The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  A second excommunication from the Workers Party for apostasy occurred during the late 1940s. When Albert Goldman submitted his resignation in the summer of 1948, the Political Committee simply described him as demoralized. But this was followed in early 1949 by the surprising resignation of Ernest Erber. Born in 1913 in Chicago, Erber had joined the Young People’s Socialist League in 1931 and was elected its national chairman in 1935.45 Tall with white-blond hair, Erber was soft-spoken, even-tempered, intelligent, and very popular among the young members, although he was not of the intellectual caliber of other young leaders such as Irving Howe. When Goldman had joined the Socialist Party on his own in 1934, he had begun to develop a relationship with Erber so that by the time of his reelection as national chairman in 1937, Erber enthusiastically led the majority of the youth organization to Trotskyism. A central leader of the Workers Party, Erber’s defection was startling. He said that he resigned because he opposed Bolshevik policy, even though he had recently defended Bolshevism in a series of lectures sponsored by the Socialist Youth League, the youth affiliate of the Independent Socialist League. Probably Erber had been demoralized by the postwar situation in general, by the resignation of Goldman, and by the departure because of personal problems of his close personal and political friend, Nathan Gould.

  In an utter rage, Shachtman responded in an article of 116 singlespaced pages called “Under the Banner of Marxism”; he dedicated it “in comradely solidarity to the delegates of our Fifth National Convention, and to all those who are unshaken and unshakable, who do not flinch and weaken.” While not so professionally written, the essay was an extension of “Intellectuals in Retreat.” It treated Erber and Goldman in much the same terms as Hook and Burnham. He called them the “I-was-a-political-idiot-but-now-I-am-smart school” because they seemed to think that the renunciation of earlier views made them more qualified, rather than less trustworthy, to serve as political guides in charting a new direction. Shachtman wondered how it had been possible for Erber to declare all previous defectors from Bolshevism victims of “class pressure,” while insisting that his own change was due to authentic disagreements with the Workers Party program—of which he made no effort to inform the membership until after he left the organization.

  Shachtman then answered Erber’s charges with a long defense of the Bolsheviks’ abolition of the Constituent Assembly following the revolution, insisting that “the composition of the Assembly, on the day it met, no longer corresponded even approximately to the political division in the country. The sentiments and aspirations of the masses had changed radically since the party lists for the assembly were first drawn up and after the voting had taken place. By its composition, we repeat, the Assembly was less representative than the Kerensky government in its heyday.” But Shachtman’s real concern in making such a lengthy case for the Bolsheviks’ actions was that the defense of the legacy of the Russian Revolution “is the defense of authentic Marxism which is the defense of socialism.”

  According to Shachtman, most of Erber’s complaints were merely an extension of those raised by earlier capitulators “to social imperialism via American chauvinism.” He characterized Erber as “an Americanized Marxist. That is, an ex-Marxist cured of his socialism by shock-treatment from Stalinism and the softer touch of Rooseveltism.” Erber was “cured of internationalism, too. Europe and Asia and their peoples don’t exist for him.” If they did, then Erber would surely have realized that it is the crimes of the imperialists that have driven the nationalist movements to accept Stalinism. Therefore, the best way to fight Stalinism is to abolish imperialism. Erber had also declared that the United States was on the verge of a war with the Soviet Union, a conflict in which the United States should be supported rather than weakened by those advocating a “Third Camp” position. Shachtman responded that “all that American imperialism can produce for the destruction of Stalinism is a military program”; but Stalinism, since it was a social system, must be replaced by a social system of a higher order if “reactionary consequences” are to be avoided. Allying with imperialism to defend “democracy” against either fascism or Stalinism made no sense because, as Rosa Luxemburg noted, “the fate of democracy is bound up in the socialist movement.” In other words, only if the working class became independent of and hostile to the bourgeoisie could genuine democracy be sustained and extended.46

