Lecture on The Book of Daniel

THE BOOK OF DANIEL: FROM THE OLD LEFT TO THE NEW

-- text of lecture delivered by Michael Meeropol, March 6, 2008 at the Western New England College colloquium devoted to the work of E.L. Doctorow

A couple of years ago, Edgar Doctorow was giving a talk at Fordham University Law School about the genesis of The Book of Daniel. He had grown up in a family of New Deal Democrats but he had been exposed to all manner of people known generically as the “Old Left.” That terms encompasses communists, communist sympathizers, socialists, Trotskyists. Not all of them liked the Soviet Union but they all were highly critical of American capitalism.

This is especially true in the context of the Depression when many of these individuals came of age.

Beginning first in the South with the sit-in movement in 1960 (which itself was stimulated by the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955) and expanding to mostly white college campuses in the mid to late 1960s, a New Left emerged.

Remember Dr. Beagle’s quote: History tells you how it was – Historical fiction tells you how it felt.

Edgar Doctorow wanted to write about the New Left – but he wanted to give it the perspective of history that many of its participants – being young and arrogant and disrespectful of their elders! -- did not have. He chose as the vehicle for this exploration, the quintessential child of the Old Left – the orphaned son of a couple executed as spies in 1954. Much of the novel takes place in 1967 when the son is now a 25 year old graduate student, married with an eight-month old son ---

In the novel, Daniel Lewin (nee Isaacson) attempts to understand the story of his family but also to sort out his role in the middle of the turmoil of the 1960s.

As with my lecture about the historical and economic background to Ragtime, I want to focus on some of the discussions of the “old left” and the “new left” that are scattered throughout this wonderful novel.

Just in case anyone was curious – I am not going to be talking about the book’s relationship to the real life story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a couple who were executed in 1953 allegedly for stealing the secret of the Atom Bomb. I have chosen this course in large part because I want to be true to Ed Doctorow’s vision for his novel. Though many have remarked on the close modeling of The Book of Daniel on the Rosenberg case the point is that these characters are not Ethel and/or Julius Rosenberg – and Daniel and Susan Isaacson are not the Rosenbergs’ two sons. Instead they are fictional characters who were part of the Old Left (communists in fact) and whose children joined the new left in the 1960s.

So what was the “old left”?

Perhaps I can get at an understanding of that term by taking off from Professor Baick’s discussion last week. Remember, he placed the novel Billy Bathgate in the context of the Great Depression and he noted that having a job and doing it well was really important for people during the depression. Equally important was the desperation to survive and succeed – symbolized by the scene where “Billy” is given a ten dollar bill and determines he has less than a minute to get away before a bunch of kids where were his friends literally seconds ago would jump him to “share” his money – and maybe even kill him in the process. In other words – if you have a chance to get ahead – take it – and the Hell with everyone else.

To that individualistic response – the extremity of which was to engage in crime – often crime that victimizes people just like yourself – was counter-posed the collective, political response.

Professor Baick noted in passing that the reason why the gang of friends would most likely jump Billy for the money was that “we are all in this [the depression] together” –

Professor Baick was implying that the people likely to jump Billy for the money believed that every gain for every individual had to be shared!

I am not an expert on the totality of Doctorow’s writing, but I am impressed by what I have read in Ragtime and The Book of Daniel and excerpts of other novels (including Billy Bathgate and The March) that he focuses on individual actors in history and not so much on “social movements” -- the activities of people in groups.

In fact in both the book and the movie Daniel, the glimpse we have of the Old Left social movements – namely the movement to free Daniel and Susan’s parents – is of total insensitivity to the children. This occurs very early in the book – pp. 21-22 in the edition in the library. They are terrified as they are lifted through a crowd so they could be displayed on stage as the crowd yells “Free Them Free Them.” The children are, of course, traumatized. We, the readers are left with nothing but revulsion for the so-called “movement” that would so exploit innocent children for political ends – even if the ends are laudable, freeing those children’s own parents.

