REVIEWS
Clark, Joseph & Hausknecht, Murray & Gay, Peter & Epstein, Cynthia Fuchs
WHICH SIDE WERE You ON? THE AMERICAN COMMUNIST PARTY DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR, by Maurice Isserman. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. 305 pp. $19.95. A tall, craggy, white-bearded...
...One always knew where Pachter stood, and these pages are not marked by doubt...
...But I believe that change (dramatic change) would not have come about without the concerted action of women in the late '60s and '70s, without raised consciousness, and without the use of the new legal machinery made available to them...
...ISSERMAN'S HISTORY presents a lively account of Communists participating in sometimes exhilarating struggles ("Make Madrid the tomb of fascism...
...this change is imposed by "natural law" as Marx put it in his preface to Capital...
...a remarkable piece on Walther Rathenau rescuing him from the novelist Robert Musil's caricature...
...and they knew how important a local political club could be if its members were fired with something more than the pap of traditional politics, by highlighting the issues and slogans that Roosevelt had made popular...
...That is, the United States and the Soviet Union "do not have military-industrial complexes...
...THE POSTWAR YEARS are covered only in the book's last 20 pages...
...On the other hand, Kessler-Harris points out, employers felt free to experiment with changes in the sexual division of labor when it proved to be beneficial...
...To explain our situation in terms of "disease" and "sickness" has the advantage of cultural familiarity...
...Lifton and Falk cite two studies that question the Administration's premise that the Soviets possess superiority in conventional weapons...
...Even American attitudes toward the Soviet dissidents he sees as an attempt to subvert the regime...
...Nor is this reductionist perspective limited to the White House...
...Silone reasserted his adherence to socialist ideals after he broke with the party and he expressed "a need for effective brotherhood, an affirmation of the superiority of the human person over all the economic and social mechanisms which oppress him...
...Pachter: I have to undergo surgery which will deprive me of my remaining eye and I am using this last occasion to write a few letters I have meant to write for some time and which I cannot leave unwritten...
...With it came a discovery that there is no greater joy than that of the sovereign mind...
...and Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky, "MAD Versus NUTS," Foreign Affairs, Winter 1981-1982...
...For black women the change was most dramatic...
...True, along with Browder, Foster had accepted the popular-front idea of supporting FDR...
...His book explains why people remained in the party when the fight was against fascism...
...But more than this: there is also the strong suspicion that those formally endowed with power also have little or no control over events...
...New York: Pantheon Books...
...The key terms are "autonomous self-generating thrust" and its synonym, "inertial thrust...
...periodically it sweeps into the forefront of consciousness as a constant reminder of the fragility of our world...
...Draper portrays the various psychological devices and rationalizations that party leaders used when they couldn't "press a button in one's mind and believe today what one had rejected for months past...
...The alchemy of character is always something of a mystery, but it is plausible to assume that Pachter's pleasant childhood, spent in a relatively secure culture, provided the psychological and intellectual foundations for his untiring, adventurous inquisitiveness and his hard-won political independence...
...THIS VISION IS PART of what Robert Jay Lifton and Richard Falk label "nuclearism . a psychological, political, and military dependence on nuclear weapons, the embrace of the weapons as a solution to a wide variety of human dilemmas, most ironically that of 'security.' " Nuclearism is a "fundamental deformation of attitude toward the weapons as well as their immediate danger...
...Pachter recognized that the world before 1914 was far from perfect or wholly serene...
...A rather small development in 1955 created a new situation for me and there were no more buttons anywhere to press...
...Problems of recruitment and turnover resulted, and the strikes began...
...some for money and some for honor, some work at play, and others for survival...
...One of the more dispiriting aspects of modern life is the belief that political and economic forces are beyond the control of individuals and groups whose lives they affect...
...q "Nuclear War, Nuclear Peace," The New Republic, January 10 and 17, 1983...
...Indeed the political sickness of our time may center on this desperado official effort to be misled and mislead on this crucial point, an effort that may go on in Moscow as well as Washington, for all we know...
...He quit when he saw no future for the CP...
...She makes clear that no one, however, objects to women doing work...
...There are, as there must be, moments in which these essays moved me to disagreement...
...To be sure, it does not protect him from the ire of the more orthodox...
...Nay, it was downright enjoyable to support democracy (even when called "bourgeois" democracy), to advocate collective security, to support your own country's national interests, to oppose the betrayal at Munich, and to praise such fighters against the fascist Axis as Roosevelt and Churchill...
...Thus, the move into Afghanistan is not symptomatic of an expansionist policy fueled by revolutionary fervor but rather a reflex of defensive nervousness...
...Shortly after the imposition of martial law in Poland he wrote, "Had Solidarity been willing to pause . . . to rest for a while on its laurels" and allow Moscow time to see that its existence "did not mean the immediate collapse of the heavens," martial law might have been averted...
...Lifton and Falk are easy to grasp in an age of psychological paradigms and psychiatric metaphors...
...The present generation of leaders, he says, are not predisposed to "adventurist policies...
...They have become so habituated to this mode that they know no other way to govern...
...But Foster said the CP should be open about it, withdraw its own candidates, and campaign for Roosevelt...
...And so the women organized, under most difficult conditions...
...268 for substituting cheaper female labor for male labor and for redefining the sex-typing of a job...
...Everywhere, social order is imposed through two kinds of social structures: a kinship system and a division of labor, and the two tend to be intertwined...
...They focus on "the American situation" with relatively little attention to the Soviets...
...Here I think he would have done better to delve into the answers that Theodore Draper provides...
...The ranks of these witnesses are growing thinner every year, as they leave the stage one by one, and the record they are continuing to compile for those who remain is thus all the more valuable...
...2 These opinions, whether in the vulgar or sophisticated mode, do not go uncontested...
...Silone added another insight: "The more socialist theories claim to be 'scientific,' the more transitory they are...
...But I'll be damned if I know why I stayed in the party...
...The job in the factory offered them a salary that enabled them to save for their trousseau, help pay off a family mortgage, or send a brother through trade school or even college...
...While the rhetoric sounds like Jonathan Schell at his worst, on the level of action Lifton and Falk stress the need for an antinuclear movement "tactically focused on obtainable goals" such as freezing the arms race and a ban on nuclear testing...
...and NATO are taken to be— not unreasonably in Kennan's estimation—threats to the security of the Soviet Union...
...The norms of division of labor allocate work according to age, race, ethnicity, sex, and family status, and in most societies some notice is taken of individual talents...
...They learned how to canvass potential voters, and they learned how to get out the vote...
...New York: Basic Books...
...Like the later stages of imperialism, which "at a certain point assumed an autonomous self-generating thrust in its own right," exterminism cannot be understood simply in terms of rational self-interest...
...358 pp...
