The image of America is so powerful and all-embracing that it is easy to suppose that it has barely changed over what we now know to have been ‘the American century’. But for those of us who became conscious of it in the 1930s, especially if we were on the left, it was in some respects quite different. For one thing, it was not dominated by envy. We began thinking about America at the only moment when the US economy was not a triumphant model of wealth and productive potential for the rest of the world. In the decade of the Great Depression we no longer saw the world of Gatsby but that of The Grapes of Wrath. In the 1920s and early 1930s America was a by-word for the hard-faced pursuit of profit, for injustice, for ruthless, unscrupulous and brutal repression. But F. D. Roosevelt’s USA not only disclaimed this reputation; it turned it sharply to the left. It visibly became a government for the poor and the unions. What is more, Roosevelt was passionately loathed and denounced by American big business, that is to say by the very people who more than any others represented the evils of capitalism to us. It is true that, as usual, the Communist International, stuck in its ultra-sectarian phase, took its time to recognize what was obvious to everyone else and denounced the New Deal, but by 1935 even it had come round. In short, in the 1930s it was possible to approve of both the USA and the USSR, and most youthful communists did both, as did a very large number of socialists and liberals. Franklin D. Roosevelt was certainly not Comrade Stalin, and yet, if we had been Americans, we would have voted for him with genuine enthusiasm. I cannot think of any other ‘bourgeois’ politician in any country about whom we felt that way. During the more than sixty years since I got to know Arthur Schlesinger Jr in Cambridge, England, we have probably never agreed on any political issue except this one. I shared, and still share, his admiration for FDR.
Although crossing the Atlantic from Cambridge was common enough, I never had the chance to do so before the war – and after 1945 the Cold War seemed to make it impossible. For the United States did not want communists on its soil. It certainly wanted no foreign ones. As a Party member I was automatically debarred from a visa, except by a special waiver of my ineligibility, which I was unlikely to get, unless by meeting the indispensable condition for being received, however temporarily, into the community of the free: confessing and abjuring sin in public, although I do not think denouncing other communists was mandatory for foreigners. These were not formalities. I recall a long talk with Joe Losey, the film director, a victim of the Hollywood witch-hunt, with whom I had struck up a friendship – which did not survive this conversation – on the basis of a common passion for Billie Holiday. For several years he had scuffled round Europe, making movies under pseudonyms or as best he could. At last, in the 1960s, he had broken through. Not only his talent, but his box-office value were about to be recognized. The notorious question (‘Are you now or have you ever been?’) stood in his way. Friends and entrepreneurs suggested that no harm would now be done if he answered it. Should he? he asked me, a question which I took to mean that he was close to doing so. I could not blame him, but was too honest, or too sanctimonious, simply to give him the answer he wanted. Probably I should have. It is not a small thing for a man to consider whether the chance to realize a great talent is worth the sacrifice of his pride and self-esteem. I can still feel the anguish behind his question.
Fortunately I myself did not face any such dilemma. If the US asked me the question and would not admit me when I answered it honestly, then I would just not go there. Of course I wanted to. What is more, the reasons for going there multiplied, if only because the American academic community was even then far quicker to recognize the heterodox than the rather hidebound British.
Just then the opportunity arose to visit the country I had hitherto known only, as it were, as a virtual reality. At one of the early postwar International Congresses of Sociology – in Amsterdam in 1956 or, more likely, Stresa in 1959 – I had got to know the economist Paul Baran, a 1930s refugee from Germany, who claimed to be the only overt Marxist with academic tenure in the USA.1 I must have got on well with this big, passionate, shambling, soft-eyed man, because he invited me to stay with him and teach for a summer quarter at Stanford University in 1960. We planned to write a paper together attacking Walt Rostow’s recently published The Stages of Economic Growth, a self-described ‘anti-Communist Manifesto’ which was then much talked about. We did so later in a cabin on Lake Tahoe.2
On this occasion the problem of my visa was finessed, thanks to the lack of bureaucratic experience of the US Consulate in London. They forgot to ask me the question. My status as a visitor to the USA was not permanently settled until 1967, when I was invited to take a visiting chair at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fortunately MIT was used both to dealing with visa applications from backgrounds suspect to FBI and CIA, and to the political operations of Washington. The prestige of the institution and its president, as also the knowledge that it was doing the state substantial service, gave it enough leverage to insist that it must be allowed to judge what foreigners were or were not worth inviting. The office politics of power thus drove MIT to mobilize all its resources to get a visa waiver for an otherwise unimportant British communist academic. I got my waiver, although on condition that I reported to the friendly but determined lady who ‘looked after’ foreigners at MIT every time I proposed to leave the Boston area. ‘You mean I can’t spend the night in New York without your OK?’ I asked. She recognized the absurdity of the situation and did not insist. Nobody subsequently interfered with my freedom of movement in the USA.
