The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  No doubt the assassination of Trotsky in August 1940 by an agent of Stalin’s secret police reinforced Solow’s new course. Since they had remained aloof from organizational ties, many anti-Stalinist Marxist intellectuals were bonded to Trotskyism through attachment to Trotsky himself. That year Solow had become an assistant to the president of the New School for Social Research, Dr. Alvin Johnson, in which capacity he administered a $1 million fund provided by the Rockefeller Foundation and other funding agencies to rescue scientists, scholars, and intellectuals from Hitler-dominated regions. Solow also became an unpaid occasional operative for the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency) in mid-Manhattan, providing information on Communist activity.58 On 11 January 1943 Solow’s longtime friend, Carlo Tresca, was gunned down in New York as he left the Fifth Avenue offices of Il Martello, the anti-fascist Italian-language journal that he edited. Once more Solow found himself immersed in research as he sought to uncover possible motivations for the assassination. He suspected that the fascists, the Stalinists, or the Mafia could have murdered Tresca, but the case was never solved.59

  Later in 1943 Solow made contact with T. S. Matthews of the Luce publishing empire, and within a short time he became a contributing editor for Time, writing mainly on education, business, political, and technological topics. In 1945 he moved permanently over to Fortune, where his special interests involved him in extensive travel, most often to Africa and Latin America, covering international politics. For the next twenty years, as he rose to an honored position on the magazine, Solow would retain only the vaguest connections to New York intellectual life, dying of a heart attack on Thanksgiving Day, 1964.

  Charles and Adelaide Walker experienced a similar, if less pronounced, evolution.60 In 1933 they had fallen under Solow’s influence, but their efforts to keep afloat the Theatre Union, a Marxist drama group of Communist and Socialist forces, caused them to refrain from signing the 1934 open letter. That same year they visited the Soviet Union carrying party-provided letters of introduction to various Soviet cultural luminaries, including Sergei Eisen-stein. On their journey back to the United States, through an arrangement made by Solow, they met Trotsky’s son Leon Sedov in Paris.

  The Walkers were much liked by the Communists because they were activists and also because Walker, due to his age, experience, and personal presence, gave the impression of being a sensible radical, thoughtful and open. Thus when Solow led them in the direction of the Trotskyists, they were warmly welcomed as well. On the eve of the Walkers’ departure for Minneapolis in 1935 to do research for what would become the classic account of the Trotskyist-led 1934 teamster strikes, American City (1936), James P. Cannon and James Burnham urged them to join the Trotskyist organization. They demurred, partly because of tactical reasons advantageous to their research. However, once in Minneapolis they became so enthusiastic about the three Trotskyist Dunne brothers that they were eager to join but could not bring themselves to ask for membership. Their first doubts about Trotskyism came a year later in Mexico during the Commission of Inquiry hearings, when they began to wonder whether the Soviet Union would have been significantly different had Trotsky’s policies prevailed. In 1938 they moved to Cape Cod to coauthor a book clarifying their views about Marxism, Stalinism, and Trotskyism. No sooner did they begin work than they discovered that their views were evolving even as they wrote. Progress on the book was stymied because of their uncertainty about where they stood. They began to run out of money, so when their friend Russell Davenport offered Adelaide a job at Fortune magazine, she accepted. By 1940 they no longer considered themselves to be revolutionaries. Politically they stood somewhere between Norman Thomas and Franklin Roosevelt. Just a year or so later, Adelaide found herself working with great enthusiasm for the industrialist Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican presidential candidate and a leading spokesman of business interests opposed to the New Deal. Charles, in the meantime, returned to the Episcopalian faith and accepted a position as assistant secretary of Yale University. In the years before his death in 1974, he also returned to his youthful love of classical languages, preparing many translations of Sophocles and other Greek dramatists for publication.

