Vol. 11.3, May–June 1978

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher		Murray N. Rothbard, Editor
VOLUME XI NUMBER 3	MAY-JUNE, 1978	US-ISSN0047-4517

Victory for Tax Revolt!

For several years I have been going up and down the country addressing libertarian gatherings, and preaching the good news that the time of “long-run” victory for liberty is now fast approaching, that we are at long last seeing the light at the end of the dark tunnel of statism. In a movement that for decades has been suffused with the spirit of doom-and-gloom, my message has been regarded—to the extent that it has not been dismissed as insincere pep-talk—as optimism of an almost incredible naivete. Not seldom I have encountered libertarians who even get hot under the collar at the good news of imminent salvation. (A curious reaction indeed!)

Now, this optimism has been vindicated, and in spades. Who would have thought a year, even six months ago, that the national media would be falling all over themselves to proclaim the strength and the might of a new tax revolt, and even to depict it in favorable terms? But that is what has been happening, even over at CBS and NBC, ever since the great day of June 6, 1978, a day which should go down in song and story, the day when Proposition 13 (“Jarvis-Gann”), mandating a drastic cut in property taxes and providing rigorous safeguards against any compensatory rise in taxes, swept to victory in California by a mammoth 2:1 majority.

Jarvis-Gann won after an unremitting smear campaign using all the media, in which day after day the voters of California were informed that the police, the firemen, even the streets would disappear on June 7 if the dread Prop. 13 should possibly win. This hysteria has won time and again before; it was a time-tested method of beating back voter sentiment for tax cuts. Not only did the teachers and the government employee unions keep up a drumfire of attack on Prop. 13, but so did the entire establishment, ranging from the politicians to big business; one of the major financial opponents of Prop. 13 was the mammoth Bank of America. The Jarvis-Gann forces had no money and less organization; how could they hope to combat the entire array of the government-media-business-union complex lined up against them.

But this time it was different; this time something wondrous happened. This time, as the usual liberal hysteria mounted, it proved to be counterproductive. This time the voters defied the blackmail threats, the vindictive bureaucracy, and the media hype, and determined more than ever to drive through the tax cut. And they did it, by the millions, in a landslide victory.

By doing this, we sent a message to politicians and the Establishment all over the country, a message saying that this time the masses are rising up angry, and will not be denied. Government is going to be slashed, even with a “meat axe” that will cut deep. That the politicians are trembling in their boots is clear by the obscene haste by which, from the night of June 6 on, they have been scrambling with each other trying to claim that they indeed love Prop. 13 and that, as in the case of the egregious Governor Jerry Brown, who fought Prop. 13 tooth and nail, he even originated the idea.

For, just as we knew it would, the landslide victory for Prop. 13 has sparked a mighty wave of similar tax cutting and tax rebellion movements throughout the country. The public is transformed as, at last, they can take hope, and rouse themselves out of the lethargy which, in the old motto, equated “death and taxes” as equally inevitable. The New York Daily News and even the old liberal New York Post hailed the tax rebellion, and the News for several days printed coupons for their readers to send in and express themselves on the tax question. Remarkably, hundreds of thousands of readers swamped the News, all of them calling for drastic cuts in property, sales, and income taxes.

And not only did Jarvis-Gann win, but voters in Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio voted down school-bond issues even though they were told that the public schools would have to close this fall as a result.

The tax rebellion is here, and we must seize this great opportunity to ride the wave. Above all, libertarians must lead, and never tail behind, the tax revolt. That is, we must never find ourselves being more conservative, more cautious, than the masses in our eagerness to slash taxes and government spending. We should not, I suppose, begrudge crusty old antitax fighter Howard Jarvis his day in the sun after twenty lone years in the political wilderness, but still it was disheartening to find Jarvis willing to be embraced by the same politicians he had rightly been calling “liars” and “fools” a few days earlier.

But more disquieting is the possibility that conservative moderates might seize control of the nationwide antitax movement that is building and deflect it into “safe” and therefore innocuous and losing paths. The main danger is the National Tax Limitation Committee, the group which includes Bill Rickenbacker, Milton Friedman, and Ronald Reagan. What they want is not a direct and outright tax cut, but rather a complex constitutional amendment, on the state or federal level, limiting the rate of future growth of government spending. Thus, if government spending is now 8% of the total state product, then the amendment would limit future spending to the same percentage. In this way, government would not only not be cut, but would continue to grow and to increase taxes. It would be tragic if the Tax Limitation people should be able to seize control of the movement. They may have the money, but they don’t have the guts or the vision, and they cannot excite the masses, for their plan would confer no actual cuts and therefore no direct and tangible benefits upon the public.

We must not deflect or tail behind the masses.We must, in every state and on the federal level, push constitutional amendments that will cut and slash taxes here, there, and everywhere. We must have the courage to be radical, to extend the courageous and anti-establishment spirit of Jarvis-Gann across the country. We must push for property tax cuts, for sales tax cuts, for income tax cuts, for cuts everywhere, and then, to copper-rivet the slashes by pushing for balanced budget amendments to cut government spending. (A balanced budget amendment without mandated slashes in taxes will bring about disastrous tax raises, and thereby increase statism.)

An example of these contrasting approaches to the tax revolt is the two constitutional amendments on the Michigan ballot for next November. The radical measure is the Tisch amendment, named for its originator Robert Tisch, which would cut property taxes in half, limit the state income tax, and forbid deficit spending for any new local programs. The conservative measure is the Headlee amendment, named for its leader, Richard H. Headlee, which would simply freeze total state and local taxes at their present percentage level of total personal income in Michigan (9.7%), which of course would raise future taxes as inflation and economic growth raise income levels. The Headlee amendment is typical of the tax limitation approach: a measure that obfuscates and deflects the antitax momentum, that badly misleads the antitax masses. It is far better for the cause if the people vote Yes on Tisch, and No on Headlee, to show the world and the Establishment that they cannot be deflected by conservative tricks: that they mean to cut taxes, and cut them now.

Meanwhile, the Libertarian Party across the country can take pride in the role of libertarians in general and the LP in particular in the fight for Prop. 13. The LP was the only political party grouping that was totally dedicated to Jarvis-Gann, and it was better organized than the Jarvis-Gann forces themselves in most areas. Libertarians spoke long and hard for Prop. 13, and the only San Francisco victory celebration on the night of June 6 took place in the Libertarian Review offices. It was a historic moment, and enjoyed by one and all.

Following is the text of a speech that the editor of the Lib. Forum delivered at the final pro-Prop. 13 rally, on June 4, in the East Bay area, put on by the Jarvis-Gann forces of Contra Costa and Alameda counties. The speech, happily, proved to be prophetic.

SPEECH FOR PROP. 13

This is a great day—for me and for all of us. I am honored and delighted to be here, to speak at this historic rally—because I know that on Tuesday we re going to win! On Tuesday we’re going to send them a message that will make them tremble—not just in California, but all across the country.

