UNSWERVING DEMOCRAT
Filler, Louis
Unswerving Democrat The Democratic Man: selected writings of eduard c. lindeman. edited by Robert Gessner. Beacon Press. 390 pp. $5. Reviewed by Louis Filler IWOULD like to think this a...
...Lindeman shunned the phonier aspects of "group dynamics...
...He also maintained a life-long interest in the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson...
...But Lindeman's career was sound and is likely to merit remembrance, if not this year, then the next...
...His career was more swiftly under way when he acquired a professorship in sociology at the North Carolina College for Women, in Greensboro, and there made a principal stand for his right to respect Negroes...
...Life paid him fully and even impressively, as with his directorship of the Department for Community Organization for Leisure, a very substantial WPA enterprise...
...Reviewed by Louis Filler IWOULD like to think this a difficult book to review, because I have regard for Lindeman and believe the banal words of appreciation his book of views is almost certain to attract will not do him justice...
...The point is that many of those who didn't sometimes ended in worse predicaments than naivete...
...There he joined the New York School for Social Work, became a contributing editor to the New Republic, and developed interests which ranged from pioneer work in recreation and adult education to responsible affiliation with the National Child Labor Committee and the American Civil Liberties Union...
...Lindeman had a passion for democratic decision, and a keen sense of the kind of bogs it could encounter...
...His career in the crucial 1910's is, to me, a fascinating study in transitions...
...And he did not hesitate to advocate the building and developing of whole people...
...He worked his way painfully through what was then the Michigan Agricultural College, in Lansing...
...This cost him threats of bodily harm, and, finally, his job...
...His own writings, brilliantly broken down and organized by his editor, orchestrate his impulses of aspiration and practice in what is at least an individual composition...
...At least one person recalls that a class he taught during the 1930's thought him well-meaning but a bit dull and old-fashioned...
...I am afraid that Gessner does not fully appreciate that Lindeman picked his "naive" democracy out of the very air of the pre-World War I period...
...They are, often, merely pieces in the 'body politic, rather than pivotal, challenging, controversial elements...
...He was a progressive educator who did not think he had discovered a substitute for thought and results...
...But his career did not suffer in any wise because he was unpopular with the Chicago Tribune...
...Lindeman kept his thoughts open-ended, caring "as little for the cult of the radical as for the cult of the reformer," and much concerned for intellectual integrity and what he called "dynamic logic...
...He was the son of a "stolid, God-fearing" sheepherder, with whom a Danish noblewoman fell in love...
...Lindeman was a friend and admirer of John Dewey...
...Lindeman began with a concern for farmers and the parcel post, the 4-H clubs and the "Y" and the War Camp Community Service...
...Gessner's memoir of Lindeman is brief but pregnant...
...He served it from 1935 to 1938, and then resigned: a maverick critic of New Deal policies of the time, though he continued to admire Roosevelt's qualities as President...
...It reminds us of Lindeman's harsh beginnings...
...Lindeman wrote on many subjects: Spain, recreation, atomic warfare, ethics, the church, human nature in Russia (which he doubted had reached the millenium), Al Smith, the proper use of aged people as a human resource, humor (which he esteemed as precious) and on and on: all subjects to interest whole individuals...
...It is good to have them drawn together, and sensitively organized and presented...
...Eduard's rough, orphaned youth and late education_ he could scarcely read or write until he was about twenty—is, in its way, a modern American saga...
...He graduated, a campus leader and a radical, in 1911, at the age of twenty-six...
...The numerous—indeed, astonishingly numerous—organizations which he helped organize, develop, lead, and for which he wrote prolifically continue, many of them, to do their work, sometimes less sensationally, less creatively, less strategically than in the 1910's and 1920's...
...For the most part, Lindeman was not a storm-center, or a leader in the ultimate sense of the word...
...And to have Lindeman's unswerving democratic thoughts and operations easily praised and paraphrased, and, I am sure, forgotten, like last year's sermons, seems to me to raise the question of just what there was to them...
...His social work perspectives did not include the "putting over" of programs on anybody or any community...
...All this he capped with a mature concern for group work, community discussion, and the nature of communication...
...So I believe...
...This does him credit, as well as qualifies his achievement and dimensions...
...Here and there he annoyed a person or community, and was called an atheist or communist...
...as a result of such exploitation, he thought, "nothing is created which enables the communty to make known its real needs, and no continuing, evolving organization results...
...Read his fourteen reasons why committees are "unfruitful and unhappy...
...The elder Lindeman escaped from a German war prison and came with his wife to a life of poverty in rural Michigan...
...He went north...
...I emphasize "mature...
...He urged statesmanship in social work, and its evolution toward science...
...Democracy is difficult, complicated, often frustrating and worse...
...Answering "a thin, wiry man with a rasping voice" who demanded to know where chemists would be if, as Lindeman asked, they should participate in politics, he said: "I think I know where chemists will be if they do not . . . they will be under the yoke of political dictators...
Vol. 20 • October 1956 • No. 10
