The New York Intellectuals, Thirtieth Anniversary Edition: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s

The New York Intellectuals

Praise for The New York Intellectuals

His book is not only a model of erudition (based on wide archival research and more than a hundred interviews) but also a literary work. Remarkably well written, it is as easy to read as a novel. Without hiding his revolutionary Marxist standpoint, Alan Wald combines commitment and critical spirit, objectivity and position held. An example to be followed.

—Michael Löwy, La Quinzaine Litteraire (Paris), 16–31 July 1987

Wald brilliantly combines the methods of biography, political theory, and literary criticism.

—Antioch Review 45, no. 3 (Fall 1987): 376

Wald has written what in many ways is the best book on the New York intellectuals by combining a historian’s detachment with a political engagement with the issues and events that shaped these writers. The primary virtue of Wald’s history comes from his combination of exhaustive, painstaking research with a constantly critical attitude toward his sources. . . . Wald knows what is at stake in the controversies and brings them to life. . . . Wald’s history is the only one that has the fire of the memoirs. . . . [T]ruly a collective biography.

—Michael Denning, Socialist Review, January–March 1988

Wald’s study—subtle, insightful—ranks with that small cluster of fine works on twentieth-century radicals.

—Milton Cantor, Library Journal

Rare for a book so steeped in scholarship, it is both highly readable and extremely informative . . . a fine combination of good writing and impeccable scholarship.

—Harmen Mitchell, Ann Arbor News, Sunday, 17 May 1987

Many scholars may question . . . the coexistence of ‘objectivity’ and partisan passion, but Wald has not only demonstrated the feasibility of this approach but that it can be done with grace, authenticity, and scrupulous accuracy. It is Marxist scholarship at its best. . . . The author glides adroitly between multiple roles of intellectual and social historian, political theorist, and literary critic; his own engaging literary style finds expression in the tightly drawn biographical sketches that he weaves gracefully into the larger fabric.

—Stewart Burns, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 24 (July 1988)

His method is Marxist, but free of jargon and sensitive to the complexities of issues and literary critical method.

—Jeffrey H. Richards, Greensboro News and Record, 8 June 1987

[Sophisticated, scholarly, and well-researched.

—J. H. Smith, Choice, October 1987

Wald’s grasp of the ideological twists and turns of his protagonists is first-rate.

—D. D. Guttenplan, Village Voice, 15–21 July 1987

[A] brilliant effort to correct the record and to explain it.

—The Key Reporter (Phi Beta Kappa), Spring 1988

Here is political and literary history of the first order.

—The American Citizen’s Reader’s Catalogue, Winter 1987–88

Mr. Wald has written a valuable book about the ‘political trajectory’ of this country’s leading intellectuals over the past fifty years. It is well-researched, insightful, and extremely opinionated. It deserves a wide audience.

—David M. Oshsinsky, New York Times Book Review, 7 June 1987

Wald’s book is still the most thoughtful and comprehensive study of the New York intellectuals.

—Ellen Schrecker, The Nation, 1/8 August 1987

[S]killfully organized so that the reader is seldom drowned in detail, and a balance is almost always maintained between individual case histories and the general line of development. . . . He gives as non-tendentious an account of the ‘anti-Stalinist Left’ as is humanly possible.

—Annette T. Rubinstein, Monthly Review, November 1987

Wald is a patient, painstaking, and erudite guide, taking the reader carefully through the clotted, overlapping, dense political and ideological transformations within, among, and around an extraordinary group of very bright and very committed people.

—Cooperative Economic Book Review, March–April 1988

Wald remains dispassionate and fair-minded, even though almost all the changes he describes move in a direction which he opposes—that is, to the right. Eschewing the impossible and scarcely desirable goal of value-free history, Wald achieves his own aim, of a work that is ‘partisan but objective.’

—James Seaton, The Centennial Review

In his biographical sketches, Wald humanizes them and enables us to see a bit of ourselves in them.

—Mark Schneider, American Book Review, September–October 1987

Wald shows how the real-life political conflicts facing his intellectuals shaped their artistic creations.

