Left Out
Schlesinger, Arthur Jr.
on political books Left Out Harold Laski, the leftist British intellectual, knew Churchill, advised FDR, and dazzled Oliver Wendell Holmes. So why has posterity forgotten him? BY ARTHUR...
...The Kramnick-Sheerman book catalogues a number of unresolved contradictions...
...and the philosopher Morris Cohen...
...He loved America and fiercely criticized it...
...I used to hear him lecture at Ford Hall Forum in Boston...
...In Britain, he regularly led the polls in the vote for the Labour Party's National Executive...
...Nor can one swallow his claims of intimacy with world figures from Woodrow Wilson to Joseph Stalin...
...He was asked what he thought had been the point of no return...
...Laski's impact, while it lasted, was almost as great on America as on Britain...
...He would write to Holmes that he had recently spent a day with the German medievalist von Below...
...for he was basically a kind and good man, especially generous to questing Asian, African, and American students...
...BY ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR...
...Laski looked stricken...
...almost as important as attacking the privileged was dining with them...
...He saw Soviet Russia as the harbinger of a new civilization, and its crimes broke his heart...
...As his devoted wife Frida put it, he was "half-man, half-child, all his life...
...I comment as one who saw Laski from time to time in the 1930s and 1940s...
...His great triumph was as a teacher...
...And then there was Laski's mythomania...
...Even his critics concede that Laski played a very large role in bringing about the transformation of British opinion that produced Labour's victory in 1945...
...He saw the Soviet Union as a police state—"a regime of deliberate and organized repression"—and the Hitler-Stalin pact as a monstrous betrayal...
...His last years were forlorn...
...A broken man, he died in 1950 at the age of 57...
...The great justice is repeatedly rendered "Benjamin Cardoza...
...He is forgotten today because he left very little to remember...
...Jim Rowe, one of FDR's early special assistants, summoned a group of New Dealers to meet with Laski...
...His besetting sin was the substitution of rhetoric for thought...
...But he also had a Holmesian commitment to civil liberties, free speech and association, and representative democracy...
...the names of Charles A. Lindbergh, Fiorello La-Guardia, Jane Addams, Samuel Eliot Morison, Zechariah Chafee, Clifton Daniel, George Sokolsky, W. H. Chamberlin, and Corliss Lam-ont are also misspelled...
...it was the familiar quavering voice of Benjamin V. Cohen, whom Laski greatly admired...
...But teaching and preaching, for all their multiplier effect, are ephemeral accomplishments...
...I observed this attending some of his Sunday afternoon teas when I was at Cambridge University in 1938-39 and later in London during the war...
...In fact, Laski's father was instrumental in Churchill's winning a parliamentary seat in Manchester in 1904, and Churchill was often in the Laski house...
...What has happened to editors in this decadent age...
...Harold," Ben Cohen said, "Harold, I'm sorry you feel that way, and I think you have it wrong...
...His fatal fluency enabled him to glide over the hard questions...
...The center of Nehru's thinking," said John Kenneth Galbraith, "was Laski" and "India the country most influenced by Laski's ideas...
...The Cold War baffled and dispirited him...
...Laski's handling of questions was very likely a hangover from the British custom of putting down hecklers...
...His Holmesian side immunized him against the Communist party per se...
...I last saw him when he came to Washington in the autumn of 1946...
...He lost a major libel suit...
...He was an erudite scholar and a mass circulation publicizer...
...This able and judicious book has been ill-served by the publisher...
...Having enchanted the audience in his lecture, Laski would then open the floor to questions...
...it was like watching a trapeze artist complete the final leap...
...But his Marxist side persuaded him of the innate depravity of the profit system, and he dreamed of a democratic collectivism...
...Someone spoke up from the back of the room...
...He is as forgotten as Ozymandias: "Round the decay/Of that colossal wreck...
...What somewhat extenuates Laski's inventions, however, is that they lacked malice and were mostly self-puffery...
...Thomas Nixon Carver was an economist, not a political scientist...
...As an intellectual who loved politics, he failed because, as Attlee said, "he had no political judgement...
...But, for all his erudition, he was neither an original nor a coherent nor a penetrating thinker, as Herbert Deane demonstrated 40 years ago in that notable work of demolition, The Political Ideas of Harold J. Laski...
...Thus far, only this one has come out in the United States...
...Sixty years ago he was a famous—in some circles notorious—figure...
...Nineteen ninety-three is Laski's centennial, and two biographies have appeared this year in Britain...
...Laski, Kramnick and Sheerman continue, was fiercely egalitarian yet an intellectual prone to elitism and cultural snobbery...
...He was a wonder on the podium—speaking in complex, elaborate, intricately balanced sentences that seemed out of control for a moment but always came out right in the end...
...And there are factual errors: The father of Dorothy Straight was not a robber baron...
...But I was never a favorite of his, and our relationship was somewhat prickly...
...Rarely has so vivid a figure faded so fast...
...It was not easy to reconcile the two...
...Much of the time he could see no enemy to the left...
...Once the music stops and the man departs, the lone and level sands stretch far away...
...Laski had a Marxist conviction that salvation lay in a planned economy based on the public ownership of the means of production and that, since the capitalist class would not acquiesce in its own liquidation, the cooperative commonwealth was not likely to be attained without violence...
