MalcolmMy brother Malcolm died December 23rd, near the end of 2004, a bad year. The only thing he was spared was news of the tsunami calamity. The high hopes for the future that inspired much of his life were damped down by anger and foreboding over the way this new century has begun.
Malcolm was four years older than I. He was part of my life longer than anyone else. We shared an unbroken connection of ideals, ideas, and brotherly love until his death. His influence in my years of childhood and youth was enormous. I grew up wanting to follow in his footsteps, and did so as best I could through high school and college. In elementary school, four grades apart, we were both suspended from school (believe it or not) for observing May Day 1930 in defiance of President Hoover’s proclaimed ban on the workers’ holiday. To this day I remember my alarm, and my Mother’s, when Malcolm disappeared for hours after hearing that our father had been badly beaten in jail by cops after a large and peaceful demonstration for unemployment insurance in our home town of Stamford, Connecticut. Malcolm wanted to be by himself to absorb what had happened, something neither of us ever forgot.
When Malcolm graduated from Hillhouse High School in New Haven, Connecticut, I followed for the next four years, taking pretty much the same courses, including German, unfortunately with the same pro-Nazi teacher. Our very best years together (there were many good ones to follow) were when we overlapped for a couple of years at CCNY. Malcolm got there first, but the only way he could support himself was by working a full time job in a print shop for two to three years. So he was still a junior when he made it possible for me to enter City as a freshman. He was enamored of City College; in those years, it was free and open to the poorest and brightest youth of a generation coming out of the Great Depression. It was a hotbed of intellectual activity, of early anti-fascist protest, of rebellion and idealism.
Coming to CCNY became my dream as well. When I got to City, Malcolm was a leader of the Marxist student movement with lots of friends not only in the famous alcoves, but also in the adjacent Harlem community where he lived and was involved. Among his very best friends were Lou Burnham and Howard “Stretch” Johnson, who were to become major figures in struggles for racial equality and justice. For four years, I was part of the household that Malcolm shared with Ida and her parents on 124th St. and St.Nicholas Avenue. In that home, as well as in classes and alcoves at City, our love of music and literature came alive, as we grew into a lifetime of commitment to the dream of a world free of oppression and capitalist greed. Our parents had given us our sense of direction in political outlook and appreciation of culture. But fruition came during those years together in New York. Malcolm and I ran for office together and won as representatives in CCNY’s Student Legislative Congress. We listened together enraptured as our friend, Clint Oliver, played Cesar Frank’s Symphonic Variations on Ida and Malcolm’s piano. We mourned together the death of Wilfred Mendelson and other comrades who fell fighting the fascists in Spain. We wrote and distributed leaflets together, and were frowned on together by the Dean’s office. The Dean told Malcolm that he should expect a hard time when it came to applying for any job post graduation. That hint of “black list” was only a foretaste of what Malcolm was soon to confront in the Army during World War II and, later, in academia.Since this is a remembrance, not a chronicle of Malcolm’s long life, I’ll move on to other highlights of experiences we shared. There was a strange one in 1984 that shed retrospective light on why Malcolm’s career is science was largely outside a university faculty setting. We were in Nicaragua together at a conference of health workers. We were chatting with another US delegate, who got around to a story about his difficult relationship with his father. His father admitted to him that, as head of a university department of biochemistry, he had been pressured during the time of Joe McCarthy into denying tenure to an outstanding young faculty member. That rang a bell, and sure enough it turned out that the university in question was Wisconsin and Malcolm was the assistant professor of Biochemistry. He was punished because he was one of the founders of the Joe Must Go movement that swept McCarthy’s home state and contributed to his eventual downfall.
Malcolm went on to a creative research career, heading up laboratories and institutes in brain biochemistry, always his main fascination. This was often coupled with adjunct academic appointments, but he could have contributed so much more as a teacher. I benefited from Malcolm’s love of teaching. He always pushed the boundaries of curiosity, of wanting to dig deeply. He was excited, enthusiastic about ideas. He loved to explore problems and puzzles, ranging from mathematics to the origin of life.
