Brendan Sexton 1911-1988
Howe, Irving
When I first met Brendan Sexton in the mid-1930s, he was pure flame: an activist in the then still-vital Socialist party, a leader in the unemployed movement, a young man full of blazing energy....
...He was right, mostly, and we were wrong, mostly...
...256 • DISSENT...
...In his last year Brendan kept his fire, but there was a new softness, a sweetness of voice...
...The socialist movement, and I with it, declined into a rectitude of sectarian posture, even as the movement for organizing the industrial working class in America got under way...
...Once Brendan retired he reaffirmed his socialist convictions and became a member of the Dissent editorial board, seldom a writer, but a keen participant...
...He respected every effort at social betterment...
...I admired him, of course, and also felt a little fearful of what seemed an extraordinarily quick temper...
...I.H...
...Then came a great divide, one of the tragedies of the American left...
...what damage it may also have done to American unionism others may yet tell us...
...Meanwhile, we came to see that the group around Walter Reuther, whatever criticisms might be leveled against it, was by far the most progressive, militant, and imaginative in the world of American trade unionism...
...He was a good man, a fighter in the cause...
...But far more important, there occurred a division all but fatal to the democratic left—the wounds are far from healed...
...He lived with this tension, a creative tension most of the time...
...To me Brendan seemed—and in this intuition I was right—one of those socialists who escaped from the narrow slots of either theoretician or spear-carrier...
...The damage this did to American socialism I have tried elsewhere to describe...
...well, let's call it, accurately enough, the class struggle...
...Gradually, too slowly, nervously, there began a rapprochement...
...The tragedy of our years—perhaps, to some extent, also Brendan's—was that we failed to bring together the two impulses that Brendan so vividly personified...
...And that wonderful temper, which I learned to take as a signal of affection, was still there—as anyone who might say a careless word about unionism at our meetings quickly found out...
...he and other good socialists became convinced that they had to choose between building a great new union movement and the Socialist party, with its ritualistic electoral purity...
...He lost his temper when he heard something foolish or callous and then grinned his way back into good humor...
...About that I wasn't so wrong, either...
...I saw him from a distance, since the decade that separates us in age can be very significant for the young...
...But we did the best we could, we sons of Norman Thomas, and when I look back at these decades—at all those who lapsed into cynicism and neoconservative retreat—I think we did pretty well...
...We were discussing "revolutionary policy," while out there in Michigan and Indiana there were great strikes, the blood at River Rouge, the beginnings of the UAW triumph...
...With intellectuals, he was a defender of unions, but I suspect that with unionists he could grow impatient if he encountered crude antiintellectualism...
...Perhaps later generations will do better...
...He was on the move, but he was startlingly articulate—one of Norman's boys, as a comrade told me...
...Brendan—with what inner hesitations can't say—chose to throw himself into...
...He saw virtue in picket lines and in scholarly articles...
...He had made the right choice, yet within him there was an unquenchable young rebel who felt—am I imagining this?— just a little uncomfortable...
...By the time I next came to meet Brendan he was an established, figure in the UAW...
...Brendan was a labor intellectual, which means that throughout his life he was pulled one way and then another...
...I saw him as a somewhat bumpy bridge between the democratic left and the trade unions...
Vol. 35 • April 1988 • No. 2
