REVIEWS

...It is fascinating to learn, for example, that many active members of the CP failed to register with the Party upon returning from World War II: apparently the taste of life in the outer world, even in wartime, made the idea of going back to the constricted circles of American Communism seem unattractive...

...A book of this kind must devote space to doctrinal issues not exactly sparkling in their present impact...

...This comparison of the different impacts of class and race essentially concludes Milner's analysis...

...In any event, we are treated here to an analysis of the fact that emphasis on educational advance once restrained social conflict but now is more likely to deepen it...

...Well, that's not quite the way one would put it, but given the source, that sentence has its value...

...And as he writes a bit later about "the peculiar sociology of the concealed Communists": To adapt itself to the separation between Partyand union meant [for the CP-dominated wing of the CIO] to follow the logic of the success ofthe unions which had become autonomous .. within the society...

...Though in the main Starobin now writes as a man who has nothing in common with the movement to which he gave his youth and young adulthood, there are some pages in which he sounds as if he were still back there arguing for the virtues of Browderism...

...For a certain number of persons Joseph Starobin's book will hold an intense interest...

...For people like Starobin the following years were extremely hard—abandoning the Communist movement was a kind of "religious deconversion" as life-shaking as to plunge into it...

...A commitment to "equality of opportunity" enables us to pursue both values at once, though a hard price may be paid in the form of what Milner calls "status inflation, . . . a decrease in the social value attributed to a given objective amount of resources"— i.e., when so many people have achieved college degrees and white-collar status, BOOKS then the diploma and the job are devalued even as they still stimulate "endless striving...

...BY CHANCE, there has just appeared an article by Philip Jaffe, "The Rise and Fall of Earl Browder" in Survey, Spring 1972...

...At a Cominform meeting held in Poland in September 1947 Duclos was severely attacked by the Russian representatives, Zhdanov and Malenkov, as well as the thenleftist Yugoslays, Djilas and Kardelj...

...Why, then, Part III, marching under the grand flag of "Education, Social Conflict, and Social Change...

...In short, we are attempting to "beat" the class structure by applying pressure at the college level when there are too powerful "countervailing social processes within the larger educational and occupational structure...

...It is no wonder that he succumbed to the illusion that he was `an independent' leader of his Party rather than an obedient servant of Moscow...

...It has gotten Professor Richard Drinnon to write an Introduction which tries to connect the socialism of the 1930s with the New Left of the '60s...

...392 pp...

...When the famous Duclos article attacking Browder came out in 1945, Browder, yesterday hailed by his comrades as a great leader, found himself painfully isolated and reviled...

...but only on the face of it, as a temporary and distorting conjuncture, did Browderism stand for such a policy...

...In the process of generalizing his argument, Milner diminishes the value of his closely reasoned contribution to the sociology of education...

...Jaffe's conclusion is this: "Browder enjoyed extraordinary adulation from Party members and great respect in the communist world...

...There is a certain comedy in this revelation, for the secret messages that Browder kept hidden for decades until allowing Jaffe to publish them contain very little that could not have been read in the dispatches American reporters were sending from Moscow...

...Unsectarian, lively, and intelligent, it didn't get the applause it deserved—other qualities were then in demand...

...From a distance one might suppose that, having gained control of major organizations, these "influentials" would favor the "revisionist" line represented by Browder...

...He contends, I think rightly, that expanded federal aid to students, the principal lever for reducing inequality in education, will not be dramatically effective because differences in socioeconomic background of families provide too powerful a set of advantages for some over others before, during, and to some degree even after college...

...and in the long run, no doubt, that was the direction in which they would move...

...But let that pass, he has a right to his opinions...

...So far so good...

...And please also be sure to enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope...

...Dissatisfied withtheir own ambiguous position and privately assuring themselves of their revolutionary commitment in the most vehement and self-persuasive terms (for the very reason that they couldnot avow it in public), the influentials wereoften most impervious to the Party's advice ofcaution and patience...

...The very comrades who had profited from his policies joined in the attack upon him, so powerful was their attachment to the Communist movement as a kind of secular church...

...Week after week, month after month," writes Jaffe, "while Browder's chauffeur sat before the receiver, nothing came through...

...q 124 BOOKS THE ILLUSION OF EQUALITY, by Murray Milner, Jr...

...Good...

...Now it may be said that even within the misshapen context of CP policy Browder was BOOKS groping toward an appropriate American strategy, or that his views represented a recognition of domestic realities that in later years would lead to the massive withdrawal from the CP of many unionists...

