BOOKS
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Radicalism in the thirties fostered superlative skill in the dissection of
ideas-but also an intense absorption into the world of the sect and a
withdrawal from the surrounding alien world.
In a movement which consisted of officers of the revolution withvut
an army, the continuous fights over the "correct line" and over esoteric
points of dogma naturally led
to
continuous factional struggles and splits.
Each splitting group gave birth in its tum to another split. But, Jacobs
remarks, "there was one important difference between body cells and
Trotskyist factions; in physical life, division is a process of growth, while
among the Trotskyists the over-all number of members remained fixed
even as the number of groups proliferated, which meant that each new
one was even smaller than its parents." I recall, years later, a talk with
a "revolutionary leader" in Chicago who spent hours explaining why
his organization offered the only true interpretation of Marxism and
who, when asked how many members he had enlisted, answered without
even the faintest of smiles that, so far, the organization consisted only
of his wife, himself and a mimeographing machine.
By 1936 Jacobs had grown somewhat tired of the inbred life of
New York's radicalism and decided to move
1;0
the University of Minne–
sota, mainly because the Trotskyists were in control of a powerful
teamster's local in Minneapolis which in the previous year had been
the main organizer of a general strike that had quickly become a kind
of legend in radical circles. H ere, at last, there seemed to be a chance
to make contact with the "real" labor movement, to move into the main–
stream of American politics.
The Minneapolis radical movement was indeed quite different from
the New York movement, but in ways young Jacobs had hardly anti–
cipated. In the hard, matter-of-fact milieu of the teamsters there seemed
little room for the dialectical subtleties of the young New Yorkers-who
soon found themselves outsiders. H ere, Jacobs encountered for the first
time a kind of spontaneous native anti-Semitism within the radical move–
ment for which he had not at all been prepared in New York. When a
speaker for the radical North Dakota Farm Holiday organization (a
group which militantly prevented the foreclosure of farms by intimidating
potential bidders with shotguns and pitchforks) wound up his speech
with a denunciation of "those J ew bankers who are trying to steal all
the farms in the Dakotas," Jacobs and his friend rushed up to the
platform to berate him for his nonsocialist anti-Semitism. They met with
genuine bewilderment on his part.
"To
that farmer, all Jews were
bankers out to screw farmers, and he could not understand our horror
at what he had said."
