Konvitz Raises New Questions
LETTERS Konvitz Raises New Questions on Carretta Incident in Rome From MILTON R. KONVITZ To the Editor: If 1 were not to reply to Mr. Lewis Mumford's comments on my article in The New Leader...
...But I would say that all that we have a right to expect is that only those shown to hive been guilty should be punished...
...If anyone troubles to consult my first letter to the Tune., be will find that it wet not the conduct of the Roman mob I was defending, but the failure on the part of people like Mr...
...An examination of my article will disclose that / did not quote Mr...
...Dictatorship and terror are bound together like Siamese twins...
...Mumford ssid in his letter: "I have singled out this report of Mr...
...Or is this asking too much...
...Not only are they the greatest danger to the morality of its collective soul but it is the very ground on which dictatorships breed...
...I saw how they carried on the spear the head of Foulon, and his son-in-law Bertieux followed him under the covoy pf one thousand armed men...
...November IS, 1*44...
...I therefore could not have misquoted him at all...
...their riot was provoked by outside enemies...
...Steinberg served as Minister of Justice in the first Lenin cabinet a coalition of Bolsheviks and Social Revolutionaries...
...The great arena of History, in which peoples and states prepare or decide their destinies does not free them from the burden of moral discipline and consciousness anymore than the hard conditions of life free the man from his obligations toward his fellow-men...
...that once my) erroneous views of his position are discarded, it will he found that he and I are on a measure of common ground...
...it is only one step from there to justification snd even glorification of people's justice...
...5) Mr...
...but there would be no point in going into this at length, for any one who is really interested ran examine Mr...
...nor was snyone snatched from his trial in s court-room...
...On the contrary, all the evidence seems to point to the fact that they were very proud of II Duce...
...that they had to take the law into, their own hands...
...they only rioted...
...But the mob in Rome took a life...
...It was, if you wsnt an analogy, like a riot in a concentration camp—a protest against the outside oppressors...
...Here is a letter he wrote to his wife on that very glorious day^July 14, 1789...
...Herbert Mstthews and Dr...
...This is what Mr...
...Mumford was referring to the mob as "those truly humane men and women who are goaded into acts of violence...
...P.S.: It is of distinct interest that later investigation disclosed that Caretta was innocent and had actually helped antifascists to escape...
...He left the cabinet in protest over Bolshevik methods snd later was forced to leave Russis...
...Knovits to shew the least human insight into such events, or the least chanty toward those who have been goaded to violence by Nasi tyranny...
...Jean Jaures, that remarkable leader of French Socialism, described, in his History of the French Revolution, the dsy of the fall of the Bastille...
...Then the haphazard acts of the demoralized street will be crystallized and hardened in the organized form of a "Cheka" which called itself many times the "organ of proletarian revenge...
...Mumford's charge is substantiated...
...Mumford's letter on the editorial page of The New Y»rk Timet, September 28, 1944, and determine for himself whether or not Mr...
...that they loved his bombastic oratory delivered from balconies...
...and it is no secret in political circles that many Italians, even those who are normally Democrats, voted for Dewey, because they have not forgotten FDR's "stab in the back" speech when Italy attacked prostrated France...
...I am afraid it is easier to discuss this problem and to accept a morally neutral position "in the quiet of the study" than to go through that personally terrible experience of revolutionary convulsions and great human suffering...
...I/et us for a moment transfer the scene of mass-hatred snd collective vengeance from Italy or from the racial lynching* (as exist in this country) to the general area of social crises snd revolutions...
...Says Mr...
...Mumford's words...
...Steinberg, now s resident of the U. S. is s student of revolutionary history snd the suthor of seversl notable books on Terror and Revolution...
...As s representative of the letl Social Revolutionaries Mr...
...it is difficult to bridle and to stop them...
...2) He makes the more serious chsrge of misquotation...
...and guilt or innocence can be established only according to objective teste, and not by a rioting mob...
...It is easy to unleash the terroristic instincts of a people...
...But since the Carretta incident the courts of Rome have been functioning and guilty persons have been punished...
...and in the name of law and order conveniently obliterates from memory the bestial crimes they have committed—even casting a greater reproach upon those truly humane men and women who are goaded into acts of violence by the law's delays and by the law's leniency...
...I do not believe I have misinterpreted Mr...
...We have accumulated, in the past twentylive years, a large volume of evidence and experience in the social-revolutionary struggles in Europe...
...He puts the matter rather neatly...
...Milton Knovitau eirticism of my position is that it repisuiis consistent, and it remains erroneous...
...Now, I took that to mean, among other things, that Mr...
...Konvitx from renewing his misinterpretations » order to buttress his morally untenable position...
...Mumford accuses me of moral obtuseness if I call the killing s lynching...
...If they are not condemned in advance by liberal minds to whom the peoples look up, then terror and cruelty will be approved and practiced...
...Mumford, however, would probably like to see as many Nazis and Fascists killed and tortured as were the innocent victims of the Nazis and Fascists: an eye for an eye, a man for a man, or approximately, snywsy...
...and the reports of the current French trials indicate that the situation is well in hand there too...
...If a people's crowd forgets for s moment those inescapable obligations towards humanity, then the historic function of the organized liberal movements is to bring clarity of mind and conscience into the burning lava of mass instincts...
...Lewis Mumford vehemently opposes the "callous moral ism and onesided legalism" of those who condemned that act of lynch justice in liberated Italy, and formulates a now moral maxim for the masses in times of upheaval: It is for the people who have suffered under the merciless and bestial tyranny of the Nasis to express both their own judgment upon the oppressors and such restrsint upon unbridled vengeance as their own conscience may in the long run dictate: for them alone...
