Sing ‘Misty’ for All of Us: <br>Whatever We May Yet Do, <br>Hold Fast Artistic Dreams

The following is adapted from the prepared text of remarks delivered April 22 at the annual dinner of the Signet Society at Harvard University by Seth Lipsky, editor of The New York Sun and founding editor of the Forward.* * *At the Signet’s musical reception last evening, I enjoyed Julia Beidry’s fabulous rendition of “Misty.” I kept thinking of Colonel Bud Day, whose obituary I wrote several years ago. Day was a United States Air Force officer who was shot down over North Vietnam and became the only prisoner ever to escape. Though Day had a broken arm and was barefoot and had been tortured, he made it across the Demilitarized Zone back to Free Vietnam — only to be, after wandering for two harrowing weeks, recaptured and dragged back to the communist North.One day he was leading a group of fellow POW’s in forbidden prayer, when guards burst in. One of them jammed the barrel of his rifle against Day’s forehead. There was a horrifying moment as everyone waited for the guard to pull the trigger. What did Day do? He started singing “The Star Spangled Banner.” Suddenly, all of the prisoners started singing our anthem. The guards backed down. America would eventually give Day, who survived the war, the Medal of Honor.The reason I kept thinking of Colonel Day is that his trademark was the song “Misty.” He made it the call sign of the detachment of F-100s he commanded above Vietnam. His pilots were known as “Misties.” His own call sign — and the headline over his obituary — was “Misty 01.” Which I’ll get back to in a moment.* * *It’s an honor for me to be here with all of you and in the company of our poet, Jonathan Galassi, a towering figure in the literary scene in New York and beyond, and our honoree, Whit Stillman, whom I first met years ago when he was associate publisher of the American Spectator. He negotiated the sale of rights for me to use as the logo of my column in the Wall Street Journal/Europe an Elliott Banfield drawing of a reporter accosting the Statue of Liberty. Let me just say, Whit was one tough negotiator (he got the deal up to something like one hundred dollars). And “Metropolitan” is a masterpiece.I’m also grateful to be here, because, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s not often that an editor with my views gets invited to any campus. I like to think that the balm of arts and culture, in which The New York Sun is invested, soothes the eczema of politics, as it did at the Signet lunches when I was an undergraduate member and a happy regular here. I’d like carry on tradition by leaving with you a copy of my biography of the first editor of the Forward, “The Rise of Abraham Cahan,” along with a second rose, the first having been sent years ago with my book of humor columns.Cahan lived one of the 20th century’s (and America’s) emblematic newspaper lives. He built the bridge over which millions of Yiddish-speaking immigrants crossed to become Americans. And he launched the plot that brought down the Soviet Union. People laugh at me when I say that, but it’s not a joke. As a young student in Russia, Cahan had become involved with the revolutionary underground. After the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, Cahan fled Russia, one step ahead of the tsarist police.In New York in 1897, Cahan founded the Jewish Daily Forward. It was a socialist and secular newspaper for Yiddish-speaking immigrants. By the 1920s, the Forward was one of the world’s most powerful publications, though with hardly a word of English. In 1927, Cahan made a trip back to what was, by then, the Soviet Union. There he stumbled onto one of the century’s greatest scoops. It happened when he met up with his old comrades in the anti-tsarist underground and discovered they were behaving strangely.Finally, one of them, a heroic woman called Vera Figner, whispered to him that life under the Soviet regime had become worse than anything under the Romanovs.Cahan called it one of the most moving moments of his life, and — to make a long story short — returned to America to launch, via the Forward, the plot against the Soviet Union. That included helping to finance the early operations of Jay Lovestone, who had been head of the American communist party until he was forced out by Stalin and in the late 1920s vowed to bring down the Soviet Union. The Forward gave him a cubicle in the Garment Workers Union, where Lovestone spent the rest of his career, organizing a network of non-communist labor unions in Europe, Asia and Africa.After World War II, Lovestone sent to Europe a young organizer called Irving Brown. Ostensibly, Brown was international vice president of the American Federation of Labor. In effect, though, he was the commanding general for our side in the twilight struggle with the Soviets over who was going to control labor in liberated Europe. The communists operated through the World Federation of Trade Unions, headquartered at Prague. Brown and Lovestone set up in Brussels the International Confederation of Free — meaning non-communist — Trade Unions.The ICFTU had agents all over the world and an office tower in Brussels. The American president who most clearly grasped what they were doing was Ronald Reagan. In Hollywood, Reagan had himself fought the communists in the Screen Actors Guild. It was no coincidence that in the late 1980s, when Irving Brown lay dying in Paris, Reagan awarded him the Medal of Freedom. That was not long after the ICFTU won the affiliation of a little known trade union at Gdansk, Poland, called Solidarity, which would eventually rise up and crack Soviet rule in the Communist Bloc.So, while I wouldn’t want to make too much of it, I wouldn’t want to make too little. The fact is that one can draw a straight line from the newsroom of the Forward to the fall of the Soviet empire.