For all over this nation there is a rebellion going on against oppressive and crippling taxation. Property taxes are forcing people out of their homes who have worked for these homes all of their lives. Last summer, in Cook County, Illinois, the assessors doubled people’s tax bills, and one taxpayer wrote to the local paper: “I bitterly resent the government trying to steal my house from me, and that’s what they’re doing.” In Cook County, the property owners got so mad that they organized a tax strike, and this forced the bureaucrats to lower their assessments.

Rebellion against taxes is an old American tradition. All during the colonial period Americans rose in revolt against the age-old desire of government to keep increasing taxes. When King George said that every transaction in America had to have a high-priced British stamp on it, Americans rose up against the hated Stamp Tax, shouting “Liberty, Property, and No Stamps!” And we all know that the American Revolution began when, in the Boston Tea Party, the people rebelled against the tax and threw the tea into the Boston harbor.

Well, now the eyes of the whole country are on California, and on Tuesday we will have a California tea party. We are going to pass Proposition 13.

We are going to do it, even though we have been subjected, day after day, to an unprecedented and unremitting campaign of scare and smear against Proposition 13. All the Establishment groups—you name them— are against us. But on Tuesday we will show them that, yes, everyone is against Jarvis-Gann—everyone except the people!

Let us look closely at our opponents: who are the enemies of Proposition 13? Invariably, they are the vested interests. They are the politicians of both parties and the bureaucrats, those leeches who have lived too long and too high off our hard-earned tax dollars. It is bad enough that they have oppressed us for so long with outrageous taxes. Now they are adding insult to injury by using those same taxes to try to scare us, to try to blackmail us out of voting for Proposition 13.

For make no mistake: that is what they are trying to do. They’re telling us that if we dare to keep a little more of our own money in our own pockets, they are going to pay us back and make us suffer. But we’re going to show them on Tuesday that we’re not going to fall for their scheme, and we’re not going to pay their blackmail.

We all know enough by now never to trust or believe politicians’ promises. So why should we believe their threats?

They tell us that if we pass Jarvis-Gann, there will be no more policemen and no more firemen, that the library books will all go up in a puff of smoke, that the streets and roads will disappear. Well, I’m here to tell you that I come from New York City—where we’ve gotten along for years with no real police, no firemen, and no streets. But seriously, the total state and local government budget in California will only be cut by a moderate fifteen percent if Jarvis-Gann wins. Is anybody going to tell me seriously that there isn’t fifteen percent of fat, of waste in the government budget in California? Are we going to believe that? Frankly, I wish we were going to cut the budget by fifty percent! But that’s all right—because Proposition 13 is a great start in the right direction—the direction of bringing runaway government to a halt.

Believe me, the most that will happen after next Tuesday is that some bureaucrats will be set free to seek honest employment in the private sector, where they can submit to paying some taxes for a change instead of living off them.

To get back to us and to our opponents—we are the taxpayers, the people of California and the rest of the country. They are the ones who live off taxes—first the politicians and the bureaucrats, and next their allies in the Establishment: for example, the banks and the bond dealers who live off tax-supported municipal bonds.

The smear artists have been saying that the supporters of Proposition are the rich—a peculiar notion when we realize that the Bank of America is on their side. On Tuesday, we are going to show them how many we are. Millions of people, young and old, from all walks of life, from all over California, are going to the polls and carry Jarvis-Gann to a landslide victory!

Solidarity — But Not Forever

by Justus D. Doenecke

James Weinstein, Ambiguous Legacy: The Left in American Politics. New York: New Viewpoints, 1975.

W. A. Swanberg, Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist. New York: Scribners, 1976.

Frank A. Warren, An Alternative Vision: The Socialist Party in the 1930’s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974.

Constance Ashton Myers, The Prophet’s Army: Trotskyists in America, 1928-1941. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1977.

James Burkhart Gilbert, Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America. New York: Wiley, 1968.

David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers: A Postscript to the Enlightenment. New York: MacMillan, 1973.

Joseph R. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943-1957. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972.

Since at least the 1930’s, it has usually been the domestic left—not the sight—that has engaged the attention of historians. For every Ronald Lora or George Nash, there are ten Melvyn Duboskys or Irving Howes who chronicle Marxist movements. What graduate student today wants to tell the story of the Committee for Constitutional Government, Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought, or Congressman George Bender when there is yet another trade union local or another radical newsletter to explore? However, amid such abundant research, there is much revisionism, and new material highlights the self-destructive tendencies among individuals once so supremely confident about the coming utopia.

James Weinstein, former editor of Socialist Revolution, offers a provocative and occasionally idiosyncratic overview. He begins at the turn of the century, when American socialism had real power. Before the Great War, over 340 cities had elected some 1,200 Socialist Party members to office. Among them were mayors of seventy-three cities and towns, including Milwaukee, Schenectady, and Berkeley. In addition, Socialists controlled such important unions as the Machinists, Western Federation of Miners, and Brewery Workers, and were influential in such unions as the United Mine Workers and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Control of the state federations of labor in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Missouri only added to their influence in the American Federation of Labor. Socialists also spearheaded the birth control movement, contributed to several woman suffrage victories (including New York and California), and helped establish the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The Socialist Party was the only political organization to oppose American participation in World War I, and for years after the war, the party’s wartime resistance remained its greatest asset. Yet the conflict took its toll, for the SP was so harassed that some 1,500 locals in the rural South and Midwest were destroyed. In addition, its membership often lost faith in any international brotherhood of workers, and government reforms undercut the Industrial Workers of the World. (The AFL supported the war, with one of its organizers, William Z. Foster, making dozens of speeches for Liberty Bonds. The IWW tried to ignore the conflict, with its leader “Big Bill” Haywood, fearful of state repression, claiming that it was “of small importance compared to the great class war.”)

At first, almost all Socialists welcomed the Bolshevik revolution, and the SP applied for membership in the Third International. (International president Gregory Zinoviev, in turning down the application, insisted that he was not running “a hotel”!) The freshly organized Communists saw the United States ripe for insurrection, and split from the more skeptical Socialists in 1919. In so doing, the pro-Bolshevik groups established centralized cadres, military discipline, and preparation for “merciless civil war.” Even when the Communists emerged from the underground in 1921, their major asset remained identification with Soviet Union, a nation beginning to move towards industrialization. (The Communist Workers Party platform was simply a rehash of Socialist demands of 1918 and 1920.) However, they became so involved with the bitter factionalism overseas that they ignored developments in their own country. The Socialist Party, by now bitterly anti-Soviet, squandered resources on the La Follette movement of 1924, the year both movements reached a dead end.

