by Alan M Wald
It was by successive stages that the New York intellectuals moved from a distinct variety of communism in the 1930s to a distinct variety of liberalism by the 1950s; from advocating socialist revolution to endorsing American capitalism. At the beginning, most of the intellectuals were anti-Stalinist communists; by the mid-1950s, most had become anticommunist liberals. Nonetheless, individuals who were not members of the original core joined the group at various points, but the newcomers were assimilated into a group drifting in a conservative direction.
This shift—in which certain doctrinal elements appear to remain the same in form while being utterly transformed in content—represents the most significant bond between such disparate members of the group as Lionel Trilling, a devout academic of immigrant Jewish parentage, who was markedly evasive in his political pronouncements, and James T. Farrell, an Irish-American, generally hostile to academe, who was at times abrasive in his political declarations. In fact, the appellation “New York intellectuals” began as a somewhat mystifying euphemism for a group originally called the “Trotskyist intellectuals.”21 After all, many in the group came from cities other than New York (James T. Farrell, Saul Bellow, and Isaac Rosenfeld were all from Chicago), while others, such as Benjamin Stolberg and James Rorty, would be classified by most cultural historians as journalists rather than intellectuals. Historically, the phrase “New York intellectuals” was episodically used to refer to nonparty Trotskyist sympathizers and allies during the 1930s and early 1940s. By the 1950s, when it had wider currency, the point of reference was those former revolutionaries who had achieved some reputation in New York intellectual journals, combined with newer friends and associates who identified in various ways with that former experience. Thus Max Eastman, a crucial figure in the formation of the anti-Stalinist left, is never considered a “New York intellectual,” while Alfred Kazin, who was only peripherally involved in the 1930s and never sympathetic to Trotskyism, is sometimes mistaken as a representative figure.
One reason for the ascendancy of the term “New York intellectuals” has to do with their changing status. During the 1930s, when they coalesced as a distinct grouping, most had not gained the prominence that they acquired in later years. Sidney Hook, James T. Farrell, Louis Hacker, Lewis Corey, and Edmund Wilson enjoyed national reputations at the time, but Lionel Trilling did not publish his first book, Matthew Arnold, until 1939, and Meyer Schapiro, Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy, Harold Rosenberg, Lionel Abel, among others, had yet to publish a book. Fame and influence came only after they had excised their anti-Stalinism from the context of revolutionary Marxism and quasi-Trotskyist politics in which it had been fashioned. It was precisely this political transformation that constituted the binding moment in their evolution and signaled their entrance as a significant force in American intellectual history. From that time on, claims of being an “anti-Stalinist” left were inauthentic, a rhetorical ploy to gain a hearing in liberal and left-wing circles. With only a few exceptions, these intellectuals had become anticommunist liberals who were embarked on an increasingly right-wing trajectory.
Among other purposes, this book tries to explain the social context in which this transformation occurred. The Moscow trials and the relentless growth of fascism caused some in the group to become demoralized in the late 1930s. Then came World War II, whose complex nature disoriented many of the intellectuals and caused some to repudiate long-held positions. Finally, the postwar environment—filled with disappointments and fear as well as opportunities for new careers in publishing and academe—precipitated the final stage in their collective change of political allegiance. Remarkably, even though most individuals made this shift in a staggered sequence—each denouncing the others for their apostasies before themselves following suit—they remained a coherent, distinguishable group. Despite broad variations in political orientation, ranging from the affiliation of Max Eastman and James Burnham with National Review to the social democratic views of Irving Howe, Meyer Schapiro, and others grouped around Dissent, the New York intellectuals’ tradition had become such a clearly demarcated ideological force that Norman Podhoretz and others of a younger generation could assimilate it secondhand and perpetuate some of its features in the decades that followed World War II.
