Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition (Princeton Classics)

by Richard Rorty

His father, James Rorty, had been a poet of high reputation in the 1920s before he turned to reformist journalism in the 1930s, but I did not know the final phase of this lineage until Dick mentioned an article his father had written about the last hurrah of the fellow-traveling left: the Paul Robeson concert, held on September 4, 1949, just north of Peekskill, New York. The local populace had stopped the concert a week earlier. When it was rescheduled, they again caught wind of the event, and organized, and the concertgoers and performers trying to leave were mobbed by patriots armed with bats and rocks. What, I asked, had James Rorty said about it? “He argued,” said Dick, “that the people of Peekskill had as much right to express their opinions as Paul Robeson had to express his.” I recalled the stories of rocks thrown at windshields and how my aunt and uncle wondered if they would get out alive, while Dick rapidly calculated the difference of view. “You better not read the article,” he said.

December 9, 2020. Page 427.