The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  FROM CULTURAL PLURALISM TO REVOLUTIONARY INTERNATIONALISM

  The departure of Cohen, Solow, Morrow, and several others from the Menorah Journal marked the political turning point for the group. But it was not unexpected; it had been anticipated since the stock market crash of 1929. By that time Solow and Felix Morrow, at least, were beginning to think of themselves as Marxists. Subsequently, the former Menorah group was drawn quite logically in the direction of the Communist Party, which appeared to provide the answers to the social and political problems that increasingly preoccupied the young writers. But they did not approach the party in prostrate awe. While new to Marxism, they had their own history as a group, their own high standards of intellectual achievement, and their own principles of integrity and fair play.

  In a certain sense it was the conceptual categories advanced and reinforced by Cohen that became the foundation of the Menorah intellectuals’ grappling with Marxist politics. At Cohen’s funeral in 1966, Trilling pointed out that he and others in his circle had gained a “complex and vivid idea of culture and society” from Cohen, whose own mind “was dominated by his sense of the subtle interrelationships that exist between the seemingly disparate parts of a culture, and between the commonplaces of daily life and the most highly developed works of the human mind.”46

  The vanguard sensibility emanating from the Menorah Journal could hardly remain static as the 1920s gave way to the 1930s. The group’s nonreligious, sociological attempt to understand the role of Jews in modern society led directly to considerations of class and politics. This intellectual process, galvanized into a desire for political action by the advent of the depression, propelled the group (united by a self-concept as a vanguard of nonreligious Jewish humanism) decisively to the left. George Novack, a friend of Cohen, Solow, Morrow, and the Trillings, recalled that they were motivated by the conviction that “the socialist revolution and its extension held out the only realistic hope of saving the Jews, among others, from destruction.” They thought that the cultural and religious heritage of the Jewish people that might have been essential to its past survival in the diaspora and the ghetto “contained very little that was usable and capable of further development once we learned about the internationalism of scientific socialism.”47

  Why did revolutionary internationalism come to dominate the thinking of the New York intellectuals in the early 1930s, and how did it replace the influence of cultural pluralism on Cohen, Trilling, and the other members of the Menorah group? First, even though the revolutionary internationalism of that era repudiated adherence to particularistic traditions and cultures, it shared with cultural pluralism a hostility to assimilation by the dominant culture.48 Capitalist society was seen as the creator of a false consciousness with false values that had to be countered by socialist-internationalist consciousness and values. Second, revolutionary internationalism shared with cultural pluralism a “cosmopolitan ideal” of sorts, although the means proposed for its attainment were different. Further, a stream of revolutionary leaders from Marx to the Bolsheviks personified this ideal.

  With these two components, hostility to assimilation and a cosmopolitan ideal, as a bridge, it is not difficult to see how the New York intellectuals moved from cultural pluralism to revolutionary internationalism under the impact of the Great Depression. As a theory, cultural pluralism presupposed a relatively stable if not static society; it was not designed to cope with intense class conflict and economic collapse. Cultural pluralism came of age during the Progressive era and was linked to a liberal view of the prospects for democratic capitalism. When the depression began, Cohen’s Menorah group abandoned the cultural pluralist perspective; it appeared insufficient from the vantage point of their intense radicalization after the stock market crash.

  The Menorah group became pro-working class and began to identify the outlook of the magazine with that of the middle class. In his 1931 letter of resignation as contributing editor of the Menorah Journal, Solow accused Hurwitz of obstructing the work of Cohen because Hurwitz allegedly wanted to make the publication into the organ of “small manufacturers, tradesmen, professionals and executives with comfortable but ‘modest’ incomes.” Moreover, Solow regarded the magazine’s program of “Jewish education” as the program of the middle class, arguing that such a program was inadequate to meet the needs of the “suffering masses (especially East European).”49

  From the perspective of revolutionary internationalism, the prevailing culture could only be transcended, and the cosmopolitan ideal realized, through the abolition of class society. In this process the decisive role was assigned to the industrial proletariat. For the revolutionary internationalist, the responsibility of the intellectual became to advance the interest of the working class, and, hence, the search for the place of Jewish culture in modern society lost its special urgency and unique significance.

