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Moe FonerMoe Foner
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Session:         Page of 592

Master:

What makes them interested in politics?

Foner:

I don't know.

Master:

And what makes you interested in politics is that they are interested in politics.

Foner:

I hear about it, I read about it, and then I'll become more interested in it, and I begin to meet people, who, like them, are interested in politics.

Master:

Tell me a little bit about, if you can remember, the first people you met who influenced you, who made you interested in politics.

Foner:

I don't remember, and I have to try to logically reconstruct it in the process and maybe make up things. It must be that I must have begun to hear my brothers talking to other people about socialists and other political things, and it may have been intriguing to me. It must have been that the magazine the Nation and the New Republic began to move into the house, and I must have begun to read it because I had heard them speak about it. That was what it was. That is a period -- what year are we talking about?

Q:

We're talking '33.

Foner:

1933. 1932.

Master:

You just started. So you said you weren't very political.

Foner:

But I write something in '32. Now, this is already -- it's got to be that in Boro Park, it's got to be that Frankie Herbst is there, and Frankie is involved in YCL in Boro Park.

Master:

Okay. Stop for a second. Frankie Herbst was the guy who lived in the same house from Williamsburg.

Foner:

He had moved to Boro Park early.

Master:

And he's the same age as you?

Foner:

A little younger.

Master:

Younger, but he's already into the YCL.

Foner:

I think he may have been already into the YCL because that's a period that I'm beginning now to recall -- no, that's the Lincoln, that's '36. That's Spain. It must be that it's percolated from my brothers because remember, I'm still playing basketball, so I hear it as a side kind of thing. It must be that I hear them talking to people and their friends, what they've read and what they've heard and what they've said. Now they're already past college.

Master:

They've graduated.

Foner:

So they went to City College.

Master:

City College.

Foner:

Uptown.





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