...In the case of exterminism the base is "the weapons-system, and the entire economic, scientific, political, and ideological support system to that weapons-systemthe social system that researches it, 'chooses it,' produces it, polices it, justifies it, and maintains it in being...
...These two factors operated when Lenin and Trotsky "corrected" the sectarianism of the newly born Communist party of the U.S.A...
...Yet many serious, intelligent, committed men and women did join the party in the 1930s and 1940s, remained in it for years...
...They see influential people inside and outside government "who would like to see American policy directed, not to an accommodation of Soviet power as it is, but to the changing of the very nature of the Soviet regime...
...But the articles, reviews, and essays that these self-portraits frame are quite as interesting, and no less intimate...
...There is at least one mistake of fact, a minor one: Hajo Holborn, that distinguished refugee from Nazi Germany and historian of his country, taught not at Harvard but at Yale...
...Factory owners assured parents that the mill would prove a suitable environment and supervision for their daughters, exacting discipline, and preparing them to become better wives and mothers...
...But he had no regrets for the years he spent in the party...
...E. P. Thompson, the noted historian and leader of the European Nuclear Disarmament movement (END), prefers the term "exterminism...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...For all its short and in the end unhappy life, the Weimar Republic has commanded, and continues to command, an astonishing amount of public attention...
...and sometimes sordid efforts ("The Yanks Are Not Coming...
...267 P.M...
...Robert Scheer quotes Colin Gray, "now a top arms-control adviser to the Reagan government...
...Perhaps the most important contribution Browder made is the development of a coalition concept for radical participation in the politics of the country...
...But he was showing the Western powers what havoc he could wreak in their own backyard...
...in 1919 and subsequently...
...victory or defeat in nuclear war is possible, and such a war may have to be waged to that point...
...Some time ago he burst out: "I know why I joined the Communist party...
...I do not think that many Europeans who were born after the war have similar reminiscences: that sense of security never returned...
...198 pp...
...In this context, the informal testimony of a survivor like Henry Pachter is particularly pertinent...
...This school of thought, like more profound ones, falls prey to its vulgarizing epigones...
...That task is keeping the specter at bay, and these reports show us, no matter how determinedly we may try to put it out of mind, how necessary and immediate a task it is...
...Ideology and a general bureaucratic thrust help more...
...If one views this book as less than a complete history—rather, as an account of the interplay between ideology, job opportunity, and economic conditions as it has affected women from colonial times to World War II—this book is an important contribution to labor history and the history of women in the American work force...
...Mike Davis, an editor of New Left Review, which sponsored the commentaries on Thompson that appear in Exterminism and Cold War, writes that to understand our present dangers we must "reinstate the revolutionary Marxist conception of the modern epoch as an age of violent, protracted transition from capitalism to socialism...
...It was too much for me then, but now I feel ashamed, especially on this day of shame for Germany...
...Such an intelligently waged war depends on "targeting flexibility and selectivity," technically 263 known as "nuclear utilization target selection" (NUTS).' Of course, even in an intelligently managed nuclear exchange there would be casualties, but the former head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Eugene V. Rostow, finds "ghoulish" estimates of "ten million casualties on one side and one hundred million on another" not unacceptable...
...The crisis we face today does not involve two morally equal forces, but the contention of human freedom Spurgeon M. Keeney, Jr...
...Not a month goes by without a monograph on the Nazi voter in the 1920s, another picture album of Berlin in the same decade, or yet another portentous article pointing to the glittering decay of the German Republic as a cautionary tale...
...She traces women's progress from doing the unpaid work in the home into the paid labor force, and she demonstrates how ideological forces have consistently undermined their role as workers, even when society was in sore need of their labor power...
...They learned political action that went far beyond the soap-boxing of traditional radical movements...
...Quite the contrary, Isserman's documented record of the party's gyrations shows that American Communists made persistent and amazingly speedy accommodation to the peremptory demands of the Soviet dictatorship...
...Even Trotsky, early in his opposition to the epigones, had admitted that no one could be right against the party...
...Kessler-Harris points out that this sharpened the class distinctions among women— those who could afford not to work matched their life style to ideology, and those who did work could not do so and felt bad about it...
...Lenin and Trotsky told their American comrades that this was stuff and nonsense...
...Among other harassments, some women faced charges of immorality for doing "men's work...
...He insisted on his own candidacy for the Communist ticket...
...Communists under Browder seemed to have found a vision that included the here and now while looking toward a utopia in the future...
...400 pp...
...The passage does not merit serious exegesis: Pachter, had he recalled it, would have had some trenchant things to say about a distinguished historian of ideas who used the vulgar and aggressive cliches of the anti-Semitic movement in his apology for the German catastrophe, pilloried the indiscretion of Jews in prosperity, their "negative and disintegrating influence," and their unfortunate "Jewish character...
...the ruling groups come to need perpetual war crises, to legitimate their rule, their privileges and their priorities...
...They think of nuclear destruction in conventional terms and not as a phenomenon that is qualitatively different from the conflicts of the past...
...Stalin knew what people wanted...
...Apparently a student of Machiavelli, Browder knew nothing would delight the far right more than Communist endorsement of FDR...
...From the time of the Korean War the U.S...
...In the early years of the 19th century, with the rise of the industrial revolution, women were called upon to enter the wage-earning labor force, and appeals were made to their sense of responsibility to both family and community...
...13.95...
...Prevailing subcultural opinion, both military and nonmilitary, concludes that nuclear exchanges cannot be limited to a specific theater...
...On the other hand, Communists played a relatively important part in the organizing drives of the CIO...
...And there has always been the fear—this problem is one of the book's constant themes—that if women were to receive unrestricted wages, the balance of power would be upset in the family, and ultimately in the whole society...
...Furthermore, the war opened opportunities for better jobs...
...Therefore, as Kessler-Harris reports, government, employers, and even labor unions have tried to make sure that this would not happen...
...Perhaps he left out one device that worked for me for a long time—before it failed...
...Russian nuclear arms have always been a reaction to the Western deployment of atomic weapons, and Kennan finds it intolerable that there are Americans who believe that Russians wish "to wreak destruction for the sake of destruction...
...Roy and Zhores Medvedev, in the essay they contributed to Exterminism and Cold War, strongly reject Thompson's "functional equivalence between the 'deep structures of the Cold War' within both sides...
...301 pp...
...It was inevitable that women eventually would enter the labor force because of economic necessity, and wartime figures may be interpreted as reflecting the tendency of women to seek wage work when there is a need to earn money and social pressures to stay at home are removed...
...Communists who were later to dissent and break with the party—such men as James P Cannon and Jay Lovestone—had accepted the notion of the Soviet party's world leadership for many years...
...387 pp...
...New York: Pantheon Books...
...a persuasive consideration of Heidegger's thought concluding (justly enough, I believe) that Heidegger's support of the Nazis in 1933 was not a casual flirtation or a momentary aberration but implicit in his thought...