Of course what we both were always most passionate about was the enduring struggle for social justice, the conviction that a better world is possible. An aspect of this was mutual support when the going got rough during McCarthyism and similar periods of aggressive reaction. As a national officer of the Labor Youth League in the early 1950s, I was hauled before the House Un-American Committee and was subject to an inquisition under the McCarran Internal Security Act. When I had to leave home for months at a time, Malcolm and Mildred, living in Wisconsin with their first two children, Marc and Jon, took Roz and our children, Carla and David, into their home. And about a dozen years later, Malcolm and Mildred and their children (now including Sara) took my organizer father, who was dying of cancer, into their home in Hartford, Connecticut. They took care of our Mother as well, while I was geographically out of reach in my first year at Berkeley.
One of our best together times, Malcolm’s and mine, was when he came to spend several months as a Visiting Professor in my department of Microbiology and Immunology. Berkeley had been even more exciting in the 60s than CCNY in the 30s. Even though the 60s were over, Malcolm loved Berkeley, the science and the politics, and everyone warmed up to and appreciated him. I didn’t mention earlier that my own scientific career, which began when I was unemployed and 37 years old, could not have happened if I hadn’t let my older brother talk me into a chemistry major when I was in my third year at CCNY. That major lay fallow, unused during 14 years of organizing activity, but it was the crutch that got me in the door of graduate school when the future looked bleak.
Malcolm’s life can’t be tied together in a simple package. Much of it was hard. He was too unusual and intelligent not to be a complicated personality. I don’t think anyone who knew him could fail to see and admire his qualities. Wherever he went there were young people surrounding him and eagerly learning from him. Often, though, he liked to shock. He was no fan of “political correctness”, of adjusting his strongly held opinions to the sensibilities of others. He was intolerant of “sacred cows”, especially of religion or nationalism. In turn, he was often quite sensitive and hurt if someone he respected challenged his statements.
Malcolm’s happiest years, I believe, were with Grace, his third wife, in New Mexico and when they returned to New York. After they retired, and until her death, he was more relaxed with life than anytime I can remember. He got particular joy from George, their big golden retriever. After that, anger at “old age” and his untreatable deafness was irrepressible. Marc and Susan, Jon and Marta did the very best for him as his health deteriorated.
Still, in the months before his death, his many e-mails to me were engaged fully with world and national events. I mentioned at the outset his foreboding about where we’re heading. Needless to say, he was hoping, as we all were, that Bush would go down in November. But he kept hope alive. For the last couple of years, he felt hope rested with a rising movement against capitalist globalization. He sent me outlines and texts of his talks in The Nation group discussions. In his last e-mail to me on November 21st, he included part of a letter sent to Jon and Marta that he said “expresses both my pessimism and the hope for a better future”. He wrote of the need for the progressive movement to grow into a new version of “international workers of the world” and “to reestablish the power to change the world.” “Only the people of this country can promote such a change. A golden opportunity has been lost. Let us hope that the next one will not lie too far in the future. Capitalism can destroy the world…. It is a race between the end of the biosphere and the end of a rapacious system.”
As Malcolm passes from our lives, I see an image from one of his favorite books (that of course became my favorite too). At the end of Emil Zola’s “Germinal”, a heroic miner’s strike has been brutally crushed. Ètienne, the organizer, is leaving town. He overcomes despair as he walks on the ground above the mine and sees “the April sun now well up in the sky, shedding its glorious warming rays on the teeming earth”. Below, “ever more insistently, his comrades were tapping, tapping as though they too were rising through the ground. On this youthful morning, in the fiery rays of the sun, the whole country was alive with this sound…. a black avenging host was slowly germinating in the furrows, thrusting upwards for the harvests of future ages. And very soon their germination would crack the earth asunder.”