by Alan M Wald
Rahv responded with “10 Propositions and 8 Errors,” a powerful polemic with an aura of practicality that was lacking in Greenberg and Macdonald’s piece. Criticizing the two for their apocalyptic vision of the socialist revolution as being “just around the corner” and imperialism as “tottering on the edge of the abyss,” Rahv insisted that each country conquered by fascism was thereby removed entirely from the arena of potential revolutionary action, thus virtually excluding the possibility of a socialist alternative: “Now we have reached the stage where the war will either be won by the combined might of the Anglo-American imperialism and Stalin’s Red Army, or else it won’t be won at all; and the military defeat of Germany remains the indispensable precondition of any progressive action in the future.” In subsequent paragraphs he responded convincingly to the arguments that Roosevelt himself would introduce fascist measures to carry out the war and that the imperialist Allies were incapable of defeating Hitler.
Rahv’s views were expressed from an ostensible “revolutionary Marxist” perspective; he wrote that “life is running so low in the revolutionary movement that only a top to bottom transformation, on a world scale, of our entire moral and political environment can possibly bring about its recovery. In the meantime let us not lull ourselves with illusions about the war-aims of the bourgeois democracies on the one hand, or about the ability of the workers to fulfill the Marxist prophecies on the other”.44
In a brief rebuttal, Greenberg and Macdonald accurately pointed out that, in the long run, ill consequences might follow from abandoning an independent working-class strategy in favor of relying on Roosevelt and Churchill to lead the war against fascism, but they also made the mistake of reiterating their own weakest point: “We think a military victory can be achieved by the Allies only as the result of profound changes in their present social structure, and that these changes will add up to either fascism or socialism.”45 Among other peculiarities, Greenberg and Macdonald did not foresee the Soviet Union’s playing an important role in the war against Hitler, possibly because the two of them subscribed to a version of the “bureaucratic collectivist” theory that minimized the economic and social advances that had occurred in the Soviet Union since Stalin’s triumph.
Immediately following the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the entrance of the United States into the war, the five editors jointly signed a statement declaring that, because of their differences, “Partisan Review can have no editorial line on the war.” Pointing out that their magazine “cannot undertake to present the kind of programmatic guidance one expects of a political party,” they affirmed that their main task was to preserve “cultural values against all types of coercion and repression.” In this context, they assured the readers that they would in the future still “give space to radical . . . analysis of social issues and the war.”46
Macdonald defended his views in two more essays, but by the summer of 1943 a split was well under way.47 The editors agreed that if Rahv and Phillips could find independent support for the magazine, they would assume full control and Macdonald would resign (Greenberg, in the meantime, had been drafted); if not, the magazine would be turned over to Macdonald. As it turned out, Rahv and Phillips came up with an “angel,” the wife of a high-ranking military officer who insisted that the magazine withdraw even further from political affairs.48 The parting of the editors was nearly as bitter as an interparty split. Although there was no brawl over control of the headquarters, Dwight and Nancy Macdonald conducted a sit-in until they were given a copy of the Partisan Review’s mailing list. Rahv threatened to call the police, and the whole episode was followed by a nasty exchange in the letters column.49
The only satisfaction Macdonald may have gained from the affair was that he was allowed to choose his successor on the editorial board. He selected Delmore Schwartz. Born in New York City in 1910, Schwartz had attended the University of Wisconsin but showed no interest in radicalism until he enrolled at New York University where he took courses from Sidney Hook.50 While a graduate student at Harvard, he came under some suspicion for allegedly holding Trotskyist views, and he associated with the poet John Wheelwright, a flamboyant Trotskyist of Brahmin origins.
Schwartz had been identified with the Partisan Review since its reincarnation in 1937 and was the most immediately successful of the group in the literary world. Like Macdonald, Schwartz considered himself to be an anti-Stalinist Marxist, close to Trotsky. While he retained his revolutionary internationalist views during World War II, unlike Macdonald, who saw himself as a political leader, if not a one-man political party, Schwartz reserved his authoritative judgments for literary matters and was more or less content to be a fellow traveler of the Marxist wing of the Partisan Review circle, at least through the 1940s. In a letter responding to the more aggressive Macdonald who had asked Schwartz to speak out forthrightly against U.S. policy during the war, Schwartz stated that intellectuals were themselves impotent as the initiators of political action, especially during times of national crisis. He argued that intellectuals ought to present themselves as defenders of “culture and truth,” advancing to a more overt “political stand when such a one is made possible by the movements of the well-known masses.”51
Yet even as he dashed off lectures about the evils of private property and the fundamental sickness of American culture, which he mailed to R. P. Blackmur and others, Schwartz was filled with an awareness of the limitations of revolutionary politics as an “adequate philosophy of life.”52 This was one of the reasons that as a youth Schwartz had conjoined seemingly disparate figures such as T. S. Eliot and Trotsky, regarding each as complementary to and corrective of the other. If the sensibility of Eliot, in isolation, shaded off into reaction and anti-Semitism, Trotsky’s logical purity, without countervailing tendencies, might evolve into the revolutionary madness depicted in Dostoyevski’s The Possessed. In letters he called his “logic-chopping” philosophy professor Sidney Hook (referred to by Schwartz on occasion as “Sidney Chop”) a prime example of one who lacked the salutary tensions that might result from a proper marriage of Marxism and modernism—Hook’s alleged contempt for the “sacred art of poetry” horrified Schwartz.53 Thus Schwartz was altogether too Hamlet-like to continue Macdonald’s views on the war question. As the decade went on, increasing signs of Schwartz’s mental instability became evident: his poetic and analytical powers deteriorated; he became more and more obsessed with job security and economic survival; and he tended to fixate on the petty jealousies of the literary life.
