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William Marx Mandel (June 4, 1917 – November 24, 2016) was an American
broadcast journalist Broadcast journalism is the field of news and journals which are broadcast by electronic methods instead of the older methods, such as printed newspapers and posters. It works on radio (via air, cable, and Internet), television (via air, cable, ...
,
left-wing Left-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy. Left-wing politics typically involve a concern for those in soci ...
political activist, and author, best known as a Soviet affairs analyst. He was born in
New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
.


Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee

Considered a leading
Sovietologist Kremlinology is the study and analysis of the politics and policies of the Soviet Union while Sovietology is the study of politics and policies of both the Soviet Union and former communist states more generally. These two terms were synonymous unt ...
during the 1940s and 1950s, Mandel was a fellow at
Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
's
Hoover Institution The Hoover Institution (officially The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace; abbreviated as Hoover) is an American public policy think tank and research institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and ...
, but lost his position there due to the political pressures of the McCarthy era. He is perhaps best known for standing up to Senator
Joseph McCarthy Joseph Raymond McCarthy (November 14, 1908 – May 2, 1957) was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957. Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visi ...
during a televised 1953 Senate committee hearing in which Mandel pointedly told the senator, "This is a book-burning! You lack only the tinder to set fire to the books as Hitler did twenty years ago, and I am going to get that across to the American people!" In 1960, Mandel was again subpoenaed, this time by the
House Un-American Activities Committee The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), popularly dubbed the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives, created in 1938 to investigate alleged disloy ...
. He testified on May 13 in a hearing held at the San Francisco City Hall. Outside the hearing, hundreds of protesting Bay Area college students were blasted with firehoses and dragged down the marble steps by police officers, leaving some seriously injured. Newsreel cameras recorded Mandel's scathing response to the question posed by Lead Counsel Richard Arens, "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?":
Honorable beaters of children, sadists, uniformed and in plain clothes, distinguished
Dixiecrat The States' Rights Democratic Party (whose members are often called the Dixiecrats) was a short-lived segregationist political party in the United States, active primarily in the South. It arose due to a Southern regional split in opposition t ...
wearing the clothing of a gentleman, eminent Republican who opposes an accommodation with the one country with which we must live at peace in order for us and all our children to survive. My boy of fifteen left this room a few minutes ago in sound health and not jailed, solely because I asked him to be in here to learn something about the procedures of the United States government and one of its committees. Had he been outside where a son of a friend of mine had his head split by these goons operating under your orders, my boy today might have paid the penalty of permanent injury or a police record for desiring to come here and hear how this committee operates. If you think that I am going to cooperate with this collection of Judases, of men who sit there in violation of the United States Constitution, if you think I will cooperate with you in any way, you are insane!
Mandel "spent the remainder of his testimony respectfully telling his inquisitors to go to hell."Matthew Lasar, ''Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network'' (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press Temple University Press is a university press founded in 1969 that is part of Temple University (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). It is one of thirteen publishers to participate in the Knowledge Unlatched pilot, a global library consortium approach t ...
, 1999), 186.
Recordings of the hearing were aired repeatedly on
KPFA KPFA (94.1 FM) is an American listener-funded talk radio and music radio station located in Berkeley, California, broadcasting to the San Francisco Bay Area. KPFA airs public news, public affairs, talk, and music programming. The station sign ...
and other
Pacifica Radio Pacifica may refer to: Art * ''Pacifica'' (statue), a 1938 statue by Ralph Stackpole for the Golden Gate International Exposition Places * Pacifica, California, a city in the United States ** Pacifica Pier, a fishing pier * Pacifica, a conceiv ...
stations in subsequent years, and "literally represented the final hours of the 1950s" for young people who had come of age in the McCarthy era. Scenes from the hearings and protest were later featured in the award-winning 1990 documentary, '' Berkeley in the Sixties''.