...Mumford: "and | Konvitz] even 'quotes' words I have never used, such as 'a trial by a court is slower than a lynching...
...And this is what Jaures himself added to this quotation: Proletarians, remember that cruelty is the remnant of servitude because it demonstrates that the barbarism of a despotic regime lives in ourselves...
...The msn in the revolutionary street (and his leaders also) does not indulge in the fine variations of neither approving nor condemning cruelties...
...Remember that in 1789, when the crowd of workers and citizens wss for a moment drunk with blood, it was the first of the great liberators of the proletariat who felt how hia heart contracted with pain...
...Why did they act only when they had before them a defenseless msn who wss standing trial for his life in an orderly court-room...
...But why did not the mobsters in Rome have the heat of paetion when Mussolini was stiff in power...
...But I would point out this: if I did misinterpret him, I would expert Mr...
...Steinberg Discusses Role of Terror and Social Change from Dr...
...But all this will lead to the most terrible results...
...Mumford says that the legal system or order has no place when a catastrophe happens...
...I did, however, interpret what he said...
...Thus an innocent man was cruelly lynched...
...thst they supported his attack on Ethiopia and loved to hear references to the Greet Italian Empire...
...If one will say that for years they had been waiting for this "opportunity," then their killing teas pre-meditated and in cold blood...
...To my way of thinking, a mob that takes the law, snd the victim, into its own hands, and commits acts of violence, commits a lynching...
...Mumford accuses me of misinterpretation...
...If this will require the establishment of more courts, or the appointment of more investigstors, prosecutors snd judges, that is not an insurmountable difficulty...
...How proud we are to hear in that cruel period of the bourgeois revolution wise and humane words coming from a socialist...
...The significance of thia discussion far exceeds the narrow limits of the subject they are debating—the lynching of Carretta by the Roman mob...
...There is nothing inherent in the...
...A crowd of two hundred thousand people expressed their joy and derision...
...One hundred and twenty-five years later these words of warning were confirmed and re-confirmed by the events of the Russian Revolution...
...1) Mr...
...STEINBERG To the hi11,,i May I interfere in the instructive and disturbing debate between Milton R. Konvitz and Lewis Mumford...
...I stand by every word that I said and I regret that 1 have been unable to prevent Or...
...Mumford says that "a trial by a court is slower than a lynching...
...But bis violent disapproval of my own views leads me to suspect that I was not guilty of misinterpretation...
...Mumford at all...
...There is one lesson many of us learned from these developments: a people (and we prefer always to speak of peoples, not of "mobs...
...Wss I unfsir when I ssid that Mr...
...law which prevents it from working efficiently...
...Furthermore, the people of Harlem had been abused for years by people who were not part of the Harlem community...
...legalism" is good enough for me...
...The revolutionary mob, intoxicated by victory and blood, carried in triumph the chopped-off heads of its enemies on pick-axes...
...The clear implication in what he says is that I have misquoted him, not once, but seversl, if not many, times, for he cites one instance only as an example—"such ss," he isys, thereby clearly Implying use of the instance as only an example of a class of misquotations...
...It is difficult to accept such a maxim by oppressed mankind for future actions...
...I understand that the people exerts its judgment How can it not be cruel in our time, after all the cruelties and punishments of the past...
...3) Mr...
...Mumford reminds me of the difference between a murder committed in cold blood, after much planning, and s murder committed in the heat of paslion...
...It seems to be the worst service to s people's cause if we only try to "understand" and to "explain" its vengeance in the period of crisis...
...that he meant that the mob was goaded into acts of violence by the law's delays...
...Mumford would prefer to compare the lynching in Rome to the Harlem riot But please note: no one was killed in the Harlem riot, nor was any one tortured on land or in water...
...Let us hope that the armies of liberation which are now moving into devastated Europe, will be armed also with the weapon of this knowledge...
...Furthermore, there is no proof st sll thst they rioted against an outside oppressor...
...we see now the beginning only...
...On a corner of the street stood, at thst moment, one of the noblest fathers of .Socialism, Babeuf...
...they abused his corpse...
...Oh, what pain thi* joy evoked in me I I felt dissatisfied and discontented...
...Mumford's statement does not mean this, I do not know what it does mean, if anything...
...They committed no lynching...
...I. N. STEINBERG is particalarly ¦tted to comment ea the aabject of revolutionary mobs snd terror...
...But I will say that it should take longer to convict a murderer than it took the murderer to accomplish his crime...
...they tortured a person...
...If that was no lynching, then I want no part of morals...
...4) Mr...
...Mumford to point out that we really, do not disagree radically...
...Matthews because it represents a kind of self-righteousness snd unctuousness which is too common smong Americans: an attitude which in practice ranges us on the side of Nasi and fascist monsters...
...Is no less subject to the demands of moral responsibility than an individual...
...Lewis Mumford's comments on my article in The New Leader regarding his views on the Roman lynching, he would, almost literally, be getting away with murder...
...Notice that he puts the word quote* within quotation markes, implying that I did and that I didn't (if you know what I mean) "quote" him...
...In Czarist Rossis he waa a leading member of the Social Revolutionary Party, sections of which organized terrorist groups...
...More than this: Professor Salvemini haa shown that oven the Americans of Italian descent were predominantly pro-Fascist and pro-Mussolini (for Italy, not for America...
...It has not yet been proved that the good people of Rome were antiFascists...
...If Mr...
...Mumford Replies — To the Editor: From LEWIS MUMFORD All that I can say about Dr...
Vol. 27 • December 1944 • No. 48