—George Lipsitz, Oral History Review, Fall 1988

Alan Wald’s book stands out for his honesty and acumen. . . . His firmly held but temperately expressed position . . . has given him special insight. . . . Wald focuses knowledgeably on a neglected stage in that journey too little considered by other literary historians and too often downplayed. . . . Wald repeatedly demonstrates his skill at applying his political viewpoint, not programmatically but analytically, to reveal how ideology and fiction are related.

—Walter B. Rideout, American Literature, October 1988

Wald’s research is exhaustive. . . . No one is likely to tell us more about these people in the near future. Nor will anyone do so with greater honesty and fairness. . . . Wald’s book is signally free from that tendency to settle old scores and rewrite the past.

—Michael Sprinker, New Statesman, August 1987

The New York Intellectuals

The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s

ALAN M. WALD

THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 2017 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

ISBN 978-1-4696-3594-1 (pbk: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4696-3595-8 (ebook)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the original edition as follows:

Copyright © 1987 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing, May 1987

Second printing, September 1987

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wald, Alan M. 1946–

The New York intellectuals.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Socialists—New York (N.Y.)—History—20th century. 2. Intellectuals—New York (N.Y.)—History—20 century. I. Title.

HX92.N5W35 1987 320.5’32’097471 86-24922

ISBN 0-8078-1716-3

ISBN 0-8078-4169-2 (pbk.)

Some portions of this book have appeared in somewhat different form in Jewish Social Studies 38 (1976); Antioch Review 35 (1977); Prospects 3 (1977); Literature at the Barricades (University of Alabama Press, 1982), pp. 187–203; and Centennial Review 29 (1985).

TO CELIA

Contents

Preface to the Thirtieth Anniversary Edition

Acknowledgments

A Note on the Text and the Illustrations

Introduction. Political Amnesia

Part I ORIGINS OF THE ANTI-STALINIST LEFT

Chapter 1. Jewish Internationalists

The Non-Jewish Jews

Portrait: Elliot Cohen

Portrait: Lionel Trilling

Portrait: Herbert Solow

From Cultural Pluralism to Revolutionary Internationalism

Chapter 2. Dissident Communists

The Menorah Group Moves Left

New Allies: Sidney Hook, James Rorty, Charles Rumford Walker

The National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners (NCDPP) and the League of Professionals

The Intellectual Disease

Chapter 3. Radical Modernists

In Defense of Literature

Other Dissident Writers and Critics on the Left: James T. Farrell, F. W. Dupee, Edmund Wilson

The Appeal of Trotskyism

Part II REVOLUTIONARY INTELLECTUALS

Chapter 4. Philosophers and Revolutionists

The Non-Partisan Labor Defense Committee (NPLD) and the American Workers Party

Party Factionalism and the French Turn

The Eastman Heresies

Marxism and Pragmatism

Chapter 5. The Moscow Trials

The American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky

The Hearings in Mexico

Marxist Cultural Renaissance

The Ambiguities of Anti-Stalinism

Twilight of the Thirties

Chapter 6. Cannonites and Shachtmanites

Party Leaders and Party Politics

Portrait: James P. Cannon

Portrait: Max Shachtman

James Burnham: From Neo-Thomism to Trotskyism

Schism

Chapter 7. The Second Imperialist War

The Enigma of World War II

Dwight Macdonald: From Trotskyism to Anarcho-Pacifism

Meyer Schapiro: Socialist Internationalist

The Politics of Literary Criticism

Chapter 8. The New York Intellectuals in Fiction

Literature and Ideology

From Acquiescence to Antiradicalism

Politics and the Novel

A Revolutionary Novelist in Crisis

Part III THE GREAT RETREAT

Chapter 9. Apostates and True Believers

Red Fascism

The Psychology of Apostasy

The Iron Cage of Orthodoxy

Chapter 10. The Cul-de-Sac of Social Democracy

Portrait: Irving Howe

The Socialist Wing of the West

Portrait: Harvey Swados

The Ambiguous Legacy

Chapter 11. The Bitter Fruits of Anticommunism

Cold War II

Portrait: Irving Kristol

Portraits: Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter

The Ideologists of Antiradicalism

Epilogue. Marxism and Intellectuals in the United States

Notes

Index

A section of photographs follows page 192.

