Books: Ironical Chronicle

JUST AROUND THE CORNER: A HIGHLY SELECTIVE HISTORY OF THE THIRTIES by Robert Bendiner. 268 pages. Harper & Row. $6.95.

The central character is Frankenstein Roosevelt, a power-mad, aristocratic cripple whose props are a wheelchair, a cigarette holder and a pile of postage stamps. Among the characters are his five children, members of a dynasty who will some day run the country (or so everybody assumes), and an adviser named Popkins, who is usually dressed in a bathrobe and is really a Russian in disguise. The plot revolves around Frankenstein's attempts to sell the country out piecemeal to the Communists. The play ends happily when That Man dies of what looks like a stroke (actually, the deed is done by a haberdasher named Falseman who wants to be President).

That is roughly how a Barbara Garson of the 1930s might have written the Macbird! of that era. As Robert Bendiner's book suggests, the virulent abuse poured on the Roosevelts by a small but vocal portion of the public matches the feelings of today's left toward Lyndon Johnson.

Shiny New Apple. Like a good glass of 3.2 beer, popular chronicles of the '30s tend to repeat themselves, and this "highly selective history," combined with personal reminiscences, is no exception. Still, Author Bendiner (White House Fever, Obstacle Course on Capitol Hill) offers a book as tempting as a shiny new apple, because his account is not oversentimental.

"My father, a man who was clearly ahead of his time, went bankrupt in 1922," writes Bendiner, explaining why there was little about the Depression to depress him. After all, he adds, it was also a time when FORTUNE was saying that the Depression had "solved the eternal domestic-service problem in America." Maids could be hired for as low as $4 a month plus room and board. "Suburban citizens still solid enough to have gardens that needed care could have them tended for $1 a week." Not that Bendiner's family had any of those luxuries. Their only fun was buying on the installment plan. The day the Bendiners received a dispossess notice from their Manhattan landlord was also the day they received a regulation-size pool table ordered for the apartment on credit.

Clenched Fists. In his 20s during the '30s, Bendiner managed to find work as a switchboard operator—errand boy-editorial assistant-reporter-managing editor for a variety of magazines, including New Masses and Nation. His account of life with the Old Left shows how wise the Communists were in denouncing him as an enemy of the people.

There were the political cocktail parties where dedicated antiFascists helped crush Mussolini by ordering martinis without olives, the disenchantment of the Daily Worker reporter who rushed into his office one day yelling, "Hold everything. It's begun. The masses are storming the Amalgamated Bank." Bendiner also describes the struggle to undermine the American way of life by slipping working-class propaganda into WPA art projects. "Swarthmore College felt obliged to close up a room in which no fewer than six clenched fists were detected in a WPA mural," Bendiner recalls. "After a mild uproar the room was reopened with three of the fists removed—a fair compromise for the time."