  The pattern of radicalization among Jewish intellectuals in the United States appears to be halfway between the eastern European and western European models. In Russia and Poland, where anti-Semitism was the official state policy, and the majority of Jews tended to be workers and paupers, there was a massive movement of Jewish intellectuals into labor, revolutionary, and socialist movements of all types. In England and France, where anti-Semitism was not official and where there had been a considerable integration of Jews into the middle and upper classes since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Jewish intelligentsia tended to be liberal, conformist, and, at best, moderately reformist; radical intellectuals were relatively exceptional.

  In the United States, the Menorah Journal writers and their contemporaries (usually second-generation immigrants) were neither outcasts, as were the east Europeans, nor deeply integrated into the existing society and its established values, as were the English and French Jewish intelligentsia. The interwar years in the United States were marked by potentially radicalizing factors, such as the existence of a substantial Jewish working class and the persistence of a virulent anti-Semitism. Thus all wings of the radical movement in the United States experienced a considerable influx of Jewish intellectuals in the 1930s. Then during the 1940s and after— with the decrease in the Jewish working class, the greater possibilities of upward mobility because of the postwar economic boom, the withering of anti-Semitism in the face of the information about Nazi atrocities, and the conservatizing pull of Zionism—all wings of the radical movement experienced a comparable depletion. In short, there was a high degree of correlation between factors such as the ups and downs of anti-Semitism and economic mobility, and the ups and downs of rebelliousness among the Jewish intelligentsia; the different ideological currents (communism, social democracy, anarchism, etc.) available to the Jewish intelligentsia modulated these movements to the left and right but were not in and of themselves the causal factors, nor did any one (for example, Trotskyism) evidence a greater attraction for Jews than any other.

  Chapter 2. Dissident Communists

  I believe that communist principles are more important than communist organizations, for they enable us to judge the theory and practice of existing communist organizations in their light.

  —Sidney Hook, “Why I Am a Communist,” 19341

  THE MENORAH GROUP MOVES LEFT

  The 1930s radicalization of American intellectuals was adumbrated and anticipated in the late 1920s. Its matrix was a growing disillusionment with what Elliot Cohen referred to in an essay as the Jazz “Age of Brass.”2 Underlying political discontent was dramatically manifested by the fervent involvement of John Dos Passos and other writers in the Sacco-Vanzetti defense campaign. This preparatory process was, of course, reflected as well in the pages of the Menorah Journal, guided by Cohen, whose broad cultural outlook served as a natural gateway to social consciousness and political radicalism, even before Cohen and the members of his circle began their collaboration with the Communist Party. In the early 1920s, for example, Louis Fischer, then the European correspondent for the New York Evening Post, sub
mitted contributions to the journal that praised the economic situation of Jews in the Soviet Union.3

  Besides Fischer, other Menorah Journal contributors also became, for a time, sympathizers or members of the Communist movement. These included the novelists and poets Edwin Seaver, Isidor Schneider, Stanley Burnshaw, and Kenneth Fearing; the artist and art critic Louis Lozowick; the journalist A. B. Magil; and the German writer Lion Feuchtwanger. In 1927 Maurice Hindus, in a prophetic study called “The Jew as Radical,” argued that Jews had a predisposition to radicalism that stemmed from their ancient heritage, a predisposition that could be stimulated to action by certain conditions. In 1930, Mike Gold, probably the most prominent Communist writer of his time, published a chapter from his forthcoming Jews without Money (1930) in the pages of the Menorah Journal.4

  The Menorah group’s metamorphosis during the pre- and early depression years is recorded in the memoirs of Albert Halper, who encountered the New York coterie at the beginning of his career as a novelist. In 1929, Halper, freshly arrived from Chicago with one story already accepted for publication by Marianne Moore’s Dial, traveled the regular circuit of small magazines and left-wing agitprop theater meetings and attended a few John Reed Club sessions. His visit to the Menorah Journal office found him discussing politics with Cohen. But Cohen, projecting an aura of great personal integrity, did most of the talking—about the stock market crash, the necessity of economic changes, the New Masses, and the Daily Worker. Halper recounted the direct transformation of Cohen’s liberalism into radicalism in the early 1930s, and the resultant friction with Henry Hurwitz. Cohen aspired to have his own magazine with full control of its editorial policy.5