...I cannot be a slave, I will not be a slave, For I'm so fond of liberty That I cannot be a slave...
...the dead were innocent...
...The vistas were so bleak, the country was so poor, the peasants who clustered at the train doors selling decrepit-looking foodstuffs were so little related to the image of "socialist man," and the conversations with Soviet army officers were so unenlightening, my disillusionment commenced forthwith...
...It is true that in the United States there are profits to be made from the arms race, but the profit motive alone does not "bring us to exterminism, although it helps...
...For the prevailing ideology has proclaimed—at odds with that of free access to the marketplace—that women's first priority is the home...
...Of course, Browder was preceded in this strategy by Sidney Hillman and David Dubinsky, who surely had a lot more to contribute to coalition politics than the CP...
...Kessler-Harris also documents the changing shape of the American family, effected by birth control and a developing sentiment that women ought to have more rights in the work force...
...they are as sensitive to the appalling consequences of nuclear war as anyone else...
...Though married women were not counted as part of the labor force, tens of thousands, nevertheless, had worked at home as shoe binders or seamstresses...
...One might argue, however, that the ideology mandating woman's place in the home pervaded women's consciousness at all class levels and that even today it undercuts their commitment to labor-force mobility...
...Parties in dozens of countries around the world accepted the seniority and "collective wisdom" of the party that had carried out the first successful 259 revolution (or, more correctly, seizure of power...
...He knew, belatedly, about the evils of Stalin...
...Can one really write and read, taste and understand, in our day and age, a sentence like 'Oh, how sharp was the bitter taste of spring on my tongue?' It was corny even when it was first written, and I am angry at myself to discover that I was not aware then how corny it was...
...Introduction by Walter Laqueur...
...207 pp...
...Small wonder that many young people found it attractive to go along with a radical movement that opposed fascism, upheld the New Deal, helped organize workers into unions, helped win the war against the Axis—and all this in a "conspiracy" with Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt...
...153-59...
...Even George Kennan, who comes from an entirely different intellectual and political tradition, sees the present situation as the result of "the inner momentum, the independent momentum, of the weapons race itself...
...When the Soviets finally apprehended the menace of German fascism to them, it was pleasant for American Communists to join the fight against fascism...
...Thus the Factory Girls Association in 1836, some 1,500 strong, marched through the streets of Dover, New Hampshire, singing: Oh, isn't it a pity that such a pretty girl as I Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die...
...And how does it affect his motivation "to confront the exterminist structure . . . of his own nation...
...Indeed, Kessler-Harris explains that women had higher expectations in the 19th century than in the early 20th...
...organizing investigative trips to the Harlan County, Kentucky, coal-mining areas when the deputy sheriffs were stomping on the Bill of Rights...
...But it was all the fault of Beria," Khrushchev explained...
...It's instructive to compare the attitudes of archsectarian CP leader William Z. Foster with Browder's during the Landon-Roosevelt contest of 1936...
...He played cat and mouse with them and finally made a sudden choice...
...You will receive a warm welcome...
...He was, almost from the beginning, a political man— almost, one might say, a political boy: at the age of thirteen he began working for the liberal Democratic party, which alone of all parties lost votes with every election during the Weimar period...
...Pachter knew so many and knew so much, but beyond that, his judgment, always pungently expressed, rarely faltered...
...Lifton and Falk overlook the possibility, as folk wisdom has it, that even paranoids can have enemies...
...But something crucially important did happen to this movement in its infancy...
...Definition is malleable, Kessler-Harris points out...
...Part of our lives—for Weimar is part of our lives whether we were ever in Germany or not—is rapidly receding into the past...
...Lash himself had joined the Lincoln Brigade, organized by the CP to fight fascism in Spain...
...World War II provided legitimacy for women working for the first time in many a decade...
...They learned not only from Browder, but from Jim Farley, for whom the whole country was a sum of its election districts...
...Although some union leaders, such as Samuel Gompers, advocated the organizing of women workers, most unions excluded women by a variety of measures—both formally, by refusing to grant them membership, and informally, by holding the meetings in saloons (the preserve of men) or scheduling them at late hours, or by ridiculing women who dared to speak up...
...so they learned how to combine efforts on these special issues with the overall campaign...
...When the world is viewed through Russian eyes, says Kennan, it is easy to understand their apprehensiveness...
...their use of the judicial process to argue important constitutional cases up to the Supreme Court...
...A mass movement like END must aim at averting the coming collision between the superpowers...
...These boarding houses exacted stringent standards of behavior from their residents...
...In 1833 Philadelphia seamstresses banded together and struck, to be followed by women shoe binders, umbrella sewers, and bookbinders...
...Thank you for your kind cooperation...
...But, as Rose Coser points out,' geographic mobility and a degree of economic independence permit individuals to establish new relationships in new networks —a freedom objected to by the defenders of the status quo...
...But that, after all, is the ultimate end and not the task facing us here and now...
...He is right when he says that "Browder became an innovator" and tried to move in the direction of leading an American movement and—for the period when it was "allowed"—defending democracy not only as a means but as an end...
...They mastered the nuts and bolts of political action but they also learned that what the workers won or tried to win in the shops they could lose without proper legislation...
...At work here is isomorphism, the identity or similarity of form and function among structures...
...But that balance was upset in the 1830s when mill owners, hard-pressed to repay debts for machinery and to reduce prices in order to compete with newer mills, began to pressure workers to speed up production and accept lower real wages...
...This didn't mean success for "communism" any more than the Socialist party under Eugene Victor Debs brought America close to socialism...
...there is a ring of intuitive truth to it...
...About 20 percent of those who had worked at domestic jobs moved into areas where they had been snubbed before...
...Meinecke, Pachter insists, was no anti-Semite, and he regrets that the charge has been made...
...their primary focus is the internal problems of the society and holding on to their own power...
...264 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL OVERTONES of "nuclearism" de fine it as distinctively American...
...They reveal, for example, that the FBI and Army intelligence concocted "a gigantic conspiracy participated in by not only subject [Joseph Lash] and Trude Pratt [soon thereafter to be Trude Lash] but also by E.R...
...he is thinking afresh and, as his rumination on Hesse clearly shows, willing to learn from his mistakes...
...women's professional work in lobbying and in the study and evaluation of women's position...
...Illustrated...
...Missing is the story of women's spectacular entry into the male-dominated professions of law and medicine and into the business world...
...These verdicts are terse, confident, and, I think, generally right on target...
...Nothing else so important ever happened to it again...
...Please understand that I was quite unprepared to see a Jew and a Communist...
...THIS BOOK IS RICH in data and examples of the interplay between the workings of our economy and the power structure that defines women's work...
...It is, after all, "not the whole of the population...
...He was fired for being a Communist and there wasn't a peep, let alone protest, from a union in which the pioneer organizers had been the New York Communists...