During the famous Third Period, lasting from 1924 to 1935, the Communists did not seriously attempt to capture political power, but rather focused upon trade union work. Why did Communists neglect the ballot box, which Weinstein finds “the only avenue to power available to working people”? Because they believed that the factory would increasingly be the center of American society. Party emphasis was always on “workers as workers,” not “workers as potentially self-governing citizens.” The CP severed its short-lived alliances with Farmer-Labor groups, formed independent unions (in a process called “dual unionism”), and became increasingly isolated from other Socialist and left-liberal groups. Yet only in the fur industry, where Ben Gold gained power, did the Communists exert control. Weinstein finds party activity during the Third Period “horrendous,” for the comrades blindly assumed that capitalism was collapsing, and that Russia, not yet an industrialized power, was nevertheless the model for American emulation.

Such an orientation was disastrous. True, in the thirties the CP’s syndicalist orientation, and experience in organizing independent Communist unions, proved helpful in launching the Congress of Industrial Organizations. However, in the long run—so Weinstein claims—it did itself much harm. Again, why? Because it emphasized industrial workers as an interest group, indeed a vanguard class, doing so “at the expense of the working class as a whole.” In the CP model, workers would not—and’ party leader William Z. Foster made this clear—really organize production, but only defend their immediate interests; social priorities would be left to newly-created Communist bureaus. “At best,” writes Weinstein, Communist rule would mean a benevolent paternalism, in which the workers would be infantalized,” and in which dictatorship would be of the party, not the proletariat. Yet the CP’s accomplishments, even immediately after the crash of 1929, were sparse, in fact substantially less than the Socialists before World War I.

Strength is one thing, insight another, and Weinstein finds “partial truth” in the Communist charge that Roosevelt’s National Recovery and Agricultural Adjustment acts were “fascist legislation.” In both measures, he writes, “various class interests were balanced within the framework of preserving corporate capitalism.” In fact, both the NRA and AAA were “similar to the corporate statist ideas of Italian fascism.” Weinstein further claims, in a point that needs elaboration, that “in many ways the Republicans represented no greater threat to constitutional government in the United States than did New Dealers—indeed, in many ways the Roosevelt administration had more contempt for democratic procedure than did their Republican predecessors.”

The Communists radically shifted their position in 1935, becoming part of the Popular Front established in Western democracies to defend Russia and check German power. Hence, as Weinstein notes, they backed New Deal efforts to “smear” Huey Long as a “fascist” and worked to pin the label of “economic royalists” on FDR’s opponents. Abandoning dual unionism, Communists labored to build up CIO unions, with their influence greatest in the ILGWU and National Maritime Union. (To obtain office in the latter union, one had to serve the CP). They were one of several important factions in the United Electrical Workers and the United Automobile Workers, and at times played a most moderate role. (In 1939, for example, Communists, acting under direct orders of party secretary Earl Browder, backed the union’s centrist candidate for UAW president, not the one self-proclaimed leftist). However, Communists had little power in such bodies as the UMW and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. An in the United Steel Workers, they served as “hired hands” of Philip Murray.

As the CP became part of the mainstream of mass unionism, and as it subordinated socialism to New Deal liberalism, it abandoned all pretense of seeking an independent class politics. The Communists, so Weinstein claims, generally represented the interests of rank-and-file union members, but often acted undemocratically. “Socialism,” he continues, “did not emerge as an issue because the Communists never put forth a serious socialist position for which to argue as an alternative to the New Deal.” They did not—the author keeps stressing—attempt to organize a popular party for socialism; instead, they sought only to gain control of union bureaucracies. Playing the game of “interest group politics” to the hilt, they were co-opted by “the corporate liberals of the New Deal.” The Corporate capitalists, in turn, writes Weinstein, found New unions valuable “to the degree that they stabilize the work force, help discipline the workers, and limit themselves to bargaining over wages and working conditions.”

Weinstein claims that there were genuine alternatives. Rather than back Labor’s Non-Partisan League and the American Labor Party of New York, both simply devices to get more votes for Roosevelt, the Communists could have fought as socialists in the electoral arena. They could, in short, have abandoned the Democrats and set up labor-socialist alliances, and thereby have built “a popular socialist movement among millions of workers and unemployed.”

All this, however, is what might have been. During World War II, the Communists stood firm with the forces of order. They opposed trade union militancy, fought A. Philip Randolph’s plans for a black protest march on Washington, advocated no-strike agreements, and endorsed Roosevelt’s prosecution of Trotskyist teamsters under the Smith Act. Even after 1945, according to Weinstein, the party subordinated socialism to a liberal capitalist program, acting in the hope of maintaining the pro-Soviet coalition with liberals that had lasted throughout the war. Such a tactic explains Communist backing for the Progressive Party of 1948, but after the failure of Henry Wallace’s “Gideon’s Army,” the CP lost all sense of direction. By the 1940’s, its organizing talents were no longer needed, and closeness to CIO leadership was not sufficient to keep it in power there. With the Cold War emerging, the label “Communist” took on decidedly “anti-patriotic” overtones. Philip Murray of the USW and Walter Reuther of the UAW wasted little time in dumping the left, while Joe Curran of the NMU and Michael Quill (“Red Mike”) abandoned fellow-travelling.

The Communist Party, says Weinstein, never possessed an authentic vision of a socialist America; Soviet life was its sole model. Only in the 1960’s, with the rise of the New Left, was there a revival of genuine radicalism, but this diffuse body stupidly shunned workers, ignored the aged and farmers, abandoned theory, and often adopted a “politics of despair and adventurism.” The need to build a new socialist movement, writes Weinstein, still remains, although we have the political base to construct it.

Weinstein’s book is most valuable in its analysis of Communist expediency, far less helpful in comments concerning other aspects of American life. Does America really possess “the potential of building a substantial mass movement for socialism,” for example then there are historical questions. Did the Third International really focus national attention on “the Negro Question”? Did Foster’s opposition to “American postwar expansionism” really reflect “world realities” more than did Earl Browder? Could an independent left party have taken millions of votes from the New Deal? Could the Communists have ever prevented “business unionism” from taking over the CIO? Is there such a thing as “the world capitalist empire” and “the world class”? Does “corporate capitalism” possess an “inhuman nature”? How much white support for black civil rights resulted from the need “to rationalize and integrate the labor market”? If a Marxist analysis illuminates some areas of the past, it hides others, and Weinstein’s book shows both tendencies at work.

Given the partisan nature of Weinstein’s survey, better understanding might be reached by concentrating on certain figures and movements. And without doubt the leading Socialist for some forty years—from the twenties though the sixties—was Norman Thomas, the subject of W.A. Swanberg’s book. As Swanberg’s biography is sprawling and undisciplined (not a new feature in his writing), it is really a kind of source book, but one that contains fine portraits of many Socialist leaders. The subtitle (“the last idealist”) is no misnomer, and such old friends as Ella Wolfe and Sidney Hook still testify to Thomas’s intelligence and integrity.

