The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  By the time the campaign was launched Rorty had collected some fifty well-known names for the league’s letterhead, including Sherwood Anderson, Newton Arvin, Erskine Caldwell, Robert Cantwell, Lewis Corey, Malcolm Cowley, Kyle Crichton, Countee Cullen, H. W. L. Dana, John Dos Passos, Waldo Frank, Horace Gregory, Granville Hicks, Sidney Hook, Sidney Howard, Langston Hughes, Matthew Josephson, Alfred Kreymborg, Lincoln Steffens, Charles R. Walker, and Edmund Wilson. The league also distributed forty thousand copies of the manifesto Culture and the Crisis (1932), jointly written by Corey, Cowley, Rorty, Hook, and Josephson, and five thousand copies of a leaflet called “Architects and the Crisis.” On 30 October 1930 the league sponsored a public meeting at Cooper Union featuring Earl Browder, Waldo Frank, Cowley, and Rorty; two thousand people attended and another two thousand were turned away for lack of space, although a goodly portion of the attendance consisted of rank-and-file party activists. Members of the league also filled about thirty speaking engagements during the campaign, which was but a fraction of the total requests for speakers.41

  Following the election, an attempt was made to retain the organization as simply the “League of Professionals.” An ambitious program of educational activities was discussed, including publication of pamphlets and a new magazine. A lecture series on “Culture and Capitalism,” which was organized by Rorty and John McDonald, was held in a large room over Chaffard’s French Restaurant on 7th Avenue near 23rd Street. Featured speakers included Hook on philosophy and Meyer Schapiro on art. But the party quickly began to crack down on the independence of the intellectuals, some of whom began to use these occasions to criticize the Communist line that designated all Socialist parties as “social fascist.” This analysis served as the justification for the party’s use of the “United Front from Below” tactic, which meant trying to reach the Socialist ranks by violently denouncing their leadership. Another area of criticism was the party’s advocacy of dual unionism, which meant the construction of “revolutionary” trade unions as rivals to the American Federation of Labor (AFL). A third disagreement was with the party’s slogan, “Self-determination for the Black Belt,” which was based on the belief that there already existed an independent Afro-American nation in states with a heavy concentration of black sharecroppers. These criticisms were met with jeers from party intellectuals and their allies present at the discussions. Then, in the middle of these disputes, a brutally harsh criticism of Hook’s philosophical views appeared in the party theoretical organ, the Communist. Next, the final text of a league pamphlet written by Lewis Corey vanished after Rorty had turned it over to the party for inspection. Corey, whose real name was Louis Fraina, had for some time been regarded with suspicion by the Communists because of his activities as a leader of the party in the early 1920s.42

  The acrimony came to a head following Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany. An emergency meeting of the league was called at which Solow put forward a motion that the league initiate a united front of the entire left against the advance of nazism. This was the Trotskyist line, sharply contrasting with the Communists’ view that the main danger was not fascism but “social fascism,” i.e., social democracy. The motion passed, but, when Rorty led a delegation to the party offices to report the decision, Clarence Hathaway, editor of the Daily Worker and a member of the party’s Politburo, refused to consider the proposal on the grounds that “Solow is a Trotskyist.” Rorty never called another meeting of the league and it simply faded away.43

  The NCDPP met a parallel fate in which Solow played a catalytic role as well. During late 1932 and early 1933 he discussed politics intensely with all activists with whom he came in contact. Now separated from Slesinger, he held court at his Greenwich Village apartment. The explosion in the NCDPP finally occurred at a 28 April 1933 meeting. As with the crisis in the league, the proximity of this date to Hitler’s coming to power is important; but it is also important to consider other aspects of the conflict to recognize that, while the necessity of struggling against fascism was paramount, the dissidents were not solely concerned with that issue nor were they moving away from communism. If exclusive concern with German fascism had been the case, one might be led to the erroneous conclusion that the group had approached the Communist Party seeking an ally against fascism—a position more characteristic of the liberals who would be drawn into the Communists’ Popular Front organizations after 1935 and again during World War II. But in 1933, with only a few exceptions, the intellectuals were dissident communists, not liberal fellow travelers or Socialists. Many, in fact, were like the Trillings, whom Morrow and Novack remembered as being ardent Leninists and Hook recalled as being disdainful of liberals and Socialists.44

