Penn
Kemble was a political activist and Social Democrat that wrote an article for
Commentary Magazine, November, 1969 on Eric Hoff. I pasted the article below
and will comment on it.
Kemble
(K after this): “The monthly magazine of opinion.
November 1969 Law, Government & Society
On Eric
Hoffer
To judge by a recent flurry of articles in important
magazines, and the echoes of Marxist-Leninist slogans coming out of…
by Penn Kemble
To
judge by a recent flurry of articles in important magazines, and the echoes of
Marxist-Leninist slogans coming out of the New Left, the working-class white
American may be in for a good deal of attention in the next few years. And
although one may have misgivings about some of the things that are being said,
the attention itself is. long overdue. Ever since the mid-1950's, American
intellectuals have been virtually uniform in their aloofness from—if not
down-right hostility to—that sector of the population which lies between the
dramatically poor and the neurotically affluent. Part of the price of this
hauteur has been paid in the national and municipal elections of the past year.”
My
response: Now, in 2024, we once again see that Leftist intellectuals are aloof
from, and down-right hostile to working class white workers, and have paid the
price in the election. It seems that blacks and Hispanics too, turned against
Democratic elitists.
K:
“Perhaps this new concern for the “common man” or the “man-in-the-middle” as he
is called—there is a lingering squeamishness about the use of the Marxian terms
“worker” and “working class”—will make possible a new appraisal of the writings
of Eric Hoffer.1
During
the past few years Hoffer has emerged as a singular exception to the cultural
blackout of the lower-income white. Although he is often rather glibly
classified as a cold-war liberal, a backlasher, or a plain crank, his work
deserves to be read seriously, even if only as a case study.2 For all
his undeniable uniqueness, he is a rich example of some typical working-class
attitudes—especially those which have been so perplexing to the American Left.”
My
response: Hoffer was dismissed as not a professional thinker, as a crank, a
backlasher and cold-war liberal, if not a blatant racist who insisted upon
referring to blacks as Negroes not blacks. If one easily dismisses a
deep-thinker like Hoffer, then one does not have to heed his insights and
warnings.
K:
“Calvin Tompkins, whose perceptive profile of Hoffer originally appeared in the
New Yorker, quotes him as saying, “My train of thought grew out of my
life just the way a leaf or a branch grows out of a tree.” No doubt this is
true of most writers. But because Hoffer had little contact with professional
intellectuals (except for radicals in the labor movement) until he was in his
fifties and had published his first book, his personal experience must have
been an unusually strong influence on his work.
_____________
Hoffer
was born in New York of German immigrant parents and spent his childhood in
relative poverty. He was afflicted by blindness when he was five, and when he
recovered his sight at fifteen he became an avid and wide-ranging reader. The
habit never left him—he discovered Montaigne, who had a great influence on him,
simply by picking the fattest book off a shelf in a second-hand book store to
take with him on a winter mining trip. Both of Hoffer's parents were dead by
the time he was eighteen. “When my father died,” he says, “I realized that I
would have to fend for myself. I knew several things; one, that I didn't want
to work in a factory; two, that I couldn't stand being dependent on the good
graces of a boss; three, that I was going to stay poor; four, that I had to get
out of New York. Logic told me that California was the poor man's country.”
In
the 1920's, California was still open country. Going west, Hoffer joined a
great popular migration, made up for the most part of people of his own social
class. These were the people who became the miners, longshoremen, railroad
workers, sailors, and field-hands of the exploding, rough-and-ready capitalism
of the Pacific coast. Their own adventurous natures combined with the relative
freedom of western society to create in these workers a rambunctious
individualism. The American West was one of the few places in the world where
capitalist society really did rely to a great extent on “free labor.” There
were, at least for a time, enough jobs to go around, so that if a worker got
fed up at one he could pack up and find another. In contrast to the middle-class
individualist who strained after business success, the working-class
individualist sought mainly to preserve his mobility and independence (and
bargaining power) against the onset of stable, large-scale economic
organization, and the tightly structured society that came with it. These
western workers, rather because of than in spite of their individualism,
contributed a great deal to the rise of a native working-class radicalism in
America. Those who had sought escape from the confines of Europe or the
industrial East fought back bitterly when capitalism caught up with them in its
inexorable westward march. Out of the disillusionment of these last seekers of
the promised land come some of the epic names of American labor and radical
history: Coeur D'Alene, Ludlow, Bill Haywood, the Western Federation of Miners,
the IWW.”