Unlike many reformers, Thomas came from the middle class, not patrician wealth, for he was the son of a rigorously orthodox clergyman in Marion, Ohio. He studied at Bucknell, Princeton, and Union Theological Seminary, after which he became a Presbyterian minister, and there are those who say that he never really left this vocation. (This essayist heard Thomas speak several times; the nature of the man’s fervor was as appropriate to the pulpit as to the podium). Pastorates in Harlem made him a Socialist, World War I turned him into a pacifist—a conviction strengthened by the imprisonment of his brother. However, even when he joined the Socialist Party in 1918, he confessed “a profound fear of the undue exaltation of the State,” voiced opposition to “any sort of coercion whatever,” and said that a party’s only justification lay in winning liberty for men and women.”

Although a candidate for many public offices, including the Presidency, his major work lay in reform. He was never a doctrinaire Marxist, for he rejected both economic determinism and dialetical materialism. Always he stressed his belief in egalitarianism, doing so in such a way that, as one Socialist quipped, “Any Rotarian can understand him.” In a sense, Thomas was an oldtime progressive, downplaying immediate nationalization of basic resources in an effort to tap middle class liberals. His wife possesed independent means and he was at home with those corporate leaders represented by his Princeton classmates. As Swanberg writes, “To people who equated Socialism with rioting in the streets, he was the gentleman personified, the man you would be proud to have living next door, soft-pedaling Marxism and making nationalization sound eminently reasonable.”

Yet, even given the man’s grace, leading such a movement was not easy. Recruited by Morris Hillquit (who, writes Swanberg, saw Thomas as a means of bringing more Gentiles into the overwhelmingly Jewish New York party), Thomas soon broke with the SP’s Old Guard. He attacked Hillquit for serving as legal counsel for Standard Oil and Vacuum Oil, two companies striving to regain petroleum lands nationalized by the Soviet Union. To the Old Guard, Thomas was unaware of Communist duplicity; to Thomas, who was not yet bitterly anti-Soviet, the Old Guard’s loathing for Communism was not based on principle, but rather on the competition the Socialist unions in the AFL were getting from Communist ones.

Taking on the Old Guard pitted Thomas against a formidable machinery, for the Old Guard controlled the New Leader, the Jewish Daily Forward, the needle-trades unions, the Rand School, and radio station WEVD (the last three call letters standing for Eugene Victor Debs). The issue came to the fore at the party convention of 1934, when the Militant faction of the SP pushed through a Declaration of Principles. The Declaration, though drafted by pacifist Devere Allen, feared a fascist coup. It spoke in terms of meeting fascist violence by seizing command of the nation’s resources, crushing “the reckless forces of reaction,” and replacing “the bogus democracy of capitalist parliamentarianism by a genuine worker’s democracy.” In addition, it would meet any declaration of war with “massive war resistance,” including a general strike. All this, of course, was quite a tall order, particularly for a party claiming only 23,000 workers and not all of these in good health. Thomas wanted to tone the statement down, but the Old Guard first prevented its modification, then condemned it. Other issues causing fissure included the Old Guard’s doctrinal rigidity (all the more ironic in light of its apathy towards Arkansas sharecroppers) and co-optation of leading SP members in New Deal administrations. By the fall of 1935, the Old Guard had barred Thomas from speaking to groups under its control.

The Militants fought back. They established the weekly Call, formed a rump New York party, and admitted some 300 Trotskyists (the latter done through the mediation of philosopher Sidney Hook). The Old Guard in turn retaliated by establishing the Social Democratic Federation, a group that Thomas called “neither Socialist, democratic or a federation but merely a halfway port to Tammany Hall.” It also helped form the American Labor Party of New York, a New Deal mechanism for bypassing the regular Democratic machine in securing the labor vote. (Ironically, it was through the Old Guard’s protege, the ALP, that the Communists became so powerful in New York politics.)

Thomas kept denying what Roosevelt’s rightist opponents had long argued—namely that the New Deal had stolen Thomas’s thunder, leaving the Socialist leader without a real following. FDR, said Thomas, had not nationalized the banks; his social security program was a pale imitation of Socialist demands; the NRA stabilized capitalism while the AAA subsidized scarcity. “Roosevelt did not carry out the Socialist platform,” Thomas quipped, “unless he carried it out on a stretcher.”

By the 1936 elections, the Socialist Party lay in ruins, and subsequent events helped little. The stormy expulsion of the Trotskyists led to the exodus of much Socialist youth and to the death of the California SP as well. A new faction, the Clarity group, controlled the Call, and it bucked Thomas by wanting to limit the party to an elite of revolutionary cadres. Then Thomas’s effort to recruit a Eugene V. Debs column for the Spanish Loyalists antagonized such militant pacifists as A.J. Muste. “By what right,” asked the Socialist clergyman John Haynes Holmes, “does any Socialist today profane the sacred name of Debs by using it to designate a regiment of soldiers enlisted for the work of human slaughter?”

And if all this were not enough, Thomas faced more party defections and personal slander for his isolationism. In 1938 he helped organize the Keep America Out of War Congress so as to rally support for traditional neutrality. However, realizing that this group was impoverished, in 1941 he gladly cooperated with the far wealthier America First Committee. After Pearl Harbor, Thomas opposed internment of the Japanese-Americans and was furious when the American Civil Liberties Union refused to fight vigorously on their behalf. Furthermore, he debated feeding children under German occupation with Dr. Frank Kingdon, a clergyman who defended starvation with quotations from Scripture. Movies such as “Little Tokyo” and songs such as “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” aroused his ire, as did Jim Crow in the army and in his beloved Princeton. He found “obliteration” bombing utterly unnecessary, leaned toward the belief that Roosevelt had deliberately goaded the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor, was outraged by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and saw Dumbarton Oaks as “as dangerous attempt to underwrite a temporary and unstable cartel of empires.”

In his later years, he became more and more anti-Soviet, and he favored the Marshall Plan, Atlantic Pact, and American participation in the Korean War. In addition, he used CIA money (unknowingly, says Swanberg) to promote the Institute for International Labor Research, of which he was chairman.

However, he sided with Walter Lippmann’s critique of containment, while voicing suspicion of Lippmann’s call for balance-of-power diplomacy. He criticized the Truman Doctrine, fearing that “American intervention in Turkey (will) become more and more imperialistic, more and more tied to the politics of petroleum.” Thomas attacked the Mundt-Nixon Communist Control bill and House Committee on Un-American Activities. He briefly joined the American Friends of Vietnam, a front for the Diem regime, but balked at the Indochina conflict. When Reuther and the UAW endorsed the conflict, Thomas wrote him, “President Johnson and the Chamber of Commerce must be glad to know that they can always trust labor when it comes to policing the world with bombs.”

