REVIEWS

...Caute does not quite take this position—though some of his informants and sofirces have done so— but his failure to discriminate among the feared, the fearful, and the fearsome makes him at times appear at least to flirt with it...

...They look for more extrinsic satisfactions...

...OF WILSON'S CORRESPONDENTS, Zabel, Tate, Dos Passos, John Peale Bishop, and Louise Bogan were those who regularly got the best letters...

...Schrank uses the Yiddish term "schmooze" to describe the opportunity to enjoy the simple pleasures of companionship with others...

...It began and ended in the '30s, and it was never passionate...

...Schrank also discusses recent experiments with new forms of work organization...

...MY MEMORIES of the period are influenced by the fact that I had at least a worms-eye insider's view of the top State Department officials and the leading foreign diplomats in Washington...

...Perhaps even more insulting are the informal practices that reflect the paternalism of the political culture...

...Workers also attempt to maintain some control by "banking work," producing more than they turn in, hiding the excess, and using it to meet their quotas when they don't want to work too hard...

...He was the U.S...

...The courts did not escape contamination by the moral ignominy of the period, but they did set definite limits and eventually acted so as to bring the entire enterprise into disrepute...

...Although he tells us nothing very new or startling, he is well worth listening to because we seldom get a reporter with Schrank's combination of characteristics...

...While reporting on the Scottsboro trial, he tells more than one correspondent of his sympathy for the whites of that town, who are hugely outnumbered and naturally enough feel threatened...

...It's the negative criticism and the rasping which never let up for a moment (and, in their correspondence and in his polemics, Engels tries to imitate him...

...Many cases were ultimately dismissed by the courts...

...The press self-protectively avoided defending the rights of actual Communists such as the party leaders indicted under the Smith Act, but leading newspapers spotlighted the absurd injustices bureaucratically inflicted upon innocent people for misconstrued conventional liberal opinions or for mere personal associations, often in the remote past...

...The magazine has become so dull that the editors themselves say they are unable to read it and the subscribers are dying off like flies...

...when he issued a judgment, he showed his reasons...

...A group of press photographers suddenly appeared, clicking and flashing their cameras in the lace afternoon sunlight...

...Opportunity to maximize schmooze time is an important aspect of tolerable jobs...

...Read The New Republic...

...A few years later, Acheson voiced his profound regret over the creation of the loyalty program and accepted full responsibility as a member of the Truman administration for the contribution it made to the erosion of civil liberties...

...He had a brother fighting on the Fascist side, and he was one of the few Spaniards who knew Russian, so that he may have known too much...

...and I can't imagine any other inducement short of bribery or blackmail—which sometimes appear in rather inobvious forms and to which I hope you haven't fallen a victim—to justify and imitate their practices at this time...

...This has become a rather popular line nowadays, with a spate of memoirs by aging former Communists or near-Communists picturing themselves as farsighted early opponents both of an American foreign policy that came to grief in Vietnam and of such disgraced right-wing politicians as Nixon and McCarthy...

...OUT OF PRINCETON, and after three years of service— a time during which Wilson shared, from a distance, the sense of general waste that marked his whole generation—he settled in Greenwich Village and went to work for Vanity Fair and the New Republic...

...Haraszti recalls, for example, how he and his fellow workers sabotaged new technology to protect themselves from the ever increasing rigors of labor and reductions in pay...

...Schmoozing means beating the system, another way of not "busting your ass" for the boss or the company...

...Schrank suggests that academic observers tend to slight this aspect of factory life or, when they do notice it, see it from a management perspective as an impediment to production...

...They ought to lock up their lawyers too...

...Without permission from their foremen, workers at the Red Star are not allowed to change clothes, to turn on lights, to arrive before or stay after working hours...

...My father was Canadian ambassador to the United States for all but the first year or so of the Truman administration, a post he held so long because he and Dean Acheson were old personal friends...

...CAUTE'S SUBTITLE is meant to minimize the role of Senator McCarthy by attributing greater responsibility for the purge to the policies and personnel of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations...

...They were less than intimately familiar (except, of 105 course, for Kennan) with the tortured history of the Soviet Union, which perhaps is why they continued to regard Alger Hiss with sympathy even after, as we learn from Allen Weinstein, he had been eased out of the State Department as a suspected Communist agent long before he came to the attention of HUAC...

...Making "homers" brings out the best in the workers...

...Caute's prose is undistinguished but this is an exceptionally bad example—the metaphor doesn't even work, for prickly cactus grows in sand...

...McCarthy's sheer brazen rascality exercised a kind of snake-and-bird fascination over many of us, and he continues to assume outsize proportions in recollections of the period...

...It was the Truman administration that manured the soil from which the prickly cactus called McCarthy suddenly and awkwardly shot up...

...As I walked down the steps of the Supreme Court building, Emanuel Bloch came out of the front door behind me...

...101 Caute is thoroughly knowledgeable about the difference between inveterate followers of the Communist party line and independent liberals and radicals: he previously published a study of Communism and the French intellectuals as well as a highly praised account of fellow-travelers in Europe and America during the years of the Popular Front...

...But irony is not Wilson's characteristic mode...

...Since the engines were not mass-produced and replacement parts had to be made to fit the idiosyncracies of each engine, there were some opportunities then for "creativity" and intrinsic satisfactions...

...Citing a purge victim's conclusion that "we have accepted fear as our supreme master," he shrewdly remarks that: this was a charitable view of politicians, bureaucrats, and petty officials whose behavior was arbitrary and corrupt...

...What finished him was probably his enthusiasm for the social revolution, which the Russians were putting down...

...It dulls his mind...

