The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  40. Barrett, The Truants, p. 8.

  41. See Philip Rahv, “Proletarian Literature: A Political Autopsy,” in Essays on Literature and Politics, 1932–72, ed. Arabel J. Porter and Andrew J. Dvosin, pp. 292–308 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978).

  42. Barrett, The Truants, p. 77.

  43. Ibid., pp. 87–88.

  44. James Burnham, “Lenin’s Heir,” Partisan Review 12, no. 1 (Winter 1945): 61–72.

  45. Midge Decter, “Socialism and Its Irresponsibilities: The Case of Irving Howe,” Commentary 74, no. 6 (December 1982): 25–32.

  46. George B. de Huszar, ed., The Intellectuals (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960), pp. 52–80.

  47. Michael Löwy, Georg Lukács: From Romanticism to Bolshevism (London: New Left Books, 1979), p. 15.

  48. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (New York: International, 1971), p. 9.

  49. James Gilbert, “The Voice of Dissent from a Left Outsider,” In These Times, 12–18 January 1983, p. 18.

  CHAPTER 1

  1. Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (New York: Oxford, 1968), p. 33.

  2. A good synopsis of different views on the sources of Jewish radicalism is contained in Allen Guttman’s The Jewish Writer in America (New York: Oxford, 1971), pp. 134–37. See also Lawrence H. Fuchs, “Sources of Jewish Internationalism and Liberalism,” in The Jews: Social Patterns of an American Group, ed. Marshall Sklare, pp. 595–613 (New York: Free Press, 1958); Arthur Liebman, Jews and the Left (New York: Wiley, 1978); Jack Nusan Porter and Peter Dreier, “The Roots of Jewish Radicalism,” Jewish Radicalism (New York: Grove, 1973), pp. xv–liv; Peter I. Rose, ed., The Ghetto and Beyond (New York: Random House, 1969); Stephen J. Whitfield, “The Legacy of Radicalism,” Jews in American Life and Thought (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1984), pp. 73–96.

  3. Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays, p. 27.

  4. Sidney Hook to AW, 28 December 1978.

  5. John Higham, Send These to Me (New York: Atheneum, 1975), p. 196.

  6. Horace Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” Nation 100 (1915): 191–94, 217–20. Allen Guttman discusses the possible influence of Kallen on Mordecai Kaplan and others in The Jewish Writer in America, pp. 93–100.

  7. Randolph Bourne, “Transnational America,” Atlantic Monthly 128 (July 1916): 86–97.

  8. Randolph Bourne, “The Jew and Transnational America,” Menorah Journal 2 (December 1916): 277–84. This was a speech to the Harvard Menorah Society.

  9. The following provide useful background on the Menorah Journal: Robert Alter, “Epitaph for a Jewish Magazine,” Commentary 39, no. 5 (1965): 51–55; Henry Hurwitz, [untitled foreword], Menorah Journal 14, no. 1 (1928): i; Jenna Weissman Joseliet, “Without Ghettoism: A History of the Intercollegiate Menorah Association, 1906–1930,” American Jewish Archives 30, no. 2 (November 1978): 133–54; Horace Kallen, “The Promise of the Menorah Idea,” Menorah Journal 69, nos. 1–2 (1962): 9–12; Mark Krupnick, “The Menorah Journal Group and the Origins of Modern Jewish-American Radicalism,” Studies in Jewish-American Literature 5, no. 2 (1979; joint issue with Yiddish 4, no. 1): 56–67; Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York: Random House, 1967); Leo Schwartz, Foreword to The Menorah Treasury (Philadelpia: Jewish Publications Society, 1964), pp. vii–x; Lionel Trilling, Afterword to The Unpossessed by Tess Slesinger (New York: Avon, 1966); Alan M. Wald, “The Menorah Group Moves Left,” Jewish Social Studies 38, nos. 3–4 (Summer-Fall 1976): 289–320. Henry Hurwitz (1886-1961) immigrated from Lithuania to Massachusetts and was educated at Harvard University where he helped found the first Menorah Society.

