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From New International, Vol. XXI No. 2, Summer 1955, pp. 120–128.
Marked up up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Part of Our Time: Some Ruins of the Thirties
by Murray Kempton
Simon and Schuster, New York City, 1955, 334 pp., $4.00.
Readers of the New York Post know Murray Kempton as one of its leading institutions; the Post’s more acute readers know him as a puzzle. Having succeeded Victor Reisel, erstwhile radical, of whom it could accurately be said, “he is the fairest labor columnist: one day he’s for the workers and the next he’s for the bosses,” Kempton has for some years now ostensibly been the Post’s labor columnist. Ostensibly, because such items of interest to the labor movement as automation, the guaranteed annual wage, the recent UAW convention, and the forthcoming merger of the CIO and AFL have barely, if at all, found their way into his columns. Indeed, until the past few days when he began to cover the UAW-Ford negotiations, Kempton has virtually ignored the unions and their problems during the past year.
Instead, his articles have concentrated almost exclusively on questions of civil liberties. These, however, have not been in the main the larger questions relating to the witchhunt and the anti-democratic trends in the nation. Kempton, concerned more with personalities than with politics, generally searches out the “dramatic” and the “ironic” from among civil liberties incidents and focuses on them. Hence the fact that column after column has in recent months starred Harvey Matusow, wringing the last drop of interest to be found in that informer through the wringer.
Prior to his civil liberties period Kempton rode the “corruption in the labor movement” wagon. And so, for months and months he hammered away at racketeering and gangsterism in the International Longshoreman’s Association, reporting ad nauseam the criminal histories and activities of ILA officials and organizers, hunting down the last detail of their associations, connections and family relationships with this or that underworld figure or gang, with this or that racket, race-track, questionable business, or other unsavory group or institution.
Kempton, then, appears to have a touch of the old-fashioned muckraker in him, at least with regard to his range of interest, if not with respect to his attitudes. And therein lies his first limitation. Muckraking without social vision and political theory may have some value but in the long run it is necessarily ineffective, and frequently becomes a bore.
Moreover, Kempton betrays too much concern with the “human interest” and “ironic” value of his subject matter, and takes too much delight in turning a phrase, even at the expense of clarity and meaning, to bear close comparison with the exemplars of the liberal muckraking tradition. Indeed, his popularity among liberals rests as much upon his literary style as upon his political views and knowledge, many of his devotees being attracted to the man on a basis similar to that which brought so many intellectuals to the Stevenson banner during the 1952 elections.
This reviewer, it should be said at the outset, is not one of those enamoured of Kempton’s literary style. Kempton writes in an exaggerated, flamboyant fashion; the hyperbole dominates every sentence. His “literaryness,” in which the maudlin and the rococco march hand in hand, frequently results in clouding ideas and exaggerating the trivial to unwarranted importance.
Kempton’s literary style recently figured in a court decision. Victor Lasky had sued Kempton for libel. The court, in finding for Kempton, declared that it was impossible to say whether or not Laski had been libeled since the article in question had been written in so hyperbolic a fashion that its exact meaning could not be elucidated.
After all is said and done, however, it must be recorded that a solely negative evaluation of Kempton as a newspaper columnist is both inaccurate and unfair. For, every so often, Kemp-ton produces a column which, given our time, is an outstanding and unmincing expose of and attack on the witchhunt or against racketeering in the trade unions; in these reside his value and justification. And of course, the fact is that Kempton and the newspaper for which he writes are almost singular in American political and journalistic life for the degree of resistance to the witchhunt which they offer.
Kempton has now devoted his talents to a larger stage. Part of Our Time, a study of that “Red Decade,” the 1930s, may well turn out to be one of the items in the biblical canon of contemporary liberalism, even though its dissemination and reception so far in liberal circles has not been on a grand scale. The reviews to date by such liberals as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. indicate that they will by and large accept it as the definitive explanation of not only the growth of Stalinism in that decade, but also of the “radicalism” of the period and of their own, in the case of many, now-embarrassing radical pasts.
The book’s dust-jacket bears as a subtitle the following legend: “Concerning some of the men and women who were active in the ‘Red Decade’ in the US. Some of them radicals, most of them Communists; how they felt in their days and their gain or loss from an experience intense and passionate, which changed their lives profoundly.” From this, and from the organization of the work, which in Kempton’s words, consists of “a series of novellas which happen to be about real persons” one might conclude Part of Our Time to be merely a collection of disconnected portraits of radical or Stalinist figures of that period.