...CAUTE PLACES little credence in the view, proclaimed by Communists at the time and echoed by many radical young people in the following decade, that the purge represented a turn toward "fascism" engineered by the "ruling class...

...The big boys who know all about Wilson's mistakes can afford to remember that SainteBeuve, the critic with whom for some reason he is most often compared, could hardly write a paragraph about his greatest contemporaries without striking a pose of casual disdain and wondering to himself: "Now, how far can I condescend to him...

...From such a system, writes Haraszti, "Sisyphus could have learned a thing or two...

...The more one works the less that work is worth...

...His renewed tenure at the magazine lasted most of two decades, and was certainly the high point of its literary department, from which the descent has been graceful in the'40s and 'SOs, and catastrophic in the '60s and '70s...

...You're a great guy to talk about the value of a non-partisan literary review after the way you've been plugging the damned old Stalinist line, which gets more and more cockeyed by the minute...

...Here we arrive at the crux of the matter, for the entire eight-year assault on suspected domestic Communists rested on the false conflation of the internal and external threats...

...One June day in 1953 my mother and I decided to use the visitors' passes regularly supplied us through the kindness of Justice Frankfurter to attend a session of the Supreme Court...

...She had been a heroine of the French Resistance, and knew that she and her husband were Communist sympathizers...

...But today a skilled toolmaker, for example, must follow the specifications drawn up for him by engineers...

...the meetings and conferences that are regular features of bureaucratic life are other examples of how socializing with others is inextricably intertwined with the formal task...

...court proceedings as well as the published minutes of the American Civil Liberties Union and the files of several state and local "loyalty" commissions, and read most of the scholarly, autobiographical, and journalistic writings on the subject...

...Besides, Truman had wished to keep the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, whom he disliked and distrusted, out of the picture, but he failed to achieve this aim...

...This judgment has wider application than to the Immigration Service, as Cause's accounts of other public and private agencies fully attest...

...He confines himself to a scant three pages of formal "conclusions," in which he correctly insists that the most significant and determining larger historical facts about the purge are that it occurred just a few years after the Second World War when the Democrats had been in control of the presidency for 15 years...

...Following the 1946 elections in which the Republicans won control of Congress for the first time since 1930, Truman established a loyalty commission, the first piece of bureaucratic machinery charged solely with investigating the political allegiances of federal civil servants...

...If McCarthy's repudiation by the Senate ended it all, his apparently charmed political life intensified the purge during the two years in which the Eisenhower administration blatantly appeased him despite his own unimpressive reelection victory in 1952...

...But as they naturally increase their speed of production, the norms stipulating the time it should take to complete various tasks are continually revised downward by the bureaucrats who run the factories...

...Cambridge: MIT Press...

...Everyone concerned, "managers, behavioral scientists, owners, and workers all know very little about how to organize insitutions in a way that makes them truly participative...

...Caute's biases are of more recent vintage, stemming from the revisionism of the defunct New Left...

...Yet, much of Caute's evidence compels us to wonder just who is supposed to have been afraid of whom...

...He says he wishes to shun "the intractable debate over who 'caused' the Cold War" and observes only that Britain also opposed the Soviet Union while avoiding anything like the American crusade against native Communists...

...an apostle of the modern, to whom Mann, Kafka, and Lawrence were thoroughly resistible...

...Perhaps overstating the point, Haraszti compares his comrades to natives who in the early days of colonialism handed over everything, their treasures, their land, and themselves, for worthless trinkets and who became aware that they had been robbed only when they failed to get the usual junk in return...

...Instead of aspiring to control the workplaces where they daily invest their bodies, minds, and souls, workers narrowly concern themselves with mere squabbles over what can only euphemistically be called "fair wages...

...This is a wonderful selection of letters: one wants it not to end, and cheerfully forgives the misleading title ("literature and politics," but in truth most of the politics are literary...

...It has occurred in France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United States, but not in exactly the same form...

...I eventually managed to say that I thought the Rosenbergs were guilty as charged but that I was horrified and appalled by the dealth penalty...

...In many areas of American life, especially government service, the press, and the craven entertainment and advertising industries, real risks were run in speaking out...

...They stopped when they reached the established quota of trucks for the day-3l—and under no conditions would they even begin to work on the 32nd...

...Involved instead is an incentive that, to Haraszti, is "stronger than all others: the conviction that our labour, our life and our consciousness can be governed by our own goals...

...Instead, "us" is appropriated by the directing elite and used to disguise conflict and to speak on behalf of the entire factory "community...

...Speaking of the old antiStalinist left, he makes ample use of the slippery label "Cold War Liberals," so indiscriminately wielded by those who claimed to look back in anger in the late 1960s...

...We suffer from collective ignorance when it comes to this form of social action...

...and from then on he gravitates toward the Beard-school isolationism that will serve him for the rest of his life...

...Schrank's book is a good starting point for those who wish to think about these issues...

...q TEN THOUSAND WORKING DAYS, by Robert Schrank...

...In whitecollar work, especially at the managerial and professional levels, schmoozing is a part of the task...

...Axel's Castle and To the Finland Station were the serious projects of the '20s and '30s...

...The order creating the loyalty program was issued only nine days after the presentation to Congress of the proposals that came to be known as the Truman Doctrine, regarded then as now as the first decisive American political and military commitment in what was already being called the 104 "Cold War...

...Axel's Castle is dedicated to Christian Gauss, who taught Wilson European literature at Princeton, and whose view of literature as part of the history of ideas gave impetus to the earlier chapters of To the Finland Station as well...

...Wilson had a hand in discovering R. P. Blackmur, Allen Tate, and Malcolm Cowley—an impressive plurality of the next generation's critics...

...Wilson's opinions are worth something in themselves: he records them in the heat of discovery, whenever he can find someone to dispatch them to, beginning in his prep-school days...

