Interesting to hear Bill's report on his Hazleton, PA experience. Kind
of fills in some gaps on how this labor-intense area I live in moved
from the great labor militance of John L, the Molly McGuires, etc. to
the hopelessly conservative labor bastion it now is --a very peculiar
politics to this Pa. outsider (who's nonetheless been here for 25
years). Our local Labor Party efforts got virtually nowhere with
organized labor in 5 years of trying. I keep running into what seem like
residues left over from the decades of Red Scare tactics, etc.
Ted Morgan
>My identical experience was at the turn
> of 1946-7 when McCarthy wasn't yet on the scene, but Truman's Loyalty
> Oath and prosecution of a hero, Leon Josephson, who had entered Nazi
> Germany before World War II to make contact with the underground, led to
> an atmosphere in which my expression of dissent against the brand-new
> Cold War resulted in my being barred from lecture platforms outside the
> Left:
> "Hazleton, Pennsylvania, cooked my goose. There, I had been booked into
> the Presbyterian Church and the Kiwanis Club, with radio broadcast. The
> response was splendid, and the superintendent of schools asked me to
> speak to the junior and senior classes of the high school. A few days
> later the Hazleton Sunday Times carried a very lengthy letter by a Naval
> SeeBee. He wrote of my 'active participation and campaign last November
> for the only Communist now seated in the U.S. Congress, Vito
> Marcantonio.' Marcantonio, who I later knew personally, was never a
> Communist. He was the only member of Congress to vote against U.S. entry
> into the Korean War.
> "The Hazleton newspaper ran an editorial, which said, 'A front page
> story in today's Times tells how one William Mandel...after delivering
> TWO addresses in Hazleton [their emphasis here and below],...was
> permitted to lecture to the students at Hazleton High School, without
> even the pretense of proper rebuttal made available....WE call on the
> Hazleton city school board...to investigate the conditions which permit
> an ostensibly tainted propagandist to be foisted on the faculty and
> student body of our school system, and to inform the public why the
> incident was at all possible and what will be done to preclude any
> recurrence.'
> "The news story was a classic example of the technique we wrongly call
> McCarthyite--wrongly because it antedated his use of it by several
> years. I quote: 'It has been learned through the offices of Plain Talk,
> a magazine for the purpose of disseminating information on
> Totalitarianism, that Mr. William Mandel, from 1945 to 1946 was an
> instructor at the Jefferson School of Social Sciences...New York City.'
> The article then specified that my two books were used in classes of the
> Jefferson School and were sold currently in Communist book stores. That
> was quite true. They were also sold in every serious bookstore in the
> country. The later one was in use as a text at Yale, Stanford, and
> elsewhere. The earlier one had actually found its way into use at a
> university in South Africa....I had been mentioned twice in the past
> five months in the Daily Worker. One was for a local speech I had given
> at a Communist-sponsored summer camp, the other for a statement I made
> on a national radio broadcast. In the latter case, I quote the Hazleton
> Times, I 'very vehemently and emphatically demanded that United States
> troops be recalled from China and other outposts of the world. Everyone
> immediately recognized this kind of chatter as regular Communist Party
> talk.' But it was also the view of the then Secretary of Commerce, Henry
> Wallace, who had been vice-president under Roosevelt and, earlier, his
> Secretary of Agriculture, and whose thirteen years in the U.S. cabinet
> amounted to more time spent there than any other non-president in
> American history before or since." -- from my autobiography, SAYING NO
> TO POWER,
> pp.139-141.
>
> So my lecture contract with the country's top management, which later
> managed Roosevelt's widow, was cancelled. A period of about 15 years
> began during which Americans could hear only proponents of the Cold War
> (regrettably, Eleanor Roosevelt, a loyal Democrat, did not combat it). I
> did play a part in slowing and then reversing that situation by my
> testimonies as an "unfriendly witness" when subpoenaed by the Senate
> Internal Security Subcommittee, next by Sen. McCarthy, and finally, in
> 1960, by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
> William Mandel
>
> ========================================================
>
> My autobiography, SAYING NO TO POWER (Creative Arts, Berkeley, 1999),
> is designed for the general reader. However, if you teach in the social
> sciences, consider it for course use. It was written as a social
> history
> of the U.S. for the past three-quarters of a century through the eyes
> of
> a participant observer in most progressive social movements (I'm 84),
> and of the USSR from the standpoint of a Sovietologist (five earlier
> books) knowing that country longer than any other in the profession.
> Therefore it is also a history of the Cold War. Positive reviews
> in The Black Scholar, American Studies in Scandinavia, San Francisco
> Chronicle, etc. Introduction by Howard Zinn. Chapters are up at
> http://www.billmandel.net where you may also hear/see my defiant
> testimonies before Sen. Joe McCarthy in 1953 and
> the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1960. Available via Amazon
> and Barnes&Noble. Bookstores that don't have it will get it for you
> virtually
> overnite from wholesalers. For autographed copies, postpaid, send me $23
> at
> 4500 Gilbert St., Apt. 426, Oakland, CA., 94611.
> William Mandel
> ========================================================
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