From Portside Culture <[email protected]>
Subject New Left Memories
Date November 7, 2019 1:00 AM
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[Two new memoirs portray the activist left over the last
half-century.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

NEW LEFT MEMORIES  
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Paul Buhle
November 6, 2019
Portside [[link removed]]

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_ Two new memoirs portray the activist left over the last
half-century. _

,

 

_A Democratic Socialist’s Fifty-Year Adventure_. By Milt Tambor.
Self-published, 2019, 95pp. (Order on line, $5.)

Allen Young, _Left, Gay and Green: a Writer’s life_. North
Charleston, SC: Create Space, 2018, 480pp. $25.

The historical moment for 1960s radicals’ self-reflection may have
arrived early a while ago, even before 1980 for the especially large
egos, but has arrived in force mostly in the last few years. We are
now evidently beginning a smallish rush on the market, smallish in
part because many of the books are self-published, smallish in another
part because these are not the celebrity-status famous people or even
the purported Beautiful People. A certain modesty is a great source
of their attractions.

Milt Tambor’s _Democratic Socialist Adventures_ surely takes the
cake for modesty. It is all about him and it is not about him. This is
a fellow who grows up within a Jewish-American world and never seems
entirely comfortable about being there— no doubt because the
institutions and their big shots have shifted sharply right during our
political lifetimes, even when the community itself remains largely
liberal. Tambor is forever, in these pages, reaching out beyond the
limits of that world toward others, as he searches for a career equal
to his talents. He is a “people skill” person who works with
social service clients, with fellow workers of various kinds, and with
allies, smoothing out tensions and searching for solutions in place of
conflicts.

Tambor, as he explains, became early in his career a unity-builder
between Jewish and minority communities in Detroit. He had a fine
mentor: Saul Wellman, an erstwhile Communist dignitary of note as well
as a veteran of the Spanish Civil War. Wellman had been doing the work
of bringing people together for decades when young Milt came on the
scene in Detroit. A more than willing protege, the younger man showed
himself eager to build alliances, for his own reasons. Born in 1938
and raised in Miami and New York in a highly religious household, he
was too old for the New Left and perhaps skeptical of imagined
utopias. Besides, trained in social work was and assigned to community
projects, not on the campus where the New Left action mostly took
place.

You might almost say that Milt Tambor was born for DSA, or what became
DSA. 

On staff from 1965 at the UAW Retired Workers Center in Detroit, he
was in a bargaining unit—a union within a union—for AFSCME. He
soon set himself to organize various social work agencies as he
prepared to go on to graduate school. He leaped into the labor
movement’s own peace initiatives of the time, no easy matter when
the AFL-CIO was led by super hawk George Meany and his circle of
bureaucrats, enraged at peaceniks of any kind. Happily, the best of
the old radicals were also against the war, almost as if the aging
socialists of the 1930s-40s found a place to work together again. It
was too little and too late, but meanwhile, Tambor had helped lead a
strike of Detroit social workers, setting the pace for long term
improvement of their collective situation.

The New American Movement formed in 1971 had a special appeal to him,
bringing him into closer contact with such revered figures as Dorothy
Healey. By the middle 1980s, he had become part of a labor delegation
in support of Central American uprisings in Nicaragua and El Salvador,
once again in sharp contrast to the AFL-CIO leadership. He also went
back to graduate school and became a scholar of unions in social work,
as well as a labor educator. With a pension, he took retirement and
headed for an Atlanta retirement in 2001, eager for new political
opportunities.

DSA had meanwhile emerged, joining two Left organizations and in a
sense, bringing a sense of reconciliation between warring communist
and anticommunist traditions.  He was in the right place to push for
Bernie Sanders, to build an Atlanta Metro DSA, and to secure the links
with the labor movement that would make the movement a success in….
coalition building! 

Nothing spectacular here but everything useful. Milt Tambor teaches
us, especially but not only the young, how to be the Jimmy and Jenny
Higgins of today and tomorrow.

Allen Young has a bigger story as well as a much, much bigger book,
and I am not sure that even 450 pages tells it all. Or I am only
griping because some of the high points—seem by this veteran
observer of Allen Young’s work—do not seem to get the full
treatment here.

