WASN'T THAT A TIME?

Schrank’s autobiography would be a yawner—yet another memoir of a radical who decided to get comfortable—if he weren’t a good storyteller and if he didn’t write from the point of view of a union member and organizer. Schrank, now a management consultant, joined the Young Communist League in 1934 as a teenage high school dropout, but with a solid grounding in radical ideas from his anarchist father. As a member of the working class in a party filled with intellectuals, and with his natural talents for organizing and public speaking, Schrank was a prized recruit. His value to the party increased when he became president of his machinists— union local in New York City, then organized a statewide council of machinists’ locals, of which he also became president. But then the machinists were swept up in Cold War anticommunist fervor; Schrank was expelled from the union in 1950, despite landmark victories in a series of court battles, and his disillusionment with the Communist Party, from which he resigned in 1948, grew. He went back to factory work for a few years, won a hard-fought victory organizing copper miners in Montana for the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers’ union, then went over to the other side, eventually becoming a corporate executive. When the book ends in 1965, Schrank, at 48, has just graduated from college and left his long-suffering wife, and he thanks his therapist for keeping him from suicide. Schrank says this book is a product of his therapy, and the worst parts—his preoccupation with sex, his psychological ruminations about his parents—read that way. His descriptions of how both the Communist Party and the American worker let him down smack of the bitterness of a disappointed lover. But there are also wonderfully told stories here that are a textbook on how to organize everything from a street-corner rally to a union.