The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  PARTY FACTIONALISM AND THE “FRENCH TURN”

  When Solow returned to the East Coast, he found that a major dispute had broken out in the fledgling WPUS concerning the party’s future posture toward the Socialist Party. A minority tendency, led by Cannon and Shachtman, argued that greater attention should be paid to developments in the Socialist Party’s left-wing. They were opposed by a variety of internal groups, the most important of which was led by Hugo Oehler, a former Communist Party district organizer who had joined the CLA in 1930. Another group, led by A. J. Muste, believed that Cannon and Shachtman’s proposal was only a gambit to prepare the WPUS ranks to enter the Socialist Party, which was what the Trotskyists in France had done. Oehler believed that such an entry, known as the “French Turn,” would be a violation of revolutionary principle, a capitulation to reformism. Muste also feared accommodation with the reformists, but additionally was unhappy about the possibility of abandoning his newly formed organization and uncomfortable with the ethical aspects of entry.16 As the Cannon-Shachtman position began to gain support, the Oehler opposition grew more adamant and started to publish its own newsletter, thereby raising the possibility of being expelled for indiscipline. Morrow and Novack quickly sided with Cannon and Shachtman, but Solow and McDonald held a position somewhere between Oehler’s and Muste’s. Solow failed to show up at the meeting where the vote to expel the Oehler group was taken, while McDonald identified himself with the expelled group and met briefly with them afterward. However, neither McDonald nor Solow ever joined another Marxist organization.17

  Several faction fights had already occurred in the Trotskyist movement before the one concerning the “French Turn.” One of the most important had resulted in the expulsion of B. J. Field.18 Born Max Gould in New York City in 1903, Field had graduated from Columbia University. Shortly after, he and his wife, Esther, moved to Europe for several years, where he became fluent in French and German. He returned to New York and embarked upon a successful career on Wall Street as a petroleum analyst. After the stock-market crash he rapidly moved to the political left and applied to join the CLA.

  Of medium height, slightly stocky, and swarthy with jet-black hair and a mustache, Field was brilliant but erratic. He was a good speaker, although he tended to talk above the heads of most workers. In the CLA he organized private study groups in his home, later remembered by his young disciple Paul Jacobs for its legendary book and record collections. When the New York branch of the CLA insisted that such educational activities should be brought under its direction, Field refused to cooperate, which led to his and Esther’s expulsion in 1932. Field then journeyed directly to appeal to Trotsky in Constantinople, making such a strong impression on Trotsky with his writings on the capitalist economy, which he knew intimately from firsthand experience, that Trotsky persuaded the CLA to take him back into membership after a period of collaboration.

  The New York Hotel Strike broke out in January 1934. Because of his facility with languages Field was assigned by the CLA to assist in the strike because French chefs, who knew little English, were playing an important role. He was soon propelled into leadership of the strike along with Aristodimos Kaldis, a Greek-born Trotskyist waiter who later became a famous landscape artist.19 Once more Field refused to collaborate with the CLA, and once more he was expelled.20 This time Field and Kaldis organized their own group, the League for a Revolutionary Party, which briefly found some supporters among a group of precocious Columbia students, including the future philosopher Morton G. White and the military analyst Albert Wohlstetter. Although Field’s Canadian affiliate, led by the journalist William Krehm, grew at one point to more than a hundred strong and became more significant than the official Trotskyist organization in Canada, the American group dwindled, surviving for only a few years until it fell apart. After being expelled from his own organization, Field was offered a job in a prosperous California real estate firm run by the attorney Nat Mendelsohn, a former follower, and ultimately disappeared from the political scene.

