For Marty Dworkin and his band of young Trotskyist dreamers in Buffalo, New York, the vision of a just, socialist world crumbles with the rise of Stalin and the chaos of World War II. In the two decades that follow, Dworkin and his idealistic colleagues strive to establish a new political party and battle through unexpected trials with family, work, aging, and the changing world. They run up against an increasingly conservative America and a thriving materialism directly opposed to their own fervent beliefs. They emerge humbled, but still hopeful, into the 1960s, when civil rights struggles and anti-war radicalism move to center stage. Standing Fast is a classic, panoramic portrait of life amid the shattered dreams and visionary ambitions of the American left.
For Marty Dworkin and his band of young Trotskyist dreamers in Buffalo, New York, the vision of a just, socialist world crumbles with the rise of Stalin and the chaos of World War II. In the two decades that follow, Dworkin and his idealistic colleagues strive to establish a new political party and battle through unexpected trials with family, work, aging, and the changing world. They run up against an increasingly conservative America and a thriving materialism directly opposed to their own fervent beliefs. They emerge humbled, but still hopeful, into the 1960s, when civil rights struggles and anti-war radicalism move to center stage. Standing Fast is a classic, panoramic portrait of life amid the shattered dreams and visionary ambitions of the American left.
eBookDigital Original (Digital Original)
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
For Marty Dworkin and his band of young Trotskyist dreamers in Buffalo, New York, the vision of a just, socialist world crumbles with the rise of Stalin and the chaos of World War II. In the two decades that follow, Dworkin and his idealistic colleagues strive to establish a new political party and battle through unexpected trials with family, work, aging, and the changing world. They run up against an increasingly conservative America and a thriving materialism directly opposed to their own fervent beliefs. They emerge humbled, but still hopeful, into the 1960s, when civil rights struggles and anti-war radicalism move to center stage. Standing Fast is a classic, panoramic portrait of life amid the shattered dreams and visionary ambitions of the American left.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781480414839 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 08/06/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 656 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Standing Fast
A Novel
By Harvey Swados
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1970 Harvey SwadosAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-1483-9
CHAPTER 1
NORM
Slanting between the red-brick ranks of apartment houses and business buildings of Upper Manhattan, the sun struck Norman on his bared head, finding its way also to the wooden platform from which he addressed the street-corner meeting. He gripped the railing tightly, taken by a kind of exhilaration.
"They lied to us," he cried, "all of them! Stalin, Chamberlain, Roosevelt! If I had said a week ago that Stalin would make a deal with Hitler, you would have laughed at me. Now I tell you that we cannot rely on Stalin or Chamberlain—or Roosevelt—to fight fascism for us."
"So who do you suggest?" An aging, unshaved man with a shriveled right arm peered up at him anxiously, more worried than challenging, from the front of the crowd.
"Ourselves!" Norman spread his arms wide in an all-embracing gesture. "When Molotov said that fascism is a matter of taste, he did more than give Hitler the green light. He taught us something we should never have forgotten: to rely on our own strength as a class."
"On our strength?" The graying man waved his newspaper incredulously at his neighbors. To judge from his accent, he was probably a German refugee. "Wiz us," he persisted, "wiz us you're going to stop ze Nazis?"
"With international solidarity. The workers as a class have nothing to gain from fascism."
"Tell it to ze German vorkers."
Norman had been prepared for the usual assaults from the Stalinists, but the Pact had silenced them. On this sunny September afternoon almost everyone was willing, perhaps even anxious for a new explanation of what still left them stunned.
Nevertheless the skeptical refugee was not entirely wrong. He stood among children on roller skates, slowing to stare at the orator on the little platform, gaping at his flag and his fervor as they might have at a sidewalk pitchman. Beyond them, women shoppers glad of an excuse to linger on the summer street, high school kids licking ice cream suckers, their unformed faces curiously neutral; and worn-out working people and shopkeepers, in flight from other shores like the heckler, or from long hours at the sewing machine, the lunch counter, the punch press. What could the concept of class mean to them? Were they prepared to think of themselves as the bearers of incalculable possibilities?
Raising both hands, he brought them together, symbolically uniting himself with them. "When our comrades pass among you, put your names and addresses on the sheet they carry, and we will be happy to keep you informed about our activities and our program of mass action for peace and against fascism."
