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Part of Our Time: Some Ruins & Monuments of the Thirties
Through brilliant portraits of real persons who created the myths and realities of the 1930s, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Murray Kempton brings that turbulent decade to life. Himself a child of the time, Kempton examines with the insight and imagination of a novelist the men and women who embraced, grappled with, and in many cases were destroyed by the myth of revolution. What he calls the "ruins and monuments of the Thirties" include Paul Robeson, Alger Hiss, and Whittaker Chambers, the Hollywood Ten, the rebel women Elizabeth Bentley and Mary Heaton Vorse, and the labor leaders Walter Reuther and Joe Curran.
360 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1955
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
August 18, 2012
Your odds of reading every word of this in-depth analytical reflection on the Communist movement in 1930s America would increase signficantly if you are 1) an avid student of the subject, or 2) an ardent admirer of Kempton’s prose. I consider myself both, but still found this otherwise fascinating look at a misunderstood period to be slow going at times. Not because Kempton is ever dull or pedantic -- the man couldn’t compose a dull sentence under threat of interrogation by KGB thugs (or by FBI pugs) – but because he seemingly knows every step of political machination at play and every nuance and quirk of personality on display, and describes them with a style that might be best described as aphoristic analysis: compulsively quotable but slow to digest, as you can’t help but pause at least two or three times a page (and sometimes per paragraph) to ponder and admire an elegant, entertaining and penetrating insight. I found myself copying out many passages for quick future reference after each chapter. Kempton described this series of profiles of major figures associated with the Communist (though not all are readily recognizable names for anyone not well versed in the period) as a collection of “novellas,” a characterisation that reflects his impressive ability to sift and shape volumes of political and historical minutiae with the craft and fascination with human frailty of a novelist. If these are novellas, then I would describe his weekly columns, the bulk of his journalistic writing for which he is generally best known, as prose poems. Personally, I prefer the latter to the former. They have all the skill and insight of the novella but delivered with the concision and power of a memorable verse. Take for his example, his column on the late Black Panther leader, Huey Newton, “The Promise of Huey P. Newton,” a two-page piece in Rebellions, Perversities and Main Eventsthat sums up a controversial and polarizing figure with jaw-dropping wisdom and compassion: “Juries that tried Huey Newton had a way of always ending hung, simply because, like pretty much everyone else and perhaps himself not least of all, they did not know who he was.”
The novella analogy, however, is an apt one, as Kempton’s primary goal of debunking what he calls “myths” that have influenced our understanding of the period becomes a rich theme illustrated by historical figures as complex as any literary character. In particular, he takes apart two key myths:
1) American Communist movement was a genuine and deep-rooted threat to democracy and capitalism. Instead, Kempton concludes, “I tend to think of the thirties as a time when we represented an island of guilt surrounded by a sea of innocence. … For America then was not afraid of the persons in these studies because it was not afraid of itself. It knew then that the very many were to healthy to worry about infection from the very few. We were only a part of our time; it was our illusion that we were the most important part, but most Americans knew that we were not, and they were right. … If a nation of the healthy chooses to believe that its history was made by a little group of the sick, then it is in peril of the mistake only a few made in the thirties, trading the real for the malignant unreal.”
2) Members of Communist movement were rabid ideologues who could match their Soviet counterparts slogan for slogan; that they were all part of a global community bent on subverting the American way of life. Kempton, who himself flirted with Communism as a young man, sees a far more personal factor motivating many enthusiasts: “We were, most of us, fleeing the reality that man is alone upon this earth. We ran from a fact of solitude to a myth of community. That myth failed us because the moments of test come most often when we are alone and far from home and even the illusion of community is not there to sustain us.”
Don’t be misled by the melancholic, existential tone of these reflections. Kemptons’s real skill, amply on display throughout the book, is his ability to skewer people he finds guilty of arrogant self-delusion, hypocrisy or just plain ineptitude with dead-pan zingers. For example, this take on Alger Hiss’s bizarre testimony about his relationship with Whitaker Chambers: “And, at the end, all Hiss said he could remember was those bad teeth, as if the abyss before him then and now was somehow an ill-tended dental cavity.”
In the chapter “The Social Muse,” he unleashes some of his most acerbic lines for second-rate writers promoting “social realism” who tried to cover their lack of talent with political enthusiasm: “To read that poem and to think its author once gave his mother pangs of birth is to understand why, if the Old Testament God and all his vengeance did not exist, man would have had to invent them.”