  Thus the CLA leadership had compromised with but had not completely bent to Trotsky, who obviously had had great hopes for a person as extraordinarily talented as Field. Therefore it is surprising that most scholars argue that Cannon and Shachtman were mechanically following orders from Trotsky in their subsequent support of the “French Turn.”21 That Trotsky supported the tactic of entry and carried the highest authority with Cannon and Shachtman is beyond question, but Trotsky’s history of stormy relations with his followers around the world suggests there is no reason why Cannon and Shachtman could not have opposed him if they thought that the entry strategy was untenable. To the contrary, their willingness to implement the “French Turn” strategy in the United States exemplified a flexibility and practical sense that distinguished them, at least in this particular instance, from the rigid sectarianism, organizational fetishism, and purism characteristic of the growing number of ex-Trotskyist splinter groups that had appeared on the scene. These split-offs included not only the Field and Oehler groups, but also the followers of Albert Weisbord (a Harvard graduate who led the 1926 Passaic textile strike) and George Spiro (who called himself “Marlen,” after Marx and Lenin). Several letters written to Trotsky by Harold Isaacs, then a young party intellectual, testify to considerable skill and organizational even-handedness on the part of Cannon and Shachtman during the dispute over entry into the Socialist Party.

  Isaacs, born 13 September 1910 in New York City, graduated from Columbia University in 1930.22 Taking a job as a reporter for the China Press in Shanghai and Peking, he befriended a South African journalist, C. Frank Glass, who was sympathetic to Trotskyism but had been collaborating with the Chinese Communists through his association with the writer Agnes Smedley. A facile writer with a sharp mind, Isaacs was an adventurous sort and soon he established further connections with Trotskyists during an investigation of a rebellion in the Kuomintang. After being introduced to Smedley, he was able to obtain funds from the Communist Party to establish an English-language paper called China Forum, which he edited for two years. He then issued a public statement, “I Break with the Chinese Stalinists,” and returned to the United States, where he joined the WPUS, but found himself opposed to the entry proposal.23 His letters to Trotsky from early February to early March 1934 describe his about-face regarding Cannon and Shachtman’s positions. In particular, his detailed praise for their objectivity, their fairness in treating internal opponents, and their nonfactional style of leadership, adds at least another perception of this important turning point in the relationship of New York intellectuals to the Trotskyist organization.24 Isaacs, who used the pseudonym “H. F. Roberts,” would remain loyal to Cannon until the end of 1940. When the Trotskyist newspaper Socialist Appeal was launched in late 1937, Isaacs was for several years its real editor—organizing the staff, assigning articles, and editing most of the contributions—despite Max Shachtman’s name on the masthead. In 1938 he published his classic The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, with an introduction by Trotsky, who had also helped formulate its thesis. Discouraged by the assassination of Trotsky and the onset of World War II, Isaacs began a new career as a Newsweek editor and correspondent in 1943. In 1951 The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution was reissued with Trotsky’s introduction deleted and the revolutionary Marxist conclusions expunged. That same year Isaacs inaugurated a successful academic career at Harvard University, the New School for Social Research, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he retired as a professor of political science in 1976.

  John McDonald, on the other hand, concluded that the struggle had revealed the actual degeneracy of the two Trotskyist leaders. He later claimed that he and Solow had differentiated themselves from the Oehler group by opposing entry on “democratic” grounds; they believed that “the Trotskyists’ intention to dissolve and reform themselves inside the Socialist Party formed a poor model for a future society.”25 But Sidney Lens, an AWP member who had joined the Oehler group an
d later a well-known radical writer and activist, recalled in his autobiography that Solow and McDonald had supported Oehler. Moreover, Solow sent a letter to Margaret De Silver a few months later suggesting criticisms of Cannon and Shachtman that clearly parallel those of Oehler.26

  Accusing the New Militant of “left-wing Thomasism,” Solow complained that the WPUS had already made concessions to the Socialists by not criticizing Socialist Party leader Jack Altman when he praised trade unionist David Dubinsky for supporting Roosevelt instead of the Socialist presidential candidate. In addition, Solow castigated the Trotskyists and Felix Morrow in particular for not dissociating themselves and the Tampa Committee of the NPLD from a statement by Norman Thomas proclaiming that the Tampa Committee was opposed to all violence and favored “the American tradition of fair play.” Solow concluded that the Trotskyists really did plan to abandon their revolutionary politics and adapt to the Social Democracy, citing these incidents as dishonest maneuvers designed to pave the way. He was certain that NPLD would soon be sacrificed by the Trotskyists as well.27