Thomas spoke on other things as well, and sometimes quite sharply. The former clergyman opposed Zionism for linking religion to a nation-state; peace to the Palestine area, he said, would never come until displaced Arabs could return to a federated homeland. When he visited Israel in 1957, he raised the question of Israeli expansion Golda Meir— much to her discomfort. His faith in all-out socialism slipped, and not only because of the Russian experience. Mass collectivism, and the inevitable bureaucracy it bred, could always kill individual freedom. By J951, he was allowing a large sphere for private ownership, with nationalization limited to the “commanding heights” of the economy.

A more learned defense of Thomas comes from Frank A. Warren of Queens College, who debates such “realist” critiques of American socialism as Daniel Bell, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Bemarc Johnpoll. The “realists” find Thomas so staunch in support of “absolute” goals that he failed to realize that politics was always “the art of the possible.” Socialists in general, such scholars argue, are too wedded to ideology, too optimistic concerning man and history, too unable to comprehend the workingman’s bread-and-butter aspirations—in short, Socialists are too impractical. Unable to reconcile the tension between millennialism and immediate demands, they cannot not get things done”, and are hence irrelevant to American politics.

Warren dissents on all counts. The Socialists of the thirties, he writes, kept alive “a resistance to oppression and an intransigence against the forces of state and industry that can overwhelm us.” On the other hand, the SP of the 1960’s, by backing such “pragmatists” as Johnson and Humphrey, betrayed its birthright.

The author begins by challenging the “realists” philosophically. Socialists, he says, offer solutions that lie at the root of the nation’s problems, doing so not in any doctrinaire manner but in the spirit of pragmatism offered by John Dewey. Mainstream American politics, on the other hand, offered superficial remedies that merely looked pragmatic. The Militants, writes Warren, were correct in attacking Old Guard ties to the AFL, for the American Federation of Labor had within its ranks groups guilty of racketeering, red-baiting, and strong hostility towards industrial unionism. Cooperation with the American Labor Party and the CIO simply meant co-operation, with radicals becoming transformed into liberal reformers. It is those like the “realist” theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who assumed that the Democratic Party would be the instrument of meaningful social change, who were the truly “naive” ones, not the Socialists with their stress on ethical imperatives based on a more rigorous standard of justice.

Thomas, claims Warren, was no narrow sectarian, for he did all he could to gain a broad base for his party. In fact, he did more nationwide proselytizing among workers than did the Old Guard. In addition, Thomas attacked Russian atrocities before the Old Guard ever did. And unlike certain liberal apologists, the Thomas Socialists were among the first Americans to analyze the bureaucratization of Stalin’s terror. Freedom, they believed, meant genuine control, certainly not the practice of the Soviet state.

Warren also praises Thomas’s critique of the New Deal. Roosevelt’s domestic policies, the historian argues, combined “a welfare program for the masses and a domesticated unionism with a maintenance of the essential power relations of society,” and Thomas saw this. Not only did Thomas find New Deal social programs inadequate, but he was disturbed by centralization of power in the Presidency and warned against incorporating unions in the structure of government. Furthermore, the Socialist saw the New Deal creating, not socialism, but state capitalism, in which government intervenes to preserve the prevailing profit system.

In his chapter on World War n, Warren faults Thomas for working with America First and for exaggerating the danger of domestic fascism. Warren himself does not support Thomas’s opposition of aid to the Allies. Yet Warren opposes the temptation of historians to “put down” isolationist intellectuals, while applauding liberal ones. (He denies that Thomas was an isolationist, in fact, finding Thomas’s willingness to defend the Spanish republic a healthy contrast to the international feebleness of the “capitalist New Deal.”)

It is the interventionists, writes Warren, who did much to poison American culture. Poet Archibald MacLeish’s attack on “irresponsible” anti-war intellectuals implied that artists and writers should serve as adherents of the state. Critic Louis Mumford claimed in 1940 that the conflict resembled “the armies of the Christians and the Saracens when they met on the battlefield of Tours,” thereby speaking in the arrogant language of Pax Americana. The New Leader was no real friend of democracy when, in January 1941, it criticized the ACLU for attacking legislation aimed at Communists and Bundits. Nor was it any real friend of tolerance when, in 1942, it published an article entitled “Scratch a Jap, and You’ll Find a Fanatical Shinto Priest—An Essay in Nipponese Psychology.”

On the other hand, Warren finds Thomas and his followers genuine prophets. They saw that the New Deal, “bankrupt in ideas and drive,” was increasingly relying upon “armament economics,” and that this trend would remain a permanent fixture of American life. They opposed conscription as a totalitarian device, one that—once entrenched—would be difficult to alter. Unlike a whole herd of silent liberals, they fought apathy towards Jewish refugees and opposed the fire bombings of Dresden. If Popular Front liberals wanted to share nuclear power with Russia, only the Socialists addressed themselves to the moral issue of the actual use of the bomb. Warren is particularly scathing on Civil liberties during the New Deal, and he goes so far as to write, “German Bundists were tried on vague charges, with very little protest and some applause, from pro-war Socialists and liberals. The government policy during the war was not enlightened on civil liberties; there simply was not much opposition to the war.”

Radicals of the thirties are given a different look in monographs by Constance Ashton Myers and James Burkhart Gilbert. Myers, a professor at the University of South Carolina, tells the story of American Trotskyists. The movement, of course, was founded in 1928 when James Cannon, former general secretary of the IWW and chairman of the Workers (Communist) Party, attended the Sixth Comintern Congress in Moscow. Expelled from the party he had help to found, he established a new party that went under various names—The Workers (Communist) Party, Left Opposition; the Communist League of America (Opposition); the Workers Party; and the Socialist Workers Party. Under all these labels, one thing was clear; the new group would be as intolerant of dissent as the old. As Myers notes, “leaders demanded docility in their ‘revolutionary’ followers—a dangerous demand for a radical party, because inevitably comes a weaker and less creative critique of capitalist values.” Yet, “to question Trotsky’s analysis of world events, to disagree in the tiniest detail, was to court expulsion or denied membership.”

What was the Gospel according to Trotsky? Well, it involved a series of tenets: Leon Trotsky as the as the sole authentic heir to Marx and Lenin; the need for “permanent revolution,” as no state can remain socialist in a capitalist world; “boring from within” established trade unions and united action groups; and opposition to pacifism and class collaborationist” farmer-labor movements. What was its greatest asset? The prophet exile himself, drafting manifestoes to his followers as he moved from one place to another. And almost in passing, Myers notes that Stalin had not abandoned permanent revolution any more than Trotsky suddenly advocated “counter-revolution.” “The plain truth,” she writes, “was that a dynamic and influential figure like Trotsky posed too formidable a threat to the monolithic regime Stalin thought necessary to bring industrial technology quickly to a technically and socially medieval land.”

