by Alan M Wald
In 1946 Howe had indeed launched a polemic against Macdonald in the pages of Politics magazine, which then employed Howe as a part-time assistant. Howe’s line of argument was drawn from Burnham and Shachtman’s “Intellectuals in Retreat”: the “flight from Marxism of Macdonald and his friends” could be correlated to “the present period of reaction.” However, these new backsliders persisted in deceiving themselves by constructing “rationalizations to withdraw from the struggle which continues to face humanity.” Among the rationalizations that Howe refuted was the belief that the failure of the working class to transform society after World War II signified a permanent loss of its revolutionary potential, to which he replied: “The major social impulsions driving the working class to revolt persist; and the working classes of all countries do revolt. Sporadically, in disorganized and disoriented fashion, it is true, but they still revolt, even though doomed in the absence of revolutionary socialist leadership.” Howe also claimed that Macdonald had caricatured Leninist party norms as “coercion,” when, in fact, all that Leninism signified was “the discipline of a group of people who, voluntarily entering into certain associations from which they can just as freely withdraw, nonetheless believe that for a common purpose it is permissible to subordinate opinions on secondary matters in order to maintain continuous co-operation.”29
Yet, at the same time, Howe published an essay in Commentary suggesting that some of his thought was elsewhere. Called “The Lost Young Intellectual: A Marginal Man, Twice Alienated,” Howe presented a largely autobiographical portrait of the young secular Jew alienated from the past but a misfit in the present. Howe concluded that no solution to this rootlessness existed at present, although someday it might be solved “if an American society appears in which both the Jewish intellectual and his people, along with everyone else, can find integration, security, and acceptance.”30 Howe could not be expected to call upon the readership of Commentary to join the Workers Party, but the element of despair and passivity that pervaded the essay suggests that a second self coexisted in troubled tandem with the overconfident Howe of the New International, Labor Action, and Politics. Four years earlier he had written an article for the Workers Party on the “Jewish Question” that strongly insisted that “there is no such thing as ‘the Jew’; there are rich and poor Jews, Jewish workers and Jewish bosses.”31 Both a class analysis, which Howe had so emphatically defended as the sine qua non of any intellectual discussion, and a revolutionary internationalist point of view, were muted, if not entirely missing, in the Commentary essay. What is most remarkable is that both Howes, the confident revolutionary and the twice-alienated marginal Jew, could present their cases with equal conviction, abundant evidence, and a well-crafted felicity of expression.
THE “SOCIALIST WING OF THE WEST”
Howe’s political differences with the leadership of the Workers Party erupted in the spring of 1948. In a full-page article in Labor Action he reacted to the Stalinist takeover of Czechoslovakia with a flood of emotion. Beginning by announcing his “feeling of discouragement,” he declared that “the world today is in far worse state than ten years ago when Hitler over-ran Europe.” He concluded that “only the most sober realism, only, if you will, the most honest pessimism can possibly serve as a basis for a useful discussion.” Perhaps he had intended his ending to be upbeat, but it was decisively undercut by his rhetoric: “That at the moment the war of atom bombs seems to be the more likely result of the current historical tragedy is, for this writer at least, too obvious to require reiteration. But it is not inevitable, it is not unavoidable. It is still possible for men to act! Perhaps then action can forestall the atom war; [or] perhaps it can only keep alive that spark of thought and hope, that flickery but still beautiful dream—with which those to follow us will try to rebuild from the ashes of the atoms. But even if it is the latter perspective which will be realized, to nourish and guard that spark is to us the most worthy and useful of dedications.”32 Protests abounded in letters to the paper, in the Internal Bulletin, and in private letters to Shachtman. While Howe remained a member of the party for another four and a half years, he was most certainly in a state of painful rethinking, and his literary contributions thereafter were confined mainly to the theoretical magazine.33
In early 1949 Howe’s two closest associates, Stanley Plastrik (whose party names were “Sherman Stanley” and “Henry Judd,” although he was also known as “Rajah” because of his fascination with India) and Emanuel Geltman (known as Emanuel Garrett), opposed Shachtman’s analysis of the Marshall Plan, which they said had become more critical. They urged that the Workers Party adopt a policy of endorsing American economic aid to Europe but opposing military aid, which would be used for imperialist purposes.34 Then, in January 1950, a year after the Workers Party had changed its name to the Independent Socialist League, Howe and Plastrik urged that the party transform Labor Action into a more “weighty and serious” paper. Finally, in October 1952, Howe and Plastrik submitted a long statement of resignation which began with the affirmation that “we are and intend to remain democratic socialists. Our motive in leaving the ISL is a conviction that it has ceased to be useful for advancing the cause of democratic socialism or for providing a lively center in which its problems can be discussed.”35 The organization, in their view, was retreating to greater orthodoxy under the pressure of the times, which only made the situation worse:
The ‘third camp’ concepts seem now to us meaningless. . . . There are not available, at the present juncture, those historical energies which alone could activate a ‘third camp’. . . . We are opposed to war. . . . But, as democratic socialists, our place is in the Western world, the democratic world, no matter how sharp our criticisms of its bourgeois leadership. The struggle between Stalinism and the West is not merely a struggle for the imperialist division of the world but, also, and in terms of consequences, more fundamentally a struggle between two ways of living: between democracy, however marred, and the most bestial totalitarianism ever known.