Such a conclusion would be misleading; Kempton himself makes clear the larger intent of his study. For Kempton the personality study is the vehicle for understanding history best and through this vehicle, he believes, we shall come to understand a given period. He writes:
“It was the sense of the author of this book that the anatomy of any myth is the anatomy of the men who believed in it and suffered by it. To understand the thirties it is, of course, necessary to understand what the thirties themselves would have called their social forces. But it is far, far more important to try to understand the people who lived in that long-gone time. Whatever is permanent in the lessons of the thirties is permanent from these people.”
This book attempts, then, a vision of an entire period, a social portrait of the 1930’s, and an explanation of that era. It is written from the standpoint of our day, a time to which all of the momentous developments of those years seem utterly alien, and in which social struggles and impulses of “long-gone” years seem to so many of those who participated in them to be embarrassing gaucheries committed by callow youngsters.
The picture which Kempton paints of the 30’s and his theories about that period are presented in a prefatory chapter, which he characteristically calls A Prelude, and is often repeated in other chapters of the book. These cement Part of Our Time and give it cohesion; they explain Kempton’s selection of characters, the incidents in their private and public lives which are examined, and the analysis which he offers.
Every decade, says Kempton, has its own myth: the myth of the 1930’s having been a social myth. Its essence lay in the idea of social struggle and social revolution, in the notion that the problems of capitalism in the 1930’s could be solved only by the destruction of the social system, only in the replacement of capitalism by a new revolutionary social order. The new society, it was felt, would indeed come to pass. If it did not, barbarism would triumph.” There would be some kind of Armaggadon, of that, the “victims” of the myth had no doubt.
Kempton sets himself the task of reaching through this myth and searching out reality, he sees himself the exploder of myths who can definitively disentangle the distorted versions of the history of that era. This process involves two aspects for not only must the myth be uncovered, but the myth prevalent in our day about that myth must likewise be exposed. The myth of our day is the McCarthyite myth which holds that the myth of the ‘30’s was real and not myth at all, which believes that capitalist America was in danger of falling before the revolution, and therefore wishes to bring the myth-makers and myth-victims of those years “to justice.” Thus Kempton identifies the ideology of the witchhunt with the position that the radicalism of twenty years ago had some reality to it. Although he does not say this in so many words, one can easily infer from this idea the feeling that one of the defenses of civil liberties which Kempton makes is that the socialist and Stalinist forces never amounted to anything anyway.
Rather than being the exploder of myths, as he likes to think of himself, Kempton has fallen victim to a number of myths, himself. The most obvious myth of which he is captive is the myth of “American exceptionalism.” In its most recent form the myth holds that the New Deal, and not World War II, ended the depression. As seen through the eyes of its votaries, a galaxy of New Deal bureaucrats, labor “statesmen,” and enlightened capitalists, through their “social engineering,” afford America an unlimited opportunity, with the few, as yet, unsolved social problems to be smoothly solved without social convulsions or intense class struggle.
Throughout the book Kempton contrasts the futile self-defeating activities of his radicals and Stalinists with the reality-oriented constructive work of those who gave up the “myth.” Reuther and Curran, for example, by giving up the myth were able to achieve without a revolution that which the radicals thought only radicalism and social revolution could deliver. He even ties this myth in with a psychological point. The radicals, he tells us, were neurotics; they reacted not to social reality but to their inner conflicts and to their rebellion against their fathers. Reuther, by way of contrast, is lovingly viewed by Kempton, as a man with a happy childhood, whose psyche presented a picture of harmony, being at peace both with itself and its environment, finding no need to indulge in the usual adolescent rebellion against parental authority and restrictions.
TO EVOKE THE ATMOSPHERE of the Thirties, Kempton writes rather precious vignettes of those he considers its representatives. Most of them, to be sure, are Stalinists. We are fairly certain that Kempton is politically sophisticated enough to know the difference between genuine radicals and Stalinists, and to know, moreover, that while the Stalinists have reactionary aims they are pursued in a peculiar manner. The Stalinists operate primarily in the labor movement, and in appealing to the working class they frequently invoke legitimate demands. They are not only participants in social struggles, but attempt to lead them. In this sense, and this sense alone, can Stalinists be regarded “radicals.” There are few in Kempton’s cast of characters who were such participants during the Thirties. Yet, actually, had he dealt with the historic reality he would have been offered a wide selection.
Kempton’s representatives include Hiss, Chambers, Lee Pressman, Joe Curran, J.B. Matthews, Elizabeth Bentley, Ann Moos Remington, Paul Robeson, some Hollywood characters, and a few of the less inhibited proletarian literature cultists. A motley crew of espionage agents, New Deal bureaucrats, Hollywood hacks and neurotic women. McCarthy and Kempton have hired the same cast to act out the history of the Thirties, but whereas McCarthy bellows about their villainy, Kempton has them playing bit parts or off stage entirely. When they do make an appearance, they serve as comic relief, as objects of ridicule.