...Most factory friendships begin with this illicit activity...

...He was convicted, fined, and given a suspended jail sentence...

...By Caute's own reckoning, the anti-Communist campaign lasted from early 1947 to late 1954 when McCarthy's censure by the Senate was the beginning of the end, although it took about another year for the changed mood to take effect in the boondocks...

...Once manual workers have a chance to experience the difference between their situation and white-collar work, as happened with some who were involved with Mobilization for Youth, they became less willing to return to the shop floor...

...Selected and edited by Elena Wilson...

...His downright insistence on the fact of himself and his independence is what engages us most, and makes him endearing...

...She demanded to know what I thought about the case and, without waiting for an answer, passionately declared it to be a monstrous injustice, "America's Dreyfus case," and, worse, "fascism come to life again— how could Americans do this...

...To his list of those who don't know he could have added "socialists" for whom the problems of participation and control are or ought to be central...

...At first glance this is another history of "making it" in America: Robert Schrank, son of immigrant parents, leaves school during the Depression at age 14 to take an unskilled laborer's job in a furniture factory, and then works his way through life as a plumber's helper, does a stint as a farmhand, an auto mechanic, union organizer, skilled machinist, union official, middle-level manager in private industry, a staffer with Mobilization for Youth during the War on Poverty, an assistant commissioner in the Lindsay administration, and, finally, a philanthropoid with the Ford Foundation...

...But as Haraszti avers, it is at the workplace that servitude begins and there that liberation must extend, if humankind is to be truly free...

...Gauss" well into Wilson's thirties...

...American Celebration," on the other hand, was a jibe used first by C. Wright Mills in the 1950s aimed, not at most Americans who never needed much excuse to celebrate America, but at ex-radical intellectuals who had become more conservative in response to the Cold War...

...He seems not to have passed through a phase of callow enthusiasms, and in a passage like the following on Boswell—very unfashionable, by the way, for an educated young gentleman of 1915—we already hear the mature author of The Triple Thinkers and The Wound and the Bow...

...Thus I had many opportunities to hear the chief architects of American postwar policy toward Russia discuss informally what they thought they were doing...

...Neither money nor utility accounts for the risks and pains they take...

...Caute is not writing a history of the Cold War, but it is quite a feat to discuss the origins of McCarthyism without so much as mentioning the impact of these events...

...New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux...

...Haraszti reports that Hungarian factory life is characterized by "coercion, dependence and obedience...

...But how policy was conceived by those who made it and how it was publicly presented are two different things...

...Schrank once worked with a machinist who kept a generating plant's steam engines in repair...

...There are probably not very many unexamined sources left to provide a fuller account of the antiCommunist campaign than Caute's, and doubts about some highly placed individuals such as Harry Dexter White may never be resolved...

...Yet their consciousness strays little beyond this merely negative awareness...

...in sociology...

...By writing with such impassioned and clearsighted honesty about the betrayal of Hungarian workers, Haraszti allows socialists to see more clearly certain pitfalls to be avoided in the long march to a new world...

...I remember in the early'S0s standing at the still point of a churning Washington cocktail party and hearing "McCarthy, McCarthy, McCarthy" resound off the walls...

...The years 1948 and 1949 alone witnessed the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, the Berlin blockade, the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Soviet bloc, the frame-up trials of national Communists in Eastern Europe, and the persecutions of Jews in Russia itself...

...but he was without a trace of the "we"-complacency that became so fixed a part of Trilling's appeal...

...These stratagems prove futile...

...McCarthy, in short, was the personal incarnation of the purge for fully five of its eight years, a fact that is obscured by Caute's organization of his book into separate sections dealing with the various areas of American society affected rather than in chronological sequence...

...His involvement in left politics turns out to have been less intense than we assumed...

...by] the style—tactical and rhetorical— of Truman's immersion in the Cold War...

...Many of us looked wistfully at the British example and repeatedly invoked it at the time, but Britain, after all, was abandoning rather than assuming a leading role in world politics...

...As one who followed the whole shabby undertaking fairly closely, I am in fact surprised at how many of the activities and individual cases reported by Caute were widely and critically discussed in the press at the time: the young Coast Guard cadet denied an officer's commission for having maintained the family association with his accused mother, the pregnant war bride detained on Ellis Island for three years, the Trotskyist legless war veteran fired from his clerical job with the Veterans' Administration—I well remember their names and the details of their various plights...

...He writes in The Great Fear as a historian primarily concerned to document in detail the ways in which suspected Communists were victimized in a wide range of sectors of American society...

...Only a few isolated sectarians on the far right today revere the memory of Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose name has become the identifying tag for the period and a synonym for extreme and mendacious attacks on political opponents...

...The first of these books seems to have occured to Wilson by chance, as a good way of lifting his frequent spells of depression: it would give him something to do with the old articles on modern writers, it would keep him working, perhaps there would be some money...

...Allen Weinstein's research on the Hiss case was not fully available to him at the time of writing...

...Along the way he acquires a college education and a Ph.D...

...at last Wilson says, "This correspondence is getting to be like those two Russians of divergent (not disparate or dissident) philosophical and political views who wrote each other long letters from opposite corners of a room in Moscow...

...At dinner, I told my parents what had happened and how much it depressed me...

...Rather oddly, Wilson is sometimes grouped with Lionel Trilling, as a literary critic who took a more than provincial interest in politics and culture...

...In the summer of 1939 Cowley has still failed to mend his ways—now he is taking the Stalinist line against a Spanish revolutionary, Jose Robles—and early in 1940 Wilson catches up with him: You seem to have given hostages to the Stalinists in some terrible incomprehensible way...

