Plus: A Forgotten Massacre in Arkansas; Trump's Unjust Peace Plan for Ukraine
| Today in The New York Review of Books: Suzanne Schneider investigates the schism on the American right; Atul Dev revisits a forgotten American massacre; Linda Kinstler asks what Ukrainians think of the terms of Trump’s peace deal; and, from the archives, Russell Baker on Emma Goldman. Concern over antisemitism in their midst has split the conservative world in two—and GOP gatekeepers have lost the ability to contain it. More than a century after white mobs in Elaine, Arkansas, murdered hundreds of black sharecroppers in 1919, the massacre’s memory remains contested. Weary of war but unable to imagine its end as anything other than a kind of defeat, the Ukrainian public seems primed to reject the Trump administration’s unjust peace. Free from the ArchivesIn 1919, after years of efforts to quell union organizing and socialist rabble-rousing by deploying federal troops into American cities or endorsing the formation of nativist vigilante groups, the Woodrow Wilson administration hit upon the idea of rounding up and deporting leftists. Beginning that November Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer—with the assistance of an ambitious twenty-four-year-old Justice Department official named J. Edgar Hoover—organized a series of violent raids of anarchist, Communist, socialist, and immigrant groups, rounding up thousands of people, immigrants and American citizens alike. On December 21, 1919—106 years ago today—a group of 249 of these political dissidents, including the anarchist Emma Goldman and her lover Alexander Berkman, were crammed onto a thirty-year-old cargo ship and sent to the Soviet Union. In the Review’s October 13, 2011, issue, Russell Baker wrote about Goldman, Berkman, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and the clash between political radicals and “unrestrained and uninhibited American capitalism” at the turn of the century. “People fascinated by history’s human agents and victims may justifiably feel some sympathy for Emma Goldman. She was the one character in this melodrama who had the dreamer’s redeeming impulse to strive for the impossible, and she ended, as Gornick shows us, mortified and disillusioned, and with her dreams mocked when her longed-for revolution finally occurred.” “Our favorite restaurants, hands-down, were the closet-sized Polish cafés.… The flagship of the fleet was once Christine’s at 13th and First. Its specialty was French toast made with challah: great puffy rafts of egg-dipped bread swimming in syrup and a mind-boggling quantity of melted butter. Whenever my friends and I found ourselves unemployed, we ate this meal around 11 AM in the morning. You’d always run into someone you knew doing the same. The French toast was around $5, with bacon, breakfast sausage, or kielbasa.” “Steely Dan’s music provoked undeniable pleasure, but its methods were synthetic and clinical, and their decision to name themselves after the high-tech dildo from William S. Burroughs’s 1959 novel Naked Lunch felt especially apt.” Special Offer
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