  The dissidents offered an explanation for their walkout from the explosive 28 April meeting in a letter dated 8 May 1933, which was signed by Berg, Brenner, Novack, Cohen, Rubin [Diana Trilling], Rice, and Solow. The letter is written from the perspective of individuals who considered themselves partisans in the revolutionary working-class movement against capitalism, but who also had specific criticisms of certain tactics of the major force within that movement, the Communist Party. The letter addressed two major issues: a proposal by Solow and Rorty to organize a united front of all organizations claiming to be antifascist and a resolution by Solow and Cohen calling upon the International Labor Defense to dissociate itself from certain racist statements made by Samuel Liebowitz, the ILD attorney in the Scottsboro case, who had stressed the alleged ignorance and inferiority of the black defendants.

  Faced with a fusillade of abuse from party members and supporters, particularly directed at Solow, to the effect that such proposals were acts of counterrevolutionary sabotage, the group stated that it had come to doubt the possibility of free discussion for “loyal members” of the NCDPP such as themselves. Further, they denied that they had any connection with the Communist League of America (the Trotskyist organization), which was probably true for most of them who knew little about Trotskyism at that point except that it was a bad word in the Communist Party’s lexicon.45

  Solow, however, had lied, for there is no doubt that he was consciously trying to move his circle toward Trotskyism. By September 1933 he had already persuaded Novack to donate money to the Communist League of America after hearing the Trotskyist leaders James P. Cannon and Max Shachtman—and the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera—proclaim the need for a new International when they spoke at Irving Plaza.46 Felix Morrow had been secretly reading the Trotskyist newspaper, the Militant, for some time. Novack clearly recalled Solow as the person most responsible for influencing him toward the Trotskyists, and he believed that this was probably the case with Morrow as well. Before Solow began to work on him, Novack had hardly given the Trotsky-Stalin dispute any serious consideration.47 Solow’s political activity complemented the Trotskyist newspaper, the Militant, which also predicted that the campaign against “social fascism” in Germany would bring disaster, and exposed errors made by the Communist Party in its Scottsboro defense work.

  Finally, on 16 February 1934 Solow’s hard work bore real fruit. The Communist Party, carrying out its line against “social fascism,” violently disrupted a Socialist Party rally at Madison Square Garden organized to protest the Austrian chancellor Dolfus’s armed attack on workers’ houses in Vienna, which were mainly occupied by Austrian Social Democrats. The dissident intellectuals were outraged. Immediately afterward Cohen and John McDonald composed a letter of protest and, with the aggressive help of Rorty and others, gathered twenty-five signatures of writers, intellectuals, and journalists. The open letter articulated three features of left-wing anti-Stalinism that made it politically compatible with certain aspects of Trotskyism: (1) it reaffirmed the partisanship of the signers for the movement of the working class and against capitalism in its fascist and imperialist manifestations; (2) it severely criticized the disruptive tactics of the Communists that tended to produce the opposite of their professed goals; (3) it rejected the reformism of the social democrac
y which, the signers charged, had tended to tolerate rather than struggle against the fascist advances and which had suspicious ties to the status quo as well. The signers were Louis Berg, Will Gruen, Elinor Rice, Robert Ford, James Rorty, Diana Rubin, Louis Grudin, Anita Brenner, Felix Morrow, Elliot E. Cohen, George Novack, Lionel Trilling, Meyer Schapiro, John Dos Passos, Clifton Fadiman, John McDonald, Edmund Wilson, John Chamberlain, Margaret de Silver, George D. Herron, Meyer Girschick, Gilbert C. Converse, Samuel Middlebrook, Robert Morss Lovett, and John Henry Hammond, Jr.48

