Free Radicals’ Lives and Times

Michael Friedman

Radioactive Radicals:
A Novel of Labor and the Left
By Dan La Botz
Booklocker.com, 2024, 738 pages. $29.99 paper.

RADIOACTIVE RADICALS BY Dan La Botz presents a sprawling, sometimes chaotic, panoramic overview of the author’s experiences and lessons learned in the left political movement that was birthed in the 1960s.

The novel is written as a roman a clef, i.e. based on the real people the author knew, worked with and engaged with politically, but with their stories told through characters whose fictional presentations both mirror and differ from the individuals on which they are based.

For those who actively participated in the various left political movements birthed in the 1960s and thereafter, especially those whose work focused on labor organizing, Radioactive Radicals presents an absorbing and challenging read.

In one of the chapters titled “First Interlude and Reflections,” the author explains why he chose this particular mode of presentation:

“For the true is, as Hegel says, the whole. I want to grasp for myself what happened and share with you the pattern into which everything fits. That’s why I am writing a novel, because, though truth may be stranger than fiction, fiction always has more veracity than mere facts. The truth, I believe, is in the story.”

Yet a few pages later, the author presents a somewhat different stance towards his approach to storytelling and his storytelling methodology:

“Perhaps it’s because of my childhood experience, raised as a pacifist, beaten by my classmates on the South Side of Chicago, experience that made me an outsider, an observer, turned me into a precocious anthropologist … made me ever after always attentive to the details of others’ lives, always taking notes of those around me … the perpetual anthropologist doing the ethnographies of my family, my tribe, and later of my generation, so that I found myself engaged in what has become an extended lifetime field of study of the species and particularly of that subset marked by the bomb’s radiocaesium with its luminescent aura.”

I will shortly explain the perhaps confusing reference to the “subset marked by the bomb’s radiocaesium with its luminescent aura” in this quote, but at the moment I will simply point out the two roles the author describes himself as playing — the novelist and the anthropologist. These are not necessarily in conflict, but they do function in quite distinct ways throughout.

The author purports on one hand to be a storyteller, recounting the experiences, actions and viewpoints of the fictional characters he has created; on the other he seems to be studying them simply as players in the historical drama he is presenting. In the latter role, La Botz provides contextual interludes and historical backgrounds to events he is seeking to portray as a novelist.

For example, when the main character Dirks Leeuwenhoek is introduced, there is an extensive presentation of his family’s three-generational history in Chicago, which becomes a detailed telling of the history of Chicago itself.

When Dirks gets a truck driving job in Chicago, he proceeds to tell the history of the Chicago Teamsters union; when Dirks begins working with the United Farm Workers Union, he provides extensive discussions of Caesar Chavez’s role in the organization’s founding and its successes and failures.

When Dirks moves to Detroit, we are regaled with an extended story of Henry Ford and the city of Highland Park; and when Ron Carey runs for and becomes president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), Dirks provides a very extensive and absorbing description of Carey’s background and his rise to, and fall from, power.

Here is the anthropologist at work, and in truth, I often found these anthropological/historical background offerings among the best parts of the book. La Botz ended his very varied and extensive working career as a college professor, and this book shows him to be highly talented in that role.

There is a lot to be learned from this book about a very wide range of political events in which his main character either observed or was directly involved — both the contexts in which these events occurred and the historical backgrounds that led to them. These background excursions make a valuable contribution.

Problematic Metaphor

La Botz, however, is a far better anthropologist/historian than novelist. The novel is driven by Dirks’ meeting and working with the other main protagonist, Wes Kinsman.

The book starts in a somewhat dramatic fashion by noting that Wes and Dirks were born on “almost” the same day — “on both ends of the long atomic day that began August 6 and ended on August 9, 1945; he born on the sixth, when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and I born on the ninth, the day the second bomb fell on Nagasaki.”

With this dramatic opening, one hopes that the novel will make some significant, if not dramatic, use of this surprising circumstance of the beginnings of its two main characters. The novel after all is titled “Radioactive Radicals.”

Here my previous reference to the confusion of “that subset marked by the bomb’s radiocaesium with its luminescent aura” should make some sense. Unfortunately, rather than a powerful metaphor that defines his generation, the radioactive consequences of the atomic coincidence of the births of Wes and Dirks are used literally to explain the political commitments, sexual drives, and organizational basis for a range of characters and organizations that Dirks and Wes move through.

By the end of the novel, the numerous references to “radiocaesium in the blood” as a reference point, or explanation for what the characters are doing, becomes a bit trite. It’s an explanation that explains very little, and the repetition becomes somewhat tiresome.