In 1935, Trotskyists co-opted A. J. Muste’s American Workers, with the new group totally abandoning Muste’s pacifism. (Pacifism, said Trotskyist James Burnham, was a “subtle and dangerous enemy” that “socialists must oppose”). Soon afterwards, Trotskyists entered the Socialist Party, acting in order to fulfill a specific Trotskyist strategy called “enterism.” This union was short-lived, although when Trotsky’s followers were expelled, they took some 1,000 Socialists with them. All this time, the party was recruiting a number of intellectuals, including Dwight MacDonald, Irving Howe, Leslie Fiedler, Saul Bellow, and Bert Cochran. (Later a large number of youthful Trotskyists would make their mark on the discipline of sociology, wrestling with the concept of bureaucracy that they found so glaring in Stalinism and in their own movement).

The coming of World War II created more splintering. In 1937 Burnham claimed that American involvement in war was inevitable, for United States ties to the world market system were strong and its commitment to uphold world capitalism firm. When in September 1939, conflict broke out over Danzig, Burnham and Max Shachtman, eidtors of New International, wanted no support for Russia, calling her an “imperialist” power. Cannon, however, sought “unconditional defense” of the Soviet Union. Having Trotsky on his side, he used the party machinery to purge the more extreme antiwar faction. (Shachtman and Burnham forged a new Workers Party which lasted eight years. Burnham himself renounced Marxism and left the group within a month).

During the war, some twenty-eight Trotskyist leaders in Minneapolis were convicted under the Smith Act, an action strongly supported by the Communist Party. Roosevelt, Myers implies, was repaying Dan Tobin, general president of the AFL teamsters union and a strong interventionist on the war question. Tobin had long been in conflict with powerful Trotskyist locals, particularly the 4,000 member Local 544 of Minneapolis. The presiding judge compared the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party to the Nazis: “Hitler once ran around in a greasy old overcoat and was belittled for his efforts.” FDR’s action, Myers writes coyly, “illuminates a less familiar facet of the Roosevelt years and reveals that the president followed a pattern his predecessors established when beset by similar problems.”

Particularly fascinating is Myers’s account of Trotsky’s death, an event that took place on August 20, 1940. She notes how deeply American Trotskyists were involved in the “prophet’s” coterie in Mexico, with one follower an unwitting accomplice of the assassin’s. Trotsky, she argues, was killed by Stalin simply because “he knew,” and was going to share much of this knowledge with J.B. Matthews, investigator for the Dies Committee.

To the very end Trotsky was spirited. When a representative of the newly-founded Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and Peace met with the exile, Trotsky commented, “A fine name. The war capitalist imperialism, the social revolution rising out of the war, and the lasting peace that will follow.” The Institution representative merely responded, “I doubt if Mr. Hoover would approve of that interpretation” (Stanford Daily, April 30, 1940, p. 1). Without Trotsky, the movement would never have held together, and once he died, it had even less impact on American life than it did before.

Yet one should not judge things too fast, and it is the strength of Gilbert’s book that he shows the wide influence a group of Trotskyists had through the Partisan Review. (The work has helpful chapters on early Greenwich Village culture, and on the literary revolt of the twenties, but its real contribution lies in its material on the late thirties). The Partisan, edited by William Phillips and Philip Rahv, was far from the standard Marxist journal. T.S. Eliot used it to publish “East Coker” and “Cry Salvages,” and in the Partisan first appeared Franz Kafka’s “Penal Colony.” Other contributors included Allen Tate, Gertrude Stein, Lionel Trilling, Ignazio Silone, and Mary McCarthy.

Unlike the Communists, who attempted to merge socialist realism with the American past, Rahv and Phillips denied that Marxism had much to do with the American tradition (The magazine did present several “realists,” such as John Dos Passos and James T. Farrell, but both men were unpopular in CP circles). Objects of particular scorn included Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, and Malcolm Cowley, with the former in particular claiming that old American forms of collectivism lay at the root of her civilization. Brooks’s focus dovetailed nicely with the new Communist position, for by 1937 the CP was no longer supporting “revolutionary” culture; rather it was paying homage to FDR, traditional liberalism and democratic ideals.

The Trotskyists, on the other hand, demanded a culture based upon European—not American—experience, and were not afraid to flirt with existentialism. Rahv found the politically “reactionary” Dostoevski, for example, offering more insight into the nature of Stalin than any contemporary writer. Trotsky himself, incidentally, was dubious about the Partisan Review, for he did not believe it struck out sharply enough at the Communists.

Undoubtedly, the Partisan’s most able editor was Dwight MacDonald, former staff writer for the New Yorker and Fortune. (MacDonald’s wartime essays in Politics are matched in their bite only by Milton Mayer’s articles in the Progressive). Half-anarchist, half-aristocrat, MacDonald found Trotskyism appealing “because—“he wrote”—“it was founded by Trotsky, whose career showed that intellectuals, too, could make history.” Trotsky, said MacDonald, was “a father to many of us in the sense that he taught us our political alphabet and first defined for us the problems to be solved, so that even when, in the manner of sons, we came to reject the parental ideas, our very rejection was in the terms he taught us.” MacDonald’s own rejection came about quickly indeed, for his first article in New International was a bristling attack on Trotsky’s role in the Kronstadt rebellion. Always a foe of American intervention, MacDonald soon found such pro war luminaries as Henry Wallace and Henry Luce in fundamental agreement: both men linked liberalism and imperialism together, seeking to refashion the world in America’s image.

Many of the attitudes opposed by the Partisan Review are ably described in David Caute’s work on fellow-travellers. Caute destroys the myth that the fellow-traveller is merely a watered-down Communist who lacks the courage of his convictions: rather, Caute sees the fellowtraveller as a true child of the Enlightenment, one who “heartily welcomed the torments and upheavals inflicted on the Russian peasantry during collectivization, arguing that only by such drastic social engineering could these backward illiterates be herded, feet first, into the modern world. Neither an orthodox Marxist or a revolutionary, the fellow-traveller is less radical, and hence less disillusioned with Western society, than the Communist. He retains partial faith in the parliamentary system and civil liberties. In fact, fellow-travellers disliked Trotsky for one simple reason: he wanted world revolution and they didn’t. In effect, the fellow-traveller finds Bolshevism (as they say in 1066 and All That) “good thing—but always for someone else!”

Conducted tours of the Soviet Union encouraged many intellectuals to become its defenders. Theodore Dreiser approved of Russia’s easy divorce system; in the Soviet Union, he saw “the only sane treatment of the sex questions I have ever encountered.” George Bernard Shaw described Stalin as “simply secretary of the supreme controlling organ of the hierarchy, subject to dismissal at ten minutes’ notice if he does not give satisfaction.” To Shaw’s fellow Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, “There are ends more important than additional food supplies for immediate consumption,” an opinion undoubtedly not shared by starving kulaks. Historian G.D.H. Cole could think of no other way to “socialize” the minds of peasants than a “forced march” approach, while novelist Upton Sinclair noted that starvation was, after all, a Russian tradition. Commentator Maurice Hindus reflected a whole generation of fellow-travellers in remaining silent about slave labor; Siberia, he said, was simply, “a new world for a new humanity.” Journalist Alexander Werth admitted in 1967 that he pulled his punches about what is now called the Gulag, since he feared the truth would agitate Cold War tensions. Jean-Paul Sartre commented to Albert Camus in 1952, “Yes, Camus, like you I find these camps inadmissible, but equally inadmissible is the use which the so-called, bourgeois press makes of them every day.”