Kempton is a victim of McCarthyism to the extent that he, like McCarthy, treats communism as a conspiracy of dedicated fanatics worming their way into the government, trade unions, motion picture industry and other institutions for the purpose of spying and subverting. But while McCarthy plays up this “menace,” Kempton plays it down. In effect, he is telling the witchhunters that their picture of the Thirties as an era of mass radicalism is a distorted one, that radicals were few and far between but managed to publicize themselves well, and that really it was an eminently respectable period. One wonders whether Kempton might feel the witchhunt justified if he believed that Stalinism had really represented a dangerous mass movement.
For the most part, those presented as representatives of the Thirties were not really of that era. Robeson, for example, was in Europe during most of the period and therefore not an active participant in American political life. Pressman did not really achieve prominence until the Forties. Hiss was a minor New Deal bureaucrat and did not achieve any public status until after the war, and then he was accused not of public association with the Stalinist movement but of espionage. Chambers was a minor figure in the CP during the late Twenties whose claim to that status rests on his authorship of a few short stories and the editorship of the New Masses for a short period. He disappeared from public life entering the Russian espionage apparatus in 1934, emerging during the Forties to confess. The motivation for including Chambers, Hiss, Bentley and Remington as figures of the Thirties is to identify the radicalism of that period with espionage.
The various sketches present abundant evidence of which Kempton seems dimly aware that his “radicals” lived their entire lives in a manner at variance with the “myth” and had as motive for their activities no discernable impulse that can be called radical. In a few of the essays he points ironically to the discrepancy between the lives and activities of these Stalinist “radicals” and the “myth” they represent but mystifies his readers by failing to draw any conclusions. The individual studies are of an uneven character. Some, like the one on Matthews and another on the Hollywood Stalinists contain nicely delineated insights into the personalities of those dealt with; but, for the most part, they are merely personal projections and utterly pointless when they are not downright dishonest.
In the chapter on Hiss and Chambers, Kempton sets himself the task of explaining the relationship between the two men. He sees them as drawn to each other precisely because of the difference of their backgrounds, with each longing for the other’s environment. For Hiss, according to Kempton, Chambers represented a much to be desired rootlessness, bohemianism and non-conformity, while for Chambers, Hiss’ near Southern shabby gentility and traditionalism proved very attractive. Sometimes in the early Thirties Hiss joined the CP and soon thereafter was brought into the underground apparatus. What motivated Hiss to join the Communist Party? Was the “myth” of social revolution and radicalism responsible? Kempton maintains a discreet silence on this question. Only once does he quote Hiss on politics, a comment on the Moscow Trials that “Joe Stalin certainly plays for keeps.” The reality of power and not the “myth” of radicalism brought Hiss and many others like him to Stalinism.
Lee Pressman with an entirely different tradition and background is essentially the same type. Kempton portrays him as a fellow-traveler, always balancing himself carefully between the Stalinists and the official leadership of the CIO. He had his big moment during the war while an alliance existed between these forces. When the break occurred Pressman carefully wrote resolutions straddling the fence. As to Pressman’s political ideas, his radicalism, Kempton offers two quotations, both defending the use of terror by the Russian government.
The mockery of this group as representing the Thirties is nowhere more glaring than in the chapter dealing with the Hollywood Stalinists. Kempton ironically points out the lack of connection between their lives and “creative” work and the radicalism and social consciousness of the “myth.” The script writers, actors, directors and producers who were Stalinists or fellow-travelers spent their lives, for the most part, in a manner undistinguishable from the non-political and politically conservative members of the movie industry. The films they wrote, directed and produced were the typical Hollywood product. Kempton runs down a list of movies in which Stalinists were involved and quotes the favorable reviews accorded them by the Daughters of the American Revolution.
As Kempton knows, or should know, the Hollywood Stalinists had essentially two functions to perform for the CP. Their primary task was fund raising for the party and its innumerable front organizations, and secondarily they were used as public figures and speakers for CP fronts. Kempton pretends ignorance and gleefully tells stories about a Stalinist actor whistling a few bars of the Internationale when asked to improvise during a blank spot in a scene and of a Lester Cole movie in which the football coach paraphrases La Passionaria. About such gestures he can perceptively say:
A few bars from the Internationale, a slogan of La Passionaria: these, of course, are only the rags and tags of what these people are supposed to have believed. It is hard to understand why gestures so empty of meaning seemed important to men whose daily lives were spent consuming the comforts of commerce. To say that they were vagrant twinges of conscience does not seem quite adequate. They are more like gauges of culture. For most of the younger Hollywood Communists appear to have been persons whose knowledge of the Communist Internationale was limited to a snatch of its anthem. Their vision of the Spanish War was confined to La Pasionaria’s phrase about refusing to die on her knees, which does not sit uncomfortably on the lips of a football coach.
