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Moe FonerMoe Foner
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Session:         Page of 592

of times. Nowadays, the Nation is not exactly a mass circulation paper. Did it have a broader impact at that time?

Foner:

It wasn't the mass circulation paper then, either. However, it was read by intellectuals and left intellectuals. Later on, the New Masses appeared, although the New Masses had existed way, way back, but emerged as a more popular magazine during the Popular Front period where well-known people would write for it. Its position was obviously different from that of the Nation. The Nation was a true liberal publication, but it commented on all current national and international affairs, and one could get an enormous amount of information from a social point of view by reading those magazines. At the beginning, where we were interested in issues, you know, in the world and what was happening in the country, we found like open- your-mind articles by people who were prominent to us. They became more and more prominent, whether it was Norman Thomas or Fiorello LaGuardia or Bob LaFollette or people who were from the universities who wrote on all kinds of issues and you followed them there.

Q:

So the Nation attracted big-name contributors from the socialist and left communities.

Foner:

And liberal. The liberal community was an important community. It did not have votes in that sense, but it was an important grouping in the society. First of all, Jack said that their interests in Marxism came largely after they were graduated and when they started to teach, and they began to become acquainted with Marx and people who wrote from a Marxist point of view, and they became interested in it as teachers, and then their peers, as teachers, included people who were Marxists. I remember meeting them through my brothers, although there was always an influence of my brothers on me, even though our paths were very different, they were much more brilliant than I was, and there was a tendency for me to hide behind athletics, but nevertheless, I knew what they were thinking about and who they knew. And then when I got a job at the college -- I'm trying to put this into some kind of logical year perspective -- we moved from Williamsburg to Boro Park, I must have been sometime in my freshman or sophomore year. That means I must have been around seventeen years old.

Q:

And so it was about 1932.

Foner:

It was '33, because I entered college in '32, and I can remember going home to go Williamsburg during the first year. I think after that we moved to East Flatbush and then to Boro Park. This is





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