  Actually, Shachtman was quite mistaken in equating Erber with Hook and Burnham; his quirky behavior on the eve of his departure was only a prelude to a long period of political silence during which he became an urban planner outside of the radical movement and started a family. A somewhat similar pattern occurred with Jean van Heijenoort, who, under the party names “Logan,” “Gerland,” and “Loris” had continued to collaborate with the Workers Party until late 1947. During that autumn, van Heijenoort held a number of political discussions with Meyer Schapiro in which he gave no sign that he had changed his views. Suddenly, he sent out invitations to about twenty people to hear him read a paper on the one hundredth anniversary of the Communist Manifesto. The gist of the paper was that, although Marx’s predictions had seemed quite reasonable in 1848, they had turned out to be all wrong. Van Heijenoort explained that the political incapacity of the working class had been definitively proven to be an inherent and not a conjunctural weakness.

  In a letter to Alfred Rosmer, an early but short-term member of the French Left Opposition who had lived in the United States during the war, Meyer Schapiro expressed shock that van Heijenoort’s paper presented a very low level of analysis. Van Heijenoort had not carefully examined the subject presented in the paper but had coldly and haughtily claimed to have been let down by the working class. Schapiro was stunned not only by van Heijenoort’s sad and in some ways unpleasant performance but also by the loud applause on the part of several supporters of Dwight Macdonald’s Politics who were present. Shachtman was in attendance but he was too astounded to speak. Even more bizarre, in conversation afterward van Heijenoort insisted that his views really had not changed all that much. He suggested collaborating with Schapiro and others in publishing a new version of the Marxist Quarterly, a proposal that had been circulating among the remaining anti-Stalinist radical intellectuals. As it turned out, van Heijenoort chose as his last political act to publish his repudiation of Marxism in the Partisan Review under the pseudonym “Jean Vannier.” He then vanished from the political arena to begin a new life as a professor of philosophy at Brandeis University.47

  These instances of sudden and almost shameless volte-faces were only the latest in a long stream that stemmed back to the late 1930s. The Trotskyist movement was by no means unique in this phenomenon. Among the most extraordinary cases were those of Bertram D. Wolfe and Will Herberg, arch-theoreticians of the Lovestone group. A few weeks before the Lovestone organization disbanded in 1940, Wolfe appeared at a meeting to plead with the members not to change their Leninist-internationalist opposition to the coming war, as Lovestone himself had just done. In a moving voice he declared, “I have never supported imperialist war; I will never support an imperialist war; and I am breaking a lifelong friendship with Jay Lovestone over this issue because this war is no different from any other imperialist war.” Yet within weeks, Wolfe’s position became the same as Lovestone’s.

  Herberg was a man with a fantastic courtroomlike capacity to build up a case for any position he wanted. Yet with astonishing ease he showed himself just as capable as Lovestone and Wolfe of switching from one position to its opposite. A specialty of Herberg’s was demolishing all arguments in favor of theology. When he discovered that Lovestone’s young secretary, Edward Sagarin, was an agnostic, he marshaled such a barrage of evidence to demonstrate the nonexistence of God and the social evil of religion that Sagarin, fifty years later and a retired professor of criminology, could still feel the force of his logic. Yet Herberg himself went directly from militant atheism to wearing a yarmulke and praying, eventually establishing himself as one of America’s lead
ing theologians.48

  Quirky behavior, political quiescence, and extraordinary turnabouts were among the least objectionable manifestations of apostasy exhibited by these defectors. Albert Goldman embarked on a course that veered between pathos and tragedy, while Felix Morrow’s was worthy of performance by the Theater of the Absurd. At least a year before resigning from the Workers Party, Goldman had fallen into a political malaise. Unable to practice law because he had been disbarred, worried about supporting a young wife he had met and married during his Smith Act trial and a son born in November 1948, Goldman drove a taxicab for a while before accepting his brothers’ generous offer to set him up as assistant manager of the Courtesy Car Service, a limousine taxicab company in Chicago. But business was so poor that Goldman himself had to do much of the driving. In these years Goldman underwent strange changes in personality and appearance. Formerly a hearty man, nearly six feet tall with brown hair, he now became extremely thin and even foppish in appearance. He declared himself a vegetarian, developed a cleanliness fetish, and insisted on boiling all his drinking water. Old friends found him hardly recognizable.