Preface to the Thirtieth Anniversary Edition

I. THE PRESENT OF THE PAST

After thirty years, the history of the New York intellectuals has come back to visit in a curiously unforeseen manner.¹ Our contemporary cultural landscape has become a magnet for refracted and contradictory appropriations of ideas and experiences from this older politicocultural tradition. The events of the past feel as if they have been shot forward, bounced off accounts written up in later decades, and then seized by writers and intellectuals of the present as pertinent to our own time. Inexplicably, the emerging America of terror, tweets, and Trump has become a strange new homeland for the famous circle that began as old-fashioned committed writers, one that evolved from the Great Depression to the New Left, blew apart during the backlash against the 1960s, and finally attained an afterlife in which assorted narratives were assembled. What is the reason for our choosing to absorb elements of this considerably concocted past in the various ways that we are?

Even more startling, these incoming references and invocations are embraced by intellectuals who crisscross the political, cultural, and generational spectrum of the present. The New Yorker and the New York Review Books, periodicals of the mainstream liberal intelligentsia, serve as the primary memory industry for the fabled group. In their pages, Louis Menand and Edward Mendelson have produced a steady stream of retrospectives about canonical figures such as Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, Alfred Kazin, and Edmund Wilson. Reprints of collections of their classic essays and books have appeared in tandem with these publications.

Yet the topic is equally the obsession of deradicalized or deradicalizing literati of the moment, several of whom are chastened veterans of the 1960s student Left, such as Paul Berman and Mitchell Cohen. They uphold aspects of this earlier political history, sometimes as personal vindications for their current views and perhaps as model recovery narratives from a onetime Marxism. In contrast, militant activists—some up-and-coming radicals such as Corey Robin and Bhaskar Sunkara—champion different facets of the legacy as exemplars of resistance and rebellion.

Many of the historical allusions, appropriations, and reconsiderations, not always accurate or fully understood, are mainly extracted from the repertory of the New York intellectuals’ Greatest Hits. These are the episodes that were widely debated in the late twentieth century when the original movement was dying and a lot of last-minute score settling was under way. Some of the most popular are the interminable arguments over ownership rights for George Orwell’s anti-Soviet yet prosocialist politics; the antinomies of Hannah Arendt’s views on totalitarianism and Zionism; and the validity of the New Liberalism and Vital Center renunciation of a utopian future for acceptance of an ongoing present. Yet there are also signs that individuals and publications on today’s far Left are suggestively embracing some of the less-exalted Marxist components of the tradition, ones nearly erased in the retrospectives of the 1980s.

The most refreshing and hopeful citations of these customarily shunned elements are to be discovered among the young radical intellectuals who edit journals such as N + 1 and Jacobin. Here one finds very positive references to the Marxism of the early Partisan Review, and these two magazines in particular have ties to the Verso publishing house of New Left Review, a journal famously inspired by Isaac Deutscher’s neo-Trotskyism.² Jacobin, in fact, is named in honor of the classic The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938), by the Afro-Trinidadian revolutionary C. L. R. James. Not only do James’s political life and literary work originate in the very milieu of 1930s Marxist anti-Stalinism that is critical to what is most attractive and relevant in the legacy, but James’s later career continued to embody the liberatory potential of that tradition. This homology is often missed by those who read the history of the New York intellectuals through the prism of Cold War liberalism.

How do we explain this multifaceted persistence of the past? Why do certain aspects of the political and cultural activity undergone by the New York intellectuals feel so timely to so many different people—as if they matter now? As far back as 1986, historian James B. Gilbert, himself the author of a classic study about the Partisan Review, declared the appearance of a fresh crop of surveys and memoirs to render the subject as the new burnt-over district of American cultural history.³ Nonetheless, for decades the experience continued to be critiqued, skewered, sentimentalized, falsified, idealized, homogenized, delegitimized, and caricatured. It was even kitschified in one famous instance, when Woody Allen’s character Alvy Singer observed in the 1975 film Annie Hall: "I heard that Commentary and Dissent had merged and formed Dysentery."⁴

Yet, over fifteen years into the new millennium, at a point when books like Sidney Hook’s Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation (1933), Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940), Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950), Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), and Dwight Macdonald’s The Root Is Man: Two Essays in Politics (1953) should feel as dated as a Golden Oldie, why do episodes from times of yore resonate in ambiguously contemporaneous ways?