...I can explain it only because "the law of motion of capitalist society" was still valid for me...
...He applies the most poignant bit of nostalgia ever voiced to his own life: "It has been said that those who did not experience French society before the Great Revolution never knew how beautiful life could be, while those who were born after the first world war never knew how secure life could be...
...Draper's interpretation, Isserman writes, makes it hard to understand why anyone with intelligence and integrity would have remained in such a movement for more than a few days or weeks 2 The Roots of American Communism (New York: Viking, 1957) and American Communism and Soviet Russia (Viking, 1960), both by Theodore Draper...
...Reagan's own view of the Soviet Union and communism is a throwback to the most frigid days of the Cold War—Russia is a morally evil, "godless" society...
...No one could be out after 10 ' Rose Laub Coser, "Stay Home, Little Sheba: On Placement, Displacement, and Social Change," in Women and Work, Rachel Kahn-Hut, Arlene Kaplan Daniels, and Richard Colvard, eds...
...In each society...
...Henry Pachter, who died in 1980 before he could give final shape to his Weimar etudes, had long been one of the most articulate and respected voices in that chorus of intelligent, cultivated (and when all is said surprisingly adaptable) men and women whom Hitler drove from their homeland to make new lives...
...Hermann Hesse, the "poet of our youth," proves on rereading a "poor writer...
...If the Medvedevs see the world in this way, how does it appear to the average Soviet citizen continuously assaulted by only one definition of reality...
...At such times we eagerly seek further knowledge of the apparition, and so pay more attention to events in the subculture...
...Browder was spared that ignominy, but only because he had already been expelled from the CP...
...On the other hand, if those in power are all suffering from a "disease" or "political sickness" then one tends to discount their perceptions as merely symptoms of the illness...
...His union, under Communist leadership, won conditions twice as good as those of the women's and men's garment industries...
...Two reasons for this sort of behavior stand out: (1) Marxist-Leninist ideology that embraces a doctrine of inevitable revolutionary change from capitalism to socialism...
...But she documents the growing popular and official sentiment that the way to make husbands sober and industrious was to keep wives dependent—a message warmed over today by George Gilder (author of Wealth and Poverty, Basic Books, 1981), a favorite of the Reagan White House...
...A HISTORY of Communist movements the world over is a history of adherence to a dream of a bright and future transformation, interrupted by a nightmare that comes with every Kronstadt lurking within every Communist as individual and every Communist movement...
...A conversation with an acquaintance who had been a fur union activist for many years is pertinent...
...The strikes they organized reflected a high level of community among the women...
...Yet it was one thing for young women to work at home, under supervision —and quite another to go out to work in the factories...
...My own recollection of the prewar days is that of a wellprotected childhood in the midst of an expanding empire, a recollection of well-being and of a trustworthy world...
...Oddly, Isserman confines this disagreement mainly to his preface...
...Even the Italian CP leaders in their Eurocommunist phase admitted that Togliatti, when a member of the ECCI (Executive Committee of the Communist International), had concurred in the death penalty for Bela Kun, the old Hungarian Bolshevik who had been a leader of the short-lived Hungarian Communist regime after World War I. Then, after World War II, when Stalin demanded that every Communist party declare openly that it would not support its own country in the event of a war with Russia, Togliatti made his obeisance...
...But these are small cavils...
...Etched in my mind is the first day I spent in the Soviet Union...
...It must have been reflected on my face because a TASS correspondent, who had been a fellow reporter at the United Nations, came over, put a friendly arm around my shoulder and said, "Wait till we're in Moscow...
...a long, discriminating and affectionate essay on Friedrich Meinecke, the celebrated intellectual historian with whom Pachter studied and whose work he is in a good position to appraise...
...258 People of differing backgrounds could win a niche in the American CP's version of the Popular Front, some of it almost a parody of that concept, as when screenwriters would be praised for inserting a single "socially significant line" in a grade B movie, or for writing Charlie Chaplin's final speech in "The Great Dictator...
...But after Molotov had explained that fascism "was a matter of taste," and after Stalin proceeded to provide the Nazis with the sinews of war, and when he surpassed his quota of collaboration with the Nazis by shipping German Communist exiles of Jewish origin back to Hitler—why then did people of "intelligence and integrity" remain in the party...
...As with militarism and imperialism, exterminism is founded on a specific "institutional base" that influences the system as a whole...
...It's the dirt that does it . . . if there are enough shovels to go around, everybody's going to make it.' " Although Jones is an obvious embarrassment, his views are not too far from Edward Luttwak's, which grace the pages of Commentary...
...The fact that besides their negative and disintegrating influence they also achieved a great deal that was positive in the cultural and economic life of Germany was forgotten by the mass of those who now attacked the damage done by the Jewish character...
...He argues for the use of "theater nuclear forces" as part of the strategy for opposing Russian aggression in Europe, and says that no army "could withstand such terror as nuclear weapons would cause—even if at the end of the day it were to be discovered that the dead on all sides were surprisingly few...
...When he imposed outrageously antidemocratic and antinational policies on the world's Communist parties after World War II, he knew that they couldn't get to first base...
...While Thompson obviously appreciates that the "suppression of internal dissent" in Russia and the United States are different phenomena, he tends to see something like McCarthyism as being isomorphic with the persecution of the Russian dissidents...
...It was no accident, as the Communists loved to say, that Stalin titled the Cominform paper "For a Lasting Peace, for a People's Democracy...
...WE'RE LEFT with Isserman's unanswered question...
...Although Leon Wieseltier is a bit unfair in saying that Kennan is a man "unnerved by a nightmare,' Kennan can be a little unnerving himself...
...I was on a train trip from the Polish border to Moscow...
...Kennan believes that the Soviet Union today behaves "in the main as a normal great power, the traditional concerns and ambitions of Russian rulers taking precedence over ideological ones in the minds of the Soviet leaders...
...Bertolt Brecht, that great ironist, had "the habit of using people...
...From then on women's wage labor was not to be so much in demand as it had been in a developing economy, and the growing immigration began to supply the labor pool...
...Only then did a combination of factors—the civil rights activism of the '60s, the women's movement, and the change in the law— make for a great leap forward...
...He had fought against Franco in Spain...
...I hope that you can forgive me, and I pray that you come again to my house...
...While the chances of mounting an effective antinuclear movement here and in Western Europe are quite good, they are practically nil in Eastern Europe and Russia...
...It is a perspective of a prototypical Establishment type who is contemptuous of those who view the world ideologically...
...But at least my mind was on the road to freedom...
...It "designates those characteristics of a society —expressed, in differing degrees, within its economy, its polity, and its ideology—which thrust it in the direction whose outcome must be the extermination of multitudes...
...Why then did they stay in the party...
...So, clearly, American Communists were not always allowed to obey compelling needs within themselves...