...Here Schrank is particularly valuable, for his own experience as a worker and organizer does not allow him to forget what is also frequently overlooked by academic researchers...

...Caute does not overlook the mean-minded persecution of aliens by the Immigration Service (chiefly in the form of deportation, denaturalization, or the threat of them), of drafted soldiers by the Army, and of passport holders or applicants and prospective foreign visitors by the State Department Passport Office controlled by McCarthyites...

...His Scotch honesty compelled him to tell the truth, even when his part was a ludicrous or mean one...

...When Szociologia, a major Hungarian social science review, eventually agreed to print extracts, the police were alerted and Haraszti was arrested...

...Working for piece rates means ostensibly that workers are paid according to the quantity of their output...

...Quite possibly, the slogan was first suggested to Luce by a member of the active Communist cell at Time and Fortune: the Communists went in heavily for patriotic rhetoric during the Popular Front years, "Communism is 20th-Century Americanism" being only their most notorious slogan...

...Other correspondents, who encountered Wilson when he was already a famous critic, found him as generous as ever but proud beyond the point of equality...

...The other day my local newspaper published a cartoon depicting the ghostly likeness of Senator McCarthy emerging from a cupboard carrying a pot of paint bearing the name of Proposition 6, the antihomosexual referendum in the state of California...

...Maintaining the norms" is a battle...

...Yet, people in politics, government, the press and— perhaps especially—people in trade union leadership positions had grave responsibilities for others, and this often dictated their cautious attitude rather than hypocrisy or unprincipled selfinterest...

...London: Penguin Books...

...q A WORKER IN A WORKERS' STATE: PIECE-RATES IN HUNGARY, by Miklos Haraszti...

...For example, only 163 of over 300 persons arrested for deportation were actually deported and only 13 persons were denaturalized—but, of course, even those who won their court battles suffered burdensome material and psychic costs...

...When used to extract maximum output in exchange for minimum pay, technology enters the class war and becomes yet another victim of 108 needless waste...

...There is some truth in this, but no one who lived through those years can quite see McCarthy in that light: it's too much like (allowing for the difference in scale) the claim that Hitler played a "healthy historical role" because his actions finally discredited Prussian militarism...

...I told her and, her face contorted, she shouted "I hope those lousy bastards fry...

...Rate fixers are pitted against machinists in an especially cruel way, since they determine the norms that dictate the speed of work...

...These experiments are designed to increase the workers' participation in decision-making on the shop floor...

...I'm just recovering from a slight bilious attack brought on in this way...

...What transforms technology into a dire enemy are the aims to which it is put...

...Unfortunately, David Caute never distinguishes clearly between the foreign-policy decisions, how they were publicly presented and what relation they bore to the treatment of domestic Communists, which, despite his disclaimer about the origins of the Cold War, gives the impression that he condemns all of these together as malign and avoidable causes of the anti-Communist purge that is his primary subject...

...It was very far from his mind that the book would serve to define its subject for decades to come, or that Auden and Cyril Connolly would regard him as the Paul of modernism...

...q 114...

...This book is Miklos Haraszti's account of his experiences in 1972 as a machinist in the Red Star tractor factory in Budapest, Hungary...

...No doubt, some rightists hated these things with an irrational passion, but, apart from special concerns over Soviet espionage, there cannot have been very many people who were truly frightened by Communists in the United States...

...The men who advised Truman were constantly mindful of the appeasement and unpreparedness in the years before the Second World War and also had firm memories of the American rejection of the League of Nations and retreat into isolationism after the First World War, the period in which most of them had begun their own careers...

...standing on an assembly line or tending a machine is mind-numbing and souldestroying...

...Caute is hard on those who voiced their outrage only when antiCommunists or obvious apolitical innocents were attacked, sometimes with justice as when no more than cushy Hollywood jobs were at stake...

...85 pence...

...He never could forgive any kind of success: when The Cocktail Party was a box-office smash, he even threw over Eliot—so I suppose that after that there was nothing for it but Christ...

...In the rotunda I met a French woman with whom I had gone to school in Europe before the war...

...Caute himself has interviewed a number of people both famous (such as Alger Hiss) and obscure, consulted records of Reprinted with permission from the London Times Literar_r Supplement, November 17, 1978...

...He has explored several unpublished collections of documents, including correspondence and records of interviews with victims of the purge...

...By this curious method he formed a good many friendships that survived every nervous outburst and exasperation...

...Work organized and imposed from above creates human automatons...

...One doubts whether the politicians, leaders of patriotic associations, and columnists and editors who rallied behind Senator McCarthy really feared a Communist revolution...

...and his reasons always fitted him like a skin...

...Self-destructive cynicism gives way to the inspiration of meaningful labor and pride in good craftsmanship...

...This required skill now consists largely of the ability to work to the exceedingly fine tolerances modern machinery demands...

...Kennan, as is well-known, thought even before 1951 that the policy of containment he had done so much to shape had been overextended and interpreted in too military a fashion...

...When Allen Tate converts to Catholicism, however, there is much hilarity on Wilson's side, and, we may safely conjecture, an elegant but unposted challenge to duel on Tate's...

...Workers almost always use "them" as a shorthand expression for management, but never use the "us" that signifies the countervailing power to their exploitation...

...But Wilson had done furious detective work on The Waste Land and Ulysses and, like his research on the Dead Sea Scrolls much later, it paid off...

...My father, tired from overwork on the Korean peace negotiations and suffering, though we didn't yet know it, from the illness that was to end his life in less than a year, reacted impatiently, dismissing the matter as of minor importance...

...Those experiences were con109 ditioned by a close relationship with his father, an anarcho-syndicalist and admirer of the IWW, and by growing up in an atmosphere of classconsciousness and socialist ideologies...

