LETTERS
Simon, William & Gibney, Frank B. & McMahns, Ian & Mayfield, Julian
Editors: It is unfortunate that in summarizing the symposium of "The Young Radicals" [Winter, 1962], Mr. Lewis Coser could not resist the temptation to pass out grades. At least one of his...
...Coser's summary...
...Suburbs are too new and too various— despite a certain sameness—for us to do more than speculate about them...
...and that this stance did not satisfy the reigning reactionary machine which continued to destroy Pink as well as Red organizations...
...Lewis Coser could not resist the temptation to pass out grades...
...Completely aside from questions of the real content of democratic forms in such societies as West Germany, there are many obvious ohjections to this formulation...
...If it is the first instance, I should have expected Mr...
...A final point: there are of course upper class, middle class and even working class suburbs—and each tends to be homogeneous...
...Their suburbia remains anonymous well beyond the obligation that serious journalism has to its informants...
...The few Young Radicals who are aware of the history of radicalism in the U. S. have obviously read the wrong books, according to Mr...
...I am, however, a working editor...
...democratic socieU' ) obviously is entitled to apply to a conspirator tim same harsh law of repression that he threatens to use in case of stlccess...
...When Mr...
...The unfortunate aspect of this type of analysis is that in fixing upon suburbia as being causal in some mystic way we tend to neglect some of the more basic social processes...
...Coser or I think of political trends in their countries...
...Does it exist in the suburbias of more provincial urban centers...
...McMahan--I tried to suggest that everybody should be measured by his own rod...
...But in his comment he, as a radical, comes dangerously close to the political insularity I suggested was characteristic of the American scene as a whole...
...To the contrary, there is some evidence that all that changes is the rhetoric of the social critic unable to resist the temptation of an overworked cliche...
...There is no evidence to suggest that suburbanites differ radically from the non-suburbanite of comparable social characteristics...
...Editors: It is unfortunate that in summarizing the symposium of "The Young Radicals" [Winter, 1962], Mr...
...and when I see better ones, I shall be only too happy to print them in Show...
...in Utah, union organizers...
...Rarely, if ever, has the relationship between the producers and consumers of culture been either a direct or complementary one...
...King with political terrorists...
...It remains a mystery to me why white radicals should be so horrified that black men should organize to defend themselves, a right most white radicals take for granted...
...In Henry Pachter's review of Kirchheilner's Political Justice, there appears a sentiment which seems out of place in D~SSEXT...
...Coser suggests that I am pleading for a kind of "mindless activism, a know-nothing militancy," I don't know if he is referring to my support of Robert F. Williams in Monroe, N. C., last year or to my observations about the importance of the Black Muslim Movement...
...That indeed such a suburbia exists I am more than willing to trust to their intuition...
...A great deal also rests upon the larger social and political issues that face our society and, to which, despite the impression created by the Bensmans and Rosenbergs, even our suburban areas have not developed an immunity...
...it made them uneasy...
...A few of us took the trouble to read all of the documents of the Rosenberg Case, and concluded that there was at least enough available evidence to warrant their not being executed in the hysterical anti-Red atmosphere then current in the U. S., while others (of the mild and gentle socialist Left) took the view that because the Communist Party was playing a leading role in the case they would have none of it...
...Are they at all typical...
...There also appears to be a major difference between them...
...The very manner in which culture is used and consumed in suburbia, they caution us, threatens to consume the sources of culture...
...I am too shy to accept the label of decisionmaker that Mr...
...I have been a working editor for a good bit of my life, and, although also the Publisher of Show, I am responsible for its editorial content and I direct this...
...If Mr...
...If anyone is interested in passing out medals for fighting lost causes, which is silly, he should tell Mr...
...Recognizing how deeply implicated we all are, they often found fault with their own culture...
...PAUL GOODMAN replies: Hartford Gibney, Gibney Hartford...
...It does not, of course, make any difference to these leaders what Mr...
