civil rights establishment as he worked his way upward in Washington over the last decade...
...Perhaps I am being naive, but I take this phenomenon to mean that Geoghegan may (not necessarily will, but just may) live long enough to see the American labor movement once again become as strong as it was, or as strong as he thinks it was, in the thirties...
...That effect is both disquieting and enriching...
...How did it outlive George Meany...
...Lane Kirkland is outside the American consensus in a way that even Abbie Hoffman never was...
...I could see no point in plowing through yet another patronizing jeremiad about the decline and fall of the labor movement (and the malfeasance of its leaders) written by yet another disillusioned liberal intellectual...
...it only limits the range of possible solutions...
...Don Wycliff n early 1981 I got a firsthand experience of one of the phenomena that motivated Stephen L. Carter to write his book...
...Indeed, by his own repeated admission, Geoghegan is "obsessed with the thirties, with John L. Lewis, and with the New Deal...
...I was working at the time as an editor on the Week in Review section of the New York Times...
...It was more than worth the effort...
...Early on in the first chapter I discovered which side Geoghegan is on now that labor is fiat on its back...
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Vol. 118 • November 1991 • No. 19