II. SLOUCHING TOWARD APOSTASY

Few transformations in the political alignment of writers are so supercharged with conceptual ideas from so many disciplines as the wrenching conversion that produced the unique identity of the New York intellectuals. And hardly any have attracted a comparable degree of sustained attention from academics and journalists. To be sure, there was plenty of good material in the legendary makeover of the Marxist anti-Stalinists of Manhattan, especially since there was heterogeneity in each phase. That is, even as the core of the original milieu mostly stayed together, the movement itself metamorphosed into a binary star system with a fundamentally different sun. Before World War II, that bright center was revolutionary Marxism, and afterward it was liberal anticommunism. But not all planets were ever of the same size or had the same distance.

Only a small part of the explanation for today’s fascination with this phenomenon can be due to a pining among readers and scholars for the time when Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe stood like colossi on the covers and front pages of leading intellectual publications. They and others associated with the tradition are still read; but as the guardians of cultural distinctions between what is high and low, major and minor, their appeal has waned. It is a political pining that mainly exists, and in some instances this is for a safe haven from the challenges of the young and the intransigent, or perhaps for an arsenal of tested intellectual weapons to fend them off. In either case, one is talking about a one-way ticket back to the dream of a secure past.

This nostalgia for a New York Family Reunion Tour is frequently found among those politicized intellectuals who consider themselves liberals but stand on many concrete issues in contrast to the young Marxists of N + 1 and Jacobin, activists who see some issues very differently in the tradition. Due to the hot-button nature of controversies about Israel, a moment of dramatic disparity might be found in the events of July 2014. To categorically oppose Israeli state policy in Gaza, N + 1 editor Benjamin Kunkel and Jacobin contributing editor Corey Robin lay down in the street in front of the Israeli Mission to the United Nations in midtown Manhattan, for which they were arrested.⁵ Meanwhile, the mostly Liberal Hawks in the New Republic ran an essay called Israel’s Deadly Invasion of Gaza Is Morally Justified by a young admirer of Paul Berman.⁶

Since Martin Peretz purchased and took editorial control of the New Republic in 1974, its ties to the liberal anticommunist phase of the New York intellectuals became obvious and have been much discussed.⁷ One of the editors of the late Peretz era, Adam Kirsch, taught a course called The New York Intellectuals Revisited in 2013 and wrote the book Why Trilling Matters (2013);⁸ another, Leon Wieseltier, used to sport a picture of Trilling on his office wall and in 2014 was featured in an essay called The Last of the New York Intellectuals.⁹ A bit to the left of that milieu, Dissent magazine is a living monument to liberal socialist Irving Howe; and to the right, the neoconservative journals Commentary and The New Criterion are shepherded to this day by the ghosts of Sidney Hook and Irving Kristol. And this is only my short list of such affinities.

A major reason for the ideological breadth in those presently reaching out for the ricocheted Blasts from the Past is the current international political polarization and the test that a new configuration of challenges—not just Israel—presents for engaged intellectuals. An increasing uncertainty about matters such as the nature of the economic system, the role to be played by the United States around the world, the unexpected return of religious fundamentalisms and nationalism, the future of work, and much more have resulted in cascading conflicts of the past fifteen years that are not only between Left and Right but between currents of liberalism and the Left.

The polarization was anticipated by earlier events, but the new millennium opened with a distinct aura, and long-standing patterns began to go into hyperdrive. First came the 9/11 terror attacks and Can There Be a Decent Left?, the 2002 proclamation by Dissent magazine editor Michael Walzer excoriating leftist theories of imperialism.¹⁰ Then came the 2003 invasion of Iraq with a militant attack on opponents of President George W. Bush’s catastrophic policy by Liberal Hawks, joined by a deradicalized Christopher Hitchens, some of whom made aggressive use of Decent Left arguments.¹¹ Two years later, the 2005 BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) campaign was launched to pressure Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian land, and from much the same overlapping circles (Dissent, signers of the 2006 Euston Manifesto, future refugees from the New Republic that would break apart in 2014) emerged a countermovement against BDS; in their view, anti-Zionists and supporters of a single democratic secular state in Israel held illegitimate if not anti-Semitic views. Then there was the global financial crisis that fueled a return to the study of Marx. Now we have the complicating challenges ensuing from the Arab Spring, especially the Syrian civil war; the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement; the simultaneous growth of antiausterity as well as anti-immigrant parties in Europe; and the socialist electoral campaign of Bernie Sanders and its uncomfortable relationship to the Democratic Party.

