On Tue, 22 Dec 1998, James Farmelant wrote:
> There is a certain irony concerning Richard Rorty's ignorance
> of Marxism given his family background. Richard's father
> James Rorty was a journalist who was a close associate
> of Sidney Hook and he followed Hook in moving from the
> independent Marxism of the American Workers Party to
> later adopting Hook's anti-communism.
Again, from Rorty's *Achieving Our Country*
My parents were loyal fellow-travelers of the Communist Party up through 1932, the year after I was born...[They] broke with the party after realizing the extent to which it was run from Moscow, and so i did not get to read the Daily Worker when I was a boy. By 1935 the Worker was printing cartoons of my father as trained seal, catching fish thrown by William Randolph Hearst...As a teenager I believed every anti-Stalinist word that Sidney Hook and Lionel Trilling published in PArtisan Review--partly, perhaps, because I had been bounced on their knees as a baby. My mother used to tell me, with great pride, that when I was seven I had the honor of serving little sandwiches to the guests at a Halloween party that was attended both by John Dewey and Carlo Tresca, the Italian anarchist leader who was assassinated a few yeas later. That same party, I have since discovered, was attended not only by the Hooks and the Trillings, but by Whittaker Chambers. Chambers had just broken with the Communist Party and was desperately afraid of being liquidated by Stalin's hit men. (pp. 60-61)