The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  26. Lens, Unrepentant Radical, p. 42.

  27. Herbert Solow to Margaret De Silver, undated, Solow Papers, HIL.

  28. George Breitman to AW, 17 July 1985.

  29. Author’s interview with George Novack, June 1978, New York City.

  30. Elliot Cohen, “Stalin Buries the Revolution—Prematurely,” Nation 138, no. 359 (9 May 1934): 527–29.

  31. Author’s telephone interview with Elsa-Ruth Herron, 5 November 1983, Truro, Cape Cod, Mass.; Sylvia Cohen to AW, 29 August 1977.

  32. Biographical information about V. F. Calverton has been assembled from the following: Haim Genizi, “Victor Francis Calverton: Independent Radical” (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1968); notebooks of C. Hartley Grattan, June 1957, courtesy of Michael Blankfort; Sidney Hook, “Modern Quarterly, a Chapter in American Radical History; V. F. Calverton and His Periodicals,” Labor History 10, no. 2 (Spring 1974): 250–73; author’s interview with Michael Blankfort, July 1982, Los Angeles, Calif.

  33. The most substantial of these was David Ramsay and Alan Calmer, “The Marxism of V. F. Calverton,” New Masses 7, no. 6 (June 1933): 9–27. Earlier there was a two-part series by A. Landy, “Cultural Compulsives or Calverton’s New Caricature of Marxism,” in the Communist 10, no. 9 (October 1931): 851–57, and ibid. 10, no. 10 (November 1931): 941–59.

  34. Useful details about changes in the editorial board are contained in Haim Genizi, “Edmund Wilson and the Modern Monthly,” Journal of American Studies 7, no. 3 (December 1973): 301–19.

  35. The most substantial studies of Eastman are Milton Cantor, Max Eastman (New York: Twayne, 1970); John P. Diggins, Up from Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual History (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), pp. 17–73, 201–32; Stanton Lloyd, “Max Eastman: An Intellectual Portrait,” Harvard Honors Essay, 1965; William L. O’Neill, The Last Romantic: A Life of Max Eastman (New York: Oxford, 1978).

  36. See E. Solntstev to Leon Trotsky, March or April 1928, and Max Eastman to Leon Trotsky, 24 February 1933, Trotsky Papers, HL.

  37. Max Eastman, Love and Revolution: My Journey through an Epoch (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 154.

  38. For further details on Konikow, see Dianne Feeley, “Antoinette Konikow: Marxist and Feminist,” International Socialist Review 33, no. 1 (January 1972): 42–46.

  39. Cited in O’Neill, The Last Romantic, p. 183.

  40. George Novack, “Trotsky’s Views on Dialectical Materialism,” Leon Trotsky: The Man and His Work (New York: Merit, 1969), p. 94.

  41. See Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed (New York: Vintage, 1959), p. 295.

  42. Max Eastman, Great Companions: Critical Memoirs of Some Famous Friends (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1959), p. 169.

  43. Max Eastman, Marx, Lenin and the Science of Revolution (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1926), p. 26.

  44. Ibid., p. 63.

  45. George Lichtheim, “The Romance of Max Eastman,” New York Review of Books, 14 January 1965, p. 8.

  46. James Burnham, “Max Eastman’s Straw Man,” New International 2, no. 7 (December 1935): 220–25.

  47. See Edmund Wilson’s important assessment, “Max Eastman in 1941,” Classics and Commercials (New York: Vintage, 1962), pp. 57–69.

  48. Burnham, “Max Eastman’s Straw Man,” p. 223.

  49. Waldo Frank, “Socialism and Value,” Modern Quarterly 5, no. 4 (Winter 1930–31): 448–50.

  50. Sidney Hook, “Marxism, Metaphysics, and Modern Science,” ibid., pp. 388–94.

  51. Burnham, “Max Eastman’s Straw Man,” p. 225.

  52. David Ernst, book review in New International 1, no. 4 (July 1934): 26; Thomas Cotton, ibid. 1, 7 (December 1934): 158.