Back to Professor Baicks point –

The depression definitely was a period of gangsters and crime – but it was also a period of intense organizing of unions and the growth of both the Communist and Socialist Parties. This trend was based on a conception of solidarity– that to return to Prof. Baick’s statement: “We are all in this together …” The solution was not to try to become successful as an individual but to change the system so that all could benefit from the productivity of society.

There are two versions of today’s (with hindsight) view of the “Old Left.”

The one that dominates political discourse today is a very harsh condemnation of the Communist Party which was the largest and most influential grouping within the Old Left. The condemnation is that they were a group of traitors or would-be traitors whose loyalty was to the Soviet Union. If this organization and its members ever did anything to advance positive things in the US it was purely to manipulate people. Individuals who were members who did not participate in traitorous activities and would not have supported such activities were dupes – manipulated by their cynical “leaders.”

The other version is the version I support ---

The Old Left believed Socialism (even Soviet-style socialism) was superior to capitalism – even US style capitalism – The communists went further -- they believed that the Soviet Union was the hope of the world – and they therefore believed that it was important that the Soviet Union survive.

Some of them who were in a position to help – such as the scientist Klaus Fuchs, the scientist Theodore Hall – actively helped the Soviet Union during World War II.

However – the vast majority of communists were never in a position to help the Soviet Union as spies… they “helped” by publicizing positive things about the Soviet Union and arguing against negative information about the Soviet Union.

However, they mostly spent their active political lives fighting for a number of things that lots of non-communists also fought for – civil rights for blacks, the right of unions to organize, against the nuclear arms race and the various post-WW II wars (Korea, Vietnam).

Though I believe most communists were not spies it is definitely true that most Communists were “pro-Soviet” – what that meant was they thought the idea of a country calling itself socialist and attempting to build communism was very important

By the way, the terms “socialism” and “communism” meant different things to communists in the 1930s than they mean now.

In the context of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, “Socialism” meant an economic system which produced and distributed goods and services according to the following rule: – from each according to his ability, to each according to his work. (Where “his” referred to both men and women!)

Communism was the goal which could only be achieved after a long period of time under socialism. After developing the ability of society to produce so much that in effect the problem of “scarcity” would be banished, the society could then be organized according to a different rule: – from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs

Note that most of us in this room would probably deny that it was possible to banish scarcity but communists did believe that.

For American communists and communist sympathizers, the idea was that a country building socialism and aiming towards communism (as defined above) was a better country than the US.

Now – some communists would no doubt have agreed that the Soviet style one-party state and the absence of American style civil liberties would not be good for an American version of socialism … and many would have probably been a bit confused if forced to explain how the so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” would work in the American context. Nevertheless, I do believe that many of the gut feelings of the individuals who were in the American Communist Party would and could be summarized by the following statement:

They wanted Jefferson and Lincoln plus a planned economy. (Jefferson because of the Bill of Rights – Lincoln as a shorthand for full citizenship for ex slaves -- a planned economy to create economic justice).

However, they were very much in the mold of Americans participating in the political process and the mainstream of culture. Thus, unlike the anarchists such as Emma Goldman and Mother’s Younger Brother who we met in Ragtime, there was no free love and “living in sin…” Communists got married, served in the military, were actually quite staid in their personal lives. Some artists who were communists practiced what came to be known as the “bohemian lifestyle” but in general communists were critics of anarchism, avant garde art, drugs, homosexuality, etc. Writers for example had to conform to principles of so-called “socialist realism.”

It is important to understand that in the context of the Great Depression and World War II, Communism was very attractive to idealistic young people. Here was a system – a proposed way of organizing society -- that promised to abolish poverty and the unfairness of workers working 10 hours a day so their bosses could get rich. Here was a system that in the middle of the world wide depression was building dams, steel mills, collective farms and creating universal education and health care in the Soviet Union.

Old leftists could look back on American history (from the vantage point of the 1940s and 50s) at the struggles of abolitionists to fight slavery – the struggles of freed slaves after the Civil War to keep their rights in the face of the intransigence of white Southerners who (with the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan and the withdrawal of Northern troops) ended up disenfranchising the freed slaves and relegating them to approximately 90 years of second class citizenship (depending on what state we’re talking about) –

They could look back on the struggles of workers to organize unions in the face of violence against strikers – from the 19th century right up to the sit down strikes of the 1930s – and they could also look with pride on the role of Communists in World War II.

