An interview with Harry Magdoff - co-editor of the 'Monthly Review' - Interview

Monthly Review, May, 1999 by Christopher Phelps

The popular notion about students in the twenties was that they drank the hard stuff to excess and wore raccoon coats. By accident, I landed in the high school English class from which the editors of the following year's school newspaper were to be chosen. Among our assignments was to write an editorial. I wrote one contrasting student riots over social issues in Hungary - maybe Romania, I can't recall - with the indifference of U.S. college students to poverty and politics. The teacher and I got along well. He had read Veblen and asked me to talk about Veblen to the class. But at the end of the term, when the editorial staff of the next term was announced, the class expressed surprise that I wasn't listed for any position. The teacher apologized: "Can you imagine the editorials Harry would write?"

I think the determining element in my radicalization was the demonstration of the unemployed in Union square in March 1930. The fact that I went there shows an inclination, an interest. The experience, however, was overwhelming. The square was mobbed, crowded with gaunt-faced people, dressed as you might expect people in poverty to dress. They listened quietly to the speeches, applauding and shouting from time to time. Then a speaker roused the crowd to a high pitch and urged that all march down to City Hall. As the crowd began to move, mounted police appeared. With billy clubs, they beat anyone within reach ruthlessly on heads, arms, shoulders. Blood splattered. I ran like hell.

Q: What were the circumstances of your expulsion from City College?

MAGDOFF: Well, in the early thirties, the change among students was startling and sudden, not a revolution but a transformation, a rapid growth of student political activity. That was where my politics grew. As I remember, those of us in the Social Problems Club at City College decided to put out a magazine called Frontiers, and I became editor. My first article was about the dangers of fascism, when the Nazis got their first big vote in the election. We sold it for a nickel. It got to be very popular on campus, and we sold large numbers. We just barely covered our costs. Not like Monthly Review! You know, we'd take it one place and they'd do something for us, and we'd carry the type someplace a little cheaper - that sort of thing. It was also the Depression years. People cut prices. I don't remember the details, all I know is that we didn't have the deficits that I've known later in my life!

Q: Ah, the carefree days of youth.

MAGDOFF: That's right. What happened was, you were supposed to get approval to have a publication, we didn't, and they suspended the club. We checked, and we found that the Democratic Party club had a paper, and they never got the formal approval of it. We complained, but that did nothing. So a group of us got together, I think at my house, and we wrote a leaflet telling what had happened and protesting it. I headed the leaflet, "Stop Whistling in the Dark." I used the idiomatic expression incorrectly, but it was appropriate for getting people's attention! We distributed it at the subway and at the school. That was a violation, and we were then suspended.