  10. Robert Alter, “Epitaph for a Jewish Magazine,” p. 52.

  11. Author’s telephone interview with Elsa-Ruth Cohen Herron, 5 November 1983, Truro, Cape Cod, Mass.

  12. This point was emphasized by both Felix Morrow and Lionel Trilling in their comments on a draft version of the essay “The Menorah Group Moves Left” by AW.

  13. Elliot Cohen, “The Menorah Summer School,” Menorah Journal 9, no. 4 (October 1923): 339–45. In this report on school activities, Cohen refers to Kallen as one of the teachers.

  14. Trilling, Afterword to The Unpossessed, p. 320.

  15. Ibid., pp. 327–28.

  16. Ibid., p. 313. Similar sentiments are expressed in a letter from Herbert Solow to Elliot Cohen, 23 December 1929, Solow Papers, HIL.

  17. This was noted by Morrow on a draft of “The Menorah Group Moves Left” by AW.

  18. Elinor Grumet, “The Apprenticeship of Lionel Trilling,” Prooftexts 4, no. 2 (May 1984): 164.

  19. Lionel Trilling, contribution to “Under Forty,” Contemporary Jewish Record 7, no. 1 (February 1944): 15–17.

  20. Lionel Trilling, “From the Notebooks of Lionel Trilling,” Partisan Review 51, no. 4 and 52, no. 5 (Double Issue, Fall 1984 and Winter 1985): 496.

  21. Trilling, Afterword to The Unpossessed, p. 316.

  22. Trilling, “Under Forty,” p. 17.

  23. Lionel Trilling, Introduction to The Immediate Experience by Robert Warshow (New York: Atheneum, 1975), p. 14.

  24. This and the following biographical facts are drawn mainly from Edward Joseph Shoben, Jr.’s Lionel Trilling: Mind and Character (New York: Ungar, 1981), pp. 11–14; and Diana Trilling, “Lionel Trilling: A Jew at Columbia,” in Speaking of Literature and Society, ed. Diana Trilling, pp. 411–29 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980).

  25. Lionel Trilling, “Impediments,” Menorah Journal n, no. 3 (June 1925): 286.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Lionel Trilling to AW, 10 June 1974.

  28. Trilling, ed., Speaking of Literature and Society, p. 20.

  29. Lionel Trilling, “Notes on a Departure,” Menorah Journal 16, no. 5 (May 1925): 421–34

  30. Trilling, “Under Forty,” p. 17.

  31. Ibid., p. 15. For other discussions of Trilling’s Jewish identity see Edward Alexander, “Lionel Trilling,” Midstream 19, no. 3 (March 1983): 48–57; Thomas H. Samet, “The Social Imagination,” in “The Problematic Self: Lionel Trilling and the Anxieties of the Modern” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1980), pp. 1–43; Mark Shechner, “The Elusive Trilling,” Nation, 17 September 1977, pp. 247–50, and ibid., 24 September 1977, pp. 278–80.

  32. Herbert Solow to Elliot Cohen, 23 December 1929, Solow Papers, HIL.

  33. Anne Solow to AW, 28 August 1978.

  34. Interview with Sylvia Salmi, June 1975, Ajijic, Mexio. The details of Solow’s college matriculation and graduation are contained in his Columbia College transcripts, copies of which are in Solow Papers, HIL.

  35. Mark Van Doren, “Jewish Students I Have Known,” Menorah Journal 13, no. 3 (June 1927): 264–68. The students in the article are unnamed, but in Mark Van Doren’s 1958 autobiography he identified them as Henry Rosenthal, Clifton Fadiman, Meyer Schapiro, John Gassner, Louis Zukofsky, Herbert Solow, Lionel Trilling, and Charles Prager. See also Whittaker Chambers, “Morningside,” in Cold Friday (New York: Random House, 1964), pp. 91–144.

