The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  some of the ex-radicals and ex-Marxists, who have gone so far in smoothly re-adapting themselves . . . as to be scarcely distinguishable from the common run of philistines. In their narrow world anti-Stalinism has become almost a professional stance. It has come to mean so much that it excludes nearly all other concerns and ideas, with the result that they are trying to turn anti-Stalinism into something which it can never be: a total outlook on life, no less, or even a philosophy of history. Apparently some of them find it altogether easy to put up with the vicious antics of a political bum like Senator McCarthy, even as they grow more and more intolerant of any basic criticism of existing social arrangements.28

  The evolution of Elliot Cohen’s Commentary was yet another symptom of the transformation of the anti-Stalinist left into the New York intellectuals under the impact of Cold War anticommunist ideology. At the time of its founding in 1946, Commentary considered anti-Stalinist Leninists to be part of its intellectual community, frequently publishing feature articles by the Trotskyist Sherry Mangan as well as some essays and reviews by Workers Party member Irving Howe. Clement Greenberg was the central link to both men, although assistant editors Nathan Glazer and Robert Warshow agreed that the Shachtman group was an ally. Cohen was willing to tolerate this attitude, and Irving Kristol, another staff member, immersed in a return to Judaism, was simply unconcerned. By 1948 Mangan had essentially been purged as a regular contributor because of his refusal to give critical support to the “West.” Later, when Howe launched Dissent magazine, partly to chart a path away from revolutionary socialist politics but also to challenge the conformist atmosphere of the early 1950s, Glazer wrote a sharp attack on its premier issue.

  Cohen himself drew increasingly close to Sol Levitas, the influential editor of the New Leader, and functioned as a right-wing element in the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, only slightly less extreme than James Burnham. He also served as an unofficial adviser on Communism to executives at the Luce publications as well as to New York State officials. Yet his peculiar relation to Judaism persisted. Even during his radical years he took the unpopular position of defending the German-Jewish-American establishment, and after leaving the Menorah Journal he had worked as public relations director for the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies without ever becoming a Zionist. Indeed, it was anti-Zionism that was his main link to the American Jewish Committee, which sponsored Commentary, although Cohen’s anti-Zionism stemmed from his original universalist perspective while the American Jewish Committee seemed to view Zionism as an expression of an east European Jewish nationalism that it did not share. Cohen’s staff members also held non-Zionist positions: Glazer believed in a binational state in Palestine; Kristol’s Judaism was confined to philosophical issues; and Warshow evidenced no special concern about the matter. When information about the Holocaust became public, Cohen appeared to be unaffected. Although Martin Buber once came to Cohen’s home to discuss the situation in the Middle East, Cohen himself never traveled to Israel.29

  Another indication of the disorientation of the anti-Stalinist left during the witch-hunt was its failure to rally to the cause of the Independent Socialist League’s campaign to have its name removed from the attorney general’s list of “subversive” organizations. When hearings were held on the issue in Washington, D.C., Shachtman was shocked that Hook refused to testify on behalf of the Independent Socialist League. In general, he found it difficult to get any intellectuals to testify. James T. Farrell refused to cooperate, probably because he was bitter about having been “used” by the Workers Party in the 1940s. C. Wright Mills refused to testify as well, apparently because he was hesitant to be identified publicly with a group still claiming to be Leninist and Trotskyist. Finally, Daniel Bell, Norman Thomas, and Dwight Macdonald were brought in to speak on behalf of the organization; all acted with considerable honor and integrity, although on the witness stand Macdonald insisted on raising his old grievance about one of his articles not having been published in its entirety. The main witness testifying to the organization’s “subversion” was James Burnham, who reluctantly testified under government pressure. Arriving at the administrative hearing he proferred a friendly greeting to Shachtman, who responded with a brutal cold shoulder. Once on the witness stand, Burnham was forced by the Independent Socialist League’s attorney, Joseph Rauh, to admit that he would lie in court if he felt it were his patriotic duty. This discredited the government’s case and the Independent Socialist League’s name was eventually removed from the list.30

