As We Saw the Thirties: Essays on Social & Political Movements of a Decade

by Rita J. Simon (editor)

By Earl Browder, Hal Draper, Granville Hicks, A.J. Muste, Max Shachtman, Norman Thomas, Gerald L.K. Smith & Burton K. Wheeler.

256 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1967

About the author

Rita J. Simon is a University Professor in the School of Public Affairs and the Washington College of Law at American University in Washington, D.C. She has published more than forty books and is currently the editor of Gender Issues.

Reviews

[Erik Graff]

As the Kirkus review has it, these are "frank talks by survivors of the crucial social-political contests--Norman Thomas for the radical left, Max Schachtman for the Trotskyites, Earl Browder for the doctrinaire Communists, Gerald L.K. Smith for the Huey Long Share Our Wealth program, A.J. Muste for militant labor, Granville Hicks for the committed intelligentsia, Hal Draper for the student movement, Burton Wheeler for isolationism--all from lecture appearances on the University of Illinois campus in 1965 & '66, & providing a uniquely revealing experience for kids who know what happened, want to know how & why."
I'll buy all of that except for assigning Norman Thomas, former minister, occasional electoral candidate and chair of the Socialist Party of America, to the "radical left." By modern standards, he was a moderate democratic socialist, much of what he advocated now being common practice.