Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties Book

A long-time New York reporter for The New York Post and Newsday, Kempton died in 1997. Famed for a prose style that grew steadily more baroque, if not occasionally Byzantine, Kempton saw things plainly and strove to capture their complexity in a form that required poetry for clarity. Over his long career he wrote on many subjects, politics, organized crime, civil rights, unions, sports (he wrote about the losing pitcher in Don Larsen's perfect game), music (loved classical music, jazz and the blues), and anything that seemed to represent some revelatory shard of the human condition.

In 1954 he began writing Part of Our Time, a book that looked at the radicalism of the 1930s with a critical, balanced, and compassionate eye. Again, he was writing this in 1954, fairly in the heart of the McCarthy era where balance and compassion were in short supply and anything less than hysterical paranoia was seen as anti-American. Yet Kempton wrote this book and wrote it masterfully. He admits to his early, brief radicalism, including a short stint in the Communist Party. He writes in chapter length case studies, focusing on true-believers (Hiss and Chambers, for example) gone aground, believers in a cause (Sacco and Vanzetti, the Spanish Civil War, unionism, racial justice) for which communism seemed a means to end, and the naïve (college students and Hollywood radicals) whose interest had more to do with fashion and transitory passion than any real commitment or risk. He apologizes for no one's involvement. Nor does he stretch facts or inflate risk. It is, he tells us off the start, a book about those who contrive myths that seek to change an unacceptable reality. Each generation--and here he shortens the length of a generation to the span of a decade--composes its own myth. Those who created the myth of the thirties are "with us still, not as the prophets they thought they were, but as the scapegoats of an aggressive new myth which has shoved their own aside. The bearers of the myth of every decade seem to carry in their hands the ax and spade to execute and inter the myth of the previous one."

Kempton seems to drop aphorisms in his prose as easily as the rest of us drop "uhms" and "you knows" in our speech. He writes: "It is a perilous thing for any generation to misjudge its immediate past." "Independence is a communicable disease." "Most persons who achieve anything of substance bring a certain pride of performance to the worst calling they fall into." "When a faith is dying, the best go first and the lesser spirits trail behind." "These are the memorabilia of the very young; and first love may be sweet or bitter, but it is seldom consequential." "We were very young then, and properly speaking, the young have no experiences; experience is the price of their youth."

So the writing is one reason to seek this book out, which David Remnick calls Kempton's masterpiece. But there are others--rigor of study, depth of understanding, strength of insight and reason, and the human level drama, which brings the Reuther brothers, Paul Robeson, Whittaker Chambers and others to life, as well as lesser known folks such as Jack Curran and Thomas Patterson, the former a rough and tumble seaman union organizer and the latter a leader with Phillip Randolph of the Pullman Porters. It's a fascinating history, extremely well-told.