The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  PORTRAIT: HARVEY SWADOS

  The problematical nature of the social democratic vision can also be seen in the political evolution of another committed and unusually talented veteran of Shachtman’s party, the radical novelist and critic Harvey Swados. Swados was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1920 of a Russian-Jewish family.63 He was tall, sturdy, and handsome, with wavy light-brown hair, regular features, and a ruddy complexion. His father, Aaron, was a physician, and his mother, Rebecca Bluestone, was a singer, pianist, and painter. Under the influence of his older sister, Felice, Swados joined the Young Communist League in high school and remained a member after he enrolled at the University of Michigan in 1936 at the age of sixteen. There, in his senior year, he met two graduate students from New York, Donald Slaiman and Melvin J. Lasky, who won Swados to Trotskyism. In letters to Felice’s husband, Richard Hofstadter, with whom she had eloped to New York, Swados defended his new political views, just as Hofstadter was joining the Communist Party.64

  Swados distinguished himself in literary affairs as well as in political activism at Michigan, winning the Hopwood Award for creative writing and publishing a story, “The Amateurs,” in The Best Short Stories of 1938. Felice, too, had literary aspirations, and in 1941 she published House of Fury, a novel about women in a penal institution. After graduation, Swados returned to Buffalo to work with the Workers Party, using the party name “Dancers.” There he got a job in an aircraft plant as a riveter and passed through a brief marriage. A year later, he moved to New York and worked in another aircraft plant in Long Island City. Drifting away from the Workers Party in about 1942, his organizational connection was far less than Irving Howe’s, and in a certain sense Swados might be said to have been “with” but not truly “of” the Shachtman political tendency. He simultaneously began a lifelong friendship with C. Wright Mills, to whom he had been introduced by Hofstadter, and, in the following year, enlisted in the Merchant Marine where he was trained first as a seaman and then as a radio operator.

  Between 1943 and 1945 Swados served as a radio operator on a number of ships which took him to the North Atlantic, the South Pacific, the Mediterranean, and the Carribean. In 1945 he was stunned by Felice’s death of cancer at the age of twenty-nine. Returning to New York in 1946 he lived on his savings, married Bette Beller, and completed his first, unpublished novel. Between 1947 and 1955 Swados wrote furiously while supporting himself with a variety of part-time jobs augmented by unemployment compensation. Finally, in 1955 his first published novel appeared. Out Went the Candle, a story of his own generation during the 1940s, focused on the family of a Jewish businessman who becomes a war profiteer. Two years later Swados published On the Line (1957), a classic of radical fiction. Through eight detachable episodes, which stand as short stories, On the Line describes the lives of nine assemblyline workers in an automobile factory and the work process in capitalist America.

  When it first appeared, only a small number of mostly forgotten books had been written on the work experience. But during the subsequent decades many social scientists corroborated Swados’s literary theme that the rise of the American standard of living during the 1950s had failed to bring contentment to the American working class. Thus the novel’s position, once considered “eccentric”—that a worker is oppressed because of his or her relationship to the means of production, regardless of wages or accessibility to commodities—became the concern of an increasing number of influential books, including Richard Sennet and Jonathan Cobb’s The Hidden Injuries of Class (1973), Barbara Garson’s All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work (1975), Robert Pfeffer’s Working for Capitalism (1979), and Working (1979), the popular collection of interviews by Studs Terkel. The subtitle of the best of these studies, Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the 20th Century (1974), clearly states the theme Swados sought to fictionalize in his novel.

  At the time of its publication the few reviewers of On the Line who accorded it serious attention tended to celebrate the “authenticity” of Swados’s depictions of assembly-line workers. Ironically, Swados’s character portraits are partial and somewhat contrived, as if he sought to offset certain negative images of workers by going too far in the direction of “prettifying” them. Thus he fails to show the true range of responses to capitalist oppression. For example, none of the workers speaks the language one hears in factories and working-class bars, and there is no hint of wife-beating, very little racism, and no instances of escaping the pressures of the work routine through alcohol and drugs. The one heavy-drinking character, Harold, controls his alcoholism through submission to the work routine. Although Swados had other work experiences, the precise background for the book was a few months that he had spent as a finisher in an auto plant in New Jersey in 1956.

  Rather than trying to validate the novel’s worth through its “authenticity,” the strengths and weaknesses of On the Line are more aptly disclosed through an examination of the way in which Swados used literary craft to express his political vision. For example, a remarkable feature of the book is that, probably more by intuition than conscious intent, Swados’s vignettes of factory life dramatize the four characteristics of alienated labor elaborated by Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Marx’s notion of the means by which workers are both alienated from and dominated by the products that they produce is depicted by Swados in two ways. Many of the workers show hostility and disrespect toward the cars they produce; yet, as is revealed in Swados’s stories about Kevin and Pops, they also worship cars, with destructive consequences.