Sy and Bernice had been standing in the middle of the crowd, their upturned faces absorbed. No longer children, after the depression years at home and the alcove arguments at City College, they were still not quite adults, not when you looked down at their transfixed worshipfulness. It was flattering, but just a little silly, and Norm was glad to see them bustle hopefully with their literature bundles and interest sheets.
They were a smallish, rather intense pair, both with shell-rimmed glasses and sweet doglike dark eyes. If they lacked humor, life had not given them much to laugh about; it was more important that they were decent and loyal. When they held each other by the hand, the history major and the sociology major, they could touch you not only with love but with envy.
Norman leaped off the platform and began to fold it up. Some of the youngsters hastened to help him; whether or not they understood what he had been saying, they were at least ready to give him a hand. In a way you could say the same thing about Sy and Bernice, even though they swore fidelity to Norman's faction. He had the uncomfortable feeling that with all their knowledgeable talk about the need for an American radical party, and a real break with the traditional fixation on Russia, they were smitten with him as a dashing figure, more glamorous than the Marxist logic-choppers with whom they had grown up.
Still fresh from Mexico, where he had been first pick-wielding archaeologist and then pistol-toting bodyguard to Trotsky, he possessed for them the added attractiveness of having gone to college out of town, in Ann Arbor, of having played football there, of having his own place on 113th Street. They could not possibly have understood that he still felt trapped in the middle-class and had been attracted to the revolutionary movement as a possible way out of experienced middle-class agitators like himself, whose principal working class like Sy and Bernie, would have invested him with an additional appeal: the man of quality voluntarily disassociating himself from his origins in order to better serve their common ideal.
"I leave these to you," he said to them, rolling up the American flag and stowing it in the folded wooden platform, "to put back in the branch office, along with the literature. Have you got the key?"
"Somebody will be there," Bernie assured him. "We made arrangements beforehand."
"Did you dispose of many papers?"
Sy nodded, pleased. "And I made three good contacts, thanks to you. Your talk was great. You know how to get through to people."
"It won't last very long, without a follow-up. By the time they finish their salmon salad, they'll be wondering whether to play cards or go to the movies. My speechmaking has a limited effect."
But so did his belittling of his speechmaking. Sy replied anxiously, "You'll be there tonight, won't you?"
"You still want me to talk to the downtown branch?"
"We've publicized it," Bernie said seriously. "Everyone's expecting you, to hear about your experiences in Mexico."
It was nearly five; his father would be waiting. "Suppose I come by your flat," he said to Sy, "about a quarter to eight." He could as easily have gone directly to the headquarters of the downtown branch, but the warmth and contentiousness of the Glantzmans' Lower East Side flat were as attractive to him as the obligatory visits to his father's Riverside Drive apartment were tedious.
Sy was pleased. Loaded down with literature, he shook hands somewhat awkwardly and then turned to help his girl friend with the dismantled speaker's platform. Norm waved farewell to them both and hurried off to the 175th Street station of the Independent subway.
He had to change after one stop, at 168th Street, for the Seventh Avenue. Here, beneath the Presbyterian Hospital complex, he joined the walking wounded of the great city and its bastard civilization: invalids returning from treatment of banal or exotic complaints, visitors to the afflicted, sniffling relatives, and the motley mass of workers coming home from a sixth day of work downtown—or leaving home, carrying night lunch in brown paper bags, for nameless labor in deserted office buildings or sheeted and eerie department stores. Even if they had not yet been affected by the new war declared in defense of an obscure territory, they were nevertheless abstracted and unsmiling, enfolded in the private problems that bore on them more heavily than the far-off Nazis.
It was already too late, he was realistically convinced, to keep America out of war, no matter how many committees were formed, no matter how enthusiastically Russia's admirers now embraced isolation. The trick would be to transform what had been learned from the betrayals and the miseries of the Thirties into a new movement that would do what no one else was doing: fight on the one hand against the war and the obviously inevitable military dictatorship and postwar depression, and at the same time against the fascist poison that had already infected the isolationists and the Stalinists.