  Another example of a post-Moscow trial defection was the particularly abrupt about-face of the novelist Charles Yale Harrison. Born in Philadelphia in 1899, Harrison was a newspaperman who enlisted in the Royal Montreal Regiment in the early days of World War I. He returned home a radical and drifted toward the Communist Party for which he served as a contributing editor of New Masses, directed the party’s agitation on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti, and helped to found the John Reed Clubs. His 1930 antiwar novel, Generals Die in Bed, became a best-seller and caused a storm of controversy among conservative critics, turning him into a hero of the left. But when Trotsky’s daughter, Zina, committed suicide in 1933, Harrison broke publicly with the party to become a sympathizer of the Trotskyists.61

  In the summer of 1936 Harrison conceived the idea of writing a popularization of Trotsky’s ideas and traveled to Oslo for a personal interview. Prevented by the Norwegian government from arranging a meeting, Harrison returned to the United States pledging in a letter to Trotsky that he would redouble his efforts to “plead your cause and the cause of revolutionary socialism before my colleagues in the literary circles, in the universities and before the youth.”62 In 1938 he published an anti-Stalinist satire, Meet Me at the Barricades, which Bernard Wolfe enthusiastically commended in a letter to Trotsky.63 By 1939, however, Harrison had left New York radical circles for a government post in Washington and was so hostile to the Trotskyists that Shachtman and Burnham publicly attacked him as a renegade and opportunist in the New International.64

  The ambiguous nature of anti-Stalinism was also evidenced in the short and sad story of the Marxist Quarterly, probably the most distinguished socialist theoretical journal ever published in the United States.65 In 1936 a group of Communist sympathizers at Harvard asked Lewis Corey to join with them in establishing a left journal, initially called the American Marxist Review and later Science and Society. Corey instead proposed to found a Marxist journal that would involve a variety of revolutionary tendencies and convinced Corliss Lamont, at the time a critical supporter of the Communists, to provide funding for the venture. Corey assembled representatives from the Trotskyists, James Burnham and George Novack; from the Lovestone group, Will Herberg and Bertram D. Wolfe; and from the left-wing Socialist and independent milieu, including Louis Hacker, Francis Henson, Sidney Hook, Meyer Schapiro, Sterling Spero, and Herbert Zam. The Communists, as expected, declined to participate. To resolve a personality conflict, Corey, a short, dark-haired, soft-spoken man, became the journal’s managing editor while Hacker assumed the post of the president of the “American Marxist Association,” which sponsored the journal.

  The first issue included an inspiring editorial that posed two challenges. The first was directed “to the forces of disorder, bewilderment and reaction. . . . We believe that it is possible to analyze scientifically the complex subject matter of society from a definite point of view without sacrificing the richness of the material considered, without ignoring difficulties, without bogging down in a mass of unrelated descriptive correlations which comprises so much of American social science.” The second was directed “to Marxists themselves. Too much Marxist writing, especially in America, consists of mere doctrinal exegesis that is wholly discreditable to Marxism. Too often a mistaken sense of organizational loyalty is given precedence over the weight of evidence and truth. With all too few exceptions, Marxist writing is not rooted in American history, conditions and problems. The whole of American life needs to be explored by Marxist scholarship.” The statement concluded with a boast that, despite tactical differences among the editors, they were unified by “a spirit of free enquiry guided only by fundamental theory and their intellectual conscience, a confidence in scientific research as the means by which new truths can be won, and a willingness to
learn.”66

  However, a crisis erupted immediately after the appearance of the first issue. The Trotskyists became wholly absorbed in fighting the Moscow trials frame-up, while the Lovestoneites and Lamont defended the trials. Burnham, Novack, and the Socialist Zam resigned from the editorial board. Two more issues appeared, but when Nikolai Bukharin, the Lovestone group’s mentor, was tried, convicted, and executed, the Lovestoneites and Lamont bitterly split and Lamont withdrew his financial support on the grounds that the publication was moving in an “anti-Soviet” direction.