My
response: One can be a blue-collar laborer, a union member, and still an
individualist or even a great soul, like Hoffer was. Labor radicals often are
absolutists in their thinking: there have always been loyal, union-loving,
individualist union members that are pro-American, pro-capitalist and
pro-worker at the same time. American laborers in the trades may be liberal,
even socialist in their political values, but their cultural values are much
more traditional than the values of professional intellectuals and the
Progressive Left.
K”
“When Hoffer reached California in the early 20's the great working-class
rebellion that had produced the Wobblies was very much in decline. Yet heavy
traces of the Wobbly spirit must still have lingered in the air. Hoffer's
experiences brought him into close association with many workers who, whether
or not they shared the political program of the IWW, must have shared some of
the basic social attitudes that marked its membership. He drifted from job to
job, often living on skid row or in the hobo jungles. He has not written much
about his personal experiences in this period—a regrettable compunction—but
when he does, it is usually to illustrate a favorite theme: the great
resourcefulness and natural decency of the people with whom he worked and
traveled. For example:
Once,
during the Great Depression, a construction company that had to build a road in
the San Bernardino Mountains sent down two trucks to the Los Angeles skid row,
and anyone who could climb onto the trucks was hired. When the trucks were full
the drivers put in the tailgates and drove off. They dumped us on the side of a
hill in the San Bernardino Mountains, where we found bundles of supplies and
equipment. The company had only one man on the spot. We began to sort ourselves
out; there were so many carpenters, electricians, mechanics, cooks, men who
could handle bulldozers and jackhammers, and even foremen. We put up the tents
and the cook shack, fixed latrines and a shower bath, cooked supper and the
next morning went out to build the road. If we had to write a constitution we
probably would have had someone who knew all the whereases and wherefores. We
were a shovelful of slime scooped off the pavement of skid row, yet we could
have built America on the side of a hill in the San Bernardino Mountains.
It
seems a long way from Eric Hoffer to the IWW; any comparison must sound
sacrilegious to those campus radicals who are trying to establish their own
paternity in the Wobblies' struggles for free speech and the eight-hour day.
And indeed, the differences between the Wobblies and Hoffer are unmistakable:
they were revolutionaries, he certainly is not. Yet there are intriguing
likenesses as well. Hoffer's vision of building America in the San Bernardino
Mountains has much in common with the syndicalism of Big Bill Haywood, the IWW
leader, who called for the reorganization of society into “One Big Union.” Both
evoke a world without bosses, professors, hippies, or welfare cases, a world in
which honest workers build and produce.
_____________
In
this syndicalist vision workers not only manage basic production, they create a
total civilization. “Every longshoreman thinks he could write a book if he
tried—and it is true, he probably could,” Hoffer told Calvin Tomkins. “Every
intellectual thinks that talent, that genius is a rare exception. Talent and
genius have been wasted on an enormous scale throughout our history; this is
all I know for sure.”
Hoffer's
disdain for intellectuals, another of his pet themes, echoes a familiar
prejudice. Yet he is in no sense an anti-intellectual of the Know-Nothing,
Ku-Kluxer variety, for his own work shows scholarship and a great enthusiasm
for ideas. He does not mind intellectuality; he resents professional
intellectuals. His reasons, put very simply, are that intellectuals don't work,
and that they have a great urge to dominate those who do. The two objections
are actually related, since in Hoffer's view it is the intellectual's lack of a
“sense of social usefulness” which goads him into grandiose dreams of power.”
My
response: Hoffer was anti-professional intellectuals who were group creatures
and addicted to amassing power to rule the masses. Hoffer the individuators and
amateur intellectual of great originality, had no desire to rule anyone, or be
rule by anyone.
K:
“A belief in the moral and social healthfulness of work is probably the major
premise of Hoffer's outlook.”
My
response: This Hofferian emphasis on the moral and social healthfulness of work
out in the world is implicitly what he felt professional intellectuals needed
to remain centered and sensible, abandoning their ultraist conclusions, and their
obsession with gaining power over others.