  53. See the following by Ruben Gotesky in New International: “Marxism: Science or Method? Part II,” 2, no. 6 (October 1934): 147–51; “Marxism: Science or Method: The Historical Limits of the Materialist Conception of History,” 2, no. 3 (March 1935): 71–73; “Marxism: Science or Method? Part II, “2, no. 5 (May 1935): 106–9. Some of Gotesky’s arguments had been presented by Trotsky in an earlier exchange with Hook. See Sidney Hook, “Marxism—Dogma or Method?,” Nation 136, no. 3532 (15 March 1933): 284–85, and “Correspondence: Trotzky and Sidney Hook,” ibid. 137, no. 3548 (5 July 1933): 18–19.

  54. Information about Rubin Gotesky is from a 26 October 1974 letter from Rubin Gotesky to AW; an August 1981 interview with James Gotesky in Oberlin, Ohio; and Ellen Schrenker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford, 1986), p. 94.

  55. Rubin Gotesky to AW, 26 October 1974.

  56. For a first-rate analysis of peculiar features in the development of the United States see Mike Davis, “Why the U.S. Working Class Is Different,” New Left Review, no. 123 (September–October 1980): 3–44.

  57. See Marcel Liebman, Leninism under Lenin (London: Merlin, 1975), pp. 113–212.

  58. See the useful discussion by Howard Brick in “The Crisis of Evolutionary Socialism: Daniel Bell and the Rise of Modernist Sociology” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1983), pp. 168–69.

  59. V. J. Jerome, who had sat in on some classes taught by Hook at New York University, published his polemic called “Unmasking an American Revisionist of Marxism” in Communist 12, no. 1 (January 1933): 50–82. Hook wrote a response and it was published with an extensive commentary by Earl Browder in two parts as “The Revisionism of Sidney Hook,” ibid., no. 2 (February 1933): 133–46, and no. 3 (March 1933): 285–300. Hook’s meeting with party officials to discuss his philosophical ideas is described in a letter to AW of 26 November 1984.

  60. For Hook’s views at the time of the fusion negotiations, see “Discussions between American Workers Party and the Communist League of America (Opposition),” 26 February 1934, in the Martin Abern Papers, Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit, Mich. In a letter to AW of 4 February 1984, Hook explains that he did not join the new party because he wanted more time to write and also because he was fed up with factional disputes.

  61. See Socialism in Our Time (New York: Thomas and Nelson Independent Committee, 1936).

  62. Robert C. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 5.

  63. See the discussion of the views of Hook and Eastman in O’Neill’s The Last Romantic, pp. 142–47.

  64. Sebastiano Timpanaro, On Materialism (London: New Left Books, 1975), pp. 73–74.

  CHAPTER 5

  1. Philip Rahv, “Trials of the Mind,” Partisan Review 4, no. 5 (April 1938): 10.

  2. The most detailed study of the Moscow purge trials is Robert Conquest, The Great Purge Trials (New York: Oxford, 1978).

  3. For a thoughtful analysis of this phenomenon see Frank A. Warren, Liberals and Communism: The “Red Decade” Revisited (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966).

  4. Malcolm Cowley, And I Worked at the Writer’s Trade: Chapters of a Literary History, 1918–1978 (New York: Viking, 1978), pp. 50–51.

  5. Quoted in David Caute, The Fellow-Travelers: A Postscript to the Enlightenment (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 168.

  6. Naomi Allen and George Breitman, eds., Writings of Leon Trotsky [1937–38] (New York: Pathfinder, 1976), p. 277.

  7. James T. Farrell, “Dewey in Mexico,” Reflections at Fifty (New York: Vanguard, 1954), p. 104.

  8. George Novack, “Max Shachtman: A Political Portrait,” International Socialist Review 34, no. 2 (February 1937): 29.

  9. Author’s interview with George Novack, August 1975, Oberlin, Ohio. See also the following letters in the Solow Papers, HIL: Solow to Tom Mooney, 4 February 1937; Solow to Clifton Fadiman, 19 February 1937; Solow to Lewis Mumford, 10 February 1937; Mumford to Solow, 20 February 1937; Solow to Mumford, 24 February 1937; Mumford to Solow, 25 February 1937; Solow to Mooney, 2 March 1937; Mumford to Solow, 18 March 1937.

