Betty Friedan's secret was shared by hundreds of her comrades on the left — though not, of course, by the unsuspecting American public — who went along with her charade presumably as a way to support her political agenda. As Horowitz's biography makes clear, Friedan, from her college days and until her mid-thirties, was a Stalinist marxist (or a camp follower thereof), the political intimate of leaders of America's Cold War fifth column, and for a time even the lover of a young communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects with J. Robert Oppenheimer. Not at all a neophyte when it came to "the woman question" (the phrase itself is a marxist construction), she was certainly familiar with the writings of Engels, Lenin, and Stalin on the subject and had written about it herself as a journalist for the official publication of the communist-controlled United Electrical Workers union. These newly disclosed facts suggest that the histories of feminism, including some written by other veterans of the communist movement like Eleanor Flexner and Gerda Lerner, apparently another Party alumna, need to be reexamined just to get the record straight.
The antecedents of Friedan's version of feminism also bear revisiting in light of the new information. Her infamous description of America's suburban family household as "a comfortable concentration camp," in The Feminine Mystique, probably had more to do with her marxist hatred for America than for her own experience as a housewife and mother. Her husband, Carl, also a leftist, once complained to a reporter in 1970 that, far from being a homebody, his wife "was in the world during the whole marriage, either full time or free lance," lived in an eleven-room mansion on the Hudson with a full-time maid, and "seldom was a wife and a mother." Of course, no one paid much attention to the family "patriarch" when he supplied these interesting details, because as a male he was deemed guilty before the fact.
One indication that Goldstein-Friedan has not liberated herself entirely from the Stalinist mentality that shaped her views is the fact that she still feels the need to lie about her identity. Although her biographer is a sympathetic leftist, Friedan refused to cooperate with him once she realized he was going to tell the truth. After Horowitz published an initial article about Friedan's youthful work as a "labor journalist," Friedan publicly maligned him.
Speaking to an American University audience, she remarked: "Some historian recently wrote some attack on me in which he claimed that I was only pretending to be a suburban housewife, that I was supposed to be an agent."
This was both false and unkind because Friedan's professor-biographer bends over backwards throughout his book to sanitize the true dimensions of Friedan's past. Thus he describes Steve Nelson as "the legendary radical, veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and Bay area party official." In fact, Nelson was an obscure radical but an important party apparatchik (later notorious for his espionage activities in the Berkeley Radiation Lab), who would be a legend only to other communists and who was in Spain as a party commissar to enforce the Stalinist line. The professor also bends over backwards to defend Friedan's lying, excusing it as a response to "McCarthyism." In her attack on him she claimed, absurdly, that he was going to use "innuendos" to describe her past. This was based on the fact that he had asked questions about what she actually believed at the time, based on his examination of her published articles. Horowitz's response to what might be called Friedan's "right baiting" is all-too understanding or would be seen as such by anyone outside the claustrophobic circles of the left. "Innuendos," he explains, is a word often used by people "scarred by McCarthyism." Indeed.
Reading these passages called to mind a C-SPAN Booknotes program on which Brian Lamb asked the president-elect of the American Historical Association, Eric Foner, about his father, Jack. The younger Foner claimed that his father was a man "with a social conscience" who made his living through public lectures and who, along with his brothers Phil and Moe, was "persecuted" during the McCarthy era. When Lamb asked Foner why they were persecuted, Foner responded disingenuously that his father was a political dissenter and had supported the loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War. (He repeated this misleading charade in a similar exchange with a reporter from the Chronicle of Higher Education .†) Even in the McCarthy 1950s, no one was persecuted simply for siding with the Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War.
The Foner brothers, in fact, were fairly well-known communists, one a party labor historian and another a party union organizer. It is a historical fact that, communist-controlled unions in the cio, on orders from Moscow, sought to block the Marshall Plan effort to rebuild Western Europe. This was a plan, it should be recalled, that was in part designed to prevent Stalin's empire from absorbing Western Europe which had been the fate of the new satellites in Eastern Europe. That is why socialists like Walter Reuther purged the union "reds" from the CIO and also why communists like Foner's uncle came under FBI scrutiny — that is, why they were "persecuted" in the McCarthy era. They were potential fifth column agents for the Soviet state.
That communists, like the Foners, lied at the time was understandable. They had something to hide. But why are their children lying to this day? And why are people like Betty Friedan lying, long after they have anything to fear from McCarthy committees and other government investigators?
Surely no one seriously believes that people who reveal their communist pasts in the Clinton era are going to be persecuted by the American government. The folk singer, Pete Seeger, a party puppet his entire life, is a nationally celebrated entertainer and was honored at the Kennedy Center with a Freedom Medal by President Clinton himself. Angela Davis was once the Communist Party's candidate for vice president and served the police states of the Soviet empire until their very last gasps. Her punishment for this career is to have been appointed "President's Professor" at the state-run University of California, one of only seven faculty members on its nine campuses to be so honored. Nationally, she is a living academic legend, officially invited to speak on ceremonial occasions at exorbitant fees by college administrations across the country and memorialized with rooms and lounges named in her honor-this despite the absence of any notable scholarly contributions on her part and a corpus of work that is little more than ideological tripe.