The odds were that it was a hopeless effort. But did that make it wrong to try? You had to do what was indicated by history, as well as by logic and passion. Most painful was the quality and insufficiency of his own comrades, an ill-assorted handful of inexperienced middle-class agitators like himself, whose principal asset was their stubborn refusal to concede that radical politics would end with the ending of the Thirties.
They proposed to attract to their side Communists whose sensibilities were still live enough to be shocked by the Nazi-Soviet Pact; Socialists who also refused to make common cause with racists; trade-union militants who did not propose to quit fighting, simply because they might embarrass the Administration; and young idealists like Sy and his girl, overwhelmed by the clarity and inner logic of a Bolshevik Leninism, that, like Catholicism, seemed incontrovertible once you accepted its first premises—but too humane nevertheless to follow blindly the dictates of the old man in Mexico, much less the tyrant in Moscow.
It was not much—a little group of Akron rubber workers, a roomful of Chicago students, a couple of old militants on the Mesabi Iron Range, some second-generation Wobblies here and there—but it was what they had, and it included people who were not simply more good than bad, but in all honesty, he believed, far ahead of their contemporaries in intelligent self-sacrifice and dedication to principle.
At 72nd Street he took the steps up to Broadway two at a time, still almost childishly pleased that he could reach the street faster than anyone else, without being winded. Heading west, toward the Hudson, he turned north on Riverside and breasted the river wind before his father's stately apartment house as the sun was already slipping behind the Palisades on the Jersey side.
The building had been his home, too, for a brief period after his return from Mexico. There had been plenty of space for the two of them in the four and a half-room apartment, but as soon as he had broached the idea of his taking a room farther uptown, near Columbia, his father had been more than receptive. Why not? At fifty-three Milton Miller kept an oily-nosed Turkish mistress in the very same building, one flight below in 4D, and although he visited that slothful but voluptuous woman three meticulous evenings a week, it was undoubtedly a nuisance to have his grown son hanging around, picking up the telephone even when it was Zoraina who rang, answering the doorbell and the downstairs buzzer too, grabbing the mail, watching his comings and goings like a jealous wife.
Nevertheless Milton, who had buried two wives already—Norman's mother and an almost as dim second one—had made his own fortune as a factor to textile jobbers, and was not about to throw any of it away on things like separate establishments—no matter how convenient that would be for all concerned—without imposing conditions. He was determined to show that he had not forgotten the value of money just because now he had a lot of it, and to reassert his authority over a son who was pushing twenty-five and still not settled into a profession.
"Listen," he had said, mouthing his Antony y Cleopatra, in the shrill piercing voice that made it impossible for you to do anything else, "put it out of your mind that you're just going to use me as your friendly neighborhood bank."
"What do you want, interest?"
"Funny. I want only your own good. You've got no mother, I've got to be twice as careful. You majored in archaeology at Ann Arbor, fine. You were crazy about it, you persuaded me you should go to graduate school. Fine. Then you had to do field work in Mexico. Fine."
"We've been through all this."
"All of a sudden," his father went on inexorably, "you're not on a dig. You're moved in with that crazy old man, guarding him, taking your life in your hands every minute."
"That didn't cost you a penny."
"Heartache it cost me. How many sons you think I've got?"
"I never did find out."
"Wise guy. Now he converted you, I'm supposed to support you while you run around and make propaganda for him. This country was pretty good to me, and I'm not going to let you—"
Hastily Norman reassured the patriot, righteously indignant in Palm Beach suit and silk socks rolled to the ankles. Teetering in his two-tone black and white summer bucks, his father demanded from him a commitment that he would indeed register at the Columbia School of Journalism as a graduate student, in earnest of his desire to enter a new profession.
"You can't spend your life being an agitator. You've got to have a profession."
It did not seem possible to Norman that his father could really believe that the war would spare him. Perhaps he thought—Norman did not really want to find out—that the magic of a "profession," even a semi-respectable one like journalism, would confer enough prestige to warrant a commission, if not protection from the hazards of an infantryman's existence. It was clear that he wanted to be able to say to his friends that his son was on the road to becoming a professional man. Since this did not seem too much to ask in return for support with few questions about his daily life, Norman had agreed, especially since his comrades, already preparing to form a new party, had regarded this as an excellent device, freeing him to work for them as publicist and propagandist.