...Jaffe further reveals—and this is a revela tion!—that when the Trotskyist leaders of the Socialist Workers party were being tried under the Smith Act in 1941, "the [Communist] Party To Our Contributors • When sending manuscripts, please make surethat you do not send your only copy...

...There is, then, a significant difference of opinion—certainly, of emphasis—in the views of Starobin and Jaffe, and while the analysis of the former is subtler in statement, the opinion of the latter seems to me more valid...

...But more...

...The admirable work of scholarship he has now written shows that, as intellectual and human being, he has come through...

...This, of course, is a more modulated and plausible kind of statement...

...Probably not true...

...But for the very reason that the Communistinfluentials had not legitimized their politicalconvictions, they tended in private to rational ize their roles by assuming they were betterrevolutionaries than the publicly avowed Communists...

...Yet, as it seems to me, Starobin's book suffers from a major intellectual flaw...

...was beginning and the CP claimed to foresee "fascism" at home, the "influentials," according to Starobin, were inclined toward intransigeance...

...That a "revisionist" or "reformist" policy is the sole way an American radical movement can gain influence may well be true...

...Boston: Beacon...

...But the same skeptical temper that results in a valuable revision of a sacred received idea about American society also tempts the sociologist to take a sounding on the whole of American society...

...Intellectually, this seems to me a misconceived effort—unless far more attention is paid to, and far more intimate knowledge is had of, the differences between the two periods than Drinnon commands...

...Despite all our attention to education the data show that both rates of mobility and income distribution have remained relatively constant...

...About the terrorism of the Weathermen, the totalitarianism of the Maoist wing of SDS, the wretchedness of the ways in which the once-promising movement has repeated many of the worst aspects of '30s radicalism, Drinnon says nothing...

...Now, at a moment when (or perhaps after) radical books sell in college bookstores, Beacon Press has reissued Rebel America...

...But what of it, for we have already learned the essential lesson from Part II: "economic equality must precede rather than follow meaningful educational equality of opportunity...

...In that party it could not be otherwise...

...It is a tricky question...

...3.95, paper...

...Duclos, it turns out, had been guilty in France of the same "revisionism" for which Browder would be denounced in America...

...San Francisco: Jossey-Bass...

...Financial aid to colleges has a modest effect on social mobility but "no form of aid will change the patterns of mobility sufficiently to have significant effects either on equality of opportunity or on equality in the societal stratification system...

...Yet, as Milner shows, student aid to racial minorities is likely to be more effective because "Negroes who are able to obtain a college education during the next decade will probably be able to move much closer to occupational and income equality...

...But directly after the war, when the struggle between Russia and the U.S...

...Jaffe, for many years close to the CP leadership, covers the same ground that Starobin does...

...Milner doesn't say, because he is preoccupied thereafter with extended comments on "Marxist scenarios," student unrest, status anxiety, alienation, women's lib, and the black revolution, all to the end that "status-group conflict cannot be reduced to class conflict...

...And here Milner moves from his discussion of education to argue unconvincingly about what went wrong in Marxism to portraits, Riesmanstyle, of national character ("The Excluded," "The Vulnerable," "The Chosen") to a catchall diagnosis of the American illness ("endless striving") and a cryptic prescription for its resolution (income redistribution...

...172 pp...

...The book went out of print: Lillian Symes died...

...8.50...

...Probably true, but what of it...

...Sociologists frequently challenge the conventional wisdom not because they are perverse but because they must pay heed whenever their data do not square with prevailing ideas...

...Here's a curious case...

...For many years an intellectual spokesman for the CP, Starobin had developed grave disagreements by the early 1950s...

...Murray Milner demonstrates convincingly that contrary to what we think or hope, "expansion of the higher education system is not likely to increase either equality or equality of opportunity significantly...

...his article is important, however, for a number of startling details that Starobin either did not know about or was too discreet to use...

...Only, Duclos confessed and Browder did not...

...Perhaps the FBI couldn't afford to subscribe to the Militant . . . During the war years, Jaffe writes, Browder was in indirect communication with President Roosevelt, sending him letters "full of warnings against a large variety of men and periodicals, like Roger Baldwin, Walter Reuther, David Dubinsky, Alex Rose, James Carey, James Wechsler whom he called a Trotskyite, and the following magazines: the Nation, the New Republic, the New Leader and PM, some for opposing the labor draft law...

...Still another tidbit offered by Jaffe is that the famous Duclos article was not written by Duclos himself...

