America Faces the Barricades
by
[Covici-Friede, $2.50]
JOHN L. SPIVAK has traveled through some of the industrial and agricultural centres of the United States and has discovered that he can find, in some of them, poverty and economic inequality. He has taken the very worst instances available and has composed a book of them. Some of the chapters have already appeared in the New Masses.
Mr. Spivak says: ’After talking with all kinds of people throughout the country, I am convinced that the American worker does not want to overthrow the government. All he wants is food. But if the government will not make it possible for him to earn it or will not give it to him, then he will overthrow the government, without realizing that he is doing so.’
For a Communistic writer, such a statement involves many admissions. All through Mr. Spivak’s book he records conversations with workers in which he invariably asks subversive questions and the worker invariably declines to join either the Communists or anyone else who wants to overthrow the American government.
I covered all the territory that the author describes at just about the time he did. My engagements included employed skilled workers, business men, professional men, as well as the unemployed. I also discovered poverty and economic inequality, but I found no justification for the picture that Mr. Spivak paints. His hook is as fair to the United States as Mother India was to Asia. His tour gave him what he hoped to find, just as some tourists go to China in the hope of discovering bandits there.
From Mr. Spivak’s figures on unemployment he reaches the conclusion that from 30,000,000 to 35,000,000 Americans are on relief. How does he know? Nobody knows how many are unemployed in this country. All figures are guesses, even those issued by the government. An unemployment census has been projected to determine this figure with some degree of accuracy. Yet Mr. Spivak reaches a conclusion from a collection of estimates and guesses and calls it reasonable. Against his guess is the unmistakable rise in national income since June 1932.
Throughout his book he is antagonistic toward the American Federation of Labor and whenever the opportunity presents itself he describes its organizers as ridiculous figures. His statement that the union of the United Mine Workers of America ‘is pretty much shattered’ is sheer nonsense. Mr. Spivak’s book appeared at the moment when that union was able to force the Guffey Bill upon an unwilling Congress. A more correct statement would be that the union is too powerful for what it really represents, and that Mr. John L. Lewis’s current influence with the Administration is out of proportion to the position of the mine workers in American economic life.
The point, so often stressed by radicals, is made that the NRA A only helped big business. Actually the NRA helped nobody. Business, big and little, was glad to have it go. Apparently this chapter was written a long time ago, before the Supreme Court settled the chicken case.
Mr. Spivak has included his chapters from the New Masses on anti-Semitism in the United States. He seems to want to make a case to the effect that the presence of anti-Semitic groups is indicative of a Fascist movement in this country. He does not seem to understand that such racketeering groups as the Silver Shirts always exist because of widespread fear of Communism in America. As long as there are Communists, Americans will fight them and some racketeers will get into the fight.
Much of Mr. Spivak’s material appeared in the investigations of a Congressional Committee, although he did some original interviewing.
John Strachey once wrote a book setting forth the Communist point of view, and, although Mr. Strachey was rather weak in his understanding of American life, his book was important and thought-provoking. If Mr. Spivak is presenting a factual appendix to Mr. Strachey, he is weakening the case for the Communists. No capitalist will deny the existence of slums, but no description of life in a few slums can be accepted by anyone as a full and true characterization of American life. Mr. Spivak kills his book by his unfairness.
GEORGE K. SOKOLSKY