Remembering Irving Howe
Horowitz, Mitch
I had been looking forward to hearing Irving Howe's speech all week. At last April's Socialist Scholar's Conference he was part of a closing panel; I knew his address would be short and...
...Irving brought wisdom and complexity into a movement too often marred by dogma and sophistry...
...There were times when approaching Irving felt a little like what Michael Harrington described when he wrote of his FALL • 1993 • 531 own awe around Willy Brandt: "It is hard to discuss the weather with someone who, morally and historically, is twenty feet tall...
...In the name of causes supposedly greater than free speech, Irving had witnessed the flames...
...After Irving finished there were the usual embarrassing disruptions from sect members...
...This was a man who had witnessed the resulting horrors when civil, electoral democracy was disrupted in the name of mobilizing "the people...
...Goodbye our teacher and comrade—I can only pray that we have...
...He exhorted the crowd to keep alive the flames of a democratic utopianism, to exercise one's "moral imagination...
...One participant on the stage had recently written an unkind and inaccurate attack on Irving's politics...
...But, more important, he urged the listeners not to fall into the delusion that Western democracy was somehow a fraud...
...As true as Luxemburg, Kautsky, Bernstein, Debs, or Thomas, Irving was a socialist and an opponent—not a modifier—of a capitalist order he saw as marred by personal limits and social cruelty...
...I knew his address would be short and probably without notes—but the chance to hear him speak was a small treasure...
...He reminded us again and again of the fruits of steady, clear thought and of a utopianism that understood the pains of history...
...He walked in looking very pale and, as it always seemed, dressed too warmly for such a sunny spring day...
...Who will teach us these things now...
...And certainly it was them—the other guys—whom he meant...
...And in just his very presence at such events, he taught us how to maintain our principles in a discouraging movement at a troubling time...
...For all his reputed "prickliness," who at such times could be more gracious...
...He went on to talk painfully of the corruption scandals shaking the European social democrats—couldn't we socialists expect at least a little more from them...
...He concluded the question period by wryly congratulating one yeller who insisted that he'd been investigated by the FBI and recommending that the man read Lenin's Left-wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder...
...Did we learn them well enough to survive and pass them on...
...Calmly—and with some humor—Irving responded to the tumult...
...I knew that, like me, others present were wondering whether to say hello...
...Irving shook the man's hand and assured the audience that the panelists would "more or less" be in agreement...
...It's been since that speech and Irving's death that I've learned in my gut what I've always known in my head: that he was not a social democrat with a loyal penchant for socialist language...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