Macdonald went on to found Politics in 1944, which ran for forty-two issues. At its peak the circulation reached five thousand, and Macdonald was periodically able to convene public discussions of two to three hundred people under the aegis of the magazine. Although a one-person operation, the magazine attracted considerable support from an impressive array of writers and intellectuals who later became quite prominent, including C. Wright Mills, Daniel Bell, Hannah Arendt, Lewis Coser, Paul Goodman, and the young Irving Howe, who sometimes wrote under the name “Theodore Dryden.” With these and others, Macdonald continued to debate problems in revolutionary strategy and theory until the use of the atomic bomb in 1945 threw into question for him “the whole Marxist conception of socialism as the great crown of scientific progress.”54 During these years both he and Mary McCarthy fell under the influence of Nicola Chiaromonte, an Italian-born writer who spent the war years in the United States. Chiaromonte advocated a kind of utopian socialism and was a close friend of Albert Camus.55 Soon Macdonald came to regard himself as an anarcho-pacifist, a phase that lasted until 1949, a year after he gave up Politics. The Soviet blockade of Berlin convinced him that, without American military might as a countervailance, millions of people would be “betrayed” to the Soviet Union.56 Subsequently his interest in politics diminished considerably, and in 1951 he began a fifteen-year career as a staff writer for the New Yorker.
MEYER SCHAPIRO: SOCIALIST INTERNATIONALIST
Of the several articles
in the Partisan Review that addressed the question of the war, the most sensational was the debate between Sidney Hook and Meyer Schapiro that was published in 1943. The exchange grew out of a series of articles that Hook had begun on “The New Failure of Nerve.” In the first article, Hook seemed to be mainly defending science and reason against the growth of religious and nonrational ideas in the work of Reinhold Niebuhr in the United States and several of his counterparts in Europe.57 But in a second essay, “The Failure of the Left,” Hook declared that scientific thinking could only be demonstrated by giving support to U.S. government policy in World War II; he merged left critics of the war and revolutionary internationalists with the antirationalists, arguing that they shared a common “utopianism.”
Hook’s article was more than simply a defense of a prowar position, which was in itself a bit surprising but hardly implausible in the face of the Nazi threat. It also testified to his reconciliation with forces he had once so vigorously urged others to oppose, and it represented a repudiation of the very values by which he had lived his own life since World War I. Hook’s thesis was that the appearance of a current of thought among liberal intellectuals who were struggling “to break out of our time of troubles by a faith that would serve sinners, but also lead to a better social order” had its parallel in the radical left: “For in its own way the political left shows just as definite a failure of nerve as the more numerous and conservative groups to which it aspires to give leadership. In virtue of its pretentious claims, its failure is even less excusable.”
Hook’s attack was undoubtedly directed against his one-time allies, the Trotskyists of both the SWP and the WP as well as against a few unaffiliated intellectuals such as James T. Farrell. The Communist Party was dismissed as irrelevant to the discussion because it was “little more than the American section of the G.P.U.” Hook by now was regularly characterizing everyone on the left in the same kind of vulgar, dehumanizing language with which he himself had been traduced in the early 1930s by such Communist functionaries as Earl Browder and V. J. Jerome. The Trotskyists—Hook said he would not specifically name the groups because one (the SWP) was “currently being subject to unjust and foolish prosecution by the government”—should be characterized as “Platonic Revolutionists”: “They worship a system of Ideas originally projected as instruments of social action. Historical experience, having long since been impolite enough to reveal the inadequacy of these Ideas, is no longer regarded as capable of exercising a veto power over them. And so they have become transformed into shining fetishes valid in their own right.” In Hook’s view the Trotskyists’ position on the war was tantamount to “political insanity”: the SWP’s recently modified strategy of fighting for socialism and against fascism simultaneously should be considered “normal madness,” while the WP’s two-stage proposal for fighting U.S. capitalism first and fascism second was “psychopathic.” Even more ludicrous were “Bohemian revolutionists” without any party commitment such as Dwight Macdonald, who made similar declarations but did little to further their views other than write for the Partisan Review. He briefly mentioned the Socialist Party, which, since Pearl Harbor, had been carrying out a prowar line in practice despite vague reservations on the part of Norman Thomas.
