Reviews
Pachter, Henry & Robbins, Richard & Trachtenberg, Alan
HARD TIMES: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION, by Studs Terkel. New York: Random House. 462 pp. $8.95. THE GREAT DEPRESSION, b. 1929, d. 1939 (?)—you have to think about those hard...
...Vic feels "obliged" to his history: "Jake and I were stained by memory...
...You got no guts, Dresden...
...Like Berle, he "wanted to believe that monsters were explicable," and once understood, manipulable —"a position shared both by scientist and magician...
...men like Happy are "scarcely human," "should be rubbed out...
...The reader finds Jake situated in a world beset by trouble, by dirty sheets and roaches...
...Is the murder of O'Brien an authentic enactment of Jake's value...
...In ignoring his possibilities, we have a welfare generation...
...Yet in 1939 at the age of forty-seven he found himself a liege of Hyman Kravitz, whose insigne was a skeleton globe with blue longitudinal ribs and a red slash across its equator, bearing the name, "Atlas Laundry and Linen Supply Service...
...Somehow, Vic's justification of the executioner as the "hero of revolution," whose act must be judged after the "moment of horror," when its goal of "a new world" is achieved, sounds hollow at best, frighteningly terroristic at worst...
...hence capitalism is incapable of realizing even that freedom that is essential to its functioning...
...I pulled up her sweater, went under her brassiere, felt her breasts...
...And in the treatment, though Litwak's hand falters occasionally, what seems obvious and one-dimensional achieves subtlety, nuance, qualification...
...Hard Times captures this experience in a vivid and memorable way...
...Since in the nineties the imperialist ideology spread through the whole continent and indeed through all of the Western world, it is no wonder that instances of it can also be found in farm journals...
...On the Left, Dorothy Day, Saul Alinsky, Carey McWilliams, Max Shachtman, and others who reminisce in Hard Times, all saw the ways in which the New Deal fell short...
...But we didn't realize the house is not enough...
...LrrWAK COMMAND a very sophisticated craft and he employs it in a number of ways, some too obvious, to situate the story within a context of ideas, to "point" the meanings lest they be missed...
...It is enacted in Jake's two sons, Ernie, the older, and Vic, the book's narrator...
...This is a fascinating story, which we have no space to repeat here...
...More doubtful even than his use of available quotations is Williams's use of quotations that are not there...
...Stated so boldly, both matter and theme might suggest a book regorged from the memory of proletarian sympathies and agit-prop sensibilities...
...The present book covers the period from the beginning of the 19th century and leads up to the "closing of the frontier" in 1893, the SpanishAmerican War of 1898, and America's participation in the Boxer intervention...
...To let the pineapples into the American customs system...
...The Nazis could be explained...
...The line is echoed shortly after by Berle: "We all got to do terrible things when we keep faith with our principles...
...They bear the burden not of a curse but a promise: Jake assures his continuity, and his dream's, by exacting the oath...
...Marx would have classified Williams among the romantic, nostalgic hankerers after Paradise whom he contemptuously called "utopian" or German socialists...
...The book can be taken as one son's discourse on the meaning of his father, on the constraints of the inheritance, and finally on the pattern of his own existence...
...But this is not the case at all...
...This first explains the idea of Manifest Destiny, the conquest of the continent, the wiping out of its aborigines...
...But first let them bleed...
...He counted dirty sheets...
...Imperialism is the search for new frontiers— a notion on which Williams relies heavily...
...He finds them both in the "market mentality...
...He is also drawn, unaccountably in Vic's mind, to the worldly aplomb of Leonard Mitchell, already on his way as a Cream-of-Michigan petty monster and punk...
...for despite the "opening" there were no sales...
...representatives of the farm states in Congress would exert pressure, whether to obtain specific measures or to stamp their general economic philosophy on government policies...
...What Elizabeth Wood, a pioneer in the housing field, says about public housing then and now would apply as well to the welfare system, rural poverty, pensions for the aged, racial discrimination...
...They talk and remember...
...He wanted to become a brute so he might be spared the catastrophe we all waited for...
...I say this space is evoked, because in its action the novel does not get past 1943...
...544 pp...
...I let nobody—not a man, not awoman, not a child—nobody steps on me...
...The "sensitive" Berle, a "love-sick poet," "a delicate man who didn't look Jewish," is Jake's intellectual adversary...
...It was a leap forward...
...As to American capitalism, he has become more pessimistic than before...