K; “It colors not only his attitude toward
intellectuals, but his views on the race issue and the problems of the Third
World. In the case of the intellectuals he abandons any pretense of Montaigne's
detachment, and strikes out with polemical ardor:
One
of the greatest surprises of the 20th century was sprung by the educated when
they came to power. Gandhi once said that what worried him most was “the
hardness of heart of the educated,” and it staggers the mind that education
rather than educating the heart often makes it more savage. . . . We have yet
to assimilate the fact that it took a nation of philosophers to produce Hitler
and Nazism, and that in Stalin's Russia professors, writers, artists, and
scientists were a pampered and petted aristocracy.
No
honest democrat can deny that this statement hits on an important fact of
20th-century political life. It certainly should give a moment's pause to those
who see the growing size and influence of our intelligentsia as a prelude to an
inevitable movement toward greater democracy and social justice. Whatever its
progressive accomplishments, the new intelligentsia has also shown a second,
unmistakably ominous face. Alongside the democratic and nonviolent idealism
(which has by no means fully vanished), there have now appeared a familiar
elitism, an exaltation of militant totalitarianism, and a juvenile but no less
dangerous mystique of violence.
_____________
Yet
it is not hard to believe that, had other things been different, the
restlessness of the intellectual might have led—it might still lead—to far
different results in the politics of America and the world. Intellectuals have
given themselves both to despotism and to democracy, depending on the character
of the larger social forces around them. They helped create the American
Republic, and figured largely in the overthrow of European absolutism during
the 18th and 19th centuries. It was the intellectuals of the Petofi circle who
gave leadership to the Hungarian people in the first major popular uprising
against modern totalitarianism. And this year we have seen a constant stream of
reports of protests by Czech and Russian intellectuals against the growing
chill of Soviet despotism. Hoffer's history is unbalanced; it would be fairer
to say that in the intellectuals, to borrow the words of the anti-Stalinist
writer Victor Serge, “the best and worst live side by side, and sometimes
mingle—and that which is worst comes through the corruption of what is best.”
But
it should come as no surprise that someone like Hoffer feels as he does about
intellectuals. Like most American workers, he probably has rarely sensed that
the intellectual community has been on his side. Those intellectuals whom he
has encountered in the labor movement have for the most part only confirmed
this impression. He describes some, of benign intention, whose obsession with
the social millennium has led them to scoff at the practical, day-to-day needs
of workers—those banalities which often mean the difference between human
degradation and a semblance of dignity to a working-class family. And there
have been those who have simply used the labor movement to advance a
totalitarian design—the Communists, whom Hoffer knows well from his years on the
San Francisco waterfront.
_____________
Hoffer's
views on the race problem are similarly rooted in his ethics of work:
The
simple fact is that the people I have lived and worked with all my life, and
who make up about 60 per cent of the population outside the South, have not the
least feeling of guilt toward the Negro. The majority of us started to work for
a living in our teens, and we have been poor all our lives. Most of us had only
a rudimentary education. Our white skin brought us no privileges and no favors.
For more than twenty years I worked in the fields of California with Negroes,
and now and then for Negro contractors. On the San Francisco waterfront, where
I spent the next twenty years, there are as many black longshoremen as white.
My kind of people does not feel that the world owes us anything, or that we owe
anybody—white, black, or yellow—a damn thing. We believe that the Negro should
have every right we have: the right to vote, the right to join any union open
to us, the right to live, work, study, and play anywhere he pleases. But he can
have no special claims on us, and no valid grievances against us. He has
certainly not done our work for us.
When
the essay from which the preceding statement is taken first appeared in the New
York Times Magazine, supporters of the civil-rights movement were
generally offended. That was in 1964, when integration was still fashionable.
It is a fascinating irony that while Hoffer's tone and analysis would still in
some circles be considered “racist,” his program for solving the race problem
would today be endorsed by many black militants and their white supporters.
Hoffer believes simply that the Negro must solve his own problems: “Anything
done to and for the Negro must be done by Negroes.” Rhetorical packaging aside,
this is the same rationale as that behind CORE's Black Capitalism and Stokely
Carmichael's Black Power.
Of
course, what all the bootstrap strategists, Hoffer included, overlook is that
the American economy has eliminated the opportunities which once made it
possible for so many unskilled, “culturally disadvantaged” whites to achieve a
half-decent way of life.”
My
response: If American blacks had it rough, and they did, in America, if one
stays at it, one can build wealth and prosperity for oneself, one’s family and
one’s people, so Hoffer’s recommendation that self-help and self-bootstrapping
were the only techniuqes which would uplift blacks permanently.