La Botz via Dirks, however, does present a very important portrayal of Wes Kinsman, whose real life doppelganger clearly inspired La Botz, as well as many others who knew and worked with him.

Wes is a highly committed, yet complicated person. He is portrayed as very much a kind of ultimate grassroots organizer.

His ability to spot opportunities, connect with a wide range of folks, provide an unshakeable commitment to those tasks he deemed important, and to do all this with a kindness and integrity towards those he worked with impressed nearly everyone he met.

On the other hand, Wes was perhaps the most disorganized “organizer” one might ever meet, whose personal habits and foibles were both infuriating at times and self-destructive at others.

In short, Wes was a notable and important contributor to many of the struggles that Dirks became involved with, the most important of which was the organization of a rank-and-file caucus in the IBT that came to be known as Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), called in the novel Teamster for Democracy (TfD).

Dirks’ portrayal of Wes Kinsman here pays justifiable homage to the work Wes had done throughout his life both as a student, community and labor organizer. Dirks’ appreciation of that work is both significant and heartfelt.

Yet for all Wes’ importance in the novel, Dirks’ descriptions of Wes falls somewhat short of fully humanizing this character. The detailed descriptions tell what Wes did, how he did it, sometimes why he did it, but rarely do we get inside the character of Wes to experience him for ourselves.

Indeed, one of the adventures that Wes and Dirks got involved with underlined for me the artificiality of the book’s characters, even the presentation of Wes. That adventure is when Dirks describes himself and Wes going to help organize a scrap-metal yard in Detroit owned by mob interests.

Their motive for involvement in this venture is never clearly explained, as it needed to be since Dirks admitted that this was not the kind of venture Wes would be attracted to, and likely would see that the pros did not outweigh the cons. Nevertheless they went to help, and while I will not go into the details of what occurs, it’s dramatic and very definitely out-of-step with how Wes usually operated.

By the end of the novel it becomes clear why this episode was included. While dramatic, it’s clearly a contrived one — not a fictionalized telling of actual events — and its consequences for the novel’s story come across to this reader as a contradictory intrusion to the overall tenor of the story, and a bit gimmicky as well.

Characters and Conflicts

If Dirks does not succeed in fully presenting Wes, it should go without saying that no other characters in the novel fare much better. We are presented with a string of women with whom Dirks gets involved (my quick count noted 14, though Dirks implies the number is higher); but these women are often just named, given a short bio, the affairs are noted, but almost none of them come across as more than appendages to the story Dirks is telling about himself.

Even the child Dirks had with one of these women comes across to the reader as little more than a problem to be solved whenever Dirks changes jobs, ends relationships, or moves to a new city.

More importantly and perhaps most controversially is Dirks’ treatment of the character of Fred Getz, a key organizer and leader with Wes of TDU, the rank and file caucus that is a focal point of the novel. It is clear that Dirks does not like Fred.

Dirks met Fred through the activity of the International Socialist (IS) group and the role it played in organizing TDU. Dirks grudgingly recognized that among the leadership of that group Fred “seemed to be the sharpest. . . .

“But whatever was said, it was Getz, who was not one to get physical, who at the end of the day made the call, because generally he did have the best ideas in any discussion, and we all recognized that. He was one of those who unfortunately combined brilliance with arrogance.”

While Dirks clearly thinks Getz did not fully appreciate Wes nor necessarily treat him well, he seems to miss that while Wes and Getz did not always get along, the contributions of both were key and essential in creating TDU as the most successful rank and file caucus in U.S. labor history.

Getz brought the long-term organizational and strategic skills and the personal inner drive; Wes brought the grassroots outreach skills, tactical perspicuity, ever-renewable energy and outward passion. Unfortunately Wes also brought a measure of erratic, undisciplined behavior that was somewhat incompatible with Fred’s inner sense of discipline and the organization’s need for assigned tasks to be carried out in a timely fashion.

Importantly, however, it was the singular and unique contributions of both that allowed TDU to successfully develop the multi-racial, multi-gender, and multi-generational rank and file activists and leadership that has allowed TDU to survive for almost 50 years.

Movement Failure?

As I was trying to put my finger on what I felt was missing in the characters who populate this novel, I thought of the Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s aphorism “the map is not the territory.” However accurate and detailed a map may be in describing a particular landscape and the features of a place, it is not the same as exploring and experiencing that territory, that place, directly.

