"[1] Strongly influenced by the political and social convictions of his sister Felice Swados (who had many discussions at the Hunter Colony run by Margaret Lefranc), and while still an undergraduate, Swados also initiated during this period what was to become a lengthy relationship with the anti-Stalinist American Left and, by the late 1930s, had affiliated himself with the Leon Trotsky–inspired and Max Shachtman–led Workers Party (U.S.), whose adherents included novelist James T. Farrell and democratic socialist theorist, literary critic and social historian Irving Howe.
Though he had already begun distancing himself from the Trotskyist organization by the beginning of the 1940s, Swados remained committed to principles of democratic socialism—exclusive of any party structure—and thought of himself as an independent radical for the rest of his life.
"Despite his own drift away from the revolutionary expectations of his youth, much that would remain central to Swados's worldview was formed in these politically charged years of factory employment in the early 1940s."
Dissatisfied with its reception among friends and colleagues whose opinions he valued, and unable to place it with a publisher at that time, Swados set the work aside shortly after its creation in the 1940s.
On the commuter train between Rockland and Weehawken, New Jersey, on his way to and from his midtown Manhattan office job, Swados often did his own work, assembling his thoughts and writing his first published novel, Out Went the Candle, which was released in 1955.
Their mutual friend, writer Dan Wakefield, observed that Swados's short stories "dramatized concerns such as Mills addressed in White Collar, like the threat to individual freedom from new technology and corporate conformity.
More than any other writer I knew, C. Wright Mills's friend and neighbor Harvey Swados embodied the search to live and do his work in a commercial world and maintain his commitment as an artist.
"[4] Beginning in the late 1950s, in addition to his literary and journalistic work, Swados began teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, where writer Grace Paley was among his colleagues.
Through the generosity of Rockland County friends who owned a modest villa there, Swados and his family resided, from 1955 to 1956, in the medieval Cote D'Azur village of Cagnes-sur-Mer, midway between Cannes and Nice.
In his introduction to the University of Illinois Press edition of On the Line, Nelson Lichtenstein wrote, "When Swados showed up at the Mahwah plant in February 1956, the personnel man was glad to see that he had had some blue collar work experience, but he also found his job application strangely full of blank spots.
In an enthusiastic letter to his friends Stuart and Barbara Schulberg, whom Swados and his wife had met in Cagnes-sur-Mer, he wrote, "I think when [the stories] are all done they will give an inkling of what has happened to the American dream.
As examples of Swados's voluminous journalism, two pieces written for The New York Times Sunday Magazine in many ways typify his wide-ranging social curiosity.
In an article published on November 13, 1966, "When Black and White Live Together," Swados presented the integrated community of Rochdale Village, in the New York City borough of Queens, as a paradigm of American brotherhood, idealism and economic self-interest.
He was strongly urged by members of the reformist Alexander Dubček government to depart the country, which the family was indeed forced to do, mere hours before the arrival of invading Russian troops.
In what was to be one of the final public acts of his political life, Swados traveled to Washington, D.C., in 1972 and volunteered his writing services to the presidential campaign of George McGovern and his running mate Sargent Shriver.
In a 1973 memorial tribute, the critic Hilton Kramer lauded his friend's "attention to all those aspects of our history and our feelings that our stylish literature, then in the high tide of its so-called radical phase, had either conveniently forgotten or never knew.