by Alan M Wald
The New York Intellectuals
Praise for The New York Intellectuals
“His book is not only a model of erudition (based on wide archival research and more than a hundred interviews) but also a literary work. Remarkably well written, it is as easy to read as a novel. Without hiding his revolutionary Marxist standpoint, Alan Wald combines commitment and critical spirit, objectivity and position held. An example to be followed.”
—Michael Löwy, La Quinzaine Litteraire (Paris), 16–31 July 1987
“Wald brilliantly combines the methods of biography, political theory, and literary criticism.”
—Antioch Review 45, no. 3 (Fall 1987): 376
“Wald has written what in many ways is the best book on the New York intellectuals by combining a historian’s detachment with a political engagement with the issues and events that shaped these writers. The primary virtue of Wald’s history comes from his combination of exhaustive, painstaking research with a constantly critical attitude toward his sources. . . . Wald knows what is at stake in the controversies and brings them to life. . . . Wald’s history is the only one that has the fire of the memoirs. . . . [T]ruly a collective biography.”
—Michael Denning, Socialist Review, January–March 1988
“Wald’s study—subtle, insightful—ranks with that small cluster of fine works on twentieth-century radicals.”
—Milton Cantor, Library Journal
“Rare for a book so steeped in scholarship, it is both highly readable and extremely informative . . . a fine combination of good writing and impeccable scholarship.”
—Harmen Mitchell, Ann Arbor News, Sunday, 17 May 1987
“Many scholars may question . . . the coexistence of ‘objectivity’ and partisan passion, but Wald has not only demonstrated the feasibility of this approach but that it can be done with grace, authenticity, and scrupulous accuracy. It is Marxist scholarship at its best. . . . The author glides adroitly between multiple roles of intellectual and social historian, political theorist, and literary critic; his own engaging literary style finds expression in the tightly drawn biographical sketches that he weaves gracefully into the larger fabric.”
—Stewart Burns, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 24 (July 1988)
“His method is Marxist, but free of jargon and sensitive to the complexities of issues and literary critical method.”
—Jeffrey H. Richards, Greensboro News and Record, 8 June 1987
“[Sophisticated, scholarly, and well-researched.”
—J. H. Smith, Choice, October 1987
“Wald’s grasp of the ideological twists and turns of his protagonists is first-rate.”
—D. D. Guttenplan, Village Voice, 15–21 July 1987
“[A] brilliant effort to correct the record and to explain it.”
—The Key Reporter (Phi Beta Kappa), Spring 1988
“Here is political and literary history of the first order.”
—The American Citizen’s Reader’s Catalogue, Winter 1987–88
“Mr. Wald has written a valuable book about the ‘political trajectory’ of this country’s leading intellectuals over the past fifty years. It is well-researched, insightful, and extremely opinionated. It deserves a wide audience.”
—David M. Oshsinsky, New York Times Book Review, 7 June 1987
“Wald’s book is still the most thoughtful and comprehensive study of the New York intellectuals.”
—Ellen Schrecker, The Nation, 1/8 August 1987
“[S]killfully organized so that the reader is seldom drowned in detail, and a balance is almost always maintained between individual case histories and the general line of development. . . . He gives as non-tendentious an account of the ‘anti-Stalinist Left’ as is humanly possible.”
—Annette T. Rubinstein, Monthly Review, November 1987
“Wald is a patient, painstaking, and erudite guide, taking the reader carefully through the clotted, overlapping, dense political and ideological transformations within, among, and around an extraordinary group of very bright and very committed people.”
—Cooperative Economic Book Review, March–April 1988
“Wald remains dispassionate and fair-minded, even though almost all the changes he describes move in a direction which he opposes—that is, to the right. Eschewing the impossible and scarcely desirable goal of value-free history, Wald achieves his own aim, of a work that is ‘partisan but objective.’”
—James Seaton, The Centennial Review
“In his biographical sketches, Wald humanizes them and enables us to see a bit of ourselves in them.”
—Mark Schneider, American Book Review, September–October 1987
“Wald shows how the real-life political conflicts facing his intellectuals shaped their artistic creations.”
—George Lipsitz, Oral History Review, Fall 1988
“Alan Wald’s book stands out for his honesty and acumen. . . . His firmly held but temperately expressed position . . . has given him special insight. . . . Wald focuses knowledgeably on a neglected stage in that journey too little considered by other literary historians and too often downplayed. . . . Wald repeatedly demonstrates his skill at applying his political viewpoint, not programmatically but analytically, to reveal how ideology and fiction are related.”
—Walter B. Rideout, American Literature, October 1988
“Wald’s research is exhaustive. . . . No one is likely to tell us more about these people in the near future. Nor will anyone do so with greater honesty and fairness. . . . Wald’s book is signally free from that tendency to settle old scores and rewrite the past.”
—Michael Sprinker, New Statesman, August 1987
The New York Intellectuals
The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s
ALAN M. WALD
THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
The University of North Carolina Press
Chapel Hill
© 2017 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.