  The New Masses responded by singling out John Dos Passos and urging him to free himself from the “queer company” of the other signers, many of whom were believed to be troublemakers. The New Masses editors began their response with a didactic treatise on the “United Front from Below” strategy and ended by praising Dos Passos’s past activities. The editors also denounced Fadiman for having a “ritzy” office (he was an editor at Simon and Schuster), Chamberlain for hiding in the sanctuary of the New York Times (he was daily book reviewer for the Times), and Berg, Cohen, Brenner, and Edmund Wilson for having “scarcely a nodding acquaintance with the masses.” They dressed their contempt for the remaining signatories in metaphor:

  As to the rest, those vacillating intellectuals who overnight have become metamorphosed from their academic cocoons into revolutionary butterflies, flit dizzyingly from Zionism to internationalism, from Lovestoneism to Trotskyism and Musteism. When the crucial moment comes they will no doubt flee in an attempt to save their beautiful multicolored wings from the fire.49

  In the 20 March issue of the New Masses, a letter of response from Anita Brenner was printed, although others from Berg and Novack were not. In her letter Brenner emphasized that individuals, not a group, had signed the open letter. She argued that the signers had all been active sympathizers of the revolutionary movement and therefore were justified in raising criticisms, and she polemicized against the “United Front from Below” policy, the disruptive effects of which she claimed to have personally witnessed in Spain.50 In a full-page answer to Brenner, the editors of the New Masses justified their previous position while making certain tactical adjustments. This time they affirmed that the Communist Party would be quite pleased to receive the cooperation of some of the open letter’s signers such as Robert Morss Lovett, Meyer Schapiro, and John Chamberlain. Others, however, were in a different category:

  Edmund Wilson has formed an unholy alliance with the “shady” Max Eastman [already known as a partisan of Trotsky] and the still “shadier” [V.F.] Calverton [editor of Modern Monthly, an independent Marxist journal] and Hook. James Rorty is a member of the so-called American Workers Party [just formed by A. J. Muste], an organization which at the present time is trying to split the ranks of the working class.

  As for Brenner and the others, the editors promised that the question of their sincerity would be probed in a future article.51

  The promise was fulfilled in a New Masses editorial of 27 March entitled “Unintelligent Fanaticism.” In it the editors sneered at the vacillating records of such intellectuals as Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, and Sherwood Anderson, who had moved from anticapitalism to pro-Rooseveltism in the recent period. The editors admitted that, in its own “eagerness for allies from all disaffected sections of society,” the New Masses had often erred in being “insufficiently discriminating” and too ready to hail the tenuous leftward steps of prominent intellectuals, who often turned out to be detrimental to the movement. Many of the signers of the open letter were only lesser-known examples of this dangerously deceptive type:

  On a microscopic scale we see the same class laws operating in the case of some of the signers of the Open Letter to the Communist Party protesting the Madison Square Garden events. We refer to the Gruens, the Grudins, the Girschicks, and particularly to the erstwhile Menorah Journal group— these loop-de-loopers from Zionism to “internationalism”: the Brenners, the Cohens, the Bergs, the Novacks, the Trillings, the Morrows, the Rubins.. .. They now imagine themselves to be Trotzkyites, hence the declared enemies of the Communist Party use them for what they are worth. (It is rather significant that individuals like Sidney Hook and Herbert Solow, their intimates, who have already declared themselves Trotzkyites or Nationalist “Communists” [a reference to the American Workers Party], desisted from signing the letter.)

