Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR FISCHER Jakob Linken, in his letter ("Dear Editor," NL, June 23) discussing the chapter of my new book (Russia's Road from Peace to War), which you published, raises what he calls "a...
...Precisely the people Kelman demeans may end up remolding the consciousness of the majority, so that personal acquisitiveness no longer submerges social concern...
...However, I am compelled to criticize John P. Roche's "admittedly impressionistic" suggestions on "The Rebellion of the Clerks'* (NL...
...to the institutions of a mass society in which they are not accorded the status they believe their intelligence, sensitivity and sincerity merit...
...For the moment, Kelman's exhortations on the behalf of labor will result in little more than juicier contracts for the fortunate...
...Roche's assertion that the young dissenters seek "to radicalize the campus and use it as a launching pad for destroying American society" seems to me both hysterical and untrue...
...He took advantage of this to end the freedom...
...Mass...
...Edmund Cromer...
...I must admit that as a lifelong Democrat I have ambivalent, maybe even antagonistic feelings toward Roche, since I feel—and his article seems to verify the suspicion—that he was most instrumental in hardening Lyndon Johnson's views on Vietnam and the dissident young...
...Newspapers were free to publish...
...and to urge the resurrection of Roosevelt's old coalition...
...Boston...
...This presumably means that the new coalition is potentially viable— though Tyler neglects to draw this obvious conclusion...
...July 7...
...Though perhaps better motivated than the Right, we share its capacity to resist change which undermines our traditional loyalties, to confuse old myths and new realities...
...Thus in earlier articles, he misconstrued the ideas of Donald Peterson and John Kenneth Gal-braith to mean only the intellectuals or only the upper-middle class or only the blacks should compose the "new" coalition, where they clearly meant to include all those elements...
...Barring the advent to power of a Marcuse or Rap Brown, we simply must depend upon the evolution of a more humane American ethic before we can turn our institutions away from their bestiality...
...Soldiers in hundreds of thousands left the trenches and went home...
...At root they object to egalitarianism...
...Undoubtedly, some of the more extreme protesters may fit this description, but 1 think that there are many more who have been taught an egalitarianism which has never been made functional in reality...
...The democratic Left, if it can think through its means and ends, can effect the necessary reforms in the structure of society...
...New York City Steven E. Hengen Harvard '71 ROCHE I am a rather recent reader of The New Leader and have thoroughly enjoyed most of your selections...
...The most appropriate stand with regard to these people is not to condemn them out of hand but to work with them and try to kindle in them our concern for the important, if mundane, issues of people's daily well-being...
...government...
...The national minorities raised their heads...
...To remain on the democratic Left, to eschew the benevolent dictatorship propounded by Marcuse or the coercive violence of the militant "pluralists," we have to evolve a means of mobilizing the majority on behalf of minorities, and give the minorities the tools to take advantage of new opportunity...
...This leads me to conclude that he is at heart a total authoritarian who believes that he is endowed with the unusual ability to expound upon, prescribe and enforce egalitarianism (for students, at least...
...he apparently cannot recognize the new patterns now emerging...
...But surely the fact Yorty was able to win despite "wide and organized" opposition compounds rather than diminishes the catastrophe...
...Some of the students may wish to do this, just as other people at different age levels advocate their own strident and absurd ideas...
...McCarthy folk...
...They are not objecting to egalitarianism, but to people like Roche who build "rational" cases for their own interpretation of "reality," and who place all those who disagree with them into the "irrational" and "irrelevant" category...
...DEAR EDITOR FISCHER Jakob Linken, in his letter ("Dear Editor," NL, June 23) discussing the chapter of my new book (Russia's Road from Peace to War), which you published, raises what he calls "a rather peripheral matter": the existence of democratic benefits in the Provisional or so-called Kerensky government of Russia in 1917...
...Salt Lake City, Utah Louise Hess TYLER Like some of your other correspondents...
...Everybody talked...
...Kelman takes no account of the different nature of the democratic Left's role now that it can no longer appeal to the material self-interest of the majority...
...The peasants took the land...
...If you add Herman Badillo's support—drawn from "reform clubs...
...Agenda for the Democrats," a disturbing tendency to equivocate and slide over difficulties...
...If they can convince us that most people—because of restricted information—don't know enough to make judgments on political issues and should therefore accept the opinions of those who claim to have "rational authority...
...And like Kelman, pl reserves its harshest words for the esthetes of the Left...
...Someday, they may help a frustrated and insecure working class elect a George Wallace...
...It seems to me that freedom to think and to question are two important democratic values that we have been trying to preserve...
...I have noticed in Gus Tyler's current series...