Nor does the amnesty extend merely to members of the Communist Party. In the midst of the Vietnam War, New Left icon Jane Fonda incited American troops to defect in a broadcast she made from the enemy capital over Radio Hanoi. She then returned to the United States to win an Academy Award and eventually become the wife of one of America's most powerful media moguls. In this capacity she oversaw a twenty-two-hour CNN Series On the Cold War equating McCarthyism with the Soviet gulag. This travesty is now an "educational" tool destined for use in classrooms in every state in the nation. Bernadine Dohrn, leader of America's first political terrorist cult, who once officially declared war on "Amerika" and personally set a bomb in the nation's Capitol, and who has never conceded even minimal regret for her crimes or hinted at the slightest revision of her views, was appointed by the Clinton Administration to a Justice Department commission on children. Her husband and equally unrepentant fellow terrorist, Billy Ayers, is a professor of early child education at Northwestern University. The idea that America relentlessly punishes those who betray her is laughable, as is the idea that leftists have anything to fear from their government if they tell the truth about what they did fifty years ago.‡
So why the continuing lies? The reason is pretty obvious: the truth is embarrassing. To them. Imagine what it would be like for Betty Friedan (the name actually is Friedman) to admit that as a Jew she opposed America's entry into the war against Hitler because Stalin told her that it was just an inter-imperialist fracas? Imagine what it would be like for America's premier feminist to acknowledge that well into her thirties (and who knows for how long after?) she thought Stalin was the Father of the Peoples and that the United States was an evil empire. Or that her interest in women's liberation was just the subtext of her real desire to create a Soviet America. Now, those explanations would demand a lot from an
yone.
Which is why it probably seemed easier to lie about all of it at the time, apparently until after her death, when her papers would be unlocked. The problem with this solution, however, is that lying can't be contained. It begets other lies, and eventually becomes a whole way of life, as President Clinton himself could tell you. One of the lies that the denial of the communist past begets is an exaggerated view of McCarthyism. Fear of McCarthyism quickly becomes an excuse for everything. The idea advanced by people like Friedan, that McCarthyism was a "reign of terror," as though thousands lost their freedom and hundreds their lives while the country remained paralyzed with fear for a decade, is simply false.
McCarthy's personal reign lasted but a year and a half, until Democrats took control of his committee. The investigation of domestic communism, which needs to be separated from McCarthy's own underhanded tactics, is another subject altogether. Ultimately, however, being an accused communist on an American college faculty in the 1950s was only marginally more damaging to one's career opportunities than the accusation of being a member of the Christian Right would be on today's politically correct campus, dominated as it is by the tenured left. Bad enough, but a reign of terror, no.
The example of Betty Friedan should be a wake-up call. If we are going to restore civility and honesty to public discourse about these issues, and integrity to intellectual scholarship, it is necessary to insist on candor from people about their political commitments and from intellectuals about what they know. And it is important to call things by their right names. Without such a resolve, we will continue to be inundated with books from the academy with ludicrous claims like this: "In response to McCarthyism and to the impact of mass media, suburbs, and prosperity, a wave of conformity swept across much of the nation. Containment referred not only to American policy toward the USSR but also to what happened to aspirations at home. The results for women were especially unfortunate. Even though increasing numbers of them entered the work force, the Cold War linked anti-communism and the dampening of women's ambitions."
This is the commentary of Friedan's biographer and the kind of ideological hot air that passes for analysis in the contemporary academy. It is the same nonsense that Friedan has sold to American feminists: "With The Feminine Mystique, Friedan began a long tradition among American feminists of seeing compulsory domesticity as the main consequence of 1950s McCarthyism." Well, if the new biography is correct, perhaps it is not American feminists to whom Friedan has sold this bizarre version of reality so much as American communists posing as feminists in Women's Studies Departments, along with the unsuspecting young people whose understanding of the past comes from tenured leftist professors.
* * *
*Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminist Mystique (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachsetts Press, 1998).
†October 23, 1998: "His father, Jack D. Foner, and his uncle, Philip Foner, were both leftist historians blacklisted during the McCarthy era for their alleged Communist activities ('like supporting the Spanish Civil War,' Mr. Foner says dryly). 'I grew up in a family where we were well aware of the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of freedom — and where we were willing to challenge it. "'This is how the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at one of the nation's most prestigious schools describes his Stalinist family's political opinions.
‡In fact this was even the case in 1955, when the left-wing journalist Murray Kempton published his book about the 1930s, Part of Our Time. Kempton felt at ease enough to recall that he had been a member of the Young Communist League. The difference was that Kempton was an anti-Stalinist and anti-communist in the 1950s, even though he was still on the left. Unlike Friedan he had nothing to hide from his readers about his politics.