In elaborating his own views, Hook, like Rahv before him, evinced considerable skill in justifying his new orientation in a way that seemed as consistent as possible with his former Marxist values. In noticeably subdued language, he criticized right-wing socialists and liberals in the Roosevelt camp who had begun to overlook “the objective oppositions between those who are for the moment companions-in-arms”—the workers and the capitalists. Thinking of the future, he warned that “a socialist and labor movement which ideologically disarms itself when it cooperates with its opponents for a specific task, may find itself terribly disadvantaged after a purely military victory.” Hook offered four recommendations to prevent this from happening: he urged socialists to continue to work for an independent labor party; to develop specific policies of their own as to how best to prosecute the war instead of rallying around Roosevelt; to resist the temptation to believe that defeating Hitler will be “a final solution to problems that were unsolved when he came to power”; and to fight the illusion that under Roosevelt the United States was in a “drift toward collectivism,” thereby justifying all increases in Roosevelt’s personal power. Hook observed that Roosevelt might be replaced by someone who would really turn the New Deal in a totalitarian direction, such as Vice-President Henry Wallace, who was an ardent admirer of the Soviet Union. Hook concluded by proposing that socialists support efforts to conduct the war as democratically as possible by establishing “war councils” of workers and consumers, but he simultaneously insisted that authority and respect would come during the postwar period only to those who took the lead in supporting the war effort, even as “ideological drum majors.”58
Hook’s essay was subjected to a long and detailed rebuttal by Meyer Schapiro, but at Hook’s recommendation Schapiro used the pseudonym “David Merian” to protect his job at Columbia, a university notorious for having dismissed dissident faculty during World War I.59 Meyer (originally “Meir”) Schapiro had been born in Shavly, Lithuania, in 1904. His family moved to the United States in 1907, and he became a naturalized citizen in 1914.60 His father, Nathan Menachem Schapiro, a bookkeeper in Lithuania who became a small businessman in the United States, had an orthodox Jewish upbringing but broke with religion when quite young. He had become interested in science and socialist ideas through the Jewish Socialist Bund before he left eastern Europe. As one who read constantly and widely, the elder Schapiro subscribed to the Forward and to the New York Call in New York. But his wife, Fanny Adelman, was pious and insisted that her children receive a traditional Jewish education. Eventually the two compromised by sending Meyer to a modern Hebrew school instead of a cheder (which emphasized teaching Hebrew by drill and repetition). Extraordinarily precocious, Schapiro learned to speak Hebrew rapidly and soon read much of the Bible in Hebrew. Although he never believed in God, he had early assimilated and retained for the rest of his life a fascination with religious concepts as expressed in history and art. He began drawing in elementary school and subsequently enrolled in evening art classes with John Sloan at the Hebrew Educational Settlement House.
Although Hebrew education and art were his main intellectual interests during his first sixteen years, Schapiro also absorbed radical politics at the Brownsville Labor Lyceum. He joined the Young Peoples Socialist League while at Boys High School in Brooklyn, where he excelled in mathematics and Latin. Although he and Felix Morrow were from the same neighborhood, they did not meet until 1920 when Morrow was invited to a party to observe a young genius with a photographic memory: the prodigy turned out to be Schapiro who performed for the guests. They continued to see each other episodically during the 1920s. Enrolling at Columbia University at the age of sixteen on a Regents State scholarship, awarded for intellectual merit, Schapiro studied with John Dewey and Franz Boas, although by special arrangement he also took drawing classes at the National Academy of Design. He received a B.A. in philosophy and art with honors in 1924, and, after being rejected by Princeton University for graduate study probably because of Princeton’s anti-Semitism, he continued at Columbia for his doctorate where he specialized in the late antique and early medieval periods. A two-year Carnegie Corporation fellowship enabled him to travel for sixteen months in the Near East, Italy, Greece, Spain, and France during 1926 and 1927, and it supported him for a year while he wrote his doctoral dissertation. Returning to the United States in the late summer of 1927, he resumed a relationship with Lillian Milgram, the sister of his best friend from Brownsville; she had been a Barnard student before going on to medical school at New York University. They were married in 1928, the same year in which he completed his dissertation, “The Romanesque Sculpture of Mosaic,” and soon he began a lectureship at Columbia on a one-year renewable contract at $50 a week.61 His disser
tation was presented in 1929 and it was published in the Art Bulletin in 1931, although he did not bother to deposit the required copies with the university until 1936, which is the date on his diploma.
Thus Schapiro began a lifelong career at Columbia. Although popular among his students, his popularity stemmed from the excitement that he inspired in his lectures, for he was often too busy to devote much personal attention to the students. He also elicited considerable resentment from many faculty members, not only because of his revolutionary politics and his Jewish background, but because of his unrestrained expression of opinions, his outspokenness, his contentiousness, and his persistency in argument. He was not promoted to associate professor until 1948. With Greenwich Village artists, however, his relations were quite the opposite; he enjoyed the company of bohemians and maintained close friendships with such disparate individuals as Whittaker Chambers and Delmore Schwartz. These associations, however, were in marked contrast to his own stable, industrious life.