...The right of self-defense and to defend one's neighbor against criminal assault is inherent in American federal law, and in the legal code of nearly every state in the Union...
...Coser's) radical contemporaries during their heyday...
...Coser will not face, understandably, is the fact that in terms of political achievement the Left Wing in the United States has failed absolutely...
...I hope Mr...
...Coser to support any group of men defending their families and homes against racist attack...
...They will be included in next year's catalog—for exclusive distribution in the provinces...
...Apparently Mr...
...McMahan does, and I feel sorry for him...
...This brings us to a peculiar omission in Mr...
...is less conducive to cultural segregation than a suburban enclave like Crestwood Heights or Levittown—or Highland Park, Editors: I think I should set straight the facts behind the note by Paul Goodman prefacing his article "Format and Anxiety" in your summer issue...
...His basic complaint seems to be that the Young Radicals lack a sense of history, and that many of the symposium responses are self-centered to the exclusion of political considerations...
...Speaking of a West German labor leader who was a Stalinist stooge, Paehter sa.~s: " . . . It (an 'open...
...The major thesis of my article was that one of the reasons for the absence of a meaningful Left to( lay was that it allowed itself to be destroyed during the McCarthy years because it abandoned the Communist Party and the extreme Left during the height of the persecution, in an attempt to prove that while radical it was not subject to any subversive influences from the Soviet Union...
...names, no facts, uncorrupted by confusing statistics there is not even the epitomizing quotations that a dedicated Time contributor might produce for just such an occasion...
...Coser's reference is to the second instance, it should be apparent to him that the rapid growth of the Black Muslim movement is glaring proof of the failure of the American Left to involve working-class black men in any significant political activity...
...Does it, in effect, exist for suburban areas that do not send their breadwinners to Madison Avenue or The New School...
...One of us is a suburbanite who gathered his data by participant observation in a non-Madison Avenue suburb...
...I have not tried to justify the McCarran Act and I ha~e not confused the Rex...
...Their utterances concerning the unhappy situation of the cultural producers and cultural consumers manage only to create, at least for this unhappy reader, considerable apprehension about the possible situation of the cultural middlemen...
...Goodman reserves for people who veto his work...
...Not least of these is the effects upon cultural life of the increasing productivity of our educational institutions and the corresponding transformation of these institutions...
...I was told Hartford...
...For what are we to make of his complaint that "Castro's men fraternize with Khrushchev and Mao...
...Coser that most of the so-called Young Radicals were hardly out of high school and no more than faces in the crowd at rallies and on picket lines...
...Loser did not deal with it in his summary...
...In Albany, Ga., Dr...
...1961, particularly page 125...
...Why don't Publishers and Presidents stick to their own business, signing the checks and all that...
...Nasser with Tito...
...Instead, he chose to be distressed at my "undifferentiated response" in voicing support of Nkrumah, Toure, Nasser and Castro...
...Coser wonders, when he and DISSENT were fighting the whole pack of Right-turning intellectuals during the McCarthy period...
...Obviously a great deal depends upon the quality of the "Commodities" that are placed upon this new cultural market...
...in Great Britain, members of the Committee of 100...
...There is, at best, uncertain evidence that it represents or creates a special environment of its own...
...The existence of a few commendable publications like DissENT, and organizations like the Committee of Correspondence and SANE, do not alter this truth...
...Does it exist in the almost countless cities small enough to make the use of the term suburbia suggest pretension...
...Simon was written by two men who grew up, respectively, in Two Rivers, Wisconsin and Detroit, Michigan...
...What Mr...
...BENSMAN and ROSENBERG reply: The article that disturbs Mr...
...Coser that Castro and Nasser, being big boys now, may fraternize with whom they please, and that as leaders of nations involved in socialist revolutions, nothing is more natural than their associating with the leaders of the world's two greatest socialist nations...
...Goodman will write better pieces than this in the future, as he has in the past...
...Coser, for they do not seem to properly appreciate the role of his (Mr...