22
Professor Rorty's Left
FOR YEARS, Richard Rorty has been holding court as the foremost left-wing intellectual in America. Recently, he published a book that is a heartfelt lament about the state of his party, which he describes as anti-American, programless, and politically irrelevant. Damning as this indictment might seem, Achieving Our Country is not a work of political "second thoughts." Rorty has no intention of abandoning a movement in whose causes he has toiled as a lifelong partisan. When all his complaints are registered, the left remains in his eyes the "party of hope," the only possible politics a decent, humane, and moral intellectual like himself could embrace. This irreducible air of invincible self-righteousness, coupled with a tone of worldly lament, make Rorty's book at once a desperate and revealing specimen, an emblem of the impossible quandary in which the American left now finds itself.
Rorty's own career as a philosophical pragmatist is based on an American skepticism hostile to the grand theorizing and absolute certitudes characteristic of marxism. Yet Rorty's background is rooted firmly in the marxist tradition. His parents, by his own account, were "loyal fellow-travelers" of the Communist Party, breaking with their comrades in 1932 when they realized how completely the party was dominated by Moscow. Rorty's father became a leader of American Trotskyism and was lampooned in a 1935 Daily Worker cartoon that portrayed him as a trained seal reaching for fish thrown by William Randolph Hearst. In this environment the young Rorty grew up as an "anti-communist red diaper baby" — supporting America's Cold War against the Soviet empire abroad, while keeping the socialist fires burning at home — a postmodernist avant la lettre. With the passing of Irving Howe, Rorty is now one of the last of the breed, godfather to a small but influential remnant of self-styled "social democrats" huddled around Howe's magazine Dissent. While Rorty sometimes seems to understand the profound real-world failure of the socialist fantasy, he stubbornly clings to an idea of socialism as (in Irving Howe's phrase) "the name of our desire."
Rorty begins his diagnosis of the American left by comparing national pride to individual self-esteem, declaring it a "necessary condition for self-improvement." This introduces his central concern, which is the emergence since the 1960s of a left that despises America and hates everything it stands for. When this left speaks of America, according to Rorty, it does so only in terms of "mockery and disgust." When it thinks of national pride, it is thinking of a sentiment "appropriate only for chauvinists." The left associates American patriotism with the endorsement of atrocities against Native Americans, ancient forests, and African slaves.
In Rorty's view, it was not always so. There was once a progressive left in America, whose pride in country was "almost religious" and whose aspirations were summarized in Herbert Croly's famous title The Promise of American Life. It was a left that believed in an organic development of this country into the nation that it should be; it believed, therefore, in a politics of piecemeal reform. Into this radical Eden, according to Rorty, there came first the serpent of marxism and then the trauma of Vietnam. Instead of reformism, the left embraced marxism, which was chiliastic in its ambitions and absolutist instead of skeptical in its epistemological assumptions. Instead of aiming at realistic improvements to our benighted condition, marxists aimed at a totalizing revolution that would transform the world we know into something radically other. This apocalyptic vision made piecemeal reform irrelevant and even dangerous, since reforms might co-opt the revolutionary spirit and dampen its zeal. Negativism is the principal weapon of revolutionary intellectuals committed to this totalitarian faith. In their hands, social criticism is a corrosive acid since, in order to create a new socialist order, the old slate of existing institutions has first to be wiped clean. But, in the absence of a social catastrophe that would provide it with fertile political ground, this negativism, according to Rorty, merely leads to political isolation.
Rorty views the Vietnam War as the decisive event converting the American left to the marxist revolutionary paradigm. He describes the war as "an atrocity of which Americans should be deeply ashamed." Along with the "endless humiliation inflicted on African-Americans," the war persuaded the New Left, which had previously recognized the "errors" of marxism, that some
thing was "deeply wrong with their country, and not just mistakes correctable by reforms." As a result, they became neo-marxists and revolutionaries.
In Rorty's view, that revolutionary vision is now irretrievably dead, killed by the failures of twentieth-century utopias and the nonmarket economies on which they were based. The fall of communism made marxism untenable. Rorty is realist enough to recognize this truth, but remains leftist enough to believe that rather than vindicating its capitalist opponents, its death offers new opportunities for the left to advance its socialist agendas. With communism no longer an issue, the previously divided factions of the left can now unite in a new version of the old Popular Front, the anti-fascist coalition between Stalinists and liberals of the 1930s. According to Rorty, it is time to dispense with distinctions like "Old Left," and "New Left," which once reflected differing attitudes towards the Soviet bloc. It is also time to erase the distinction between socialists and liberals, since it is easy to see that the two share similar egalitarian goals, once the (metaphysical) idea of overthrowing capitalism is abandoned.
Just how far Rorty is willing to take this reconciliation is revealed by the roster of icons he selects as representative of his progressive front: "A hundred years from now, Howe and Galbraith, Harrington and Schlesinger . . . Jane Addams and Angela Davis . . . will all be remembered for having advanced the cause of social justice," he writes, apparently forgetting that for Angela Davis the cause of social justice was the communist gulag itself. "Whatever mistakes they made, these people will deserve, as Coolidge and Buckley never will, the praise with which Jonathan Swift ended his own epitaph: 'Imitiate him if you can; he served human liberty.'" Elsewhere, Rorty comments: "My leftmost students, who are also my favorite students, find it difficult to take my anti-communism seriously." His readiness to embrace apologists for police states like Angela Davis, while dismissing such defenders of liberty as William F. Buckley, shows why.
Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes Page 22
