Cynthia Grenier. WorldNetDaily.com.
May 12, 2001.
"Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover
Left" by Ronald Radosh (Encounter Books) -- fresh in bookstores -- is an
absolutely wonderful book: funny, moving, deeply sad. A book which anyone at all
interested in the radical side of American life during the last half century
should not miss.
Ronald Radosh considers himself to have been virtually born on the 1st of
May, the great day of celebration for the left -- above all, in the Soviet
Union. Radosh has a photograph taken in 1939 of himself in a stroller, at a year
and a half, about to be pushed down Fifth Avenue in the yearly Communist Party
celebration that went through the garment center of the then-radical needle
trade unions, ending with a mass rally at Union Square -- for decades the
historic center of radical protest.
His parents -- father from Poland, mother from Russia -- never actually
joined the Party, but certainly were what could be called fellow travelers.
Friends and relatives were Party members. An uncle died fighting in the Spanish
Civil War. Radosh imbibed the ideas and sympathies of the left practically along
with his mother's milk.
Ironically, by the time of the Cold War, his father -- because of his past
activity with the Reds -- found he was put on an industry blacklist. He then did
, says Radosh, what many other blacklisted union activists close to the
Communist Party did: he became a capitalist. He went into business with an old
neighborhood friend whose cousin had owned one of the major hat firms in
America. And, in a strange quirk of history, his pro-Communist father wound up
getting the contract for the official Eisenhower hats in the 1952 campaign,
which he designed and which were created in the factory he now owned.
Radosh and his parents moved from a Lower East Side apartment to Washington
Heights, a new middle-class neighborhood, mainly inhabited by Eastern European
Jewish immigrants and a new group of German Jews, like the parents of Henry
Kissinger. His grade school, PS 173, was largely filled with Jewish students
taught by Irish teachers who were largely conservative. When a student brought
in a record of Paul Robeson as part of "Negro History Week," the
teacher, Agnes Driscoll, thrilled to the singer's magnificent baritone until she
asked who the singer was. Learning it was Robeson, she snatched the record from
the player, screaming, "... that Communist in my class!" The student
was sent to the principal's office and suspended for a week.
Miss Driscoll had other occasion to find fault with her class on political
grounds. At the time of the Dewey-Truman election, Radosh's parents -- and most
of his classmates' parents -- were supporting the third-party candidacy of Henry
Wallace, former vice president running on a pro-Soviet platform for the
Progressive Party. So, naturally enough, at the time of a mock-election poll in
school, Radosh and his classmates voted in good number for Wallace. Miss
Driscoll exploded, Wallace in her eyes was a Red and a traitor. "In our
classroom we could only vote for Dewey or Truman. She went on to inform us that
if any of our parents were intending to vote for Wallace, we should tell them
they could not and should not." Little Ronald ran home crying.
Radosh went to high school at the Elizabeth Irwin High School, an affiliate
of New York's famous Little Red Schoolhouse, spending every summer in the
Catskills at "Commie" summer camps. Entering the University of
Wisconsin in the late 1950s, he became pretty much one of the founding fathers
of the New Left and stayed center stage through the '60s.
Radosh's long road to Damascus really began when he decided (along with
co-author Joyce Milton) to write a book testifying to the innocence of Ethel and
Julius Rosenberg, executed as Soviet spies. As a youth, he had stood vigil the
night they were put to death. Imagine his surprise as he studied the government
documents and all the material on the trials to find out they were, in fact,
guilty. The resulting book, "The Rosenberg File," created a sensation.
The authors went on Nightline, took part in debates, while erstwhile leftish
friends ripped the book to shreds in hostile reviews. Radosh found what it was
like to be blacklisted himself. University professorships were refused him. The
academic left closed its doors to him.
Radosh soldiered on through the wars in Central America, the Contras and the
Sandanistas -- experiences that only firmed his lack of spirit for the left. A
visit to Cuba in 1992 really shut the door for him: Cuba had from his student
days always been a kind of Communist ideal. But finally seeing the "paradise"
that Castro had built for the Cuban people tore it from him.
Visiting a Cuban mental health hospital, he and others in his group were
struck by how zombie-like the patients appeared. When they asked the doctor
whether the patients were heavily sedated, he replied, "Lobotomy did
wonders for her condition", and, "We are proud that in our
institution, we have a larger proportion of hospital inmates who have been
lobotomized than any other mental hospital in the world." When one member
loudly objected, he was silenced by a Castro supporter, "We have to
understand that there are differences between capitalist lobotomies and
socialist lobotomies."
"Commies" is quite a book. Vivid, funny, lots of left-leaning
celebs for color and, yet, deeply touching. Go buy it. You won't regret it.
Cynthia Grenier, an international film and theater critic, is the former
Life editor of the Washington Times and acted as senior editor at The World &
I, a national monthly magazine, for six years.
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