...in a deadpan footnote, Mark Howe, the editor of the Holmes-Laski letters, observed that von Below had died three years before...
...These he too often disposed of in a condescending, sarcastic way that humiliated the questioners, usually earnest folk, and alienated the rest of us...
...Leftists acclaimed him as the prophet of a golden tomorrow...
...The lone level sands stretch far away...
...Watching Laski thus lose his audience, I learned the utility of reformulating dumb questions so that they make some sort of sense and thereby preserving the self-respect of the questioner...
...He was active in the Labour Party, the Fabian Society, the Left Book Club and lectured regularly in America, where he picked up a new generation of friends, especially Max Lerner and Edward R. Murrow...
...He gave the highest value to individual freedom but never explained how it could survive without diversification of ownership...
...He burst on the United States in 1916, a 23-year-old prodigy out of Oxford who joined the Harvard faculty and proceeded to dazzle everyone he met—and he took care to meet everyone of importance...
...A socialist by allegiance," George Orwell called him, "and a liberal by temperament...
...It was," Laski replied with his usual confidence, "the speech Jimmy Byrnes gave at Stuttgart"—a speech in which the then-secretary of State announced American support for a democratic Germany...
...Anyone who doubts the youthful brilliance of this small, frail, chainsmoking Britisher should look at the two sparkling volumes of the Holmes-Laski Letters...
...And today...
...Now his pronouncements increasingly irritated a Labour leadership in power...
...He called for the overthrow of the ruling class, but he relished their company...
...After the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia, he wrote Frankfurter, "I have a feeling that I am already a ghost in a play that is over...
...A professor of political science at the London School of Economics, he was known round the world as the evangelist of democratic socialism...
...When young, he seemed destined to be a considerable political theorist...
...I can remember Laski during the war telling how his hotel was bombed one night as he slept and his bed fell through three floors...
...But ironically, Labour's arrival in 10 Downing Street doomed Laski to frustration and depression...
...Isaac Kram-nick, an American political scientist known for his work on Edmund Burke and on civic republicanism, and Barry Sheer-man, a Labour MP, have written a fair-minded and scrupulous book, sympathetic to Laski but not panegyric in tone nor inclined to overrate the subject...
...Those dazzled (some longer than others) included, in the older generation, Justices Holmes and Brandeis, Herbert Croly of The New Republic Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...After a controversial intervention in the Boston police strike of 1919, Laski returned to England where, in addition to his LSE professorship, he lived a frantic life as a political and intellectual gadfly, pouring out books, pamphlets, and newspaper columns in an endless stream...
...Rightists denounced him as the evil genius behind the Labour Party and the New Deal...
...Harold Laski: A Life on the Left Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman, Viking, $35 Does anyone still remember Harold Laski...
...The trouble perhaps is that he never grew up...
...Anti-colonial nationalists in Africa and India looked to him for inspiration...
...C. L. Sulzberger was never the publisher of The New York Times', etc., etc...
...In America, he was on close terms with Franklin Roosevelt and half a dozen Supreme Court justices...
...He was an incorrigible teller of tales that exaggerated—sometimes fabricated—his own accomplishments, charms, and triumphs...
...My father had met him through Frankfurter, and, when Laski visited Harvard, he would occasionally come to our house for dinner...
...Oddly, some stories that seemed mythological were evidently true...
...The blame, he suggested, rested with the United States...
...He was selfless and generous to a fault and an indefatigable self-promoter...
...As Rebecca West said, "He exaggerates about 50 percent, but only in areas where it does no harm...
...He spoke about the breakdown in relations between the Soviet Union and the West...
...He would even tell of playing and beating the American tennis star Maurice McLoughlin...
...His political role was ambivalent: "He wanted both worlds: the insider's thrill of influencing events, and the outsider's capacity to criticize and dissent...
...The London School of Economics, where Laski "moulded the minds of so many future leaders" of the Third World, Pat Moynihan once said, was "the most important institution of higher education in Asia and Africa...
...His books were in demand, his articles appeared everywhere, his lectures were enthusiastically applauded, his energy seemed boundless, his influence was indisputable...
...Prime Minister Attlee finally told him, "A period of silence on your part would be welcome...
...His heart went out to the young and obscure as well as to the old and famous...
...He was, in the words of Kramnick and Sheerman, "a mass preacher and public teacher" swaying wide audiences...
...In his Marxist mood, he dismissed liberalism as no more than the self-serving ideology of the rising bourgeoisie...
...among his contemporaries, Felix Frankfurter, Roger Baldwin, Walter Lippmann, Edmund Wilson, and Charles A. Beard...
...he was the precocious youngster to the end, always seeking ways to call attention to himself...
...In his Holmesian mood, he cherished liberal ideals as autonomous and universal...
...Kramnick and Sheerman accept the story as true, but I still can't believe it...
...is Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at the City University of New York and the winner of Pulitzer Prizes in biography and history...
...Communists, he said, "lie, they intrigue, they falsify, they distort, they indulge in vile personal abuse...
...One listened with skepticism to his claim that Churchill used to dandle him on his knee when Harold was a boy...
...For all his public visibility, he never had had much practical influence on policy when Labour was in opposition...
...Graham Wallas wrote about Francis Place, not William...
...I should know—I wrote the Stuttgart speech...
Vol. 25 • January 1993 • No. 11