I did not realize until very late just how difficult the US authorities must have found the problem of my visa. Like all bureaucracies they reacted in the first instance by silence and evasion. However, in the course of a series of increasingly frantic transatlantic telephone conversations I discovered some of what made my case so tricky. ‘Do you mind,’ said my sponsor in the course of one of them, ‘if I ask you a question, which, I can assure you, does not affect our invitation to you? Are you or have you ever been the chairman of the British Communist Party?’ It was a typical intelligence file entry, combining laziness (for the names of all the Party’s chairmen were certainly within easy reach of the spooks) and confusion. Since 1939 I had, as far as I can recall, never occupied any political function in the Party, not even at branch level. Someone had clearly been unable to distinguish the only thing I had ever been chairman of, in or outside the Party, namely the Historians’ Group of the CP (see chapter 12) from the chairmanship of the Communist Party. Anyway, MIT won out against Immigration. I got my waiver.
From that moment my troubles were almost over. Once there is a precedent, bureaucracies know what to do: the same as last time. From then on I went to the States without real trouble, though initially I was interviewed once or twice by the consular officer in charge of waivers, who might look at my file, say casually, ‘I see you’ve been to Cuba again,’ to prove that Uncle Sam had his eye on me, and arrange for the waiver. I still could not, of course, land in America without a visa, even in air transit, but eventually my applications were routinely made and granted within days, until the a priori ineligibility of communists was finally abolished and British visitors no longer neded visas.
II
So in 1960 the USA as virtual reality turned into the USA as a real country. How? Here, at least initially, my jazz identity proved far more relevant than either my Marxist or my academic contacts. For the truth is that by 1960 the American Marxists of my generation were largely isolated from the world in which they lived and the American academic historians I knew did not know a lot about it in the first place. In New York I could discuss the problems of capital accumulation and the transition from feudalism to capitalism with my friends from Science and Society, the oldest anglophone journal of intellectual Marxism, for which I wrote, but they taught me no more about New York than any other Manhattan lower-middle-class Jews would have taught a visitor from outer space: where the good dairy delicatessens and second-hand
bookshops were (not yet reduced to the Strand Bookshop on Broadway and Twelfth), what Dr Brown’s Celery Tonic was and that in the USA pastrami was not what Englishmen called salt beef.
I got rather more through Paul Baran on the West Coast, chiefly because (I think via his then lover, a Californian Japanese lady) he knew the intellectuals who worked with Harry Bridges’ International Longshore and Warehousemen’s Union, foundation-stone of the Bay Area left. It organized all Pacific ports from Portland to San Diego and, for good measure, everything that could be organized in Hawaii. To my intense satisfaction I was introduced to Bridges himself, a lanky hook-nosed hero, who had imposed exclusive job hire through the union at Californian conditions on the Pacific Coast employers, no lambs by nature, by means of two general strikes and a sound sense of power and bargaining strategy. He had also fought off several attempts by the American government to deport him as an alien subversive. He was then in the process of reluctantly supervising the euthanasia of the Pacific waterside workers by negotiating the substitution of container and tanker technology for manpower, against ample lifetime pensions for the union members whose jobs disappeared. The union was still strong, and Bridges’ revolutionary convictions, expressed in an Australian accent that made few concessions to half a lifetime as an American union leader, were undimmed. He still dreamed of a general strike of the world’s dockers that would bring the capitalist system to its knees, for in the minds of watersiders the great oceans are bridges between continents, not barriers. Not that he had much time for seamen, all of whom, he thought, were ‘bums’, because they lacked the staying-power of a union on terra firma like the longshoremen, held together by families and regular communities. Nor, as a good Australian, had he much use for pommies. In his youth as a seaman he had once, he told me, kept company with a docker’s daughter in the port of London. This had given him a permanent contempt for the forelock-tugging acceptance of their social inferiority by British workers.
