Born in Brooklyn in 1919 to Jewish immigrant parents, Daniel Bell was raised in New York's Lower East Side. Bell's early childhood was difficult. His father died when he was six months old and Bell's mother worked long hours in a factory to support herself and her son. She was forced to put Bell in a day orphanage. Bell's childhood was spent in a world characterized by poverty and the hopes and frustrations of a Jewish immigrant population drawn largely from Eastern Europe. For a variety of historical and sociological reasons, this population maintained a clear and persistent association with socialist politics.

At the age of 13 the then Daniel Bolotsky joined the Young People's Socialist League, a youth organization of the Socialist Party. Particular components of this heightened political environment had a powerful effect on Bell's later views about leftist politics. Debates with the militant Young Communist League and...