Marx as a Myth-Maker
FEUER, LEWIS S.
The Best of Bohn I REMEMBER AMERICA By William E. Bohn Macmillan. 285 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by ERWIN D. CANHAM Editor, "Christian Science Monitor" If I were to select only one word to...
...This sense of the goodness and worth of men and nature, this love of the world in which we live, becomes a profound kind of religion...
...There is no musty flavor, no lavender and old lace...
...Frustration...
...None of these are present...
...In their ideology as in what we might call their geopolitics, these memoirs are clinically realistic...
...Bill Bohn has made a rich contribution to the understanding of the nature, depth and changing forces of American life...
...Though "reminiscence" runs through the book, its essays are written with the eyes and sense of the present...
...It knits the living memories of more than eight decades into the structure of the present...
...Bohn has seen the United States make enormous progress toward fulfilment of the ideals he began to formulate before the century turned...
...This is a volume of comment not on the America that was, but the America that has come to be...
...In short, Bohn loves man and he loves America...
...He understands their limitations...
...It blossoms out in Bohn's passion for gardening and country life...
...He knows there is a long way still to go...
...It is a profound and constructive philosophy...
...What they remember is always related to the present and the future...
...Bohn is among the very last of a wonderful generation: a man whose own father helped write the abortive constitution for a tiny Saxon principality in the revolutions of 1848, a man whose half-brothers fought in the American Civil War, a man who remembers President Garfield and was a friend of Eugene Debs...
...He is no Henry Adams...
...But he deplores the ineffectiveness with which decades of steady exposures of Communism have overcome its evils...
...For Communism he reserves cold and devastating scorn...
...But he presents the society he has savored for so long with utter validity and compassion...
...Here is a lifelong reformer who is not bitter, never unfair, scarcely ever impatient...
...He respects them...
...In this lifelong struggle for social justice in which Bohn took a useful part, what might one expect at the end...
...And so at the end he is chiefly grateful for the distance covered...
...Under "Annals of the Innocent" Bohn summarizes what must now be unique recollections of Socialist stirrings at the turn of the country...
...We sense and feel the innocence as well as the rising populist protest in the Ohio town into which he was born in the 1880s, the breaking waves of protest in the Greenwich Village to which he moved in the 1910s, the gradual fulfilment of hopes through the New Deal and later, and finally, the concentration on combatting the world scourge of Communism...
...Or triumph...
...Talking, not shouting, he tells us and our children a great deal they will always need to know...
...Just 100 essays or selections are included in the volume...
...Reviewed by ERWIN D. CANHAM Editor, "Christian Science Monitor" If I were to select only one word to describe Bill Bonn's life and comments as collected in this volume, it would be "goodness...
...What a span of history...
...Weariness...
...To have their realism infused with love is what is rare...
...He glories in their progress...
...I am inclined to think that this rich volume of comment, couched in brief, light essays and ranging over everything under the sun, tells more about Bohn and his times than a formal autobiography would have done...
...Toward conservative leaders he is generous, saying for example: "Herbert Hoover [was] one of the most intelligent and public-spirited Presidents of our time...
...It is strikingly marked in his admiration for Maine fishermen, whom he identifies as the most individualistic and un-Socialistic of humans...
...But doubtless things have not worked out as he might have planned...
...They have been grouped in rough classifications ranging from nature to revolution...
...There is something ineffably generous, benevolent, mellow about all he has to say...
...Bohn is perceptive and appreciative toward such things as the new capitalism, which he feels should be better understood and explained...
Vol. 45 • June 1962 • No. 12
