The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)
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Alan Wald, August 2016
NOTES
1. Although this book follows the style of the University of North Carolina Press in not capitalizing “intellectuals” unless it is part of a title, I have no objection to capitalization. The point is that the phrase refers to a particular group (with some debate about affiliations), but not all intellectuals associated with New York.
2. A good overview of the return of a left-wing Marxism to U.S. intellectual life can be found in Timothy Shenk, “Thomas Piketty and Millennial Marxists on the Scourge of Inequality,” Nation, 14 April 2014, https://www.thenation.com/article/thomas-piketty-and-millennial-marxists-scourge-inequality/.
3. James B. Gilbert, review of Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World,” Nation 135 (26 April 1986): 589.
4. Cited in Benjamin Baint, Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left into the Neoconservative Right (New York: Public Affairs, 2010), 73.
5. See the article by Batya Ungar-Sargon, “Twenty-Four Arrested in Protest against Israel’s Gaza Campaign,” http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/180812/24-arrested-in-protest-against-israels-gaza-campaign.
6. https://newrepublic.com/article/118788/israels-war-gaza-morally-justified.
7. See the 10 December 2014 essay in Haaretz, “Exodus from the New Republic: What Will It Mean for Jewish Thought?,” http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/news/1.631038.
8. Yivo Institute, “Interview with Adam Kirsch,” https://yivo.org/interview-with-adam-kirsch-new-york-intellectuals-revisited.
9. Damon Linker, “Leon Wieseltier: The Last of the New York Intellectuals,” The Week, 8 December 2014, http://theweek.com/articles/441724/leon-wieseltier-last-new-york-intellectuals Wieseltier published an essay on Gaza supporting the invasion but expressing dismay over the lack of humanitarian concern for civilians (https://newrepublic.com/article/118986/leon-wieseltier-israel-and-gaza-just-and-unjust-war).
10. Michael Walzer, “Can There Be a Decent Left?,” Dissent 49, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 19–23.
11. A key document of deradicalization, the Euston Manifesto of 2006, appeared a few years later, mainly authored by former British Trotskyist Norman Geras (1943-2013) and signed by Walzer, who was himself not a supporter of the invasion. It was reproduced on the Dissent website (https://www.dissentmagazine.org/wp-content/files_mf/1390330362d5Euston.pdf).
12. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm.
13. See my review essay “Reaching for Revolution” in Against the Current 179 (November–December 2015): 25–29.
14. The title of a 1997 memoir of Greenwich Village in the 1950s by Anatole Broyard.
15. I recently published an assessment: “Between the Power and the Dream,” Against the Current 178 (September–October 2015): 41–44.
16. There have been several well-documented refutations, but among the most cited is Bill King’s 2004 “Neoconservatives and Trotskyists,” http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0304/0304neocontrotp1.htm.
17. See Nathan Abrams, Norman Podhoretz and Commentary Magazine: The Rise and Fall of the Neo-Cons (New York: Continuum, 2010), 31.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the following libraries for assistance and in some cases for permission to quote from letters and manuscripts: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University; Boston Public Library; Butler Library, Columbia University; Charles Patterson Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania; Frank Melville, Jr. Memorial Library, State University of New York at Stony Brook; Guy W. Bailey Library, University of Vermont; Harvard University Records Office; Haverford College Library; Hoover Institute, Stanford University; Houghton Library, Harvard University; Humanities Research Center, University of Texas; Labadie Collection, University of Michigan; Leon Trotsky Institute, Grenoble, France; Library of Congress; Library of Social History, New York City; Middlebury College Library; Mills College Library; Museum of Social Science, Paris; Northwestern University Library; Tamiment Library, New York University; Tufts University Library; University of California, Los Angeles, Research Library; University of Delaware Library; University of Illinois Library; University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Library; University of Oregon Library; University of Tennessee Library; University of Washington Library; Wisconsin State Historical Society; Yale University Library. The following individuals generously gave me access to their private collections: Daniel Aaron, Cambridge, Massachusetts; George Breitman, New York City; Robert Gorham Davis, Cambridge, Massachusetts; James T. Farrell, New York City; Albert Glotzer, New York City; Walter Lippmann, Los Angeles; and George Novack, New York City. I appreciate the assistance of Cassandra Johnson in obtaining and allowing me to use photographs from the Sylvia Salmi Collection.
