As he had more than two dozen times before, Jack Spiegel awoke one morning early this summer and knew that before the day was out he would get arrested.
The occasion was a protest at the A.E. Staley Manufacturing Co. plant in Decatur, where union workers had been locked out of their jobs for more than a year in a bitter dispute with management not so much over wages as working conditions.
Sitting on the asphalt, blocking a plant entrance, the 89-year-old Spiegel ignored repeated orders from the police to move. He let his frail body go limp. Officers, clad in riot gear, reached under his arms, hoisted him up, then took him to jail.
“That,” Spiegel recalled recently, “was a fine day.”
There was a time when the American Left had muscle, when it was a movement to be reckoned with, when organizers like Jack Spiegel could make things happen.
This is not that time.
Fine days, if that is what the protest at A.E. Staley is to be called, are rare. Organized labor, once an engine powering America’s radicals, is struggling.
Some of the best known symbols of the Left have flipped: The Rev. Daniel Berrigan has appeared in a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream advertisement; the late Jerry Rubin went from being a Yippie to a suit-and-tie entrepreneur hawking health-food juices on TV.
More than that, the American Left, particularly its more progressive side, finds itself swamped by the Right. It is fragmented, its many parts in more than a little disarray. Its relationship to the heydays of the 1920s, 1930s and even the 1960s seems distant.
“Things aren’t so good right now,” said Spiegel, a long-time Chicago-area trade unionist, Socialist and peace activist. “Certainly, they’ve been better.”
“The Left is in crisis, and it has been for some time,” said Carl Davidson, the former national secretary for the radical Students for a Democratic Society. “I don’t know if it’s even bottomed out yet.”
“What Left?” asked author and Northwestern University professor Garry Wills.
To put a shine to what would appear to be such a sorry state of affairs, some on the Left describe this as a time of dialogues rather than manifestos. It is, they are fond of saying, a time to assess the world’s changes: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the East Bloc; the end of apartheid; conservatism and the resurgence of the far Right.
Bide time, they say, then strike.
But as much as the Left is in distress, it remains vital, not so much idling in thought as making things happen. There are, in Chicago and elsewhere, deep pockets of radicalism, alive and vibrant and tuned to political and social action.
The Left may not be setting the nation’s political agenda; often, no one comes around to gauge its reaction to events, much less to notice what course it is charting.
“You see among leftists now a little more humility,” said Barbara Ransby, a professor at DePaul University. “They’re more searching, a little more reflective. Not so many people on the Left are saying, `This is the only direction we can go.’ “
Yet those on the Left remain committed. Problem is, they often are working their own issues. It is a fact of the Left today that many sympathizers spend their energy on what often are called single-issue politics: abortion rights, homelessness, health care, civil rights.
They can be found in bookstores and theaters, bars and coffee houses. At the New World Resource Center, a cluttered bookstore on Irving Park Road run by a dozen volunteers, the notion is to be an “all-points-on-the-Left” shop, according to Rust Gilbert, a former SDS member.
The Pathfinder Bookstore, on West Roosevelt Road, offers but one point. It is the headquarters of the Socialist Workers Party, which put up several candidates for election this year-apparently not so much for getting them elected as for gaining notice.
The Blue Rider Theatre, on South Halsted Street, performed a show about Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-Jewish revolutionary, then hosted discussion groups. Soon to come: A comedy about the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
“This is a place for lots of issues, an umbrella for the Left,” said Blue Rider co-founder Tim Fiori. “I think politics will infuse everything we do around here.”
The Hothouse, on Milwaukee Avenue, plays host to world music and Cuban solidarity groups. The Crossroads Fund, at Logan Square, supports progressive organizations with grants of $7,000 or less. Networking for Democracy, Davidson’s not-for-profit group, tries to teach radical and other organizations to use computers in their work.
To some, these groups and their ideas are anachronistic, way out of time as well as fashion. But they are all that remains of the Left, of progressives.
`Capitalism has to fail’
“Radicals today have a burden.”
It is approaching midnight, and Jack Spiegel is sipping a beer in his tidy apartment on Lake Shore Drive. He is, as DePaul’s Ransby might have predicted, reflective.
“The best thing radicals can do is admit our mistakes,” he said. “We have to be honest. What we are trying to achieve won’t happen in one day. It won’t happen in one year. But Capitalism has to fall. People will see there’s something else.”
Although approaching 90, Spiegel is agile, both of body and mind. He is animated, too, his eyes a little watery but still bright. Seizing on a loose thought, he dashes through his apartment for the magazine article to illustrate it, fingering it so sharply the paper snaps.
Spiegel got his first taste of radicalism in the 1920s, in what was called the Unemployed Movement, and he has been trying to show people something else ever since. He turned away from a career as a lawyer to become a trade unionist in the shoe factories here.
He did a stint with the Communist Party, but quit and now is with a group called the Committee of Correspondence, which recently broke off from the Communist Party.