  36. Felix Morrow to AW, 2 October 1975.

  37. However, in a 24 December 1975 letter from Meyer Schapiro to AW, Schapiro emphasizes the importance of both The Unpossessed and Van Doren’s recollection as valuable documents in relation to understanding Solow.

  38. Sidney Hook to AW, 20 October 1975.

  39. See Eleanor Clark’s contribution to Herbert Solow: Memorial Service at Community Church, November 30, 1964 (New York: Luce Foundation, 1964), and Eleanor Clark to AW, 13 August 1974.

  40. Herbert Solow to Elliot Cohen, 23 December 1939, Solow Papers, HIL.

  41. Felix Morrow to AW, 14 July 1975.

  42. Sidney Hook, contribution to Herbert Solow: Memorial Service.

  43. Solow’s changing sentiments are recorded in two letters written in Jerusalem on 21 November 1929. One is addressed to Tess Slesinger and the other (never sent) to the editors of the Menorah Journal. The anti-Zionist Menorah Journal articles are “The Sixteenth Zionist Congress,” 17, no. 1 (October
1929): 23–40; “The Era of the Agency Begins,” 17, no. 2 (November 1929): 111–25; “The Realities of Zionism,” 19, no. 2 (November–December 1930): 97–127; “Camouflaging Zionist Realities,” 19, no. 3 (March 1931): 223–41.

  44. Born in San Francisco in 1877, Magnes had achieved notoriety among American radicals for his militant opposition to World War I. Praised by pro-Bolshevik writers such as Max Eastman and Joseph Freeman, Magnes became sympathetic to the Russian Revolution during its early years. Arriving in Palestine in 1922, Magnes began to organize the Hebrew University, serving first as chancellor and then as president. During the time that Solow was briefly in Palestine (late 1929), Magnes had begun to achieve notoriety of a new kind. Sparked by the violence of 1929, he openly opposed official Zionist policy and began agitating for a binational cultural state in Palestine based on Arab-Jewish cooperation, joint ownership of the land, and the restriction of Jewish immigration. Although Solow’s first encounter with Magnes erupted in a personal conflict—due probably to a misunderstanding by Magnes of Solow’s motives in interviewing him—as late as the 1940s Solow remained attracted to Magnes’s ideas and identified with the Ihud (Union) Association formed by Magnes in 1942. A summary of Magnes’s political activities during World War I is contained in the chapter “The Pacifism of Judah L. Magnes” in Zosa Szajkowski, Jews, Wars, and Communism (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1972), 1:79-102. Magnes’s views on Palestine can be found in the following sources: Martin Buber, Judah L. Magnes, and Moses Smilansky, Palestine: A Bi-National State (New York: Ihud Publishing Association, 1946); Martin Buber, Judah L. Magnes, and E. Simon, Towards Union in Palestine (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972).

  45. Solow wrote the Board of Directors informing them that Hurwitz wastrying to lead the magazine back to its conservative days before the advent of Cohen. He also charged Hurwitz with having spread the false story that Cohen had quit the Menorah Journal because he could not print material exclusively of his own viewpoint. See the following correspondence in the Solow Papers at HIL: Hurwitz to Solow, 18 June 1931; Solow to Hurwitz, 19 June 1931; Solow to Hurwitz, 21 June 1931; Hurwitz to Solow, 23 June 1931; Solow to Board of Directors, Menorah Journal, 12 October 1931; Hurwitz to Solow, 12 November 1931.

  46. Lionel Trilling, “On the Death of a Friend,” Commentary 29, no. 2 (1960): 94.

  47. George Novack to AW, 24 December 1978.

  48. It is true that many Marxists, especially before the Holocaust, referred to themselves as “assimilationists” or as advocating “assimilation,” but they obviously could not have meant this in the sense of taking on the dominant Christian bourgeois culture. They believed, somewhat naively, that cultural, religious, ethnic, racial, and even sexual oppression and antagonisms among working people would be reduced by a linear growth of class consciousness in the industrial countries of the West.

