ALLARD LOWENSTEIN (1929-1980)
Howe, Irving
When I was teaching for a few years at Stanford in the early '60s, that excellent university was as politically dormant as American universities were then supposed to be. Perhaps the first...
...The meeting was held, successfully, and Lowenstein "brought his crowd...
...Once I asked him about joining our editorial board and he answered, "Sure, if it'll help any...
...What he meant was that he didn't excel as a political writer or theorist, but as a political activist and tactician...
...IN THE LATE '60s Al and I were talking together at a forum at Harvard...
...At the end of the meeting, Al came over and said, "You really shouldn't have been so rough on Marty...
...and for that, a certain independence was best...
...IRVING HOWE 259...
...That he should now, at the age of 51, have been shot down in an utterly insane act...
...But when he saw that I was about to burst out again, either into rage or tears, he quickly added in his utterly charming and lovable way, "Not that he didn't deserve everything you gave him...
...The meeting's sponsors, nice inexperienced California boys and girls, were worried—with good reason—whether anyone would show up until one of them said, "Lowenstein will bring his crowd...
...The bulk of the students, their emotions shaken by New Left rhetoric, were hostile to us, not exactly because they believed in violence or knew how or where to apply it if they did, but because they felt irked that anyone should speak clearly against it...
...We organized a protest meeting...
...Afterward, over the years, whenever there was a good cause, Lowenstein brought his crowd...
...And we want to join those Americans who find it hard to imagine a politics, a new effort, a community of the left without Al Lowenstein...
...In later years we didn't see much of one another, though I lived a few blocks from his brother's restaurant, which I made into a sort of headquarters for myself...
...So we'd meet occasionally, exchange notes and gossip, and always there was something exhilarating about his breezy American style, his hurtling into the place with a gang of young people, his sudden exits, his warmth, his steadiness...
...Perhaps the first political meeting held on campus in some years was organized after the Birmingham outrages (the killings of several black children by bombers...
...that he should not have lived on, to fulfill himself as public citizen and private man—I find this completely intolerable...
...I replied very sharply, and Marty took it well enough (he had been trained at Brandeis...
...A whole generation of young people swore by him...
...ALLARD LOWENSTEIN lived out what was best in American liberalism...
...Al and I held fast to the principles of nonviolence (I sometimes felt at these occasions that we were the last two believers in democracy...
...that we should lose him at a time when he is so badly needed...
...At one point an old friend and former student of mine, Martin Peretz, got up to attack me from (of course) "the left...
...Far more often a loser than a winner in his electoral campaigns, he still left his mark...
...Without rhetoric or pomposity, Al embodied that sense of social commitment which is the very opposite of the spirit of the '70s...
...It is a loss we share with many others, those with whom we agree and those with whom we do not...
...opposing us were some New Left people, and the topic of the evening was the tactics advisable for the antiwar movement...
...Some sort of assistant dean in, I think, the law school who had gathered about him a group of left-liberal students...
...That was my first encounter with Al, and we soon became friends...
...He was a wonderfully friendly man...
...He somehow managed to combine loyalty to comrades in a movement with a freewheeling style that enabled him to start things on his own...
...Who was this Lowenstein...
...This was more than I could take, it seemed as if everyone was losing his mind...
...He didn't call himself a socialist, but his hero was Norman Thomas and he agreed with most of what we have been saying in Dissent...
Vol. 27 • July 1980 • No. 3