Now that the war in Europe had actually broken out, however, Norman was somewhat less than sure himself about the bargain.
He intended to take this up with his father and thereafter with some of the people in the national office.
Milton Miller was standing in the doorway of 5G, fountain pen in one hand, cigar in the other, when Norm stepped off the elevator. "You're a little late."
"I hurried." Norm smiled reminiscently, thinking of how disgusted his father would have been if he had been among the crowd of spectators in front of the soapbox on Fort Washington Avenue. "The bank isn't closed yet, is it? I see you're just making out my check."
"Boy are you a comedian. Maybe you ought to audition for the Eddie Cantor show instead of being a perpetual student."
"Then you'd take me off the payroll, and how could I become a professional man?"
His father, already bending over the big family-sized checkbook that he favored, probably because it made him feel not so much businesslike as patriarchal, declined to answer. Certain payments that he did not wish to have on record he made in cash; if he paid his son by check it was no doubt because he desired proof that although his son was of age he was still classifiable as a dependent on Form 1040. Well, why not take advantage of the tax allowance?
Milton's attitude toward the Internal Revenue Bureau wasn't nearly as shocking as his taste in clothing and household furnishings. The apartment was a disaster, and each time that Norman came back to it, no matter how briefly, he congratulated himself on having gotten out from under. Brocade chairs lined the stippled walls like sentries. The baby grand Steinway of dead wife number two, its never-lifted lid draped like an odalisque with a fringed Spanish shawl, served as showplace for a gallery of photos, ranging from Norman's overstuffed and artificially tinted grandparents on his father's side to Norman himself in cap and gown. Every time he glanced in the direction of that unsmiling, unforgivable dummy he felt himself as dead and buried as his grandparents, all of them survived by the indomitable widower, still undertaking, along with the weekly gift of money, to do good works.
"Here, stick this in your pocket. Why do you look so down in the mouth?"
"For openers, there's that little war that started since I was last here."
Milton Miller laughed readily. "Hitler got you down too? Listen," he begged, "that bum has finally bitten off more than he can chew. He's bluffed himself into a corner."
"You sure of that?"
"I'll make you a little wager. First time those armies meet—if they ever do—you'll see what a hollow shell Germany is. The Czechs or the Polacks are one thing, but just let him come up against a first-class fighting force, like the French and those fortifications of theirs—"
"Then what?"
"The Krauts'll starve. He's got an exhausted labor force, and what's more he hasn't stockpiled food for a long war. Time," he announced, as though it had just come to him, "is on the side of the allies."
The line sounded familiar. Norman's eye wandered over the pile of magazines in the wrought-iron rack beside the wing chair. Back issues of Harper's, The Nation, His father prided himself on being "forward-looking," as he called it, and did not hesitate to pass off as his own the dubious estimates of the liberal journals of opinion. This daring had often confounded his more moth-eaten associates in the textile industry, but it only depressed his son, who kicked himself for having compounded this fashionableness by sending his father the beaten silver mask from Taxco and the straw baskets from Xochimilco that hung on his father's wall with a kind of magnificent pointlessness as proof that, if nothing else, Milton really had sent his boy to Mexico to dig for pots.
"I doubt that you're right," he said to his father. "But even if you are, I doubt that time is on my side."
"Meaning what?" His father squinted suspiciously through the cigar's fetid smoke.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Standing Fast by Harvey Swados. Copyright © 1970 Harvey Swados. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
PART ONE,1. Norm,
2. Fred,
3. Big Boy,
4. Bill,
5. Joe,
6. Irwin,
PART TWO,
1. Bill,
2. Sy,
3. Joe,
4. Norm,
5. Big Boy,
6. Irwin,
PART THREE,
1. Joe,
2. Norm,
3. Irwin,
4. Sy,
5. Big Boy,
6. Bill,
PART FOUR,
1. Norm,
2. Joe,
3. Vito,
4. Ham,
5. Fred,
6. Sy,
PART FIVE,
1. Vito,
2. Irwin,
3. Joe,
4. Ham,
5. Norm,
6. Fred,
PART SIX,
1. Sy,
2. Vito,
3. Ham,
4. Joe,
5. Paul,
6. Norm,
About the Author,