Who today remembers this book?

Arnold Petersen was national secretary of the Socialist Labor Party from 1914 to 1969, surely a world record of some sort. During this period, the SLP (once a relatively large group on the left of the US labour movement) was transformed into a strange political fossil. Petersen's output was equally strange, and this little book is no exception.

"Reviling of the Great" was published in 1949, when Petersen was about mid-term into his national secretary tenure. The book details various campaigns of slander, calumny and vilification directed against four men Petersen regards as particularly great: Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Karl Marx and Daniel De Leon (the chief theoretician of the SLP). There seems to be little point in the exercise, however, except to portray De Leon as of equal stature with Marx, Lincoln and Jefferson, and (incidentally) to portray Marx as comparable to the two American presidents. I actually have the original edition of this work, the front page of which shows portraits of the four great men in "Stalinist" style. The book also contain a correspondence between Petersen and one Irving Stone, who had apparently written a grossly inaccurate novel (!) featuring De Leon.

I don't think "Reviling of the Great" is of interest to anyone. Still, I have to end with a little quote:

>>>A few years ago an Austrian hack named Hayek wrote a book, "The Road to Serfdom", which was loudly acclaimed as the final, utterly devastating answer to Marx! Once and for all, and at last, Marx was finished! The book followed the pattern of the predecessors. There were no original falsifications by Hayek, no new angles in this clumsy attack, but it contained the familiar, stupid misrepresentations. Yet it was viewed by the capitalist apologists as a sensation, but who today recalls it? How many would remember the author's name, how many the title of his book? Hardly any. The book, as Artemus Ward would say, is now deader than Ceasar!>>>

Artemus...who?

:D