  The shift to the right was not confined to the founding generation of the New York intellectuals; younger writers, including some who had been Trotskyists, participated in what Mills called “The American Celebration.”31 Melvin J. Lasky, who was born the son of a manufacturer in New York in 1920, attended the City College of New York from 1935 to 1939, where he was known as a brilliant and ardent sympathizer of the Trotskyists. He continued his Trotskyist political activity during 1939–40 at the University of Michigan, where as a graduate student in history he attempted to reinterpret the Civil War era under the inspiration of Lenin and Trotsky, and in letters to Dwight Macdonald bemoaned the lapses from revolutionism of Hook and Rahv.32 When he began graduate work at Columbia University in the fall of 1940, he was a supporter of the Workers Party. The following year, after World War II had begun in earnest, he found himself swayed by Sidney Hook’s repudiation of the revolutionary internationalist position. Offered a job as literary editor of the New Leader, he accepted, although at first he and managing editor Daniel Bell considered themselves to be on the far left-wing of social democracy.33

  From 1943 until 1946 Lasky was in the United States Army, where he advanced to the rank of captain. Following the war he worked in Germany as a journalist, and in 1948 he was offered the job of running a United States-sponsored cultural magazine that was to be called Der Monat. After the Berlin blockade, a leading German Socialist proposed that Lasky invite writers who had been published in the magazine to attend an international conference to be funded by the West German and United States governments. The event became the first gathering of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the international parent organization with which the American Committee for Cultural Freedom had an affiliation. The congress had simultaneously and independently been initiated in Paris by Michael Josselson (later identified as an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency), Nicholas Nabokov, Raymond Aron, Arthur Koestler, and Irving Brown (a former leader of the Lovestone group). In 1953 Lasky received a $275,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to open a publishing house for the purpose of publishing books sponsored by Monat, and Monat joined Preuves, Encounter, and Tempo Presente as journals affiliated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom. That same year, after reading a proposal from Macdonald and Mary McCarthy to launch a new journal called Critic, Lasky announced that he had repudiated the politics even of Stevensonian liberalism and wrote Macdonald that “Mary McCarthyism” and “Joseph McCarthyism” were equally evil.34

  A more complex evolution was that of Leslie Fiedler, who was not a resident of New York but who shared many common experiences with the younger adherents of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. Born in 1917 in Newark, New Jersey, he switched from the Young Communist League to the Socialist Workers Party during his final year at New York University and became an organizer for the Socialist Workers Party while a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin. When the Workers Party was formed he was briefly a member, but at the end of 1941, halfway through the first year of his teaching job at Montana State University, he drifted away for nonideological reasons. A career and a family had changed the pattern of his life. At the start of the war he considered himself an independent Trotskyist, but by the 1950s he was writing virulent anticommunist essays so full of dubious psychologizing and calls for atonement by the entire left that Harold Rosenberg felt compelled to publish a lengthy rebuttal called “Couch Liberalism and the Guilty Past.” Yet in the very year that Rosenberg�
�s essay appeared Fiedler underwent a sharp change in his thinking, finding himself increasingly drawn to the Parrington tradition of indigenous American populism.35 In the 1960s he embraced anarchism and became an enthusiastic proponent of the counterculture.

  The kind of thinking that led the center and right wings of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom to equate cultural freedom with anticommunism appeared embryonically in its predecessor organization, the short-lived Committee for Cultural Freedom, launched by Sidney Hook in the late spring of 1939. Originally called The League Against Totalitarianism, it represented the first organized effort by New York intellectuals to separate anti-Stalinism from a revolutionary Marxist context. At that time, it was aggressively resisted by all the Partisan Review editors who, in alliance with Trotskyist writers and other radicals, gathered around the rival League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism. When the Trotskyist newspaper Socialist Appeal pointed out that Hook’s committee “is silent on the question of socialism and social revolution,” thereby giving its anti-Stalinism a “reactionary character,” Hook’s organization treated the allegation as a smear comparable to the Daily Worker’s claim that the committee members were “agents of fascism.”36 The specialty of the committee, of course, was exposing “Communist front” organizations; thus, when World War II began and the Soviet Union emerged as an ally of the United States, the committee, whose leading members all supported the war, simply faded away.