Old Leftists would see the march of progress from the American Revolution to the spread of democracy (removal of property qualifications for voting) to the Civil War and Reconstruction to the struggles of farmers in the populist movement – to the struggle for union recognition which led to the creation of the CIO – Old leftists could claim that America had moved almost in a straight line from less democracy to more democracy from slavery and oppression to freedom and a move towards equality --- they could see the rise of unions as part of this march and the role of blacks in American culture as part of this march – and even in the late 1940s the integration of both baseball and the armed forces could be seen as part of this march towards progress.

Old leftists also celebrated their favorite playwrights, poets, authors, artists -- Clifford Odets (Waiting for Lefty), Richard Wright (Native Son), Langston Hughes (Harlem – the poem that inspired the play and movie A Raisin in the Sun), Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie – not all of them communists but all of them pro-communist ….

At the same time, old leftists warned about repression that occurred in many periods of US history: the alien and sedition acts during the John Adams administration, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War and again in the 1920s, the repression of labor unions throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Palmer Raids after World War I and the witch-hunts – what came to be called McCarthyism -- after World War II.

What was the difference between the old left and the new left?

Perhaps the most important difference was that the new left did not feel the need to either defend or embrace the Soviet Union --- for the most part, they considered the Soviet Union irrelevant.

People in the new left were not very ideological in the middle years of the 1960s decade. They were explicitly socialist (even communist) members of various new left groups but they mostly were interested in action rather than theory.

In the early 1960s the Civil Rights movement in the South inspired northerners to offer their support – either by picketing of local Woolworth stores in support of the Southern students engaging in sit-ins or with actual trips to the South – as in the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964.

In 1962, the Port Huron Statement was adopted by SDS. In it you can see how different the New Left was from the Old Left.

The New Left was more anarchist -- definitely not Marxist-Leninist. As such it was quite attractive to certain libertarians. Senator Barry Goldwater who ran for President as a libertarian conservative in 1964 stated explicitly that he had a lot in common with the “anarchist wing of the New Left.” His campaign manager Karl Hess actually became a New Leftist and wrote quite approvingly about the libertarian tendencies within SDS and other organizations.

One of the most celebrated individuals by the New Left was (is) the linguist Noam
Chomsky. He opposes the Communist view of the need for hierarcy and strong governments.

Why do I bring him up? Because he is above everything else an individual. He is the exact opposite of an organization person. He celebrates the actions of ordinary people acting in groups – those who demonstrate, who commit civil disobedience, who actively oppose illegitimate authority – but he does not join organizations. He opposes most political parties especially old left political organizations.

He would probably identify himself as a “libertarian socialist” because he believes private ownership of wealth-producing property creates imbalances of power that are always exploited by the owners and the already powerful to enhance their positions versus the people with less power and less wealth.

By the way, the organization that Susan Isaacson is involved with, the Boston Resistance is an outgrowth of a document signed by Chomsky among others called “A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority” – those who burned draft cards, refused induction into the armed forces, fled to Canada or went to jail were all followers of The Resistance and Susan Isaacson ends up involved with that particular organization.

The New Left was composed of privileged individuals. They were mostly college students or recent graduates. The blacks who launched the sit-in movement in 1960 and who founded the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee were not sharecroppers – they were college students (albeit in the segregated South for the most part). The students who drafted the Port Huron Statement and then engaged in acts of civil disobedience at the Pentagon in 1967 (where the Daniel Isaacson character participates on pages 250-257 in the book) were different from the people who organized unions and participated in the sit down strikes of the 1930s.

Whereas one could argue that many communists and fellow travelers were poor and working class themselves trying to make a better world for themselves – many of the individuals of the New Left (the black college students who gave up the comforts of their academic opportunities to work with rural sharecroppers trying to get the right to vote – the white college students who went to Washington to demonstrate against the Vietnam War – who burned their draft cards even though they had student deferments) were taking action on behalf of others.

Certainly, the character of Daniel in The Book of Daniel is quite diffident about engaging in action at the beginning of the book.