  Concerning the second form of alienated labor, Marx wrote, “Alienation appears not only in the result, but also in the process of production and productive activity itself. The worker is not at home in his work which he views only as a means of satisfying other needs. It is an activity directed against himself, that is independent of him and does not belong to him.”65 Swados writes, “What troubled [Kevin] and nearly shook his faith was that his fellow workers were not merely indifferent, they were actively hostile to their surroundings and to what they did with their own hands: Their talk was continuously seasoned with contemptuous references to the factory, to their work, and to the lives they led. Almost everybody who discussed it with him hated the work and admitted frankly that the only incentive to return from one day to the next was the pay check.”66

  Swados suggests Marx’s view of the alienation of workers from each other by not giving last names to his characters and by the awkwardness of their personal associations outside of the workplace: “Instead of learning names, we refer to the fellow with the bad teeth, or the guy with the blue coveralls. When I work next to a man for months and learn that his wife is being operated on for cancer of the breast and still don’t know his name, it tells me something, not just about him and me, but about the half-connections that are all the factory allows you in the way of friendships.”67

  Finally, the fourth facet of alienated labor—alienation from society—is dramatized by a character disorder that appears in a number of workers: they begin to prefer the prisonlike factory to the external world. Pops, for example, is homeless outside the factory; Harold needs the total control of the rhythm of factory life to stop his drinking; and Orrin, the central character in the title story, derives his only sense of self-worth from the illusion that he is somehow indispensable to the factory operation.

  On the Line incorporates a successful adaptation of traditional literary modes to a radical and working-class subject. The detachable episodes of psychological portraiture invoke, first of all, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), although echoes of Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and Upton Sinclair may also be detected. Swados’s book, like Anderson’s, falls somewhat short of the formal definition of the novel in its lack of a central character who undergoes a significant development. Still, On the Line is something more than a collection of stories because one can only grasp the basis for Swados’s eight deta
chable episodes by stepping back and looking at the book as a whole. One can then see that the episodes are unified by the fact that workers must sell their labor power for wages in order to survive. Although workers develop an independent justification for being on the line, it is the money, certainly not pride in work or interest in fellow workers, that drew them there.

  It is tempting to argue that the auto plant itself is the main character. Yet the factory, unlike the beastlike coal mine in Émile Zola’s Germinal (1885), is insufficiently animated to serve such a central function; it is merely a steady, functioning machine that dominates, controls, and intrudes in the lives of the workers. What we have instead are dispersed moments of character development that aim toward changing the empathetic reader’s political consciousness. One such moment is when the young Walter learns from the experienced Joe, a free-floating leftist, to respect the lives of his fellow workers and understand their entrapment. Another and more important moment is when the fifty-six-year-old Frank, returning to the line after decades in a small business that has just failed, overcomes his hostility to the United Auto Workers. He realizes that, in spite of the rough stuff the union pulled on him back in the 1930s and 1940s, its struggle was just and it represents the only hope for dignity at the present.

  Of course, Frank does not appear until the end of the book, but the character change he undergoes is meant to be derivative of all the experiences that precede his entrance. For example, the novel begins with the stories of the most defeated characters—Leroy, whose goal of becoming an opera singer is destroyed by a plant accident; and Kevin, who flees the United States to return to a small town in Ireland when he discovers that the “American Dream” is only a sham. These stories might be seen as necessary prerequisites for understanding why Frank’s reconciliation with the union in the end is so significant. The political concern of On the Line is survival with dignity, not fundamental change in one’s life circumstances.

  THE AMBIGUOUS LEGACY

  In On the Line the politics of the artist’s vision are sometimes a source of strength, but they are also responsible for certain weaknesses. Although he had remained adamantly “Third Camp” throughout the 1940s, by the 1950s Swados’s early Marxist training was being overlayed with aspects of the social democratic perspective of limited reform. The extent of his deradicalization is revealed explicitly in On the Line in an exchange between the Communist leader of the union’s opposition caucus and Joe, who evokes the class-conscious spirit of the 1930s. To the Communist’s pro-Soviet propaganda, however, Joe can only counterpose a vague mix of anarchist-individualist radicalism. It is clear that neither character is intended to provide an alternative. Joe is even compared to the Native American Indians (he is called “the vanishing American”); that is, he represents the best of labor radicalism’s past, but it is a past that one can only look to with nostalgia.

  The real alternative is depicted at the end through the characters of Lou and the other “union boys” who save Frank’s job and treat him with unexpected kindness and respect at the picnic of the United Auto Workers. Unless there is irony intended in this ending on the “little victory” of UAW fraternity, it would appear that Swados, pragmatist-fashion, is presenting us with the “experience” with which to counter the impotent ideology of the Communists and Joe. If so, it may well represent Swados’s own “reconciliation with reality,” but it is a view that is ideology-laden nonetheless.68 To revolutionary socialists still inspired by the heights of class consciousness once achieved by the American working class, Lou will seem somewhat of a Boy Scout, and the UAW’s picnics and bingo games will seem very remote from the kind of political leadership necessary to solve the problems of capitalism.