...Pachter also, as was almost inevitable, joined the Communists for a while and the youth movement and offers some fascinating reminiscences, candid as always, about that experience...
...Pachter is not posturing for his readers—though the slangy term "corny" suggests a kind of deliberate, muscular Americanism that is absent from most of these pages...
...The same "ideological and bureaucratic forces" are at work in Russia, and there too is an "incremental thrust" toward exterminism that "has acquired an autonomous inertia, embedded in the structure of Soviet society, and can no longer be ascribed to reaction in the face of Western extremism...
...This ideology (described by Barbara Welter as "The Cult of True Womanhood'") justified the limitation of opportunities and created a false picture of women as creatures outside the market economy...
...Kessler-Harris demonstrates how the division of labor by sex has reinforced the restrictions placed on women's work in the United States, limiting their opportunities, curtailing their freedoms, and restricting their incomes, so that they would not compete with men and stayed dependent on male support...
...For under Earl Browder that's just what happened to the CP in the years 1935-45...
...He was as impatient with unregenerate admirers of Stalin as with sentimental apologists for Heidegger...
...He accepts this verdict without question...
...editing the Student Review, magazine of the Communist-led National Student League in the early 1930s...
...Pachter, teacher and writer, was always worth listening to, and this ample gathering of essays and reflections will only serve to confirm his stature...
...Yours very sincerely, Pastor Nathanael ROsler...
...Max Bedacht, one of the party's founders and leaders who was then in Moscow, could see neither logic nor justice in Stalin's decision...
...q Re: Letters • Dissent welcomes letters, but we must ask that they be kept within bounds, about 225 words...
...The requirements of "the leading sector" of a society, its weaponssystem, "stamp its priorities on the society as a whole...
...It is sobering to reflect that in two or three decades the Weimar Republic will be a matter of pure history, kept alive not by living testimony but by printed or archival materials alone...
...The development of new weapons in each system is "self-generating" and the result of a steady, inexorable incremental pressure...
...THE MEDVEDEVS' STRESS on American belligerence and Russia's justified suspicion of American intentions finds something of an echo in George Kennan's view of Soviet-American relations...
...She is a bit fuzzy about the transition between conditions in the late 19th century when women were still encouraged to engage in wage labor, and those in the early 20th century, when a domestic code idealizing women as the purer sex had taken hold, proposing their retreat from the workplace, and calling upon them to provide havens for the men in a heartless world...
...organizer of sharecroppers and the Communist party in Alabama...
...They are also honest, looking back on earlier, sometimes rather different views...
...the Bolshoi and Kirov ballet theaters were splendid...
...INDEFENSIBLE WEAPONS: THE POLITICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CASE AGAINST NUCLEARISM, by Robert Jay Lifton and Richard Falk...
...They learned how to organize voter-registration drives, especially among those people who had been neglected in politics, among the poor and the exploited, those who would be more likely to vote for liberal candidates...
...As an ideology for a mass movement Thompson's has its uses...
...and to distract from the manifest irrationality of the operation...
...Were these the same women who had worked in the mills hoping for freedom...
...Isserman is on target when he recounts the contributions Browder made in getting radicals to participate in something more than protest politics...
...Associating the Communist parties with antifascism and, equally important, with democracy (the Blum government in France), along with patriotic, pronational assertions, moved the Communist movements out of sectarian isolation into whatever successes they attained...
...NONE OF THESE REPORTS from and about the subculture of nuclear destruction, either singly or together, persuades us that we now know enough to drive a stake through the heart of the specter...
...Foster and then Browder as CP presidential candidates received about 0.10 percent of the vote...
...2) A world Communist leadership, located in Moscow and headed by the Comintern, controlled by the Soviet CP from its inception, which is the heart and soul of the world revolutionary movement and without which the "natural law" could not operate as speedily...
...In 1909, for instance, following in the footsteps of the New Hampshire Factory Girls Association, 20,000 women walked out of New York City's garment shops over the objections of male union leaders, and Polish "spool girls" in Chicopee, Massachusetts, won a victory against a rate cut by striking when their union pressed them to settle...
...But the specter has not been thoroughly domesticated...
...It should come as no surprise that Europeans have a different angle of vision...
...Moscow deepened my gloom about the Soviets...
...some at dirty or distasteful tasks, others at interesting and pleasant ones...
...New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp...
...But the CP record, as Isserman unravels it, moves blithely from a program for "a Soviet America" in the early '30s to "Communism Is Twentieth Century Americanism" in the late '30s, then from collective security against fascist aggression to a fight against the "imperialist war...
...In the 19th century, wage-earning women were fighting not for gains but against an erosion of privileges they had enjoyed in earlier years...
...This, of course, was no more true of Browder than of Togliatti...
...Not that doors opened magically...
...It seems to have escaped the notice of many students of communism that Stalin knew in his very bones that it could never succeed in any indigenous fashion in the democratic countries...
...Joseph Lash, the noted biographer, has told me how difficult it is to explain to people of this generation that there was a time when thousands of idealistic young people joined the Communsits in order to challenge economic depression at home and the march of fascism aborad...
...The highest point of socialist support, 6 percent of the presidential vote, was reached by Debs in 1912...
...once nuclear weapons are brought into play there is an inevitable "escalation...
...260 Peter Gay The Past Recaptured WEIMAR ETUDES, by Henry Pachter...
...And, looking back, he recognizes the rather unsavory " `folkish' slant" to it all, and the "homoerotic" attachments that the movement fostered and to which Pachter, as an impressionable young man, seems to have paid fleeting homage...
...But this, of course, was not the road that Solidarity, or at least part of Solidarity, took...
...One of these, T. K. Jones, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces, has provided Scheer with a meaty quote and the title of his book...
...SMALL THOUGH IT WAS, the American CP attained a greater measure of influence than ever before, or since, during the Browder decade...
...How to Think About Nuclear War," Commentary, August 1982...
...Above all they learned about the idea of a great coalition, of bringing together the entire productive part of the nation, to win social legislation through the Democratic party...
...THE NUCLEAR DELUSION, by George F. Kennan...
...In this book, Alice Kessler-Harris provides evidence that women in the United States have been assigned important but unvalued work...
...Kessler-Harris tells us that the depression of 1837-38 was the turning point...
...The difference between the two types of societies has a bearing on another aspect of the problem...
...Even during the Depression they had to apologize for working, but the war defined women's work as a contribution to preserving freedom...
...This created much male hostility toward women workers...
...And she illustrates this as she traces the course of the history of women's work— beginning with their industriousness in colonial days, when most goods used by the family were produced in the home (often with the assistance of men) to the present, when women make up half of the paid work force...
...This was especially true in the crucial sitdown strike at GM's Fischer body plant in Flint in 1937...
...After Mike Quill had broken with his former CP comrades, the witch hunt descended to the only "underground" a certain CP member of the Transport Workers Union had ever known, the subways of New York...
