THE EARLY YEARS
BELL, DANIEI
Learning History Firsthand The Early Years By Daniel Bell I BEGAN WRITING for THE NEW Leader in 1938, at age 19, when I was a senior at the City College of New York. I continued to do...
...When I remonstrated that few readers would know the classical allusion, he said, "F___'em...
...I looked forward to a discussion of philosophy, but all Russell wanted to do was find a bookstore where he could buy some detective stories to read that night...
...In the succeeding years, down the Schachtman lineage, individuals such as Carl Gershman and Leslie Lenkowsky became "neoconservatives," supported President Ronald Reagan, and took posts in his Administration...
...Schlamm later became a foreign policy adviser to Henry Luce, and sought to create an intellectual magazine at Time, Inc...
...They included Max Eastman, the former coeditor of the Masses, philosopher Sidney Hook, economist Louis Hacker, black poet Claude McKay, writer James Rorty (father of Richard), journalist Eugene Lyons, and essayist Dwight Macdonald (before he started the journal politics...
...When it was announced that a number of German generals had been killed, we lined up their pictures across a page with the headline, "German Generals Die Von by Von") Some of the numerous other important émigrés who passed through our doors were: The diminutive Boris Souvarine, a founder of the French Communist Party (this was how we learned history firsthand) who would produce the unsurpassed book Stalin...
...Farben of Germany and Standard Oil of New Jersey...
...In her extraordinary memoir Anna Larina, his widow, who spent years in the camps, claimed the "Letter" was used by the secret police to frame Bukharin...
...The New Leader was located in the Rand School of Social Science, on 15th Street between Fifth Avenue and Union Square, where scores of recently arrived immigrants were acculturated...
...We will bare our breasts and stop them...
...Thursday morning at the shop on Canal Street where we printed, again nothing came...
...Unfortunately, this was protected by patents held jointly by I.G...
...Wendell L. Willkie, the 1940 Republican Presidential nominee, and Eleanor Roosevelt asked Stalin directly about the pair's whereabouts...
...Mineral resources were an essential part of the military buildup...
...A dour autodidact, he occupied a desk in the corner of the large editorial room, wore a green eyeshade, and rarely uttered a word...
...In 19401 joined the two-man staff as a writer, and a little over a year later, at age 22, assumed the title of managing editor—a post I held for three years...
...Apparently the person who stood up was the head of the Polish Jewish Bund, Henryk Erlich, also a short man with a spade beard like Abramovitch's...
...In the other, James Carey, the secretarytreasurer of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, made some remarks on lagging wages...
...But Ralph had gone one better, adding the de, which meant of, of Toledo...
...Across the top of the page, the headline blared: "Reuther, Carey, Lead Attack On Administration's Wage Policies...
...I asked...
...On the literary side there was Partisan Review, edited by William Phillips and Philip Rahv, with a remarkable roster of writers...
...In literary criticism, Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson and Alfred Kazin...
...The "Old Bolshevik" was Bukharin, the Party theoretician and onetime editor of Pravda...
...When the ghetto was leveled, Ziegelboim committed suicide in London, stating that he had no right to live after his comrades had been killed...
...It was little read outside of Socialist circles— though Levitas would leave copies on the subway trains as he rode home to Brooklyn each evening...
...Speaking in Cincinnati, James Carey...
...After Kempton returned from Army service in Southeast Asia, he became a prominent Post columnist...
...And there it remained...
...He subsequently became educational director of the Rand School...
...Oneal wrote the editorials and edited the inside pages...
...The NL's major involvement, however, was with Levitas' Russian Menshevik cohort...
...Neither, however, will go into the dustbin of history...
...Trotsky, who was in the chair, jangled his bell and shouted: "Letthemgo...
...They were largely saved by Frank Bohn, a brother of Doc's who was a representative of the American Federation of Labor...
...Then Levitas brought in Ralph de Toledano, a handsome oliveskinned young poet and former Communist...
...Why at this time...' Yes, why at this time...
...The most heart-rending affair during my years at The New Leader was the Henryk Erlich and Viktor Alter case...
...I quickly wrote a signed piece that began: "It was evident this week that the trade union movement was becoming uneasy with the Administration's wage policies...
...Farben and Standard Oil, and the American company had agreed with its German partners not to use the patents in wartime...
...On the fourth floor, across the hall from its editorial office, the NL had a separate business office, where Sol Levitas occupied the business manager's partitioned cubicle before moving, years afterward, to a third room of his own down the hall...
...The friend began to question me on details andmy sources, sayingthey overstated the relationship...
...Letthemgo...
