>>>>> Preview of article for "After Shock," about the life of Alvin Toffler
Billy Rojas
One of the first college teachers of Future Studies, in 1968 - 1969
at Alice Lloyd College in Kentucky. Alvin Toffler's first research assistant,
early member World Future Society, editor of The Future magazine, published
in Arizona. Graphic artist and game designer. Former teacher of History,
Comparative Religion, Social Science, Political Science, and Philosophy:
A Lifetime of Creative New Ideas, a Lifetime of Dishonesty
The Story of Alvin Toffler
By: Billy Rojas
He was the man who did the most of anyone in his era to make the study of the future
important both to the public and to professional people of many kinds. All of the field
of Futures Research, in academics and business, is dated in terms of Before Toffler
and Since Toffler. The publication of Future Shock in 1970 changed the world.
The book was pivotal in ways that few publications ever are. We became
"futures conscious" because of Future Shock. It was that consequential.
However, Alvin Toffler was a conflicted man who had a terrible dark side,
a dimension of his life he kept secret until his death in 2016. It was not a side
I had any idea even existed until going to work for him as his research assistant
in 1975. And it was a side that cost me a career and a fortune when I insisted that
he "come clean" and openly admit his Communist past, a past that haunted him
at the time -and would haunt him all of the years from that now-distant period
until well into the 21st century.
I first heard about Alvin Toffler in late 1969, shortly after founding the Future Studies
Program at the University of Massachusetts. It was at a formal dinner where the guest
of honor was Arthur C.Clarke, and since I was the 'resident futurist' at the school, we were
seated next to each other so that we could talk at length. I do not remember much else
about our conversation but recall very clearly that Clarke recommended a new book
he had just read after being given an advance copy. "As soon as possible," he said,
"be sure to get a copy of Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. It is amazing; it speaks
to everything we have been discussing."
There were meetings with myself and Toffler at various times during the following
several years and then in the Spring of 1974 he asked me to meet him in Colorado
to discuss the possibility of working for him in New York. In January of 1975,
after resigning from Phoenix College where I had taught Future Studies,
I arrived in Manhattan to begin my new job in his office near Central Park.
There was just one catch. That first night after starting work Alvin said that he
needed to talk with me; there was something I needed to know. To be sure,
we had discussed politics during our meeting in Colorado. I told him that,
while I was a Democrat at that time, in my college years I had belonged to
YPSL, the Young Peoples Socialist League, in Chicago. "Was this a problem?"
Toffler said that it wasn't, adding that his own political background was also
Marxist, "but more to the Left than you were." And that was pretty much it.
He didn't elaborate and I did not press the issue, assuming he meant something
like the Left wing of the Socialist Party. I knew that the legacy of Morris Hillquit
was alive and well in New York City, but who couldn't live with that? This was
the East Coast version of "streets and sewers socialism" and it was about
as sinister as Swedish social democracy. Not exactly a serious concern.
That evening in upper Manhattan, however, was not what I expected. Alvin did
most of the talking but his wife Heidi made sure that her voice was heard.
The two of them had been Communists in the 1950s, the heyday of Gus Hall
in the United States, and of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union. Al and Heidi
had kept their past a secret and wanted to keep it that way, they were mortified
at being found out because, in those Cold War years, their fame -and fortune-
would be jeopardized if their political past became public knowledge.
Their fear was rooted in passage of the new Freedom of Information Act,
and rumblings from William F. Buckley that he might look into the Alvin's
record. Already there were criticisms of Future Shock as based upon
ideas that sounded Marxist or even Marxist-Leninist.
Buckley never pursued matters, nor did anyone else who had questioned whether
part of the inspiration for the book ultimately was Marxist in some sense, and things
were normal enough in the office for several months: Until Toffler decided to
venture into US politics. I had kept his secret -what else could I have done?-
despite my unease. Besides, a new world was opening up before me, and there seemed
to be no harm, and not much foul. Toffler's membership in the Communist Party was
a thing of the past, so he said, and it was time to focus on the here-and-now
and upon the future. For the time being anyway, I could live with that.