The following people participated in personal interviews, many of them tape-recorded: Lionel Abel; Sherry Abel; Nathan Adler; John Archer; Erwin Bauer; Estar Bauer; David Bazelon; Irving Beinin; Michael Blankfort; Dorothy Breitman; George Breitman; Alexander Buchman; Nicholas Calas; Joel Carmichael; Noam Chomsky; Phil Clark; Bert Cochran; Malcolm Cowley; Charles Curtiss; Lillian Curtiss; Hope Hale Davis; Robert Gorham Davis; Farrell Dobbs; Ross Dowson; Hal Draper; F. W. Dupee; John Dwyer; Dorothy Eisner; James T. Farrell; Cleo Ferguson; Leslie Fiedler; Pauline Firth; Max Geldman; Emanuel Geltman; Milton Genecin; Tybie Genecin; Martin Glaberman; Frank Glass; Nathan Glazer; Albert Glotzer; Maggie Glotzer; Walter Goldwater; Sam Gordon; James Gotesky; Barbara Gray; Clement Greenberg; Horace Gregory; Al Hansen; Joseph Hansen; Reba Hansen; Elinor Rice Hays; David Herreshoff; Davis Herron; Elsa-Ruth Herron; Helen Hirschberg; Rod Holt; Irving Howe; Louis Jacobs; Sarah Jacobs; Julius Jacobson; Phyllis Jacobson; DeMila Jenner; Matthew Josephson; Alfred Kazin; Almeda Kirsch; Stanley Kunitz; Suzanne La Follette; Joe Lee; Morris Lewit; Sylvia Lewit; Robert Littman; Ethel Lobman; Frank Lovell; Mary McCarthy; Dwight Macdonald; John McDonald; Ernest Mandel; Felix Morrow; George Novack; George Perle; William Phillips; Hugo Rasmussen; Harry Ring; Harry Roskolenko; Muriel Rukeyser; Edward Sagaran; Sylvia Salmi; Irving Sanes; Meyer Schapiro; Morris U. Schappes; Ralph Schoenman; Philip Selznick; Paul N. Siegel; Donald Slaiman; Ray Sparrow; Bette Swados; Virgil Thomson; Jean Tussey; Doris VanZleer; Adelaide Walker; Beatrice Warren; Jac Wasserman; Stan Weir; Myra Tanner Weiss; George Weissman; B. J. Widick; Bernard Wolfe.
The following people shared information with me through correspondence and phone conversations: Herbert Aptheker; David Aronson; Mary Anne Ashley; Carleton Beals; Julian Behrstock; Jeanna Belkin; Daniel Bell; Saul Bellow; Louis Berg; Shirley Biagi; Earle Birney; Peter Bloch; Edgar Branch; Cleanth Brooks; Pierre Broué; Spencer Brown; Stanley Brown; James Burnham; Grace Carlson; Eleanor Clark; Sylvia Cohen; Jack Conroy; Lewis Coser; Alex P. Daspit; Peter Davis; Hugo DeWar; Caroline Durrieux; Ernest Erber; Clifton Fadiman; Lewis Feuer; Leona Finestone; Jack Fischel; Maxwell Geismar; Jules Geller; Richard Gillam; Tom Glazer; Boyer Gonzales; Rubin Gotesky; Peter Graham; C. Hartley Grattan; Louis Graver; Louis Hacker; Albert Halper; Robert Heilman; Granville Hicks; Fred Hochberg; John Hollander; Eric Homberger; Sidney Hook; Quincy Howe; Carlos Hudson; David Hurwood; Charles Hyneman; Harold Isaacs; Paul Jacobs; Marlene Kadar; Alice Kahler; Garson Kanin; Harold Kaplan; Peter Boris Kauffman; Harvey Klehr; Hilton Kramer; William Krehm; Elinor Langer; Richard La Pan; Melvin J. Lasky; Donald Lazere; William Lewis III; Michael Löwy; Eugene Lyons; Nancy Macdonald; Seymour Martin Lipset; Staughton Lynd; Lois Mahier; Jerre Mangione; Ed Medard; Seymour Melman; Howard Mitchum; Arthur Mizener; Jeanne Morgan; Belle Myer; Helen Neville; Russell Nye; William O’Neill; Shirley Pasholk; Cleo Paturis; Victor Perlo; Nunzio Pernicone; Stanley Plastrik; T. R. Poole; Earl Raab; Philip Rahv; Paul Rasmussen; Jack A. Robbins; Selden Rodman; Richard Rorty; Winifred Rorty; Harold Rosenberg; Richard Rovere; Roscoe J. Saville; Carl Schier; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; Janet Sharistanian; Mark Sharron; Jesse Simons; Anne Solow; Davidson Sommers; George Spir
o; Eliot Stanley; Arne Swabeck; Edith Tarcov; Harvey Teres; Diana Trilling; Lionel Trilling; Martin Upham; Eric Voegelin; Harold Vorhees; Nathan Walker; Robert Penn Warren; Douglas Webb; Allen Weinstein; Morton G. White; Ralph Wickiser; Leonard Wilcox; Calder Willingham; Eleanor Wolff; Virginia Xanthos; Milton Zaslow; Arthur Zipser.
