A SUPERFICIAL REPORT BY STOLBERG
Coleman, Mcalister
A Superficial Report By Stolberg TAILOR'S PROGRESS, by Benjamin Stolberg. Doubleday, Doran and Company. $2.75. Reviewed by McAlister Coleman WHEN he is at his best, Ben Stolberg can write rings...
...However, there is more good stuff in Dubinsky than Stolberg has discovered...
...The hierarchy of the International are not so smart as the author makes them out...
...Reviewed by McAlister Coleman WHEN he is at his best, Ben Stolberg can write rings around any other labor reporter now practicing the highly specialized profession of telling the public what the American workers and their organizations are all about...
...There it is, the dragging in of "dialectic" to give an air of profundity to a palpable platitude, the silly flag-waving of those who wish it had been 800 rather than 44 years and the Mayflower rather than the big steamships at the turn of the century to which the present business-minded leadership of the union might refer...
...The book is rather a New Yorker profile sort of thing, struttingly hard-boiled, retailing the chit-chat of the inner group of officials with an irritating air of omniscience...
...On the other hand it is deplorable that this march should be so continually interrupted by parades from the side-streets bearing the placards of Stolberg's pet hates...
...And where will Ben Stolberg be then, poor thing...
...The author's tactic of inflating Dubinsky by deflating Sidney Hillman is a surprising exhibit of peevish infantilism by one supposedly so "realistic...
...It is also superficial and so suffused with the author's prides, prejudices, and phobias as to make it little more than an extended gossip column...
...You are in a struggle, boys and girls, that will take all the patience, wisdom, and abundant courage of the devoted men and women who founded your union...
...Stolberg can take a complicated union situation to pieces, put it together again, and start it marching in print like nobody's business...
...Bringing up the rear are the Communists who either amount to enough to gum up the whole show or nothing at all, according to the author's moods...
...For this every plodder through the gloomy morasses of the bulk of labor literature should be grateful...
...Here is no history of an organization, born in the darkness of city ghettos, come to stature after almost incredible struggle, turning its official back today, in its attempt to overcome its immigrant complex, upon the ideals which made it great...
...I would say to a youngster taking up Tailor's Prog* ress, "Watch your step, brother...
...To be sure the book only inferentially bears the imprimatur of the union, but David Dubinsky, likable President of the International, and his lieutenants took down their hair when Stolberg was around, with the result that unspoiled, unsophisticated young people might well believe after reading this book that the union is no more than a tightly-held business organization whose function it is to collect dues from the members and contracts from the bosses on the ground that the union officials will protect one group from the other—a conception of trade unionism only a step higher than that held by Westbrook Pegler...
...And don't let any side-liner, no matter how brilliant, tell you otherwise...
...It would be interesting to know what a rank and file member of the union would make of this book...
...This current practice of thumbing rides on the passing band-wagons of capitalism will get the tailors and the rest nowhere except into the ditch of a new depression...
...Whereas Debs, in the Stolbergian version, was no more than a kind-hearted but confused half-wit who never could get it through his head how to rise from the rank and file to the status of dress clothes at the White House and swanky luncheons at Longchamps...
...So though the hits and misses in this hit and run evaluation of men and events are consistently flashy, the misses consistently...
...Otherwise they might have thought of the effect upon their impressionable youngsters of a book which shows officialdom bowing down before the altars of success...
...This time he makes the oft-told story of the International Ladies Garments Workers Union march to the crack of his wit...
...Settlement workers, devoted underdog fighters like Walter Weyl and Paul Kellogg and the middle-class pioneers in such organizations as the highly effective Women's Trade Union League, are in this cross-town parade labelled "uplifters," "sentimentalists...
...IT IS A minor disaster and at the same time a significant comment on the state of the I. L. G. W. U. today that this book should appear at such a critical period...
...Then come the Socialists who "don'^ amount to much" and whose influence in the labor movement is distinctly "over...
...IHAVE SAID the book marches, and so it does...
...The publicity men for the bosses should have a time for themselves with Tailor's Progress even as they had a time with Stolberg's articles in the Saturday Evening Post...
...don't believe it all, sister...
...Labor scenes are shifting fast these days and it is quite possible that the two leaders of the needle-workers may get together in the manner of two opposing lawyers outside the courtroom doors...
...outnumber the hits...
...Now the late Sam Gompers, the heavy-handed, tired old man who led his people into the wasteland of business unionism which has held up the progress of tailors and the rest of the organized movement to this day, turns out to have had a "rich and fascinating personality"—he was about as fascinating as a steam-shovel to anyone who really knew him...
...There is such a thing as the simple idealism of simple working people...
...What he would make, for example, of the last sentence which is Stolberg at his worst...
...After stating the obvious fact that it has been the function of the International to absorb wave after wave of immigrant workers, the author concludes: "The dialectic of this process has been the Americanization of America for three centuries...
...He can lighten the drab details of labor politics with a sultry flash like the "heat lightning" of a summer's dusk, remote and somewhat sinister and signifying nothing much but that there is a storm around and everyone is feeling nasty...
...The smarty-pants, the compromisers, the opportunists, and the would-be realists—these are and always have been the dregs of the labor movement, no matter how much to the tdp they may seem to rise...
...The book has the merit of being readable and witty, two rare qualities in labor journalism...
Vol. 8 • September 1944 • No. 37