  Hook revived the committee when the Cold War was well under way, just after the 1949 Waldorf World Peace Conference, which was not actually a “peace” conference but a pro-Soviet gathering that attracted three thousand delegates, many of whom were Communists and fellow travelers. There were several attempts by anti-Stalinist intellectuals to counter the conference. Hook brought some of them together under the rubric Americans for Intellectual Freedom. With a $5,000 donation from David Dubinsky, the organizers took a hotel room as the center of operations. According to William Phillips, the central organizers were Arnold Beichman, a public relations director for an electrical workers’ union who later became a professor of political science, and Merlyn S. Pitzele, a former Trotskyist who had become the labor editor of Business Week. The two men apparently launched a veritable disruption campaign against the Peace Conference that included the interception of mail and messages and the issuance of misleading statements in the name of the conference.37 This temporary formation became the nucleus for the revamped American Committee for Cultural Freedom, organized shortly afterward.

  THE PSYCHOLOGY OF APOSTASY

  Throughout the history of the radical movement much vituperation has been aimed against those who have repudiated their former convictions. One is hesitant to join the chorus of shrill critics or, at least, to use the same terminology to describe the transformation of the New York intellectuals and a considerable portion of the anti-Stalinist left. Indeed, in a moving obituary for Max Shachtman, a former disciple, Julius Jacobson, still faithful to the revolutionary socialist cause and bitterly disappointed with the apostasy of his mentor, concluded with some anguish: “I tremble to use the word, renegade. But what term better describes a man who reneged on his earlier, most fundamental commitment to social justice? To say that he died, in any sense at all, a socialist, is to denude the word of all meaning, to deny the relevance and seriousness of what he taught us about socialism in years past.”38 The more extreme of the apostates tend to turn against their former convictions with a fanaticism that leads to the caricaturing of their own experiences and former beliefs; in the name of rebelling against leftist ideological dogmatism, they create a new world outlook as narrowly ideological and at least as dogmatic as the crudest adherents of the left ever achieved. Most apostates, however, present lesser manifestations and variations of this paradigm. Considerable attention has been devoted to analyzing the tergiversations of former Communists, but almost nothing analytical has been written about apostasy from anti-Stalinist revolutionary communism.39

  The central document illuminating the experience of apostasy from anti-Stalinist Marxism is the powerful essay, “Intellectuals in Retreat,” written in 1939 by the Trotskyist editors of the New International, James Burnham and Max Shachtman. With astonishing foresight they described the dynamic that would soon overwhelm their generation of intellectuals and, not long after, engulf themselves. The essay’s essential argument is that the drift to the right-first, from revolutionary Marxism to social democracy, and then, for some, even beyond to pro-imperialism—is usually masked by a series of questionable grievances: criticisms of Marxist philosophy, most often based on a caricature of dialectical materialism as being too “fatalistic”; the inaccurate charge that Leninists advocate a one-party dictatorship, which was never true of Lenin; the claim that Leninist ideology inevitably produces Stalinism, which is a real example of fatalistic reasoning; objections to the harsh tone of Trotskyist polemics, even though many apostate intellectuals themselves never hesitated to accuse the Trotskyists of being cryp-to-Stalinists or even objectively fascists. Counterposed to these evils are a series of abstractions, devoid of precise content, about the need for “freedom” and “democracy.” Finally, “the main intellectual disease from which these intellectuals suffer may be called Stalinophobia, or vulgar anti-Stalinism.” This illness was caused “by the universal revulsion against Stalin’s macabre system of frame-ups and purges. And the result has been less a product of cold social analysis than of mental shock, and where there is analysis, it is moral rather than scientific and political.”40