As it was 1960, we discussed the presidential election. Jimmy Hoffa of the teamsters (truck-drivers), the target of Bobby Kennedy and the FBI, was thinking of throwing his union’s vote behind Nixon rather than Kennedy. The teamsters’ goodwill was essential to both labour and capital in California, but Hoffa’s reputation was bad. Bridges, who felt no loyalty to either ‘bourgeois party’, saw this as a purely pragmatic choice. Was Hoffa not, I asked, in the hands of the mob? ‘He may work with the hoods,’ said Bridges sternly and from experience, ‘but he is a stand-up guy and so far as I know he has never sold out his members. What he skims off comes from the bosses, not the workers.’ Nobody ever accused Bridges of either becoming rich or selling out his members. He died not long after I met him, as San Francisco was moving far away from the city of Bridges and Sam Spade. I recall him with admiration and emotion. His union certainly knew about the mob. One afternoon its organizer, who later moved into the academic sphere, gave me what amounted to a seminar on negotiating with the Mafia, with which the IL WU had to coordinate its activities, since, though the Pacific port unions were clean, the mob controlled the unions on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Dealing with the Mafia, it seemed, rested on two basic assumptions and a knowledge of its limitations. The first, mutual respect, could be taken for granted. Both parties operated on the waterside, which was not a children’s playground. They knew its rules, the most important of which was that you didn’t snitch. Stand-up guys didn’t have to trust one another, but they could talk. The second was that no favours, however minor or symbolic, must be accepted from the Mafia, because that would automatically be interpreted as establishing dependence. So, there were always polite but firm refusals to suggestions that the two unions might get together to decide questions of common interest – say, a single date for ending contracts – in an agreeable location such as Vegas.
On the other hand, the knowledge of the Mafia’s limitations gave a politically hip organization like a red union the possibility of demonstrating what to the mob must have looked like power worthy of serious respect. Of course the IL WU had no power, even though, one suspects, the Representatives and Senators from Hawaii treated its views very seriously. It merely had strategies, national political horizons, committed and knowledgeable intellectuals, and it knew how to operate on Capitol Hill. On the other hand, in the experience of the IL WU, the mob’s economic perspectives were short, its political horizons local. ‘They talked to city aldermen and mayors’ offices. We took them round Congress in Washington once,’ the organizer told me. ‘They could see our people, said hello to Representatives and Senators from all parts, we asked them would they like to meet Jimmy Roosevelt Jr, the son of FDR. That impressed them. After that negotiations became a lot easier.’ All this helped to inoculate me against the tendency of US laymen and political campaigners to exaggerate the power and reach of the Mafia. Or even its wealth, although the actual net worth of a Mafia family, rather modest by the standards of real money in New York, was only recorded in the early 1970s, the decade when Italo-Americans came into their own and America conducted its love-affair (via Hollywood) with the godfathers.3 It also gave me a realistic introduction to American politics.
How far did this change my view of the USA? Like all transatlantic US watchers and, as I discovered, a subculture of American intellectuals, I had been fascinated by gangsters. Fortunately in the 1950s a mass of material became available for the first time about the development of organized crime in the USA, which naturally paid attention to the interactions between the mob and labour. (This had not been stressed in the young leftwingers’ image of American labour history.) My studies of the Sicilian Mafia had in any case given me a professional interest in the American side of its operations. So I was sufficiently familiar with it to write a small study on ‘The political economy of the gangster’ as a subvariety of the market economy, that passed completely unperceived, perhaps in part because, for a joke, I sent it to the most ancient, indeed almost prehistoric and unread, Tory journal, The Quarterly Review, which published it without a murmur.4 By the time I arrived in the USA I was therefore well clued up on such topics (but, for obvious reasons, not on the Kennedy family’s impending projects to use their mob connections to kill off Fidel Castro). And yet, in some ways I still shared the basic view of primary school or Hollywood morality, in which goodies (honest people) behave as goodies and are therefore better than, and have nothing to do with, the baddies (crooks), even when they have to coexist with them. Even after living a long time in a very imperfect world, I would still prefer to believe this. In the law-abiding and state-governed British Isles of the 1950s, it still seemed not only an aspiration, but a sort of reality. But the USA was neither law-abiding, though it had more lawyers than the rest of the world put together, nor a society that recognized the rule of the state, though to my surprise I discovered it to be much more enthusiastically bureaucratic at all levels.