The following people provided various kinds of technical assistance and offered suggestions about the content of the book: Bazel Allen; Jeff Beneke; Anne-Marie Bouché; Edgar Branch; Robert Buckeye; David Cooper; Bill Costley; Harold Cruse; Stuart Dick; John Dobson; Ellen Dunlap; Les Evans; Dianne Feeley; Milton Fisk; Alan Freeman; Marilyn Gagron; Joel Geier; James Gindin; David Hollinger; Jane Holzka; Nancy Johnson; Robert Johnson-Lally; Mark Krupnick; Robert Langston; Paul Le Blanc; Ralph Levitt; Walter Lippmann; Brian Lloyd; S. A. Longstaff; Cleo Paturis; Warner Pflug; Daniel Pope; Eric Poulos; Rodolphe Prager; Paula Rabinowitz; Peter Railton; Gerard Roche; Barbara Shapiro; Mark Shechner; Tony Smith; Frank Thompson; Edward Weber; Neda Westlake; Stephen Whitfield; Brooke Whiting. Joanna Misnik aided with translations. The Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan provided me with two research assistants, Geoff Cummins and William Ferral, who prepared transcriptions of tape-recorded interviews and located library materials. On several occasions I presented the gist of my argument in public symposia, and I received useful criticism from the following respondents: Robert Brenner, John Diggins, Robert Fitrakis, Martin Glaberman, Nathan Huggins, Chris Huxley, Mel Rothenberg, Wally Seccombe, and Michael Wreszin.
The funding enabling this research was provided by a 1982–83 fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, several contributions from the Robert H. Langston Foundation, and a Research Grant from the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan.
Portions of the manuscript were criticized at various times by Jeff Beneke, Paul Breines, George Breitman, Howard Brick, Paul Buhle, Neil Chacker, Robert Gorham Davis, James T. Farrell, David Finkel, Michael Folsom, James Gilbert, Albert Glotzer, Laurence Goldstein, Elinor Rice Hays, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Julius Jacobson, Phyllis Jacobson, Berta Langston, Ralph Levitt, Michael Löwy, Ernest Mandel, John McDonald, Leonard Michaels, Felix Morrow, George Novack, David Reid, Irving Sanes, Meyer Schapiro; Morris U. Schappes; Mark Shechner, Louis Sinclair, Henry Nash Smith, Diana Trilling, Lionel Trilling, Celia Wald, Haskell Wald, Douglas Webb, B. J. Widick, and Bernard Wolfe. My debt for such generous assistance is enormous, but I wish to emphasize that none of these individuals is responsible for the opinions expressed in this book. In addition, I wish to give particular mention to Patrick Quinn, who selflessly devoted many hours to carefully scrutinizing every aspect of my work; Berta Langston, whose unflagging moral support has been indispensable; George Breitman, who generously gave me the benefit of his unparalleled knowledge of the history of American Trotskyism; James T. Farrell, who sent me informative and encouraging letters on this subject nearly once a week from 1974 until his death; and Ernest Mandel, whose writings on socialist theory and practice have helped to guide me through the maze of contemporary politics since the late 1960s. At the University of North Carolina Press, I again had the privilege of benefiting from the efficiency and reliability of Iris Tillman Hill, and I am grateful to Sandra Eisdorfer for her work on the manuscript.
This book challenges the conventional wisdom established through a plethora of memoirs and earlier studies about a crucial episode in contemporary intellectual history; its publication is bound to produce controversy, and its author is likely to be scrutinized with some ruthlessness in at least two areas. First, his accuracy will be questioned by those of his subjects still alive, as well as by their friends and associates. Such questioning, however, is welcome; while I have gone to unusual lengths to check and recheck facts with numerous participants in the events discussed, as well as with a variety of scholars, I will happily acknowledge any legitimate corrections of the historical record. I apologize in advance for any errors that remain.