ISBN 978-1-4696-3594-1 (pbk: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4696-3595-8 (ebook)
The Library of Congress has cataloged the original edition as follows:
Copyright © 1987 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing, May 1987
Second printing, September 1987
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wald, Alan M. 1946–
The New York intellectuals.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Socialists—New York (N.Y.)—History—20th century. 2. Intellectuals—New York (N.Y.)—History—20 century. I. Title.
HX92.N5W35 1987 320.5’32’097471 86-24922
ISBN 0-8078-1716-3
ISBN 0-8078-4169-2 (pbk.)
Some portions of this book have appeared in somewhat different form in Jewish Social Studies 38 (1976); Antioch Review 35 (1977); Prospects 3 (1977); Literature at the Barricades (University of Alabama Press, 1982), pp. 187–203; and Centennial Review 29 (1985).
TO CELIA
Contents
Preface to the Thirtieth Anniversary Edition
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Text and the Illustrations
Introduction. Political Amnesia
Part I ORIGINS OF THE AN
TI-STALINIST LEFT
Chapter 1. Jewish Internationalists
The Non-Jewish Jews
Portrait: Elliot Cohen
Portrait: Lionel Trilling
Portrait: Herbert Solow
From Cultural Pluralism to Revolutionary Internationalism
Chapter 2. Dissident Communists
The Menorah Group Moves Left
New Allies: Sidney Hook, James Rorty, Charles Rumford Walker
The National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners (NCDPP) and the League of Professionals
The Intellectual Disease
Chapter 3. Radical Modernists
In Defense of Literature
Other Dissident Writers and Critics on the Left: James T. Farrell, F. W. Dupee, Edmund Wilson
The Appeal of Trotskyism
Part II REVOLUTIONARY INTELLECTUALS
Chapter 4. Philosophers and Revolutionists
The Non-Partisan Labor Defense Committee (NPLD) and the American Workers Party
Party Factionalism and the “French Turn”
The Eastman Heresies
Marxism and Pragmatism
Chapter 5. The Moscow Trials
The American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky
The Hearings in Mexico
Marxist Cultural Renaissance
The Ambiguities of Anti-Stalinism
Twilight of the Thirties
Chapter 6. Cannonites and Shachtmanites
Party Leaders and Party Politics
Portrait: James P. Cannon
Portrait: Max Shachtman
James Burnham: From Neo-Thomism to Trotskyism
Schism
Chapter 7. The Second Imperialist War
The Enigma of World War II
Dwight Macdonald: From Trotskyism to Anarcho-Pacifism
Meyer Schapiro: Socialist Internationalist
The Politics of Literary Criticism
Chapter 8. The New York Intellectuals in Fiction
Literature and Ideology
From Acquiescence to Antiradicalism
Politics and the Novel
A Revolutionary Novelist in Crisis
Part III THE GREAT RETREAT
Chapter 9. Apostates and True Believers
“Red Fascism”
The Psychology of Apostasy
The Iron Cage of Orthodoxy
Chapter 10. The Cul-de-Sac of Social Democracy
Portrait: Irving Howe
The “Socialist Wing of the West”
Portrait: Harvey Swados
The Ambiguous Legacy
Chapter 11. The Bitter Fruits of Anticommunism
Cold War II
Portrait: Irving Kristol
Portraits: Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter
The Ideologists of Antiradicalism
Epilogue. Marxism and Intellectuals in the United States
Notes
Index
A section of photographs follows page 192.
Preface to the Thirtieth Anniversary Edition
I. THE PRESENT OF THE PAST
After thirty years, the history of the New York intellectuals has come back to visit in a curiously unforeseen manner.1 Our contemporary cultural landscape has become a magnet for refracted and contradictory appropriations of ideas and experiences from this older politicocultural tradition. The events of the past feel as if they have been shot forward, bounced off accounts written up in later decades, and then seized by writers and intellectuals of the present as pertinent to our own time. Inexplicably, the emerging America of terror, tweets, and Trump has become a strange new homeland for the famous circle that began as old-fashioned “committed writers,” one that evolved from the Great Depression to the New Left, blew apart during the backlash against the 1960s, and finally attained an afterlife in which assorted narratives were assembled. What is the reason for our choosing to absorb elements of this considerably concocted past in the various ways that we are?
Even more startling, these incoming references and invocations are embraced by intellectuals who crisscross the political, cultural, and generational spectrum of the present. The New Yorker and the New York Review Books, periodicals of the mainstream liberal intelligentsia, serve as the primary memory industry for the fabled group. In their pages, Louis Menand and Edward Mendelson have produced a steady stream of retrospectives about canonical figures such as Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, Alfred Kazin, and Edmund Wilson. Reprints of collections of their classic essays and books have appeared in tandem with these publications.
