Word: ex-communist
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INTERVIEWS WITH 47 AGING ex-Communist Party members are sandwiched between Gornick's nostalgic memories of the Bronx and her subsequent experience as a radical feminist. Her childhood taught her that optimistic left-wing ideology could soothe the pain of voiceless poverty: "People sat down at the kitchen table to talk, Politics sat down with them, Ideas sat down with them, above all, History sat down with them." During her teens, she joined the Communist-affiliated Labor Youth League, but she recalls, "I had often been in a state of dismay as I felt the weight of simplistic socialist explanations...
...former labor organizer and Spanish Civil War volunteer, who today is a folk hero to vacationing liberals. There are old Wobblies from Idaho, miners from West Virginia, women who left their families to go "underground," fiery daughters of dirt farmers, rebellious sons of the rich, and even an ex-Communist who now works for organized crime...
...Alger Hiss, New Deal whiz kid, Harvard Law graduate, head of the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace, was accused by an ex-Communist named Whittaker Chambers first of being a Communist, then later of passing State Department documents during the 1930s to the Communist underground. Chambers, a senior editor at Time, made his initial accusations in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where Hiss vigorously denied the charges. Despite Chambers' somewhat sordid past, the weight of evidence seemed on his side in the two perjury trials that followed; Chambers produced State Department documents allegedly typed...
...which he reviews Alger Hiss: The True Story, a strong defense of Hiss by John Chabot Smith, a former reporter who also had access to the Hiss defense files. Smith's book on Hiss deals largely with conspiracy theories. He argues implausibly that Chambers was not an ex-Communist but a Walter Mitty-type dreamer who typed the disputed documents himself. If not Chambers, the FBI or someone else may have done Hiss in, Smith concludes...
...preoccupation with the politics of the sixties and seventies. Unable to distinguish these intellectual conservatives from the likes of Nixon, he ends by trying to subtly discredit them. If it is true, as one former radical said, that "the final struggle will be between the communists and the ex-communist", then this prelude to that struggle surely deserves better...