...A moving tribute to Ziegelboim, which we joined, was written by Alfred Kazin in the New Republic...
...he replied...
...Reed was not there, he did not know Russian well, and he got the story the next day from a newspaper source...
...News had arrived that the Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace...
...In art criticism, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg...
...The SDF and The New Leader organized meetings to arouse public support, which were disrupted by the American Communists...
...Bohn's home was a farm in Wilmington, Delaware, and he commuted to Manhattan for the midweek...
...I continued to do so during the next two years, while a graduate student at Columbia University...
...They were the leaders of the Polish Jewish Bund, the largest organization of the 3.5 million Jews in prewar Poland (the Zionists were a small minority...
...But full perception is sometimes precipitated by a word, and it was only when the term Holocaust was coined years afterward that the full extent of what had happened was widely recognized...
...Frantically, I dove into my briefcase and came up with two disparate clippings...
...The Rand School (later Meyer London) Library took up the entire front of the second floor...
...Ralph's fami ly called itself Toledano...
...Yes," he answered, "who are you...
...But faute de mieux (as one might say with conceit), I knew Socialist history, I was a member of "the party," and I kept putting out the paper...
...Together with Professor Gaetano Salvemini of Harvard, Zevi waged a battle against Generoso Pope, publisher of the American Italian language newspaper Il Progresso and a supporter of Mussolini, for control of the Office of War Information's Italian broadcasts...
...This was refused on the grounds that it was considered too risky...
...On Friday I received congratulations from Levitas and others for the achievement...
...The public Truman Committee hearings served that purpose...
...It recounted the Politburo upheavals after the murder in Leningrad of the popular Sergei M. Kirov, considered a possible rival to Stalin (whom he had outpolled at a Party Congress in 1934), and intimated that Stalin organized the killing...
...With the partition of Poland following the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, Erlich and Alter disappeared into the Russian territory...
...Based on our discussion, I left space for a double banner headline and a lead column of text...
...I would phone him Monday mornings, discuss what he might cover, and leave space open for him...
...Didn't Norman tell you...
...Later, though, I was coeditor with Abramovitch of the periodical Modem Review) Abramovitch was famous for one of the landmark episodes of revolutionary history...
...Speaking in Detroit, Walter Reuther...
...Shaplen loved to let himself go...
...There has long been an argument about which of the two publications was the more important voice (Commentary was not begun until late 1945...
...Saturday morning I picked up a copy of the Daily Worker and saw that the previous evening Earl Browder, the Communist Party leader, had made my article the occasion of a bitter attack on us...
...We carried many articles on this tussle, as well as similar infighting regarding other language services...
...Senator Harry S. Truman (D.-Mo...
...The New Leader at that time was a standard size newspaper with a five-column format...
...As the staff scribbler, I would frequently write about 5,000 words a week, stuffing the articles with cribs from different books I had on hand...
...Little did she know that, as Solzhenitsyn would write, these vans were transporting prisoners...
...That was the measure of his conceit, which he flaunted endlessly...
...Once he had the British Labor Party "meeting at Whitsuntide, on the other side of London...
...A deeply anguishing event was the brutally suppressed 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising...
...And the brilliant young Italian architectural historian Bruno Zevi, head of Giustìzia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty...
...The third transforming development at The New Leader in the 1940s was a focus on Washington and on economic policy...
...Why at this time, when a second front is necessary, does the New Leader seek to block that necessary effort to help the valiant Soviet peoples who are carrying the burden of the War...
...We used the term churban, the Yiddish word for burning...
...In the 1940s, the anti-Stalinist Left became a majorpresence in American intellectual life...
...Abramovitch, Reed reports, stood up and cried out: "We will go, we will go...
...The first was the influx of a large number of noted intellectuals who had moved out of the Trotskyist orbit...
...But there were rubber cartels, tin cartels, zinc cartels, copper cartels— all beyond U.S...
...He was a former leader of the Austrian Communist Party and author of The Dictatorship of the Lie, called by Edmund Wilson the best book on the Russian leadership...
...Mary McCarthy was its theater critic...
...He had secretly met with Nicolaevsky in Paris and disclosed the Politburo discussions...
...I am the vice president of the Standard Oil subsidiary jointly holding the patents...
...In poetry, Delmore Schwartz and Karl Shapiro...
...Our most widely noticed articles happened to be a series written by me linking I.G...
...The paper had a small circulation of about 5,000 copies in 1940...
...And there were those I noted earlier among "the intellectuals in retreat...
...The left-wing "Militants," headed by Thomas, denounced Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal as "the corporate State" and won over 60 per cent of the national membership...