  Both Corey and the Lovestone group were indeed moving precipitously to the right. In 1940, the former would renounce Marxism and become a bitter anticommunist, while the latter abandoned their organization to eventually become conservative ideologues of considerable influence in intellectual circles and the organized labor movement.67

  Louis Hacker’s evolution was quite similar. Born in 1899 in New York City, the son of Austrian immigrants who worked in the sweatshops, he intermittently studied history at Columbia University, receiving a B.A. in 1922 and an M.A. in 1923.68 After spending the 1920s working for the New International Encyclopedia and the New International Year Book, he began to write a series of left-oriented books on American history modeled after Charles Beard’s work, including an influential Marxist study called The Farmer Is Doomed (1933). During a stint as head of the Historical Project of the Works Progress Administration, Hacker brought in Solow, Morrow, McDonald, and Corey as co-workers, and in the process developed close ties to the anti-Stalinist left. He also became the inspirational figure for a promising but unfulfilled attempt by Novack, Morrow, and others to revise the contributions of the Progressive historians, such as Beard and Vernon Parrington, from a Marxist perspective. Hacker’s political writing expressed the need for “the building of a revolutionary party” and “the conversion of the imperialist war into civil war.” He called upon workers to use “mass power to free themselves from a system of production—the profit system—which was every day proving that it had outlived its usefulness.”69 Yet only two years after the demise of the Marxist Quarterly, he published The Triumph of American Capitalism (1940). Here he presented a class-struggle analysis of American history up to 1900, but then he proclaimed that the New Deal was overcoming all manifestations of inegalitarianism and economic insecurity, thereby proving “that capitalism was a success.” James Burnham, nearing his own last gasp as a revolutionist, criticized the book in the Partisan Review, ironically titling the review, “God Bless America.”70

  Certainly the most complete political turnabout of the late 1930s was that of Max Eastman. At the start of the decade his views had been firmly pro-Bolshevik. In Artists in Uniform (1934) he fully embraced revolutionary socialism, his only caveat being that revolutionists must find ways of preventing a replication of the Stalinist malaise when they extended the socialist revolution to other countries. But following publication of the book his doubts became so strong that for two years he remained silent on the Soviet Union, abandoning his pro-Soviet lectures. Then, in 1936, under the impact of the first Moscow trial, he wrote an article for Harper’s called “The End of Socialism in Russia,” in which he reversed his previous opinion.71 The defects of the Soviet system now outweighed its economic gains. In Stalin’s Russia and the Crisis in Socialism (1940), Eastman explained that he no longer saw Stalinism as the enemy of Leninism but as its logical product. He then rewrote Marx, Lenin and the Science of Revolution (1926) as Marxism: Is It a Science? (1940) in order to bring the book into accord with his new outlook.

  One year later, in 1941, at a cocktail party, Eastman told those present that he had become completely antisocialist in orientation.72 He became a roving editor for the Reader’s Digest and also served for a short time as a member of the editorial board of the New Leader, but only because he agreed with its anticommunist views. Eastman always had a tendency to consider human instincts as a force sufficiently potent to transcend environmental material factors.73 This view now became central to his argument against socialism and in defense of capitalism:

  Another mistake of the Socialists was to imagine that there might be brotherly peace in a free society—a settlement, that is, of all head-on conflicts of interest, all caste and class struggles. That might happen in heaven, but on earth men will always divide into groups with conflicting interests. . . . The task of the social idealist is not to suppress these groupings, or try to reconcile them, but to keep them in a state of equilibrium—never to let any one of them get out of hand.74

  An earlier Eastman, of course, would have seen the fundamental absurdity in believing that as a law of nature humanity must divide into slave master and slave, feudal lord and serf, or industrial profiteer and exploited laborer, let alone that “equilibrium” between oppressed and oppressor must be sustained in the name of “social idealism.” But such banalities now became the stock-in-trade of his popular journalism. In a special article written for the Reader’s Digest in 1941, Eastman declared that Lenin failed in the Soviet Union, just as Robert Owen had failed in the United States, not for historical-material reasons but because both designed experiments that fundamentally ignored humanity’s competitive instincts. Moreover, he contended, a classless society would simply be a bore.75 Having jettisoned all support for socialist internationalism, Eastman’s anticommunism soon mushroomed into virtual paranoia.76