And there were all the things I was learning professionally. My salary was little better
than that of a Teaching Assistant at a university but my job was the equivalent
of study at an elite grad school, with the advantage of a cast of opinion-leader celebrities
who came and went in the Toffler orbit. There were liabilities, however, and they were
always on my mind. After all, if Toffler's past was exposed that would not only
mean serious damage to Alvin's reputation, it would mean damage to the cause
of futuristics at large, which I was very much involved in, and damage to my own
reputation for not saying anything. But allow me to discuss the positive dimensions
of life before returning to the issue of politics in the shadow of the Sword of Damocles.
---------
Among criticisms, some of them arrived at by several writers independently of each other,
several stand out, for example:
*Toffler takes the view that the future is relatively easy to predict, as if the problem
is much more like Newtonian physics than General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics.
*Toffler seems to think that the need for constant life adjustments as society changes
at greater and greater rates, is nearly inconsequential when, in fact, it is a huge issue
that must be resolved for any kind of viable social forecasting to be possible.
*Toffler makes no distinctions between classes of motivations. Is altruism no better
and no worse than individualism? Is egoistic drive for power simply a neutral alternative
to an ethos based on co-operation and sharing? Where is Toffler's morality?
It can also be observed that Toffler's public politics in the Future Shock era
was something of a mystery. It wasn't all that clear what it really was -beyond
the obvious: He was an enthusiast for direct democracy. Or was he? The trouble
was that he often talked out of both sides of his mouth. He was for a federal form
of government except when he favored central planing. He was for citizen's participation
in decision making except when he said that we need more and better experts to do the job.
Toffler was a product of the times. As I was, as Newt Gingrich was, and as was just about
everyone else. How could any of us escape the spell of the later 1960s? For a time
it seemed as if the New Age would roll over everything in the country.
Out of that ferment came heightened interest in new political organizations and parties.
It should be remembered that the era saw the rise and eventual fall of about 25 new
political parties or large scale political organizations. Among them were:
Patriot Party, 1966, rural radicals from Appalachia and the Pacific Northwest
Freedom Socialist party, 1966, Trotskyists,
Socialist Alternative, 1966, also loyal to Trotsky,
Black Panthers of 1966,
Youth International Party (Yippies) of 1967,
Democratic Socialists, 1967, under the Peace and Freedom Party banner,
American Party of 1968, loyal to George Wallace.
Plus a wide assortment of "movements" or sometimes decentralized organizations,
including Women's Liberation, Neo-Conservatism, Students for a Democratic Society,
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference affiliated with Martin Luther King, Jr.,
the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee, and still more. A little after
Future Shock was published along came the Libertarian Party in 1971. Shortly
after that came a 'senior liberation' organization called the Gray Panthers.
By 1975 there also were new organizations for Communists, Neo-Nazis,
Environmentalists, Mexican-Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans.
And there was the New Zealand "Values Party" which, earlier that year, had garnered
over 5% of the votes in national elections there, all of that total from out of nowhere.
This was important because the Values platform was partly futurist in outlook.
And it was politically independent. Just maybe something like that could be successful
in the United States. Toffler's CAD, Committee on Anticipatory Democracy, while it
borrowed various ideas from Future Shock, was also influenced by the Values Party.
The New Zealand party, not at all incidentally, morphed into the first Green Party
of any importance. It wasn't strictly an "eco party" at the outset, but that is
what it became.
What Toffler had said in his 1970 book about "sub cults" becoming a major part
of American culture and politics was coming true with a vengeance. Which is not even
to discuss the explosion of "new religions" in those years, or re-makes of old religions
as was the Hare Krishna movement, plus America's new versions of Tibetan Buddhism.
Also in the mix was Yazda Mazna, a Zoroastrian mission to America in the years the Shah
was still in power. This was also the time when the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo attracted
significant numbers of Americans. And there were offshoots from Islam, the so-called
Black Muslims and also Ahmadiyya Islam, similar to the Baha'i Faith in some ways.
As well, Qadiri Sufism made its appearance at this time, as did Subud, and the
Meher Baba people.
In reaction to this unexpected religious competition and in opposition to the
rising tide of libertine morality, we also got the rise of the Religious Right.
Toffler did not have it all spelled out, but he really got the idea, dead center.
