Read Do You Sincerely Want To Be Rich? for Free Online

vehemently expressed at Brooklyn College, where Cornfeld arrived in 1948 after serving two years as an assistant purser in the merchant navy. (He made several trips in tankers down to the Maracaibo oilfields in Venezuela. From this experience would seem to date Cornfeld's interest in foreign currency and his seminal observation that 'no matter what it looks like, it's all money'.)
        Brooklyn College at the time was in a state of fierce political ferment. The students were united in a desire to avoid the classroom at all costs. Julius Jacobson, who was a student at that time, says: 'We were all engaged in one basic course. We wanted to major in cafeteria.'
        Majoring in cafeteria - where one table carried the slogan, 'Peasants and Workers' Soviet of Brooklyn College' - meant strenuous mental exercise. It was a matter of hours of merciless political debate, of producing leaflets, setting-up meetings, writing tracts. As one veteran of the period put it: 'All you needed in those days was a nut and a mimeograph machine, and you were in business as a party on the American Left.'
        Cornfeld's time at Brooklyn straddled the presidential year of 1948, which sharply intensified the political ferment. To the Brooklyn radicals, naturally, the Democrat Harry Truman was only slightly, if at all, less contemptible than the Republican Thomas Dewey. But there was little agreement on which tactics would most suitably expose the hollowness of Establishment pretensions. The Communists on campus came out without hesitation for Henry Wallace of the Progressive Party. But for most other people, Wallace's approval of Stalinist Russia was too much. The American Socialist Party decided to try to draft
        Norman Thomas, and the enterprise is now remembered with affection as one of the great lost causes of the Left.
        Cornfeld had arrived on campus as a member of the Yipsels, which decided his loyalties, and he threw himself enthusiastically into the task of organizing for the Thomas campaign. It appears that Cornfeld and a young man named Shim Levy were the effective leaders of the Brooklyn College Socialists.
        Already, the nucleus of the IOS high command was beginning to assemble. Two prominent members of the group that Cornfeld and Shim Levy led were Richard Gangel and Eli Wallitt, both of whom became IOS sales chieftains of the first rank. These young people had a political mentor a few years older than themselves. In 1970, he remembered them with some clarity:
        'The first time I met them half a dozen of them came to the house when I was living in a basement apartment and we had a huge discussion about Thomas as opposed to the capitalist candidates. The leader of the group was a guy called Shim Levy. The only time I came across him later he was selling mutual funds, oddly enough, but for some outfit that was nothing to do with Cornfeld as far as I knew.
        'Anyway, these young kids were clawing and searching for some kind of role for their idealism in a confusing world. They were just young enough that I felt I could help them, being a little bit detached from their problems and so on. What I am coming to is that Cornfeld struck me - and I saw quite a lot of him for about a year - as one of the most egocentric people I had ever met and I found him very irritating. It was inconceivable for him ever to admit that he was wrong about anything.
        'He was always bringing round girls, I felt to show them off. They were the sort of girls you would expect, highly intellectual Jewish girls, not fashionably dressed, some rather nice. But you felt he just wanted to show them off.'
        The prime aim of the Norman Thomas campaign was to obtain enough voters' signatures to have their man placed on the ballot for President. Brooklyn produced more signatures for Thomas than any other part of the United States. But not all campus radicals accepted the aims of the Thomas campaign.