The Travails of a Fellow Traveler
[an essay of about 7000 words for the Princeton University Library Chronicle].

My book in press (The Anti-Communist Manifestos, Norton, August 2009) had its origins in my accidental discovery that the papers of “Jan Valtin” [Richard Krebs] were housed among the Special Collections of the fabulous Firestone Library in Princeton. I was among the first to examine the Valtin papers, only recently arrived.  About the time I was studying them, Gretchen Oberfranc, the editor of the Princeton University Library Chronicle, had the idea of devoting a special issue of her journal to a series of short pieces on some of the library’s minor holdings—the sort of special collections that might attract an enterprising senior in search of an original topic for a senior thesis, for example. Jan Valtin is not exactly a household name—not until the publication of The Anti-Communist Manifestos, that is—and Gretchen invited to contribute a little essay [“The ‘Truth’ About Jan Valtin,” PULC, 67 (2005-2006): 68-80].

Work among the Valtin papers led me also to some of the materials housed in the Seeley Mudd Library—what I had always thought of as the “University Archives,” the last resting place of senior theses and old Princeton yearbooks.  Those valuable artifacts are indeed stored, but so are the papers of numerous eminences, including some important friends of Jan Valtin.  Among them is Louis Fischer (1896-1970), one of the great political journalists of the twentieth century. Fischer was born in Philadelphia to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. He had spent many years living with his family in Moscow where, like numerous American and European radicals of his generation, he had once intended to take up permanent residence. Only slowly did he become disenchanted with the Paradise of the Workers.  His extraordinary career would be worthy of a large biography—though it would have to compete with his own large autobiography of 1941, Men and Politics. He ended his days as a sometime member of the Institute for Advanced Study and a sometime lecturer in the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. He lived in the Stanworth Apartments. I knew him very slightly, but of course I never dreamed that I would one day be reading his private and public papers trying to figure out the precise moment, if there was one, at which he ceased being an apologist for Stalin to become one of the giants among American liberals.  That has come about because of Ms. Oberfranc’s latest idea: a special number of the PULC devoted to the archival riches of the Seeley Mudd library.

There are only two headshots of Fischer easily available in “Google Images.” One makes him looke pretty sinister, the other manic. I have opted for the manic, which is also the one preferred by Helene van Rossum, the expert scholar-librarian who organized his copious papers in the Seeley Mudd Library at Princeton. You’ll have to take my word for it that that big thing is his lip, not his tongue.  He may have salivated a bit over a hot story, but he was not an epilectic.

Fischer’s literary production was stupendous—upwards of a hundred books and pamphlets, and what must be literally thousands of essays and articles. So far as I have been able to discern from a study of the archive, he spent most of his time somewhat unequally distributed between two postures: seated with a typewriter [shown above] and horizontal with a female other than his wife [not shown above].

Back to Recent Writing