  Gradually, the core of the Menorah group gravitated toward the Communist Party and its auxiliary organizations. Among the most capable and committed of the group was Felix Morrow. Born Felix Mayorwitz on 3 June 1906 in New York City, he was the son of eastern European Jewish immigrants who ran a small grocery store. Although his family came from a Hasidic tradition, at the age of fifteen Morrow’s father had fled in disillusionment from the House of the Chortkow Rebbe where his own father was a Gabe (a manager of the affairs of a Hasidic rabbi). Morrow’s parents both became socialists in the United States, but his mother remained religious. Consequently, Morrow had a traditional Jewish education in addition to joining the Junior Circle of the Young People’s Socialist League and attending activities at the Brownsville Labor Lyceum.

  At sixteen he became a reporter for the Brooklyn Daily Times and shortly thereafter began working his way through New York University as a reporter for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. As a philosophy major Morrow became close to the department head, Philip Wheelwright, who one day asked him to come along to meet a boat carrying a new instructor from Oxford who turned out to be James Burnham. Morrow also audited Sidney Hook’s first class on Marxism at the university and edited the school newspaper, the Arch. One morning, he went to the Menorah Journal office to take Cohen’s secretary, a high school friend, out to lunch. Cohen seized on him, as he did almost any bright student, and began suggesting topics on which Morrow might write. At the time, Morrow reluctantly accepted the notion of dealing with Jewish material for the sake of publishing in a prestigious magazine.6

  Three of his longest polemical articles demonstrated his use of Jewish subject matter as a springboard to broader concerns. “The Yiddish Theatre in Transition” scored the Yiddish theater’s trends toward an imitation of popular American theater.7 In “Religion and the Good Life,” Morrow lambasted the belief, expressed by Walter Lippmann in A Preface to Morals (1929), that there is a dependent relationship between the influence of religion and the prevalence of morality. Morrow explained instead that morality is a social relationship, therefore the dynamic of Judaism stems from its being more an ethical tradition than a religion.8 Finally, in “Higher Learning on Washington Square: Some Notes on New York University,” Morrow’s political side waxed explicit as he joined his remarks about discrimination against Jewish teachers to observations about racism against blacks, noting the shift in interests on the campus from literary concerns to Communist ideology.9

  In 1928 Morrow graduated from New York University and began graduate study in the Philosophy Department at Columbia University pursuing a special interest in religion. When he enrolled a friend told him that “you’ll go farther with a neutral name,” so Mayorwitz matriculated as “Morrow.” He also continued his journalistic activities, contributing to the New York World and American, while simultaneously writing for literary publications such as the Symposium, edited by Wheelwright and Burnham, and the Menorah Journal.10 He had entered Columbia with the fantasy of going back to New York University to teach philosophy; however, he was quickly disenchanted when he learned that John Dewey had left the department. When Hook asked him if he was really “ready to put in all those years on Kant,” he began to feel rudderless. In 1931 Morrow applied for membership in the Communist Party; Israel Amter, the New York district organizer, told him to consider himself a party member but that he would be more valuable as a secret member—so secret, in fact, that Amter would personally hold Morrow’s application in his desk.

  In the Communist Party Morrow found clear direction for the first time. During 1930–31 he traveled around the country extensively as a reporter for the New Masses and Daily Worker under the pseudonym “George Cooper.” His accounts of the political struggles in which party workers in various cities were engaged were later translated into Russian and published in book form as Life in the United States in This Depression (1933). Alexander Trachtenberg, head of International Publishers, the party’s press, tried to get Morrow to visit the Soviet Union, tempting him with the huge sum of rubles he had earned from royalties on the book. But Morrow showed no interest, preferring instead to undertake a series of articles for the New Masses on the “Bonus Army” (concerning World War I veterans demanding financial relief), the “Hunger March” (concerning unemployed Ford auto workers in Detroit), and other struggles.11 He also gave courses on American history at a Communist school, participated in the party’s speakers’ bureau, and assisted Joseph Freeman on the New Masses.