...Draper describes how Stalin rode herd on the American party leaders in 1929 when he ordered the removal of Lovestone from leadership and scotched the idea that America might be "exceptional" among the nations of the world...
...talent can be suppressed or encouraged according to the social will...
...It is a subcultural universe of scientists and engineerS, bureaucrats, and ideologues concerned with the theory and practice of nuclear destruction...
...But never had the party been more active, more thorough, more diligent in getting others to canvass for the Democrats and to get out the vote to defeat Landon "at all cost...
...Khrushchev had flown to Belgrade and admitted that the attacks against Tito had been slanderous, that all the trials of traitors in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria were complete concoctions...
...In the body of his book Isserman, a careful historian, does not contradict the thesis that American communism "has corresponded to the fluctuations of Russian policy...
...That Caligula in politics indeed knew what it would take to succeed...
...I don't believe that the evidence supports this view...
...Both Draper's volumes deal in great detail with intelligent, capable, and utterly sincere revolutionaries who violate conscience and understanding to accept changes in their own party's policies with which they disagree...
...In a long, briskly written and informative autobiographical fragment with which Weimar Etudes opens, Pachter draws an appealing portrait of the world into which he was born in 1907 and which changed forever after the suicidal world war began in 1914...
...they are such complexes...
...Pachter thought so, and he may well be right...
...Distinctions, though, must be made...
...Still, when they work for wages in competition with men, a public sentiment questions their ability or right to equality in the marketplace...
...it's a great place, you'll like it...
...Probably not, although Kessler-Harris does not tell us...
...WHAT IS TO BE DONE...
...against totalitarianism.'" If the world is understood in these terms then it is not far to a felt moral obligation that we take arms against these evils...
...What begins as a valid questioning of a premise is converted to a certainty that it is invalid...
...In his preface Isserman defines what he considers the major flaw of Draper's volumes...
...to exercise social discipline...
...But we need to know 261 more than we do about that period, especially in view of the cultural pessimism that had infected Germany (and not only Germany) from the 1880s on, and that had coined some persuasive, gloomy slogans...
...Much of European political thought is rooted in one variety or other of Marxism, and Thompson's roots also are in that tradition...
...One was to defend democracy, the other to advance the national interest...
...They also learned that there are single issues that often motivate political choice...
...Their language is the speech of middleclass consciousness: "The end of war implies, in effect, the displacement of Machiavellianism by a holistic world picture...
...and, on Sundays, church attendance was required...
...They must be typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...285 pp...
...And Pachter's view of Meinecke, however nuanced, strikes too positive a note for my taste...
...Pachter never saw Pastor Rosier again, but on April 1, 1933, the day the Nazis had organized a "spontaneous" boycott of Jewish stores, he received a letter from Rosier that he here transcribes from memory, and that deserves full quotation: Dear Mr...
...I remember the day when you came to my house and I behaved very badly...
...To this day there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of people participating in political campaigns who learned the ABC of politics during the Browder decade...
...Did 1914 really change the world of Western civilization out of all recognition forever...
...Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top...
...On the difficulty of breaking with the dream of future transformation, Ignazio Silone has written in The God That Failed: The increasing degeneration of the Communist International into a tyranny and a bureaucracy filled me with repulsion and disgiust, but there were some compelling reasons which made me hesitate to break with it: solidarity with comrades who were dead or in prison, the non-existence at that time of any other organized anti-fascist force in Italy, the rapid political, and in some cases also moral, degeneration of many who had already left Communism, and finally the illusion that the International might be made healthy again by the proletariat of the West, in the event of some crisis occurring within the Soviet regime...
...This entails a fundamental concern with "maintaining the integrity of Soviet hegemony" in Central Europe and preserving the perception of the regime as a revolutionary force in the world...
...He addressed the foreign Communists and told them there were two ingredients to success for the Com257 munist parties of the world...
...The significant implication is that the push toward war does not come from a given stratum or group within the society...
...But now...
...In a letter to the Catholic bishops, a group of predominantly Republican congressmen wrote, "No true peace is possible unless human dignity is upheld...
...In his preface Isserman takes sharp issue with Theodore Draper's view, conveyed in Draper's two volumes on the first ten years of the ' Love...
...From the Administration's view the problem is communism's uncontrolled tendency toward expansion, while for Lifton and Falk the problem is precisely the Administration's perceptions and predispositions...
...These letters are part of the record that Pachter's fellow Germans made in the Nazi days, and it is right that he has seen to it that they are not forgotten...
...This might have been expected in Lowell, where women worked and lived together, but it also held true in Patterson and Philadelphia, where they lived with their own families...
...Try telling him all this was wrong...
...Other historians have shown that whatever the failures of radical parties and movements in this country, they made an impact to the extent that they helped win reforms...
...A European mass movement that embraces Thompson's vision becomes, in effect, a movement for unilateral disarmament...
...WITH ENOUGH SHOVELS: REAGAN, BUSH AND NuCLEAR WAR, by Robert Scheer...
...to silence dissent...
...Before answering that question it's important to know why people joined, and Isserman makes a signal contribution to answering that and describing those activities that did correspond to their "compelling needs...
...the gifted often may do creative work...
...But now black women did get help from some unions (the UAW in particular), some civic agencies, and the government in gaining factory jobs...
...But my TASS friend was wrong...
...14.95...
...required to discover its gross inadequacies...
...administrations has been, and continues to be, more provocative and less predictable in the global interrelationship between East and West...
...But I am confident that, were he alive, he would be only too happy to engage me in that ongoing debate about the history of modern Germany to which his posthumous volume is such a lively contribution...
...This is especially regrettable given the "theory" behind this book that improvement in the role of women has come about gradually as a result of their growing participation in the labor force...
...London: Verso...
...He said he was a Togliatti-type of Communist —not subordinate to control by the Soviet Union...
...He visited Pastor ROsler in the late 1920s...
...EXTERMINISM AND COLD WAR, by E. P Thompson et al...
...For immigrant and other poor women in those days, much as for economically needy women today, the necessity for doing wage work clashed with the ideology that the proper place for a woman was in the home...
...the landmark consent decree entered into by AT&T through efforts of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and some visionary women lawyers that set off a chain of important suits in other industries...
...Some wrote speeches to elect Frank Murphy governor of Michigan and still others organized New Theater groups or another Jewish Workers children's school...
...There are short, thoughtful pieces on irrationality in politics...
...But, Kessler-Harris argues, the war did not bring a sharp departure from a developing pattern...
...and, the clearer the vision of successful war termination, the more likely war can be waged intelligently at earlier stages...
...One of the first things we learn is that our terror is not shared by some within that subculture...
...We have long been told how union men feared that women might undercut their effectiveness...
...I know why I quit the party...