All of which fit my interests just about perfectly, and gave me a lifelong agenda
of trying to make practical sense of it all.
Still, as a good number of critics have noted, beneath the veneer of generous
and tolerant acceptance of just about anything and everything, what you will also
find in Future Shock are strata of pure Marxian ideas, and, in places, ideas that
can fairly be categorized as Marxist-Leninist in character and inspiration.
For an excellent review of Toffler's contribution to the world of ideas of the later years of
the 20th century, see the John B. Judis article, "Newt's Not-So-Weird Gurus," in the
October 8, 1995, edition of the New Republic. About this essay there is much, indeed,
to say. Judis, like no other, pointedly identified Toffler's intellectual indebtedness
to Marxism generally and to Communism specifically.
Not that I had it all figured out, but before Autumn of 1975 it seemed to me that it
was getting increasingly risky to work for Toffler. Ironically, my fears proved to be
needless, but at the time they were all too realistic. But there was also New York and
if I had doubts about the wisdom of leaving Toffler's office, the realities of the city
were what they were. Basically I could not stand the crowds, the ceaseless torrents
of traffic, the grime, and proximity to never ending crime, and I needed to escape.
To be sure, at that time there was little or no acrimony between Toffler and myself.
And he was a good person to work with; most people who knew him felt the same way.
In terms of personality conflicts the real issue was his wife, Heidi. She could be
abrasive. But the serious problem was that this was the period when Alvin had a crush on
Shirley McClain, pretty much an open secret, and Heidi was unhappy about it.
At least as I remember the situation, but I am trying to be objective, this was when Heidi
began to insist that she receive co-author credits for Alvin's books. Actually, of course,
a co-author does roughly half the actual writing. However, Heidi never wrote a word
of Alvin's books -except for the indexes, which were her responsibility, which she
more-or-less fulfilled despite all kinds of omissions along the way. I'm not the only
person to note the incompleteness of the indexes.
As I remember things, the co-author ploy was Heidi's stratagem for binding Alvin
to herself and, in the process, controlling important leverage in case she ever needed it.
This also helped her in terms of bona fides with her friends in the Women's Movement.
Regardless, the most anyone can say is that Heidi was Alvin's collaborator, that was as far
as things ever got. They discussed if not everything that made it into the books,
a great deal, and Heidi had the virtue of making herself informed. But she was
never an actual co-author. And she never published anything on her own, anywhere.
She simply was not a writer.
This is mentioned here because of how much Heidi made of her "co-author" status
in later years, which was total hypocrisy and an example of one of the lies that Toffler told.
Some of those lies can be directly attributed to his wife.
Alvin always tried to be nice to other people. He was nice to me when I broke the news
that it was time for me to move on, and he tried to line me up with a job in some other city.
None of that effort was successful, sometimes for absurd reasons like the time I was
interviewed for a teaching position at Ithaca College, and things had gone quite well.
Mr. Phillips, of the foundation in his family name and a decision maker at the college,
had seemed very positive. Then, back in Manhattan, came the news that Mrs. Phillips
had vetoed the idea because I (supposedly) did not have a background in history, her favorite
subject. All she needed to do was read my resume, there it was, a Master's degree
in Intellectual History, with honors. But it did not matter, her mind was made up.
Such was fate, in that case determined by an irresponsible woman who did not
deserve a place in the councils of an elite college.
In the end, Toffler was contacted, unbidden, by a small time publisher in Scottsdale
and I returned to Arizona, a place that I very much like. They pay was miserable,
maybe $8000 over the course of approximately 15 months, but there had been
an opportunity to serve as editor of The Future magazine, the concept being
a Time magazine format publication all about the world to come. With a
national advertising budget of about $1,500 (not a typo) I did my best, but never
really had a chance. The one-and-only issue featured interviews with Toffler
and environmentalist Hazel Henderson, but there were minimal revenues.
Some 100,000 copies were printed, sales reached at most about 20,000.
The way that publisher Arthur Bernard operated, every year or so he would launch
a new magazine for very little money. Most failed. But if one caught on somehow,
he would start to spend real dollars to see it get to the next level. Basically he "paid"
in terms of promises and experience gained. His risk was minimal, his authors
received pittances.