What does get full treatment and what many readers (that is to say,
fellow Red Diaper Babies in particular) will find stirring is
Young’s detailed, beautifully written memoir of growing up in a
Leftwing rural Jewish family in the Catskills. The intimate
Jewishness, more tightly wound but also complicated by the hovering
persecutions of McCarthyism. He also becomes gay in these years, and
then it’s off to Columbia University where he becomes a journalistic
star, editor of the campus _Spectator_.

Young tells us more, perhaps, than we need to know about his global
travels after college, but he advances further in his journalism and
his understanding of American imperialism. Heading back to Columbia
and the journalism school, he finds his calling and is even writing a
bit for the _New York Times_. After two spells in Brazil, his takes a
job at the _Washington Post_.

He insists that it was the viewing of _The Battle of Algiers_, the
famous film of Algerian revolt from French domination, that helped
prompt him to leave a glorious mainstream future and head for the
underground press.  I have a different take.  Young was headed for
the biggest adventure of his life, and nothing could have likely kept
him away.

To appreciate this point, one needs to grasp what the emergence of
hundreds of local papers mostly during the later 1960s and early 1970s
meant to newspaper innovation: staffed by amateurs, laid out in
artistic versions unknown in the commercial press, sometimes with
poems on the front page and wild cartoons inside, these papers broke
every journalistic rule of the mainstream. By offering real news
about the US invasion of Vietnam, news about the local resistance to
the war that could not and would not be printed in the mainstream
press, they gathered an audience of tens and hundreds of thousands
thirsting for another kind of news and a fresh style of presentation.
You could say the Web began here, although that would be giving the
Web too much credit. These were truth telling papers, and LNS played a
crucial role in spreading the reportage and insight from one page to
another. Allen Young made it happen, and yet he seems to recall the
reportage without the layout, a mystery to me.

This golden or reddish-golden moment could not last and did not.  The
New Left collapsed and LNS was doomed. Young was also by now a figure
in Gay Liberation, turned off (to put it mildly) by restrictions in
revolutionary Cuba, but also by the difficulties of the Gay Liberation
Front, a very unique corner of the Movement that struggled to find its
own place. Publishing his discoveries turned out to be somewhat of a
disappointment. _Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay
Liberation_ (1972) came out at the right time to make a splash,
although Young recalls that he failed to receive the royalty
statements to find out the actual sales. _The Gay Report_ (1979), a
successor of sorts to the sensationally-selling _Hite Report_ on
current women's sexuality, never got the publicity it needed to go
very far.

Much of the rest of the book concerns his life at “going back to the
land” in several locations, ultimately Western Massachusetts. This
is the section of _Left, Gay and Green_ that seems overly long and
overly detailed, as if personal life from the 1970s onward has
overtaken the more outward eras. There is also something remarkably
missing.

Young wrote in these years, as a local journalist in Athol,
Massachusetts, hundreds of pages, at the very least, of local or
regional community life and observation of the natural setting. Two
little volumes collected and published locally deserve recuperating as
a unique quality within Young’s life projects.

One can nevertheless appreciate the deep logic of _Left, Gay and
Green_.  Young wants to tell_ his_ story as a child of the Old
Left, aka Jewish chicken farmers in the Catskills, the gay teenager
who becomes  not only a key journalist of the time but an important
figure in the Gay Liberation movement, and then a back-to-the-land
activist, with all the attendant problems of quasi-collective property
and complex relationships. The story comes across as deeply humane, if
more and more personal, less about politics and more about
relationships in older age.

_[Paul Buhle, founding editor of the new left journal RADICAL AMERICA,
has published many books on the history of the US Left but in recent
years turned to creating radical history graphic novels. His most
recent is Eugene V. Debs: A Graphic Biography
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co-authored with Steve Max, illustrated by Noah Van Sciver. He is a
retired Senior Lecturer at Brown University, and is currently working
on the 3rd edition of the Encyclopedia of The American Left.]_
 
_Thanks to the author for sending this review to Portside._

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