Insisting that they intended to be the “socialist wing of the West” but would “retain every right to criticize the bourgeois leadership for its policy vis-à-vis Stalinism,” they concluded that “the major task of socialists today is to engage in sustained intellectual activity, mainly with the end of reorienting and reeducating ourselves.”36
The response from Shachtman was predictable: “when two people like Howe and Judd [Plastrik] quit the organization, the act is a measure of the fierce pressures exerted upon individuals and movements alike by the objective circumstances of the present world situation.” Strangely, Shachtman observed, Howe had been more active in recent weeks than ever before, speaking and writing in defense of Marxism, “but Howe’s political instability is not a new thing and his present action is an expression of it.” As for Plastrik, who at one time was a follower of B. J. Field, “since the end of the war, we have observed his evolution from the most hide-bound and terrifyingly ‘orthodox’ Marxist to a political chameleon.” The major responsibility of the moment for revolutionaries is to maintain a socialist organization “to keep alive the great socialist traditions of the past and present for the coming generations.” Anyone who abandons this duty “with a slick slogan like ‘We Support the West’ identifies himself with one of the imperialist powers or camps, and ceases to be, in the real sense of the word, a socialist.”37 Shachtman’s response reflected the traditional view that leaving a socialist organization is tantamount to desertion of the cause. But complex personal elements may have been involved as well as the crucial political difference over “supporting the West.” On the one hand, Howe had always been politically close to Shachtman and was taken by many to be his protégé. On the other, Howe’s extraordinary literary productivity may have been a sore reminder to Shachtman of his own failings in that regard.
Despite the opposition of some leaders, Howe and Plastrik were invited to the New York membership meeting of the ISL to discuss their resignation. Howe
was given forty-five minutes to present his views. Plastrik had originally declined to speak, but, after hearing the representative of the Independent Socialist League Political Committee, he demanded a rebuttal. In an undoubtedly partisan description of the meeting written by Glotzer, it was reported that Howe had accused the ISL leadership of using Cannonite methods in responding to his resignation and that he had charged the organization with impeding his literary activity. Howe’s presentation was “undignified in its utterly subjective character, ungraceful in the material used, ungrateful in the failure of appreciation of what our movement has given him in more than a decade’s membership.”38 When Howe, Plastrik, and Geltman began publishing Dissent magazine eighteen months later, Hal Draper printed a sharp criticism of it in Labor Action, charging the three editors with backsliding into liberalism. This was followed by a denial from Howe that was published in the next issue, but the ISL leadership went so far as to pass a motion forbidding members from contributing to Dissent without special permission.39
Howe did not leave the Independent Socialist League with the plan of starting Dissent as a rival publication to New International and Labor Action. The idea was suggested by the sociologist Lewis Coser at a meeting of former members and sympathizers of the Independent Socialist League. Although the core group—which included Howe’s indispensable comrades, Plastrik and Geltman—saw themselves as Marxists and radicals to the left of social democracy, the central issue for the publication was dissenting from the Mc-Carthyite atmosphere. Perhaps if Dwight Macdonald’s Politics had continued, Dissent would never have come into existence.
Born in Germany, Coser had fled to France in 1933 where he participated in several radical groups, including a small Trotskyist organization named “The Spark” after Lenin’s newspaper. As a wartime refugee in the United States, he wrote for Politics and Socialist Party publications under the name “Louis Clair” and for Workers Party publications under the name “Europicus.” A letter announcing Dissent was prepared by Howe and issued under Meyer Schapiro’s name. Financial contributions were held in escrow for one year and were to be returned if the project failed to get off the ground. Only two to three thousand copies of the first issue were projected, but it caused such a sensation that the editors had to reprint many thousands more.40
Part of the sensation was due to the bitter opposition of the Commentary circle. This opposition had already started to mobilize a few weeks earlier when Howe, at Philip Rahv’s instigation, published “This Age of Conformity” in the Partisan Review. Commentary associate Robert Warshow submitted a long and peevish reply in the next issue, followed by Howe’s rejoinder. The debate was a classic exchange between pro- and antiestablishment intellectuals. Howe had carefully charted a trend among intellectuals away from independent and critical thought and toward defense of the status quo. Warshow translated the political into the personal, claiming that Howe was a hypocrite for charging Commentary writers with impurity while he himself earned a living as a professor at Brandeis University and had worked for the Luce publications. As Howe noted, Warshow had simply trivialized the issues. The problem was not how intellectuals earn their living, a social necessity, but whether they devoted at least part of their skills to the political and cultural emancipation of humanity—whether they on some level acted to subvert, rather than merely adapt to, the conformist pressures of the institutions within which they work.41
If the Independent Socialist League leaders expected Howe to quickly follow the course of Eastman, Hook, and Burnham, they were quite mistaken. Dissent stayed distinctly to the left of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom and aimed a good deal of its fire at those Cold War liberals who complied with the antiradical witch-hunt, especially Sidney Hook and Irving Kristol. Even though the editors progressively rejected Bolshevism, they did not succumb to the Leninophobia characteristic of deradicalizing intellectuals of the time. Dissent was sharply critical of segregationist policies in the United States, and, much like Shachtman’s Independent Socialist League, it assumed an attitude toward the labor movement favorable—in the end, too favorable—to the policies of Walter Reuther, the subject of Howe’s first book, Walter Reuther and the UAW (1949), coauthored with Independent Socialist League leader B. J. Widick. Among Dissent’s most glaring weaknesses was its two-dimensional caricature of the Communist movement.