Yet the topic is equally the obsession of deradicalized or deradicalizing literati of the moment, several of whom are chastened veterans of the 1960s student Left, such as Paul Berman and Mitchell Cohen. They uphold aspects of this earlier political history, sometimes as personal vindications for their current views and perhaps as model recovery narratives from a onetime Marxism. In contrast, militant activists—some up-and-coming radicals such as Corey Robin and Bhaskar Sunkara—champion different facets of the legacy as exemplars of resistance and rebellion.
Many of the historical allusions, appropriations, and reconsiderations, not always accurate or fully understood, are mainly extracted from the repertory of the New York intellectuals’ “Greatest Hits.” These are the episodes that were widely debated in the late twentieth century when the original movement was dying and a lot of last-minute score settling was under way. Some of the most popular are the interminable arguments over ownership rights for George Orwell’s anti-Soviet yet prosocialist politics; the antinomies of Hannah Arendt’s views on totalitarianism and Zionism; and the validity of the “New Liberalism” and “Vital Center” renunciation of a utopian future for acceptance of an ongoing present. Yet there are also signs that individuals and publications on today’s far Left are suggestively embracing some of the less-exalted Marxist components of the tradition, ones nearly erased in the retrospectives of the 1980s.
The most refreshing and hopeful citations of these customarily shunned elements are to be discovered among the young radical intellectuals who edit journals such as N + 1 and Jacobin. Here one finds very positive references to the Marxism of the early Partisan Review, and these two magazines in particular have ties to the Verso publishing house of New Left Review, a journal famously inspired by Isaac Deutscher’s neo-Trotskyism.2 Jacobin, in fact, is named in honor of the classic The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938), by the Afro-Trinidadian revolutionary C. L. R. James. Not only do James’s political life and literary work originate in the very milieu of 1930s Marxist anti-Stalinism that is critical to what is most attractive and relevant in the legacy, but James’s later career continued to embody the liberatory potential of that tradition. This homology is often missed by those who read the history of the New York intellectuals through the prism of Cold War liberalism.
How do we explain this multifaceted persistence of the past? Why do certain aspects of the political and cultural activity undergone by the New York intellectuals feel so timely to so many different people—as if they matter now? As far back as 1986, historian James B. Gilbert, himself the author of a classic study about the Partisan Review, declared the appearance of a fresh crop of surveys and memoirs to render the subject as “the new burnt-over district of American cultural history.”3 Nonetheless, for decades the experience continued to be critiqued, skewered, sentimentalized, falsified, idealized, homogenized, delegitimized, and caricatured. It was even kitschified in one famous instance, when Woody Allen’s character Alvy Singer observed in the 1975 film Annie Hall: “I heard that Commentary and Dissent had merged and formed Dysentery.”4
Yet, over fifteen years into the new millennium, at a point when books like Sidney Hook’s Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation (1933), Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940), Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950), Hannah Aren
dt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), and Dwight Macdonald’s The Root Is Man: Two Essays in Politics (1953) should feel as dated as a Golden Oldie, why do episodes from times of yore resonate in ambiguously contemporaneous ways?
II. SLOUCHING TOWARD APOSTASY
Few transformations in the political alignment of writers are so supercharged with conceptual ideas from so many disciplines as the wrenching conversion that produced the unique identity of the New York intellectuals. And hardly any have attracted a comparable degree of sustained attention from academics and journalists. To be sure, there was plenty of good material in the legendary makeover of the Marxist anti-Stalinists of Manhattan, especially since there was heterogeneity in each phase. That is, even as the core of the original milieu mostly stayed together, the movement itself metamorphosed into a binary star system with a fundamentally different sun. Before World War II, that bright center was revolutionary Marxism, and afterward it was liberal anticommunism. But not all planets were ever of the same size or had the same distance.
Only a small part of the explanation for today’s fascination with this phenomenon can be due to a pining among readers and scholars for the time when Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe stood like colossi on the covers and front pages of leading intellectual publications. They and others associated with the tradition are still read; but as the guardians of cultural distinctions between what is high and low, major and minor, their appeal has waned. It is a political pining that mainly exists, and in some instances this is for a safe haven from the challenges of the young and the intransigent, or perhaps for an arsenal of tested intellectual weapons to fend them off. In either case, one is talking about a one-way ticket back to the dream of a secure past.
This nostalgia for a New York Family Reunion Tour is frequently found among those politicized intellectuals who consider themselves liberals but stand on many concrete issues in contrast to the young Marxists of N + 1 and Jacobin, activists who see some issues very differently in the tradition. Due to the hot-button nature of controversies about Israel, a moment of dramatic disparity might be found in the events of July 2014. To categorically oppose Israeli state policy in Gaza, N + 1 editor Benjamin Kunkel and Jacobin contributing editor Corey Robin lay down in the street in front of the Israeli Mission to the United Nations in midtown Manhattan, for which they were arrested.5 Meanwhile, the mostly “Liberal Hawks” in the New Republic ran an essay called “Israel’s Deadly Invasion of Gaza Is Morally Justified” by a young admirer of Paul Berman.6