Toffler had tried to help out by granting the interview but it wasn't enough
to make the magazine a sales success. It was off to California for me and
eventually Hawaii and the state of Washington. It was during those years
that I began to train myself for an alternative career as a free lance graphic artist,
a profession you may know by another designation, commercial art. In high school
I had become an accomplished architectural draftsman and supported myself
when attending night classes at Roosevelt University while working as an architectural
illustrator at US Gypsum Corporation. Graphic art was a natural for me.
And it helped that my college minor was Art History.
It was in Washington, living near Seattle in 1977, that my break with Toffler took place.
We had met once during that time, when he visited Portland. The actual severance
took place long distance, via letters.
There were several causes for the break, although one factor that became important to me
some years after, was still a secondary issue at that time. This was Toffler's increasing
promotion of homosexual causes. In 1975 this was not much of a concern;
my view was
still that of a liberal Democrat, basically uninformed about the entire phenomenon, simply
repeating the canard that homosexuality was a civil rights cause. This started to
change in New York where, for the first time I had seen homosexuals in a variety
of settings, where nothing of the homosexual scene was in any way something other
than repulsive. My education into this deranged form of behavior continued while
working for Mr Bernard; that was when I carried out the first of my academic studies
of homosexuality and became more and more disgusted. There no longer was any real
question about it, homosexuality is a clinical psychopathology, a conclusion supported
by an abundance of empirical studies.
At any rate, this was to become a major contention between us, certainly by the mid 1980s,
but in the late 1970s it was basically a resentment of mine and a source of unease
with Toffler's values. Call it a serious irritant.
Something else did happen to precipitate the break but exactly what it was still
eludes me. It simply does not come to mind. Possibly it was connected to the debate
about the ERA then in full swing, but whatever it was, my feelings about Toffler's
political activities boiled to the surface. I wrote a fairly lengthy letter and told him
that he needed to finally become honest about his Communist past; Arthur Koestler
had done so, as had many others, he could emerge from it all as a better man
and no longer have a threatening cloud hanging over his head.
His reply, although the story was complicated, this is the short version, was to blacklist me
from any Futures Research employment that I might ever seek from then onward.
This worked like a charm for him, especially since it involved slanders and lies
about me that I did not know about and, accordingly, could not defend myself against.
Only years later did I learn some of the false allegations, like supposedly beating up
two women in Arizona whom I never as much as met, and similar fictions,
but mostly there was little I could do but soldier on.
Those still were years of the Cold War, and anti-Communist sentiment helped
elect Ronald Reagan in 1980. A Communist past was anything but a recommendation
for membership in the upper echelons of society. And it was anathema in US politics.
We should not interpret the era through perfect hindsight, knowing what we now do about
Michael Gorbachev and his major reforms. In those years we feared going to war with
the Soviet Union at almost any time.
What did become clear from the silence, and from a couple of replies that mattered a
good deal, was that lies were part of Toffler's response.
One important correspondence was from the principal of Maslow-Toffler High School
in Brentwood, on Long Island, which I had visited and had gotten to know some of
the faculty and students. Another was from a friend in Washington, DC.
Let me explain things this way: When Toffler's next book, The Third Wave, was published
in 1980, the preface included comments to the effect that Alvin, during his youth as a
college student, had, like many others, taken a passing interest in Marx. But that was
all it was, inconsequential, and nothing came of it. So millions of readers were
led to believe. His Communist past had been airbrushed out of existence.
There also would be frequent references to Newt Gingrich, supposedly dating to a
non-existent time when Alvin and Newt met in Chicago long before they actually
did meet, and only then because of my efforts to tell Toffler about a rising political star
he should know about. This was another lie.
As far as the first point is concerned, just try and find out anything at all about Alvin's
younger years. Everything is blank before his last year at New York University
when he met Heidi. There are no references to the years before, anywhere, none at all.
For that matter, there also is a blank where the years of the Korean War are concerned.
What else Toffler told me that evening in January of 1975, was that he had been
terminated from the US military during the Korean conflict for some kind of
subversive activities. He was never forthright about what, precisely, this was all about,
but the impression I had was that he was less than honorably discharged.