  Mary McCarthy’s short story, “Portrait of an Intellectual as a Yale Man,” collected in The Company She Keeps (1942), captures an element of the opportunism, or, at least the glibness, that pervaded such turnabouts. The protagonist, the journalist Jim Barnett, is a composite recalling James Burnham in name, resembling John Chamberlain in body, and probably drawn from Dwight Macdonald, Herbert Solow, and various other anti-Stalinist radical intellectuals of the 1930s in career. After graduation from Yale, Barnett takes a position on the Liberal, a weekly journal of opinion suggestive of the Nation or the New Republic. There he simultaneously dabbles in radical politics and has an affair with a young woman, Meg, who had been isolated by her fellow-traveling colleagues because of her defense of Trotsky at the time of the Moscow trials. Barnett is characterized by his pragmatism (he abhors systems) and a remarkable ability to combine personal success with the repeated assertions of his integrity. For example, he resigns from the Liberal staff in protest over Meg’s treatment, but he had actually been looking for a good excuse to move on to a new career. In the end, Barnett’s real mediocrity is exposed. He becomes a staff writer for Destiny, a magazine resembling Fortune, his intellectual promise unfulfilled and his radicalism as well as his feelings for Meg suppressed because they remind him of his own failings.

  Certainly there is an element of authenticity in Barnett, yet the engagement with radicalism of many intellectuals may have operated on several levels at once. Part of their experience is captured not just in Barnett but also in Meg, who is ostracized for her views and who is genuinely motivated by moral concerns. But, as in virtually all fiction about radical intellectuals of the 1930s, the substance of political thought is absent. Barnett is simply incapable of the literary productions and active political commitment of a Burnham, a Macdonald, or a Solow. In regard to intellectual qualities, McCarthy may have intended instead to depict John Chamberlain or even Clifton Fadiman, who, despite greater public recognition, in no sense had the theoretical abilities or sense of commitment to be central to the formation and development of the anti-Stalinist left.

  TWILIGHT OF THE THIRTIES

  Anti-Stalinism in and of itself had a dual nature. It allowed the possibility of either a return to classical Marxism or a sharp turn to the right, depending on individual circumstance and the complexity of the context in which an individual became an anti-Stalinist. More common among the New York intellectuals in the late 1930s, however, was an attempt to rethink Marxism in some original way. Occasionally such an attempt only delayed but did not prevent a conservative course of development, but in other instances it shifted on
e’s radicalism onto a new terrain. Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station (1940) reflects just such a development.

  Throughout the years spent researching and writing his magnum opus on socialist thought, Wilson’s political views were in transition. The Mosow trials proved to be a turning point. In Travels in Two Democracies (1936), Wilson expressed guarded criticisms of the Soviet bureaucracy, although he did not hesitate to attack the American Communists in a more direct manner. In The Triple Thinkers (1938), Wilson explicitly denounced international Stalinism as a perversion of Marxism. But by the time he had completed To the Finland Station, he was prepared to call the whole progressive significance of the Russian Revolution into question.

  Wilson joined the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky in 1936. Although he greatly admired Trotsky and in To the Finland Station he would restore Trotsky to his rightful place as Lenin’s staunchest collaborator, Wilson made little differentiation between the organized expressions of the international communist movement in the 1930s. In his view the Communists, the Trotskyists, and the Lovestone group were all mechanical imitations of a dogmatic brand of politics appropriate only to Russian conditions. In 1937 he wrote: “As for the Trotskyists, they are often more intelligent [than the Communists], and they are freer to think and say what they think. But they suffer, also, from the Russian defects in being the obverse of the Stalinist coin. They, too, tend to turn everything into a factional issue and are likely to proceed to a literary discussion with all the polemics of a party unmasking.”77