That’s the point of the very angry exchange over Christmas dinner between himself and his sister.

When we experience this argument we already know that Daniel’s sister Susan has made a suicide attempt and is currently in a mental hospital. Daniel remembers the previous Christmas on pp. 79-82. In that passage we learn of Susan’s political involvement and her proposal to use the money raised for Daniel and herself (which would become theirs at the time of her 21st birthday) to start a foundation in their parents’ name that would give money to “the movement.”

Daniel argues against it – making Susan so mad that in a letter she writes to him, she states “Some day Daniel following your pathetic demons you are going to disappear up your own asshole. To cover the time until then I am writing you out of my mind. You no longer exist.”

Daniel concludes a couple of pages later that Susan was driven to eradicate him [Daniel] from her consciousness by the radical means of eradicating her consciousness – that is, attempted to commit suicide.

Though Daniel appears very much opposed to taking the actions Susan endorses, for the rest of the novel he begins to follow up on Susan’s desires. Because she is incapacitated in the mental hospital, he becomes active.

He claims (in the book) that he has ultimately achieved what he calls satisfaction when he puts his body on the line at the Pentagon in the 1967 demonstration.

Please note that the entire structure of the book is Daniel’s individual quest – identifying the new left as highly individualistic and discovering the real shortcomings of the old left.

It begins on p. 34 where Daniel remembers his father –

“What I remember is the lectures.”

Beginning with that sentence, we get almost a complete summary of the ideology of the old left in these pages.

One of Daniel’s lessons from these lectures are not the ones that his father wanted him to learn. While Paul was stating “The battle is not finished, the struggle of the working class is still going on. Never forget that, Danny,” Daniel has decided that “… it seemed to me then that I was marked. Because they had a lot more power than we did.” (p. 36)

By the way, this idea that “they” had a lot more power than “we” had was the opposite of the new left view – The new left view was that the power of the people would ultimately prevail. That if enough people demanded change – whether it was in the South against official racial discrimination and second-class citizenship or on College campuses where the draft created cannon fodder for an imperialist war – the idea that if enough people opposed bad policies, they would be forced to change.

The Old Left after WW II was not optimistic – the new left during the 1960s was wildly optimistic!!

On p. 40 we are introduced into a very interesting contradiction within the Old Left. Daniel (or the author) is describing Rochelle (his mother) as a better radical than Paul, ELD (through Daniel) points up a rather ridiculous contradiction in the old left.

“ …the implication of all things he used to flagellate himself was that American democracy wasn’t democratic enough. He continued to be astonished, insulted, outraged, that it wasn’t purer, freer, finer, more ideal … Why did he expect so much of a system he knew by definition could never satisfy his standards of justice? [Rochelle’s argument] A system he was committed to opposing because he had a better one in mind.”

Later on, on p. 85 and 86 we see Paul Isaacson being upset that America wasn’t living up to its democratic ideals. A communist functionary – obviously someone high up in the organization – patronizingly marvels at Paul Isaacson’s naivete about the US. Whereas Paul is shocked and angered by the anti-democratic actions of the US government, the man says that it’s obvious that this is the logical result of capitalism – why should Paul Isaacson be surprised?

E.L.Doctorow wants us, the readers, to be outraged by our country’s betrayal of our ideals. He does not want us, the readers, to be convinced by the cold, calculating Communist leader who accepts it as a matter of course. We don’t like his cynicism and to make sure we aren’t convinced, the child Daniel observing the conversation “doesn’t like” the man either.

A bit later in the novel, on p. 104, Paul Isaacson has apparently learned that lesson – or at least he’s learned to “parrot” that lesson. When Paul informs his wife, Rochelle, that their friend, a Dentist named Selig Mindish, has been arrested he says, “It’s only the coming of fascism so why should we be surprised?”

Communists feared “the coming of fascism” because they know that in Europe when fascism came, the communists were the first to be arrested and killed and put into concentration camps. In 1950, a security index was created and a law was passed that provided for detention without trials of anyone on that security index should the President declare a national emergency. The Communist leaders were tried and convicted under the Smith Act in 1950 for “teaching and advocating the overthrow of the US government by force and violence…” And of course there were spy trials as well.

