Detroit is known the world over as the “Motor City”, Are you trying to change it? Where is your gratitude to your men, your city? We ask what will happen to the thousands who will be let out? What is going to happen to the thousands who are buying homes?

On September 11, 2001, the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center targeted a city that has long been a symbol of high finance, speculation, and investment—the capital of multinational capitalism. Yet among those killed in New York were hundreds of working-class men and women, people whose labor has long been essential to the functioning of Wall Street. The causalities included electricians, dishwashers, and janitors, as well as “pink collar” workers such as secretaries, typists, and file clerks. Joshua Freeman reminds us that these laborers played an important role in shaping the politics and society of modern New York as did the financiers, brokers, and lawyers so central to our image of the global metropolis. Freeman begins his book with a criticism of the “astonishing blindness” to working-class life in the “vast literature celebrating postwar New York” (xiv). Working-Class New York goes a long way toward the rewriting of the history of New York with workers at the center.

In march, 1994, the University of Pennsylvania held a conference to celebrate the opening of the Howard Fast papers at the university's library. To commemorate Fast's remarkable sixty-year career, a group of historians and literary critics gathered to reconsider the intellectual and cultural milieu of the United States in the early years of the Cold War. During the eventful years, from 1945 to 1960, Fast emerged as a leading Communist activist and a major literary figure who achieved great popular success. Fast, an unabashed member of the Communist Party, like many other oppositional writers of the era, clashed with the national security state. He faced harassment, blacklisting, and marginalization for his refusal to cooperate with federal authorities who were committed to silencing cultural and political voices from the Left. Like other stalwarts of the Communist Party, Fast was often doctrinaire. As a reporter for the Daily Worker and an occasional partisan polemicist, Fast was often stiflingly orthodox. But Fast's Communism was a distinctively American variant, mediated by New York's Jewish radicalism, deeply concerned with the American dilemma of racial inequality.

In the american popular imagination, the 1950s and 1960s stand in stark juxtaposition. The conformity of the 1950s contrasts with the rebelliousness of the 1960s. Consumerism was undermined by the challenge of youthful antimaterialism. Repressed sexuality gave way to sexual liberation. Political centrism yielded to polarization. A homogeneous mass culture fragmented into balkanized cultures. Consensus broke down into irrepressible conflict. For conservatives, the 1950s serve as a symbolic “golden age,” an era that atavistic (and terribly forgetful) Americans evoke when pondering current economic, cultural, and social problems. For those on the Left, the 1950s remain the “dark ages” of repression, corporate domination, and racial and sexual subordination.

Alan Wald: When we read your memoir that came out in 1990, Being Red, many of us had also read an earlier book called The Naked God in 1957 — and our impression of your experience was represented by The Naked God until we read Being Red. There seems to many of us to be a big difference between the two books and it is also noticed by some of us that in your long list of books in front of Being Red you don't mention The Naked God, and in Being Red you don't talk about The Naked God. So we are wondering whether or not Being Red is sort of a new version of the past that is appropriate for some reason. Is there something inadequate, perhaps, about the earlier version or some political need now to rethink and reform your ideas? What are the differences between the two books? Why did you write the second?

Howard Fast: The chief difference is thirty-five years — which is a big difference. When I wrote The Naked God, I was very angry. I was furious with what I considered a betrayal of people of good will by a large part of the leadership of the Communist Party. You see, I do not look upon the destruction of the Soviet Union and the careers of the men who led the Soviet Union as an attempt to establish a tyranny.