...As a result of these policies, and of the President's insistence that they be imposed upon the Democratic candidate in 1968, the party has become fragmented to the point where it may never recover...
...But the majority even of the militant activists wish to implement the things which they have been taught—freedom, equality, brotherhood—and if the schools and universities are impeding these then the students feel they must either change what is being taught or else change what is being practiced...
...Negroes, and Puerto Ricans, affluent Leftist intellectuals," etc..—to that of Norman Mailer, you get a plurality...
...They represent one of the best hopes for our political system...
...It is interesting that although Tyler still seeks to rescue the failing political cliches of 30 years ago...
...In the meantime, the esthetic Left is doing little damage...
...Roche assumes that "Higher education's . . . overriding obligation is to maintain certain pedagogical values," among them the idea that a student only flunks "because he could not or did not do the work...
...these problems have come to a head, producing an outright contradiction...
...In Los Angeles, however, such "a broad coalition of labor, civic, ethnic, business, religious and . . . liberal groups"—a precondition for the Tylerian Utopia—backed mayoral candidate Thomas Bradley and was defeated by "the discredited and unpopular Sam Yorty...
...Again, why Kelman feels compelled to trample upon the cultural Left escapes me...
...At the same time that we seek to integrate the alienated and disenfranchised into the progress, if not the structure, of the labor movement, the ethos of American labor must change sufficiently so that ever more successful competition in the marketplace is not its only goal...
...The crusty inflexibility which Kelman would impose upon us is a luxury we can little afford...
...I do not accept all that is presented, but feel that differing viewpoints are most stimulating...
...Women won equality...
...I disagree vehemently with Roche's contention that the radicals' "indictment runs against the very nature of our society...
...But in his most recent installment, "A Tale of Three Cities: 1969" (NL...
...The fantastic multiplication of the ways of recording and disseminating ideas brought about by technology means that college professors will not only have to teach how men with diverse opinions can live together, but also that they themselves will have to learn to live with diversity...
...it should be easy for authoritarians to preach egalitarianism, while ignoring it in practice...
...I believe it is a hopeful sign that young people are thinking and questioning and even demonstrating, if there are no good answers for their questions...
...Poetry, theater, literature flourished...
...Extraordinarily, Tyler attempts to convert this disaster into a victory of sorts with his observation that the challenger's appeal went far beyond the limits of the L.A...
...His shortsightedness applies to the New York Democratic primary as well...
...a new specter haunting the Western World...
...He maintains, correctly, that this March to November regime was weak, and is also right in saying that it was too feeble to withdraw from the War...
...To be sure, the Bolsheviks took advantage of all this...
...In fact, the Progressive Labor faction of sds engineered the disruption, insofar as anything like that could be engineered...
...And the freedom was the product of the extreme frailty of the government...
...Princeton, N.J, Louis Fischer KELMAN Summer polemicists influence campus politics by determining the character with which groups begin the year and recruit new members...
...black community...
...Though the movement struck a progressive chord in the 1930s, today it may actually worsen trie situation of the minorities isolated from our affluence...
...The price of foregoing some of our aggressive competitiveness, according to the Economist, would not cost America nearly so much as Kelman insinuates...
...On the one hand, Tyler wishes to uphold his thesis about the conservative renaissance, propelled by a "rift within the Left...
...It seems most peculiar that the views of an intellectual like Roche on this matter could so closely approximate those of that senile Rightist J. Edgar Hoover, who described radical student organizations as...
...On the other hand, our grave social problems will continue to loom intractably before us if we remain confined to a system of highly competitive political and economic pluralism...
...The tone and substance of Steven Kel-man's "Student Confrontation at Alghero" (NL, June 9) betrays an intolerant self-righteousness born of his failure to accept the passing of New Deal America, and if the democratic Left on the campus accepts his version of where we stand, it will again find itself incapable of providing an alternative to the increasingly successful extremists of both the Right and Left...
...a firmly established subversive force dedicated to the complete destruction of our tradi'ional democratic values and the principles of fre...
...If a society has enough such "talented" people, then applied authoritarianism can begin to look much like egalitarianism...
...Lenin, who arrived in Petrograd from Switzerland by the grace of Ludendorff in April 1917, declared that Russia was "the freest country in the world...
...There was confusion and anarchy, and, perhaps therefore, liberty...
...He misrepresents the situation at Harvard when he identifies those promoting poetry in the classroom and psychoanalysis for America with the invaders of University Hall...
...Nevertheless, those months were a period of exciting freedom, the only such hiatus in Russia's 1.000-year history...
Vol. 52 • July 1969 • No. 14
