Lewis Coser remembers Joseph Buttinger
Coser, Lewis
Joseph Buttinger was one of the last of a now almost extinct species, a self-educated workerintellectual. He was born in a provincial Austrian town into a working-class family. His father was a...
...And he proved to be the guardian angel once again...
...Joseph Buttinger was an exemplary figure, a true friend...
...He was almost entirely self-taught, since his family could not afford the expenses necessary for higher education...
...After their return from Europe, the couple fashioned a new life for themselves...
...It was not very much compared to the large-scale funds backing journals such as the Nation or the New Republic, but it meant much to us over the very many years of Joe's association with the magazine...
...LEWIS A. COSER 556 • DISSENT...
...They fell in love and were married shortly after Buttinger managed to escape from Nazi Austria...
...Whenever a refugee couple encountered obstacles and difficulties, there was always the implicit or explicit advice: Go and see Joe...
...Only after their relationship had already been firmly established did Gardiner "confess" to Buttinger that she was a very wealthy heiress from one of the major American meat-packing families, and that the Buttingers now had a very large fortune...
...Yet he then moved from glass worker to political educator and leader in very little time...
...He assured us that he would give Dissent a fixed sum of money each year...
...Muriel became a renowned psychoanalyst specializing in the treatment of disturbed children, while Joseph became an omnivorous reader of works in sociology, economics, and history in his private library of many thousand volumes in a town house on New York's Upper East Side...
...When the authoritarian regime of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss declared the Social-Democratic party illegal in 1934, and after a short and futile attempt at toppling the government in a four-day insurrection by Vienna's socialists was defeated, the party's leadership, largely located in the capital, had to flee abroad...
...Joe contributed a number of important articles on Vietnam to Dissent, and he joined the board of editors...
...Having joined the Austrian Social-Democratic party as an adolescent and having later become an active provincial leader, Buttinger acquired his culture and knowledge largely within the ranks of his party...
...His father was a highway builder and his mother a servant...
...During his illegal work for the party, Buttinger often found refuge with a young American medical student named Muriel Gardiner...
...He was a true comrade...
...When Irving Howe, my wife, Rose, and I began talking about publishing a socialist political quarterly at the high point of Joe McCarthy's assault on American decency, values and fundamental liberties, the old advice was followed: Go and see Joe...
...It was then that Buttinger, a largely unknown, and young, political leader from the provinces, became the head of the underground socialist movement, a role he played until the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938...
...He represented all the virtues of the prewar socialist movement from which he came...
...He read his first book at age fifteen...
...In an amazingly short time he became a well-known and respected author of several important books on Vietnam...
...When American policy makers became seriously interested in the fate of a hitherto hardly noticed French colony, Indochina, Buttinger, perhaps moved by the fate of his own Austria, began to immerse himself in the literature of Southeast Asia...
...In those years the Buttingers spent large sums of money to help their fellow refugees find their bearings in America...
...At no time did Joe attempt to influence the policy of Dissent...
Vol. 39 • September 1992 • No. 4