In praising Kempton’s career, Christopher Hitchens wrote: “Those of us who enlist in the apparently pointless but endlessly rewarding occupation of holding up the colonnade take comfort when one of our number is recognized as something more than a mere caryatid. If Kempton had been a column, he would have been Doric -- spare and slim and tapering.” I would extend the metaphor to argue that in Part of Our Time, Kempton is more Ionic than Doric, inspecting a weather-beaten frieze of pantheonic figures and finding plenty of cracks and worn features as well as universal virtues worth celebrating, and restoring them with eye-catching scrolls of wit, sympathy and elegance that occasionally stray into Corinthian excess. But the overall effect is a timeless and enduring one. In the final analysis, this is a book about faith and commitment to an ideal, and all the human ways in which faith and ideals can be corrupted and misused by those attempting to fulfill them and by those attempting to crush them.
The novella analogy, however, is an apt one, as Kempton’s primary goal of debunking what he calls “myths” that have influenced our understanding of the period becomes a rich theme illustrated by historical figures as complex as any literary character. In particular, he takes apart two key myths:
1) American Communist movement was a genuine and deep-rooted threat to democracy and capitalism. Instead, Kempton concludes, “I tend to think of the thirties as a time when we represented an island of guilt surrounded by a sea of innocence. … For America then was not afraid of the persons in these studies because it was not afraid of itself. It knew then that the very many were to healthy to worry about infection from the very few. We were only a part of our time; it was our illusion that we were the most important part, but most Americans knew that we were not, and they were right. … If a nation of the healthy chooses to believe that its history was made by a little group of the sick, then it is in peril of the mistake only a few made in the thirties, trading the real for the malignant unreal.”
2) Members of Communist movement were rabid ideologues who could match their Soviet counterparts slogan for slogan; that they were all part of a global community bent on subverting the American way of life. Kempton, who himself flirted with Communism as a young man, sees a far more personal factor motivating many enthusiasts: “We were, most of us, fleeing the reality that man is alone upon this earth. We ran from a fact of solitude to a myth of community. That myth failed us because the moments of test come most often when we are alone and far from home and even the illusion of community is not there to sustain us.”
Don’t be misled by the melancholic, existential tone of these reflections. Kemptons’s real skill, amply on display throughout the book, is his ability to skewer people he finds guilty of arrogant self-delusion, hypocrisy or just plain ineptitude with dead-pan zingers. For example, this take on Alger Hiss’s bizarre testimony about his relationship with Whitaker Chambers: “And, at the end, all Hiss said he could remember was those bad teeth, as if the abyss before him then and now was somehow an ill-tended dental cavity.”
In the chapter “The Social Muse,” he unleashes some of his most acerbic lines for second-rate writers promoting “social realism” who tried to cover their lack of talent with political enthusiasm: “To read that poem and to think its author once gave his mother pangs of birth is to understand why, if the Old Testament God and all his vengeance did not exist, man would have had to invent them.”
In praising Kempton’s career, Christopher Hitchens wrote: “Those of us who enlist in the apparently pointless but endlessly rewarding occupation of holding up the colonnade take comfort when one of our number is recognized as something more than a mere caryatid. If Kempton had been a column, he would have been Doric -- spare and slim and tapering.” I would extend the metaphor to argue that in Part of Our Time, Kempton is more Ionic than Doric, inspecting a weather-beaten frieze of pantheonic figures and finding plenty of cracks and worn features as well as universal virtues worth celebrating, and restoring them with eye-catching scrolls of wit, sympathy and elegance that occasionally stray into Corinthian excess. But the overall effect is a timeless and enduring one. In the final analysis, this is a book about faith and commitment to an ideal, and all the human ways in which faith and ideals can be corrupted and misused by those attempting to fulfill them and by those attempting to crush them.
January 31, 2009
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.
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.