...Around 1920 an eloquent Presbyterian minister, Norman Thomas, entered the ASP and quickly became not only its spokesman but the editor of a party daily, the Leader...
...We did, quite often...
...As The New Leader's image changed, its circulation and public notice increased...
...In one, I noticed that Walter Reuther, President of the United Auto Workers, had voiced some criticism of the War Labor Board...
...Lerner continued to write for The New Leader on how to finance the War and other economic issues...
...I asked him what happened...
...Roosevelt, on her return home, reported that there was probably little hunger in Moscow, because all through the night she saw large black vans crisscrossing the city, bearing the words Chorny Gleb (Black Bread...
...Wednesday evening nothing came from Allen, nor could I locate him in Washington...
...He also wrote the Introduction to Larina's poignant memoir...
...It dealt with the necessary role of government in managing the business cycle, and was the first journalistic exposition of Keynsian economics...
...Hook had arranged for him to give a series of lectures after he was barred from a new post at City College by Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia, for alleged past "sexual misconduct...
...After a few weeks they threw him out...
...on the lobby level there was a bookstore and an auditorium in the rear, featuring murals by Willy Pogâny...
...Riesel was elevated to managing editor, but within seven months he was lured away by the New York Post to become its labor editor...
...At my suggestion he hired as his leg man Murray Kempten, a close friend and occasional NL contributor who had come to New York from Baltimore...
...It was named for Carrie Rand, a wealthy benefactress married to the Socialist Gospel Evangelist George D. Herron...
...All were executed or died in prison...
...In Spain, as in Italy, when Jews were forced to take family names (instead of just "the son of"), they often chose place names, à la the Italian émigrés Max Ascoli or Paolo Milano...
...I could only sputter, "I am a friend of Abba Lerner...
...Meanwhile, in reorganizing the paper, I expanded the book review section to attract young contemporary writers such as Isaac Rosenfeld and Saul Bellow...
...The assistant editor was Victor Riesel, son of an International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) official, who was nominally going to City College at night...
...He was himself about 70, his oldest brother had fought in the American Civil War, and a grandfather had served against Napoleon...
...Happily, we locked up the pages and the paper went to press...
...Whenever Levitas and I quarreled, he called me a "Danist...
...I was assigned one day to bring Russell from his hotel to the Rand School...
...Both men were imprisoned...
...When that collapsed, it was replaced in 1924 by The New Leader, a weekly, under Oneal's stewardship...
...In 1983, Sidney Hook argued in a letter to the New York Times that since the politics was more important, The New Leader was central in the formation of the anti-Stalinist Left...
...Under the sly name of Dick Reynard he also did a column dealing with foreign affairs...
...Those were the days...
...One final episode, which taught me more about conspiracy theory than any other event in my life up to that time...
...That a New York Jewish boy didn't know of Whitsun may not be surprising, but the genius was the phrase "on the other side of London...
...Perhaps Beria did not like ballet, said the New York Times mockingly...
...Rather than sit, they stood throughout the lectures...
...its vaulted ceilings, mezzanine and cathedral windows extended through the third floor...
...A further retreat: During the Vietnam War the Schachtman group publicly supported the U.S.-backed Ngo Dinh Diem regime, because Ho Chi Minh in the North had murdered Trotskyists and Vietnam was a war against Stalinism...
...I wrote a memorandum about the lunch that I shared with Ferdinand Lundberg, a muckraking journalist and longtime NL contributor, who was following up on these matters...
...I received a call from Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, congratulating me on the series...
...IN the 1940s three developments transformed The New Leader, bringing it to national attention...
...In the meantime, I kept putting out the weekly paper...
...In Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World, the iconic book of the period (and in the movie version, Reds, with Warren Beatty), he gives a vivid picture of the Petrograd Soviet's turbulent meeting...
...The interesting thing is that all the writers I have named above, with the exception of Edmund Wilson, wrote both for The New Leader and Partisan Review, though the literary side got more notice, especially in the universities...
...Perhaps...
...Nothing fazed Riesel...
...This is a question we can best leave to future historians...
...meaning of Toledo...
...Each is an enduring presence in American intellectual life...
...Thus was the SDF formed, with the support of ILGWU President David Dubinsky...
...A few years later, Burnham testified for the government when the Schachtman group was put on the Justice Department's "subversive" list...
...On a Monday morning I spoke as usual to Allen in Washington...
...the inside pages were crammed with articles by Social Democratic Federation (SDF) members on topics of forgettable interest, and pieces lifted from Socialist publications abroad...
