The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  Ten months after publishing this statement, Hook became the victim of an intense antiradical campaign promoted by the conservative newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. Hearst’s New York American ran a series publicizing Hook’s role (and also that of his New York University colleague James Burnham) as a guiding spirit of the American Workers Party, and demanding that he be ousted from his teaching position. In response, Hook turned to a Trotskyist-led organization called Non-Partisan Labor Defense, which organized a protest rally of 2,500 to denounce Hearst’s redbaiting activities.4

  Yet twenty years later, in 1953, this same Sidney Hook, now fifty-one years old, a full professor, and the former chairman of the New York University Philosophy Department, published a book called Heresy, Yes—Conspiracy, No. Its thesis was that “communism . . . is the greatest menace to human freedom in the world today.” Hook unabashedly called upon faculty and administrators to enforce “a policy of exclusion of members of the Communist Party and similar groups” from teaching in schools and universities.5 Even as he wrote this book, Hook still considered himself a liberal socialist. Two decades later, he campaigned for Richard Nixon, and in 1980 he proudly endorsed Ronald Reagan, who in turn sent warm greetings to Hook’s eightieth birthday party in the fall of 1982.6

  This political odyssey, a strange blend of the paradigmatic and the idiosyncratic, requires comment. First, Hook’s move from left to right is familiar to those who have studied the deradicalization of twentieth-century American intellectuals, a middle-class stratum increasingly tied to the professions. But the same pattern appears among a cross-section of an entire generation born in the first two decades of this century, including white-collar workers, radicalized owners of small businesses, and industrial workers. What distinguishes intellectuals from the others is not the overall direction of their movement but the suddenness of their shifts, the extremes to which they went, and the fact that, as intellectuals, they articulate their new views at every stage, sometimes blithely contradicting what they had earlier professed. Thus, an understanding of the causes and consequences of Hook’s evolution from revolution to reconciliation has broad implications for the understanding of our political culture.

  Hook’s evolution is distinctive among the left intelligentsia of the 1930s for its failure to exemplify the “God that failed” motif. In contrast to most ex-Communists and fellow-travelers, Hook’s disillusionment with the Soviet Union as the fatherland of socialism somewhat predated his public emergence as a revolutionary Marxist. His political activity in the early and mid-1930s, especially before the eruption of the Moscow purge trials, was devoted to developing a revolutionary communist left in opposition to official Communism, or “Stalinism,” as Soviet communism was already being called by such Marxist and Trotskyist-influenced opponents as Hook. Yet what appears in this instance to be Hook’s personal idiosyncrasy vis-à-vis the mainstream radical intellectuals of the 1930s turns out to be paradigmatic for the formative years of the group known today as the “New York Intellectuals.” It is precisely the attempt by the founders of the tradition of the New York intellectuals to develop an anti-Stalinist revolutionary communism that distinguishes them from the pure and simple anti-Communists of the 1930s and after, despite the efforts of some in later years to obliterate, to trivialize, or to misrepresent this crucial episode of their lives. Moreover, it was the abandonment of an opposition to Stalinism on anticapitalist premises that sapped the movement of its most positive qualities in the years following World War II. Hook and many others became fanatical adherents of a more sophisticated version of the anticommunist ideology that was promoted by the United States government, business, and conservative elements to smooth the transition in the changing world role of the United States from a semi-isolationist stance to the major imperialist power; subsequently, this “liberal anticommunism” took on a life of its own.7

  A good example of an inaccurate representation of this history is contained in a 1984 letter to the New York Times Book Review by Sidney Hook and Arnold Beichman. They argue for the centrality of the New Leader in the tradition of the anti-Stalinist left, in response to a piece by Nathan Glazer, which recognized Partisan Review’s right to that role.8 From the perspective of the political frame of reference used by the New York intellectuals themselves during their formative years, a frame of reference that is resurrected and embraced in this book, the New Leader was generally regarded as a halfway house for right-wing social-democratic anticommunists from which virtually no one returned. If the New Leader had actually been central to the anti-Stalinist left from its inception, then Clement Greenberg’s oft-quoted remark that “anti-Stalinism . . . started out more or less as Trotskyism” would be false.9 There would, in fact, be little difference between the anti-Stalinism of Hook and his associates in the 1930s and their views in the 1980s, a myth that some might like to foster for the sake of appearing politically consistent, rather than acknowledging the subsequent sequence of turnabouts and gyrations in their orientation. Obscured would be the profound difference between anti-Communism (originally, opposition by revolutionary Marxists to Soviet Communism, after the rise of Stalin, as a deformation or perversion of socialism) and anticommunism (in the United States, an ideological mask for discrediting movements for radical social change and supporting the status quo by amalgamating these movements with Soviet crimes, expansionism, and subversion).10

