The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)
Page 40
Furthermore, the intellectuals’ rejection of Trotsky’s dualistic conception of the Soviet Union as embodying a progressive socio-economic structure presided over by an intolerably repressive regime may have facilitated the most debilitating misconception of the era. In the Cold War atmosphere the careful distinctions that the New York intellectuals had once made between criticizing Communism from the left and criticizing Communism from the right tended in some cases to dissolve into epithets that equated the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany: “Red Fascism,” “Communazis,” and the ambiguous term “totalitarianism.”6 “All evil was now to be attached to Communism,” Alfred Kazin later wrote.7 Several works by Arthur Koestler, George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), and new editions of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) were popularly interpreted according to this anticommunist mood, and radical intellectuals themselves were drawn back to the demoralizing memory of the Moscow trials with their shocking confessions.
Into the charged atmosphere of this historical moment came Hannah Arendt’s book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which among intellectuals in New York may have performed a conservatizing role. Such an impact, however, was undoubtedly unintended by its author, a maverick thinker of considerable creativity who feared that the United States might itself move in a totalitarian direction under the impact of McCarthyism. Arendt’s genuinely independent streak derived in part from a personal political history that deviated somewhat from the mainstream of the New York intellectuals; she had never passed through a Leninist phase, although she had partially assimilated the tradition of dissident communism through her husband, Heinrich Bluecher, a former Bukharinist.8 Her German education and upbringing also distinguished her from the others, but it was from the New York intellectuals that she received her initial attention, support, and most lavish praise. In the late 1940s and 1950s she contributed to Politics, Commentary, and the Partisan Review. It was Kazin who first arranged for the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism when her original publisher backed out of the contract. In reviewing the book, Mary McCarthy described Arendt’s political acuity as “amazing,” Kazin said that her thinking had a “moral grandeur,” and Macdonald dubbed her “the most original and profound—therefore the most valuable—political theoretician of our times.”9
The book represented a major departure from Marxism in its method. Its conflation of Stalinism and Hitlerism was developed without a comparison of class structures and economic systems, and it was based on the metaphysical assumption that the most appropriate measure for believing that the two social orders were a single genus was the degree of “radical evil” that they embodied. Thus the book could be read in such a way as to bolster the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s, reinforcing the view that the Soviet Union was to be expected to behave as Nazi Germany had in the 1930s. Once this belief took hold among the New York intellectuals, it influenced how they perceived all other relevant information. Any ambiguous actions on the part of foreign or domestic Communists were taken as signifying a dangerous threat, whereas an observer with a more complex theoretical perspective might have seen other possible explanations. Like the apologists for the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the New York intellectuals began to perceive aspects of both the history of the Soviet Union and the nature of American capitalism in ways that were more conducive to their new beliefs, ignoring facts that might have been discomfiting.
Becoming firmly convinced that the Soviet Union would behave as had Nazi Germany led to support of U.S. imperialism (recast as “Western democracy” and “the free world”) as the only practical deterrent to Stalinism. Thus it became increasingly easier over a period of time for many of the intellectuals to renege on their advocacy of progressive domestic legislation and eventually to turn against all movements for fundamental change. This was especially true among some who became pro-Zionist and who thus found themselves allied with politicians who had right-wing domestic views. In the 1960s quite a few of the New York intellectuals would be distressed more by rebelling students, women, and blacks than by the American government’s slaughter of Vietnamese peasants and its support of reactionary dictatorships around the world; some, in fact, showed a real fear and loathing of the new militants precisely for the wrong reasons—because many of the students raised intellectual challenges, refused blind obedience, and significantly raised the country’s moral and cultural level. In 1972 Sidney Hook, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and a number of other intellectuals voted for Richard Nixon as the “lesser evil” compared with George McGovern, although they were registered Democrats. In 1980 and again in 1984 they supported Ronald Reagan.
If the admittedly complex phenomenon of World War II divested the intellectuals of their internationalism, it was the postwar years that wedded them ideologically to the social structure of which they had once been so critical. In lockstep fashion they proclaimed belief in the guilt of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs despite many contradictions in the evidence and dubious procedures by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that have raised questions for decades.10 They universally purged themselves of ideas at variance with the ideology of Cold War liberalism, especially all forms of Leninism, and in some cases may actually have blocked out from memory the authentic nature of their past radical convictions. Ironically, several of those who proclaimed faith in the freedoms of the United States and scorned those who criticized the witch-hunt as “alarmists” felt it tactically wise to misrepresent their political histories in public statements—a tacit acknowledgment that there was indeed an antiradical hysteria. Taking advantage of the general public’s ignorance of the different varieties of communism, they claimed that they had been consistent anticommunists since the early or mid-1930s, never mentioning the subsequent years during which they had been independent communists decrying Stalinism for its adaptations to liberalism.
