Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

and Society, the oldest anglophone journal of intellectual Marxism, for which I wrote, but they taught me no more about New York than any other Manhattan lower-middle-class Jews would have taught a visitor from outer space: where the good dairy delicatessens and second-hand bookshops were (not yet reduced to the Strand Bookshop on Broadway and Twelfth), what Dr Brown’s Celery Tonic was and that in the USA pastrami was not what Englishmen called salt beef.

I got rather more through Paul Baran on the West Coast, chiefly because (I think via his then lover, a Californian Japanese lady) he knew the intellectuals who worked with Harry Bridges’ International Longshore and Warehousemen’s Union, foundation-stone of the Bay Area left. It organized all Pacific ports from Portland to San Diego and, for good measure, everything that could be organized in Hawaii. To my intense satisfaction I was introduced to Bridges himself, a lanky hook-nosed hero, who had imposed exclusive job hire through the union at Californian conditions on the Pacific Coast employers, no lambs by nature, by means of two general strikes and a sound sense of power and bargaining strategy. He had also fought off several attempts by the American government to deport him as an alien subversive. He was then in the process of reluctantly supervising the euthanasia of the Pacific waterside workers by negotiating the substitution of container and tanker technology for manpower, against ample lifetime pensions for the union members whose jobs disappeared. The union was still strong, and Bridges’ revolutionary convictions, expressed in an Australian accent that made few concessions to half a lifetime as an American union leader, were undimmed. He still dreamed of a general strike of the world’s dockers that would bring the capitalist system to its knees, for in the minds of watersiders the great oceans are bridges between continents, not barriers. Not that he had much time for seamen, all of whom, he thought, were ‘bums’, because they lacked the staying-power of a union on terra firma like the longshoremen, held together by families and regular communities. Nor, as a good Australian, had he much use for pommies. In his youth as a seaman he had once, he told me, kept company with a docker’s daughter in the port of London. This had given him a permanent contempt for the forelock-tugging acceptance of their social inferiority by British workers.

As it was 1960, we discussed the presidential election. Jimmy Hoffa of the teamsters (truck-drivers), the target of Bobby Kennedy and the FBI, was thinking of throwing his union’s vote behind Nixon rather than Kennedy. The teamsters’ goodwill was essential to both labour and capital in California, but Hoffa’s reputation was bad. Bridges, who felt no loyalty to either ‘bourgeois party’, saw this as a purely pragmatic choice. Was Hoffa not, I asked, in the hands of the mob? ‘He may work with the hoods,’ said Bridges sternly and from experience, ‘but he is a stand-up guy and so far as I know he has never sold out his members. What he skims off comes from the bosses, not the workers.’ Nobody ever accused Bridges of either becoming rich or selling out his members. He died not long after I met him, as San Francisco was moving far away from the city of Bridges and Sam Spade. I recall him with admiration and emotion. His union certainly knew about the mob. One afternoon its organizer, who later moved into the academic sphere, gave me what amounted to a seminar on negotiating with the Mafia, with which the IL WU had to coordinate its activities, since, though the Pacific port unions were clean, the mob controlled the unions on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Dealing with the Mafia, it seemed, rested on two basic assumptions and a knowledge of its limitations. The first, mutual respect, could be taken for granted. Both parties operated on the waterside, which was not a children’s playground. They knew its rules, the most important of which was that you didn’t snitch. Stand-up guys didn’t have to trust one another, but they could talk. The second was that no favours, however minor or symbolic, must be accepted from the Mafia, because that would automatically be interpreted as establishing dependence. So, there were always polite but firm refusals to suggestions that the two unions might get together to decide questions of common interest – say, a single date for ending contracts – in an agreeable location such as Vegas.