Second, those who disagree with the central argument of the book may attempt to disparage or dismiss the author’s perspective by stamping it with a simplistic political label that elides the subtlety of the argument. While I have tried to be unambiguous about my purpose and point of view in preparing this study, I especially regret that there is inadequate space to develop concretely the political perspective I espouse as an alternative to that of the social democratic figures in the closing chapters, Irving Howe and Harvey Swados, for whom I obviously have more sympathy than I have for the neoconservatives to their right. Readers who recognize the insufficiency of labels will find further elaborations of my general perspective in two essays appearing just as this book goes to press: Robert Brenner’s “The Paradox of Social Democracy: The American Case,” in The Year Left (1985), pp. 32–86, and Ralph Miliband and Marcel Liebman’s “Beyond Social Democracy,” in Socialist Register 1985/86: Social Democracy and After (1986), pp. 476–89. Noam Chomsky’s Turning the Tide (1985) and Mike Davis’s Prisoners of the American Dream (1986) are additional sources. Moreover, for assistance in formulating my general approach to the subject of politics and intellectuals, as well as for providing models in the application of contemporary Marxist theory, I wish to acknowledge the considerable influence of Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism (1976) and Arguments within English Marxism (1980), and Michael Löwy’s chapter “Towards a Sociology of the Anticapitalist Intelligentsia,” in Georg Lukács: From Romanticism to Bolshevism (1979).
A Note on the Text and the Illustrations
An important obstacle to the study of political culture in the United States of the 1930s and after is the mystification of the terms “Communism” and “communism.” The capitalization or noncapitalization of the letter “c” makes a qualitative difference in the meaning of the term, to which the reader must be ever alert.
In 1967, thirty years after the break of Partisan Review magazine from the Communist Party, Philip Rahv, the journal’s central editor, felt the need to clarify in a public symposium in Commentary that “it was not communism, in its doctrinal formulations by Marx, or even Lenin, that we broke away from, but the Soviet embodiment of it known as Stalinism.” In other words, Rahv and his circle broke from Communism (by which they meant the official Soviet-dominated movement, which they characterized as Stalinist), but for some years remained communists (by which they meant general adherents of the revolutionary ideas of Marx and Lenin).
Following Rahv, this study uses the terms “Communism” and “Communists” (uppercase “C”) to refer to official doctrines and adherents of parties of the Soviet-dominated Third International, which after the late 1920s can be characterized as “Stalinist.” In contrast, “communism” and “communists” (lowercase “c”) refer to doctrines and adherents of the broader movement growing out of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, which includes not only the Stalinist current but also Trotskyists (the most important for this book), Bukharinists, and council communists.
Since one aim of this book is to vivify an important politicocultural experience as expressed through the lives and work of a talented group of intellectuals, a portfolio of photographs has been inserted in the text. Most of these photographs come from the private collection of the late Sylvia Salmi, although a few are from libraries and individuals who responded to requests. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the photographs were undated and in most cases it was impossible to offer a sound guess of the year in which they were taken or to identify the exact setting.
Even though the photographs exhibit the men and women at various stages of their lives, from youth to old age, it was decided to present the photographs roughly in order of the appearance of the individuals in the narrative. In some cases, there are two photographs that show the man or woman at different ages. The appearance or nonappearance of photographs of individuals, or the number of pictures printed, is not necessarily an indication of the centrality of the person to the narrative; the decision to include photographs was also base
d on the availability of the photographs and their quality.
The New York Intellectuals
You think you are doing the pushing, But it is you who are being pushed.
—Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust
Introduction. Political Amnesia
Today’s younger generation of intellectuals consists of the late arrivals to the generation that made its appearance as American “Marxists” and which has lived its entire life with Marxism (including, of course, anti-Marxism) as its central theme and interest. Without Marxism this generation is not only dull—it is nothing. It does not exist.
—Harold Rosenberg, “Death in the Wilderness,” 19651
In late 1933, Sidney Hook, a thirty-one-year-old assistant professor of philosophy at New York University, wrote the political program for a new revolutionary communist party. The organization that would be launched in just a few months was called the American Workers Party. Hook, widely believed to be the only Marxist professor in the United States at the time and one of the few Jews to hold a university appointment in the humanities, thought that the need for such a new party was exigent. “Despite its best revolutionary intentions,” his program declared, “the Communist Party has neither advanced the cause of revolutionizing the situation of the masses, nor has it done anything to advance the immediate interests of the producing classes.” In short, the Communist Party “has brought disgrace to the term Communism.”2 Hook presented additional motivation for the new party in an article published shortly thereafter in the Marxist journal Modern Monthly, edited by V. F. Calverton: “It seems to me that only communism can save the world from its social evils; it seems to me to be just as evident that the official Communist Party or any of its subsidiary organizations cannot be regarded as a Marxist, critical, or revolutionary party today. The conclusion is, therefore, clear: the time has come to build a new communist party and a new communist international.”3