Such declarations were made, for example, when revelations about James Rorty’s radical past caused him to lose his position as a script writer for the “Voice of America,” where he specialized in sensational exposes of “The Communist War Against Religion.”11 In a 1951 letter to the Regional Loyalty Board of the United States Civil Service Commission, Rorty stated, “I have been fairly well-known for the past eighteen years as an active public enemy of the Communist Party. . . . I was never a member of the Communist Party or any of the Communist factions, or in any way affiliated with them.”12 It is true that, starting in 1933, he went into opposition to the Communist Party; but in 1934 he joined the American Workers Party, a revolutionary communist organization, and in 1935 he supported its fusion with the Communist League of America, refraining from membership for tactical reasons only. Despite his nonideological outlook and anarchist tendencies, Rorty’s politics were essentially revolutionary communist for five years following the 1933 rupture with the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners.
This blurring and then dissolving of the difference between revolutionary anti-Stalinism and simple anticommunism was a hallmark of the former radicals in the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, as can be demonstrated by three other examples. In a statement supporting Rorty, Sidney Hook attributed to himself a similar political biography: “I speak as one . . . who has been marshalling the efforts of all genuine liberal forces in the United States since 1933 to defend the structure of our freedoms from totalitarian attacks.”13 Yet until 1939, Hook’s view was that the problem with the Communists was that they were insufficiently communist, having forsaken true revolutionary Leninist strategy for an alliance with liberalism; Hook had nothing but scorn and contempt for the reformism and liberalism of the Communist Party of the Popular Front years of the late 1930s. His primary allies and associates for most of that time were Trotskyists and other independent communists.
When Lewis Corey died in 1953, Sol Stein, executive director of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, sent a letter of protest to the New York Times. He criticized its obituary stating that Corey “had helped to form the Communist P
arty in this country, but in recent years had turned against it.” Stein claimed that the Times was “interpreting a twenty-year fight against Communism as something that happened in ‘recent years.’“14 Both the Times and Stein neglected the significance of Corey’s dissident communist activity for six years after 1933, which included secret membership in the Lovestone group from 1937 to 1939.15
Finally, there was the bizarre episode of James T. Farrell’s resignation as chairman of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom in 1956. From the onset, Farrell had been in the left-wing of the committee. This position meant that he desired to decrease the domestic anti-Communist focus and pay greater attention to repressive aspects of McCarthyism. At the same time, he supported the American Committee’s criticism of the Paris office for being too “cultural” and insufficiently “political” (viz., anti-Communist) in its activities abroad. In the spring and summer of 1956, however, he undertook a world tour on behalf of the committee and came to the conclusion that the approach of the Paris office did, in fact, more correctly correspond to the political situation in Europe and Asia. Yet, during a stopover in Turkey, he managed to get drunk and send a crude letter to the Chicago Daily Tribune with sentences such as the following: “Often I have criticized our Chicago and our America but we must stop taking as much as one insult from anybody in the world, we must apologize to no one for our country, and from here on in, we must not give one cent or one drop of the blood of our sons and nephews, unless it is for an honest and free partnership of free peoples.”16 Despite the vulgarity of the statement and its chauvinist overtones, it was in a certain sense still a “left” critique in that Farrell thought that the United States should not support social systems that were not really democratic merely for diplomatic reasons. Upon his return to New York he submitted his resignation by telegram, which a mortified executive committee gladly accepted. Since his official letter of explanation attacked the committee once more from the left, he also tried to bolster his anti-Stalinist credentials by referring to himself as having been “an active anti-Communist” since before 1936. As in the other cases, this formulation directly implied that there was no qualitative discrepancy between Farrell’s revolutionary communism, which lasted until 1948, and the anticommunism he embraced only one or two years before the American Committee for Cultural Freedom was formed.17
No doubt the episode of political persecution at the “Voice of America” motivated Rorty to undertake the writing of McCarthy and the Communists (1954), sponsored by the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. Rorty, who now described himself as a “Taft Republican,” collaborated on the project with Moshe Decter, the former political editor of the “Voice of America,” who referred to himself as a “Stevenson Democrat.” Their thesis was that, although McCarthy had performed a service in drawing attention to Communist agents who had sneaked into the Roosevelt administration, his sloppy methods had begun to hinder rather than aid the necessary purge of Communists.18 The appearance of the book indicated a slight shift in the attitude of the American Committee toward McCarthy now that a substantial section of public opinion had been mobilized against him by other forces.
