History's Revenge

Winston Churchill went to Manchester one day in 1906 to attend to some politicking. While there, Churchill was entertained by the local Liberal Party campaign chairman, a wealthy Jewish cotton merchant named Nathan Laski. No one seems to remember whether he met Laski's 13-year-old son, a bright-eyed, dark-haired lad named Harold Joseph.

Over the next four decades Winston Churchill got to know Harold Laski pretty well, and the better he knew him the more he disliked him--intellectually, anyway. By 1945, Harold Laski was chairman of the British Labor Party's executive committee and Winston Churchill was rumbling: "Honi soit qui Laski pense."

Brilliantly in Greek. Some people maintain that Manchester was the only place where Harold Laski could have been born. Manchester had nursed the industrial revolution and produced the "Manchester school" of laissez-faire liberals e.g., John Bright, Jeremy Bentham, Richard Cobden. State Planner Harold Laski, the argument went, was History's revenge on the city of Manchester.

Harold Laski attended Manchester Grammar School, performed brilliantly in Latin and Greek, then went up to Oxford to take a First Class Honors degree in modern history. From Oxford, Laski went as a lecturer to McGill University in Montreal, thence to Harvard, where he became fast friends with Felix Frankfurter and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, among others. At Harvard, Laski inveighed tirelessly against the state, just as his "Manchester-school" predecessors had before him. Sometimes he would say: "All governments are bloody. The anarchists are right."

He became a professor at the London School of Economics, where he fell gradually under the spell of Fabian Socialists. He joined the British Labor Party. Laski still professed his fear of the state and of any centralization of authority, but he came to believe that only a Socialist government could destroy capitalism and pave the way for a genuine free society, which was just about where Karl Marx had stood. When his espousal of Socialism brought him the title of "the Red Professor," Laski retorted: "The devil [i.e., Laski] is not as red as he is painted. His evil-minded Socialism is nothing more than the logical development of Jeffersonian democracy in the 20th Century."

Satanic Illusion. Meanwhile, Laski's fame as British Socialism's most suasive intellectual polemicist grew steadily. The militant gospel of class warfare that Laski preached during the 1945 campaign had put the fear of revolution in many a Briton's heart. The Nottinghamshire Newark Advertiser accused him of having advocated violence to impose Socialism on Britain. Laski sued the paper for libel, but the court was not convinced. Laski had to pay all the court costs of $52,000, including a thumping fee to the paper's lawyer, wealthy Sir Patrick Hastings.

That winter, Laski returned to the U.S., his favorite foreign stamping ground. He told a Manhattan audience: "Free enterprise and the market economy mean war; Socialism and planned economy mean peace. All attempts to find a compromise are a satanic illusion. We must plan our civilization or we must perish." Laski had a lot to do with persuading the British public that the U.S. economy was incorrigibly manic-depressive.

He went to Moscow in 1946, talked with Stalin, renewed his admiration for some Soviet political techniques. This did not mean that Laski was a Communist. He often spoke harshly of the Soviet Union and the British Communist Party.

During the last general election, Laski renewed his efforts for the Laborites. Two days before the election, Laski left his home, where he had been bedded with pneumonia, to speak in the constituency of North Hammersmith. He stood on the speaker's platform swaying, pale and weak. Since then he had been ill. One day last week his left lung collapsed and he was taken to the hospital. Next day, at 56, Harold Laski was dead. He once told a biographer: "I really don't think there is anything to say about me except that I am honest and anxious to see a decent world before I die." It is fairly certain that Harold Laski considered that wish unfulfilled by the world as it was when he died last week. Jeffersonian-Marxist Harold Laski, for all his brilliance, had never made it quite clear what he considered a decent world to be.

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