A fascinating, deeply researched tome to a long past era, that still resonates today. Fantastic read!

YOUNG RADICALS: IN THE WAR FOR AMERICAN IDEALS (2017)
Jeremy McCarter
Random House, 340 pages.
★★★★★

I didn’t like this book; I adored it! It is so well written that it reads like novel. Among the unorthodox things Jeremy McCarter has done is pen it in the present tense. Another is to make its major theme the death of idealism. Or perhaps I should say its betrayal.

McCarter, a Chicago-based writer and critic, turns his gaze to the first two centuries of the 20th century, a time in which American socialism sprouted, blossomed, and was pulled up by the roots—its dreams of a global cooperative community sacrificed upon World War One’s altar of militarism, nationalism, greed. Rather than tell this tale through the usual channels of analyzing historical forces, material conditions, and mounting tensions, McCarter shows how larger dramas played out in the lives of five fascinating characters: Max Eastman (1883-1969), John Reed (1887-1920), Alice Paul (1885-1977), Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), and Randolph Bourne (1886-1918). He chose well, as between them, they moved in circles that represented the numerous strains within American culture.

The book’s title is apt, for the five radicals were indeed young and were, in their own ways, warriors within the “war for American ideals.” If you associate socialism with glum Russian apparatchiks, think again. Max Eastman was the editor of The Masses, a publication that was as much bohemian as socialist. Its pages supported labor unions, social equality, and pacifism, but also sported graphic art, poetry, and fiction that ranged from agit-prop to whimsical. It survived on a hope, serendipitous donations, and Eastman's dogged determination to keep it afloat.

Journalist “Jack” Reed was an energetic swashbuckler crossed with a frat boy. He seduced and exasperated, pontificated at one moment and betrayed his half-baked views the next, pissed off his friends as he exhaled and charmed them on the inhale. He was the very scarred embodiment of a fast, hard, full, short life. He needed to be where the action was, which is why he didn’t allow a lost kidney to keep him out of Europe as war clouds gathered and why he was a firsthand witness to the Russian Revolution.

Alice Paul wasn't good at moderation either. Like a reckless campus radical, she put her body on the line for the cause of suffrage and wore out others in the process, including Inez Milholland Boissevain who died from taking part in Paul-orchestrated non-stop agitation. Paul’s was a world of picketing, workhouse internments, force-feedings, and embarrassing President Wilson. One of the book’s many revelations is the depth of mutual contempt between Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt. Catt saw Paul as an impetuous troublemaker who threatened her careful one-state-at-a-time strategy and nearly cost Wilson the White House; Paul saw Catt as a self-aggrandizer willing to tolerate the status quo to be an insider player in the Wilson administration.

The latter charge was also leveled at Lippmann, with some justification. Lippmann, who co-founded the New Republic, was an intellectual who had trouble reconciling idealism and pragmatism. As war loomed, he jettisoned socialism for liberalism and joined Wilson’s team in the vain hope the war would "make the world safe for democracy.” Lippmann actually wrote most of Wilson’s famed 14-Points, but their abandonment led him to leak an internal document that doomed Wilson's nationwide campaign for the League of Nations.

A good tale requires a tragic figure and few were more so than Randolph Bourne. His was one of the most inventive minds of his day. Bourne dreamt of transnational identities, cosmopolitanism, and universal citizenship decades before Greenwich Villagers imagined themselves global villagers. His capacious mind was housed in a sickly hunchbacked body that he felt was doomed to be unloved. He was wrong; the beautiful free spirited actress Esther Cornell seems to have accepted his marriage proposal, only for Bourne to perish in the postwar influenza epidemic.

The postwar fallout took more than Bourne with it. Socialism’s promise also faded—not just because wartime repression and the postwar Red Scare—but because idealists often battled with each other, and bitterly so over the war. It has been said that World War One was the only war wished into being by the left. Though somewhat hyperbolic, roughly half of U.S. socialists—including Lippmann and John Dewey—supported the conflict. The latter were mistaken. History would soon judge the Great War a disaster in nearly every way one can measure such things. Ideals such as transnationalism gave way to cynicism and insularity. Paul would hold fast to her principles, but Eastman and Lippman would embark on several journeys between left, center, and right before settling into contrarianism.

McCarter’s book is a masterpiece of forgotten and overlooked detail. It is also an examination of how dream worlds and officialdom overlapped and separated. The book is so compellingly written that I shall refrain from quoting so you can make your own discoveries and savor the richness of its prose. Kudos to McCarver for restoring the “story” in history and making tales come alive in real time. One can dispute whether the hopes of McCarter's five young radicals were admirable or misguided, but there is something tragic in the observation that we now live in a world too parochial to conceive of globalism in non-economic terms.

Rob Weir

Fresh New Voices – of 1910

Every decade seems to have its bright fresh new voices. My own favorite was the 20s, when The Algonquin Roundtable brought together such minds as Edna Ferber, Ruth Hale, Dorothy Parker and a bunch of young men who all made their mark in the media, like Harold Ross founding The New Yorker. Just across the street at the Royalton, George Jean Nathan, HL Mencken and James Thurber hung out. It was the peak of literary creativity. Jeremy McCarter has gone back one further decade, and assembled five fresh young minds to guide us through their era. Their efforts were political; their goals much loftier. Most hung out in Greenwich Village, where it was cheap. It’s a great way to view the state of the nation. And it gives life to dimly recognized names.

Walter Lippmann, Jack Reed, Max Eastman, Alice Paul, and Randolph Bourne are the protagonists of The Young Radicals. We hardly know the names today, but in their time they made their marks, landed hard punches and racked up real achievements. They only had one common trait – drive. And America before WWI was the perfect environment for it. Their focus was equality, in women’s suffrage or workers’ rights, or arts and letters. It’s hard to imagine them getting anywhere today.

The first section gives a lightning round chapter to each of them and how they came to be those radicals. With the basics out of the way quickly, McCarter develops their stories and the connections between them. It continues to move rapidly; the whole 310 pages is over well before you want it to be.

It was an era with promise and change just ahead. The future looked brighter than the present. There were ideas about. They flowed freely, and got rational consideration. Woodrow Wilson proposed to end all wars with a League of Nations. Bourne praised America’s acceptance and encouragement of every kind of immigrant. Lippmann saw equality as reachable, and Paul saw women voting and running for office.

McCarter writes as much as possible in the present tense. It gives the book a more tentative feel and a stronger presence. It makes everything more real. The lives he follows are up and down and never far from disaster. Even when they win, they lose. Even flat out victories are disappointing. The world moved past them, ignoring their ideals. There is constant suspense, constant reversals, and numerous rebounds. It is an exciting time and life is hectic. And it is made worse by highly developed minds, frustrated. It’s a gripping book, giving bright life and style to a seemingly bland time.

McCarter has done a great service in rehabilitating this era and these characters. They are all sympathetic, subject to criticism, and very much alive. They risk all, every day. He looks to them for inspiration in our uncertain political and social climate. He takes solace in seeing Americans protesting today, when for decades they seemed to just accept everything taken from them. His five protagonists are an inspiration for everyone.

David Wineberg