On p. 134, we are in 1967 where Daniel meets up with the New Left counter-culture in the person of Artie Sternlicht. He is an Abbie Hoffman/Jerry Rubin type – two of the three who founded the “Youth International Party” known as the Yippies …

The three pages of Sternlicht “rapping” are in fact a neat summary of the audacity of the New Left and the contrast with the old left (with their organizations and rules and hierarchy).

Listen to Sternlicht a bit …

“So how do you bring change to something this powerful. The same way a skinny little judo freak throws a cat three times his size. You don’t preach. You don’t talk about poverty and injustice and imperialism and racism. That’s like trying to make people read Shakespeare, it can’t be done. Look there, what do you see? [out the window at other apartments] Little blue squares in every window. Right? Everyone digging the commercials. That is today’s school, man. In less than a minute a TV commercial can carry you through a lifetime. It tells the story from the date to the wedding. It shows you the baby, the home, the care, the graduation. It makes you laugh and makes your eyes water with nostalgia … Commercials are learning units. So like when the brothers walk into the draft board down in Baltimore and pour blood all over the induction records – that’s the lesson. And the Yippies throwing money away at the stock exchange…. Society is a put on so we put on the put on. Authority is momentum. Break the momentum. Legitimacy is illegitimate. Make it show its ass. Hit and run. … Next month we’re going to Washington and exorcizing the Pentagon. We’re gonna levitate the Pentagon by prayer and incantation and blowing horns and throwing magic invisibilities at the Pentagon walls. We’re gonna lift it up and let it down. We’re gonna kill it with flowers. Be there! We’ll be on television. We’re gonna overthrow the United States with images.”

Earlier in the book, Doctorow had said it more succinctly—“So the Trustees of Ohio State were right in 1956 when they canned the English instructor for assigning Catcher in the Rye to his freshman class. They knew there is no qualitative difference between the kid who thinks it’s funny to fart in chapel and Che Guevara. They knew then Holden Caulfield would found SDS.”

And Daniel is there in Sternlicht’s apartment because Susan had previously come there to add a poster of her parents to a big collage on the wall

On p. 151 Sternlicht attacks the old left – and Daniel’s parents …

I read Doctorow as being appalled by Sternlicht’s insensitivity to both Susan and Daniel, but he wants the reader to at least think about what Sternlicht is saying …

“Your folks didn’t know shit. The way they handled themselves at their trial was pathetic. I mean they played it by THEIR rules. The government’s rules. You know what I mean? Instead of standing up and saying fuck you, do what you want, I can’t get an honest trial anyway with you fuckers—they made motions, they pleaded innocent, they spoke only when spoken to, they played the game. …someday they’re gonna really off me. When the Federales wake up and they see I’m not just some crazy acid-head when they see that all the freaks are together and putting it together we will be set up for the big hit or the big bust or both, which is all right because I don’t give a shit about ding, when you’re into revolution you have to die, and you can’t be a revolution unless you’re willing to die. But man, if they ever put me on trial my action will be to show them up for the corrupt fuckers they really are. That trial will be my chance. I will turn that courtroom on, and what I say and do in the courtroom will go out on the wire, and the teletype, and kids all over the world will be at that trial and say, “Man, who is that dude, dig the way he’s got his shit together!” And if they find me guilty I will find them guilty and if they find me innocent I will still find the guilty … And they will be on trial not me. You see?”

Doctorow was actually describing tactics that had already occurred …

When a bunch of radicals were put on trial for inciting a riot at the Democratic Convention in 1968, the defendants turned the trial into a trial of the system and a celebration of their revolutionary zeal.

Though the defendants in the Conspiracy Trial of 1969 were all convicted, they exposed the unfairness of the system and actually used the trial to radicalize more people.

By contrast, in the Communist trials and the spy trials of the 1950s, the passivity of the defendants and their taking of the Fifth Amendment in effect said to the rest of America that they had something to hide.