...We acquired a Washington columnist, Will Allen, who also wrote for Justice, the ILGWU newspaper, and therefore used the pen name Jonathan Stout in the NL...
...A tragic byproduct of the Italian dispute was the murder in 1943 of the anarcho-syndicalist Carlo Tresca, a member of the broadcast board, as he walked out of the Rand School...
...One evening, during the intermission at a ballet performance I was attending, I saw a tall man striding up the aisle...
...My sources...
...control...
...Formed by the brothers Nello and Carlo Roselli, both murdered by Benito Mussolini, the movement described itself as "post-fascist"—going beyond the traditional categories of politics...
...Another noteworthy NL series, by Abba P. Lerner, who had come from the London School of Economics, was entitled "The Economic Steering Wheel...
...On the political side there was The New Leader...
...I have been asked, "Why didn't you write about the Holocaust...
...Go ask Will Allen...
...They were charged with giving up their revolutionary ardor and becoming deradicalized...
...It was once observed that secret service chief Lavrenti P. Beria was missing when the Bolshevik leadership was present at a Bolshoi ballet...
...The New Leader now closes after 82 years...
...He did a weekly piece...
...Known more for its title than its contents, the work argued that there was no essential difference between the American New Deal, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, since all were a new kind of "social formation," and that World War II was the first round of the war among the managerial elites who ruled each society...
...The rightwing was led by Raphael Abramovitch (family name Rein), whose son, journalist Mark Rein, was killed in Spain by the NKVD, the Russian secret police...
...There wouldbe an irony in this...
...An assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan from 1907 to 1910, Bohn had been sacked for being a Socialist...
...In April 1940 Oneal, long at loggerheads with Levitas over the NL's direction, quit...
...The only problem is that this is not true...
...But The New Leader was the first to unveil the existence of these camps, just as it would be the first to demonstrate that the massacre of 4,250 Polish officers in the Katyn forest was the work of the Russians, not the Nazis, as Stalin had claimed...
...I checked with a few friends, because I had reason to suspect the envelopes had come from British Intelligence...
...Burnham, a philosophy professor at New York University and close associate of Hook, became famous a few years later for his book The Managerial Revolution...
...There were (as always) two factions...
...When the State of Israel was reborn, he was invited by the new Labor government to advise on economic policy...
...In fiction, there were John Dos Passos and James T. Farrell (a highly vocal combatant in the sectarian quarrels...
...The articles created a stir in Washington...
...He helped shape the ideological line, and pulled in new contributors like Bertrand Russell...
...We did have some playful moments...
...Bereft, Levitas recruited a courtly Editorial Board member, William E. ("Doc") Bohn, as editor...
...Nicolaevsky and Dallin's more important undertaking, though, was identifying the forced labor camps in the Soviet Union, beginning with the useless project of the White Sea Canal...
...Good man," he said, moving on...
...Stalin lied...
...Bukharin was featured in the second Moscow trial, and executed...
...Marked by their bizarre confessions, the trials targeted Grigory Y. Zinoviev, Lev B. Kamenev, Nikolai I. Bukharin, Karl B. Radek, and virtually every original leader of the Revolution...
...That, we said, is why we singled him out...
...They will go into the dustbin of history...
...Taking Levitas' wiles in hand, I put my name on the masthead as managing editor...
...Partisan Review closed down in 2003, after a 67-year run...
...Riesel and I turned out the front page news stories, often using pseudonyms to vary the "staff...
...The second development was the flow of European Socialists who came to the United States after the fall of France in May 1940...
...How do you know...
...Some years after the War, a memoir by H. Montgomery Hyde revealed that British Intelligence had unmarked offices in Rockefeller Center, one of whose tasks was to reveal secret ties of American firms with Germany before the War...
...I told them to cut wages," he said...
...A short, dancing, finger-snapping man, he wrote a popular column called "Heard on the Left" that was full of gossip items and snippets of anti-Communist jibes...
...The burly French Socialist anthropologist Jacques Soustelle, on his way to organize an intelligence service in Mexico, who later led the French colonialists in Algeria and was Charles de Gaulle's most vocal opponent...
...Nicolaevsky, a bear of a man, had been with the MarxEngels Institute in Moscow and went on to be the Paris director of the Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, the main depository of European Socialist archives...
...The Bund was the most forceful agent opposing their treatment and seeking full equality for Polish Jews...
...One reason was that Levitas had privately promised Ralph he would become the managing editor...
...We shall never know, because he had just been executed...
...The War Production Board tried mightily to gain access to synthetic substitutes, particularly synthetic rubber...
...But this has been disavowed by the American scholar Stephen F. Cohen, author of the authoritative Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution...