...He was a conscientious editor, making revisions, asking for clarifications, and when necessary saying no to his favorites...

...What of the judgment...

...Wilson's journals of the '20s were so empty, tiresome, and soul-sickening in their matter-of-fact rapport with decadence, that many of us secretly feared our estimate of him would have to be revised downward: all his vices were on display, wearing a sign that said—"And here you see the inner man...

...Index on Censorship reports that during the past year Haraszti has twice been denied a visa to travel abroad...

...One is the danger involved in slighting problems concerning work and its organization...

...Obviously, their import is that the American public was seized with an irrational fear of domestic Communism...

...More and more we keep the Protestant ethic myth alive by the confusing of schmoozing and work...

...Caute's language has a hit-andrun quality in view of his failure to justify the judgments it implies...

...The union is our paid enemy," remarks one worker...

...A sketch of him, along the lines of his early sketch of Boswell, would have to say: he was not only an intellectual but a Protestant intellectual in America, and this means that he was governed by two things—an uncompromising self-reliance, and a troubled democratic wish to find the same spirit alive in others...

...Moreover, he was indeed a latecomer in 1950 to the Communisthunting charade, relying initially on old and discredited charges and on lists of people investigated several years earlier...

...They are really in quite a bad way...

...given to fits of spleen and flights of not always contagious whimsy...

...correspondent for a Paris newspaper and she had come down from New York with a delegation accompanying Emanuel Bloch, the Rosenberg's lawyer...

...He was proud, willful, unyielding in argument, and filled with the hubris of the autodidact, notably in Russian matters...

...He would be caught out, would he not...

...that they once showed through factory controls, the necessity of making a living, and the pressure of wages, as a surrogate for something which by then perhaps will be even more impossible to name than it is today...

...In 1938, this cover note for an essay on Bakunin: 112 What in God's name has happened to you...

...The answers can be read in the career of Wilson's successor at the New Yorker...

...Except for an article on Mencken, he thinks nothing of his early work for the magazine, leaves it more or less apologetically— though not before lecturing Walter Lippmann on how to improve it—and then returns three years later as a regular writer...

...Twenty years earlier the "place in the sun" had scarcely yet been secured...

...In the letters, he is addressed as "Mr...

...Sharp eyes, firmness, an absolute insensitivity to the evidence of the wound they are inflicting on the enemy: those are the qualities rate fixers need...

...Musing reflectively on the limits of power, he gave as an example Senator Vandenberg's famous—or infamous—advice to "scare hell out of the American people" in order to obtain Republican congressional support for the Truman Doctrine...

...Part of the definition of good working conditions is the extent to which workers can escape from the job, i.e., the formal requirements that strictly bind the worker to his task and force him to concentrate solely on production...

...But it is an American success story with some differences...

...Wilson never postured...

...768 pp...

...a revolutionary who never denied himself the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense...

...It is snapped up by the rhythm, and turns round, like a caged squirrel in a treadmill...

...The private views coincide with the public—how many critics could claim this now...

...He was the true creative genius, which always feels more than it knows...

...The skilled worker is not much better off...

...The other trap illuminated by both A Worker and its suppression was memorably warned against by I. F. Stone in response to Hungary's revolution in 1956: No condescending stereotypes about "bourgeois democracy" can hide the great lessons of events—the worker needs the secret ballot, the opposition party, "due process" of law and the free press as much under socialism as under capitalism...

...I myself served in 1951-52 as a research assistant to George Kennan at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a stint that was cut short when Truman appointed Kennan ambassador to the Soviet Union...

...Yet, throughout the book and especially in the two opening chapters, Caute strains for an assessment possessing greater political "relevance" today by seeking to locate the roots of the evils of McCarthyism, Vietnam, and Watergate in the decisions and conflicts of the late 1940s that set the American course in the postwar world...

...Caute tries to arrive at rough statistical summaries of how many people were charged under various anti-Communist statutes or executive orders and of how many actually suffered the loss of jobs and various civil rights as a result...

...Some of the posthumous reviewers, one cannot help noticing, have adopted a measured tone in writing of Wilson's achievement, as if there might be a way of scolding him tactfully...

...This futile effort turns taxing but nonetheless potentially enjoyable work into a physically debilitating activity empty of all mental or spiritual pleasure...

...Finding its roots in party politics rather than in the hidden designs of corporate elites, he crisply notes at the outset the immense difference in scale between the American violations of civil liberties and the Nazi and Fascist (also Soviet) tyrannies to which it has often been likened in the more hyperbolic rhetoric of the left...

...Many other humiliations daily attend the lives of Hungarian workers...

...Not the way we had wanted to present it, said Acheson even before the anti-Communist purge had started, but we felt we had no choice...

...The authorities prosecuted him for writing a book likely to stimulate "hatred of the State...

...The three-martini business lunch is the prototypical example of "productive" schmoozing...

...the workers are not fooled...

...Here too his lack of a sure sense of the time is apparent: "the American Century" was a phrase much favored by Henry Luce early in the Second World War, but even the Luce publications dropped it after the war, presumably because they recognized its offensive jingoistic overtones now that old-style isolationism was dead...

...he replies, not badly stung, and a warm exchange follows...

...But, of course, workers do not expect a job to be enjoyable, interesting, or intrinsically satisfying...

...For example, in a Volvo truck assembly plant that has abandoned the usual assembly line for "autonomous work teams," Schrank found that workers stopped working an hour before the formal quitting time...

...who has not sold his soul to the blurb solicitor?—and they do not vary with the individual correspondent...

...Writing to a mutual friend, Wilson hopes that conviction will soften Allen, who has lately been excessively venemous about his literary contemporaries...