Politics and professors took me to America, but once again it was jazz which made me feel that I had some understanding of the reality of this extraordinary country. I could hardly have chosen a better moment to visit the USA as a jazz-lover than 1960. At no time before or after was it possible to enjoy the entire range of the music live, from the survivors of the 1920s to the anarchist sonorities of Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry which could already be heard by a determined avant-garde on the eastern outskirts of Greenwich Village. Indeed, in spite of the suicidal lifestyle of jazz people, with some notable exceptions the great names on which my generation had been raised were still in operational form. What is more, as we listened to the unique originality of Monk and the absolutely extraordinary Miles Davis Quintet of Milestones and Kind of Blue , we could not help noticing that the second half of the fifties was a golden age of the music, the last as it turned out. Bliss was it in those New York and San Francisco nights to be alive, even if it was too late for a historian in his forties to enjoy the very heaven of Wordsworth’s youth.
Not that jazz was separable from the politics of the left, although
in 1960 its place in the professional academy was rather like homosexuality: it was a private taste of some teachers, but not part of their academic activity. That is why New York, notoriously so much less typical of middle America than, say, Green Bay, Wisconsin, was probably the best place to convince someone like myself that it was actually possible to understand, perhaps even to love, that extraordinary country. Le tout Manhattan despised the witch-hunt and, being a city of immigrant Jews and the centre of intellectual publishing, theatre and the popular music and recording business, took for granted the existence among some of its denizens of revolutionary Marxism, past or present. In the Big Apple only the FBI really worried about the precise nature of someone’s political commitment, for by the time I got there it was a city in which even the billionaires were, as likely as not, to be Democrats. Curiously enough jazz did not much appeal to the full-time American Marxists, whose instinctive taste seemed to be for classical music and political folksong. (I still recall the disastrous evening when I took Paul Baran to hear Miles Davis at the Black Hawk in San Francisco.)
Most of my jazz contacts were men, with a few exceptions such as the tough showbiz pro who devoted her life to furthering the career of the wonderful pianist Erroll Garner, and who tried to do me a massive favour by getting me on the Johnny Carson Show with Garner on the assumption that I would publicize the book I had recently published on jazz. (My remoteness from the realities of American publishing in 1960, thirty years ahead of the British scene, was such that I went through the entire four minutes of my interview slot without so much as mentioning the title of my book.) Most of them were in some ways refugees from the conventional American male life of the 1950s, decade of ‘the man in the grey flannel suit’, except the greatest talent-scout and promoter in the history of jazz, John Hammond Jr. No out-of-town visitor, seeing him outside, say, the Village Vanguard, would ever have asked him, as I was asked, standing with a friend outside a place in North Beach, San Francisco: ‘Excuse me, but are you two gentlemen beatniks?’ Of course, nobody needed to ask who he was outside the place to which he took me first, Small’s Paradise in Harlem. John Hammond Jr was almost a caricature of the Ivy League White Anglo-Saxon Protestant upper class: tall, crewcut, talking in the sort of accent in which one imagines they talked in Edith Wharton novels – he was a Vanderbilt himself – and sporting an unwavering grin. As so often in the USA, this did not indicate a great sense of humour. He was not a man for informality or casual laughs, any more than his one-time brother-in-law Benny Goodman, who had the reputation of freezing his sidemen with a basilisk stare. John remained an unreconstructed and militant 1930s leftwinger to the end, even though the FBI could never tie him down as a card-carrying communist. The history of jazz in the USA before the Second World War and, since he was probably the most important single influence in launching the ‘swing music’ vogue of the 1930s, the history of the USA, cannot be understood without him. I asked him on his death-bed, what he was proudest of in his life. He said it was to have discovered Billie Holiday.
Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life Page 48