April 19, 2010
the older i get, the more excited i become about the quasi-genre of "literary" journalism. i picked up this book because i've heard it mentioned alongside some of my favorites of its ilk (like orwell's homage to catalonia or baldwin's notes of a native son), and i approached it with high expectations. having read it, i'm a little disappointed, honestly. but i'm not sure exactly why. my rudimentary knowledge of U.S. labor history certainly didn't help as i worked my way through it. the book expects a familiarity with the major narratives of the 1930's that i certainly lack. so my "3" rating comes from a slightly ill-informed place. to put it differently - the rating comes from someone who had to put the book down to wikipedia the sacco and venzetti trial. prior to part of our time, i knew sacco and venzetti were anarchists and that ben shahn made an awesome painting of them. if you know more about them than that, you'll probably get more out of this book than i did.
anyway, parts of the book are brilliant. by tracing the shifting ideological paths of american "proletarian" writers like sherwood anderson and john dos passos, kempton characterizes left-wing disillusionment with a sobriety and fair-mindedness that's lacking in contemporary discourse (the closest contemporary equivalent i can think of would be bill moyers... and even his admirable style seems like a relic of an earlier era, unfortunately). kempton is quite good at conveying the urgency of the time - the way that young radicals imagined themselves as an active part of history. their convictions were a far cry from the narcissistic counter-cultures emerging since the 1960's. but they weren't always more noble, necessarily... and kempton shows the shortcomings of their righteousness as well. the conclusion, which considers a few veterans of the spanish civil war, is particularly tragic, resonant and illuminating.
other chapters didn't pack the same punch. when dealing with race and gender, kempton's language is a bit dated (which is understandable) and he's less capable of the nuance he brings to topics like class and labor. also, kempton has a confusing habit of shuffling his subjects. one person's profile evolves into the story of a particular event, which evolves into another participant's story. sometimes this works, and sometimes it interrupts the rhythm of the initial argument. but if you study the U.S. during the 1930's more thoroughly than i do, you'll probably be able to keep up with him!
anyway, parts of the book are brilliant. by tracing the shifting ideological paths of american "proletarian" writers like sherwood anderson and john dos passos, kempton characterizes left-wing disillusionment with a sobriety and fair-mindedness that's lacking in contemporary discourse (the closest contemporary equivalent i can think of would be bill moyers... and even his admirable style seems like a relic of an earlier era, unfortunately). kempton is quite good at conveying the urgency of the time - the way that young radicals imagined themselves as an active part of history. their convictions were a far cry from the narcissistic counter-cultures emerging since the 1960's. but they weren't always more noble, necessarily... and kempton shows the shortcomings of their righteousness as well. the conclusion, which considers a few veterans of the spanish civil war, is particularly tragic, resonant and illuminating.
other chapters didn't pack the same punch. when dealing with race and gender, kempton's language is a bit dated (which is understandable) and he's less capable of the nuance he brings to topics like class and labor. also, kempton has a confusing habit of shuffling his subjects. one person's profile evolves into the story of a particular event, which evolves into another participant's story. sometimes this works, and sometimes it interrupts the rhythm of the initial argument. but if you study the U.S. during the 1930's more thoroughly than i do, you'll probably be able to keep up with him!
March 2, 2011
I liked the essays on the Pullman Porters and the Detroit auto workers the best. Interesting to read, from today's perspective, an essay written in the 1950s, about Detroit in the 1930s. The essay on women in the socialist movement was about... love? Not so good. Skimmed through some of the less interesting chapters.
August 16, 2015
Kempton was a brilliant newspaper columnist, who here describes some of the characters who shaped the 1930's, and whose influence continues to shape our current world (though those who have forgotten history don't know it). Even some with no interest in the politics of the thirties can enjoy Kempton's writing style, however.
November 28, 2020
"Each of us lives with a sword over his head..."
So, somewhat pompously begins Murray Kempton's book about the late twentieth century. How did Mr. Kempton handle that uncomfortable situation? Furiously typing out eleven thousand newspaper columns for the New York Post (my favorite newpaper), as well as articles and essays, including as a court reporter with a taste, according to David Remnick, for Aeschylus.
Kempton then acknowledges the myths he was involved in, the taste for the dramatic that shaped his experience of the 1930s. Interestingly enough, the myth of the thirties was a direct attack on the myth of the 1920s. We've been introduced to F. Scott Fitzgerald as he documented in fictional form the ambition of the 1920s, the opportunity to make something of oneself, to be someone in America. How pathetic all that turned out to be, with drugs, alcohol, and mental illness around each corner.