...This failure, together with the emergence of a kind of response to the world rather troubling to the reader, makes one wonder if we are not in the presence of what critics call "the unreliable narrator," a voice whose judgments cannot be taken at face value but must themselves be judged...
...In reality, the American farmers were free traders and hoped to get a fair price for their product in exchange for their willingness to buy goods manufactured abroad...
...If it is not, we need clearer grounds for certainty that Vic is to be judged as misrepresenting that value...
...For here the interviews are grouped around one theme, the Depression, in its many aspects: the desperate search for work, the hard traveling to another place to make a new start, the strikes and the unions, the chaos and confusion on the farms (with crops and animals destroyed to keep prices up), the excitement and frustration of the New Deal, the surprising effort by the federal government to support hungry artists and writers (the one time, as the painter Robert Gwathmey notes, when "the most important thing was: the artist had a patron who made no aesthetic judgments...
...To link their intense nationalism up with a supposed "market ideology" and to marry the two to produce "imperialism" is a fantasy...
...We BOOKS begot it...
...Bleeding and groveling—that'sa German education...
...Robin Langston, 43, black, social worker and jazz musician: "I think the powers-that-be missed the boat, during the Depression...
...He wants to understand—the classical form of transcendence, as Santayana wrote...
...We are handed a few figures on the phenomenal percentage growth of agricultural exports but are never told BOOKS what part of total farm output they amounted to...
...It can conquer more land or create new industries...
...Quite apart from the sharp memories of the middle-aged and in spite of the indifference of the young, it remains the supreme example of collapse-and-recovery in our development...
...These examples may suffice to show that Williams, for all his industry and scholarship, does not make proper use of his sources...
...but then, when the last frontier has been reached, the impulse to sell directs our sights across the ocean...
...THE ORIGINALITY OF WILLIAMS'S CONTRIBUTION is in the proof, which fills the bulk of his book, that expansionism was not promoted by big business, still less by monopoly capitalism as Lenin and his followers would have it, but by the American farmers, whom he never fails to call "agricultural businessmen...
...It is to be noted that he does not blame direct economic advantage for specific foreign policy moves, but a state of mind that itself is economically conditioned...
...To assure a favorable environment for American business we had to "open the doors" everywhere and to convert every nation to our ideal of a market economy...
...It is all there...
...The tone, the style of Vic's mind, simply fails to register any change in quality of awareness...
...War, antiSemitism, gas chambers, these were all symptoms of "historical necessity," of the profit motive, of an irrational economy...
...He could just as well say that the movement against the Vietnam war was defined and joined by people who feared the draft rather than by general revulsion from futile, illegal, and immoral sacrifice...
...Can we read those last words without a damaging irony...
...If interest flags now and then because of too many interviews, if the sessions with "famous people"—Jim Farley, Sally Rand, Raymond Moley, Pauline Kael, and others, perhaps a tenth of the total—are largely unrewarding, the great majority of the people who speak and remember in this book bring the Depression vividly to life...
...For example: Vic often makes comments with apparent authority regarding the book's monsters...
...Ernie, more complex, moody, brooding, needs Vic's dogged pursuit to be brought finally to his task as executioner of the evil O'Brien—whom the boys take to be responsible for Jake's murder...
...It is precisely this ideological need of imperialism, or of any political movement for that matter, to justify itself in terms of human civilization—it is this ultimate dependence of the sword upon the pen that gives us hope for a future beyond Empire...
...Its action precedes that of the earlier book and in some respects corrects its thesis...
...Suffice it to mention the last leg of Williams's arduous voyage: the clamor for war against Spain...
...the Cream of Michigan, hangout for the hoods who, with all their glamor, are enemies of the union, of reason and hope...
...He now thinks that imperialism is inherent in the character of a marketplace economy and in its conceptions of reality...
...the "commercial interest" —namely flour mills—hoped to continue do ing business with the Spanish Crown (as today with established dictators) and considered the rebels responsible for insecurity and loss of sales...
...The indictment that the farmers' market orientation was the "root" of American imperialism can stand up only in the mind of one who considers trading and economic exchange sinful in themselves...
...on the contrary, they fought against protectionists at home and abroad who exploited their weaknesses...
...even less so when the "instance" is out of context or the quotation misleading...
...Aren't reactions like these themselves monstrous and brutish...
...but to get there they had to wax enthusiastically about Cuba in order to provoke war with Spain...
...The novel is remarkable less for the more obvious daring of its choice of subject than for its treatment...
...But if the imperialist mentality outlived—as, incidentally, it had preceded—the "agricultural businessman," then we are compelled, unfortunately, to assume other, psychological and perhaps anthropological factors favoring expansionism or the search for dominium as an outlet for social energies...