On the other hand, the knowledge of the Mafia’s limitations gave a politically hip organization like a red union the possibility of demonstrating what to the mob must have looked like power worthy of serious respect. Of course the IL WU had no power, even though, one suspects, the Representatives and Senators from Hawaii treated its views very seriously. It merely had strategies, national political horizons, committed and knowledgeable intellectuals, and it knew how to operate on Capitol Hill. On the other hand, in the experience of the IL WU, the mob’s economic perspectives were short, its political horizons local. ‘They talked to city aldermen and mayors’ offices. We took them round Congress in Washington once,’ the organizer told me. ‘They could see our people, said hello to Representatives and Senators from all parts, we asked them would they like to meet Jimmy Roosevelt Jr, the son of FDR. That impressed them. After that negotiations became a lot easier.’ All this helped to inoculate me against the tendency of US laymen and political campaigners to exaggerate the power and reach of the Mafia. Or even its wealth, although the actual net worth of a Mafia family, rather modest by the standards of real money in New York, was only recorded in the early 1970s, the decade when Italo-Americans came into their own and America conducted its love-affair (via Hollywood) with the godfathers.³ It also gave me a realistic introduction to American politics.

How far did this change my view of the USA? Like all transatlantic US watchers and, as I discovered, a subculture of American intellectuals, I had been fascinated by gangsters. Fortunately in the 1950s a mass of material became available for the first time about the development of organized crime in the USA, which naturally paid attention to the interactions between the mob and labour. (This had not been stressed in the young leftwingers’ image of American labour history.) My studies of the Sicilian Mafia had in any case given me a professional interest in the American side of its operations. So I was sufficiently familiar with it to write a small study on ‘The political economy of the gangster’ as a subvariety of the market economy, that passed completely unperceived, perhaps in part because, for a joke, I sent it to the most ancient, indeed almost prehistoric and unread, Tory journal, The Quarterly Review, which published it without a murmur.⁴ By the time I arrived in the USA I was therefore well clued up on such topics (but, for obvious reasons, not on the Kennedy family’s impending projects to use their mob connections to kill off Fidel Castro). And yet, in some ways I still shared the basic view of primary school or Hollywood morality, in which goodies (honest people) behave as goodies and are therefore better than, and have nothing to do with, the baddies (crooks), even when they have to coexist with them. Even after living a long time in a very imperfect world, I would still prefer to believe this. In the law- abiding and state-governed British Isles of the 1950s, it still seemed not only an aspiration, but a sort of reality. But the USA was neither law-abiding, though it had more lawyers than the rest of the world put together, nor a society that recognized the rule of the state, though to my surprise I discovered it to be much more enthusiastically bureaucratic at all levels.

Politics and professors took me to America, but once again it was jazz which made me feel that I had some understanding of the reality of this extraordinary country. I could hardly have chosen a better moment to visit the USA as a jazz-lover than 1960. At no time before or after was it possible to enjoy the entire range of the music live, from the survivors of the 1920s to the anarchist sonorities of Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry which could already be heard by a determined avant-garde on the eastern outskirts of Greenwich Village. Indeed, in spite of the suicidal lifestyle of jazz people, with some notable exceptions the great names on which my generation had been raised were still in operational form. What is more, as we listened to the unique originality of Monk and the absolutely extraordinary Miles Davis Quintet of Milestones and Kind of Blue , we could not help noticing that the second half of the fifties was a golden age of the music, the last as it turned out. Bliss was it in those New York and San Francisco nights to be alive, even if it was too late for a historian in his forties to enjoy the very heaven of Wordsworth’s youth.

Not that jazz was separable from the politics of the left, although in 1960 its place in the professional academy was rather like homosexuality: it was a private taste of some teachers, but not part of their academic activity. That is why New York, notoriously so much less typical of middle America than, say, Green Bay, Wisconsin, was probably the best place to convince someone like myself that it was actually possible to understand, perhaps even to love, that extraordinary country. Le tout Manhattan despised the witch-hunt and, being a city of immigrant Jews and the centre of intellectual publishing, theatre and the popular music and recording business, took for granted the existence among some of its denizens of revolutionary Marxism, past or present. In the Big