  10. Pierre Naville to Herbert Solow, 1 March 1937, Solow Papers, HIL.

  11. John Dewey to Max Eastman, 12 May 1937, Dewey Papers
, LL.

  12. James T. Farrell to Margaret Marshall, 16 April 1937, Farrell Papers, CPVP.

  13. John Dewey, Truth Is on the March (New York: American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, 1937), p. 11.

  14. Author’s interview with James T. Farrell, May 1976, New York City.

  15. Eugene Lyons, The Red Decade (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941), pp. 252–55.

  16. Sidney Hook, “Some Memories of John Dewey,” Commentary 14 (September 1952): 247.

  17. Herbert Solow to Margaret De Silver, 2 April 1937, Solow Papers, HIL.

  18. The biographical information on Bernard Wolfe is from an author’s interview with Wolfe, August 1974, Hollywood, Calif.

  19. Information on Benjamin Stolberg is based on a June 1980 author’s interview with Suzanne La Follette, Palo Alto, Calif., and “Memoirs of Benjamin Stolberg,” in Stolberg Papers, BL.

  20. Author’s interview with Suzanne La Follette, June 1980, Palo Alto, Calif.

  21. For further details, see Dewey, Truth Is on the March, pp. 8–9.

  22. John McDonald to AW, 5 December 1976.

  23. Author’s interview with Adelaide Walker, June 1982, Cape Cod, Mass.

  24. Author’s interview with James T. Farrell, May 1976, New York City.

  25. Author’s interview with Albert Glotzer, June 1980, Edgartown, Cape Cod, Mass.

  26. Bernard Wolfe to AW, 18 May 1977.

  27. Author’s interview with George Novack, June 1976, New York City; see also George Novack, “How the Moscow Trials Were Exposed,” International Socialist Review (May 1977): 3–4, 10.

  28. John Dewey to Robbie Lowitz, 6 April 1937, Dewey Papers, LL.

  29. The Case of Leon Trotsky: Report of the Hearings on the Charges Made against Him in the Moscow Trials (New York: Merit, 1968), pp. 1–2.

  30. Herbert Solow to Margaret de Silver, 10 April 1937, Solow Papers, HIL.

  31. John Dewey to Robbie Lowitz, 15 April 1937, Dewey Papers, LL.

  32. James T. Farrell to Margaret Marshall, 16 April 1937, Farrell Papers, CPVP.

  33. Albert Glotzer to AW, 16 March 1977.

  34. Biographical information on Dwight Macdonald is from the author’s interview with Dwight Macdonald, May 1973, Buffalo, N.Y.; Dwight Macdonald, Politics Past (New York: Viking, 1970); Norman Levy, “The Radicalization of Dwight Macdonald,” M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1966; Stephen J. Whitfield, A Critical American: The Politics of Dwight Macdonald (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1984).

  35. Dwight Macdonald, “Notes on Hollywood Directors,” Symposium 4, no. 2 (March 1929): 159–68.

  36. Dwight Macdonald, “Trotsky and the Russian Trials,” New Republic 91, no. 1172 (19 May 1937): 49–50; William Phillips, “How Partisan Review Began,” Commentary 62 (December 1976): 45.

  37. Biographical information on Mary McCarthy is from the author’s interview with Mary McCarthy, May 1978, Paris, France; Mary McCarthy, On the Contrary: Articles of Belief, 1946–1961 (New York: Noonday, 1962); Doris Grumbach, The Company She Kept: A Revealing Portrait of Mary McCarthy (New York: Coward McCann, 1967).