  By 1950 he described himself as a “right-wing socialist” in a letter to New Leader editor Sol Levitas.49 In 1951, his sister-in-law, while applying for a clearance to obtain a job with the Atomic Energy Commission, wrote AEC officials that “Mr. Goldman has contacts with the FBI and co-operates with them when they seek information about former Communists.”50 A year later Goldman himself gave testimony at an AEC security clearance hearing in order to assuage any doubts about his sister-in-law’s loyalty. He confirmed that he had collaborated with the FBI, adding that “right now I would say that the agents of the FBI and Immigration Authority always come to me for help, not only with reference to particular individuals but with reference to a general attitude, for me to explain to them what the differences are between groups.”51 Declaring that he was now opposed to Marxism and the class struggle, Goldman claimed that he was still a socialist “on ethical grounds,” explaining that “more and more I am going back, not to religion, but to the ethical concepts of Christ and the prophets. That is the basis of my present socialism.” Still, he added, his anticommunism had become so strong that “if I were younger . . . I would gladly offer my services in Korea or especially in Europe where I could do some good fighting the Communists.”52 For the next four years Goldman struggled to obtain a pardon for his Smith Act conviction. After receiving the pardon, his license to practice law was restored in 1956, shortly before he was stricken with cancer. Once one of the best-known radical lawyers in the United States, he died in total obscurity in May 1960 in the Garden View Convalescent Home on Chicago’s far north side.53

  Felix Morrow remained a member of the Socialist Workers Party until the 1946 convention, vigorously fighting for his views.54 In his final speech he declared, in what he thought at the moment was absolute sincerity, “You can’t expel me; I’ll live and die in the movement!” Party members in the audience saw that there were tears in his eyes. Yet ten minutes later, his expulsion approved, he was surprised to find himself tripping down the stairs of the convention hall with the greatest sense of glee and freedom. Reneging on his commitment to join the Workers Party, he also resisted Schapiro’s proposal that he edit a new version of the Marxist Quarterly. Morrow then threw himself into a job at Schocken Books, a publishing house, that Schapiro and Elliot Cohen had helped him obtain. With the activist skills learned in the Trotskyist movement, he had no difficulty in becoming Schocken’s vice-president by the end of the year. To celebrate his newfound sense of freedom, he and a female friend gave an operatic concert at the home of his brother-in-law, the theatrical lawyer William Fitelson, who had contributed financially to the Partisan Review and would later support Dissent. Originally trained in opera, Morrow had not performed in more than twenty years. It was also at the Fitelson home that he met the twenty-three-year-old woman who became his third wife.

  Soon Morrow became even more immersed in Cold War anticommunist activity than was Goldman. Although he insisted that he only informed on Communists, he found it difficult to draw the line. Files obtained under the Freedom of Information Act disclosed that he may have given some information about the Socialist Workers Party as well.55 In addition, he began collaborating with the Central Intelligence Agency as an unpaid consultant on various literary projects, including an aborted effort to smuggle Russian-language editions of Dr. Zhivago into the Soviet Union. With the advent of the Vietnam War, Morrow began to have doubts about the Cold War ideology to which he had been so passionately devoted, but he rejected a return to radicalism. Instead, he busied himself with the publishing house he had started in 1956 while also working as a sales representative and consultant to a half-dozen other publishers, usually earning $50,000 to $60,000 a year.