  In the subsequent conflict over the NPLD, it is difficult to judge whether or how much each succeeding stage was conspiratorially plotted in advance. George Novack later recalled that the Trotskyists had never intended to come out in favor of abandoning the NPLD, which Solow continued to lead even after he left the WPUS. But it soon became apparent that the Socialist Party regarded the NPLD as a Trotskyist front which stood as a roadblock to entry into the Socialist Party. This stance precipitated an intense and bitter struggle in mid-1936 between the Trotskyists in the NPLD, especially Morrow and Novack, and most of the members of the former Menorah group. In the end the Trotskyists entered the Socialist Party, and the Workers Defense League was established as a replacement for the NPLD. The 1936 struggle took a significant toll on the Trotskyist membership, which had risen from one hundred in 1929 to two hundred in 1932 to 429 just before the fusion with the AWP. After the fusion, the membership of the WPUS was seven hundred, but it had dropped to between five and six hundred at the time of the entry into the Socialist Party.28

  Novack wrote most of the new Worker Defense League’s program. As the NPLD faded, Solow and his circle—exclusive of Hook, who had enthusiastically supported and worked with the WPUS in effecting the entry—became very bitter toward the Trotskyist leadership. Novack and his wife, Elinor Rice, were on opposing sides in the fight, and a personal crisis ensued that eventually led to the end of their marriage. Still, a personal attraction to Trotsky and some of his political ideas persisted so that, when the Moscow purge trials began a few months later, Solow and several of the others would find a means of again working with the Trotskyists, although with constant suspicion and at a greater distance.29 In fine, the dispute over entry into the Socialist Party and abandonment of the NPLD became the vehicle by which many of the early anti-Stalinist revolutionary intellectuals could justify withdrawing from organizational responsibility to the anti-Stalinist communist movement while still maintaining their quasi-Trotskyist ideas in the abstract.

  In addition to their activity on behalf of the NPLD, members of the Menorah group left a record of their Trotskyist sympathies in a number of publications. Elliot Cohen wrote a defense of Trotsky in the Nation in 1934, responding to an attack on the exiled revolutionary by Louis Fischer. In “Stalin Buries the Revolution—Prematurely,” Cohen argued that Trotsky had proven himself to be the greatest defender of the Russian Revolution by opposing Stalin’s dictatorship. He concluded by describing Trotskyism as synonymous with “international communism” and particularly praised the Trotskyists for their construction of authentic united fronts.30 Under the pseudonyms “David Ernst” and “Thomas Cotten” he took a similar orthodox stance in reviewing several books by Max Eastman in the New International, the journal established by the Trotskyists in 1934. Yet a few months later all of his associations with Trotskyism simply vanished, having been subsumed by his personal and professional life. In the late 1920s, Cohen had married a politically radical elementary school teacher from New Haven who was attending Columbia Teacher’s College part-time. The Cohens decided to have a child in the early 1930s, and Elliot began a ten-year stint at the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, where he made valuable friendships with several leaders in the Jewish community who would later help him launch Commentary.31

