The Thirties: Fact and Fantasy

...Man's course," he gravely tells us, "is dictated by chance and heart far more often than Marx's laws of historic necessity would seem to allow No law of history has been...

...Putting aside for a moment the beguiling vision of American society in the thirties as "a sea of innocence," vne is impelled to ask: is it possible for the radicals to have been freed of the sense of sin yet to form an island of guilt...

...The radicals of the thirties, he writes, represented "an island of guilt surrounded by a sea of innocence...

...Of silliness and shame there was, to be sure, a great deal...

...On one side, Kempton is all for "reality," a term which in his book means social adaptation...

...There can, of course, be no objection to an author concentrating on individual figures rather than the social context or political ideologies...

...IV Part of his time Kempton writes as if he were an ex-radical abusing his past, part of his time he is a rather troubled man who looks back upon the thirties with a feeling that something precious has been lost...

...And particularly if it is assumed, as Kempton all too easily does, that the radicals represented "a little group of the sick...

...Partly, this betrays the influence of the New York Post school of journalism: you gotta knock 'em dead every minute...

...The other Kempton expresses admiration in his book for "the radical in America whose tradition was defeat and whose end was community...

...This is very eloquent, but one is not quite sure what it means...

...Before long Kempton gets around to this notion too...

...Surely Sidney Hook, whose early writings influenced many of us as proving the possibility for an intelligent American Marxism, was as important as John Howard Lawson...

...Dying dreams [begins one chapter] sometimes last longest in hearts they have broken...

...Human experience becomes the occasion, sometimes the pretext for a "literary" performance...

...And in most, of course, there was a mixture of good and bad...

...Now another recent approach to Stalinism describes it as a quasireligious movement, with its own rites of guilt, salvation, resurrection etc...

...terroristic mob-leader...

...That is all, Kempton has nothing stronger to say...

...In his chapter on Chambers and Hiss, for example, he makes the interesting point that Hiss must be understood against the background of Southern gentility...

...As a writer Kempton manages to be both frenetic and florid at the same time...

...He has the right to focus on what interests him most, even if that happens to be the melodramatic figures known to readers of tabloids—but the price he pays is that his book completely fails to give a balanced portrait of the period...

...Some were idealists who gave their lives to an unworthy cause, others careerists who made a good thing out of idealism...

...The curious thing about Kempton's "personalist" approach is that it does not even permit him to see the radicals of the thirties as individual persons...

...Kempton knows this as well as—in fact, better than—I do, for he observed it all as a reporter: he knows, though he no longer troubles to say, that the distinguished Vice-President of the CIO, Joe Curran, behaved like a dictatorial and * In those chapters devoted to non-Stalinists (the Reuthers, the railway portersunion) Kempton writes in a more relaxed and considered way...

...Toward his former allies, writes Kempton, Curran was "implacable...

...a sense of sin...

...Surely when the Trotskyists and some Socialists wrote that the theory of social fascism would lead to a victory for Hitler, they were doing more than indulging in fantasy...

...The sectarianism, the meanness, the ignorance, the ineptness of American radicalism in the thirties is worth troubling about only if the radical impulse itself contained something that was authentic...

...This is a valid point, particularly with regard to Marxist writers who sometimes talk as if "social forces" were living things rather than categories of analysis...

...There were such people—otherwise Stalinism could never have been so effective and so dangerous...

...In this sensationalist liberal journalism, stress is laid upon the phrase rather than the thought, upon "color" rather than coherence...

...surely Norman Thomas was then a more significant figure (Kempton makes him out as a sort of YPSL hostage among the adults) than Part of Our Time suggests...

...My point is, however, that a man who habitually writes this way can't present a serious and •PART OF OUR TIME, by Murray Kempton...

...Perhaps, but this has no necessary relation to sin, and only someone who holds religious belief has a legitimate right to connect it with sin...

...For if one removes the conditioning influences of the social context, and if one ignores the political ideas which agitated the lives of these people, what can be left but biographical detail and psychological guessing...

...I Murray Kempton's book* of portraits from the radical thirties has been reviewed with praise by such writers as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr and Daniel Bell...

...No doubt...

...There are times when defeat is honorable and times when nothing but defeat is honorable, but surely to elevate it into the principle of radical existence is rather dubious...

...Those who "adjusted" and left behind them the "fantasies" of radicalism win his admiration...

...Now there is a certain truth in this, and Kempton is quite right in remarking that "the idea of a revolutionary dictatorship remains...