So, we update to the thirties and we find 'labor,' the 'working class,' and 'revolution' are now the bywords of the times. And the representative figure here is Whittaker Chambers, someone I have heard stories about for forty years. Let me say, was there ever a more boring individual who occupied so much media attention? The most you can say for him is that he published some short stories in the New Masses paper, stories that focused attention of what it is to be a Bolshevik. And now, we've completely forgotten the entire episode. It went nowhere. Even if Lenin has a permanent residence in the Kremlin, it's only now an embarrassment. Why should we care?
So, somewhat pompously begins Murray Kempton's book about the late twentieth century. How did Mr. Kempton handle that uncomfortable situation? Furiously typing out eleven thousand newspaper columns for the New York Post (my favorite newpaper), as well as articles and essays, including as a court reporter with a taste, according to David Remnick, for Aeschylus.
Kempton then acknowledges the myths he was involved in, the taste for the dramatic that shaped his experience of the 1930s. Interestingly enough, the myth of the thirties was a direct attack on the myth of the 1920s. We've been introduced to F. Scott Fitzgerald as he documented in fictional form the ambition of the 1920s, the opportunity to make something of oneself, to be someone in America. How pathetic all that turned out to be, with drugs, alcohol, and mental illness around each corner.
So, we update to the thirties and we find 'labor,' the 'working class,' and 'revolution' are now the bywords of the times. And the representative figure here is Whittaker Chambers, someone I have heard stories about for forty years. Let me say, was there ever a more boring individual who occupied so much media attention? The most you can say for him is that he published some short stories in the New Masses paper, stories that focused attention of what it is to be a Bolshevik. And now, we've completely forgotten the entire episode. It went nowhere. Even if Lenin has a permanent residence in the Kremlin, it's only now an embarrassment. Why should we care?
July 3, 2021
Kempton’s subject is the American left in the thirties, his focus isn’t so much a history of the movement but the lives of individual figures who were involved in radical politics in that period - just how they got involved, what they did and what it did too them, for good and bad - mostly Communists though some here were more in the fellow traveler category and others really had no connection with the CPUSA at all. As he says, the radical movement of that period was the subject of a great deal of myth making during the thirties and then again in the early fifties from a different perspective, but the reality was that the Communist Party itself really was never very large, didn’t accomplish much and wasn’t much of a danger.
October 3, 2025
If you've ever been confused about the dynamics surrounding communism, fascism, McCarthyism, organized labor, etc., this book may shed a little light. The book was written because Kempton, writing in the 50s, thought people had already forgotten what was going on just 2 decades earlier in the 30s. Think about that for a minute!
Anyway, the book, by telling the stories of different people in the 30s, does a really good job of putting it all into perspective.
Anyway, the book, by telling the stories of different people in the 30s, does a really good job of putting it all into perspective.
January 13, 2021
Well written profiles of figures - some remembered, others not - of the 30s and their dalliances with communism. The best chapters are the ones on civil rights and organized labour; when speaking of the Hollywood 10 or writers of the 30s, it drags a little.
Makes me wonder, will the DSA/PSL/Chapo kids of today become the reactionaries of tomorrow, as so many of these characters did?
Makes me wonder, will the DSA/PSL/Chapo kids of today become the reactionaries of tomorrow, as so many of these characters did?
May 5, 2007
This is perhaps the greatest work of literary journalism ever written in the United States. A collection of "nonfiction novellas" that trace the paths of '30s radicals into the the harsher climate of the 1950s, it's an incredible summation not just of the time, but of American history and political radicalism. It's truly humbling to recall that he fashioned this classic with the simple tools of the journalist: personal interviews and old newspapers, plus his voracious appetite for novels, poems and plays. Kempton is a great writer. I re-read this book every year.
December 27, 2012
Another home run from Murray Kempton, the greatest reporter of my generation. This time he covers the lives--or rather writes portraits--of selected communists from the 1930s some known such as Elizabaeth Bentley, Paul Robeson, Whitticar Chambers to the less known--labor organizers. The depth of knowledge, broth personal and through research is superb. These are people Kempton knew. In the end, most of them seem sad individuals whose lights failed.
May 16, 2013
The thirties was the young adulthood of my grandparents, the childhood of my parents and, so, of great interest to me. Kempton's take on it is through the eyes of the left--another plus--and by means of short biographies.
Thoroughly enjoyable.
Thoroughly enjoyable.
May 20, 2010
David Remnick was a fan. That was reason enough for me to check out this exceptional journalist.
February 20, 2014
I could not make it through the prologue.
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