  The answers and alternatives to renegacy provided by Shachtman and Burnham were not as consistently convincing as the critique. As in earlier writings, they tended to be a bit evasive about the question of a one-party dictatorship, devoting most of their time to explaining why, under the specific conditions of the Russian Revolution, a one-party system unexpectedly came into being, instead of unambiguously declaring themselves in favor of a multiparty system.41 The distinctions they made between Leninism and Stalinism were methodologically sound, but they failed to more directly address ways in which Lenin and Trotsky did, in fact, break in practice with their own theory of Soviet democracy. Nor did they acknowledge the specific errors that Lenin and Trotsky made during 1920–21 that contributed to the victory of Stalin’s tyranny, namely, the exclusion of factions in the Communist Party; the banning of the Menshevik Party and various anarchist organizations; and the suppression of multiple slates in elections to the Soviets after the end of the civil war.42 Nevertheless, their understanding of a basic feature of the psychology of apostasy—the inability to see or acknowledge the authentic nature of one’s change—was sound, even if it was vitiated by shrill vituperation: “The foulness of Stalinism and imperialism can today breed only maggots; in particular it is impossible for intellectuals to avoid degeneration not merely of their characters as human beings but also of their minds if for any length of time they give their allegiance to these allied monsters of the lie.”43

  Burnham joined the maggots just a few years later, but Shachtman continued his self-righteous excommunications for almost two decades. Very often these were directed against comrades from his own organization whose only sin was that they tended to move more quickly toward social democracy than he did. Among the first members of the Workers Party to feel his wrath was a young sociology student, Philip Selznick, who used the party name “Sherman.”44 Born Philip Schachter in New Jersey in 1919, Selznick began attending the City College of New York in 1935 and joined the Trotskyist youth group, the Young People’s Socialist League (Fourth International), just as it was departing from the Socialist Party. Soon he became the organizer of the “Joe Hill Unit” of the youth group, joining the Workers Party following the 1939–40 faction fight.

  Selznick was attracted to the ideas of Dewey as well as Burnham and held some private meetings with the latter. Subsequently he organized a faction known as the “Shermanites” which considered itself “revolutionary anti-Bolshevik.” Sherman a
lso opposed the notion that Marxism should remain the official doctrine of the Workers Party and was taken to task for this view by Irving Howe in a formal debate. Among the ranks of the Shermanites were quite a few young intellectuals who would become prominent scholars and academics, including Gertrude Himmelfarb, historian; Seymour Martin Lipset, sociologist; Marvin Meyers, historian; Peter Rossi, sociologist; Martin Diamond, political scientist; Herbert Garfinkel, political scientist; Jeremiah Kaplan, founder of the Free Press; and Irving Kristol, neoconservative journalist. In their programmatic statement, “Defining a Tendency,” the Shermanites accused the Shachtman leadership of employing “the same bureaucratic organizational methods as Cannon.”

  Under Shachtman’s direction, the Political Committee of the Workers Party issued “Bolshevism and Democracy: On the Capitulation of the Sherman Group,” which accused Selznick of various crimes: organizing a secret group during a time in which he claimed to have no differences with the Workers Party leadership; indoctrinating the group’s members without the benefit of a full and democratic discussion in the Workers Party; and carrying on secret discussions with both the Socialist Party and with James Burnham. Although the Shermanites by then had already departed to join the Socialist Party, the Workers Party Political Committee nonetheless declared that its anti-Bolshevik views rendered them ipso facto “incompatible with party membership” and denounced them as “weaklings taking one pretext or another to escape the discipline of the revolutionary party in time of hardship.” Shachtman, who had personally debated Selznick during one of the Workers Party discussions, mocked the decision of these organizational purists to join the social democrats as “a very unappetizing ending—to join the ‘party’ of Norman Thomas and company. If there is one labor organization in the U.S. outside of the Communist Party which has a thoroughly undemocratic, totalitarian-Fuehrer regime, it is the Thomas organization.” Shachtman insisted that, in the Socialist Party, the leaders did whatever they wished while young militants are “framed up and kicked out as the Trotskyists were a few years ago.” Ten years later, after a revolutionary anti-Bolshevik period and then a return to liberalism, Selznick found an academic use for the ideas that germinated in his debate with Shachtman. At the height of the Cold War, the Rand Corporation published Selznick’s The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics (1952), dedicated to two former Shermanites, Diamond and Garfinkel. Nevertheless, Selznick never moved all that far to the right. He even became a bit re-radicalized during the early 1960s, when he supported the Berkeley Free Speech movement on the opposing side of the barricade from Lipset, another ex-Shermanite who had become a well-known sociologist.