...who decides who is a "conspirator...
...It was rejected not by Huntington Hartford, the President, but by me, the Publisher...
...Coser correctly asserts that "the socialists of the thirties are by no means dead," but they might as well be so far as the American political scene is concerned...
...Perhaps they can partly rectify their fault by supplying one quote—of themselves— from their frankly impressionistic essay: "Any answer would at present be premature...
...Whether the effect upon culture will be a negative one is far from fully determined...
...I think our society will be worse than "a dull and dangerous monolith" if every rejection on ample editorial grounds is regarded as part of some massive ideological assault on the writer...
...Has it never occurred to Mr...
...an analysis that, I suspect, will fail to generate comparable smugness, if only because we are all implicated and to varying extents to be found guilty...
...Simon might also benefit from reading "The Quality of Culture" by A. Toffler in Fortune Magazine, Nov...
...Admittedly, the dynamics by which the cultural market-place transforms the newest possession of the avantgarde into blander, more salable commodities move more swiftly, and the strain is felt by the communities existing on both sides of the relationship...
...This theory is of course the precise justitication of the McCarran Act...
...It is no easy thing to confess that the dedicated political work of one's youth and early manhood have come to nought in one's middle age, but there it is, and unless the Senior Radicals face it they will continue to bathe in the nostalgia of the past while deluding themselves that they are playing an effective role in the American present...
...Goodman's reportage was indeed commissioned by Show magazine...
...And, not too surprisingly, we really don't know very much about the effects and uses of contemporary education...
...A more immediately effective and disturbing anal ysis, however, remains to be done on the community of producers...
...in a class society, does "society" apply such repression...
...Suburbia, I suspect, is far too dependent a concept to carry the oppressive weight that has been placed upon it...
...Their prolonged exposure to the provinces did not make them smug...
...This consists simply in the fact that an urban environment (even that of Chicago...
...To cite hut a few: how much repression may this open denrocratic society apply and remain open amt democratic...
...Oh, it's a most fine, an excellent article, a surpassingly nuggety article...
...it was also the justification for the imprisonment of Debs...
...the crucial question remains as to whether such a suburbia exists past the sociological shadow cast by Manhattan's skyline...
...Where were we, Mr...
...The findings would not be suitable for publication in a scholarly journal...
...Our article indicates that middle class suburbanites are very much like their counterparts in the city...
...Using an unscientific sample, he learned much about homes in the $20,000 to $30,000 range without benefit of a specific questionnaire or any other "research instrument...
...What suburbia they are talking about remains something of a mystery...
...Editors: The deathless criticisms of Iife and hard times in suburbia, typified by the recent contribution of Bensman and Rosenberg [Summer, 1962], have reached a degree of stylization and predictability equalled only by their smugness...
...I know there is nothing original about this idea, but one wonders why Mr...
...Vincent Price was commissioned this year to buy a large number of original paintings for Sears Roebuck...
...those advocating dictatorship have no right to complain if their recipe for goveroment is used by others...
...Which side are we on...
...Others, like our correspondent, apparently did not...
...At least one of his "pupils" is inspired to question not only the analysis but the motivations of the "teacher...
...how is the "harsh law of repression'" which our conspirator might use in case of success determined...
...Simon seems to be upset by the omission of numbers, tables, graphs, names and quotations, the familiar panoply of "science" which even Time offers in greater abundance than the writers...
...Also, incidental to buying a house, he conducted a "survey" of many suburbs in and around New York...
...The reason, incidentally, that I turned down the Goodman piece was that I felt it was not very good...
...IAN ~IC~fAHAN I~h-:xRV PACHTrR replies: Frankly, I fail to undcrstand Mr...
...In the fullness of time, they became residents of New York, by profession sociologists who devoted part of their lives to politics and some to social criticism...
...Which of us, the complacent or the dissatisfied, is to be charged with insufferable smugness...
...King is such a "conspirator...
Vol. 9 • September 1962 • No. 4