...I pulled down her pants...
...Berle, the detached observer of history, disagrees...
...When Secretary of State Sherman warned that "our foreign policy must be controlled by commercial interest," he meant to oppose the populist clamor for intervention in Cuba...
...On the other side, the conservative groups in the New Deal coalition prevented any real attack on the system of racial segregation...
...I submit this is a mistake of scholarship...
...It is clear that agrarians then used such arguments because they dared not say that the scheme was to keep the domestic price high and to protect the farmers from bankers and speculators...
...Now, OF COURSE, THE REFORMS are in place and, as everyone recognizes, they are not nearly good enough for the different, even more complex crisis of the seventies...
...There was no incalculable evil...
...Maybe it's a mistake to presume that he had thoughts and feelings like our own...
...As to the New Left, alas, it only reproduces, involuntarily and unknowingly but therefore even more menacingly, the very modes of its environment...
...Cesar Chavez remembers having gone to something like 36 elementary schools...
...Though we did not conquer many overseas colonies, we did reduce overseas countries to the status of semicolonies—buyers of our surplus, providers of raw materials, opportunities for investment...
...It is this market economy which is unsatisfactory...
...Jake understood the weapons and sentiments of Mars, bore a scar to prove it, and was not beyond using them if he had to...
...TO CONTRIBUTORS We strongly urge anyone submitting ma terial to DISSENT to keep a carbon copy...
...The confusion impinges on an otherwise splendid and courageous book...
...The effect is achieved through more than 150 transcribed interviews, mostly with everyday people ranging in age from under 20 to over 80...
...But breathing in almost every line is the knowledge that what was unadorned violence in the life of Jake Gottlieb—father, friend, organizer of laundrytruck drivers, victim of a shot in the head and a block of concrete tied around the waist—has by now lost its power to outrage...
...Likewise, no imperialism would have been possible without a consciousness that was nourished by images deeper than economic interest could suggest...
...No meaningful freedom can survive in a mass democracy...
...Perhaps that is the point, that just as Vic cannot avoid waiting for the "second coming of Jake Gottlieb," so he cannot avoid the consequences of Jake's unbending stance toward the brutish world...
...They look back and report the way in which they and their families were shaken by what happened...
...With me it's a different case...
...I didn't kiss her or makevows or in any fashion betray my father's memory...
...Williams's comrade-in-arms, D. F. Fleming, makes an even wider use of this malpractice...
...Every strike in my home town was always lost...
...To establish his case, Williams ought to give us not gross comparisons over decades but precise analyses of the ups and downs in specific strategic commodities which might explain sudden spurts of export promotion and frantic search for markets...
...There is not any one "root" of a national behavior pattern...
...After that Williams never fails to add, to the recitation of any event or utterance, the magic words, "to facilitate the expansion of the marketplace...
...but he fails to give any figures on the true size of that market, and he is right...
...Theydegrade our people, and only when I see Germans grovel will I consider that maybe they'rehuman...
...As MOST OF us are tempted to do, Williams seeks to shape his views on world affairs in the mold of his socialist convictions...
...All phenomena were natural and therefore available to science...
...After 1929, capitalism and the cluster of values which sustained it could never be the same again...
...That struggle is what the book is about...
...It spread across both sides of his truck van, accompanied by the motto, "Put your burden on our shoulders...
...Is this a case of the son's reaping the father's bitter harvest...
...Professor Williams never seems to have graduated from mercantilism to Adam Smith, and his entire book is an attack on the consequences of laissez faire, the international division of labor, and the economics of foreign exchanges...
...So keep a copy...
...The meaning of Jake's life and death comes to us through the pattern of Vic's awareness of the world, an awareness rich in the details of growing up in Detroit in the 1930s...
...In each case the interested parties would not have joined the issue had not the crusaders defined and sharpened it for them...
...Nor can we exclude the hypothesis that expansion, the search for more land, was a reaction against the market reality, a flight from the tentacles of capitalism—a hypothesis for which there are quotations available from Jefferson to Greeley...
...there is a history that at various times elicits various responses, each of which may leave a layer of tradition, habit, and ideology in the public consciousness...
...He had had in mind suchmodels as Eugene Victor Debs, Vladimir Lenin, Judah Maccabeus...
...At best, in the first half of the book or so, the writing seems artless, direct, and muscular, controlled by a tone capable of subtle discriminations...
...Both Moshe with his telescope and Leonard with his whores and burglaries represent ways of Iosing memory, evading history...
