I played and sang those songs that evening with two or three kinds of embarrassment. First of all, it seemed merely socially a silly thing to be doing. Then there was the fact that we had been moved, we had not rolled the union on or stuck to it, we had not kept our hand upon the dollar and our eye upon the scale, none of us would, that night, dream of Joe Hill, standing there as big as life and smiling with his eyes. I was embarrassed about the ineffectuality and yes, ordinariness of the Guild people we’d come in contact with. I was embarrassed for Shawn and the rest of the magazine’s management, because they appeared to have not the faintest inkling that much of what they’d said and done to fight off the union was typical of any management fighting off any union — unremarkable, unmiraculous. Again, ordinary. The union would destroy what we had all worked so hard to achieve. The New Yorker is different. We are above the crudity and coerciveness of bargaining and strikes. We are so very generous. There are no “sides” to be on. You will really suffer if you get the union. And so on. And, finally, I was embarrassed that I had looked so condescendingly on the political and economic values and ideas of many members of my own family, however romantic and oversimplified those ideas and values might have been. For here were liberals like Shawn and Jonathan Schell turning to the right when the capitalist chips were down — just as I had been told, from my childhood on, liberals usually do, often with no embarrassment at all. Just as I was doing myself, at least passively, by backing down, by not keeping the courage of what I thought were my convictions.