...To Malcolm Cowley, in the years 1937-41, and to John Dos Passos, throughout the'30s and again in the '60s, when the coiner of "all right we are two nations" was picked up by the National Review, Wilson wrote the only really political letters of this volume...

...Describing this clash, Haraszti observes that rate fixers' stop watches tick away with real zeal: their promotions depend on it...

...He concludes, not quite amused with either himself or his new project: "I'm going to do dramatic reviews and literary stuff...

...David Caute is too young to have personally experienced the period...

...THE HUNGARIAN GOVERNMENT SO successfully intimidated social criticism that Haraszti could find no publisher willing to handle his manuscript...

...He was personally aristocratic and not at all the sort of person who would be likely to suppress his disapproval...

...175 pp...

...Yet, Schrank writes, in most instances these experiments were initiated by management without the participation of the workers or their union...

...AJ e are not likely to have a critic on the scale of Edmund Wilson ever again...

...What we have, then, is a report on the world of work from someone whose direct knowledge of that world is filtered through both a leftist political consciousness and a familiarity with the scholarly research on work...

...He means his indictment to embrace the authors of the policy of resistance to Soviet expansionism under the Truman administration and those who opposed the Communists in liberal-labor organizations and journals before anti-Communism became a national cause exploited by demagogues and political racketeers...

...There is a clear inconsistency in holding that the purge was a fearsome and near-successful fascist assault on American liberties while at the same time righteously denouncing people who were less than heroic in opposing it, including liberal intellectuals who merely declined to give it exclusive attention among their political concerns...

...the worker's skill is not related to a craft situation that enables him to transcend the alienating influences of modern technology...

...There were those, to be sure, who exaggerated the power of McCarthy and his allies for ideological reasons, and a few people still do so retrospectively to justify their silence at the time...

...Truman wished to defuse agitation over the former, which he regarded as nasty partisan politicking, in order to gain Republican support for his policies to cope with the latter...

...I don't suppose you're a member of the C.P...

...In contrast to his documentation, however, Caute's evaluations and interpretations are often perfunctory and slipshod...

...But the "seeds of McCarthyism" would have dried up without the "manuring" they received from Stalin...

...Haraszti rightly insists that neither technology nor efficiency in themselves dictate the subjugation of workers to alienating labor or externally imposed discipline...

...He was an unrepentant "I...

...Alfred Kazin has logged 20 years on the reviewing circuit before Wilson feels ready to tell him "You are able to express yourself much better...

...Settled in our seats, we could hear a few 106 rows in front of us a famous Washington personality, the daughter of a former president, proclaim loudly that she hoped the court would get the damn thing over with, put Justice Douglas in his place, and send the Rosenbergs to their proper destination...

...Bereft of organized protection, the Red Star's workers are reduced to an atomized mass...

...Few historical judgments appear so unassailable as the almost universal condemnation of the harassment inflicted on Americans accused of Communist sympathies barely a quarter of a century ago...

...It is not that workers want to avoid work or escape the requirements of the job completely, although Schrank notes that in an advanced welfare state like Sweden for people who have "dumb jobs, the option of welfare and not working becomes quite attractive...

...These friendships deepened in proportion as they had the time to course within their banks...

...Most of them obviously saw in the Cold War a God-sent opportunity to associate the New Deal, the liberal wing of the Democratic party, racial equality, internationalism, labor unions, and a host of other things they opposed with the national enemy...

...Truman's anti-Communist rhetoric was extravagant, but it was intended to arouse a population that had just a few years earlier responded to similar rhetoric in supporting the greatest foreign war in American history against a dictatorial regime whose conduct at home and abroad did not differ so strikingly from that of the Soviet state...

...One difference between blue-collar and whitecollar work is that in the former schmoozing, by definition, is "nonproductive...

...Insignificantly larger ones gave higher priority to the "threat" of internal Communism over more familiar concerns such as economic problems or world peace when asked specifically about public issues...

...In retrospect, these would seem to him the glamour-years, but his letters make them appear drab and rather aimless...

...It vividly portrays the degradation of work in what is supposedly a socialist workers' state...

...No one looking at Wilson's life can suppose that the wish was wholly fulfilled, or that he ever gave up on it...

...Caute argues that "McCarthy's objective historical role was a healthy one" because his excesses exposed the fraudulence of the issue and compelled respectable politicians who had tolerated him to abandon the absurd logic of the purge in at last restraining him...

...In the end," he bitterly complains, "the only way out is to become a machine...

...The Marx who wanted us to hunt, fish, and even read is now much better known than the carbuncular churl who looked like Holmes's Moriarty, and since Wilson was the first teacher of Marx for so many of us, and played so large a role in humanizing the bogey of our childhood, we ought to take note of a single reservation that escaped him before he delivered his manuscript, in a letter to Max Eastman of February 1939: Did you ever notice it makes you sick to read Marx in too prolonged doses...

...He taught modernism, American literature, and "the writing and acting of history" to three generations of readers, and if his example as a journalist is not followed today, that is only because it seems too remote to aim for, either in the short run or the long...

...Despair abruptly descends when he again turns his attention to those forces that chase "homers" and all they represent to the fringes of working life: The day will come [he avers] when homers are no longer forbidden but are commercialized and administered...

...However, in his memoirs, Present at the Creation, the closest Acheson comes to questioning the administration's foreign-policy decisions is to observe that "it may be true" that "we overreacted to Stalin, which in turn caused him to overreact to policies of the United States...

...243 pp...

...He is in fact more tired of the old system than eager for a new one: on his trip to Russia in 1935, he falls in love with Pushkin...

...When I muttered a demurral, she screamed "People like you are just what we don't need in this country...