K:
“ When an unskilled Southern black follows Hoffer's footsteps to the West Coast
today, he finds the fields and the building sites tended by tractors and
bulldozers, the canneries humming with fabulous new machinery. Few summonses
await him in the help-wanted listings.
Hoffer
is partly aware of this. He acknowledges that “the European immigrants not only
had an almost virgin continent at their disposal and unlimited opportunities
for individual advancement, but were automatically processed on their arrival
into new men.” But he neglects to follow through the implications this
momentous difference has for his do-it-yourself solution to the stagnation and
fury of the black ghetto.
One
suspects that there is more at work here than simple oversight. For all his
testiness, Hoffer is a subtle and logical thinker, and the problems of Negro
unemployment are more or less common knowledge. Possibly he senses, if only
subconsciously, that once it is acknowledged that the Negro has few
opportunities available to him, Hoffer and “his kind” will be asked to pay the
price of creating new ones. Given the drift of liberal opinion over the last
few years, this is by no means an imaginary threat to a working man.
Comfortable liberals have shown astonishing generosity in heaping social
responsibilities on the shoulders of low-income whites. If there are too few
jobs for blacks, the answer has often been to try to squeeze out a few white
workers. If ghetto schools are bad, teachers are asked to sacrifice their own
hard-won gains. If welfare funds are short, the taxes of working people show
the first and proportionately greatest rise. And, to make it worse, if those
who carry the burden of this “progress” show any ill feeling, they are promptly
branded as reactionaries.
_____________
The
ethic of work can become a rationale which working people will use to justify
complacency and conservatism. Thus, they may vote against anti-poverty measures
by telling themselves, “Let them work for a living like I do.” They can dismiss
intellectuals, as Hoffer does, as a bunch of labor-fakers: “To me, they haven't
raised a blade of grass, they haven't laid a brick, they don't know a
god-damned thing, and here they sit in judgment.” Yet these opinions spring
from a simple insight which is in a sense very radical: society is to a
very great extent built on the labor of working people. It is out of the sweat
of their brows or the tedium of their days that Americans draw welfare
benefits, go to college, finance the Ford Foundation, and shop on Fifth Avenue.
The worker sometimes senses that he is paying for most of this, and he may
resent it. If he occasionally turns on those most vulnerable and
near-at-hand—the welfare client, or the black—he is also capable of turning
against the most powerful: his corporate bosses. It is no coincidence that the
backlash voting of the past year was preceded by a period of bitter industrial
strife. The number of man-hours lost in strikes in 1967-68 was higher than that
of any comparable period since the end of World War II. It was only after this
struggle to keep pace with rising profits and prices failed—without ever
arousing a flicker of sympathy from the liberal intellectuals—that a
significant number of workers turned away from their unions to seek relief by
voting against the taxes and social programs of the Great Society.
It
should be noted that Hoffer is a good union member. He never ran for office in
the International Longshore Workers' Union, but his diary indicates that he
participated actively as a rank-and-filer. He does not see the unions as
agencies of social reconstruction; he is a classic “pure-and-simple” trade
unionist. But on the other hand he knows from his own experience that unions
cannot be brushed aside in the Galbraithian manner as unimportant vestiges of
the first industrial revolution:
To
the eternal workingman management is substantially the same whether it is made
up of profit seekers, idealists, technicians, or bureaucrats. The allegiance of
the manager is to the tasks and the results. However noble his motives, he
cannot help viewing the workers as a means to an end. He will always try to get
the most out of them; and it matters not whether he does it for the sake of
profit, for a holy cause, or for the sheer principle of efficiency. . . . Our
sole protection lies in keeping the division between management and labor
obvious and matter-of-fact. We want management to manage the best it can, and
the workers to protect their interests the best they can. No social order will
seem to us free if it makes it difficult for the worker to maintain a
considerable degree of independence from management. The things which bolster
this independence are not utopian. Effective labor unions free movement over a
relatively large area, a savings account, a tradition of individual
self-respect—these are some of them.