...THE INTERPLAY between women's actual participation in the work force and the ideology discrediting it is a constant theme in this book...
...Their creeds and language have diffused into the surrounding culture and have helped weave terror into the texture of everyday life...
...He was unimpressed by their "mock-naive folk dances and the childish folk songs," their "romantic quest for quaint old buildings and smelly back alleys," and their "love for patriotic songs and blood-thirsty ballads about mercenaries in the Thirty Years' War...
...Some work less, others more...
...And now and again, some survivor publishes his memories and reflections for posterity...
...Hesse neither thought clearly nor wrote well...
...15.00...
...Nevertheless, there still were mixed messages in the society about women in the labor force...
...At the same time, equating the two systems helps avoid the difficult intellectual and political problem of making the necessary 265 distinctions between them—a task that can undermine the unity of a movement that has as one of its goals "a nuclear free zone from Portugal to Poland...
...I know how you must feel, and I am afraid that I must assume my share of responsibility for this...
...Isserman estimates the influence of the CP as considerable, but he also points out: "Communist strength in the union movement lay in control of office rather than in mass constituencies...
...Washington correspondent of the Daily Worker...
...I did not have the pleasure of knowing Henry Pachter well, though I valued his work as (I am happy to record) he did mine...
...New York: Random House...
...There were some who wondered about the "odd" speech he made, his last at a party congress, in 1952...
...Nor would there be any danger that the social democrats might jump ship as the Communists did in 1940 when the Nazi-Soviet Pact brought them back to the anti-Roosevelt camp...
...but socialist values are permanent...
...Workdays became longer and living conditions worse, and those who complained were penalized...
...They contributed much to that gradual depreciation and discrediting of the liberal world of ideas that set in after the end of the nineteenth century [as if that world did not have other enemies and some distinguished Jewish friends...
...During this period, the concept of "Motherhood as a career" was developed, an ideology appealing to middle-class women despite the fact that they were denied a broad range of social and economic options...
...In his most recent book,' Lash brings to light documents he got from the government under the Freedom of Information Act that are truly mind-boggling...
...A tall, craggy, white-bearded gentleman who looks like and is the small-town publisher of a weekly newspaper has an intriguing comment about his past...
...In his eagerness to counter the ideological thrust of Reagan's foreign policy, Kennan falls all too easily into the trap of blaming the victims and those who try to support and aid them...
...BEYOND THE COLD WAR, by E. P. Thompson...
...To the extent that these decades are given little attention, this "history of wage-earning women" is limited...
...Even then nothing irritated me or any true believer in Marxism-Leninism more than the suggestion that it was faith, not science, that glued us to the doctrine and the movement...
...It strikes directly at that confrontation, by initiating a counter-thrust, a logic of process leading towards the dissolution of both blocs...
...Yet enticing examples of "union maids," unafraid to hold out even when their male counterparts gave in, are to be found in Kessler-Harris's historical account...
...Reflecting on the antiSemitic movement of the 1880s, Meinecke thought 262 that the Jews of Germany had done their bit to contribute to it: The Jews, who were inclined to enjoy indiscreetly the favorable economic situation now smiling upon them [as if there had been no gentiles who had been quite as indiscreet], had since their full emancipation aroused resentments of various sorts...
...ideology still had me in thrall, if shaken...
...New York: Oxford University Press...
...Communists were getting Puerto Ricans to register for voting, hours after they arrived from their homeland...
...Pachter may be literally right, but he did not consider in his essay an unfortunate paragraph that mars Meinecke's last work, The German Catastrophe, that slim post-1945 volume in which the aged historian attempted to come to terms with what he called "the monstrous experiences" of the Third Reich...
...WEIMAR ETUDES is embedded in autobiography...
...Born of an antebellum family in Mississippi, his past includes Phi Beta Kappa at Columbia University...
...Active recruiting of women was illustrated by a new image, as extolled in the song of Rosie the Riveter: Sitting up there on the fuselage That little frail can do More than a male can do...
...The significance of the limited-war and NUTS enthusiasts is less that they exist than that their perspective has been adopted as official policy...
...It so happened that during the Browder decade Moscow was concerned about fascism (with the horrible exception of the period of Nazi-Soviet collaboration when Browder went along wholeheartedly with Stalin's profascist policies) and did allow, even nurtured, popularfront and democratic-front policies...
...they learned how important the trade unions were in the political scheme, especially in registering and getting out the vote...
...Still I remained loyal till called home shortly after Stalin died...
...That plaintive comment came to mind on reading Maurice Isserman's book...
...it must engage in dedicated and non-provocative work to form alliances between the peace movement in the West and constructive elements in the Communist world (in the Soviet Union and East Europe) which confront the exterminist structures and ideology of their own nations...
...A few sentences later the Administration's assumption becomes "the myth of conventional inferiority...
...But on balance, what people do has more to do with their social background and other ascribed characteristics than with their particular gifts...
...His job was probably the worst in that system—he cleaned subway toilets...
...The inertial thrust of each system puts it on a collision course with the other...
...Murray Hausknecht Shall We Go MAD or NUTS...
...They organized and participated in Political Action Committees long before these became the fashion...
...Well, the ice-skating in Gorky Park was marvelous...
...In the struggles of the auto workers to build the UAW, especially at General Motors and Ford, the Communists were often in leading positions...
...It is certainly true that women's increasing participation in the labor force facilitated improvement in their status...
...Many will still be dubious and wonder what it was that brought people into a movement that was so clearly identified with Stalin's terror regime...
...There are some recent studies of the years before 1914, and of the ravages that the war itself wrought upon the mind of Europe...
...The specter of nuclear war has given rise to a small world of its own...
...Since that belief is a major part of their claim to legitimacy in Russia itself, it is not a "quest for world domination" but a vital part of an essentially defensive posture...
...To forestall such dreadful developments, mill owners resorted to paternalistic regulations that curtailed women's exercise of a new freedom...
...Maurice Isserman's subject is timely and useful to new and old leftists, indeed to anyone who wonders how in the world American Communists managed to become mainstream radicals for a decade or so...
...This inattention to what has been the most dramatic era of change in women's history is a surprise, given the author's acknowledgment of the influence of the women's movement on her thinking...
...At the close of his first volume, The Roots of American Communism, Draper notes that the American Communist movement had a difficult birth and an unhappy childhood...
...Lash adds that many today don't know that the political witch-hunters and policemen who were crusading against communism managed to turn young people toward, not against, communism...
...But the stubborn facts of the real world and the monumental immorality of Communist regimes have a way of evoking disaffection among the most devout...
...In this respect Isserman does well in reminding socialists that their movement originated as a means of realizing democracy in all, including the economic, phases of life...
...They collected dues to support strikes organized by working women with whom they had little personal contact...
...After Browder was expelled, by way of the Moscow-sponsored Duclos article, the Soviets still put out a welcome mat for Browder...
