LETTERS
Forbes, Crosby & Ferry, W.H. & Muste, A.J. & Stone, I.F. & Peck, Sidney M. & Shachtman, Max
Your readers will be interested in a most significant political contest in Mas sachusetts. Noel Day of Boston is Inde pendent Candidate for U.S. Congress, 9th Congressional District....
...A Dartmouth graduate and a trained social worker, he is Executive Director of St...
...To my knowledge, this particular technique, as developed by T. Adorno and others, had not been previously used or reported on in U.S...
...achievement rests on the judgment of the reader...
...However, I do not get the feeling from reading the book (and doing so a second time, which must surely be par for the course) that it makes any difference at all, and this is in fact the principal criticism I would make in a more extended comment...
...One of the important means for gathering the data was the novel use of a group dis cussion interview technique...
...Congress, 9th Congressional District...
...Specifi cally, the research was designed to test the Commons-Perlman job-consciousness theory of the American worker...
...In extenuation, I offer the admittedly weak excuse that, writing my passing comment a month or so after reading the book, I relied on my impression of the whole instead of checking the preface...
...I say "passing comments" because it most certainly was not a review of the book...
...Yes, there are 22 pages explicitly devoted to this...
...Editor c May I correct an annoying error in by review of Deutscher's biography of Trostky (on p. 359 of your Summer 1964 number...
...It was not, as he implied, a study of the "stresses and strains on the shop steward...
...Noel Day of Boston is Inde pendent Candidate for U.S...
...politics, economics, and cultural life...
...Peck's After all, the title is The Rank-and-File Leader, and I legitimately assumed that to be its main purpose...
...The fact is that one chapter of 22 pages in a 400 page book is devoted to a discussion of the research method...
...2. As to methodology...
...Be that as it may, intent is the province of the author...
...Having been guilty of error, I do not want to seem ungenerous in reply...
...SDS has succeeded in attracting some of the best and angriest young minds now functioning, and has been able to put these minds to work in socially relevant ways...
...I suppose you can't really tell the players without a scorecard...
...His preface does establish that he worked in a variety of plants for close to four years...
...Yet Geltman has written of me, "summers he worked in factories" and "praiseworthy as his summer employment was...
...In referring to a 1928 article by Trotsky I wrote that he "named two possible candidates for the [Bonapartist] man on horseback—Voroschilov and Tukhachevsky...
...In recent months, at a half-dozen regional conferences organized by SDS, literally thousands of students have been confronted with the central facts and key debates about the American economy .. These young people are working at the most difficult task of stimulating protest and action in some of our country's most deprived and depressed areas...
...House of Repre sentatives and next in line of succession to the Presidency...
...Noel Day is a nationally known civil rights leader and is particularly active in SNCC and NSM...
...We cannot resolve this here, but it is precisely my complaint that the author himself does not realize how much the work is imbued with repeated demonstrations of method rather than with substantive clarification...
...Emanuel Geltman's review-essay in the Spring, 1964, issue of DISSENT contained some passing comments to my study of labor ideology...
...Day articulates the centrality of peace to the achievement of a just and abundant social order...
...1. Mr...
...Peck is clearly well-intentioned and a serious investigator, I suspect that he would have done better had he relied more on his own good sense, eyes, ears, and experience (and the contributions of others) rather than on his group interviews...
...Their strategy, like the strategy of the Southern civil rights movement, is to have students and young people serve as catalysts of protest in these communities...
...Furthermore what Geltman did write was so inaccurate as to suggest that he probably did not read the book...
...Mr...
...Geltman also said that I devoted entirely too much space to "tedious elaborations of methodology...
...While Trotsky would not have, I am sure, excluded Tukhachevsky from a longer list of such candidates, the fact is that he was not one of the two mentioned...
...Their plan aims at creating interracial movements in key Northern and border-state communities around such issues as jobs, housing, and schools...
...10003), put yourself on their mailing list and send along whatever size check you can manage...
...He founded the first Freedom Schools for Negro and white school children in connection with the Boston school stayouts of June 1963 and February 1964...
...But while many "old timers" remained skeptical, a group of students has been working against the odds to try to help achieve this revival...
...The two men Trotsky named were Voroschilov and Budyonny...
...Most of us have been hoping to see a revival of the radical spirit in America—that spirit which in the past vigorously attacked entrenched interests, eagerly sought to organize at the grass roots, and offered a vision of a new society in opposition to the corrupting status quo...
...All Geltman needed to do was to open the book and read it to learn that four years of continuous factory work was surely no "summer holiday...
...In my preface to The Rank-and-File Leader I wrote that for "a period of nearly four years, I worked in a variety of industrial plants in the Milwaukee labor area...
...It was a study of trade union mentality...
...The whole work conveys a sense of being overimpressed by the method used to gather the information...
...I think my statement is as fair to the book in its best sense as Mr...
...Moreover, SDS has had considerable success in reaching the American campus—its membership has doubled in the past few months, and it now has chapters on over 30 campuses, from Texas to Oregon to Boston...
...Peck is right, and I was in error, for which I offer my apologies...
...In addition to the community organizing effort, these students have published dozens of pamphlets and papers representing some of the best thinking now available on U.S...
...That is standard procedure for any piece of social research...
...I do not find the work adequately communicative of four years (or four summers) of participation, observation, or inquiry...
...His campaign is explicitly connecting peace with the issues of racial justice and unemployment...
...For that matter, barring a detail here or there, I do not see why a few students, working in tandem and armed with the technique, could not have polished off the study in a few intensive weeks...
...3. "Trade-union mentality" instead of "stresses and strains on the shop steward...
...4. The preface does indeed say that the work was designed to test the CommonsPerlman theory...
...They need you to join them with moral, intellectual, and financial support...
...302, 119 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y...
...social research...
...We want to inform your readers about a critical new development in the American political scene—the emergence of an organization of students and young people who are seriously committed to building a new American left...
...The group we are referring to is Students for a Democratic Society, an organization which is about to celebrate its second anniversary by inaugurating a major new program...
...Nearly two hundred union stewards are involved in extensive sound-recorded group discussions on these sensitive social issues...
...Again, to my knowledge, this is one of the very few empirical critiques of the CommonsPerlman approach...
...They are living at or below subsistence levels...
...Mark Social Center, a Roxbury settlement house...
...The book reported the actual verbatim responses of what rank and file unionists believe and feel in relation to issues of corruption and delinquency, automation and discrimination, recession and war, politics and socialism...
...There followed a somewhat detailed account of my industrial work experience during the years 1953-57...
...Since Mr...
...Won't you now write to them (Rm...
...Financial contributions will be gratefully accepted...
...Day's Demo cratic opponent is John W. McCormack, the Speaker of the U.S...
...My pen slipped...
...Their hope is to see the emergence of grassroots political organization in many parts of the country capable of developing a program and a constituency independent of local political machines and the national Establishment...
...The Republican candi date is one of the leaders of the Gold water movement in Massachusetts...
...They should be sent to Canon James P. Breeden, Treasurer, Noel Day for Congress Committee, 41 Winthrop Street, Roxbury, Massachusetts...
...He is co-chairman of the Massachusetts Freedom Movement...
...Much of the professional literature suffers from the same ailment, born perhaps in dissertational require meat or in academic self-indulgence...
...The SDS program is ambitious...
...Your readers will be interested in a most significant political contest in Mas sachusetts...
...If Geltman had read the book it would be difficult to understand why he did not discuss what the book was about...
Vol. 11 • September 1964 • No. 4