...Their move drew a blistering attack by Max Schachtman and James Burnham in the Trotskyist magazine the New International, entitled "Intellectuals in Retreat...
...The major intellectual figure at The New Leader was now Sidney Hook...
...It was discovered later that Erlich committed suicide after being tortured, and Alter was shot to death...
...One of the Europeans who fled to these shores, Willi Schlamm, became our military analyst...
...Abramovitch contributed regularly to The New Leader, as did two senior members of his faction, Boris I. Nicolaevsky and David J. Dallin...
...On one occasion he wrote a denunciation of the United Mine Workers' leader, John L. Lewis, calling him "Herostratus Lewis...
...Thus the misportrayals of history...
...James Oneal, the founding editor and author ?? The Workers in American History, was still on hand when I arrived...
...Although The New Leader technically became the "organ" (as was quaintly said) of the SDF, it would increasingly go its own way...
...The three of us had lunch the following week...
...Why at this time," he thundered, "do the New Leader and the Social Democrats open an attack on the Administration...
...He insisted that neither he nor the government knew, because of the vast disorganization of the country...
...When Russia became our ally after it was invaded by Germany on June 22, 1941, the ILGWU's Dubinsky, himself a former Bundist, sought President Roosevelt's help in finding the two men...
...Melvin J. Lasky (who had come on board after de Toledano went into the Army) and I wrote many joint essays on the plight of the Jews, chiding by name Herbert Morrison, a key Labor Party Cabinet member— to the dismay of Levitas, who argued that Morrison was a strong supporter of The New Leader...
...But Will Allen could not be found...
...The Moscow Trials in 1935-36 were presumably prompted by Kirov's death...
...A singular work by Nicolaevsky was his "Letter of an Old Bolshevik," published by the Rand School Press as a 62page pamphlet...
...The building had a cafeteria in the basement...
...The Bund leaders sent Shmuel Ziegelboim to London to plead with the British to bomb the Germans...
...His efforts, regrettably, have received scant attention compared with the belated praise of Varian Fry, a frequent NL contributor, for rescuing famous writers, painters and poets...
...The official Socialist Party paper during World War I, the Call, failed in the wake of a 1918-19 splitthat saw one faction hive off to form the Communist Party under John Reed...
...It was important for such facts to be revealed now, rather than after the War, he said, adding that he had a friend who wanted to give me more material...
...The material came in "over the transom," in several unmarked large envelopes delivered by mail...
...Surprised at my own cheekiness, I blurted out, "Excuse me sir, aren't you John Maynard Keynes...
...The right-wing "Old Guard," led by Louis Waldman, came away with the rest of the membership and most of the party's important institutions...
...After the War, he returned to Germany and emerged as a Right-wing spokesman...
...chairman of the Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, scheduled hearings to explore the evidence...
...We were now "going to bed" on Thursday afternoons...
...Its front page stories were largely house written...
...In those days Jewish students at the universities were told to sit on "ghetto benches" during lectures...
...I was puzzled by his name...
...Interestingly, the turmoil in those circles was reflected in The New Leader's name...
...This did not receive widespread recognition until Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn used the term Gitlag to label the whole system...
...At its 1936 convention the ASP split again...
...On the last page we introduced two new regular columnists: the caustic novelist Charles Yale Harrison, and William Henry Chamberlin, the former Christian Science Monitor Moscow correspondent whose magisterial account of the Russian Revolution remained unsurpassed...
...I realized that, fearing a public hearing, he was trying to discredit or downplay the articles in advance...
...The left-wing Mensheviks were headed by Feyedor Dan, author of the Bauer-Dan-Zymromski thesis at the Second International in 1938, which argued that the Socialist parties should not enter "bourgeois" governments...
...Nicolaevsky was a foremost practitioner (notably in the NL's pages) of Kremlinology, the arcane art of discerning the relationships to power from who stood next to whom when the Politburo attended ceremonial displays at public parades...
...A lovely man, he gave me a vivid sense of the compressions of history...
...Levitas also engaged Joseph Shaplen, a Russian-born labor reporter for the New York Times, to write the unsigned editorials...
...He wrote several outstanding books on Marx, as well as a book on the fascinating figure Azeff the Spy, who was simultaneously the leader of a social revolutionary terrorist group and an agent of the Tsarist secret police...
...Except for the Duke University Library, repository of the American Socialist Party (ASP) papers, it held the largest Socialist collection in the United States, including the papers of Eugene V Debs, the party's titular head and recurrent Presidential candidate...
...This is now the Tamiment Institute Library at New York University...
Vol. 89 • January 2006 • No. 1