Broadcaster and activist

Mandel began his career as a broadcaster in 1958, with a 15-minute-long weekly broadcast on
Pacifica Radio Pacifica may refer to: Art * ''Pacifica'' (statue), a 1938 statue by Ralph Stackpole for the Golden Gate International Exposition Places * Pacifica, California, a city in the United States ** Pacifica Pier, a fishing pier * Pacifica, a conceiv ...
station
KPFA KPFA (94.1 FM) is an American listener-funded talk radio and music radio station located in Berkeley, California, broadcasting to the San Francisco Bay Area. KPFA airs public news, public affairs, talk, and music programming. The station sign ...
-FM in
Berkeley Berkeley most often refers to: *Berkeley, California, a city in the United States **University of California, Berkeley, a public university in Berkeley, California * George Berkeley (1685–1753), Anglo-Irish philosopher Berkeley may also refer ...
, California . Within 6 months he was asked to expand to a half-hour; over a 32-year run, he went to an hour-long weekly program, then back to the half-hour format. Originally called ''Soviet Press and Periodicals'', the program stayed on the air under various names until 1995, when it was abruptly cancelled by KPFA's national parent organization Pacifica Foundation—which eventually acknowledged that its dismissal first of Rolling Stone co-founder and renowned jazz critic Ralph Gleason and then Mandel was solely out of fear that the federal Corporation for Public Broadcasting would cut funding to Pacifica if "leftist" commentators were retained. Mandel appears in the documentary film ''KPFA On the Air'' (Independent Television Service, 2000). Subsequently, Mandel hosted a weekly show on Free Radio Berkeley. In his book, ''In Battle for Peace,'' the noted Black American scholar and activist Dr.
W. E. B. Du Bois William Edward Burghardt Du Bois ( ; February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963) was an American-Ghanaian sociologist, socialist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in ...
referred to William Mandel's "defense" of him when Du Bois was "under federal indictment for heading the circulation of a peace petition". Mandel was the only non-student asked by its founders to sit on the Steering Committee of the Free Speech Movement in
Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and Emer ...
in the early 1960s. In 1968, he signed the " Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the
Vietnam War The Vietnam War (also known by #Names, other names) was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vie ...
. Mandel's radio program on KPFA was, during its later decades, titled ''The Soviet Union: a closer look'' Until the early 1970s, Mandel was a vocal supporter of the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia on this program. During the 1970s and 1980s he vigorously denied the existence of state-directed anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, disputing from personal experience and decades of scholarly research the testimonies of bitterly anti-communist Soviet emigres in the Bay Area and dissidents like Nobel prize winner Joseph Brodsky; his common refrain during KPFA broadcasts was "the Soviet Union is 100 races living together in harmony". Mandel's denial of Soviet governmental anti-Semitism was maintained as late as his 1985 book "Soviet but not Russian: The Other Peoples of the Soviet Union" which stated that at most 10% of Soviet Jews would want to leave the Soviet Union. Approximately 290,000 Jews left the Soviet Union from 1970 to 1988, when emigration was restricted; over 224,000 left in 1990 alone, the first full year when emigration was liberalized. In January 1982, Mandel wrote an article in the ''
Stanford Daily ''The Stanford Daily'' is the student-run, independent daily newspaper serving Stanford University. ''The Daily'' is distributed throughout campus and the surrounding community of Palo Alto, California, United States. It has published since the U ...
'' supporting the coup of Polish General W. Jaruzelski which imposed
martial law Martial law is the imposition of direct military control of normal civil functions or suspension of civil law by a government, especially in response to an emergency where civil forces are overwhelmed, or in an occupied territory. Use Marti ...
as an attempt to crush the Solidarity trade union. In 1992 he served as the consulting editor to the production of "The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union Trading Cards: From Lenin to Yeltsin," a history of the USSR in the form of a series of baseball cards, written by David Thorpe and illustrated by Greg Copeland. Mandel died on Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 2016 at the age of 99 at his home in Kensington, California.


Writings

The introduction to Mandel's autobiography, ''Saying No To Power,'' was written by the
left-wing Left-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy. Left-wing politics typically involve a concern for those in soci ...
historian A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the stu ...
and author Howard Zinn. The book was praised by, among others, author and senior editor of ''The Black Scholar,''
Robert L. Allen Robert Lee Allen (born May 29, 1942) is an American activist, writer, and Adjunct Professor of African-American Studies and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Allen received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Calif ...
, musician and activist
Pete Seeger Peter Seeger (May 3, 1919 – January 27, 2014) was an American folk singer and social activist. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, Seeger also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of the Weavers, notably ...
and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The
Hoover Institution The Hoover Institution (officially The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace; abbreviated as Hoover) is an American public policy think tank and research institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and ...
Archives,
Wisconsin Historical Society The Wisconsin Historical Society (officially the State Historical Society of Wisconsin) is simultaneously a state agency and a private membership organization whose purpose is to maintain, promote and spread knowledge relating to the history of N ...
and the
Bancroft Library The Bancroft Library in the center of the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, is the university's primary special-collections library. It was acquired from its founder, Hubert Howe Bancroft, in 1905, with the proviso that it retai ...
at the University of California have collections of Mandel's papers.


Books

*’The Soviet Far East and Central Asia’, Institute of Pacific Relations, 1944 *''A Guide to the Soviet Union'', The Dial Press, 1946 *''Soviet Marxism and Social Science'' reprint Ramparts Press, 1984, *
Russia Re-Examined
', 1967 *
Soviet Women
', Anchor Books, 1975,
''Soviet But Not Russian: The ‘Other’ Peoples of the Soviet Union''
Palo Alto, Calif.: University of Alberta Press and Ramparts Press, 1985, *''Saying No To Power,'' Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1999,


References


External links

*
William Mandel talks to John Whiting about his life and work
included i
MY KPFA: A Historical Footnote (Seventy-five hours of programs and interviews from the 1960s)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mandel, Willem 1917 births 2016 deaths Writers from New York City Activists for African-American civil rights American communists American male journalists American radio journalists American foreign policy writers American male non-fiction writers American political writers Writers about the Soviet Union American autobiographers Victims of McCarthyism American tax resisters Pacifica Foundation people