  49. Herbert Solow to Board of Directors, Menorah Journal, 12 October 1931, Solow Papers, HIL.

  CHAPTER 2

  1. Sidney Hook, “Why I Am a Communist: Communism without Dogmas, a Reply by Sidney Hook,” Modern Monthly 8, no. 3 (April 1934): 143.

  2. Elliot Cohen, “The Age of Brass,” Menorah Journal 11, no. 5 (October 1925): 425–47. This remarkable essay not only decries the superficial Jewish culture of the Jazz Age, calling for a complete reconstruction of Jewish intellectual values, but also expresses considerable cynicism about World War I and shows some identification with Afro-Americans.

  3. See Louis Fischer, “Under the Soviet Regime,” Menorah Journal 10, no. 1 (February 1924): 21–32, and “Jews in the U.S.S.R.,” ibid. 11, no. 2 (April 1925): 172–77.

  4. Mike Gold, “Portrait of My Mother,” Menorah Journal 18, no. 1 (January 1930): 59–70.

  5. Albert Halper, Good-bye Union Square (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970), pp. 26–32.

  6. Felix Morrow to AW, 29 May 1974.

  7. Menorah Journal 16, no. 4 (May 1929): 448–55.

  8. Ibid. 28, no. 2 (February 1930): 97–117.

  9. Ibid. 18, no. 4 (April 1939): 346–56.

  10. According to an interview conducted with Felix Morrow at Princeton in the early 1950s (authenticated by and used with the permission of Morrow), it was his radical essays in the Symposium that first caught the attention of Joseph Freeman, who subsequently tried to recruit him to the Communist Party.

  11. Author’s interview with Felix Morrow, December 1980, New York City.

  12. Author’s interview with George Novack, September 1973, Oakland, Calif.

  13. Noted by Morrow on a draft of the essay “The Menorah Group Moves Left.”

  14. New Masses 8, no. 5 (December 1932): 25.

  15. Ibid., no. 7 (February 1933): 22, 28–29.

  16. Ibid., no. 9 (May 1933): 28.

  17. Ibid., no. 8 (April 1933): 25.

  18. Sidney Hook to AW, 1 August 1974.

  19. Ibid., 15 September 1984.

  20. Sidney Hook, “The Philosophy of Non-Resistance,” Open Court 36, no. 1 (January 1922): 5.

  21. Sidney Hook, “A Philosophical Dialogue,” ibid. 36, no. 10 (October 1922): 621–26.

  22. Sidney Hook to AW, 15 September 1984.

  23. Sidney Hook, “The Philosophy of Dialectical Materialism,” Journal of Philosophy 25 (1 March 1928): 113–24, and ibid. 25 (15 March 1928): 141–55. The debate between Hook and Eastman begins with ibid. 25 (16 August 1928): 475–76 and ibid. 25 (15 March 1928): 587–88.

  24. Sidney Hook to AW, 15 September 1984, and unpublished manuscript by Hook, “Encounter with Espionage.”

  25. Sidney Hook to AW, 20 October 1975, and Felix Morrow to AW, 2 October 1975.

  26. This was recorded in a notarized 12 November 1938 memo on Whittaker Chambers in the Solow Papers, HIL.

  27. Herbert Solow, “Modern Education,” Nation 134, no. 3486 (27 April 1932): 518; Henry Storm (pseud, for Herbert Solow), “The Crisis on the Campus,” New Masses 7, no. 2 (June 1932): 12–14; leaflet, “A Call to a City-wide Conference on Students’ Rights,” with the following note from Sidney Hook: “I helped Herbert Solow organize this in 1933.”

  28. New York Evening Post, 6 October 1928, p. 9.

  29. Undated memo by Herbert Solow, Solow Papers, HIL.

  30. “A Discussion with Herbert Solow,” in Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1929–33 (Supplement), ed. George Breitman, pp. 137–47 (New York: Pathfinder, 1979).