Stalin, of course, was almost canonized. Historian Bernard Pares, speaking of the Russian dictator, said, “He has shown that his heart is in his own country, that he has set his reputation on a purely practical object of vast scope, (Russia’s) radical transformation for the benefit of all.” Caute could only comment, “For that was Stalin’s appeal: pipe-smoking back-room boy; did his homework; prodigious worker, up all night, mastering the statistics; listened to others, took his time, but once his decision was made he never flinched.” This, for many fellow-travellers, was Stalin in a nut-shell; he was the Man of Steel who symbolized social engineering, who epitomized the ability to master one’s environment.

The intellectual price was a high one. As George Orwell wrote, “The sin of nearly all left-winger’s is that they have wanted to be anti-fascist without being anti-totalitarian.” Or as Trotsky commented, “The ‘left’ intelligencia of the West has gone down on its knees before the Soviet bureaucracy.” Neither man was exaggerating.

Caute draws some skillful portraits, including those of Bertold Brecht, Julien Benda (whose Betrayal of the Intellectuals (1928) had condemned all such partisanship), Anatole France, Harold Laski, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. The book also has some wonderful phrasing. Journalist Anna Louise Strong, who grew up in Protestant Pietism, had “fallen in love with the biggest Sunday School of them all.” Laski’s praise of Soviet courts, published in 1935 after his lecture tour there, “was very much like writing a study of justice for the blacks of the Southern States without mentioning the Ku Klux Klan.” British publisher Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club was “a Popular Front in microcosm.” W.H. Auden’s poem “Spain,” so Caute writes, “proves that you don’t have to feel deeply about something to write about it well.” (But then Orwell called Auden “a gutless Kipling”!) Occasionally the reader comes across a splendid anecdote, such as the embarrassment Hewlett Johnson (“the Red Dean of Canterbury”) faced when the prelate was awarded more lines in the Soviet Encyclopedia than Jesus Christ.

Knowledge of the actual workings of Communist parties might have curbed such naivete, though one should not count on it. Joseph Starobin’s history of the postwar American CP, written by a veteran of the movement, reveals bitter internal rivalries, so bitter that they eventually broke up the party. Unlike Weinstein, who sees a hollow shell, Starobin finds a dynamic and broadly based group. By the middle of World War II, so he claims, American Communism had recruited about 100,000 members, with an influence far exceeding this numerical strength. Unlike the 1920’s, its base was no longer foreign born and working class; rather, it recruited heavily from professionals and businessmen of Anglo-Saxon and Nordic background. Although half the members lived in New York State, comparatively large blocs dwelled in the industrial East and Midwest, Minnesota, and the Pacific Coast. “It was not unusual,” writes Starobin, “for Communist Pary legislative directors or state secretaries to be given cordial attention in the offices of senators, congressmen, mayors, governors, and intermediaries of the White House.” One-third of the CIO leadership, representing over a million workers and perhaps a third of the CIO, were identifiably of the left.

On the surface, General Secretary Earl Browder, born in Kansas and the son of Populists, set the tone. Heading the party “doves,” Browder claimed that “Marxism was never a series of dogmas and formulas.” America, he continued, was not really headed for socialism. Indeed, efforts to push collectivism within the United States “would divide and weaken precisely the democratic and progressive camp, while they would unite and strengthen the most reactionary forces.” Browder downplayed any search for Communist votes, hoping instead to make CP an indispensable bulwark of the New Deal.

As part of his strategy, Browder favored the securing of foreign markets. U.S. participation in the world economy, he maintained, would not only result in absorption of American goods; it would help revive a war-shattered world. And in so doing, it could easily serve as a vehicle for cooperation with the Soviet Union.

Opposing what he called the “explosion of class conflict,” Browder discouraged strikes. He criticized strike threats made by UAW’s Reuther and, in the spring of 1945, sided with Murray and Hillman in their effort to reach a detente with the US Chamber of Commerce. Similarly, in 1944, the CP did not back Hillman and Murray, when the two CIO leaders favored Wallace as Democratic nominee for Vice President. Rather, it backed “the man from independence,” acting in the belief that Truman, a less controversial figure than Wallace, would promote coexistence with Russia more skillfully.

Browder’s tenets were challenged by William Z. Foster, a man whose background—in some ways—was quite similar to his own. Both men started out as Socialists; both were leaders of the Trade Union Educational League, with Foster its chairman and Browder editor of its Labor Herald. Unlike Browder, however, Foster saw the war creating “the crisis of world capitalism.” It was, in fact, this impending economic crisis that would make American imperialism a most aggressive force. “Comrade Browder,” Foster commented, “goes too far when he says that world capitalism and world Socialism have learned to live peacefully together.” A fundamental critique of capitalism, he continued, was needed, not just talk of “structural reform.” The Communist Party, said Foster, must not trail after the decisive sections of capital,” but “rally the popular masses of people and resist the forces of big capital now.” While Browder saw the Roosevelt government as expressing the will of “intelligent capitalists,” Foster found it a type of Popular Front. And as capitalism—in Foster’s eyes—could not be anything but reactionary, American-Soviet confrontation was inevitable.

In April 1945, French CP leader Jacques Duclos challenged Browder’s views, doing so in the Comintern journal Cahiers du Communisme. The concept of “peaceful coexistence” was opposed in the hardest possible terms, with Browder accused of engaging in “notorious revision of Marxism.” (Ironically, at the very time he was writing his attack, Dudos’s own French party was consciously collaborating with a bourgeois government). The National Committee of the American CP must have agreed, for when matter came to a vote, Browder stood alone. “Outwardly the exponents of the brotherhood of man, they had all been living in a jungle”—so comments Starobin.

Browder would not recant, and the party soon became immersed in “near-hysteria,” victimized by its own irrelevance and by a steady exodus of the faithful. By 1947, the party—according to Starobin—had “lost its way.” Ties to Russia were its “Achilles heel,” for its own desires were “neither reciprocated nor respected by Moscow.” In fact, the Soviets saw the American CP as expendable. Yet to recover influence, Foster first toyed with the idea of winning the Democratic Party to a “progressive” presidential candidate, then turned back to the notion of a third party. Such a movement, so Foster maintained, would be led by “the workers,” with “the poorer farmers, the Negro people, . . . the bulk of the veterans (entering in joint political action against the common enemy, monopoly capital.” In this strategy lay the seeds for Communist backing of Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party.

