Howard Zinn
As
the twentieth century came to an end last December, an extraordinary man, whose
life spanned the century, died at the age of ninety-seven. His name was Sender
Garlin.
I
first met Sender, ten years before his death, when he was only eighty-seven
years old. It was the fall of 1989, and I had traveled to Boulder to give a talk
at the University of Colorado. One of the chief organizers of my stay was a man
named Sender Garlin, a longtime radical journalist and pamphleteer. I did not
know him, and so I was not prepared for the excitement of my encounter with him.
We
met for lunch at the faculty dining room. I assumed this would take an hour, but
it lasted for two hours and could have gone on for six, so animated was the
conversation, so high the energy, so full of questions was I, so full of the
history of this century was Sender Garlin. He kept saying:
"It’s
my turn to question you. Equal time, you know." But I knew we were not
equals in what we had to say.
I
am a historian, and Sender, born in 1903, had lived through some of the most
exciting historical moments of our time. He had covered the Moscow purge trials
of the 1930s for three leftwing newspapers, the only Western correspondent to be
present at all those bizarre proceedings, in which Stalin methodically disposed
of his former fellow revolutionaries. In this country, he reported on a
different kind of lynching, the trial of the "Scottsboro Boys," nine
black youths falsely accused of rape in Alabama during the Depression years and
sentenced to death.
He
grew up in a working class environment in Vermont and upstate New York, his
father a baker who, according to Sender, was "an equal opportunity
employer," enlisting the services "of my mother and my three older
brothers." He studied with Scott Nearing and other blacklisted academics at
the Rand School of Social Science and spent several years in college and law
school. He had no degrees, but his education in the world was first class. He
found college libraries more enlightening than classroom exercises .
Reading
The Appeal to Reason and the writings of Upton Sinclair, Sender at thirteen or
fourteen considered himself a socialist. He said: "In later years, it was
Karl Marx who recreated me with his criticism of this cruel, unjust society. . .
. No one has refuted his fundamental critique."
Covering
the bitter labor struggles of the twenties and thirties (the textile strike in
Gastonia, North Carolina, the turbulent strikes in California as editor of the
Western Worker), he was deeply affected. Sender Garlin could never be the
detached professional journalist, above the battle, any more than John Reed
covering the Paterson mill strike of 1913, or Theodore Dreiser, writing about
the mine struggles in Kentucky.
As
a reporter, he interviewed such diverse figures as Clarence Darrow, Emma
Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Huey Long, Lenin’s widow Krupskaya, and Olga
Kniper-Chekhova, the Moscow theater star and widow of the great Russian writer.
Sender helped form the John Reed Club in the early 1930s and was a founding
editor of Partisan Review before he moved on to write for The Masses.
In
subsequent visits to Boulder, I got together with Sender whenever I could, and I
was reminded each time of his delicious sense of humor, his endless supply of
anecdotes. I recall him telling me of his time as reporter for the Bronx Home
News, which insisted on a "local angle" in every story, so when
Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic, its headline read: "Lindbergh flies
over the Bronx on the way to Paris."
But
Sender Garlin’s main thrust and satirical barbs were always against the system:
the exploitation, the racism, the militaristic nationalism that have plagued
this century, whether in the extreme form of Fascism or in more disguised form.
After
moving to Boulder in 1980 with his wife, the poet Martha Millet Garlin, he
immediately became involved with political activities in the area. He worked
energetically with CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El
Salvador) to protest the Reagan Administration’s policy of sending arms to the
death squads there. A colleague of his in CISPES, Gonzalo Santos, hearing of
Sender’s death, wrote: "I will miss Sender. He was the greatest role model
of an organizer of, and fighter for, the people that I have ever encountered. He
was a mentor and a good friend, a valuable and uplifting comrade in arms. May he
rest in peace for a while, and then shake and straighten things up where he is,
even if the Good Lordess Herself has to suffer the sting of his irreverent but
true views on heavenly inequities and pomposities. I only hope that as I grow
old, I’ll be able to emulate such a rich, full life of commitment, activism,
intellectual inquiry, joy of life, and loving mentorship to younger generations,
as my dear compañero, Sender Garlin, lived."
That
speaks for so many of us who knew this remarkable human being.