  Swados would move further to the left during the 1960s and sharply criticize the Dissent editors for being liberals masquerading as socialists. Yet the perspective of On the Line appears to be classic social democracy fostering an essentially uncritical endorsement of liberal labor leadership such as that of the Reuther brothers in the UAW, who at that time offered auto workers only piecemeal ameliorations and temporary job security.69 Ironically, the result of such politics when transformed into literary characterization is perversely reminiscent of Soviet “socialist realism”; Lou is a cardboard figure, a two-dimensional “goody-goody,” what the Stalinist cultural theoreticians once called a “positive hero.”

  This weakness, however, in no way negates the overriding power of the novel and its effective portrayal through the writer’s craft of the nature of the industrial work process and of its human costs. Raymond Williams concludes Marxism and Literature (1976) with a provocative chapter called “Creative Practice” in which he attempts to offer categories for evaluating and classifying work by class-conscious artists. On the Line contrasts unfavorably with Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter (1979), for example, in the sense that it fails to meet Williams’s third and highest category, exhibiting “a struggle at the roots of the mind . . . confronting hegemony in the fibres of the self and in the hard practical substance of effective and continuing relations.” But Williams’s second category seems very well met: Swados’s unique novel of the labor process deserves a special place in American literary history because it achieves the “embodiment and performance of known but excluded and subordinated experiences and relationships” in capitalist society.70

  In the late 1950s Swados began a new career as a teacher of writing which took him to Sarah Lawrence, Iowa, San Francisco State, Columbia, and several other colleges before he accepted a professorship at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1962. He published two novels, False Coin (1959) and The Will (1963), and two collections of stories, Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn (1962) and A Story for Teddy and Others (1965), together with several anthologies, a biography of Estes Kefauver, and numerous journalistic articles and reviews, some of which were collected in A Radical’s America (1962). Swados’s work was admired, but his audience was small; in a certain sense he had yet to find his true subject, or to even come to grips with the complexities of his own psychology and family history. He also resented greatly the recommendation of some of his friends that he focus on journalism, although “The Myth of the Happy Worker” (1957) had achieved national attention, and “Why Resign from the Human Race?” (1959) was credited with inspiring the Peace Corps.71

  In 1971 Swados published his most ambitious work, Standing Fast, which he intended to be the story of the radicalization and deradicalization of his generation. At first he had intended to call the book Children of Our Time and to focus on the most significant movement, the Communist movement, but soon he realized that he would have to draw primarily on his more intimate knowledge of the Workers Party. Thus the central characters in Standing Fast are a group of workers and intellectuals struggling to sustain and build a branch in Buffalo of an organization much like the Workers Party, starting in the early 1940s. Swados then pursues the political and private lives of these socialists and their recruits and sympathizers throughout World War II, the Bring the Troops Home Movement that came in its aftermath, the postwar labor upsurge, the McCarthyite reaction, the Hungarian revolt, the inception and development of the civil rights movement, the Cuban Revolution, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

  The novel attempts to probe the meaning of the socialist movement of the 1930s and 1940s to the aging radicals as their convictions evanesce and they become increasingly integrated into the capitalist society that they once set out to overthrow. Swados’s conclusion is pessimistic: the only purpose in life is to hold out or stand fast against inevitable despair and corruption as long as one possibly can. The narrative begins in 1940 at a street meeting just prior to the impending split in the Trotskyist movement and in broad outlines traces the history of the Workers Party with fidelity. The “New Party” is formed with its own paper, New Labor, and it survives for several years until it transforms itself into the New Socialist League and finally merges with the Socialist Party. Marty Dworkin, the New
Party’s dynamic leader, is a literary portrait of Max Shachtman, and other characters resemble figures from Shachtman’s group. Many, of course, are composites. For example, in his journals Swados indicated that at one point he intended to create the character Norm by drawing upon aspects of himself, Irving Howe, and the liberal Richard Goodwin, a man for whom Swados had great contempt; and some of Norm’s activities in the Philippines are based on the experiences of Swados’s friend, Irving Sanes.72

  The core cluster of radicals whose lives provide the thread for this lengthy novel spanning twenty-three years encompasses fourteen men and six women, although only eight of the men and none of the women are most prominently characterized. They include Fred, a radical English teacher who ends up involved in the rigged quiz show scandals of the Eisenhower era; Bill Zivic (in name and background suggestive of B. J. Widick), a militant auto worker from Akron who becomes a vote hustler for the Democratic Party; Big Boy Hull, a black steelworker who had broken with the Communist Party in the South because of its wartime policy of opposing the struggle for civil rights; and Norm, a soldier of fortune who leaves the movement early to become an independent radical journalist and then an international news correspondent. Besides Dworkin, the New Party leaders include Lewis Lorch, the organizational and financial expert who drifts away from politics to become a cultural entrepreneur; and Harry Sturm, the Buffalo branch’s first organizer who becomes possessed by the idea that socialism can only be achieved by infiltrating and capturing the mass media.