...Inexplicably, only a few sentences are devoted to the women's movement...
...it closes with an illuminating—and, as always, frank —memoir of what it meant to be an exile in our century, ranging beyond Pachter's personal odyssey to the fates of others...
...Paper, £5.50...
...They even gave him some work...
...When a historian in his early thirties, who was an active participant in the radical politics of the 1960s, writes a book with meticulous regard for Ranke's admonition to tell it wie es eigentlich gewesen, it's worth our notice...
...He had fought against Hitler in World War II...
...The conflict between Isserman's preface and the rest of his book arises in part from the fundamental opposition between the human (some would say class) needs of the people who make up Communist movements and the inhuman, reprobate requirements of the Soviet fatherland...
...Nuclearism, then, is the disease...
...and for two years more I remained loyal...
...Eleanor: Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Friends, by Joseph P Lash (New York: Doubleday, 1982...
...To the extent that seeing oneself as a Marxist is important to many potential activists, Thompson's analysis, while clearly unconventional, has its attractions...
...It was transformed from a new expression of American radicalism to the American appendage of a Russian revolutionary power...
...New technology was often the impetus 2 Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1826," American Quarterly, Summer 1966...
...Had Hesse, Pachter asks, after all not been a great favorite some decades earlier...
...Though this was unusual, Stalin often encouraged antithetical policies and competing CP leaders simultaneously in various countries...
...A Jew, unmistakably, a Communist, very opinionated, and as unbourgeois in appearance as he could manage to be—"I wore a provocative shock of unruly hair, shorts, and a Russian-type shirt"—he made himself most unwelcome, and was asked to leave, his girl in tow...
...266 Cynthia Fuchs Epstein Women Who Work OUT TO WORK: A HISTORY OF WAGE-EARNING WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES, by Alice KesslerHarris...
...Elements of female solidarity were everywhere...
...There was a trade-off between the decent wages and respectability and the paternalism offered...
...Nothing much was happening to institutionalize women's gains in the labor force, as Kessler-Harris herself points out, in the first two decades of the postwar era, preceding the late 1960s and 1970s...
...In his declining years Earl Browder nurtured the illusion that his role in the leadership of the CP was separate and apart from allegiance to Russia and Stalin...
...and the role of affirmative action programs and class action suits...
...it is only to be expected that as lively and argumentative a look back as Weimar Etudes would produce them...
...They argue instead that "the role of successive U.S...
...Roosevelt], Wallace, Morgenthau, etc...
...Indeed, these staunch guardians now recognized that the well-paid and respectable work offered in those years by the mills led women to anticipate a measure of mobility and economic independence—and that such independence threatened to undermine women's subordinate position in the society...
...Early American CP leaders, including John Reed, favored Russian-type policies, eschewing the established trade union movements or even a broad labor party...
...Concern was expressed that "too many mothers of families are working in war plants," and when the Senate Subcommittee on Education and Labor held hearings on juvenile delinquency in the winter of 1943 the blame was put on working mothers...
...Communist movements in Europe, and certainly in this country, were getting nowhere before the epoch of the Popular Front...
...But Thompson's blurring of the distinctions between "capitalism" and "communism" has its advantages, for it can also attract non-Marxists critical of both societies...
...Bedacht's mind told him it was wrong but nevertheless he wrote: After we have argued the matter out with the Comintern and after the argument is settled by a definite decision, we not only accept the decision as a matter of discipline but we accept the correctness of the decision as a matter of recognizing the international and ideological superiority of the Comintern over ourselves...
...Five and a half years later, on another German day that shall live in infamy, November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, Frau Rtisler sent the Pachters, then in exile in Paris, another letter of the same import, horrified, appalled, and deeply ashamed...
...And they may also wonder why many who finally did quit in disgust, especially after the Khrushchev revelations and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, still bristle at the notion that they participated in an unworthy movement...
...In any event, this sudden shift from security to insecurity held true of Pachter himself and of those with whom he consorted in his young years...
...With the decline of home production of the family's various needs and the growth of the factory system, public evaluation of women as workers changed, together with women's perceptions of themselves...
...How ephemeral such control can be was brought home to me during the McCarthy years...
...The rash of unhelpful, downright irrelevant comparisons between the United States and Weimar Germany has mercifully died down, but Weimar retains its vogue as a foreboding symbol...
...No person in any society, male or female, gets through life without working...
...256 American CP,' that American communism "has corresponded to the fluctuations of Russian policy" and that "it has not obeyed a compelling need within the American Communists themselves...
...The New England mills were set up as "total institutions," with boarding houses for women workers, according to a plan initiated at Waltham, Massachusetts, by Francis Cabot Lowell...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes...
...Having posed this challenge, it must be said that Isserman does not answer his own question...
...But before the Great War, most people believed that they could cope with their problems, a belief—or illusion —that did not survive Armageddon...
...Dubious was hardly the word for Tito's reaction...
...In essence, it meant that there is a prior and basic Marxist ideology—call it dogma—whose explanations of capitalist development remain cogent and transcend all other political considerations, including all the crimes and shortcomings of the Soviet, Chinese, or other Communist revolutions...
...269...
...from "The Yanks Are Not Coming" to "Open Up the Second Front NOW" And that record also managed to move from "Browder is our leader, we shall not be moved" to unanimous support for the expulsion of Browder...
...The differences between the two societies have significant consequences for the objectives of the disarmament movement...
...Only then could he develop true independence of mind...
...All this is revealing and interesting, but perhaps the most moving memory of this opening chapter is of his relations to the Christian family into which he was to marry, the ROslers...
...Mrs...
...New York: Columbia University Press...
...apparently convinced that they were contributing to the success of the causes of anti-fascism and socialism...
...The idea was to bring together labor and the liberals, blacks and other minorities, and all who had to be enlisted to defeat right-wing Republicans and move the New Deal forward through the Democratic party...
...But he enjoyed the "long hikes," the "overnight sojourns in barns or youth hostels," the rituals and the comradeship...
...American Communists, like people of other persuasions, did have compelling needs and were obviously at their best when responding to these needs...
...New York Times, December 23, 1982...
...Building on a directive from the Carter days, the present Administration has adopted a position that not only is a limited war possible but in such a war we can "prevail...
...There is a powerful seductiveness to the idea that the superpowers are in the grip of inertial forces...
...Paper, $6.95...
...permitting nations in both Eastern and Western Europe to resume autonomy and mobility...
...Hannah Arendt was "a gifted philosopher with little talent for politics...
...In a characteristic passage they note that once the Soviet Union acquired nuclear missiles "no sane meaning can be attached to the notion of nuclear advantage...
...In 1831 the United Tailoresses' Society in New York City submitted a list of prices for their work to an employers' association and then struck to reinforce its demands...
Vol. 30 • April 1983 • No. 2