Kempton’s recognition of the absurdity of the Hollywood Stalinists as representatives of revolution, his knowledge of their political ignorance, his insight into the vacuous bourgeois mediocrity of their lives poses the problem of his choice of them in the first place as people who lived by the “myth.” The answer to this question can be found only in Kempton’s vision and theory of the Thirties. It is both a symptom of his distorted perspective and an index to it. To start with a comparatively minor point, if Kempton recognizes the vast ignorance of politics among the Hollywood Stalinists, and at the same time has no doubt that they are authentic representatives of the “myth” of political radicalism of that decade, it is because for him ignorance was the hallmark of the whole radical movement. As proof for such a view, Kempton produces a letter his wife received in 1936 from a radical friend in which Ghandi [sic!] is spelled “Gandi” and Lesbianism is spelled “Lesbienism”; plus the testimony of an ex-Stalinist informer before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in which Rosa Luxemburg is converted into “Rosie Luckenburg.”
Three examples of errors in spelling and pronunciation on the part of unknown and unnamed Stalinists or radicals and Kempton is ready to say: “... this was a dismally ignorant radical generation. ...” To be sure, there were ignorant people in the radical and socialist movements in the Thirties, and this was especially true for the Stalinists. But can there be any doubt that on the whole the radical, socialist and Stalinist students stood head and shoulders above their non-political fellows in regard to political knowledge? Where did the labor “statesmen” who are Kempton’s “monuments” learn what they know, and what distinguishes them from ordinary business unionists? Surely, they too received their training in these movements. And we may well ask: what of Kempton himself?
For Kempton, movements hardly existed, if they existed at all, and the radical sentiments which swept broad sections of the workers, students and lower middle class generally were the opium dreams of the “myth” addicts. He tries to belittle and make ludicrous the mass character of radicalization. The student ferment existed only in the perturbed imagination of the Hearst press and the periodicals issued by the victims of the “myth.” For evidence he tells us that in 1937 500,000 college students took the Oxford Pledge (although he doubts the figure), but in 1940 when the draft was instituted less than 100 refused to register. Conclusion: the whole student movement was, at most, a prank. What Kempton doesn’t realize is that for most of the active participants in the movement refusing to be drafted was not considered a means of fighting against war, that the Pledge was not literal but a dramatization of political opposition to imperialist war and that only the pacifists regarded it as a weapon. Aside from that, between 1937 and 1940 the Stalin-Hitler Pact was made and the Stalinists wrecked the student movement, causing hundreds of thousands of students, to be disillusioned with radicalism and all politics for that matter, in the process. 1940, then, was set in an entirely different scene than 1937.
IN HIS CHAPTER, FATHER and Sons which deals with the Reuthers, Kempton discusses the mass unionization of the millions of workers in the mass production industries and the formation of the CIO, but does not relate this upsurge of the American working class to the general radicalization of the period and the growth of radical organizations. For Kempton, the unionization of millions simply involved another process taking place at the same time but having no real point of contact with the radical and socialist movements or the growth of radical sentiments in general among the American people. Instead of recognizing that the growth of radical parties was one expression of ferment in the population as a result of social crisis and that the trade union development was another, that the two phenomena had many points of contact, not least of which was the leading role played by Stalinists, socialists, ex-Stalinists and ex-socialists in the organization of the CIO, Kempton regards these as two distinct affairs. How then explain the radical social struggles which occurred in that upsurge, struggles which took the form of sit-down strikes and violated the sanctity of private property?
Kempton deprecates the radical nature of the sit-down strike. Using his own brand of logic, he points out that the workers were very careful not to damage any of the machines in the occupied plants; that the Detroit Woolworth strikers even fed the canaries faithfully. In order to have demonstrated their radical sentiments to Kempton the workers would have had to smash the machines and slaughter the canaries. Anything less was in the nature of conservative union action. The socialists and such radical union leaders as Reuther, Kempton tells us, felt that the working class struggles were much more than a bread and butter proposition; Reuther “had thought of the union as an instrument to reshape America sharp and fast.” But after the 1937 victories, the workers had had enough, their conservatism reasserted itself; the “surge of that promise was over and he [Reuther] was left with the ebb.” Like so many other ex-radicals Kempton feels betrayed by the working class. Yet, in his view, this situation permitted Reuther to exercize his great virtue of adjustment. “His institution would not change for Walter Reuther, and so Walter Reuther changed for it,” says Kempton approvingly. This quality of flexibility enabled Reuther to become one of the “monuments” in Kempton’s gallery; the radical inflexibility of those who remained socialists caused their ruin and caused them to create ruins.
