Books: Ware the Reds!

Louis Waldman could barely speak English when he got his first harsh lesson in U.S. labor relations. In a chandelier factory, where he worked for $2 a week, a woman’s hand was smashed in an unguarded machine. Waldman, 17 and fresh from Yancherudnia in the Ukraine, was fired when he refused to sign a paper saying the accident was her fault.

His second job brought a second lesson. As an apprentice garment cutter, Waldman took part in the great cloakmakers’ strike of 1910. For reporting on the employer’s violation of the subsequent settlement, he was not only fired but blacklisted throughout the industry.

Waldman’s experiences in the years that followed were part of the tumultuous coming of age of U.S. social consciousness. Elected to the New York Assembly on the Socialist ticket in 1917, he crusaded in vain for social security, free higher education for all, other reforms. Reelected, he was ousted in the Socialist purge of 1920. Later he thrice ran for Governor, became one of the nation’s shrewdest labor lawyers.

Labor Lawyer, Waldman’s autobiography, is an esoteric jumble. It includes an account of labor’s struggle for recognition ; a Socialist’s eye view of New York politics over the past quarter-century; a sketchy but sometimes revealing gallery of such radical and liberal greats as Leon Trotsky, Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas; an intimate history of the rise and fall of the Socialist Party. But above all, it is an old Socialist’s insistent, desperate warning against Communism as the No. 1 despoiler of the democratic ideal.

Just after the 1932 Presidential election, Waldman introduced Norman Thomas, the defeated Socialist candidate, to President-elect Roosevelt. Said Roosevelt to Thomas, according to Waldman: “Well, I took 99% of your program, didn’t I?” Waldman agrees that nearly all the worth-while social legislation of the New Deal was derived from early Socialist principles.

Meantime, he declares, the Socialist Party itself was corrupted by the insidious infiltration of Communists. By 1936, the Reds’ “militant” United Front had destroyed his Party’s democratic spirit, forced it to virtual suicide. Resigning his membership, Waldman helped form the American Labor Party. By 1940, it too had absorbed the Communist poison. Waldman quit again.

Waldman believes that the strength of Communism in the U.S. is now reaching a new peak in the C.I.O.’s Political Action Committee (TIME, July 24), “the catch-all for the political activities of unions dominated by Communists, militant Socialists and others willing to cooperate with them.” He concludes flatly: “Unless the New Deal casts out the seeds of left-wing totalitarianism, which it fosters today, it may either lead to an American variety of Communism, or, what is more likely, provoke an American expression of unadorned fascism.”