The Dream of the Golden Mountains: Remembering the 1930s
by Malcolm Cowley Viking Press Photographs, 352 pages, $14.95
Exile’s Return, Malcolm Cowley’s important memoir about the literary expatriates of the 1920’s was first published forty-six years ago. Now, after a long career as critic, essayist, and poet, Cowley picks up where he left off to tell us how he and his generation of writers responded to the bleak, scary early years of the 1930’s.
Writers are not easy joiners, but in a world that seemed to be dying, with no work to be had and people’s precious savings entombed in closed banks, Communism seemed to many of them the only source of hope. Cowley says: “By surrendering their middle-class identities, by joining the workers in an idealized army, writers might help to overthrow ‘the system’ and might go marching… out of injustice and illogic into the golden mountains.”
It is hard now to realize how close we seemed to actual revolution in 1932. An American Federation of Labor official warned a Senate committee that “if something is not done… the doors of revolt… are going to be thrown open.” A banker talked matter-of-factly to a historian about “the coming revolution.” And Lloyd’s of London began selling wealthy Americans insurance against riot and civil commotion. Actually, the only Americans who violently defied the law were “solid Midwestern farmers” bent on thwarting mortgage foreclosure sales.
Although he spoke and marched for Communist-sponsored causes, Cowley—like most of his friends—never actually joined the Party. Nor was the Party dying to have him. All intellectuals were suspect to the Communists, and writers in particular were regarded as a “Bohemian and wholly undependable element.”
In time it became clear that capitalism had been saved by the inventive energy of FDR, Cowley writes, and the dream of the golden mountains slowly faded or was ruptured by disillusion with Communism. The passionate idealism that Cowley recalls seems oddly innocent now, and this honest book is evocative and touching.
Abigail Adams: An American Woman
by Charles Ackers Little, Brown and Company 207 pages, $9.95
In reviewing this new biography of Abigail Adams—the first written since the Adams-family manuscripts were opened to scholars—it is tempting simply to quote that pungent and original lady. “My pen is always freer than my tongue,” she wrote her husband in one of the two thousand surviving letters on which this book is based, and indeed she was a candid correspondent.
Her much-quoted admonition to John to “Remember the Ladies” was accompanied by the sharper statement: “Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.” In their long, loving marriage she always made it clear, in private if not in public, that she considered herself John’s equal. “If man is Lord,” she wrote, “woman is Lordess.” Her political judgments could be equally pointed. She wrote that John Hancock, whom she considered an untrustworthy lightweight, was a “tinkleling cymball,” and she noted that “Patriotism in the female Sex is the most disinterested of all virtues.”
John and Abigail were forced to live apart for many years of their married life, and their letters poured forth, affirming their reliance on each other and discussing in minute detail the affairs of their newly emerging country. This delightful biography of the woman who was to become our second First Lady plunges us into the center of Revolutionary America.
Civilities and Civil Rights
by William H. Chafe Oxford University Press Photographs, 436 pages, $13.95
The history of the civil rights movement, William Chafe says, has been told mostly in terms of its highlights—Brown vs. the Board of Education, Little Rock, Selma, et cetera. In his new book he focuses instead on the attitudes and changes in one Southern city over a period of thirty years—1945 to 1975. His city is Greensboro, North Carolina, where four scared college students sat down at the lunch counter of the local Woolworth’s on February 1, 1960, asked to be served, and stayed sitting when they were refused.
Greensboro considered itself a civil, harmonious city. There had never been a lynching there. Whites took pride in the good manners they exhibited toward blacks. To the blacks it was a “nice-nasty town” where civility was offered in place of action. The Greensboro school board, true to the city’s “progressive mystique,” waited only one day after the Supreme Court desegregation ruling to vote to comply with the new law. But seventeen years passed before Greensboro actually desegregated its schools; it was one of the last cities in the South to do so.
Using dozens of oral histories, mostly interviews with blacks, to supplement the written record, which is mostly white, Chafe has constructed a sensitive account of how a Southern city tried to stifle black protest and evade the law.
