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chapter 16 Harvey Swados Harvey Swados died in 1972, just as Americans began to rediscover the world of work. But he helped prepare the way. His novels, stories, and spirited reportage in the last decade and a half of his life helped uncover the political and social drama that unfolds in the daily routine of every American workplace. Nothing he wrote accomplished this with more power and insight than the series of interconnected short stories called On the Line, which first appeared in the fall of 1957, a book, his wife remembers, that “Harvey dearly loved.” This humane and sympathetic portrait of the psychological and social brutality inherent in midcentury factory work injected a moral urgency into the understanding of manual labor at a time, early in the postwar era, when most literary and political intellectuals were convinced that all meaning had been drained from the toil still required of so many millions. As Swados put it in his famous essay “The Myth of the Happy Worker,” written just after the publication of On the Line: Sooner or later, if we want a decent society—by which I do not mean a society glutted with commodities or one maintained in precarious equilibrium by overbuying and forced premature obsolescence—we are going to have to come face to face with the problem of work . . . if we cling to the belief that other men are our brothers, . . . including millions of Americans who grind their lives away on an insane treadmill, then we will have to start thinking about how their work and their lives can be made meaningful.1 Here Swados prefigures so much that would come later: the empathic oral histories of Studs Terkel, the labor history of David Montgomery, the journalism of Barbara Garson, and the social psychology of Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb. The subtitle of one of the earliest and most influential of these studies, Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, reiterates the theme Swados sought to fictionalize in his collection of stories.2 Harvey Swados was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1920 of an upper-middleclass Russian Jewish family. His father was a physician with many working-class Lichtenstein_ContestofIdeas_TEXT.indd 222 5/24/13 8:04 AM Harvey Swados 223 patients; his mother was a singer, pianist, and painter. Coming of age in the 1930s, this sensitive and intelligent youth not unexpectedly turned to radical politics, first as a Communist in high school and later, at the University of Michigan, as a recruit to the Trotskyist movement. At Ann Arbor, Swados enthusiastically followed the dramatic organizing victories of the new autoworkers union, and he participated in an unsuccessful effort to organize the radio factory where he had taken his first industrial job. Swados published several award-winning short stories in his college years and even then saw himself primarily as a writer. After his graduation in 1940, however, his political commitments drew him back to Buffalo, where he pounded rivets at Bell Aircraft, passed through a brief first marriage, and then moved on to New York to take another factory job in the big, turbulent Brewster Aviation plant in Long Island City, just across the East River from Manhattan.3 During these years, Swados gave his allegiance to the Workers Party, a small but extremely energetic and resourceful political group whose adherents he would later describe in Standing Fast, his 1970 novel that sympathetically recorded the exhilaration and despair of his political generation as it moved from the radical hopes of the late 1930s to a kind of acquiescent liberalism in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite his own drift away from the revolutionary expectations of his youth, much that would remain central to Swados’s worldview was formed in these politically charged years of factory employment in the early 1940s. An anti-Stalinist radical, Swados rejected the Soviet Union as any kind of model for the society he hoped to build. Instead, he—and others committed to his brand of Trotskyist politics—put their faith in a militant, international working class that would stand as a “third camp” opposed to the ruling classes in both capitalist and Communist regimes. To put their ideas into practice, they took factory jobs in the booming war plants of Detroit, Chicago, Buffalo, and New York. Here they defended the wildcat strikes that periodically erupted, pushed for a labor party, and attacked those in the labor movement, such as the Communists , who...

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