456
LEWIS A. COSER
In St. Paul Jacobs literally starved as a youth organizer. The revolu–
tionary business was even lousier in the provinces than it had been in
New York. Lonely, sick, almost defeated, he finally returned to New
York. He then went to Rochester and Syracuse as an organizer for the
Young People's Socialist League, and finally back to New York. By
now he was thoroughly part of the little world of radicals. Here for a
few years he seems to have thoroughly enjoyed its unconventional style
of life in the interstices of society, precariously hanging on to a series of
temporary jobs, or drawing unemployment insurance or relief. I recom–
mend these pages to those of a younger generation who seem to have
gotten it into their heads that to be a radical in the thirties meant
unrelieved heroic dedication and romantic self-sacrifice.
It
meant neither
of these. It involved privation and suffering, but also a great deal of
joyous and even riotous living it up. There must have been periods when
Jacobs spent at least as much time lovemaking as organizing.
Shortly before the war Jacobs finally secured the first regular job
he had ever held: he became an organizer for the International Ladies
Garment Workers Union in Pennsylvania. I wish there were room to
recount here some of his adventures as a lonely organizer among Penn–
sylvania back-country farmers whose knowledge of unionism was, to say
the least, rudimentary. Here he experienced again the same native anti–
Semitism he had encountered earlier. In the midst of a pitched battle
between newly organized strikers and scabs, their startled and outraged
organizer suddenly heard the pickets shouting: "Don't go to work in a
Jewshop! Keep out of the Jewshop." Experiences such as these soon led
Jacobs to replace his hitherto uncomplicated vision of the labor movement
by a much more modulated and ambiguous one. But, in contradistinction
to many, perhaps most, of his former comrades, Jacobs clung to the labor
movement after he had left the Trotskyists. He moved from the ILGWU
to the labor division of the American Jewish Committee first in New
York and then in Los Angeles, and then became a West Coast organizer
for the Oil Workers International Union.
On the West Coast, as already in his last years in New York, he
was intensely involved in a variety of anti-Stalinist drives in the union
movement and in the expulsion of Stalinist-dominated unions from the
C.I.O. Such activities led at times to associations which Jacobs now
looks back upon with some slight measure of distaste. But in those years
and in those that followed, Jacobs continued to consider himself an
independent radical, slightly mellowed perhaps, yet basically faithful to
the vision that had inspired his earlier commitment.
The last part of the book I find much less interesting. Jacobs there