A book that undertakes such a vast subject as the political and cultural implications of the rise and decline of anti-Stalinist Marxism among intellectuals in New York between the early 1930s and the 1980s must be clear about its focus, priorities, and limitations. Among the questions explored in this book are the following: What was the nature of theories of Stalinism and anti-Stalinism formulated by various New York intellectuals? Did these theories change? What connections existed between evolving political attitudes and the creative practice of the intellectuals? What were the precise political engagements of the intellectuals, especially in regard to Marxist political organizations? Was the project of creating an anti-Stalinist left doomed from the start, viable only at a certain historical moment and for certain limited purposes? Has it properly attained its logical culmination in the existing worldviews that exist today around Partisan Review, Dissent, and Commentary?.
Many individuals, famous and forgotten, wend their way across the pages of this book, and numerous subsidiary issues receive consideration. Therefore, it is impossible to provide complete biographical and critical studies of all the intellectuals included; I have focused instead on those aspects of their careers that are most relevant or that have received inaccurate or inadequate attention from other scholars. Thus, even though the chapters of the book proceed chronologically, I sometimes return to earlier episodes or jump forward to later ones in order to present the overall shape of an intellectual career. The book’s primary objective is to explain the political trajectory of creative, independent-minded literary intellectuals who attempted to develop and sustain an anti-Stalinist Marxism. Consequently, I have not emphasized the impact of anti-Stalinist Marxism in areas such as the trade union movement, nor have I dealt extensively with those components of the anti-Stalinist left that were a step removed from the Trotskyist-influenced core that evolved into the New York intellectuals (such as the Bukharinist theoreticians Will Herberg and Bertram D. Wolfe, and council communists such as Paul Mattick).
To many members of the current generation, the questions addressed above are still burning ones. I hope that this book will enable readers to see the dilemma whole, in terms of both the strengths and weaknesses of its subjects. Perhaps it can help resolve the tension that many contemporary radicals feel between their anticapitalist and anti-Stalinist predilections. It may also assist efforts to avoid the sorts of dogmatically pure doctrinairism and the insufferable self-righteousness characteristic of all too many politically minded people both on the left and on the right. Perhaps this book will also help allay the process of deradicalization that eventually overtakes almost all whose lives are based in institutions of teaching, scholarship, and publishing during conservative periods.
At the same time, this book undertakes other tasks as well. It examines many intriguing people, ranging from the lesser-known Herbert Solow to the more famous Hook and Howe; it considers some psychological dimensions of deradicalization; it discusses a variety of literary and cultural issues; and it analyzes the antinomies of revolutionary internationalism and Jewish identity. In order to integrate all these themes into a coherent narrative, it was necessary to overcome a major obstacle to reconstructing the lives, activities, and values of the creators and perpetuators of the New York intellectual tradition: the politics of memory.
Some may consider the expression “the politics of memory” a euphemism for lying about one’s past actions and motivations, but the phenomenon is more complex. Individuals sometimes perceive or remember facets of their lives inaccurately for psychological or emotional reasons beyond their conscious control. The frequent sublimation of the personal into the political is one of the themes of Daniel Aaron’s essay, “The Treachery of Recollection,” written a
fter the completion of his well-known study, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (1961). Aaron came away from his research with the profound conviction that “some writers joined or broke from the [Communist] Movement because of their wives, or for careerist reasons, or because they read their own inner disturbances into the realities of social dislocation. To put it another way, the subject matter of politics . . . was often the vehicle for non-political emotions and compulsions.”22 Yet when interviewed or in writing their memoirs, intellectuals were rarely candid enough to offer such “low” motives as explanations for their lofty political commitments and breaks.