Earlier, in 1952, Farrell had demanded that a planning meeting for an American Committee for Cultural Freedom conference, “In Defense of Free Culture,” adopt a resolution proclaiming that “the main job in this country is fighting McCarthyism.” He insisted that domestic communism was no longer a threat and that “the most effective way of influencing European intellectuals is to show how we defend cultural freedom in our own country.” Dwight Macdonald enthusiastically supported Farrell, and Richard Rovere indicated assent; but Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Clement Greenberg, William Phillips, F. W. Dupee, and the vast majority of others found various reasons to object.19
The conference was held at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on 29 March. According to notes taken by Macdonald, Rovere and Mary McCarthy spoke out against Joseph McCarthy at the morning session, but Max Eastman declared that the antiradical witch-hunt did not exist and insisted that any “unhappy incidents” were due to the failure of the liberals “to see the necessity of the main task,” which was exposing Communists. In the afternoon session, James Wechsler of the New York Post proposed a resolution attacking McCarthy, but the chair, Lionel Trilling, ruled him out of order and promised that the American Committee for Cultural Freedom would discuss the matter in its appropriate bodies.20 On n April, Macdonald and Rovere met with Bell and Kristol, but the latter two refused to support a general condemnation of McCarthy. They proposed instead that he be criticized for specific incidents such as his reference to Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County as “pornographic and pro-Communist.” 21
Then, on 23 April, a meeting of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom was held at the Columbia Club. Since Farrell was not present, Macdonald spoke in favor of a general condemnation of the witch-hunt naming McCarthy, and Bell counterposed the idea of making specific criticisms when warranted. Elliot Cohen immediately objected to Macdonald’s proposal on the grounds that it would detract from the anti-Communist campaign, and he was joined in various ways by William Phillips, Irving Kristol, Robert Warshow, Nathan Glazer, Sidney Hook, Herbert Solow, Sol Levitas, and most of the others. Macdonald’s only vocal supporters were Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Diana Trilling, James Wechsler, and Philip Rahv.22
In 1953, however, Hook published a letter in the New York Times declaring that McCarthy’s reckless tactics objectively aided the Communists, and he urged “a national movement of men and women of all political parties to retire Senator McCarthy from public life.”23 When the book by Rorty and Decter appeared the following spring, Burnham, who had already been asked to leave the Partisan Review editorial board, led a walkout of the most conservative wing of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. Beyond such belated, minor, and politically ambiguous actions, it is difficult to find any other evidence of anti-McCarthy activity by the New York intellectuals who had joined the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. A few who felt more strongly about the matter, such as Dwight Macdonald, handed in resignations.
Typical of efforts by the liberal elements of the American Committee who wanted only to modulate the witch-hunt was Lionel Trilling’s participation in writing an ambiguous 1953 Columbia University policy statement on academic freedom. On the one hand, Trilling and the cosigners opposed federal investigations of American educational institutions as “unnecessary and harmful.” On the other, they agreed that “membership in Communist organizations almost certainly implies a submission to an intellectual control which is entirely at variance with the principles of academic competence as we understand them.”24 Thus, while making a gentle and guarded case against the real practice of McCarthyism, the authors offered a powerful statement that implicitly bolstered the rationale for the McCarthyite campaign. It was as if they were doctors cautiously going on record against the surgical removal of a bodily growth, while loudly declaring the growth to be cancerous.
Of course, the issue of responding to the witch-hunt was complicated by the decision of the Communist Party and many of its allies to deny their views and present themselves as liberals. This allowed some of the anti-Stalinist intellectuals to self-righteously view the Communists and their fellow travelers as hypocrites, especially since the Communists had earlier supported the persecution of the Trotskyists under the same Smith Act now used against them. On the other hand, when the Independent Socialist League fought to get off the attorney general’s list, and when the Socialist Workers Party launched an aggressive campaign in defense of the right of one of its own members, World War II veteran James Kutcher, to keep his job while maintaining his views, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom paid little attention. In fact, however much one might disagree with the tactic, one can understand the decision of the Communist victims to hide their views and affiliations because of the ferocity of the onslaught. In contrast, there was no excuse for the behavior of the Cold War liberals, who demonstrated
only the ersatz quality of their “anti-Stalinism.” After all, the more one feared and hated totalitarian rule in the Soviet Union, the more one should have opposed any replication in the United States. Yet these “anti-Stalinist” intellectuals showed an extraordinary tolerance toward those congressional committees that were menacing freedom of opinion and disregarding due process.
A few voices of left-wing resistance did come from a younger generation of anti-Stalinist radicals who participated in the 1952 Partisan Review symposium on “Our Country and Our Culture.” Irving Howe, in his last months of membership in Max Shachtman’s Independent Socialist League, affirmed that “Marxism seems to me the best available method for understanding and making history. . . . Even at its most dogmatic, it proposes a more realistic theory of society than the currently popular liberalism.”25 Norman Mailer, who, under the influence of his quasi-Trotskyist translator, Jean Malaquais, had moved in the late 1940s from a Popular Front Communism to a view of the United States and the Soviet Union as equivalently malignant forces, declared his alienation from the culture of his country.26 C. Wright Mills, who had come close to the Workers Party during World War II and who had written his first book, The New Men of Power (1948), partly under Workers Party influence, frankly accused the Partisan Review editors of having betrayed their founding principles.27 The one dissident voice among the older generation of intellectuals in the symposium was Philip Rahv’s explicit assault on his own generation for succumbing to a process of “embourgeoisement.” Clearly he had the center and right wings of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom in mind when he denounced