...Or does Kempton suppose that a sense of humility, such as Stalinism destroyed in many of its followers, can survive in human beings only when it is coupled with a sense of sin...

...able to dispose of the pilgrim heart of man...

...Part of Our Time seems to me a bad book, though not in the usual mediocre way...

...In his most favorable portrait, that of Gardner Jackson, former secretary of the Sacco and Vanzetti Committee and later a New Deal official, Kempton, while characteristically never telling us what Jackson's political ideas are, does report that during the era when Lee Pressman was a brain-truster for the CIO, Jackson was brushed aside...

...Otherwise, it was mere pathology and cheap comedy...

...For all that he is sentimentally tied to the thirties, Kempton does not stop to consider such questions: they might bring him into contact with such terrible things as social conditions and political ideas...

...Does he mean that Stalinism lent some of its followers a sense of power through an identification with the "forces of history...

...Instead, he is determined to concentrate on people...

...It is not hard to guess why...

...Every writer, no doubt, has a certain weakness for the pretty phrase, but in Kempton indulgence has become a system...

...And it may even be that when the Socialists wrote that Roosevelt couldn't cure the depression short of war production, there was more reality than fantasy in their "iron logic...

...an alien idea in America...

...Substituting the click of remembrance for the process of communication, this method makes for an aura of false depth and knowingness...

...But, again, to notice such things would have required qualification and analysis...

...Suppose, for example, he had troubled to describe one of the Jewish garment workers in New York who lived and fought for the CP, mistakenly, sometimes viciously, but hardly in order to escape a sense of sin...

...This side of Kempton comes through most shockingly in his chapter on Joe Curran, in which he describes how for years Curran worked with the Stalinists in the NMU and then cast them aside...

...As at other points in this book, one can only wonder whether Kempton has bothered to think out what he is saying...

...In any case, when Kempton tries to suggest the distinctive quality of Stalinist experience during the thirties he can only fall back on a psychotheological notion: "For the Communists offer one precious, fatal boon: they take away the sense of sin...

...After an eleven year wait, however, Jackson was added to the CIO staff by Phil Murray—which causes Kempton to conclude, "It seemed a sign and a symbol, as though the old breed of radical must wait outside the door for years on end, but, if he waited long enough, it would open for him...

...But if that is true, then they were mere monsters, and no portraiture employing the tints of humanity is possible...

...In his approach to the thirties Kempton largely ignores, on principle, its social setting and political ideas...

...The seeming invincibility of Hitler, the tragic defeat of the Austrian Socialists, the shock of the Moscow trials—these were the events that helped shape our lives, and it would be the sheerest philistinism to say that they had nothing to do with American experience, that they were important to us because we cared only about Europe...

...Isn't this too convenient a dualism: social adaptation for the substance of life and for occasional soft moments a sprinkle of radicalism on the condition it remain pure, impotent and defeated...

...Still, it may be said, DISSENT isn't a literary magazine and what matters is the substance of Kempton's book...

...everything gives way to an unrestrained alliteration and fabricated tenseness...

...But as it happens Curran, in defeating the Stalinists, used methods that made the CP look like the League for the Rights of Man...

...Kempton's temperate dismissal of the committed minority (not evil, you understand, just sick) is the philistine conviction that our major problems have all been solved...

...III In Kempton's book Stalinism as an institution that came into definitive being in the thirties, as an ideology and as a new social phenomenon hardly appears at all...

...he turned a face of stone to men with whom he had worked for so many years...

...Some were loyal to their friends, others betrayed them...

...At first I thought my objections were mainly stylistic, but after a while it became clear to me that the problems of style were actually problems of politics and ideas...

...One is again troubled by the problem of meaning...

...What, one wonders, has happened to Kempton's memory...

...An effective column can sometimes be worked up from these mannerisms, but they almost always handicap a writer when he tries to present an ordered sequence of idea or fact...

...Probably not, since there is no explicit religious sentiment elsewhere in the book...

...To become a CIO functionary—which often means to surrender whatever political independence one has—is it for this that "the old breed of radical" is to "stand alone," waiting outside the door...

...So strongly is this a motif of the book that even Leslie Fiedler, who can hardly be accused of harboring sentimental nostalgia for the radical thirties, has felt compelled, in an interesting review in Commentary, to write that "Behind Mr...

...He was the radical who dared to stand alone, to whom no man called out in vain, to whom the lie was dishonorable...

...But it is precisely Kempton's failure to capture the sense of desperation and dislocation so characteristic of American life in the thirties, as well as his contempt for what he calls the political "fantasies" of the radicals, that prevents him from making more than two-dimensional cartoons of the Stalinists...

