Steady Work: An Academic Memoir

Abstract

To Robert K. Merton, without whom it never could have happened Some years ago at a cocktail party in Washington, I approached General Colin Powell, then still head of the Joint Chiefs, and told him that he and I had a lot in common.The General, who did not know me, reacted with a quizzical look.I commented that we were both born in Harlem, moved when quite young to the Bronx, and went to and graduated from City College.I did not add what was more relevant, that he joined the ROTC, the Reserve Officers Training Corps, while I joined the youth section of the Trotskyists, then known as the Young People's Socialist League, Fourth International.Our different behaviors after entering City College determined much of our later life, although the General exhibited more consistency in his career than I did in politics.He remained with the military until retirement.I left the Trotskyists within a year after joining them in 1940, although I remained active in various left socialist groups for a number of years.I served, among other things, as the national chairman of the Youth Section of the Socialist Party, also known as the Young People's Socialist League, or YIPSILS.My final resignation from socialist organizations occurred around 1960 when I quit the Socialist Party, which had become a futile organization.Intellectually I moved a considerable distance, from believing in Marxism-Leninism-Trotskyism to a moderate form of democratic socialism and finally to a middle-of-the-road position, as a centrist, or as some would say, a conservative Democrat.In recent decades, leftist critics of my writings and subsequent politics have placed me in that category known as neoconservative.My parents were both born in Czarist Russia in Minsk and Pinsk.My mother, Lena, came to America as a young child in 1907.Her parents, who died before I was born, in the 1918 flu epidemic, were religious Jews.She was a seamstress 1 I am indebted for this title to Irving Howe, who used it for a book of his essays.

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