My Long Crawl toward Socialism (Part 2)

World War II brought long hours in the railroad yards for my father, and the steady income meant that my parents could qualify for a mortgage on a modest house in the Finn Town section of the Harbor.  My father was exempt from the draft because of the critical importance to the war effort of the iron ore docks that the railroads served. During World War II, more iron ore moved through Ashtabula Harbor than through any other port in the world. Security around the docks and the railroad yards was extremely tight.

Buying a home on a mortgage did not cause us to think of ourselves as “middle-class,” which was not a label much used then. Owning an automobile was unthinkable, and my father walked to work as did most of the neighborhood. We slowly accumulated a telephone, an electric refrigerator, and by the 1950s a television set.

My education in socialism was on hold--I did not read Marxism for Infants by Comrade X, that mythical book projected by George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier--and in fact socialism was better not mentioned as the repressions of the McCarthy period grew. Some Finns were deported, and of course the well-known Finnish-American Communist Gus Hall went to prison.

My political outlook as it slowly took shape was that of a social democrat, left of Roosevelt and most Democrats, and heavily influenced by the union movement. I had no contact with socialists. In high school, I was, I remember, greatly interested in articles about the public ownership of utilities, written by such unlikely people as Hubert Humphrey, that I read in Progressive magazine, to which somehow or other the Harbor Public Library subscribed. (I was years later surprised to find myself living near the Progressive offices in Madison, Wisconsin.) In my senior year in high school, I ran for Harbor High School’s nomination for “City Manager for the Day,” won that, and then ran successfully against the nominees of the other larger high schools in Ashtabula. My platform included taking into social ownership the city’s privately owned waterworks. I was asked at least twice during the campaign whether that wouldn’t be “socialism.”

I did read widely in my high school years, and some of the authors showed some leaning toward socialism--Steinbeck in particular. The library had a copy of the autobiography of Big Bill Haywood, the IWW leader, that I read with pleasure and profit. Still, many of the books in those years were chess books, science fiction, or detective stories. Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist was an important book to read at that age. I wouldn’t have known how to find a book on socialist economics or Marxist philosophy.

While my father was still alive, between my junior and senior years in high school, I worked, as a laborer, in the same railroad yards in the Harbor, but union membership was waived because it was a summer job. I remember the long walk home on hot summer days, sometimes coated with coal dust and looking like someone in a Welsh mining movie. But it was good to make real money--$1.56 an hour--after having been only a paperboy before. After my father died, I took a job as a lab technician in an alcohol factory to finish out my senior year in high school and work the summer before starting college. Here I joined my first union, the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers, whom I would find again years later when they played a leading role in the effort to build a Labor Party. The union meetings, at the Sons of Italy Hall in East Ashtabula, were the first that I had attended since early childhood.

My interest in literature, despite my plan to become a scientist vocationally, caused me to choose Harvard over M.I.T. when I was admitted to both. I had never visited either institution or the Boston area. (to be continued)