  Another publication in which former members of the Menorah group left a record of their views was V. F. Calverton’s Modern Monthly, which in some respects was a predecessor of the post-1937 Partisan Review. Born George Goetz in Baltimore on 25 June 1900, Calverton transferred his allegiance from Lutheranism to socialism while working his way through Johns Hopkins University.32 After a brief membership in the Socialist Labor Party, he began teaching in the junior high schools in Baltimore and in 1928 published the first issue of the Modern Quarterly (originally to have been called the Radical Quarterly), for which he adopted his pseudonym, although his friends continued to call him “George.” The journal reflected Calverton’s personal blend of interests in Marxism, psychology, literature, history, anthropology, sociology, medicine, Afro-American culture, and sex. These interests were also expressed in a series of books written by Calverton including The Newer Spirit (1925), Sex Expression in Literature (1926), and The Liberation of American Literature (1931), which on occasion reflected Calverton’s tendency to popularize and to vulgarize Marxism as well as a looseness about borrowing material. Plump with a dark mustache, Calverton wore his black hair in a sort of ring around his great high forehead. He was about five feet ten inches tall and a heavy pipe and cigar smoker. A fast talker and a furious worker, he could write away on his typewriter while the room was full of noisy guests.

  Remaining close to the Communist Party from 1926 through 1932, he lived in New York four days a week, working for publishing houses, lecturing, and writing reviews. He regularly contributed to the magazine section of the Saturday Daily Worker and visited the Soviet Union in July 1927. He held frequent parties in his studio apartment where both Communist and non-Communist intellectuals came together to discuss and argue politics. Although Calverton claimed to support Stalin against Trotsky and hid whatever criticisms he had of the Soviet Union, the Communists were becoming suspicious of his refusal to join the party and his constant emphasis on “Americanizing” their strategy and tactics. Believing that Calverton’s work and activities in some manner gave support to the ideas of the Trotskyists and other dissidents who were becoming too independent, both the party and the Communist International itself printed a series of articles attacking him as a fascist in 1932–33.33 As a result, Calverton opened his pages to articles by Trotskyists and Lovestoneites and then joined the AWP. Among the dissident communist intellectuals who wrote for the Modern Quarterly, which became known as the Modern Monthly from 1933 until 1938, were Lionel Trilling, Felix Morrow, James Rorty, Herbert Solow, Louis Berg, Elliot Cohen, Anita Brenner, and Lewis Corey. At various times Edmund Wilson, Max Eastman, and Sidney Hook served on the editorial board, the last two notable for the philosophical controversy they initiated among the left.34

  Calverton much craved acceptance as a major intellectual and was bitterly disappointed by his lack of recognition when he died suddenly in 1940 at the age of forty.

  THE EASTMAN HERESIES

  Many of the tensions between making a serious commitment to a Marxist organization and maintaining a purely literary association with Marxism are typified by the career of Max Eastman.35 It was never easy to discern whether or to what extent Eastman should be taken seriously. A lucid, witty, and prolific writer, he could pen a masterful polemic one moment and seem to miss the point entirely the next. An erratic activist who had risked his life and career at various points, he also had earned a reputation as a playboy. While in the Soviet Union at the onset of the 1920s, for example, he became so engrossed in pursuing a liberated love life and nude swimming that the fatal factional struggle at the Communist International’s Fourth Congress virtually receded in
to a dim background. A report on Eastman sent to Trotsky during the late 1920s by a member of the Russian Left Opposition insisted that he was by no means a communist, just a typical radical intellectual superficially excited about the Russian Revolution, who maintained very loose ties to Trotskyism. Yet in a private letter to Trotsky in 1933, Eastman bragged that “I supported every step taken by the Bolshevik party and by you and Lenin from the seizure of power and the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly (horrible as it was to all other American editors) to the condemnation of the Social Revolutionaries. I was for six years alone in America in supporting the Left Opposition. I was the Left Opposition.”36

  Born in 1883 as the son of two ministers, Eastman had departed sharply from the religion and sexual repression dominant in his culture to become a bohemian iconoclast and political radical in Greenwich Village. Influenced by his strong and independent mother, he campaigned for women’s suffrage, birth control, and sexual and artistic freedom. He assumed editorship of the Masses in 1912, and, with his friend John Reed, supported the left-wing of the Socialist Party and the Russian Revolution. During World War I he was threatened by lynch mobs for his antiwar agitation, and in 1918 he and the other editors of the Masses were twice tried under the Espionage Act.