  31. Meyer Schapiro to AW, 24 December 1975; Sidney Hook, “Breaking with the Communists,” Commentary 77, no. 2 (February 1984): 49. George Novack confirms the ignorance about Trotskyism of most in the group in his obituary for Solow, “A Representative Figure Dies,” Militant, 14 December 1964, p. 4: “I can recall a meeting of the dissident intellectuals at the climax of the internal dispute with the Communist Party, when most of those present indignantly repudiated any friendliness for the ‘Trotskyites’ and warned Herbert that, if he or anyone else had anything to do with such rascally renegades, ‘we would never speak to him again.’”

  32. Biographical material on Rorty has been assembled from rough drafts of his autobiography, “It Has Happened Here,” and other materials in the Rorty Papers, OL, as well as from an 18 August 1974 letter to AW from Winifred Rorty. There are also numerous biographical references to Rorty in The Selected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Ann N. Ridgeway (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968). See also Daniel Pope, “His Master’s Voice: James Rorty and Advertising Ethics,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Popular Culture Association, Toronto, Ontario, 1984.

  33. Biographical information on Walker was provided by Adelaide Walker in a 28 May 1980 interview with the author at Cape Cod, Mass.

  34. Malcolm Cowley, The Dream of the Golden Mountains: Remembering the 1930s (New York: Penguin, 1980), p. 57.

  35. “Writers Form a Defense Committee,” New Masses 7, no. 1 (June 1931): 22.

  36. Unsigned article [probably by Herbert Solow], “The Intellectual Revolt against Stalinist Hooliganism,” Militant, 10 March 1934, p. 4; Michiko Kakutani, �
�Diana Trilling, Pathfinder in Morality,” New York Times, 16 November 1981, p. C13.

  37. Cohen’s pamphlet was reviewed by Grace Hutchins in New Masses 8, no. 1 (August 1932): 22.

  38. Author’s telephone interview with Davis Herron, November 1983, Truro, Cape Cod, Mass.; letter from Leon Trotsky to National Committee, Communist League of America, 2 October 1933.

  39. Rorty, manuscript of “It Has Happened Here,” Rorty Papers, OL.

  40. Ibid.

  41. Ibid.; see also Malcolm Cowley, The Dream of the Golden Mountains, pp. 15–16; Matthew Josephson, Infidel in the Temple: A Memoir of the Nineteen-Thirties (New York: Knopf, 1967), pp. 154–55; materials on League of Professionals in the Corey Papers, BL.

  42. Rorty, manuscript of “It Has Happened Here,” Rorty Papers, OL.

  43. Ibid. For Cowley’s version of the dissolution of the League, see The Dream of the Golden Mountains, pp. 124–26.

  44. Author’s interview with Felix Morrow, 29 December 1980, New York City; author’s interview with George Novack, 5 August 1981, Oberlin, Ohio; Hook to AW, 15 December 1977.

  45. These events are summarized from the author’s interview with Felix Morrow, 29 December 1980, Princeton, N.J.; John McDonald to AW, 18 November 1974; letter of resignation to Joshua Kunitz, 8 May 1933; Joshua Kunitz to Albert Margolies, 19 May 1933; copy of resolution passed by meeting of National Committee of NCDPP on 28 April 1933; and Herbert Solow to Charles and Adelaide Walker, 16 May 1933. The last four items are in the Solow Papers, HIL.

  46. George Novack, “Max Shachtman: A Political Portrait,” International Socialist Review 34, no. 2 (February 1973): 26.

  47. Author’s interview with George Novack, August 1975, Oberlin, Ohio.

  48. Letter to the New Masses 10, no. 10 (6 March 1934): 8–9.

  49. “To John Dos Passos,” ibid.

  50. New Masses 10, no. 12 (20 March 1934): 21.

  51. Editorial, “A United Front—with Whom?,” ibid., p. 6.

  52. Editorial, “Unintelligent Fanaticism,” ibid. 10, no. 13 (27 March 1934): 6.