After the visit with Sternlicht (p. 153) Daniel realizes that Sternlicht’s contempt for Susan’s idea was probably what pushed her “over the edge.” He concludes that Susan despaired because she learned her parents “were nothing” to the New Left. As the New Left in the person of Sternlicht had contempt for the Old Left, they also had contempt for the Isaacsons.

And that certainly is a fair appraisel of many members of the New Left. Many felt that the old left had failed miserably and they weren’t going to make the same mistakes

Daniel does not merely investigate the Old Left (via his personal memories) and the New Left (his encounter with Sternlicht, his participation in the march on the Pentagon). He also seeks to understand his parents’ case and US foreign policy after World War II.

We see this from p. 211 on.

In one section, Doctorow gives us six pages he calls “True History of the Cold War, A Raga.” He quotes approvingly from two authors of what came to be known in American Historiography as Cold War Revisionism.

I don’t know what you read in your history classes but before the 1960s, most historians of the Cold War saw it as the US standing up to expansionist totalitarian Soviet Russia and protecting the Free World from Communism …

Yet, some historians wouldn’t buy it. The most influential was William Appleman Williams -- a young veteran of World War II and (amazingly) a graduate of the US Naval Academy who wrote The Tragedy of American Diplomacy in 1959 and then revised and expanded it in 1962. By the mid to late 1960s, as one of his biographers noted:

“Orators against the Vietnam War on campus and in the community … crammed the Tragedy of American Diplomacy before mounting the stage and calling for the nation to consult its sleeping conscience … “

It is at this point in the novel that Daniel goes to the Pentagon demonstration in October of 1967. He is beaten and arrested – tastes his own blood and bits of broken teeth. He starts to make connections – achieves an understanding of what lots of New Leftists were understanding. That’s the point of the references to the work of William A. Williams.

He also refers to Norman Mailer’s presence – Mailer’s book The Armies of the Night had already been published when Doctorow wrote this book.

Doctorow has commented on his conception of Daniel’s “journey” that he believes Daniel has developed a true understanding of the interconnections between the Old Left and the New Left and the American reality. He has become a true radical. (This is my recollection of a letter I received from Doctorow back in the mid-1970s. Unfortunately, I cannot find that letter at this moment so my memory will have to suffice!)

I will close with a fantastic gem on p. 283:

Daniel is trying to persuade the daughter of the man who was the main witness against his parents to allow him to see her father. He is trying to impress her that he’s not afraid to learn that his parents were guilty. He is arguing that if his parents had given the Soviet Union the Atom Bomb, he would be proud of it and not trying to deny it:

“When the Russians got the bomb what happened? There were changes, right? The situation stabilized, the superpowers cooled it. And that gave the rest of us a little time. And the bomb took Russia out of the revolution. She was dragging it down, man. She was dumping on it. So that was a good thing too. A whole new possibility of action, the guerrilla, guerrilla warfare, the restoration of ancient revolutionary possibilities [NOTE: Vietnam had not yet defeated the US but by the time Doctorow was writing the leadership of the US knew they could never “win”] that’s what happened, man. The revolution went back to the people. And look at the world today. It is aroused to its own education. It is aroused, man … Now if my own parents did their thing in their day, and that is the result of the thing they did – do you really think I’d be trying to talk myself out of it?”

I use this quote which is very near the end of the book because one of the things that distinguished the New Left from the Old Left was that the New Left saw in Che Guevara (the guerilla side-kick of Fidel Castro who died trying to spread revolution to South America) and the Vietnamese Communists who defeated the US the new hope for world revolution. The New Left considered the Soviet Union irrelevant if not a negative influence.

That was another one of those crucial differences, and Doctorow wants us to be clear about that.

I will close by re-iterating two major differences between the Old Left and the New.

The Old Left was rooted in the labor movement – in the injustices of an unequal class society. The New Left was rooted in a dismay at the failure of America to live up to her ideals.

The Old Left looked to the Soviet Union as a “model” of what might be, what could be. The New Left considered the Soviet Union irrelevant – or worse.

Thus, in many ways the New Left was free of the taint of association with the Soviet Union – but they were also disconnected from a lot of the interests and struggles of ordinary people.

[for a footnoted version of this lecture, please contact Michael Meeropol at mameerop@wnec.edu]