  Simply put, without Trotskyism there would have never appeared an anti-Stalinist left among intellectuals in the mid-1930S; there would only have been the anticommunist movement already existing, one associated with the essentially Menshevik politics of various social democratic organizations, with David Dubinsky and Sidney Hillman in the needle trades unions, and with publications such as the New Leader and the Jewish Daily Forward. But it is inconceivable that Menshevism had the power to inspire such young writers as Sidney Hook and Philip Rahv, who were drawn to the Russian Revolution, because Menshevism denied the validity of that revolution while Trotskyism, despite its opposition to Stalin’s policies, celebrated its significance and achievements. Trotskyism made it possible for these rebellious intellectuals to declare themselves on the side of the revolution (as opposed to the side of the social democrats who had just then succumbed to the Nazis without resistance), and yet also to denounce Stalin from the left as the arch betrayer of Lenin’s heritage.11 In a certain sense their position anticipated the one promoted three decades later by the Soviet dissident Roy Medvedev: that one can be a Leninist and for democracy at the same time.

  Regrettably, scholars, biographers, and literary critics have missed entirely the centrality of this political phase in their continuing efforts to analyze and assess the New York intellectuals. Instead, most of the studies to date are brief and vague about the revolutionary politics of the group, according disproportionate attention to important but secondary issues such as Jewish immigrant origins and literary tastes. Of course, the approach of Hook and Beichman, asserting anticommunist social democracy as the consistent and determining factor in the history of the group, is highly unusual. The more typical misreading of the evolution of the New York intellectuals determines membership in the circle by the extent of their involvement in Partisan Review. My own contention is that the New York intellectuals must be understood as an outgrowth of the tradition of the anti-Stalinist left as it passed through an excruciatingly difficult political period.

  Since the late 1960s, there has been a steady stream, now swelling to a torrent, of books and articles about this group. Sometimes the New York intellectuals are called the “New York family.” In popular usage, the term usually refers to a loose circle of intellectuals whose preeminent forums have been Partisan Review, Commentary, and Dissent. Contributors to these journals who were old enough to be politically active in the 1930s tended to become, like Hook, not only anti-Stalinists but also revolutionary Marxists of one persuasion or another. In the cultural arena, most defended the modernist avant-garde, even if they felt strong a
llegiances to other traditions. In the 1980s, many—including not only Hook but other former Trotskyists and Trotskyist sympathizers such as Lionel Abel, Saul Bellow, Irving Kristol, Melvin J. Lasky, and Seymour Martin Lipset—are associated with the neoconservative “Committee for the Free World” led by Midge Decter and her husband, Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz. This is a predominantly pro-Reagan organization that achieved considerable notoriety when in April 1981 it ran an advertisement in the New York Times to “applaud American policy in El Salvador.” Other surviving New York intellectuals are not quite so right wing, but very few consider themselves to be politically to the left of the Democratic Party, a position that was assumed at the outset of their careers.

  Appraisals of the New York intellectuals have been made by at least a dozen scholars, and there have been book-length studies of such individuals as Hannah Arendt (who entered the tradition at a later date), Saul Bellow, Max Eastman, James T. Farrell, Clement Greenberg, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Delmore Schwartz, Lionel Trilling, and Edmund Wilson.12 Even more striking has been the production of autobiographical and semiautobiographical works by the New York intellectuals themselves. Such memoirs include not only the acclaimed trilogy by Alfred Kazin, the sensational revelations of Norman Podhoretz (another latecomer), and the ironical “confessions” published by Mary McCarthy and Dwight Macdonald in the 1950s, but also numerous books and sketches by Lionel Abel, William Barrett, Daniel Bell, Leslie Fiedler, Albert Halper, Michael Harrington, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, George Novack, William Phillips, Harry Roskolenko, Diana Trilling, Lionel Trilling, and Bernard Wolfe.13

  The widespread and continuing interest in the New York intellectuals by students and scholars of radical political and cultural history—not to mention those of the reading public fascinated by intimate revelations about the lives of the literary mandarins of our time—is obviously because of the mark these writers have made on American culture. The New York Times Book Review described Partisan Review as “the best literary magazine in America” when one of its founders, Philip Rahv, died in 1973.14 Further evidence of the importance of the New York intellectuals on the national scene during recent decades has been provided by such political and sociological studies as Charles Kadushin’s The American Intellectual Elite (1974), Peter Steinfels’s The Neo-Conservatives (1979), Philip Green’s The Pursuit of Inequality (1981), William L. O’Neill’s A Better World—The Great Schism: Stalinism and the American Intellectuals (1982), and Richard Pells’s The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age (1985).

  One purpose of this book is to help understand how and why the New York intellectuals, a group of one-time rebels and outsiders, became so well integrated into American culture. It documents the process by which the views of former revolutionaries came into harmony with the dominant ideology of the liberal intelligentsia during the Cold War, an ideology typified by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s The Vital Center (1949). Once this happened, the skills and experience they had acquired as polemicists and ideologists during their radical years, and especially as authorities on communism with an insider’s knowledge, enabled them to move rapidly into seats of cultural power during the 1950s. In more recent decades, some even came to have access to national power. Irving Kristol, for example, became an intellectual consultant to the Nixon administration, Nathan Glazer’s work was much admired by the Reagan administration, and neoconservative articles in Commentary influenced White House policy in the 1980s.