  The publishing company, called University Books, specialized in the occult and was central to the boom in that field in the 1960s. Morrow was at first drawn to the occult when he handled the arrangements for the publication of the book Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953) in the United States and began reading Fate magazine. He believed that something in his Hasidic background linked him with the subject. Consequently he decided to start his own Mystic Arts Book Society, and he wrote introductions to a number of the books that he published. Since he only halfheartedly believed in the occult, he invented a persona, John C. Wilson, for his occultist literary endeavors and never wrote under his own name. But the stress between the two sides of his personality—Morrow the materialist and Wilson the mystic—brought the whole project to an end in 1966. At that time he took a big gamble by expanding his book club to include soft erotica, spending a fortune on a promotional campaign to secure new members and stretching himself far beyond his means. In addition, he concluded that Timothy Leary, whose books and whose journal, Psychedelic Review, Morrow had been publishing, was unbalanced from overuse of LSD. As a consequence of this stress, Morrow suffered a severe mental breakdown and was forced to sell his entire business to the Lyle Stuart publishing house at a great loss.

  In the late 1950s Morrow encountered Elliot Cohen, his old mentor, at a New York subway station, en route to the Commentary office. Although Morrow knew that Cohen had suffered periods of deep depression since the 1920s, he was unaware that Cohen’s mental health had so deteriorated that he rarely showed up at work. In the few minutes they stood on the street corner Cohen said to Morrow, “Do you know somebody who needs an office boy?” Morrow responded, “Why? Does your boy want some additional work or something?” Cohen answered, “No, I mean me!” Morrow was preoccupied with business worries, so he dismissed the peculiar remark. On 29 May 1959 he opened the New York Times and read that Cohen had committed suicide by placing a plastic bag over his head and tying it closed with a string.

  Around 1968 Morrow attended a convention of humanistic psychologists where he heard a lecture-demonstration by Ira Progoff, a former Jungian who specialized in a method of encouraging personal growth through the use of an intensive journal. In the late 1940s Morrow had undergone psychoanalysis five days a week for five years with Paul Federnn and Leci Fessler. Then, after religious feelings began to surface, he had been a disciple of Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff from 1956 to 1966. Now he became a full-time publicist for Progoff, working at Dialogue House in New York, until a methodological schism developed between the two and Morrow established his own practice. In the late 1970s he read Michael Harrington’s The Twilight of Capitalism (1976), which, much to his own surprise, convinced him that he must return to his socialist roots. Subsequently he joined the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, now known as the Democratic Socialists of America. In the 1980s, he divided his time between working as a consultant for the Internal Revenue Service on the fair-market value of literary properties and spending his weekends at a spiritual community called Center for the Living Force.

  The transformations of Erber, van Heijenoort, Goldman, Morrow, and others were not due to the “original sin” of
having been infected with Trotskyism, anti-Stalinism, or any other particular ideology; on a generational level, the changes were rooted in the postwar situation of economic boom, upward mobility, the failure of revolutions in western Europe, and the advent of the international Cold War and domestic McCarthyism. Moreover, the fear of harassment by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the resulting isolation should not be underestimated; suspect intellectuals as well as union militants were shunned by their fellow workers. On May Day 1953, the Independent Socialist League held its traditional rally in New York City, and the leaders were stunned to find only fifty members and twenty-five sympathizers in attendance.

  Apostasy takes its most notorious form when a former communist makes a career out of anticommunism. Sometimes this happened without conscious forethought. Alfred Kazin has written of many former New York intellectuals that “the Cold War and McCarthy era needed them, raised them, publicized them.”56 The most successful professional anticommunist was Sidney Hook. Indeed, Hook will probably be remembered more for his career as an anticommunist than for his contributions to philosophy; Heresy, Yes—Conspiracy, No (1953), in which he used liberal arguments to legitimize the essence of the witch-hunt, gave him a new lease on life as a leading intellectual. First as a leftist, then as a Cold War liberal, and finally as a neoconservative, Hook gained his authority by writing books and articles that rationalized to intellectuals the larger social trends in which he and others were caught up.