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“Was the life good? Was it bad? How should I know? It was life, the only life I ever knew, and it was alive. Intense, absorbing, filled with a kind of comradeship I never again expect to know. In those basement clubrooms in The Coops, talking late into the night, every night for years, we liter…

[...] she looks hard at me, and she says: “You don’t understand. We had no choice. It’s not like today, where the kids think they have the choice to be political or not be political, or be any other damn thing they want to be. We had no choice. We did not choose, we were chosen. Life came in on us,…

He went to work in a steel mill. And, of course, within minutes he became a union organizer in the mill. And, of course, within minutes after that, he joined the Communist Party. “You see, there was no way out,” Preisen laughs now. “In those days, no matter which way you turned, the best, the most …

“A lot of it was just sheer grinding shitwork. You think making a revolution is all agony and ecstasy? It’s not, it’s mostly drudgery. Hard, disciplined, repetitive work that’s boring and necessary. But what keeps you going is that twenty times a week something would happen—out there in that lousy …

Saltzman looks at his watch. “I’ve got to go,” he says. “You know, my union is striking. I’ve got to go relieve someone on the picket line.”

He shakes his head in wonder. “It’s not for myself that I picket anymore. I make good money now, I’m a privileged old man in the shop. It’s for them. It’s …