Where you will find a Communist reference in the saga as I lived it in the 1980s and 1990s,
was in relationship to myself. I happen to have detested Fidel Castro and the entire Cuban
regime. But not according to the "legend" that Toffler and his friends manufactured.
According to that story, I supposedly had a direct connection to Castro's people
and was in their pocket. The whole idea is preposterous but my denials meant
nothing and the accusations were pure platinum because they came from Toffler.
All of which, as I saw it, meant that I needed to somehow find documentary proof
that I was telling the truth, that Alvin Toffler actually had been a "card carrying"
Communist and was deliberately concealing the fact from the public and,
in all probability, from the Government of the United States.
Mostly my searching was fruitless, but eventually there were two important discoveries.
Something very close to hard evidence was published in 1995 in the John Judis article
referred to previously, in the New Republic. But I missed that issue of the magazine
and did not learn about it until years later, Other people surely did see it, though,
yet none of them that I know of anyway, made the connection. Or if they did,
they were shut up.
Here is what Judis said in his article:
*In 1948 both Alvin and Heidi worked for the Progressive Party of Henry Wallace.
This fact proves nothing, a lot of people with no Communist record did so also,
but a good percentage were Communists, so this raises suspicion.
*About the fact that the Tofflers were union organizers in Cleveland during the late 1940s,
Judis reported about his interview with Alvin: "I concluded from what he said, and from
coy hints, that he either belonged to or worked very closely with the Communist Party.
When I asked him if he studied at NYU with the socialist —but militantly anti-Communist—
philosopher Sidney Hook, he said he thought then of Hook as a "terrible reactionary."
When I asked him if he had been a Trotskyist, he said Trotskyists were the "bad guys."
*Finally, so Judis said, "there is...
a striking resemblance between Toffler's concept
of the Third Wave and Marx's somewhat inchoate view of communism." Indeed,
Judis added, in various ways clearly Toffler was
still "bewitched" by Marx.
All this is very, very suggestive but isn't quite a "smoking gun." That would come
in an article in the December 1980 issue of Design Magazine, a British publication
intended for product designers. The relevance was that this was a review of
Toffler's The Third Wave, which, of course, includes discussion of new kinds
of commercial products. The author of the review was
Professor James Woudhuysen,
sometimes known as James Woods, a member of the faculty
at
De Montfort University
of Leicester. The title is:
"Woudhuysen -Thinking about the future;
Alvin Toffler: Exiled to Malibu."
The article begins with these words:
"he and his wife were for five years Communist Party (USA) trade union
organisers at a car factory and steel foundry –and, despite his long-established
disenchantment with Marxism, it shows."
Here was someone who clearly had real world knowledge of Toffler's Communist past.
Where did he get this knowledge from? That is not clear but
Woudhuysen,
was a
Marxist himself and was associated with a publication called Novo, which is
described as
"the German sister publication of Living Marxism."
That is, James Woods had contacts in the world of hard Left politics; any number
of people who knew Toffler "back when" could have provided the information.
For that matter, possibly Woudhuysen got it from the horse's mouth. The Toffler's
maintained a home in England and maybe James was a visitor. In any case,
there are any number of possible sources and there was no doubt in his mind
when he wrote that the Tofflers were active Communists at one time. Nor were
there complaints about misrepresentation from Alvin or anyone else. The assertion
went unchallenged. This is as good as it gets in terms of documentation.
Case closed.
Except that in 2015 when I broke this news to people on my national mailing list
again the silence was deafening. These are people who are professionals of various kinds,
Some have connections in the communications business. Here was irrefutable proof
that I had been telling the truth all along yet nobody budged in their refusals to acknowledge
that truth for what it is.
Something is very wrong, indeed. As is the cowardice of those who do see the facts
for what they are but persist in prolonging inexcusable injustice for the sake of
protecting immoral people in positions of power.
And so the whitewash continues -and I have no idea how much longer it will continue.
As long as it does, however, the picture we all have of Alvin Toffler will remain
false to half the facts of his life, our impression will consist of a hagiography, not a
realistic photograph of a brilliant but immoral and hypocritical man
who changed the world.