  According to the New Masses editors, the above noted individuals were unhappy with capitalism yet unwilling to make sacrifices, so they ultimately had to turn to creating an unreal brand of revolutionary politics of their own. Referring to a letter that they had received from Dos Passos, confirming his sympathy for the open-letter protest, the editors of the New Masses acknowledged that he too had succumbed to the disease—although they expressed the hope that, like Maxim Gorky, Dos Passos might eventually return to the revolutionary fold. In the meantime, they optimistically concluded that, with the world in revolution and the American Communist Party recruiting at the rate of 1,500 members a month, the vacillations of a small group of intellectuals should not be taken too seriously.52

  The editorial was reinforced by a letter from Isidor Schneider, who had once contributed to the Menorah Journal but was now a leading Communist writer. Schneider charged that the core of the signers of the open letter had originally come to the workers’ movement with an elitist attitude. They had by and large spent less than a year on the periphery of the movement, then raised criticisms in the NCDPP and quit the organization when it was pointed out that these criticisms resembled those of the Trotskyists. Now they had set about organizing a rival committee, the Non-Partisan Labor Defense, which could only have a splitting effect.53

  While the more activist-oriented of the dissident communists— Solow, Morrow, Novack, Hook, Berg, and Walker—did become involved in new revolutionary socialist organizations, Lionel Trilling’s evolution left its mark in several magazines, including the Modern Monthly, V. F. Calverton’s independent Marxist journal. In the 1920s, Trilling had warned the Jewish novelist against parochialism; in 1931 he urged the left-wing novelist to “make at least part of his function to be a propagandist for political decency and against obscurantism if he is to continue to have any function at all.”54 In the early 1930s, during which he came as close as he ever would to collaborating with a self-proclaimed Marxist organization, Trilling had become painfully aware of the contradictions, antinomies, and dilemmas faced by himself and his associates:

  Today, when so many of our middle-class intellectuals are swinging left, it is well to remember that the position of the bourgeois intellectual in any proletarian movement has always been an anomalous and precarious one. However sincere he may be, the mind of the intellectual is apt to be overlaid with conflicting values so that it is impossible for him to be sure of his position; having so many values, he is likely to betray one to defend others. In this dilemma the recognition of his own training and nature can be his only safeguard against confusion and eventual missteps.55

  THE INTELLECTUAL DISEASE

  “The Unpossessed,” Murray Kempton wrote twenty years after the open letter protesting the disruption of the Madison Square Garden rally, “is almost our only surviving document on a group of intellectuals who were drawn to the Communists early in the thirties and left them very soon.”56 Tess Slesinger’s impressive novel published in early 1934 achieved immediate notoriety, especially in New York City.57 Nevertheless, her satirical roman à clef about the Menorah Journal group managed also to lend itself to misrepresentation. In retrospect the novel is limited; it captures, through imaginative portraits, only certain facets of the Menorah group and its preoccupations. Yet, unlike many pro-Communist literary efforts that attempted to use “art as a weapon,” Slesinger’s synthesis of innovative literary techniques, psychological insight, and quasipolitical themes is spontaneous and penetrating.

  Slesinger was born in 1905; her father was a small businessman in the garment trade and her mother was a social-welfare worker who became a lay analys
t.58 Slesinger attended Ethical Culture High School and Swarthmore College and graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism in 1927. Subsequently, she became assistant fashion editor of the New York Herald Tribune and assistant literary editor of the New York Evening Post. In June 1928 she married Herbert Solow and through him entered Elliot Cohen’s circle. Soon she was contributing reviews, quite often about books that dealt with problems of contemporary marriage, to the Menorah Journal. In March 1930 the Menorah Journal published her first short story and a second appeared a year later.59

  In the early 1930s, following her divorce from Solow, she achieved some prominence with the publication of the short story “Missis Flinders” in the December 1932 issue of Story Magazine. Based on her own experience of having an abortion at the insistence of her husband, it may have been the first story to address that theme that appeared in a general-circulation magazine. In response to requests that she expand the story into a novel, Slesinger eventually incorporated “Missis Flinders” as the closing chapter of The Unpossessed. Publication of The Unpossessed, according to Lionel Trilling, was an act of passing judgment upon and separation from the very “contemporaries” to whom the book was dedicated.60 It appeared in print not long after the 1934 open-letter controversy.