  The study that informs this book, however, would have been necessary even if its subjects had not received so much notoriety in recent years. This work approaches the history of the New York intellectuals with a view to reconstructing an important and vastly misunderstood chapter in the history of literary radicalism and the Marxist intellectual tradition in the United States. It proposes, from a contemporary Marxist point of view, to help cure a certain political amnesia that has hitherto prevented a full understanding of the achievements and mistakes of an earlier generation.

  In light of the neoconservative self-portrait being created by many of the New York intellectuals, one is tempted to conclude that they have a stake in perpetuating an amnesia that avoids a forthright disclosure of their previous political history as revolutionary but anti-Stalinist Marxists. Thus it is not surprising that many young radical intellectuals in search of a Marxist tradition among the American intelligentsia have turned elsewhere. They imagine that anti-Stalinism automatically leads to reconciliation with capitalism, an erroneous judgment that fails to account for the fact that the entire spectrum of the radical left—including Communists, Trotskyists, anarchists, and radical social democrats—moved rightward for largely social, not ideological, reasons. This misconception accounts for the recent infatuation, following the decline of the New Left in the 1970s, with the history of American Communism, particularly during the Popular Front era, an infatuation that is reflected in the many favorable references in radical journals to the scholarship of Paul Buhle, Vivian Gornick, Maurice Isserman, Mark Naison, and others.15

  The New York intellectuals are often scornfully dismissed by contemporary radicals. Even when they are treated with some sympathy and understanding, their legacy is so confused that what is most relevant, worthwhile, and enduring in their tradition is sometimes missed.16 William O’Neill’s A Better World, for example, presents his heroes, the “anti-Stalinists” in the 1940s, without ever discussing the revolutionary Marxist and Trotskyist past of the central figures.17 In The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age, Richard Pells considers the “anti-Stalinist” intellectuals only in terms of their “retreat from socialism.”18 James Atlas, in a 1985 New York Times Magazine essay, “The Changing World of the New York Intellectuals,” favorably quotes Norman Birnbaum’s statement that “a New York intellectual was one who wrote for, edited, or read Partisan Review.”19

  The most recent study, Alexander Bloom’s Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (1986), explains the phenomenon of the New York intellectuals primarily in terms of upwardly mobile Jews. Like all exaggerations, this approach has a strong element of truth in that some of the central figures in the group really were from poor immigrant backgrounds, and the incorporation of this sector of American society into the mainstream of intellectual life after World War II is an element that must be theorized along with other components of the New York intellectuals’ tradition. But upwardly mobile Jews comprised a disproportionate number of intellectuals involved in all radical movements in New York in the 1930s. The veterans of the New Masses and New Leader were not qualitatively different in their Jewish composition from those of the Partisan Review. The case for a unique association between Jewish intellectuals (including their background and literary style) and the New York intellectuals’ tradition will have to be made, if it can be made, on more specific grounds than on the percentage of Jewish editors and contributors to the key publications.20

  It is, of course, the post-World War II political evolution of the New York intellectuals that confuses these scholars and also makes it so difficult to convince young radicals that the New York intellectuals’ contribution to politics and culture in the 1930s should be critically assimilated as one of the more useful components of a rich Marxist heritage. Hook is an authentic although less desirable representative of that tradition. There are certain obvious continuities between his present neoconservative posture and some of the positions taken by the New York intellectuals in their previous incarnations. But if one understands the changes in political orientation on their part just prior to, during, and especially after World War II, it becomes clear that their ultimate evolution was not the only one possible.

  In fact, only by understanding the peculiar nature of their transformation can one come to grips with the most contradictory and confusing aspect of the New York intellectuals: that a group of individuals who mainly began their careers as revolutionary communists in the 1930s could become an institutionalized and even hegemonic component of American
culture during the conservative 1950s while maintaining a high degree of collective continuity. This pendular evolution by so many New York intellectuals suggests, from a radical point of view, that their politics were deceptive from the beginning. Politically oriented members of the generation of the 1960s and 1970s find it hard to believe that such neoconservative and right-wing social democratic figures among the New York intellectuals as Kristol and Hook once considered themselves genuine Marxist revolutionaries and at the same time expressed an uncompromising opposition to Stalinism. The contemporary generation of the left fails to understand that it was not anti-Stalinism per se that was responsible for changing these intellectuals into Cold War liberals in the 1950s and neoconservatives in the 1970s, but a host of historical and social factors that terminated their revolutionary socialist perspectives. Thus it is crucial to demonstrate that the political and cultural content of the group’s anti-Stalinism meant different things at different times.