Muslims have madrasahs, and Christians have Jesus Camps and the youth ministry movement. Secular socialists used to have their own camps, but many of the camps went down with the 20th-century Socialist Camp.
<blockquote>Raising Reds: The Young Pioneers, Radical Summer Camps, and Communist Political Culture in the United States, by Paul C. Mishler. New York, Columbia University, 1999. 172 pages. $45.00, cloth. $17.50, paper.
Ever since Plato, utopian reformers have believed that given the child, they could produce a revolutionary cadre, and the interwar movements inspired a bumper crop of radicalized youth groups. Fascists celebrated their "Giovanezzi," "Hitler Jugend," or various Falangist copycats; the Soviets organized an elite "Comsomol;" even Socialists had their "Red Falcons." Not surprisingly, American Communists created the "Young Pioneers" (1926) and "International Workers Order Juniors" (1930). But, as Paul Mishler demonstrates, these were Communist youth with a difference; American Communists developed pluralistic aspirations and party auxiliaries, so that "Red Diaper Babies" reflected American reformism as much as Communist educational theory. Incisively and concisely, the author argues that in the United States the "Popular Front" mentality was in place even before Moscow authorized left-of-center collaboration to combat fascism. Ironically, due to their very recent arrival in America, indigenous Communists worked within the American milieu, and thus stood Red pedagogical theory on its head. Because communists were contributors and participants in New Deal era popular culture, communist youth were entertained as well as edified: a folksy time was had by all.
During the 1920s American Communists' ideas about a youthful revolutionary cadre were shaped by orthodoxy inspired by the writings of Frederick Engels, August Bebel, John Spargo, and Grace Hutchins: cultivate childhood autonomy, separate children from parental authority, stress a generation gap, and incite youthful rejection of their elders' values. Their organizations should be a "Soviet of Children," bellwethers of Marxist critique and oppositionalism. Therefore, during the 1920s, children were asked to create their own cadre within public schools, to campaign for lunch programs, to oppose teachers' discipline, and to "correct" history curricula. The Communist Children's Movement also mobilized against "paramilitary" Boy and Girl Scouts as "capitalist tools." But by the 1930s, American Communist youth education had been reconceptualized, and the impulse was indigenous, predating Muscovite imperatives; during the "Popular Front," American Communist youth were bellwethers of Marxist enthicism [sic] and (to borrow a current shibboleth) family values. Catalyzed by their own experiences as well as the Depression and New Deal, leftist immigrants synthesized radicalism and second-generation culture, and aspired to a socialist democracy at once Marxist and Jeffersonian, pluralist, and integrationist. How they raised their children is the core of Mishler's pathbreaking study.
Raising Reds is about afterschool programs and racially integrated summer camps, recreational activities borrowed from mainstream society, and civil libertarianism to distinguish cosmopolitan assimilationism from bourgeois nationalism (the "isms" are clearly explicated). Softball leagues, marching bands, even merit badges aped the Scouts. The range of activities revealed a diversity within American communism that belied outsiders' fears of a Red monolith: Communist-produced primers and readers celebrated both immigrant and native-born workingclass heroes (Mishler is the first to do a content and time-context analysis), afterschool programs and summer camps chose either to stress ethnicity (especially among Jews and Finns), interracial solidarity, or American folk culture and music as protest vehicles (Mishler provides an example in microcosm of each type). Above all, the various activities and auxiliaries taught respect for their parents' culture and past as well as contemporary struggles for economic, social, and racial justice. In Raising Reds, Mishler lucidly and convincingly elucidates the distinctive features of American Communist pedagogy, and the book would be an excellent monograph for college courses on education history and theory, as well as useful on American social history reading lists.
Fairleigh Dickinson University Kalman Goldstein <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ht/34.1/br_11.html></blockquote>
<blockquote>Raising Reds: The Young Pioneers, Radical Summer Camps, and Communist Political Culture in the United States. By Paul C. Mishler. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. xii, 172 pp. Cloth, $45.00, isbn 0-231-11044-8. Paper, $17.50, isbn 0-231-11045-6.)
Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left. Ed. by Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. xii, 320 pp. Cloth, $49.95, isbn 0-252-02161-4. Paper, $19.95, isbn 0-252-06725-8.)
Read together, these two books provide a useful combination of theory, history, and memoir about growing up in the Communist movement. The authors are engaged children of the Left with explicit political agendas. The purpose of Paul C. Mishler's study is to "remember the dream," while Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro seek to help the red diaper community "name, know and strengthen itself." Both books are concerned with the cultural transmission of the ideas and values of the Old Left.
Raising Reds provides insight into the aims of formal children's organizations such as the Young Pioneers of America (the revolutionary alternative to the Boy Scouts) and the junior section of the International Workers Order, groups whose successes and failures were similar to those of adult organizations. It also contains a provocative discussion of left-wing debates about education and ethnic and religious training and sections on summer camps and children's literature. Mishler explains how the Communists changed their view of the family as a conservative institution to one that could be useful in socializing children, but family life as such is not his focus.
Where Mishler gives us a solid, if brief, treatment of adult intentions, Kaplan and Shapiro focus on the lived experiences of children in Communist families. Where Mishler points out the contradictions between American culture and the culture of the Communist movement, Kaplan and Shapiro elaborate on how difficult and often painful it was to try to negotiate these contradictions. Indeed, the one theme most common in these memoirs is the feeling children of Communists had that they were different from other children. Several writers comment on the fact that they lived two lives, one with their friends from school, the other in the Communist movement. One did not have to be named Mels (Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin) or Proletaria to know one was different. A simple apology from a friend could be problematic: "Robin assures me that she knew my father couldn't be a communist all along. 'He's so nice,' she explains." The writer's response: "I am ashamed and proud to be different. I am confused." <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/87.2/br_104.html></blockquote>
Should 21st-century socialists set up youth camps of our own, in addition to Social Forums? -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>