Another variant of the politics of memory was described by Dwight Macdonald and Philip Rahv in the early 1940s when they noticed that a growing number of profoundly disillusioned ex-Marxist intellectuals, such as James Burnham, were writing articles and books in which they fundamentally misrepresented doctrines for which they had been articulate exponents only a few years before. The two Partisan Review editors diagnosed this phenomenon as “‘cultural amnesia’ . . . in which the victim, as the result of some great shock, simply cannot recall the most elementary truths from his past experience.”23
A third example of what might more accurately be called “political amnesia” occurs when an individual, sometimes without the slightest calculation, attempts for pragmatic reasons to assign a spurious consistency to his or her political career by focusing on secondary aspects of their earlier thought and omitting, minimizing, or reinterpreting what was primary. In the early 1950s Floyd Dell recalled his feelings about the deceptive manner in which his old Masses comrade Max Eastman had reneged on his opposition to World War I, just as the Masses was suppressed by the U.S. government and the Liberator was proposed as a replacement: “You quoted . . . some earlier editorial writings to show that your recent views [in support of World War I] had been expressed earlier. . . . your sincerity was not doubted, but it was felt that there was a change, fortunate for all of us, since it permitted the continuation of the magazine under a new name.”24
In the course of research for this book, I found that the most common manifestations of the politics of memory involved a modification of the past to validate some present political conviction. For example, a number of ex-revolutionary Marxists of Jewish back ground had become pro-Israel after 1948 and had substituted either Zionism or some other form of Jewish ethnic identity for the revolutionary internationalism to which they had once adhered. They tended to recall the Marxist movement of the 1930s, including not just the Communists but also the Trotskyists, as being almost “anti-Semitic.” They now believed that the semiofficial policy of those movements denied Jews a cultural identity, even though they championed such identities for Irish-Americans and Afro-Americans. Moreover, they recalled that the Trotskyist movement paid little attention to Hitler’s war against the Jews. The fact that many radical Jews assumed non-Jewish names for party or professional reasons is cited as further evidence of a bias against Jewish ethnicity in the movement, and perhaps even a manifestation of Jewish self-hatred: Irving Horenstein became Irving Howe; Joseph Friedman became Joe Carter; Albert Glotzer became Albert Gates; Emanuel Geltman became Emanuel Garrett; Felix Mayorwitz became Felix Morrow; and so on.
On the other hand, veteran radicals who still adhered to some form of internationalism or universalism, or who at least had not adopted any form of Judeocentrism, remembered very differently. For example, they pointed out that Trotsky was among the first to predict that World War II would lead to the extermination of millions of Jews and that it was the Trotskyists alone who mobilized thousands in the streets of New York against German-American Bund activities. Trotskyists, they remembered, had published article after article in their papers and magazines excoriating anti-Semitism and analyzing what was then called “the Jewish question.”25
The point is not that one version of the past is wholly true and the other wholly false; it is that sometimes the past is remembered selectively, in accord with the needs of the ideological outlook one has at a given moment or had at some significant moment in the past. The contemporary cultural historian must try to recreate a whole through the use of all available evidence—documents, publications, and correspondence—as well as a wide range of personal interviews, and not be misled by an affinity or dislike for one or another political person.
For example, understanding the mixed motives of memoirists, not entirely ideological but not free of ideology either, is important in assessing several heated exchanges that have occurred over various aspects of Lionel Trilling’s career. Since her husband’s death, Diana Trilling has been especially active in “correcting” the record to conform with her own recollections. Her exchange with Sidney Hook in the June 1976 issue of Encounter is characteristic. In a memoir of Whittaker Chambers, Hook referred to a lunchtime discussion of the Communist theory of “social fascism” between Lionel Trilling and Chambers. Mrs. Trilling wrote a protest letter denying the possibility of such an encounter, insisting that “Lionel was not at all the kind of person who undertook, as other of our friends did, to argue the theories of political radicalism.” Then followed a bizarre battle of memories between Hook and Diana Trilling, involving a vegetarian restaurant, a 1934 New York City telephone directory, and an item from the New York Times obituary file.26