...But can the same be said for the story of the brothers...
...But that is precisely the point...
...the memory is still painful, we can still see the breadlines and the shantytowns, the Hoovervilles, in the mind's eye...
...There was a kind of integration of poverty...
...racism and poverty had to be "rediscovered" in the sixties...
...Hard Times is more of the same, better realized...
...WAITING FOR THE NEWS, by Leo Litwak...
...The people of Division Street are neither romanticized nor condescended to...
...Finally, we now have an American empire-consciousness determined by both its antagonism to another giant power and its need to retain mastery in its own orbit...
...Let them suffer what Jews suffered...
...But perhaps Sherry (not quite Portnoy's Monkey, but the difference is merely gymnastic) deserves what she gets, and what she doesn't get: That's the power of people like Sherry...
...It has made us into imperialists who impose our idea of a market society on others...
...Williams, on the contrary, attributes to the populists the foresight of a Machiavellian gambit: they were really after the Chinese market and therefore wanted the Philippines...
...Speaking of the plan to warehouse surplus products—then as under the New Deal intended to provide the farmer with short-term credit at harvest time—he approvingly cites the argument that this would permit America to manipulate the world markets or make it the marketplace of the world...
...When Cleveland tried to restore Liliuokalani, Williams interprets the populist outburst over this as a defense of the principle of the marketplace...
...But "lessons to be drawn from the Great Depression" is not Studs Terkel's text...
...He cannot forgive the crew responsible for what began as an exemplary beating of a quitter during the strike and ended as a killing...
...Dreams and fantasies of "almighty power" are taking shape everywhere in the world the boys grow into, in Hitler's apparent invincibility in 1939, in Gary Cooper movies and Hank Greenberg home runs...
...Has he kept faith at the expense of his humanity, of Jake's larger vision of a world not only without O'Briens but of "eternal brotherhood...
...In his new book Professor Williams has written the story of good men and women who embraced expansionism in the name of freedom, agrarian reformers and populist agitators who thought they were bringing the good society to all mankind but only achieved a policy, a movement and an ideology which actually launched the United States on its way to Viet nam...
...His roots, as he says, are in the agrarian West, and his vision of the good society emanates from the Christian conceptions of a soil-bound communalism...
...Watching the electricity go on for the first time in a rural area: one of the best of the programs, the RRE...
...For a model the reader is referred to Ernest R. May's studies of American imperialism...
...only became official when it hit the white man...
...It was the voice of Hitler I listened to, not the voice of Chandu the magician...
...Closed off from the mind which must contemplate its own behavior, we are left unassured that the assassination passed without a ripple on the sensibility of the more morally stricken boy...
...the second part makes it false...
...The New Deal was an enormous step...
...On the whole this works well...
...New York: Doubleday...
...Paradoxically, such an assumption gives us more hope than Professor Williams's gloomy economic determinism...
...Ernie is so much more the interesting, the sympathetic, the sensitive of the brothers, that a certain amount of his awareness always seems to escape his brother's representation...
...Consider: an unfashionable subject—a Jewish labor organizer in Detroit in the late 1930s fighting on two flanks against the bosses and the labor hoods—and an uncompromising theme—evil exists, pure and simple, and ought to be exterminated...
...Ernie "envied the brutes...
...You don't have the nerve to hit," Jake said...
...Ernie is drawn to abstractions, to the star-gazing of Moshe Bodkin, to the absorption "by stellar happenings...
...But the mere fact of wanting to create markets abroad does not constitute imperialism...
...He saw all the world's furnishings as possible weapons...
...The sit-downs in the Detroit auto plants: a disciplined courage was required on the part of workers and organizers for the CIO which is undreamed of among those student revolutionaries who today can do no more than capture a Dean's office...
...The sworn oath is before the sons throughout the book, and as the action unfolds its meanings become manifold and imperative...
...If Jake is flanked by the Happy Weinbergs and O'Briens on one side, he has Berle Dresden on the other...
...Vic, the narrator, seems closer to Jake, the truer vessel of his message...
...Thus, dubbing "protectionist" the European efforts to keep diseased animals from being imported, he finds it "highly questionable whether American meat was more diseased than the European product...
...it prevents us from BOOKS living content on our own soil and orders us to go out into the world in search of more land and new markets...
...In New York, on many streets, we would see the furniture piled high on the sidewalks...
...If his onedimensional view is right, America is bound to continue her imperial career...
...The issue is joined in a BOOKS conversation about the Nazis...