* * *During the 1980s, America’s major anti-communist labor federation, the AFL-CIO, was being led by Lane Kirkland, a heroic figure with whom I became acquainted when he visited Brussels,where my wife and I were posted for the Wall Street Journal. When the democratic revolution swept the free trade union Solidarity to power in Poland, my wife was in Warsaw, covering it for the Wall Street Journal, while I was back in New York, working to set up a new company to bring out in English the Forward newspaper that, three generations earlier, had launched the Free Trade Union movement in in the first place.Kirkland occasionally stopped by the Forward, where I gained his perspective on the unsung nature of the role of Free Labor in the struggle against communism. I’d said to him: “Lane, people say that the Soviet Union was brought down by a plot among Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and you.” Kirkland looked at me and, in his crusty way, said: “They had nuttin’ to do with it.”The movement that Cahan helped set in motion not only helped bring down the Soviet Union, but also precipitated all sorts of reforms in America, including things like Social Security and Medicare. Some were successful, others not so much. Cahan created, in his responses to letters from perplexed immigrants, a template for becoming American — learning our customs, adopting them, and mastering the American language and the rules of baseball. His template couldn’t be more relevant for our country today, in the midst, as we are, of a political debate over immigration.* * *Yet here is the amazing thing about Cahan’s newspaper life — and where we get to the relevance of the story to a society that, like the Signet, is dedicated to literature and the arts. Cahan actively edited the Forward for more than 50 years. Yet it turns out that the politics and policy debates meant relatively — relatively — little to him. To him, the feuding politicians seemed like children — sometimes fools. What he really cared about, deep down, was literature. Russian literature was his passion, as was his own literature, which he wrote in Yiddish and then in English.And when all the other reputations of his time are lost in the dusts of history, Cahan will be remembered because he wrote one great novel, “The Rise of David Levinsky.” He began it 1914, a time of labor strife at home and war and revolution abroad, and brought it out in full form in 1917. It’s about a young yeshiva boy who arrives in America with, as had been the case with Cahan himself, only a few cents in his pocket. As Levinsky sets about making his way in the garment trade, he abandons his religion and becomes a tycoon — but is lonely and unfulfilled.So realistic is the evocation of Levinsky that it’s possible to speculate that as Cahan was writing it, he was suffering from the so-called “third man syndrome,” which a person under extreme stress imagines another person is with him. There is the case of the explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, who thought someone was with him who wasn’t, and a separate instance of a mountaineer called Frank Smythe. He described how, on an ascent of Everest, he pulled out a piece of “Kendal mint cake” and divided it in half only to discover, when he turned to share it with his companion, that “there was no one there.”No less a critic than H.L. Mencken rhapsodized about Cahan’s novel, writing that no “more vivid presentation of the immigrant’s hopes and disappointments, thoughts and feelings, virtues and vices has ever been got upon paper.” He doubted any ever would be. Hardly anyone remembers the thundering editorials in the Forward or its role in the defeat of the Soviet tyranny, but “The Rise of David Levinsky” is still kept in print, by several publishers, and is being taught in American literature courses the world over, including here at Harvard.* * *There is a word for what literature was in the life of Abraham Cahan. It is drawn from Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. He was one of the 19th century masters of neoclassical painting. Yet painting wasn’t his passion. What Ingres really yearned to be, in fact, was a violinist. And the French have a word for the activity that a master of an art or a trade would rather be doing. It’s known as a violon d’Ingres. Or Ingre’s violin. So if you were, say, a statesman who loved poetry, poetry would be your violon d’Ingres. And Cahan’s violon d’Ingres was literature.It strikes me as the salient point for all of us who are invested in the Signet and dreaming of being novelists, painters, cellists, composers, playwrights, poets, or singers of songs. To make a living some of you may go into law or banking or business or government. But you’re here at the Signet because you have a violon d’Ingres. How I hope you hang onto it and cherish your “violon.” It may yet prove to be the love of your life. Don’t forget, after all, that even one of our greatest military heroes was chasing a song, and it’s no small thing to imagine that as Bud Day fell from the sky over Vietnam to what he must have thought was doom, his last word was probably “Misty-01.”

Sing ‘Misty’ for All of Us: <br>Whatever We May Yet Do, <br>Hold Fast Artistic Dreams

Sing ‘Misty’ for All of Us: <br>Whatever We May Yet Do, <br>Hold Fast Artistic Dreams

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