  38. Author’s interview with Dwight Macdonald, November 1973, Buffalo, N.Y.

  39. William Phillips, “The Esthetic of the Founding Fathers,” Partisan Review 4 (March 1938): 17, 19.

  40. Philip Rahv, “Twilight of the Thirties,” Partisan Review 5 (Summer 1939): 15, 11.

  41. Rahv, “Trials of the Mind,” p. 10.

  42. Leon Trotsky, “The Future of Partisan Review : A Letter to Dwight Macdonald,” in Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art, ed. Paul Siegel, pp. 101–3 (New York: Pathfinder, 1970).

  43. Leon Trotsky, “Art and Politics in Our Epoch,” ibid., pp. 105, 106, 112, 114.

  44. Leon Trotsky, “Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art,” ibid., pp. 118, 124.

  45. Editorial, Socialist Appeal, 4 December 1937, p. 7; author’s interview with George Novack, October 1972, San Francisco, Calif.

  46. The exchange between Dewey and Trotsky was reprinted in Their Morals and Ours (New York: Pathfinder, 1973). See also “Violence, For and Against,” Common Sense 7, no. 1 (January 1938): 19–21.

  47. John McDonald to AW, 18 November 1974.

  48. Letter from Bernard Wolfe [Trotsky’s secretary] to Harold Isaacs, 12 June 1937, copy in Cannon Papers, LSH.

  49. “Discussion with Trotsky: II—Defense Organization and Attitude toward Intellectuals,” in Writings of Leon Trotsky [1937–38], ed. Naomi Allen and George Breitman, pp. 294–99 (New York: Pathfinder, 1976).

  50. Notarized statement by Solow on relations with Chambers in Solow Papers, HIL. Trotsky’s attitude in favor of giving public exposure to Soviet secret police defector Ignace Reiss may have influenced his approach.

  51. Partisan Review 4, no. 4 (March 1938): 59–62, and ibid. 4, no. 5 (April 1938): 62–64.

  52. Junius, “Moscow Admits ‘Robinson’ Held for Espionage,” Socialist Appeal, 22 June 1938, pp. 1, 4; “Links Poyntz to ‘Robinson’ Spy Frame-up,” ibid., 12 February 1938, pp. 1, 2; “Arrested Photographer Is Stalinist Sympathizer,” ibid., 2 April 1938, p. 3; “Grand Jury Indicts Two in Rubens Mystery Case,” ibid., 9 April 1938, p. 3.

  53. See obituary, “Eugene Lyons, Reporter Turned Critic of Soviets,” Chicago Tribune, 1 October 1985, p. 28.

  54. Herbert Solow, “Stalin’s American Passport Mill,” American Mercury 47, no. 187 (July 1939): 302–9.

  55. Herbert Solow, “Stalin’s Great American Hoax,” ibid. 47, no. 192 (December 1939): 394–402.

  56. An unpublished manuscript called “Where Is Juliet Stuart Poyntz?” is in the Solow Papers, HIL, as well as undated articles from Carlo Tresca’s Il Martello on the Poyntz case.

  57. For a compelling analysis of the difference between revolutionary anti-Stalinism and reactionary anticommunism, see James P. Cannon, American Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism (New York: Pioneer, 1947).

  58. This is noted in a memo in the Solow Papers, HIL. See also Herbert Solow, “Refugee Scholars in the United States,” American Scholar 11, no. 3 (Summer 1942): 374–78.

  59. Notes on the case and an undated brochure entitled Who Killed Carlo Tresca? (published by the Tresca Memorial Committee) are in the Solow Papers, HIL.

  60. The following information is based on the author’s interview with Adelaide Walker, May 1980, Cape Cod, Mass., and the chapter “Theatre Union: Theatre Is a Weapon,” in Gerald Rabkin’s Drama and Commitment (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), pp. 44–67.

  61. Charles Yale Harrison to Leon Trotsky, 31 August 1936, Trotsky Papers, HL.

  62. Ibid., 26 September 1936, ibid.

  63. Bernard Wolfe to Leon Trotsky, undated, ibid.

  64. James Burnham and Max Shachtman, “Intellectuals in Retreat,” New International 5, no. 1 (January 1939): 4–22.

  65. The information on Marxist Quarterly is based partly on Paul Buhle, “Louis C. Fraina, 1892–1953,” M.A. thesis, University of Connecticut, 1968, pp. 93–97; and George Novack, “Radical Intellectuals in the 30s,” International Socialist Review 29, no. 2 (March-April 1968): 30–31.