Joseph Curran, President of the National Maritime Union may not be the well adjusted personality of our times, at least Kempton does not compare him with Walter Reuther in that respect, but he too enjoys the status of a “monument.” Not perhaps as stylized and refined as Reuther, granite hewn and a bit rough on the surface, but flexible, and therefore a “monument.” Curran, it turns out, was unwilling to remain a victim of the “myth” when it dawned on him that seamen were not interested in radical social programs. He was sufficiently reality-oriented to break with the Communist Party and struggle against the Stalinist domination of the union.
There is no doubt that Curran had wide support when he initiated the fight against the Stalinists in 1946. Restless in the face of the CP’s bureaucratic control of the NMU and the wretched gains that that administration had won for them during the “war unity” years, a majority of the seamen fought hard and long in the Curran caucus to oust the Stalinist leadership. Aside from the rank and file, Curran had the support of a large section of the secondary leadership of the union which had also broken with the CP. These men were more than mere Curran supporters. They were the backbone of the anti-Stalinist caucus, its theoreticians, its leaders, its spokesmen. It may be romantic to think of Curran in Kempton’s terms: “Roaring, rasping, and unsleeping, he fought them and beat them in union meetings month after month up and down the coast,” but it isn’t strictly factual.
When Curran boasts that everything he knows the Communist Party taught him, he tells the truth. Cynically, and with every bureaucratic means at his disposal once his power was consolidated in 1949, Curran initiated a struggle against any future opposition. He not only learned from the CP, he learned all too well. For an issue he used a proposed amendment to the union constitution favoring the expulsion of all present and future communists. Those who had been the leaders of the Curran group in its fight against the Stalinists in 1946, among them a group of CP dissidents, were the primary victims of the attack, but before the fight was over, thousands were involved and with Curran’s victory many seamen lost their hard won union, membership.
With all of the hard-boiled sentimentality of a tenth rate novelist Kempton gives the following account of the 1949 fight:
In the end Keith and Lawrenson had to go too, because they were not comfortable in peace and order. Curran, by now implacable, put through an amendment to the union constitution ordering the expulsion of all present and future Communists. Keith and Lawrenson fought against it and were never reconciled. On Thanksgiving of 1949, they rallied their followers for one more battle in the streets and seized the union headquarters. For one more night, Joe Curran came back to stand unmoved on a platform while the sailors roared him down too, smoking a cigarette and smiling a cold smile with bits and splinters of the woodwork flying about his head as they had flown around so many others.
But Curran did not walk away and before very long, he beat them too. Then Keith went and Lawrenson was defeated and with them passed the last organized segment of the army of the future. They had been shipmates for a very long time, but there is no record that anyone said goodbye to anyone else.
Kempton’s fiction might even have been more lurid had he stuck to the facts. He omits mention of the brutal beatings of oppositionists by Curran’s squads in private chambers of the union headquarters reserved for that purpose, of the faked charges against hundreds, of the use of police at a union meeting to protect Curran from an enraged membership which voted his defeat five to one. To report such facts about a labor “statesman” is perhaps to detract from his statesmanship.
Just as there is something malodorous about Kempton’s choice of “radicals” so there is about his selection of “monuments.” Like so many of the Stalinists he abhors, Kempton is intrigued and attracted by power. The hated Stalinists and Stalinoid intellectuals look longingly at the Russian model while Kempton confines his admiring glance to the respectable, but powerful bureaucrats of the American trade union movement.
THERE IS A SOCIAL BASIS for Kempton’s political ideology. It consists of the relative social peace resulting from the prosperity which America enjoys today, having achieved this position through World War II, its preparations for World War III and its imperial relation to the rest of the capitalist world. The radicalism of the Thirties must consequently have been a myth, the bad dream of our childhood.
But there was a social basis for the political, economic and social struggles of the Thirties. Kempton has a selective memory and has repressed his knowledge of it. Forgotten is the mass unemployment resulting from the depression, the shrinking economy, the social and economic injustice all of which gave rise to large waves of protest; forgotten the desperate and largely unsuccessful pump-priming efforts of the New Deal as a response precisely to the growing radicalism of the American people.
Kempton cannot see the real ruins and monuments for the trivia.
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