through the stresses of an actual trial. Marxism to
the American spirit is only another phase of force
opposed to liberalism.
It takes a tough theory to
survive
America,
and America thinks it has that
theory.
Therefore it will smile and suffer, quite
secure in its convictions that through all the rotten-
ness, all the political corruption,
all the cheap self-
interest of its avowedly ruling moneyed class-that
it can and will take care of itself when the crisis ar-
rIves.
My opinion is that our revolutionary literature is
merely tolerated by most Americans,
that it is
definitely in conflict with our deep-seated ideals. I
think the
very
premises of the revolutionary writers
prevent an organic integration with the democratic
principles upon which the American spirit is founded.
JOSEPH FREEMAN
IF YOU lose an arm, you are likely to think a great
deal about arms; and if you are born into an op-
pressed nationality you are likely to think a great
deal about oppression and about nationalism.
Grand-
father was a pious Jew in the Ukrainian ghetto, and
his whole world revolved around the Jews who were
God's chosen people, and whom the Messiah, arriv-
ing on a white horse, would some day lead back to
Jerusalem.
My uncle said the Jews were not a na-
tion,
Zionism
was a reactionary movement of the
Jewish bourgeoisie,
and only the social revolution,
achieved by the "toiling masses of the world," re-
ga;dless of race and nationality,
would abolish the
oppression of man by man and nation by nation.
Grandfather,
of course, considered my uncle a rene-
gade for being interested in the revolutionary
move-
ment. \Vhen the Russo-Japanese war broke out, the
Czar appealed to my father as a
Russian
to defend
his country. But the "goyim," for the most part il.
literate peasants inAamed by vodka and official pro-
paganda,
had butchered rela,tives and friends in
pogroms, and my father, like many other Jews, felt
no ,enthusiasm for the Czar's country.
And the
police arrested my uncle, his gentile friends, without
racial or national discrimination,
and clapped them
into jail because they were revolutionaries
who
agitated for "social justice."
Far off was the land of the free, the asylum of
the oppressed,
the Golden Realm, America.
The
streets were paved with gold, everybody was rich,
Jew and gentile were equal, there were no class
divisions,
everyone could go to school and be
President of the United States, all races were treat-
ed alike, everyone was an American,
the most
liberated and joyous being on earth.
But here you are at
seven
in America, in the slums
of N ew York, and utopia is as far off as ever. You
are a "greenhorn," an alien, an outsider. You don't
14
belong; you are not an American.
Differences of
language ,wall you away from the hnd and its
people,
and, as the old Yiddish adage says, it's
tough to be a Jew wherever you are. But see, the
Jews themselves are divided bitterly.
There are
two Jewish "nations," the rich and the poor.
As you start to grow up, and read newspapers
and books, and go to your first socialist meetings,
you discover that the whole of America is divided
into "two nations"-Disraeli's
illuminating phrase.
You read about the massacres at Ludlow and
Youngstown,
and begin to understand that mil-
lionaire Americans maintain their profits by exploit-
ing, oppressing and sometimes killing the Amer-
icans who dig the country's coal and mold its steel.
And because you live in the slums, and your friends
are workers, and your family is poor, and you often
go without food, and probably also because you
belong to an oppressed race, you identify yourself
wholly with the mass of Americans who work, as
against the handful of Americans who exploit them,
and for the concept
nation
you learn to substitute
the concept
class.
As yet you have not read a word of Marx; the
October Revolution is years away; and you do not
dream that someday idiots and scoundrels will call
you an "agent of .Moscow." But you do dream of
being a poet, and so the question of art, revolution
and nationality becomes, very early in your life, the
most pressing of all questions.
The native-born
American takes his Americanism for granted;
the
"alien",
absorbing America into his heart,
being
absorbed into its culture, thinks about the
meaning
of America day and night, for without understand-
ing it he cannot live. But above everything else,
stands socialism, the abolition of classes, of poverty,
exploitation,
oppression,
hunger,
ignorance,
war.
And the explanation of these things come to you
from native Americans who see no conAict between
Americanism and Marxism.
Long before I heard
of Lenin, long before the October Revolution,
I
absorbed from American sources those ideas which,
followed to their logical conclusion, were bound to
lead to communism.
First came the writings of the Founding Fathers,
the idealization of Washington,
Adams, Jefferson,
Tom Paine, the revolutionaries of
177
6 , the abstract
idea of universal liberty which so sharply and hap-
pily distinguished America from Czarist
Russia.
Then came the idealization of Lincoln, the recurring
exultation on reading of the w~r against chattel
slavery, on repeating the slogans for the liberation
of the Negro. Then the muck-rakers,
the books of
Lincoln Steffens and Upton Sinclair which castigated
the
capitalist
Americans for cheating and betraying
the
working
Americans. Finally came the old
!vI asses
and the
Liberator
in whose pages native Americans
like John Reed, Floyd Dell, Robert Minor,
Mary
Heaton Vorse and others talked about socialism,
APRIL,
1936