In
his acceptance of a strong role for private management Hoffer is not
necessarily expressing enthusiasm for free enterprise. He is, at least in part,
reacting to the state-controlled economies of the totalitarian countries. “The
elimination of the conventional employer gives rise to a general monstrosity
that bosses not only our working hours but invades our homes and dictates our
thoughts and dreams.” As so often happens, Hoffer here confuses the
regimentation imposed by a totalitarian party with the democratic economic
planning and the libertarian political order which is the authentic socialist
vision. He does remark on “the promising communal settlements in the small
state of Israel and the successful programs of socialization in the small
Scandinavian states.” But he attributes these advances to the smallness of the
countries and the heterogeneity of their populations, not recognizing that
these are forms of democratic control over economic life which differ radically
from the Communists' bleak experiments in bureaucratic monopoly. (One might
even argue that the smallness of these countries has made successful
socialization more, not less, difficult.)
_____________
Democratic
individualism, a reluctance to sacrifice in the present for the promise of a
new world deep hostility to totalitarianism, suspiciousness and resentment
toward intellectuals, and the ethic of work—these qualities of the American
working class have all been factors in the conservatism which has dominated
American politics for much of this century, and which is now making an alarming
recovery. Put another way, these are factors which have helped frustrate the
rise of a broadly based radical Left in the United States.
The
recognition of these characteristics has usually led radical intellectuals to
the opinion that something is peculiarly “wrong” with the American working
class. It is not often suggested that something may be basically wrong with
American radicalism. Yet after a near century of radical failure—heroic though
that failure may sometimes have been—this proposition deserves frank
consideration. Central to any reappraisal of the radical Left should be the
record of snubs and betrayals committed by radical intellectuals against
ordinary working people and their often glamorless efforts to better their lot
in the face of an immensely powerful corporate elite. This record is made
easier to grasp by the words and actions of those in the New Left who are
pedantically repeating all the mistakes of the past. The campaign against the
UFT in New York, the dual unionism being promoted by black separatists and
their campus allies in the auto industry, the contemptuous attitudes toward
low-income whites held by many in the New Politics movement, the opinion that
working-class anti-Communism is merely ignorant and reactionary—all
these are part of a sorry drama which is reenacted in almost every generation.
There are many among the intellectuals to voice dissatisfactions with the
American worker and few, such as Hoffer, among the workers to answer back.
Votes not words, too often tell the final story.
But
what is saddest about the current swing to the Right by numbers of lower-income
whites is the realization that the frustrations which created it could—even
now—produce a turn toward the democratic Left. It may seem quixotic to suggest
this today, when leaders of the New Left are prophesying repression and even
some who consider themselves part of the democratic Left are in a pessimistic
droop. But the same failing that caused the Left to overlook the danger of a
conservative backlash can also cause a blindness to the possibilities for a
resurgence of the movements for change. Paradoxically, the backlash itself has
proved that the average white American is not an inert atom in a mass society—a
favorite theory of the disillusioned 50's which the New Left took more or less
for granted. He has shown that he can respond effectively to fear and anger. It
is not impossible that, were a thoughtful appeal made to his own democratic
traditions and radical impulses, he could also be won to a new politics of hope.
1
Hoffer's books are available in paperback in the Perennial Library series
published by Harper & Row. They include: The True Believer (1966),
160 pp. $.60; The Ordeal of Change (1967), 120 pp., $.60; The
Passionate State of Mind (1968), 143 pp., $.75; and The Temper of Our
Time (1969), 138 pp., $.75. His latest book, also published by Harper &
Row, is Working and Thinking on the Waterfront, 180 pp., $4.95. See also
Eric Hoffer: An American Odyssey, by Calvin Tompkins, photographs by
George Knight, aphorisms by Eric Hoffer. Dutton, 115 pp., $4.95.
2
Hoffer's books have little of the impetuosity and vehemence that frequently
color his television appearances and other public pronouncements. In a widely
publicized statement before the National Commission on the Causes and
Prevention of Violence, he blurted that the problem of campus disorders might
be solved if Grayson Kirk and other college presidents had only gotten guns and
shot down a few disrupters. Rhetorical overstatement that this was, it was
nevertheless extreme, even for Hoffer. A number of liberal writers seized on
the remark as long-awaited evidence that Hoffer is a dangerous reactionary. A
good many of these same people have spent the last few years explaining
irresponsible speeches and acts of black separatists in terms of the Negro's
condition, and the wild behavior of the New Left in terms of the Vietnam war.
Hoffer deserves at least as much sympathetic understanding as the black and
student extremists who, after all, have often acted out their foolishness.”
