Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

the country was not relevant in some way. So all fans collected an endlessly fascinating bric-a-brac of facts about the USA, from the names of American cities, rivers and railroads (Milwaukee, the wide Missouri, the Aitchison, Topeka and Santa Fe) to the names of gangsters and senators. In the 1930s reputations could be made simply by knowing facts about the USA. Denis Brogan, a hard-drinking and eventually not quite so hard-working Glaswegian, teaching politics in Cambridge, was an expert on two countries, but he made his radio reputation – and he was one of the first media dons in Europe – not as a very knowledgeable historian and observer of France, but as the sort of man who could name all the state capitals of the United States and the title of every song by Irving Berlin.

The image of America is so powerful and all-embracing that it is easy to suppose that it has barely changed over what we now know to have been ‘the American century’. But for those of us who became conscious of it in the 1930s, especially if we were on the left, it was in some respects quite different. For one thing, it was not dominated by envy. We began thinking about America at the only moment when the US economy was not a triumphant model of wealth and productive potential for the rest of the world. In the decade of the Great Depression we no longer saw the world of Gatsby but that of The Grapes of Wrath. In the 1920s and early 1930s America was a by-word for the hard-faced pursuit of profit, for injustice, for ruthless, unscrupulous and brutal repression. But F. D. Roosevelt’s USA not only disclaimed this reputation; it turned it sharply to the left. It visibly became a government for the poor and the unions. What is more, Roosevelt was passionately loathed and denounced by American big business, that is to say by the very people who more than any others represented the evils of capitalism to us. It is true that, as usual, the Communist International, stuck in its ultra-sectarian phase, took its time to recognize what was obvious to everyone else and denounced the New Deal, but by 1935 even it had come round. In short, in the 1930s it was possible to approve of both the USA and the USSR, and most youthful communists did both, as did a very large number of socialists and liberals. Franklin D. Roosevelt was certainly not Comrade Stalin, and yet, if we had been Americans, we would have voted for him with genuine enthusiasm. I cannot think of any other ‘bourgeois’ politician in any country about whom we felt that way. During the more than sixty years since I got to know Arthur Schlesinger Jr in Cambridge, England, we have probably never agreed on any political issue except this one. I shared, and still share, his admiration for FDR.

Although crossing the Atlantic from Cambridge was common enough, I never had the chance to do so before the war – and after 1945 the Cold War seemed to make it impossible. For the United States did not want communists on its soil. It certainly wanted no foreign ones. As a Party member I was automatically debarred from a visa, except by a special waiver of my ineligibility, which I was unlikely to get, unless by meeting the indispensable condition for being received, however temporarily, into the community of the free: confessing and abjuring sin in public, although I do not think denouncing other communists was mandatory for foreigners. These were not formalities. I recall a long talk with Joe Losey, the film director, a victim of the Hollywood witch-hunt, with whom I had struck up a friendship – which did not survive this conversation – on the basis of a common passion for Billie Holiday. For several years he had scuffled round Europe, making movies under pseudonyms or as best he could. At last, in the 1960s, he had broken through. Not only his talent, but his box-office value were about to be recognized. The notorious question (‘Are you now or have you ever been?’) stood in his way. Friends and entrepreneurs suggested that no harm would now be done if he answered it. Should he? he asked me, a question which I took to mean that he was close to doing so. I could not blame him, but was too honest, or too sanctimonious, simply to give him the answer he wanted. Probably I should have. It is not a small thing for a man to consider whether the chance to realize a great talent is worth the sacrifice of his pride and self-esteem. I can still feel the anguish behind his question.

Fortunately I myself did not face any such dilemma. If the US asked me the question and would not admit me when I answered it honestly, then I would just not go there. Of course I wanted to. What is more, the reasons for going there multiplied, if only because the American academic community was even then far quicker to recognize the heterodox than the rather hidebound British.

Just then the opportunity arose to visit the country I had hitherto known only, as it were, as a virtual reality. At one of the early postwar International Congresses of Sociology – in Amsterdam in 1956 or, more likely, Stresa in 1959 – I had got to know the economist Paul Baran, a 1930s refugee from Germany, who claimed to be the only overt Marxist with academic tenure in the USA.¹ I must have got on well with this big, passionate, shambling, soft-eyed man, because he invited me to stay with him and teach for a summer quarter at Stanford University in 1960. We planned to write a paper together attacking Walt Rostow’s recently published The Stages of Economic Growth, a self-described ‘anti-Communist Manifesto’ which was then much talked about. We did so later in a cabin on Lake Tahoe.²

On this occasion the problem of my visa was finessed, thanks to the lack of bureaucratic experience of the US Consulate in London. They forgot to ask me the question. My status as a visitor to the USA was not permanently settled until 1967, when I was invited to take a visiting chair at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fortunately MIT was used both to dealing with visa applications from backgrounds suspect to FBI and CIA, and to the political operations of Washington. The prestige of the institution and its president, as also the knowledge that it was doing the state substantial service, gave it enough leverage to insist that it must be allowed to judge what foreigners were or were not worth inviting. The office politics of power thus drove MIT to mobilize all its resources to get a visa waiver for an otherwise unimportant British communist academic. I got my waiver, although on condition that I reported to the friendly but determined lady who ‘looked after’ foreigners at MIT every time I proposed to leave the Boston area. ‘You mean I can’t spend the night in New York without your OK?’ I asked. She recognized the absurdity of the situation and did not insist. Nobody subsequently interfered with my freedom of movement in the USA.

I did not realize until very late just how difficult the US authorities must have found the problem of my visa. Like all bureaucracies they reacted in the first instance by silence and evasion. However, in the course of a series of increasingly frantic transatlantic telephone conversations I discovered some of what made my case so tricky. ‘Do you mind,’ said my sponsor in the course of one of them, ‘if I ask you a question, which, I can assure you, does not affect our invitation to you? Are you or have you ever been the chairman of the British Communist Party?’ It was a typical intelligence file entry, combining laziness (for the names of all the Party’s chairmen were certainly within easy reach of the spooks) and confusion. Since 1939 I had, as far as I can recall, never occupied any political function in the Party, not even at branch level. Someone had clearly been unable to distinguish the only thing I had ever been chairman of, in or outside the Party, namely the Historians’ Group of the CP (see chapter 12) from the chairmanship of the Communist Party. Anyway, MIT won out against Immigration. I got my waiver.

From that moment my troubles were almost over. Once there is a precedent, bureaucracies know what to do: the same as last time. From then on I went to the States without real trouble, though initially I was interviewed once or twice by the consular officer in charge of waivers, who might look at my file, say casually, ‘I see you’ve been to Cuba again,’ to prove that Uncle Sam had his eye on me, and arrange for the waiver. I still could not, of course, land in America without a visa, even in air transit, but eventually my applications were routinely made and granted within days, until the a priori ineligibility of communists was finally abolished and British visitors no longer neded visas.

II

So in 1960 the USA as virtual reality turned into the USA as a real country. How? Here, at least initially, my jazz identity proved far more relevant than either my Marxist or my academic contacts. For the truth is that by 1960 the American Marxists of my generation were largely isolated from the world in which they lived and the American academic historians I knew did not know a lot about it in the first place. In New York I could discuss the problems of capital accumulation and the transition from feudalism to capitalism with my friends from Science