...The essential corruption was to protect and conceal flimsy, hearsay rumors, the tittle-tattle of paid or otherwise interested informers, by which the Immigration Service was manured, and to do so under the bogus mask of national security...

...but there is no specifically political interest in the trip, either before or after...

...I never heard them speak of any necessity to expand and secure "free enterprise" or "capitalism" on a worldwide basis, nor even of American overseas trade needs...

...Then, no one will suspect that homers were originally more than a "do-it-yourself' hobby...

...Even conservative Republicans, when their probity is questioned, are apt to accuse their critics of resorting to "McCarthyite smears" or succumbing to "left-wing McCarthyism"—Nixon's defenders at the time of Watergate are a case in point...

...A lot of the nasty ones are still letters one would not have minded receiving, as Fitzgerald did not mind the searching review of his apprentice fiction...

...IN THE WAR, words as well as vulnerable paychecks become weapons...

...Otherwise he has merely changed bosses...

...Because they are left to their own initiative and discipline, workers bring to their production of "homers" hidden potentials for creativity, skill, and efficiency...

...This is sometimes a tendency of revolutionaries in underdeveloped countries preoccupied with "catching up" with Western capitalism, and of other radicals who view socialism merely as a more equitable way of distributing goods...

...And one imagines Wilson would have been happy to do just that...

...In 1951 Waldo Frank is sent a mostly appreciative note on his latest book, which contains a devastating attack on his style...

...Nor can they turn to their unions for effective aid...

...They [sic] would be the first to send for the police if there were a strike...

...and he was in a position to do all this, because he was a better writer than any of the contributors...

...He finds all of the editors "curiously unattractive people," though each of them has confided in him separately, "taken me aside and told me that the rest of the staff were timid old maids...

...I shall surrender to the temptation by relating the events of a single afternoon that sum up for me the pain and moral ambiguity of the period...

...On the other hand, he is aware that it takes a major effort to get workers and union officials to break through the bounds of conventional thinking...

...His reports of organizing during the '30s and early'40s remind us that, cliche though it may be, unions were instrumental in restoring a sense of dignity to workers...

...Caute finds "indisputable" a statement by Robert Heilbroner that "It is, I think, the fear of losing our place in the sun, of finding ourselves at bay, that motivated a great deal of anti-Communism on which so much of our foreign policy seems to be founded...

...The full court was expected to meet that day to decide on the order delaying the execution of the Rosenbergs issued by Justice Douglas a few days before...

...Others—more numerous in my impression—engaged in such exaggeration (and some still do) in order to make their highly vocal opposition appear more courageous than it was...

...Like others who have worked in factories or observed factory work, he finds that there is no "joy in work" there...

...I was told some time ago that you were circulating a letter asking endorsements of the last batch of Moscow trials— though you had just published articles in which, so far as I could tell, you were trying to express a certain amount of skepticism...

...As I reached the foot of the steps, a large car pulled up to the curb and a handsome, welldressed woman of middle age got out and asked me what was happening...

...Between the remnants of the New Left, on the one hand, and the neoconservatives longing for a capitalism that never existed, on the other, it is easy to forget how much more bearable jobs have become because of the unions...

...Of course I don't think him an "utter ass," he was one of the greatest artists of his time...

...Now, what do you know about Robles...

...A few thousand people lost their jobs, a few hundred were imprisoned, but nobody except the Rosenbergs lost their lives...

...when he used the first-person plural, he only meant himself and the reader...

...Boswell was not only an artist: he was a Scotch artist, which means that he was governed by two things: a fascination in the glamour and charm of life, and a rigid conscience in telling the strict truth about it...

...12.50...

...By law Hungarians must carry workbooks listing previous places of employment, wages earned, and reasons for leaving...

...As we waited in the courtroom, a wealthy liberal family friend introduced me to a lawyer who, he proudly told me, had once been associated with the Tom Mooney defense team and who believed that the Rosenberg case represented a comparable travesty of justice...

...Heilbroner, however, wrote this in 1967 with reference to the war in Vietnam...

...IN THIS STRUGGLE for a degree of autonomy in face of management's power, an important role is played by the sense of community that develops in work groups...

...Evoking its stupefying effects Haraszti writes: "When a thought materializes, against all odds, it cannot break loose...

...I am going on The New Republic Monday," he writes to Stanley Dell...

...These men never spoke complacently of "the American Century" or indulged in such a thing as an "American Celebration," two other terms Caute reiterates with derisive intent throughout his book...

...One grows old, one indulges in anecdotes...

...For that matter, McCarthy himself was beginning to be perceived as the transparent faker he was a few months after his national debut as a redhunter, until the North Korean invasion of South Korea involved the United States in its first unpopular and undeclared war in Asia and altered the domestic political landscape...

...The men responsible for the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and NATO may very well have wryly and ironically acknowledged that what they were doing was creating a "pax Americana"—a favorite term of Caute's—in the bipolar postwar world...

...We have here the private opinions of a critic to whom forming opinions came as easily as breathing, and had about the same biological importance...

...That learning, that unbridled curiosity, that integrity: in any other writer it would be sheer ostentation, would it not...

...To recoup losses, laborers constantly speed up work, which in turn causes further downward revisions...

...Everyone is on his own in a four-cornered fight against machines, time, bosses, and worst of all, one's fellow workers...

...Then, as the essays on socialism start to appear, the balance of respect shifts a little, and Gauss is content to go to school with Wilson...

...The chair is really too good for the rats...

...His letters therefore come as a relief as well as a delight...

...Haraszti's sometimes lyrical tribute to "homers" is, however, but a momentary respite from the gloom that overhangs A Worker...