The journal was consistent in defending on paper the democratic rights of party members, but its continual characterization of Communists as totalitarians and as essentially fascistlike had the effect of undermining action against concrete instances of repression. As Sidney Hook had done years earlier, the editors simply read the Communist parties out of the working-class movement. In the concluding chapter of The American Communist Party: A Critical History (1957), Howe presented with coauthor Lewis Coser a theoretical analysis of Stalinism that at least aspired to sophistication and complexity.42 In practice, however, his view was more simplistically expressed in his 1957 controversy with A. J. Muste and Sidney Lens about the American Forum. Advocated by Muste and Lens, both contributing editors of Dissent, the American Forum was a means for organizing dialogue among the American left during the period of turmoil after Khrushchev’s Twentieth Congress speech and the Hungarian revolt. Muste had declared himself an advocate of “revolutionary nonviolence” after his Trotskyist years, and Lens, a follower of Hugo Oehler until the early 1950s, had become known as a left-wing union official and author of books on labor, radicalism, and foreign policy that offered a “third camp” perspective.
On May Day 1957 Muste participated in a rally in New York City with representatives of the Socialist Workers Party, Communist Party, and other radicals. Howe was horrified that Muste and advocates of “democratic socialism” would share the platform with Communists, whose partners in Hungary had just repressed the student-worker uprising; and he was even more outraged that the Trotskyists would share the platform with the “‘comrades’ of the executioners of Trotsky himself.” From the viewpoint of political purism, Howe certainly had a point, but one wonders if the argument were a mere rhetorical ploy, since he never applied such stringent standards to himself. After all, as a “critical” supporter of the Democratic Party after 1952, Howe was not only sharing the platform with but assisting to power the “comrades” of lynchers in the South, bombers of Hiroshima, and strikebreakers throughout the country.
Subsequently Muste and Lens helped to organize the American Forum for Socialist Education with the same group of people who sponsored the May Day rally. Howe and other editors of Dissent refused to participate in this new organization primarily on the grounds that Communists were involved: “We regard the CP not as a radical group among other radical groups, but as an association of political enemies that has no place in the socialist community.” In particular, Muste and Lens were to be criticized because this educational and discussion society lent “a helping hand to the Communist Party by providing it with a kind of privileged sanctuary and protective coloration.”43
In his response, Muste acknowledged that two of the forty-member National Committee of the American Forum were Communist Party members. Still, he argued, the purpose of the forum was not to launch a new radical organization but simply to discuss and debate issues of socialist theory and practice. In this regard, the Communists had joined with the understanding that their views would be “subjected to the severest criticism.” Howe, Norman Thomas, and others had been invited to join in order to participate in that debate. Moreover, Muste pointed out that Communist “monolithism” had broken down: many of the rebel students and workers in Hungary were themselves Communists; American Communists had openly denounced this repression in the Daily Worker; and Communists outside the Soviet bloc, such as Mao, were developing heretical positions. By participating in a discussion with Communists, one increased one’s chances of influencing them. Finally, in terms of building a new radical movement, it was necessary to settle accounts with the historical differences represented by Communis
ts, Socialists, and Trotskyists; to do that it was necessary to cease the “old type attacks on Stalinism” just as it was necessary to continue to oppose Stalinism itself.44 The conflict between the members on the board of Dissent was so great, however, that when Lens submitted a piece on the same subject it was rejected. Lens then ceased to contribute and was asked to drop off the board by Howe; Muste resigned in an act of solidarity.45
Two years later Howe had a falling out with C. Wright Mills, a friend and political associate for the past decade. First, Howe published a harsh review of Mills’s The Causes of World War III in the spring of 1959, accusing Mills’s views on foreign policy of constituting “an accommodation not merely with Russia as a power but with Communist dictatorship as a form of society.”46 In the following issue, Mills asked Howe a pointed question: “Just how does your basic view of the world confrontation today differ from the line expressed by the work of Dulles-Adenauer? I suppose there are differences, but just how far do they extend?” Surprisingly, Howe completely sidestepped this accusation of “State Department socialism” and rebutted with the all-too-predictable charge that Mills was adapting to Stalinism.47 If Howe was liberal or even radical on some issues, then his rigid, virtually right-wing social democratic views evidenced in the exchanges with Muste and Mills paved the way for Dissent’s position on the war in Vietnam.