DEATHS IN THE FAMILY
MEMO from the Editor Deaths in the Family Twice in recent weeks I've had the unsettling experience of receiving in the mail the final issue of a favorite publication. One arrived as I was sitting...
...There was a time when it had a large staff, correspondents around the country and even abroad, its own printing plant...
...And some were introduced to The Progressive: It gave me more pleasure to be quoted in Manas than in The New York Times...
...Lately, it has been issued only seventeen times a year as a thin tabloid...
...In the early 1930s, Arthur Weinberg was president of the Industrial Workers of the World, and he never abandoned his youthful radicalism...
...His "Who's on First...
...And finally even that became too great a burden...
...Box 32112, Los Angeles, CA 90032...
...Then the railroad unions fell on hard times, and so did Labor...
...The other came early in January: a remarkable weekly called Manas, with the front-page statement, "Today we have come to the end of our line—we can't go on, can't publish any more...
...the old issues are in no way dated...
...The editors say, in a story about its demise in the final issue, "From beginning to end, Labor had only one true purpose: to serve as an impassioned, biased, informed, and articulate voice for the men and women who work on the railroads...
...column is on Page 10...
...Preserving to the last its deliberately anonymous style—'''Manas wishes to present ideas and viewpoints, not personalities"—the final issue explained, "We have to stop because we have run out of energy...
...He wrote many of his works—including the 1980 biography, Clarence Darrow: A Sentimental Rebel—in collaboration with his wife Lila, and at the time of his death they were working on a book about the women who founded Chicago's Hull House...
...Labor was the better-known of the two...
...While Labor kept an eye on the railroad companies and the Government—and, incidentally, provided Franklin D. Roosevelt with the name of his New Deal—Manas dispensed the wisdom of the ages...
...This is how the editor, Henry Geiger, described his paper in each weekly issue: "Manas is a journal of independent inquiry, concerned with the study of the principles which move world society on its present course, and with the search for contrasting principles that may be capable of supporting intelligent idealism under the conditions of life in the Twentieth Century...
...If you missed out on it while it was alive, you may still be able to do some catching up...
...The last editor, Richard J. Calisteri, who signed himself "editor, trade unionist, citizen," wrote in the final issue, "We must return to the traditions of the labor movement, traditions based on the human condition and the salvation of our skills and craftsmanship...
...When railroads and railroad unions were at their peak strength, Labor went into some 900,000 homes every week...
...Doing a weekly for as long as we have been doing it takes a lot of energy and we are too tired and too old to go on...
...We're pleased to welcome Nat Hentoffback to The Progressive after an absence of almost three years...
...Throughout his life, he called himself a "philosophical anarchist...
...Over its forty-one-year lifespan, readers fortunate enough to have come across Manas were introduced to new perspectives on literature and life, on education and child-rearing—on almost anything that impinges on the human condition...
...Manas says it has "a fairly good inventory of back issues...
...It was an anachronism—a revival of Nineteenth Century personal journalism in the age of mass communication...
...That's a fair statement, and Labor did its job...
...Write to the Manas Publishing Company, P.O...
...The author of The First Freedom and many other books will be writing about First Amendment matters four times a year, beginning with this issue...
...Manas was an altogether different kind of publication...
...Arthur Weinberg, the Chicago social historian and biographer of Clarence Darrow, died late in January at the age of seventy-three...
...Manas is concerned, therefore, with philosophy and with practical psychology, in as direct and simple a manner as its editors and contributors can write...
...One arrived as I was sitting down to write this Memo: Labor, the national newspaper of railroad workers, with a front-page headline announcing, Labor dead at 70...
...He was a frequent contributor to The Progressive—most recently of a review of a new biography of "Big Bill" Haywood last October...
...It was a joint venture of the railroad unions—fifteen of them at the beginning in 1919, eleven at the end—and a case can be made that it was the best union paper ever published in the United States...
Vol. 53 • March 1989 • No. 3
