Swados on the Attack
AYRES, C. E.
Swados on the Attack A RADICAL'S AMERICA By Harvey Swados Little, Brown. 347 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by C. E. AYRES Professor of Economics, University of Texas These are pre-eminently...
...the "inane babble" to which educated but unemployed women are condemned...
...and the same is true of his "Socialism...
...Reviewed by C. E. AYRES Professor of Economics, University of Texas These are pre-eminently readable, even exciting, essays on a variety of subjects, all interesting and some vitally important...
...Actually, from first to last, what Swados seems to be attacking is neither anti-Semitism nor capitalist exploitation, but the omnipresent commercialism of the modern world and especially the forces of commercial corruption which, seemingly, have debased the mass culture of the 20th century...
...If one of us could be time-machined back to a simpler society, say that of a medieval manor or that of stone-age savages, would he hear no inane babble...
...Swados has the knack...
...The real theme, however, is difficult to pin down...
...In fact, aren't most "intellectuals" essentially mindless most of the time...
...One of them, "Why Resign from the Human Race," first published in the September 1959 issue of Esquire, "provoked more letters than any other article" in the history of that magazine, and (also according to the publisher's jacket blurb) "may very well have been the first suggestion for the Peace Corps...
...Except for very occasional and quite relaxed references to Jewish rites and one essay on "Certain Jewish Writers," his Judaism seems to play no part in his really vigorous convictions...
...and "the flood of swill daily pumped through our cultural pipelines...
...Swados contradicts, in his own person, what would seem to be one of his most deeply held convictions...
...Most of the time, Swados is really impatient with the human condition, the common lot of all mankind, and not any particular institution or social order...
...But did mediocrity become the (statistical) mean condition of mankind only with the rise of the market economy...
...Of course being interested in something and knowing how to make it interesting to other people are two quite different matters...
...There are no citations from the sacred writings of Marx and Engels, and no mumbling about public ownership of all instruments of production...
...Nevertheless a certain continuity of conviction, or at least consistency of tone, runs through all these essays, not only the ones dealing with disemployed miners and unemployedthough-educated women, but also those dealing with reform journalism, The Threepenny Opera, Herman Wouk, and "The Cult of Personality in American Letters...
...But what is perhaps more to the point, Harvey Swados knows how to make his subjects interesting...
...I carefully avoid saying that he can make anything interesting, since Swados makes very evident his own interest in the matters-literary and cultural as well as political and economic-about which he writes...
...His choicest rhetoric is reserved for American Army posts abroad, "these barbedwire oases of togetherness, mindlessness, and gluttony...
...In the introduction Swados presents himself to us with a chip on each shoulder, one labelled "I am a Jew," and the other labelled "I am a Socialist...
...Rather, if our defects are much older and more universal than Swados indicates, then the validity of his complaints is correspondingly greater...
...Indeed, if these essays may be taken as containing the identifying marks of Socialism, there are many millions of Socialists in the United States...
...Would he find only noble savages, or would he find that most people are mindless wherever and whenever you find them...
...In thus shifting the focus of Swados' indignation, I am not questioning the validity of his complaints, certainly not as regards the "grab" aspects of capitalism...
...He knows how to begin an essay, on a subject which many people might consider dull, so that his opening sentences capture his readers' attention...
...Indeed, he declares with his usual vigor that he would not write about anything of which he did not have personal knowledge and, presumably, personal interest...
...Loneliness is not the invention "of the emerging mass society": No human beings anywhere have ever been more compulsively gregarious than the members of tiny primitive communities...
...Another, "The Myth of the Happy Worker," first appeared in the Nation in 1957 and received the Sidney Hillman Award in 1958...
...What is remarkable today is not that educated women are wasted but that any women are educated...
...and he knows how to sustain interest from page to page, so that his readers are still with him to receive the impact of his closing lines...
...But these are not really his obsessions...
...And whatever its crimes, capitalism can scarcely be convicted of the "cultural degradation" of medieval serfs...
...In his introduction, he declares that he has "resisted all efforts to make of me a systematic thinker...
Vol. 45 • October 1962 • No. 21
