ILLUSTRATIONS

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This photograph of Michael Harrington and Irving Howe appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine on June 17, 1984, in connection with a featured conversation between them entitled “Voices from the Left.” Harrington died at sixty-one in 1989. Howe died at seventy-two in 1993. They were two of the leading spokespeople in the United States for democratic socialism from the mid-1950s until their deaths.

Max Lerner was a Brandeis University faculty leader in the university’s early days and its “ambassador” to the outside world of politics, law, journalism, culture, and entertainment. I learned about Brandeis from reading Lerner’s columns in the then liberal New York Post while I was in high school, and I applied as a result. I became close with Max during my senior year as his driver on his weekly commutes to and from Logan Airport, and I worked on his monumental America as a Civilization. He was one of several of my Brandeis faculty mentors.

John L. Lewis was the president of the huge and powerful United Mine Workers union from 1920 to 1960, here shown delivering a speech to assembled supporters. I received this photo as a gift from my longtime friend and comrade John “Jack” Herling, who for many years was a labor reporter and author in Washington, D.C. I first met Jack in the early sixties at press conferences where he peppered Hoffa and other labor leaders with probing questions. He is seated facing Lewis in the photo. Jack died at age eighty-eight in 1994.

A spontaneous “wildcat” strike of over 250,000 postal workers occurred in major cities in the United States in March 1970 over substandard wages and working conditions. Participation in the strike was a federal criminal offense that could result in fines and imprisonment and permanent job loss. However, the impact upon the economy, the stock market’s functioning, and the support for the strike by the labor movement brought the Nixon administration to the bargaining table, resulting in a settlement that provided wage and benefit increases and enactment of a law that gave postal workers the permanent right to collective bargaining. This March 30, 1970, Time magazine cover illustrates the postal strike situation.

Before beginning his career as the first Jewish Supreme Court justice (1916–1939), Louis Brandeis, pictured here as part of Andy Warhol’s 1980 Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century series, was involved in advancing protective labor laws. Thus, in 1908 he argued and won Muller v. Oregon in the United States Supreme Court, establishing a state’s right to limit the working hours of women; he mediated a major strike in the women’s garment industry in New York; he advised both labor and management on the value of collective bargaining, mediation, and arbitration; he encouraged his management clients to adopt progressive and generous employment policies that he developed; and in 1907 he established a nonprofit life insurance company, Savings Bank Life Insurance, which still exists.

This photograph by Carol M. Highsmith is of a 1936 mural by the prolific American artist Reginald Marsh (1898–1954), mistakenly titled Sorting the Mail. Located in the William Jefferson Clinton Federal Building in Washington, D.C., it depicts postal workers engaged in the process of moving sacks of mail that are being dropped down

chutes for distribution, opening, and ultimately “sorting” the contents. In my law practice I litigated cases about which postal “craft” and corresponding union was entitled to do such work. Today mail volume is decreasing rapidly because of email, automation, and artificial intelligence, thereby reducing the size of the postal workforce.

Herbert Marcuse, satirized here by David Levine as a revolutionary, was born to a Jewish family in Berlin in 1898. After becoming a member of the distinguished Frankfurt School of social scientists, he left upon the rise of Hitler in 1933 and emigrated to the United States. During World War II, he worked at the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor to the CIA) as an expert on Nazism and Soviet Marxism. After the war, he returned to academia and came to Brandeis in 1954 as a professor of philosophy and politics, where he became a favorite of students (including me). While there, he continued to expound upon and expand his social and political theories in his teaching and writings. Marcuse is often regarded as the father of the “New Left” of the 1960s, a term he disclaimed. He died at eighty-one while on a speaking tour in Germany in 1979. There are several illuminating Marcuse interviews and lectures on YouTube.

Paul Robeson is shown here at one of his visits to Camp Kinderland, where I spent my summers from 1947 to 1950 (see pp. 191–206). The son of a runaway slave, he was born in 1898 and grew up poor in Princeton, New Jersey. A brilliant student, he won a scholarship to Rutgers University, where he was elected valedictorian of his class, was an All-American football player, and was a singer and actor. He went on to law school at Columbia University while playing in the National Football League. Thereafter he had a successful career in theater, movies, and as a singer. At the same time, he became a national and international civil and human rights advocate and leader. Throughout his life he suffered vicious racism, and then, during the Cold War, persecution by the federal government and others because of his pro-Soviet sympathies. He died of ill health at seventy-seven in 1976.

This photo was taken in March 1965 at the funeral mass for Viola Liuzzo, a longtime civil rights activist, mother of five, and wife of a Detroit Teamsters business agent. She was murdered by Ku Klux Klan members while participating in a Selma-toMontgomery, Alabama, civil rights protest march led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Seated with Dr. King are Teamsters president James R. Hoffa (second from right) and Teamsters executive vice president Harold J. Gibbons (center).

This September 6, 1963, LIFE magazine cover depicts the two principal architects of the August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Bayard Rustin, Randolph’s deputy and longtime civil rights and antiwar activist. Randolph had threatened such a march in 1940 and 1947, but called them off when President Roosevelt ordered fair employment practices in defense industries and President Truman integrated the military, which had been segregated going back to the Revolutionary War. A quarter million people attended the 1963 march, at which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famed “I Have a Dream” speech.

I obtained a copy of this silkscreen by Jacob Lawrence, titled “The Swearing In,” by contributing to Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign fund in 1976, and I received permission from the Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation to make copies for attendees at a party celebrating President Obama’s inauguration in 2009. It focuses on the reverence that attaches to the peaceful transfer of power during a presidential inauguration, which contrasts sadly with the bizarre inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017, for which $107 million was raised privately—twice as much as for any prior inauguration—as well as with Trump’s failure to appear at President Biden’s inauguration in 2021 and his claim that the election was stolen from him.

By the end of Donald Trump’s first year in office, it was clear that his anti-Mexican, anti-Muslim, anti-Black, and other minority racist hostility, his antagonism to a free press, and his misogyny were of monumental proportions, requiring public sanction. Thus, my friend and Martha’s Vineyard neighbor Michael Cooper, a distinguished member of the New York Bar (and later a victim of COVID-19), and I initiated an online campaign to persuade both the Senate and House to “Censure Donald Trump.” At one point we listed more than eighty grounds for censure and had over 80,000 supportive signatories. But it was to no avail, since few members of Congress were prepared to take Trump on directly at that time. We adapted this New Yorker cover for our campaign.