...Remington—as his subjects, people who were never directly involved in any of the radical movements, or if so, only for brief moments...

...When the anti-Stalinist left kept pointing, in its cumbersome resolutions, to the increasing social stratification of the very Russia many liberals were hailing as a new paradise, it was more than fantasy...

...Nor is it merely a question of the depression...

...But to understand even these it is necessary to grant that in some important ways the radicalism of the thirties was "real," that it mattered...

...rather than to communicate ideas and insights...

...But there can be another way of treating the past, a kind of "antireifying," which is equally disastrous, and that is to present people as if they were isolated moral atoms without relation to the society and ideas of their time...

...For "man is a private and not a social animal...

...Surely, however, this political movement must have something else to it, must be more complex, must contain social and political dimensions that account for its terrible potency...

...Kempton's picture might also have been a little more balanced, even if less sensational, had he given a fuller reckoning to the role of the anti-Stalinist left...

...indeed, that was the peculiar strength of Stalinism, its skill in appealing to a corrupted sense of idealism...

...For apart from a pinch or two of iconoclasm, most of it rhetorical, Kempton presents a picture of the thirties that satisfies the needs and expectations of latter-day liberalism...

...It is not true, of course, and in neither sense of "naked intimacy" were the Communists very different from other people...

...No less damaging is Kempton's passion for "literary" effects...

...But even if we put aside the rise of Stalinism as an international phenomenon and think of the thirties as a time when a certain number of Americans were deluded by an irrelevant "fantasy" of radicalism, it is necessary to see things a little more historically than Kempton does...

...Simon & Schuster...

...All too often, that is what Kempton does...

...Kempton's unwillingness to consider the thirties soberly, with even a tentative seriousness, betrays him into choosing mainly marginal types—Hiss, Bentley, Pressman, Mrs...

...Alas, even the virtues Kempton associates with "the old breed of radicalism" aren't very reassuring...

...He writes, instead, that the Young Socialists framed "resolutions that moved with iron logic through a world of fantasies...

...Since Kempton surely knows that "sin" is a category of theology, is he trying to say that the power of the Communists rested upon their denial of God, along with which went a denial of sin...

...But it also happens that many of the radical resolutions were anything but fantasy...

...As they appear in his book—the addlepated Elizabeth Bentley, the maniacal Whittaker Chambers, the wretched Anne Moos Remington, the vain and deluded Paul Robeson—all seem mere illustrations of abnormal psychology, and Stalinism becomes the sum of their sickness...

...ordered opinion: the function of such a style is to gain admiration for itself (look, spangles...

...That may be why so much of whatever pain and passion is left to the myth of the thirties is carried by its lost lovers, its apostates, and its armed disenchanted...

...His book would have been helped tremendously if he had written a chapter on some ordinary person who joined the CP and without so much as hiding one pumpkin, did its work faithfully and selflessly...

...And especially so when one remembers the Kempton who is all for "reality" and contemptuous of "fantasy...

...Unless these elements of our experience are brought into full and vivid play, a book such as Part of Our Time serves little function but to amuse the liberals of the fifties with tales about the shame and silliness of the thirties...

...hate, after all, can be the strongest of memories...

...Some were men of character, others scoundrels and cowards...

...334 pp...

...At one point he speaks of "the relationship customary among Communists, who are seldom either blessed or cursed with naked intimacy...

...Is this the glory of "defeat" in behalf of which Kempton had grown so lyrical...

...It has become fashionable to say that ideologies, if taken as the substance of history, tend to reify our sense of the past—tend, that is, to make us think as if it were the ideologies that had been alive rather than the people who held them...

...Those of us who grew up in the thirties were profoundly affected, as we should have been, by the events in Europe...

...His book is filled with tags from the more fashionable poets and novelists, used in the way a radical journalist of the thirties might have used Marxist slogans...

...For if it was merely a compound of sickness, corruption and fantasy, what possible significance can there be to its betrayals and defeats...

...One cannot deny that on a surface level this approach has a certain plausibility, for if we must use these facile analogies, it can be said that the Stalinists who humiliate themselves by public confession are experiencing...

...yet what was crucial in his adult experience had far less to do with the shabby gentility of Baltimore than with the shifts and turns of Stalinist strategy, about which Kempton has almost nothing to say...

...Does he really mean this, and is it therefore necessary to remind him of so obvious a fact as that "man" is both a private and a social animal, or is it all merely decoration, the intellectual passementerie of the fifties...