In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933-1966 by Joshua B. Freeman Oxford University Press, 1989, 434 pp., $34.95 Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960 by Gary Gerstle Cambridge University Press, 345 …
Michael Harrington had two qualities of the greatly good—patience, and an almost total freedom from vanity. A political worker by calling, he was also, irrepressibly, a quick-witted man, who could startle himself (in the middle of some careful analysis of …
The last time I saw Mike, we had lunch at a coffee shop in Greenwich Village. He had a chocolate milkshake, which had been his staple food since the cancer recurred. We discussed nineteenth- century literature and E. M. Forster, …
In the pilot film for the 1987 television series Max Headroom, an investigative reporter discovers that an advertiser is compressing television commercials into almost instantaneous “blipverts,” units so high-powered they can cause some viewers to explode. American television has long …
I first encountered Michael in 1976 when he spoke at Wesleyan University. The audience was peppered with people like myself who wanted, more than anything else, not to be “social democrats.” Unable, or unwilling, to comprehend his politics, we badgered …
The Italian Communists have finally tied the knot. Led to the altar by a new secretary general, Achille Occhetto, the party (PCI) has unmistakably espoused West European social democracy. The prenuptial maneuvers had dragged on for years, with a squeamish …
The conclusions of the Kerner Commission Report on the urban riots during the late 1960s have been widely accepted; namely that this angry black urban upheaval was driven by a gnawing alienation and despair among mainly working-class and poor Afro-Americans. …
Two distinct topics have been involved in the recent debate about the future of the humanities, and the worst failure of the debate is that it hardly seems to notice the distinction. The topics in question are the traditional study …
Viewed from the outside, bicentennial France seems to be resigning its major claim to political glory, its jealously guarded national treasure: the tradition of the Great Revolution. Foreign observers have noticed a sharp contrast between the republican glamour of the …
The main square in Nanjing, China is called the “Gulou,” named after a five-hundred-year-old bell tower that used to warn the city’s Ming subjects of impending attack. Today, the bell tower still stands, but is little more than a traffic …
I had forgotten the incident completely, until I read Trey Ellis’s essay, “Remember My Name,” in a recent issue of the Village Voice (June 13, 1989). But there, in the middle of an extended italicized list of the by-names of …
It is sobering to read the entry on “homelessness” in the 1968 edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, which declares that although wandering men can be found in many societies, “homeless women and children are relatively rare. …
Martin Duberman’s excellent biography supplies a great deal of new information and insight about a man previously shrouded in myth. What Paul Robeson thought is still elusive—he wrote very little and maintained a “protective secretiveness” that not even his friends …
The status of the Afro-American intellectual community has changed drastically during the last twenty years. As a result of the civil rights movement and the urban uprisings of the 1960s, predominantly white universities began to open their doors to black …
I want to mention very briefly–not discuss, not analyze–a few matters that we will be returning to in future issues of Dissent. They are central to our moment. A few facts, perhaps known but worth repeating: Nearly one out of …