...Onetime isolationists were able to adapt the Truman administration's antiCommunist foreign policy to their own domestic "politics of revenge" against the New Deal and the Second World War, as well as to make use of and imitate on state and local levels the government's loyalty program...

...Fear of the purgers, on the other hand, can scarcely be dismissed as a hysterical reaction...

...I remember a visit with my parents to Acheson's farm in Maryland on a hot summer night in either 1947 or 1948, a time when Acheson was out of the government, he thought for good...

...The quotas workers fulfill are usually below management's maximum goals, and, consequently, factories are scenes of a kind of primitive class struggle...

...If the factory 110 is not quite the chamber of horrors it used to be and if there is some job security, it is a consequence of unionization and not the workings of the invisible hand...

...He adopts a wait-and-see attitude toward the Moscow Trials...

...He shows much of the special talent of the novelist in writing biography...

...Schmooze time must be carved out of the work situation, it is one result of a never-ending struggle on the factory floor...

...q LETTERS ON LITERATURE AND POLITICS 1912-1972, by Edmund Wilson...

...sometimes he falls into the cliches of the 1960s, which occasionally involve him in anachronisms when it comes to understanding much earlier events...

...We hear, perhaps fortunately, little more about this almost infinitely protean bourgeoisie, but such psychological terms as "mass anxiety," "hysteria," "security mania," and "collective paranoia" have dominated discussions of the anti-Communist purge since its very beginnings...

...early in 1937, he drags himself out of his study of Marx for long enough to join the Trotsky Defense Committee...

...schmooze time is time away from the task to be done...

...I knew Robles, who spent a summer up here in Provincetown, and I can't imagine anybody less likely to have worked for the Fascists...

...I never heard any of these men expatiate on the "menace of international Communism," although they talked a good deal about Russian power...

...Caute contends that the "seeds of McCarthyism were sown...

...These biases also predispose him to extend his indictment of the past beyond the deeds of Senator McCarthy and those who remained silent about them out of cowardice or expediency...

...It is difficult to think in terms other than those of conventional hierarchical organization, and "the majority of work reorganization experiments are failing because they are not truly participatory...

...a good job is one with satisfactory material returns in the shape of wages, hours, working conditions, and fringe benefits...

...It is a story concerned almost exclusively with work, "with what goes on" in the kinds of jobs Schrank has had...

...At the end of the day, it leaves him "desperate, in a cold sweat, with a trembling stomach...

...Just at the time when it seems to me that the normal thing would be frankly to discard your illusions, you have been carrying on in a way that matches The New Masses at its worst...

...Far from concentrating on the publicized cases of top government officials and the already wellaired events in the universities and the entertainment industry, Caute also surveys the activities of state and local inquisitorial bodies, municipal police "red squads," and private vigilante groups that hounded people of modest resources—New York City schoolteachers, workers in defense plants, and city parks employees—while using even less defensible definitions of "disloyalty" and of the occupations to which it was conceivably relevant than the notorious congressional committees and federal agencies...

...Sometimes he seems anxious merely to signal to certain readers that he has the correct sentiments by suddenly using a Marxist term or two...

...For all of them he seems to have felt a special affection that strikingly bears out the psychological theory of transference: worried about intellectual hygiene in general, he became particularly attached to the steadiest and most promising objects of his labor, and began to think of their physical well-being too...

...Escaping from the job means evading those constraints and seeking the satisfactions that come from socializing with others...

...For the overwhelming majority of workers the issues are reasonable production goals and the pace of work, with the latter a frequent cause of wildcat strikes...

...I 111 wonder how far he realized what a marvelous portrait he was painting of himself...

...The immediate cause of distress lay in the factory's replication of a capitalist organization of labor, or, more precisely, payment by "piece rates...

...The language Caute uses to describe their designs and motives induces a shock of nonrecognition, as does that of the revisionist historians from whom he borrows much of it...

...Like his comrades, Haraszti furiously attempts to keep apace with the incessantly rising level of production...

...102 ONE CAN, to begin with, take exception to both Caute's title and his subtitle...

...Still, the period yields some of Wilson's best negative correspondence—an occurrence as common with him as negative reviews—of which the finest are two letters fiercely remonstrating with Cowley for his fellow-traveling hackwork...

...Caute even neglects to mention that the Truman Doctrine arose precisely out of the British inability to continue aid to Greece and Turkey, which had been assumed as an obligation at Yalta...

...Finally, a clerk announced that the court would not meet that day...

...He also refers to opinion polls (reported in Samuel Stouffer's 1955 book, Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties), showing that only tiny minorities throughout the period spontaneously mentioned Communist subversion as something they "worried about...

...IN HIS most moving chapter, Haraszti describes the liberating possibilities uncovered when workers defy regulations to make, simply for their own pleasure, gadgets and ornaments known as "homers...

...Another key role is played by unions...

...While deploring the symbolic uses made of the cases of Hiss and the Rosenbergs, and of the death penalty inflicted on the latter, he reserves judgment about their guilt or innocence, although the tenor of his remarks suggests that he would be rather more surprised if definitive evidence turned up proving their innocence than the reverse...

...His opening sentence reads: The great fear, like the threat of upheaval and expropriation that inspires it, has been a recurrent phenomenon in the history of the bourgeoisie since the French Revolution...

...Last summer you were vilifying [Jose] Robles, about whom you obviously didn't know a thing except what the Stalinists had been pouring into your ear...

...The afternoon dragged on, the justices did not appear, and my mother went home...

...His aim was to divert Republican attacks on alleged Communists in government by the House UnAmerican Affairs Committee, attacks inspired by the Canadian Royal Commission, which had first revealed major Soviet espionage rings in the United States and Britain as well as in Canada and also by the ambiguous but inconsequential Amerasia case...