VINCENT CANBY

Vincent Canby was for many years one of the most powerful people in the American theater as theater and film critic for The New York Times. Charting and sometimes chiding the American theatrical establishment for more than three decades, he demonstrated his considerable taste and insight as well as his scintillating prose style. But, Canby never overcame the provincialism so typical of New Yorkers. For Canby as for many New Yorkers, the American theater was limited to a few blocks of midtown Manhattan.
     The lesson that I take from Vincent Canby's life and career, aside from the example of his taste and talent, is to celebrate the richness of American culture today. The National Endowment for the Arts has been at the center of controversy, not only for some of its decisions but also for its very existence, with many people questioning, as a relative of mine once did, whether the “dancing people” (and for that matter, the drawing people, the singing people, and the writing people) should be funded by our tax dollars.  But the NEA and numerous corporate and individual donors have fueled a renaissance in our culture.
     Growing up in Sylvester, I always looked forward to Tuesday afternoon, when the Sunday edition of The New York Times arrived in the library. It was my link to a world wide web of coverage of the arts, social issues, and international affairs. I knew the names of the reviewers, I read the reviews, and I felt that what was going on in New York theater was, as Canby felt, pretty much what was going on in theater in the United States. Now, we have not only a thriving national theater from coast to coast but also a thriving, decentralized venue for critics on the Internet. There can be no more Canby, no one critic with such power as he had.  

GUS HALL         

Finally (in alphabetical order), there is Gus Hall, who ran for president four times and served eight years in prison for his beliefs as the leader of the Communist Party, U.S.A. Virtually unknown in his own country, he was a poster-boy for the genuine American proletariat throughout the communist world. Unlike the stereotypical pointy-headed radical academic, Hall, son of a miner and himself a steel-worker and lumberjack, recalled a time when the labor movement was sparked by radical idealism.
       It sometimes surprises people that we have an indigenous radical tradition, American as apple pie, represented by such folks as Eugene V. Debs, Joe Hill, and Gus Hall, who even more surprisingly spring from the Midwest. With apologies to Garrison Keillor (like Hall, a native of Minnesota), they must be doing more than eating tuna hot-dish out there. It would have been surprising, and intriguing, if Hall had not so consistently sided with the communist leadership in Moscow and had spoken out against their excesses with a distinctively American voice. But, he didn't bite the hand that fed him and his party the money which he denied receiving.
     Hall, like Berry, reminds us of times that we would rather forget, when good people were divided by sincere but very different views of Communism, and when people went to jail for their beliefs. The lessons that I take from Hall's life are many. For one, although it is easy to defend the rights of those with whom we agree, we must be equally diligent in defending the rights of those with whom we disagree, no matter how unpleasant their beliefs may be to us. We need to be careful that the contentious issues of our day do not scar our society as earlier issues did.  And we can reflect on the irony that a party and a politician with ideas as unpopular as those of Gus Hall fared much better in this country than such a dissident party would have fared in the Soviet Union.