However, the issue in dispute here may be significant. Mrs. Trilling is attempting, as she has elsewhere, to minimize the degree of anti-Stalinist revolutionary political commitment on the part of herself and her husband, taking advantage of the fact that, because of the passage of time and Lionel’s own cautious temperament, records are scarce, participants in the events are deceased, and some intimates of the Trilling circle are inclined to perpetuate the same questionable image. Hook, who left a much longer public record of his Communist and post-Communist revolutionary activities and has therefore fewer inhibitions in demonstrating that he was not alone in such “youthful indiscretions,” tends to be more forthright about his own involvement. Yet even Hook is susceptible to significant lapses. Although he has carefully documented his break with the Communist Party in early 1933, his memory of the subsequent five or six years of revolutionary communist activity is blurred. For example, he has no recollection at all of signing a 1936 manifesto, “Socialism in Our Time.” This pamphlet, printed by the Trotskyist publishing house, endorses Norman Thomas’s presidential campaign on grounds that are unambiguously revolutionary:
Undoubtedly the struggle for socialism will be a hard-fought battle, for the capitalists will not willingly relinquish their power and privileges to the people. But only by wresting State power from the capitalists can we begin the task of building a new social order. Only by recognizing that the State power is one of the weapons with which the struggle between the two major classes is fought out, can we successfully undertake the transformation of our society.27
A tendency on the part of some of the New York intellectuals to downplay the depth of their radical involvement in order to minimize the extent to which they have reneged on their youthful ideals is elevated to a larger scale in William Phillips’s A Partisan View: Five Decades of the Literary Life (1983). Phillips’s autobiography gives the impression that he and his friends were always more or less liberal socialists who were deceived and manipulated by dishonest Leninists. For example, in describing the extent of his association with the Communist Party, Phillips says that he had first heard about the John Reed Clubs as a left-wing organization in 1934 (the clubs had been established in 1929). He reports that, after joining, he was surprised to learn that the clubs were closely associated with the Communist Party.
Yet the January 1933 issue of the Communist, the theoretical organ of the party, contains a 3,000-word essay by Phillips denouncing the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset as a social fascist backed by Wall Street and a slanderer of the Soviet Union.28 This article would have had to have been written and accepted in 1932, and it is difficult to believe that the Communist’s editor
ial board would have agreed to publish a piece by a person entirely unknown to the movement. It also seems unlikely that Phillips would have made such a submission without some awareness of important party activities among writers, such as those of the New York John Reed Club. Furthermore, the essay indicates that Phillips had been carefully studying the ultraleft “Third Period” political line and trying to apply it to cultural issues. In his memoir he also forgets to mention that his closest collaborator at the time, Philip Rahv, and his wife, Edna, were party members until the mid-1930s.29 It seems likely, in brief, that Phillips had an earlier and more intimate association with the party than he remembers.
Here the politics of memory operates to suggest that Phillips was sufficiently close to the Communists to gain expert inside information yet not close enough so that one is struck by the extreme zigzags in his political career, which in fact there were. A similar process is apparent in his discussion of Trotskyism. He claims that James Burnham, a frequent contributor to and advisory board member of Partisan Review until the 1950s, was only “briefly” a Trotskyist after Partisan Review broke with the Communists in 1936–37.30 In fact, from December 1934 until the spring of 1940, Burnham was one of the top leaders of the Trotskyists, functioning in their three successive organizations: the Workers Party of the United States, the Appeal Group of the Socialist Party, and the Socialist Workers Party. He also coedited the Trotskyist theoretical organ New International during this time and wrote a number of important Trotskyist pamphlets.
As for Phillips’s own Trotskyist associations, it is true that he never joined a Trotskyist organization, but the substantial correspondence with Trotsky from Rahv and Macdonald on behalf of all the members of the Partisan Review editorial board reflects the board’s close political agreement with Trotsky’s International Left Opposition. For example, on 23 August 1937 Macdonald wrote: “[A]ll of us are opponents of Stalinism and committed to a Leninist program of action. We believe in the need for a new party to take the place of the corrupted Comintern.”31 Phillips taught a class sponsored by the Socialist Workers Party as late as 1939.32 That same year, Phillips joined with intellectuals in the Socialist Workers Party to form the League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism, an organization of revolutionary writers and artists inspired by a manifesto issued by Trotsky, André Breton, and Diego Rivera. None of these facts appears in Phillips’s memoir.