...he chalks up what it has done to the Chinese and to us...
...Theyobserve no landmarks...
...The evil was wrought in Paradise, and even before the doors of Paradise were closed in 1893...
...She laywith her arms back...
...My pa wore the insigne on the back of his blue shirt and on his overseas cap...
...Even the young radicals, reading the story of how two black men, B. D. Nixon and A. Philip Randolph, worked against impossible odds in deepest Alabama in the thirties to organize the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, would be hard put to go on insisting "don't bug me about the Depression...
...Even the American farmer up to 1914 never sold more than 14 percent of his products abroad...
...Williams shows how in every administration the farmers' expansionist policies defeated the more parochial interests of business...
...Of the annexation of Hawaii he says that the continental farmers wanted to include the islands in their "free marketplace system"—for what...
...Imperialism, as the name says, implies command, mastery...
...It is not clear, finally, whether the unsatisfactory ending is an artistic or a moral failing...
...This is the original sin of capitalism, and we are unable to live it down or get rid of it...
...IT Is HARD to imagine a contemporary novel making life as difficult for itself, and then performing as creditably, as Waiting for the News...
...This story ties in with Williams's earlier efforts to show that American imperialism and notably the Cold War started with the policy of the "Open Door" in China and elsewhere...
...The first part of the sentence is indubitably true according to the strictest reading of the documents...
...Never forget you are the sons of Jake Gottlieb...
...Clifford Burke, 68, black, poor, saw nothing new: "The Negro was born in depression...
...The anticolonialism of the young republic colored its political expressions for over a hundred years: animosity against the world power of the Pound Sterling still rings in the 1890s' manifestos...
...For instance" is not proof...
...Vic's voice gives the right weight to the conflicting claims of his adolescent experience: his father, gross, gauche, faintly comic, yet strong and above all right...
...Those who step on me will bleed...
...They are represented in this book by such men as "Beanie" Baldwin in the Farm Security Administration, John Beecher in the migratory labor program...
...If anything, the American farmer always tried to escape the pernicious mechanism of the market...
...As if to underscore Jake's stubborness as an element of his strength, the book does contain another way of taking causes...
...presence in Vietnam we must go back to the mold in which it was shaped— namely, the Adam Smithian idea of a market economy intimately linked up with the Lockean idea of individual liberty...
...This may sound familiar to readers of the Communist Manifesto: "Capital in its mad hunt for profit has brought modem industrial civilization to all nations and has revolutionized every obsolete mode of production," etc...
...The memory of Jake's vision of "a world to win" struggles to stay alive not only against the acts of goons, but against a society that condemns memory while it celebrates fantasies of godlike power, BOOKS a society rich in distraction for those stationed at the outpost of events, waiting for the news...
...But Williams sees this process not in terms of the progress it has wrought in history (he does not believe in Hegelian dialectics...
...it is remote, sealed away as history...
...The farm crisis that produced the export drive of the eighties added another factor to the expansionist fantasies which this volume so well documents...
...The New Deal combined action with luck, and what could not be handled was postponed...
...But what the hell did they expect to sell to the Cubans...
...Williams cites all the voices of popu lists and agrarians who importuned the President to go to war, and he assures us that these spokesmen expected to "open" the Cuban market for U.S...
...The relief programs: people had to overcome a sense of shame that it was "their fault...
...The story of Jake reaches us refracted as the story of his boys and, more narrowly, as the point of view of the less troubled son, Vic...
...He takes the cause personally...
...But if The Higher Dialectic "The most important thing we've got to convince people of about this trial" [the Black Panther trial in New Haven], Tom Hayden told the rally Saturday, "is that the facts are irrelevant...
...It flies in the face of everything the "new history" of Robinson and Beard had taught at the beginning of this century...
...Theyignore volcanoes, earthquakes, tidal waves, artillery, and they remain joyful...
...This leads us to the first word of criticism...
...5.95...
...There is hardly a note of nostalgia...
...In the Tampa factory a reader, high up on a platform, would read for four hours every day—the books were democratically chosen, Zola, Dickens, Kropotkin, along with the standard magazines...
...He studied each man he met with the obsession of a general who must consider any terrain he enters as a potential battlefield...
...Thus the book opens: My pa, Jake Gottlieb, had prepared himselffor a great destiny...
...The pattern itself reaches out to include the threat of Hitler at one end, and the heroic values of Homeric myth on the other...
...Of the Civil War he writes: "[It] came over the extension of slavery, not over its abolition, and that issue was defined and joined by market-minded agriculturists rather than by crusaders...