  In the summer of 1931, four couples from the Menorah circle shared a millionaire’s lodge that they had managed to rent for $800. Included were Morrow and Fadiman and their wives; Norman Warren, a former student in architecture at New York University, who had contributed a review to the Menorah Journal, and Rose Warren, who had grown up in the same neighborhood as Morrow and Meyer Schapiro; and Elinor Rice, a future novelist and biographer, who had graduated from Barnard in 1923 and became a close friend of Diana Trilling, and her husband, George Novack, a Harvard-educated young advertising executive in the publishing field.

  During the summer months Morrow was much interested in a strike in Paterson, New Jersey, in which a Communist-led union was participating. The others listened as Morrow pressed them to become Communists. At one point Fadiman declared: “If what Felix says is true, we’ll have to change the whole course of our lives!”12 A year later, in the fall of 1932, Fadiman’s article “How I Came to Communism” was published in a New Masses symposium. But the change may not have been quite so dramatic, since the article said little more than that the author was moving leftward. Morrow suspected that Whittaker Chambers, a classmate of Fadiman’s who was then editing the magazine, so titled the article as a practical joke.13

  Nonetheless, the Menorah writers and their associated friends were becoming a small presence in the New Masses. John McDonald, a recently arrived young writer from Detroit, who had quickly become fast friends with Herbert Solow after hearing him speak at a John Reed Club meeting, contributed a review of Liam O’Flaherty’s Skerret in December 1932.14 Articles by Anita Brenner and Norman Warren appeared in February 1933.15 In May 1933 Louis Berg reported in the New Masses on recent events in the Scottsboro case, and Meyer Levin, who occasionally contributed to the Menorah Journal, reviewed one of his own books.16 Sidney Hook and James Rorty, who soon
became politically linked to the Menorah group, were among those who offered statements on the struggle against fascism in the April 1933 issue.17

  Solow, however, was the key political activist in the group and by this time had become acquainted with Sidney Hook, a former member of a pro-Communist student group who was now leading a current of intellectuals who believed they could change the policies of the Communist Party by friendly criticism. Hook’s group was aware of the factional struggles then occurring in the Communist International, and Hook later recalled that most of the people under his influence had had some sympathy for Leon Trotsky in the early 1930s.18

  NEW ALLIES: SIDNEY HOOK, JAMES RORTY, CHARLES RUMFORD WALKER

  Sidney Hook was born on 20 December 1902 in New York City, the son of Isaac and Jenny Halpern Hook. He grew up in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn where he was exposed to considerable left-wing propaganda and activity. As a student at Boys High School he defended Marxism against his teachers and adamantly supported the Socialist Party’s revolutionary internationalist position during World War I. In the fall of 1919, when he was a sixteen-year-old freshman, he helped organize a Social Problems Club at the City College of New York. Comprised of Socialists and Communists united in their vehement support of the Soviet Union, the group met secretly to discuss revolutionary ideas.19

  Several precocious undergraduate essays published in Open Court, a monthly magazine “devoted to the Science of Religion, the Religion of Science, and the Extension of the Religious Parliament Idea,” announced a theme that remained constant in Hook’s political writing for the next fifteen years: the pragmatic necessity of social revolution. His article repudiating “The Philosophy of Non-Resistance” declared that “when Bertrand Russell abandons his faith in the necessity for armed insurrection on the ground that violence may destroy ‘the priceless heritage of civilization,’ is he not called upon to show that the inevitable wars generated by the present industrial system are less devastating in their ravages, less destructive to art and beauty than any social revolution can be?” A few sentences later Hook concluded that, although pacifism has its place, “the danger to society arises when the pragmatic criterion is not retained, when those modes of conflict which are adapted to specific situations are reified above the dialectical flow of natural and social forces.”20 His witty “Philosophical Dialogue,” published a few months later, pursued the relationship between absolute values and practical necessity in a debate between “Universalis” and “Pragmaticus.”21 Under the growing influence of his teacher, Morris Cohen, Hook’s interests became almost entirely redirected toward scholarly matters. By the time he graduated, his left-wing activism had evaporated, although his pro-Communist sympathies remained.