When I was a student at the University of Wisconsin in the middle of the last century. I belonged for a time to an eating cooperative, the Green Lantern. In those days Wisconsin, beside being a fine academic institution, was known for a number of oddball things. Its Student Union sold beer (gasp), and it was the only university in the country that had an open chapter of the Labor Youth League, a Communist organization, on campus.
During my meals at the Green Lantern, with some regularity, a student (I think his name was Matthew) would get up and with glassy‑eyed zeal blast us diners with Communistic propaganda. “Who’s that?” I asked the student seated beside me the first time he started his rant. “He’s a member of the LYL,” she whispered.
Matthew’s sputterings over his doctrine struck me as loony. Before coming to Wisconsin, I had spent three years in Germany with the Air Force. I’d seen firsthand what communist USSR had done with the part of Germany it controlled after WWII. (I later had more personal experiences in East Germany and the USSR that were even more illuminating, first‑hand episodes showing me how dangerous and degrading that form of government is. I’ll get to those in later blogs.)
The word around Wisconsin’s campus in the 1950s suggested the LYL had only three members, but nevertheless it managed to make noise along University Avenue. Actually, the number was understated. I discovered recently it had “silent” members as well, some 20‑plus students who bought into the ideology but didn’t want to be identified. (This information, and much more, is available online from an extensive 2005 telephone interview with Henry Wortis, an open member of LYL who also took his nourishment at the Green Lantern.)
Wortis mentions he was a “red diaper baby,” a term referring to a child of parents who were Communist party members or sympathizers, and often Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. If you’re not familiar with the term, look online where you’ll find the names of prominent Red Diaper Babies. Not surprisingly, Bernie Sanders is one, but other names may surprise you. A number of well‑known politicians make the list, as do famous folk singers, along with other types.
To focus on Bernie Sanders for a moment, he was a leftist political activist while a student at the University of Chicago, and he continued along a trail of Communist/Socialist associations afterward. In 1988, while mayor of Burlington, VT, he took his new bride to Russia on a 10‑day trip and returned with praise of that totalitarian country while reporting the public transit system in Moscow was “the cleanest, most effective mass transit system that I’ve ever seen in my life.” He even raved about the transparency of Russian leaders.
I happened to visit another part of Russia about that same time, traveling to Leningrad with a bus load of Finnish tourists. Unlike what Bernie saw, I encountered a country even grimmer than I had expected. I saw streets filled with dirty, banged‑up buses and rather scanty numbers of mostly unimpressive automobiles. I saw poorly stocked stores, tourist hotels with grimy windows, a rampant black market for rubles, and one undeniable jewel, the Hermitage Museum. I also saw the detrimental effects of governmental control on personal lives. I’ll write about that trip soon.