All, however, ended in a fiasco. The CIO refused to endorse the Wallace movement, and even left-leaning Michael Quill refused to split the CIO over the issue. Progressives could not recruit one single major labor leader or one single city or state labor federation, and Wallace himself feared the “Communist” stigma all through the campaign.

After Wallace’s defeat, Communists engaged in internal purges, and their own “McCarthyism” equalled that of the Senator from Wisconsin. Not only were “Browderites” and “Titoists” ferreted out, but a crusade against “white chauvinism” was carried to an absurd length. Some party leaders were deposed, words like “whitewash” were banned, and novelist Howard Fast, something of a Communist showpiece, apologized for some “racist” dialect that, in reality, was quite appropriate to his narrative. Beginning in 1949, the party proclaimed that “the vanguard of the battle against imperialism was no longer the working class as a whole but the black component of it” (emphasis Starobin’s). As whites could not “understand” blacks, much less work in the same organization with them, Negroes had to take over leadership roles.

By the time Khruschev gave his Twentieth Party address of 1956, the party was in shambles. But then American CP efforts to keep in step with the international movement was always a sort of “international Coueism,” for it never really knew what was expected of it. “Moscow gave little advice,” writes Starobin, “basically because it had no advice to give.”

Starobin’s book has received kudos from such varied commentators as David A. Shannon, Theodore Draper, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. However, one should treat parts with care, for the author greatly exaggerates Communist strength. It is difficult to see the Communists of the thirties establishing the strongest, most influential radical movement in American history,” or the Communists of the forties building “something approaching a mass movement.” Claims that Communists grappled with the concept of “black power” since the 1920’s are vastly overdrawn, and one looks for evidence that it was the sports editor of the Daily Worker who persuaded Branch Rickey to hire black baseball players for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

As we have seen, the history of American left, as with the history of many other mass movements, offers classic cases of cannibalization. In fact, the smaller the stakes—and left movements were often quite weak—the greater the bitterness. One finds heroism to be sure, and the names of Dwight MacDonald and Norman Thomas come most quickly to mind. But the heroism remains that of solitary individuals, people who were able to rise above the dogmatism and expediency that so often surrounded them. As for the movements themselves, one must ask why people ever fought so bitterly in order to recover a heritage and a community that, in reality, had never existed.

Arts And Movies

by Mr. First Nighter

An Unmarried Woman. Dir. and written by Paul Mazursky. With Jill Clayburgh and Alan Bates. Speaking of tedium, ideology, and narcissism with a female focus, if Julia qualifies as one of the worst big movies of 1977, then surely Unmarried Woman takes the prize for 1978, at least so far.

Unmarried Woman comes with raves and hosannahs from the critics; which should put one on guard right away. Sure enough, this film is tedium and boredom unrelieved. A longish film anyway, it seems at least twice as long as it really is. The critics were presumably trying to push its feminist ideology, since the film deals with the movement towards independence of its herione, Jill Clayburgh. But, ye gods, there were hundreds of films of the Old Culture that portrayed women who were ten times as independent and a hundred times as intelligent as the drip Erica, portrayed by Jill Clayburgh. Think of all the movies with Katharine Hepburn. Bette Davis, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Susan Hayward, etc! Clayburgh, whether at the end of the film or at the beginning, has no ideas, no wit, no career, no nothing.

The movie has virtually no plot, no dialogue worth mentioning, no insights. Erica is a soft-focus woolly-head who drifts from one scene to another. As in Julia, the other characters are in no way believable; they are there as shadowy reflections of the ideas (none) and interests (men) of the heroine. Most of the film is soft-core (very soft) porno, with Clayburgh wandering around various apartments, including her own, in her underwear. But the pomo qua porno is almost worse than any other aspect of the picture, so don’t expect any entertainment there. The movie is almost insufferably tasteless: witness a lengthy and gratuitous monologue by Clayburgh (to her “psychotherapist”, natch) about how she felt on her menstral day.

The movie is also insufferably trendy: everything about Erica and her lifestyle is “in”, from psychotherapist to jogging to modern art to places where she hangs out (East Side, Washington Square, SoHo). In many ways, An Unmarried Woman is exactly the sort of life and attitudes so brilliantly satirized in Semi-Tough, ironically enough Jill Clayburgh’s previous picture. What should be satirized however, is taken by director and writer Mazursky with the utmost seriousness. Particularly obnoxious is the “psychotherapist”, an ugly, ungainly six-foot female, who emits idiotic and trendy platitudes in a dimwit manner. (The publicity assures us that, not being able to find an actor or actress to play a shrink in a realistic enough manner, Mazursky turned to a real psychotherapist— which adds a grisly, Grand Guignol aspect to the film.) The shrink’s deep insights consist of a lisped: ‘It’s OK to feel lonely; it’s OK to feel rage; it’s OK to feel emotions.” The only emotion not OK in “Tania’s” world outlook is guilt: “Take a week’s vacation from guilt.” And, insipidly: “I just get livid when people tell me they feel guilty.”

To top off the general tastelessness, obscenity is rife throughout the picture. But, in contrast to Semi-Tough, where the obscenity was pointed and funny, it is here as pointless and flat as the entire picture.

The ambience is as trendy and false as the rest of the picture. Mazursky’s intent is to celebrate New York, and he tries to load the dice by photographing only the most glamorous parts of the city. But even so, and without dumdum Mazursky’s realizing it, the essence of New York manages to shine through: dirty, crowded, hectic, littered, ugly, unpleasant.

There is another important aspect of this picture which no critic has mentioned, either because the critics are too inured or too polite to point it out. This is a very Jewishy picture. Aside from Clayburgh and her husband, virtually all the characters are Jewish, either in name or in fact. At a restaurant, Jewishy characters eat grossly and yell at the waiter (note, however, that in contrast to Goodbye, Columbus and many other satirical films, these people are treated favorably—not only favorably, but as if this is simply what life is!) Alan Bates is Jewish “Saul Kaplan”, presumably because Mazursky could not conceive of a Sensitive Male who is not Jewish. When Clayburgh is not flouncing around in her underwear or yakking with her psychotherapist, she is eating lunch with “the club”, a group of girlfriends who are clearly all Jewish and who spend their time bitching about men and talking about how unhappy they are. (Is it any wonder that Clayburgh finds them a teeny bit wanting?) In this totally Jewish world, Jill Clayburgh sticks out like a sore thumb. Perhaps Mazursky should have gone all the way, and starred Barbra Striesand. Then our cup truly would have runneth over.

Does this turkey have no redeeming feature? Yes it does, but is only lasts about 60 blissful seconds, after which we’re back in Dullsville. In one of the interminable soft-core underwear scenes, suddenly, an old Billie Holliday record appears on the sound-track. So, if you happen to find yourself trapped in this awful picture, when Billie’s record comes on, for God’s sake close your eyes and listen to that marvelous voice: because that’s all there’s gonna be.