...Historical awareness, with its harsh commands for personal action, stands in this novel between science (Berle, Moshe) and magic (all the brutes...
...Principle veers dangerously close to personal vendetta in Jake's refusal to grant a contract to O'Brien, the man who wielded the lead pipe...
...Most of the great political decisions he describes in the bulk of the book do concern the economic interests of farmers—especially their export opportunities: a deal with Germany on pork, the securing of outlets to the sea BOOKS either down the Mississippi or by building railroads, the silver issue, repeated slumps, etc...
...If so, the book ends on a bitter note indeed, a note which might compel us to bring into question what asks to be unquestioned in the narrative: the absolute value of Jake...
...I have always been attracted to the monster theory...
...His speech is worth quoting in full...
...The historian wants to know what and who influenced the policy-maker...
...Taking to the road...
...And what is nationalism but tribalism writ large...
...While steeling himself to serve as executioner of O'Brien, Vic has his first experience with sex: Later, I pushed her down on the sofa...
...They do not wish to be scolded: "You know, when I was young and the Depression hit this family...
...I had no difficulty discovering her flutter...
...Yet it is Professor Williams's contention that to understand the U.S...
...He denied that there were monsters...
...The choice to tell the story from Vic's point of view is the most consequential of Litwak's decisions in regard to structure...
...Who knows...
...Other interviews with workers and farmers, white and Protestant, are equally arresting...
...But it is a fact that European governments required inspection in domestic slaughterhouses, whereas even today the American consumer is not protected against trichinosis...
...But he served Love, and the crucial episode of the death of his amiable and foolish even if unreliable (from the union's point of view) friend, Sammy Persky, shows Jake in revulsion from his own warlike posture...
...Down to World War I, when many things changed, the American farmer felt himself to be exploited by the world market and victimized by domestic as well as foreign colonialism, rather than a beneficiary of the "market mentality...
...It is difficult to convey the sheer fact of millions of unemployed in a situation where there was not yet a minimal protective system, where unemployment insurance, social security, collective bargaining, bank-deposit insurance, conservation-work camps (CCC) had to be fitted into place in the midst of all the confusion...
...You pay a price if you remember your fathers," Vic wrote much earlier in the book...
...I want to see German blood flowing in German streets...
...The Government assumed a responsibility toward subsidized housing...
...The bewildering series of new programs in the first 100 days, all ticketed alphabetically—NRA, AAA, FSA, PWA: for all their defects they provided a measure of hope, a psychological as well as an economic lift...
...Then, maybe, Dresden, I myself willno longer be a monster crying for blood...
...They are variously "making it" or "rejecting the system" in their own terms...
...The sons face an obligation, an oath, a solemn pledge demanded by the morally imperious father, to avenge his murder...
...Selling apples on the street...
...What does the act of murder mean to Ernie...
...He who tries to write history by scanning balance sheets will always end up with unsolved equations...
...I want to seeGerman blood...
...Jose Yglesias tells a stirring story of the strike of the Cuban tobacco factory workers...
...He wants blood, "German blood...
...It is plain that if a Great Depression were to recur today the extraordinary patience, fortitude, and resiliency displayed by so many of the people who speak in Hard Times would be much more quickly exhausted...
...Still," writes Vic, "I was never deluded by such apocalyptic dreams...
...He has provided this book, which summarizes the studies and struggles of a lifetime, with a prologue and an epilogue, honest and reflective, defining his present position vis-a-vis both the Establishment and the New Left...
...We take more than usual precautions, but the U.S...
...Two causes seem chiefly responsible...
...The Germans were not beasts...
...It is Ernie who finally pulls the trigger on O'Brien in a scene ruined BOOKS by the author's laconicism (how the boys manage to get away with the killing without punishment takes an ingenious but dubious piece of fabrication by Litwak...
...The WPA: so much better, even as make-work, than relief and food stamps, yet stupidly denounced as an outrage ("Ieaning on a shovel") by those who still kept a little stake in the system...
...Should the gods grant Professor Williams another book in which he might trace American imperialism back to the Founding Fathers, we can be sure that he would discover still another layer of social forces, political interests and ideologies which also contributed to the singular syndrome of the American "mission...
...Jake's presence to his son has just such scope and intensity, and wry irony...
...Professor Williams is well-known as the author of three hard-hitting works: The Shaping of American Diplomacy, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, and The Contours of American History, which defined and attacked American imperialism...
...Then, maybe, German and Jew, we'll both be human...
...The Great American Depression, as you call it...
