The Last Word
Rothschild, Matthew
THE LAST WORD Matthew Rothschild A View from the Pumps My Uncle Rock runs a gas station, which is not the career his father, a successful Chicago lawyer, or his mother, a housewife with a yen for...
...Though bitter at the shutdown, Rock was ready to move on...
...His views on economic issues would please Ronald Reagan...
...My uncle, having saved some money over the years, pitched in, and they became joint owners of the small Exxon station you see just as you approach the town of abandoned textile mills...
...Navy...
...But I can't shake a small, nagging doubt: Suppose he's right...
...He preferred drinking with townies in neighboring North Adams, playing on a semi-pro baseball squad under an assumed name, and helping organize the textile workers at the local mills...
...I disagree, and I've argued the point with Uncle Rock...
...on the other, the decent, victimized working people whom he knew and trusted...
...But this doesn't bother Rock, who has always bucked the straps of social expectation, pursuing his own satisfactions rather than plodding after riches, fame, or power...
...decision to drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
...He calls us "professional do-gooders" and distrusts our motives, claiming that we strut, puff, and pose as much or more than our adversaries on the Right...
...After the war, Uncle Rock and Aunt Mary settled in Chicago, where he took on the first job available, as a traveling sales clerk for a downtown clothing store...
...Rock didn't tolerate Williams, and the college simply couldn't get a handle on him...
...In his youth, Rock cut an imposing figure...
...His thesis is at odds with all of my progressive notions...
...For twenty years, he worked at the same store, and then the business went bankrupt...
...Again, the issue seemed simple to him: Hitler was the devil incarnate, so it was our duty to smash the Nazis...
...He has no second thoughts, no regrets about the U.S...
...Matthew Rothschild is an associate editor of The Progressive...
...He would have no truck with his fellow students—the intellectuals, the smug heirs, and those with clawing ambitions...
...This is no small defect in Rock's book, for he argues that society's ills are rooted not in the structures of society but in the comportment of its citizens: Not capitalism, not patriarchy, not the arms race, but "pomposity and mendacity" will be the ruin of us all...
...They married, just months before the United States entered World War II...
...Rock served on a destroyer in the Pacific, working his way up to the rank of commander...
...Mary's brother, a mechanic at a filling station in North Adams, wanted to buy a share of the business...
...Rock was among the first to enlist in the U.S...
...For Rock, the lines were clearly drawn: On one side were the arrogant, callous mill owners...
...He thinks unions have become flabby, and their officers big-headed...
...It was late in the 1930s, and the CIO was making a breakthrough not only in the coal mines, steel plants, and auto factories of the industrial heartland, but also in the textile mills that speckled New England...
...On the picket lines and at union meetings, Rock got to know Mary, a beautiful, spirited young woman whose family had toiled for generations in the mills...
...He saw it simply as a way to earn a living, resenting it only because it took him away from his wife and two daughters and left him with less time for reading, golfing, and coaching a boys' baseball team...
...In some obvious ways, Rock is no longer the agitator he once was...
...THE LAST WORD Matthew Rothschild A View from the Pumps My Uncle Rock runs a gas station, which is not the career his father, a successful Chicago lawyer, or his mother, a housewife with a yen for culture, had reserved for him...
...No ideologue, he joined the unionizing efforts out of deep-seated sympathy for what Marxists—but never Rock-called "the exploited class...
...The rank and file now enjoy, he believes, the rights and wages he had fought for almost a half-century ago...
...he opposes the graduated income tax and professes faith in the profit motive...
...Aunt Mary longed to return to North Adams, and now that DAVID JOHNSON their two daughters were on their own, it was a good time to pack up and head East...
...And Uncle Rock has little patience for radical intellectuals and social activists...
...He was bright, too, and after attending New Trier High School, the Chicago suburbs' version of Exeter, he went on to Williams College—a small, Western Massachusetts finishing school for the sons of the upper class...
...Handsome and muscular, he also was a bit gruff, which accounts for his peculiar nickname, an endearing diminutive for Robert...
Vol. 47 • September 1983 • No. 9