  66. Editors, “Challenge,” Marxist Quarterly 1, no. 1 (January–March 1937): 3–4.

  67. See Buhle, “Louis C., Fraina,” pp. 98–126, and Ronald Radosh, “Lovestone Diplomacy,” American Labor and United States Foreign Policy (New York: Vintage, 1969), pp. 268–303.

  68. The biographical information on Louis Hacker is based partly on Stanley Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, Twentieth Century Authors (New York: Wilson, 1942), pp. 593–94.

  69. Quoted in John Melvin (pseud, for Melvin J. Lasky), “Intellectual in Defeat,” New International 7, no. 1 (January 1941): 10–13.

  70. James Burnham, “God Bless America,” Partisan Review 7, no. 6 (November–December 1940): 479–81.

  71. This was reprinted as a book, The End of Socialism in Russia (Boston: Little, Brown, 1937).

  72. Max Eastman, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (New York: Davin Adair, 1955), pp. 7–20.

  73. Milt
on Cantor, Max Eastman (New York: Twayne, 1970), p. 48.

  74. Eastman, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, p. 37.

  75. Cantor, Max Eastman, p. 161.

  76. See William L. O’Neill, The Last Romantic: A Life of Max Eastman (New York: Oxford, 1978), pp. 231–36.

  77. Edmund Wilson, “Communist Criticism,” Shores of Light (New York: Vintage, 1952), p. 645.

  78. These facts are recounted in Malcolm Cowley, “From the Finland Station,” Think Back on Us (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), pp. 178–84.

  79. At the time of To the Finland Station’s publication, Sidney Hook announced: “I am acquainted with nothing in any language which equals the insight, the eloquence and essential justice of Wilson’s biographical account of Marx,” New York Herald Tribune Books, 29 September 1940, p. 5. Other laudatory assessments include Louis Hacker, “Distilled Disillusion,” Saturday Review of Literature 5, no. 10 (October 1940): 11–12; V. S. Pritchett, “Edmund Wilson,” New Yorker 48, no. 51 (23 December 1972): 75–78; Irving Howe, “Edmund Wilson: A Reexamination,” Nation 167, no. 16 (16 October 1948): 430–33; Edward Feiss, “Art and Ideas,” Antioch Review 1, no. 3 (September 1941): 356–67. A more critical discussion of the book is contained in Meyer Schapiro, “The Revolutionary Personality,” Partisan Review 7, no. 6 (November–December 1940): 469.

  80. Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station (New York: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1955), p. 47.

  81. Ibid., p. 63.

  82. Ibid., p. 118.

  83. Ibid., p. 140.

  84. Ibid., p. 467.

  85. Ibid., pp. 188–89.

  86. Ibid., p. 299.

  87. Rahv, “Twilight of the Thirties,” p. 14.

  88. Rahv, “Trials of the Mind,” p. 3.

  89. Richard Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), p. 336.

  90. Author’s interview with F. W. Dupee, August 1973, Carmel, Calif.

  CHAPTER 6

  1. Quoted in Marcel Liebman, Leninism under Lenin (London: Merlin Press, 1975), p. 445.

  2. The attitude toward Cannon in Constance Ashton Myers’s The Prophet’s Army (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1977) is surprisingly biased. Harry Roskolenko’s autobiography, When I Was Last on Cherry Street (New York: Stein and Day, 1965), is strongly partisan, but at least it is well written and witty; Bernard Wolfe’s Memoirs of a Not Altogether Shy Pornographer (New York: Doubleday, 1972) retains the prejudice without the style. Radical groups in the United States such as the Spartacist League, which claims to be Trotskyist, and the Socialist Workers Party, which publishes Cannon’s writings, have in recent years assumed political positions Cannon would have abhorred. The “Shachtmanite” tendencies represented today in the leading circles of Social Democrats U.S.A. and the AFL-CIO reflect only his final, conservative phase.