Daniel Bell
FIRST LOVE AND EARLY SORROWS
In 1932, at age thirteen, I joined the Young People's
Socialist League, commonly known as the Yipsels, the youth
division of the Socialist party. I had grown up in the slums of New
York. My mother had worked in a garment factory as long as I could
remember; my father had died when I was an infant. All around me
I saw the "Hoovervilles," the tin sha<;ks near the docks of the East
River where the unemployed lived in makeshift houses and
rummaged through the garbage scows for food. Late at night I
would go with a gang of other boys to the wholesale vegetable
markets on the West Side, to swipe potatoes or to pick up bruised
tomatoes in the street to bring home, or to eat around the small fires
we would make in the street with the broken boxes from the markets.
I wanted to know, simply, why this had to be . It was inevitable that I
would become a sociologist.
In the Ottendorfer branch of the New York Public Library I
would squat before the 300-numbers section - the sociology books in
the Dewey classification system used at the time - thankful not only
for the free library but also for the open access to the stacks, which
allowed me to browse at will, reading Robert Hunter on
Poverty
or
Herbert Spencer's
Principles
of
Sociology.
On the weekends, I would go
to the Socialist Sunday School and study Fred Henderson's
The Case
for Socialism
and Algernon Lee's
The Essential Marx.
Twice a week, in
the evenings, I would go to the Rand School of Social Science on Fif–
teenth Street to attend a reading group on Marx's
Capital-the
text,
however, was an abridgement by a man named Borchardt (as I re–
call it), and had been edited by Max Eastman - and even to attend a
course on "Dialectical Materialism ." In that course I learned that or–
dinary materialism saw events in simple cause-and-effect terms,
such as a stone falling from a ledge and hitting someone on the head,
whereas dialectical materialism looked for the causes in the wider
natural and social contexts, so that one should understand that the
stone fell because there had been erosion of the soil and the soil was
eroded because of the exploitation of the land. I was impressed. I
was thirteen years old.