...So it is with The Illusion of Equality, a study by a New York University sociologist on the relationship of equality of opportunity to education— higher education in particular...

...One wonders, though, why the Department of Justice needed help, since the "important collection of documents" provided by the CP consisted mainly of excerpts from SWP publications...

...In 1934 two youngish writers, Lillian Symes and Travers Clement, both then active in the Socialist party and the latter to become for a time its National Secretary, published a very good popular history of American radicalism...

...Clement moved on to other ventures, including a stint as an editor of DISSENT...

...I do not know the answer except to suggest that "status inflation" and excessive striving can operate in a book as well as in the world...

...But, continues Starobin, the CP faced an insoluble contradiction: it remained tied to the world Communist movement, switching its line on Moscow's orders after World War II and thereby losing all it had built up...

...THERE ARE OTHER, extremely valuable pages dealing with the inner life of the Communist movement, especially those on the "underground" period of the 1950s...

...His most absorbing sections, however, are those that deal, not with ideology, but with the movement's inner life...

...Starobin manages them with skill and dispatch...

...Ripped out of historical context, the Browderite strategy in the late 1930s and during the '40s may seem better adapted to American conditions than the more "leftist" course followed at the time by Norman Thomas...

...Many a left-wing unionist in fact accepted the compulsions of this institutionalization as a matter of day-to-day practice...

...But finally there came the sacred word from Moscow, which helped Browder make the short-lived turn to "The Yanks Are Not Coming" period that lasted until Hitler invaded Russia...

...But with this difference: Thomas's views were his own, they were authentic, whereas Browder's line had been imposed, as Starobin acknowledges, by Moscow and was to be annulled by Moscow...

...This is an important and sobering conclusion at a time when the school and college are often seen as the "up" escalator of social mobility...

...So it is, again, with The Illusion of Equality...

...Travers Clement, the very much alive co-author of Rebel America, was not consulted as to the reprinting of his book or the choice of Professor Drinnon as the one to introduce it...

...For a long time, Jaffe writes, Browder kept trying to evade the realities of his past, but in 1971, now an aging man, he told Jaffe: "When I was in Moscow, I was like a child...

...To summarize the intricate weave of Milner's argument: Americans, rich and poor, are caught up in "endless striving"—we believe in egalitarianism and in achievement, in equal standing before the law and in the rewards of striving which results in markedly different levels of income and status...

...A postcard, sent either to DISSENT or some other socialist institution would have brought a simple answer as to his whereabouts...

...BOOKS...

...Historically, however, his Introduction is a scandal, since, though dated August 1971, it presents the New Left as if its early anarchofraternal phase, about which Drinnon is enthusiastic, were still the reality...

...It presents, with authoritative detail and a serious effort at objectivity, the story of the collapse of the American Stalinist movement beginning at the point when Earl Browder was removed as its leader and ending at the point when both the Cold War repressions and the ideological stupidities of the CP brought it to ruin...

...Such a query might also have evoked the suggestion that an author ought to have some control over the way his book is reprinted...

...a few years later he aligned himself with the "revisionist" wing headed by John Gates and, in revulsion against the Khrushchev revelations and the suppression of the Hungarian revolt, quit the party...

...These details substantiate, I think, my view that Starobin makes too much of the "autonomous" possibilities of Browderism...

...His conclusion is that, as a result of the Browderite Popular Front policy, the American CP had begun to establish itself as a genuine force within American life— anticipating, perhaps, the "coalition strategy" that has since won the support of most people on the democratic Left...

...With a new introduction by Richard Drinnon...

...126 REBEL AMERICA, by Lillian Symes and Travers Clement...

...In September and October 1939, shortly after the signing of the Stalin-Hitler pact, Browder received two secret messages from Moscow through a shortwave radio receiver set up in Long Island, messages regarded as so confidential in character he did not mention them even to the other top CP leaders...

...Apparently, it was a bit of grisly Stalinist irony to have the letter denouncing Browder signed by Duclos...

...Milner's focus is on college, since the status race has now been moved beyond the high school...

...This shameful act, worthy of stool pigeons, occurred during the time Browder was head of the CP...

...THE EDITORS prepared for the Department of Justice an important collection of documents to help prove the guilt of the SWP...

...Still more valuable are Starobin's pages on the "influentials," those Party members who had achieved prominence and power in trade unions but had to keep their Communist affiliation quiet...

...but even then it is necessary to place far greater stress than Starobin does on the encompassing context of Stalinism as a total ideological movement within which the Browderite heresy arose...