“We’re hoping to keep Socialist ideals alive,” he said of the COC.
But even Spiegel, whose idealism never seems to flag, admits that those ideals are spread so thin and among so many groups that bringing them together is a daunting task.
A house fragmented
The Socialist Workers Party is in this corner; the International Socialist Organization is in that one. The COC is in another. The radicals, or even the liberals with some radical leanings-so-called “soft radicals”-seem to find it hard to abandon individual issues for a broader movement.
“People kind of burn out trying to build links between all the issues,” said Nancy McLean, a professor of history at Northwestern University and a former member of the International Socialist Organization. “That’s been getting harder and harder.”
Still, the effort is being made, trying to broaden the Left’s traditional economic and social range to include, say, health care, abortion and immigration.
That is, in one sense, what Saturday afternoons are for at the Pathfinder Bookstore. The bookshop is a drab room filled with plain-cover political tracts: Marx, Lenin, Trotsky. In a back room are rows of folding chairs. Two small electric fans stir the air. A banner tacked up on one wall declares, “Defend the Cuban Revolution.”
On this day, soon after the fatal shooting of a doctor outside a women’s clinic in Pensacola, Fla., the party’s Militant Labor Forum is hosting a discussion about abortion rights. A previously scheduled topic, the sagging dollar overseas, has been pre-empted by news. The Socialist Workers Party is attempting to be current. Twenty people show up.
“Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Bill Clinton,” says James Warren, ticking off the names with more than a little sarcasm as sweat beads on his forehead, “I don’t think any of them are defenders of women’s rights. That must be our job.”
A steelworker at A.M. Castle Metals in Franklin Park, Warren has been the Socialist Workers Party candidate for president, governor of Illinois and mayor of Chicago.
Born in 1952, he grew up in Memphis and in high school became active in the civil rights and black liberation movements. He was with the Black Panthers for a while.
For years, he moved around the country, working with the Young Socialist Alliance in Grand Rapids, Mich., and for busing and desegregation in Boston. Like others in the Socialist Workers Party, he is a Marxist, a unionist dedicated to a revolution of the working class.
“You can’t define the effect of the Left or its impact on politics by how many people show up for a talk or how many votes we get or how many people walk a picket line,” Warren said later, his tone clearly defensive. “What we’re more interested in is the effect we have on people’s thinking.”
The Right example
But if the Left is changing the way people think, the evidence of it is hard to find. Perhaps, though, that is not the point. Consider the Crossroads Fund.
“It’s really important for us to just push a progressive agenda,” said Lucy Smith, the fund’s associate director. “We don’t try to get involved in politics.”
What the Crossroads Fund does is provide financial support to progressive organizations. Founded in 1980, the fund raises its money without the benefit of an endowment, then gives it away in relatively small grants-none more than $7,000.
The recipients include labor, prison activists and gay and lesbian groups-the traditional backbone of the Left. Crossroads officials then help the groups figure out how to use the money.
“If Left equals progressive, then yes, we’d be Left,” said Smith. “But there are so many factions out there on the Left that I don’t know if we really fit.”
It is amid this political confusion that The New Party would like to step in.
“If there’s anything that defines the American Left, it’s fragmentation,” said Dan Cantor, the party’s national organizer. “There are hundreds of thousands of people doing good progressive work, but it doesn’t add up. The whole is far less than the sum of its parts.”
The New Party aims to change that. By uniting the progressives behind a cohesive ideology, one that, in theory at least, will have room for all the factions that now litter the landscape of the Left, The New Party is confident progressives can again be strong.
It is a strategy not unlike the one that has made the Right so strong. The Right, it seems, derived its strength by seizing on a few issues-the fight against Communism, cutting taxes and the size of government, decaying morality.
Then it took its case to voters.
The New Party, according to Cantor, will do the same. Although its Chicago organization is not yet fully formed, in other parts of the country it has run candidates in local races, winning 39 of 59 races in places like Little Rock, Ark., Milwaukee and Missoula, Mont.
The races were small-school boards, city councils and such-but they fit with the two-year-old party’s goal of turning grievances into ideas and achieving incremental gains without playing the spoiler and inadvertantly helping Republicans.
`A church not a sect’
“We’re of that Left tradition that thinks we could have a majority out there someday,” said Cantor. “We want to build a church, not a sect. Because if the Left is going to amount to anything, it’s going to be made up of groups that have reached their limit on one issue.”
It is a notion that sits comfortably with Jack Spiegel. Sipping the last of a beer, he points to the Los Angeles riots as proof that the same unrest that charged the Left in the first half of the century exists to give it renewal.
Like Cantor, he preaches a strategy of unification. He has seen that work before; indeed, he is one of the few who has. It is, he said, simply a matter of time. Make small gains, then hold them. The movement, he said, will continue to grow. There is no other way.
“If we’re just going to be little sects, the Left will never succeed,” he said. “We have to come together. But that takes time. It may take years. I may not see it.”