...The present situation is so unique that the effort to reduce it to hundred-year-old "roots" hardly helps our understanding...
...As free traders and allies of the British Anti-Corn-Law League, they had no intention of monopolizing or of fencing in any market...
...THIS IS AN IMPORTANT and, in a way, a moving book...
...In the plot Jake's own destruction at the hands of the monsters follows directly from his prodigious capacity not to forget Sammy's killers, not to allow them an inch...
...Watching silently, and on occasion, resisting fiercely, when the men came to foreclose the farm, evict tenants from the apartment...
...A population can find Lebensraum abroad, or it can use the available land more intensively...
...Even in the late forties, when we listened to him on radio, interviewing musicians across the whole jazz-folk-blues spectrum, he had already developed great skill not only in putting questions but in relating the music to the social process, to the black ghetto, the small town, the Deep South...
...Leonard is now "a man without an inner life...
...This feature of the book, the tensions between the boys, impresses us as the major, or at least the most ambitious intention of the novel...
...Hitler is still at some distance, but thugs like Happy Weinberg are uncomfortably near-at-hand...
...He is Jacob, lover of God (Gottlieb), he is Maccabee, he is Atlas...
...Thinking about the Depression, in retrospect, they speak BOOKS strongly, pungently, directly, above all realistically...
...Going broke...
...it evokes, as much by the intangible aura of its prose as anything, the space between a world where monstrous brutality lay in wait in every headline and every ring of the phone, and one—our own times— that is hardly less brutal but in which the plain fact of evil has lost its edge, its simple shuddering presence to the moral consciousness...
...For the young, on the other hand, the Depression happened too long ago...
...History was inside our skins...
...Protectionist and financial lobbies early in this century gave American imperialism a third dimension, closer to Hobson's and Lenin's interpretation...
...We may be inclined to simplify a little, to say that FDR and the New Deal "saved the country," though we know well how much of the economic and social programs were palliatives, and we recognize that in the end the advent of World War II really took up the slack in the economy and blunted what was described, euphemistically, in the late thirties as "the recession...
...There's the person...
...For anyone 45 and over the Depression happened too recently...
...mails these days are not exactly at the peak of efficiency and we have had one or two unhappy situations in which articles were lost in the mails...
...No fight against extension of slavery could have been possible without abolitionism...
...for the motivations that before the turn of the century drove the American farmer toward expansionism were slightly different from those that afterwards animated the American businessman...
...farm products...
...On all these issues a farm lobby would legitimately express its views...
...THIS CONTRADICTION, roughly between ends and means, commands the entire novel, its structure, its schema of characters, its tone...
...Ernie continues to play with tin soldiers in his bed, exercising the power of god over them...
...The factory owners, for no reason, tore down the lecture platform...
...By the end it seems Vic does know, without doubt...
...In fact, what is imperialism but nationalism on a world scale...
...He can quote some silly fantasies to the effect that the conquest of the Philippines would open the great Chinese market...
...Some of the more dynamic, deeply aware, New Deal administrators and field agents understood the limits of what they were doing and tried to do much more...
...And Jake is this world's antagonist...
...Men were Happy Weinberg's battlefield...
...This episode, by the way, is a good example for the pitfalls of exemplifying from history: whether we support or subvert the status quo, whether we intervene or whether we don't, in each case the "instance" proves commercial imperialism...
...If it is, if vengeance is the road to a better world, God help us all...
...In the case ofthese two adolescent boys, existence is constituted by the father in a stark and compelling way...
...He seems to think that there must be one common root for both the social evils of American capitalism and the international horrors committed by American imperialists...
...Studs Terkel has perfected this approach over the last 25 years, in and around Chicago...
...HARD TIMES: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION, by Studs Terkel...
...Then maybe they'llunderstand Jews...
...If one scans provincial newspapers and private correspondence, he is likely to come across enough quotations to fill a book and prove any thesis...
...The enemies were the City of London—British imperialism— and its allies in the Yankee cities...
...But, once you are dealing with states of mind rather than ascertainable facts, all states of mind have equal standing and it becomes very hard to prove that the "market mentality" rather than "antiBritish parochialism" or a Schumpeter-type "power madness" was the fount of expansionist impulses...
...He refuses to believe in devils, in "a power for evil beyond human understanding...
...THE ROOTS OF THE MODERN AMERICAN EMPIRE: A STUDY OF THE GROWTH AND SHAPING OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN A MARKETPLACE SOCIETY, by William Appleman Williams...
...Now we are paying heavy dues...