Novels are intended to bring the reader into the territory they have created, not simply to be map guides as to how the author sees those places and characters. Reading maps can be both interesting and illuminating, and this novel at times is both. But in seeking to carry out his goal of unearthing the truth from the story — because as the author has said, “The truth, I believe, is in the story” — La Botz may have mapped out the story, but that is not the territory where the truth of any successful novel ultimately lies.

I believe, however, that what ultimately undermines the novel is Dirks’ characterizing the limits of his life in the movement as reflecting not simply personal change, but the failure of the movement itself.

“By 1980, I felt ground down and defeated,” having left his position of leadership in the IS, lost his relationship with the mother of his son, and quit his truck driving job, Dirks admitted that he “was pretty lost.” But he does not seem to have personally lost his way, so much as he believes it was the movement that had failed, or rather it was the movement’s failure that had taken the meaning and purpose from his life:

“Our movement has been wrong about everything. The crisis we expected had never come, or at least not in any form we recognized, and the working class upheaval had already begun to wane in the early seventies, just about the time we got jobs in industry. . . . Our socialist group, created to lead mass labor struggles, was not useful in the new period when revolution was not on the agenda. America was back to normal and we no longer fit. I was now thirty-five. Who was I now? What was my life about?”

What Dirks is saying here clearly reflects feelings that many who had been committed activists in the labor, women’s, queer, antiwar, anti-capitalist struggles of the 1960s and beyond, may themselves have expressed at one time or another. Indeed, many simply gave up, or at least had serious doubts whether it all had been worth it.

But Dirks’ pessimism unduly colors the novel’s conclusions. While it is clear that La Botz is not wrong in bemoaning the failures of the movement, and specifically those of the more radical left that saw a socialist working-class uprising as a strategic near-term goal, such pessimism ends up preventing him from seeing, as he had previously announced, that Hegel was right — the truth resides in the whole.

It is Dirks’ failure here to fulfill the mission he set for himself in writing this novel.

Dirks describes the TDU that had been created by the efforts of Wes Kinsman, Fred Getz and many, many others as having given up on the “socialist revolution.” But it is not clear in the historical moment that TDU ever saw or should have seen itself as directly creating such a revolution.

Given the state of U.S. politics at that time, creating a democratic, militant labor movement might be possible, and that movement if created might play a significant role in moving things closer to such a pre-revolutionary context.

How well TDU succeeded in its mission is a matter for extensive debate and discussion. But to write TDU off as becoming some kind of foundation-supported NGO, as Dirks describes it, leads him not to see that TDU, beyond continuing as a serious and successful rank-and-file caucus, has succeeded in replacing the Teamsters’ corrupt old guard, developed numerous local officers who are TDU members or, influenced by the its work, have sought office as progressive rank-and-file leaders, and organized more women Teamsters and Teamsters of color to play a greater role in the union — locally, regionally and nationally — than ever before.

Most significantly, through the example set by and lessons learned from TDU, the caucus has influenced the creation of similar efforts in a number of other unions. Perhaps the most significant and impactful of these are in the United Auto Workers (UAW), but efforts in the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and other major unions cannot be ignored.

Moreover, TDU has been an inspiration to a new generation of union organizers who are working outside traditional union structures to create unions in companies such as Starbucks, Trader Joe’s and Amazon.

“Failure” is Not Irrelevance

Further, La Botz gives no recognition to another project that the IS was instrumental in creating, the magazine Labor Notes. Since its inception in 1979 Labor Notes has been reporting on union organizing drives, intra-union struggles, and developments in nascent unions both in the United States and globally.

It actively organizes workshops on all issues facing labor activists, publishes books about organizing strategies and worker rights, and at its biannual conferences brings together literally thousands of labor activists from all over the world to meet, share experiences and learn from each other.

Shawn Fain, the current president of the UAW, has openly spoken about what he has called his “bible” for organizing, the Troublemaker’s Handbook published by Labor Notes. The number of labor activists who would probably agree on that is too long to list.

Indeed, the IS and all the other socialist organizations active in the 1960s and ’70s did not foster a successful socialist revolution — indeed most organizations that had pursued such a goal have either fallen by the wayside or have become infinitesimally influential — but one period of historical failure does not condemn a movement to eternal irrelevance.

The IS may have been wrong about a lot of things, and these need to be analyzed and understood (the topic of other books to be sure), but it was hardly “wrong about everything” as the narrator Dirks would have us believe. Unfortunately, concluding that it was universally wrong works at cross purposes with La Botz’s work as a novelist who seeks to present the “truth” that resides in the “whole.”

It is in some measure that part of the “whole truth” which La Botz misses that renders the novel, as impressive as it is in its scope and breadth, ultimately less than satisfying.

January-February 2025, ATC 234