...Is Vic, finally, an object lesson of the price, of the terrible cost of waiting for Jake Gottlieb...
...This certainly makes more sense than the orthodox Marxist-Leninist theory which puts the blame on the capitalists as a class, or the pseudo-Marxist theory of the New Left which singles out specific capitalists and their illegitimate influence...
...He is also a socialist who has angered Marxist orthodoxy by his essay The Great Evasion: On the Contemporary Relevance of Karl Marx...
...Jake wants "the exterminators exterminated...
...He bore the burden of others on his shoulders...
...They deal with extraordinary landscapes, but their eyes superimpose the commonplace on what they see...
...Though Professor Williams is no Marxist, he has fallen into the trap of an economic determinism which lands him in inevitable doom...
...It is hard to resist the pull of fantasy in a time of "waiting for the news...
...Division Street: America, which appeared in 1967, conveys the mood of urban life authentically...
...The workers struck, but as usual "the strike was lost...
...The relationship between agrarianism and nationalism is not economic, as a look at European history will make clear...
...Reluctantly willing to crack heads in a good cause, Jake is horrified, and his integrity threatened, when the head-splitting takes over the cause...
...And please also be sure to enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...The novel takes exact measure of the distance between then and now...
...The novel falls off noticeably toward the end, after the disappearance of Jake...
...Any imperialism that was built upon the old rural notion of land as the only source of happiness is dated...
...it has long since been replaced by other imperatives...
...Quoted by Ron Rosenbaum, The Village Voice, May 7, 1970 this is the point, it is occasionally expressed in a manner at odds with Jake's underlying humaneness...
...Only when they grovel will they havehad the experience of Jews...
...It was a logical next step to extend the interviews to the streets and homes of Chicago and, from there, to put the tapes into print...
...After I wash inGerman blood I'll be clean of my shame...
...we have a clearer if simpler version of Jake than we would have through Ernie's eyes...
...there is no other way...
...Just as Williams is short on economic theory, so he provides no statistical information to back up his conception...
...In this big, rambling, uneven, nearly always compelling account of a terrible time, he has provided a many-sided view of people, high and low, coping with crisis...
...This is in the end a book of our times, not the thirties...
...The speech is important because it contains the contradiction of Jake's own life: he must play the monster in order to recover humanity...
...In the end it is less successfully rendered, less engaging, than the vigorous presence of Jake and his entourage of followers and enemies...
...Don't give me logic,'" Jake snorts...
...But the half-success of the New Deal took the fire out of the Socialist party, while the Communists could not survive the purge in the CIO or the consequences of the Hitler-Stalin pact...
...If, on the other hand, multiple causes and historical variations have fed the imperialist mentality, then civilization may still learn to turn off some of these spigots of destruction...
...This can easily be "proven" by writing history selectively—leaving out what does not fit...
...He was familiar with guns, brass knuckles, knives, pipes, blackjacks, bare hands...
...Especially the minority-group people, caught behind a double wall of poverty and discrimination...
...About Leonard Mitchell, early in the novel, he writes, "I don't know what occupies such heads...
...In some cases, the information he gives is mistaken...
...Without any doubt, the decrepit Spanish monarchy was less able to resist American economic penetration than Cuban patriots, and the American farmers' enthusiasm for the rebel cause might just be a case of international solidarity for like-minded people—revolutionary imperialism...
...The German peasant who fought Bismarck's wars or the French peasant who voted for Napoleon had nothing to sell in the world market...
...THE GREAT DEPRESSION, b. 1929, d. 1939 (?)—you have to think about those hard times in a context of chronology and generations...
...All that the American "farm businessman" wanted was a chance to sell...
...But we must keep in mind that "frontiers" can be expanded not only horizontally but in depth, too...
...In particular, the conflict between humane values and direct action to eradicate evil is the leading issue between Jake's sons...
...As usual, the scheme can be exposed by quotations, notably from "letters to the editor...
...He scattered roaches...
...Moreover, by the end of the book the most notable aspect of Vic's narration, its archly managed tone, seems to stiffen just when it should grow more pliant, more open to complexity and implication...
...the news from Europe, of Nazi terror and pogroms, news that, like a magic lantern, projects a background of world history for Jake's local struggles...
...But the Depression is simply too immense an event, too deep a rupture in American history, to be assimilated into analysis by age groups...
...For the peak three years alone (1875-77) we are told farm exports were 7 percent of GNP—not really impressive as a cause for imperialism...
...312 pp...
...Logic...
Vol. 17 • July 1970 • No. 4