While diverse individuals, including editorial board members, can’t be archived into tight boxes, the political schism between those who identify as closer to liberalism and those who embrace the radical Left is following a course familiar to several polarizations associated with the earlier history of the New York intellectuals themselves. Most of the younger Marxist activist-intellectuals are facing off against a rightwardly drifting current that draws the line at supporting BDS and political candidates outside of the Democrats (especially the Green Party) and is devoted to attacking the radicals’ icons, such as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. Most of the now mainstream-tilting journalists and academics, however, rightly insist that they are not neoconservatives or even conservatives. While adamantly pro-Israel, many adhere to a two-state solution and are critical of Israel’s military excesses against civilians.

Still, such postures seem to be modeled on those who in the 1950s chose the West while acknowledging that it had shortcomings. And one finds key strategies of Liberal Hawks and their friends that resonate with past practices as well. For example, in the late 1940s and 1950s, the specialized political term Stalinism—a way of identifying a faction within Bolshevism from a Leninist perspective—metastasized into a sweeping antiradical condemnation, one including all varieties of Leninists and other unrepentant dissidents. Thus a newly defined term became a significant weapon in the cultural warfare that consolidated the national security state and led to Vietnam. Today, epithets like Left-wing anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism are similarly divorced from original or precise meanings, and they play an analogous role of amalgamating diverse radical critics of Israeli state policy (some for two states, others for a nonreligious single state) and U.S. interventions into a demonized other. The 1950s New York intellectuals judged radicals and liberals by their assessments of the USSR and posited an adherence to anticommunism as the prerequisite to collaboration on common projects. Now we are seeing a trend that holds up having a correct view of Israel, or U.S. foreign policy, as a litmus test.

Nevertheless, a polarization is not a finished process, and one can acknowledge these threads of continuity and recognizable patterns without trying to squeeze a new development into a preexisting frame. Moreover, the forces coalescing around documents such as the Euston Manifesto (see note 11) or the academic-affiliated groups of the progressive Zionist organization Ameinu are not yet sufficiently consistent, coherent, or weighty enough to comprise a formation as imposing as the liberal anticommunist one emerging in the 1950s. While it sometimes seems as if a prominent radical individual such as Christopher Hitchens has abruptly gone Vader-like to the Dark Side, the pace of deradicalization is unpredictable. There is always the chance that some intellectuals will wake up and realize that they are not defending liberal values but are actually participating in an ugly backlash. Still, one cannot ignore the increasing signs of yet another generation of quondam rebels slouching toward apostasy.

III. THE ODDITY OF INCONGRUITIES

One may wonder, as well, how the political valence of the New York intellectuals could be stretched so broadly to appeal to neoconservatives, liberals, social democrats, and neo-Marxists. To be sure, over long and extraordinary careers, most of the progenitors changed their minds. Yet one of the reasons that this tradition can be hailed at both ends of the current political spectrum, as well as from the middle, is that the complex realities of the New York intellectuals’ experience could never really be contained by the many myths about its history. When efforts are now made at fuller contextualization (including new biographical information) and sharper definitions, questions are raised about the earlier assessments that make episodes and conflicts beg for continual rethinking.

The problem of packaging arose after Gilbert’s Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America (1968), which began broadly in the Greenwich Village bohemia of the World War I era but was in due course limited to the journey of Partisan Review into the early 1950s. One might have expected the subsequent extension of the scholarship to encompass political dimensions that went beyond Gilbert’s accurate rendition of those of the Partisan Review core and thus deepen the understanding of the intricacies of both the original movement and its 1950s transformation. What came next, however, tended to be contradictory. Cultural historians assiduously added in more names, episodes, and publications, but they also narrowed the topic by shearing off persons, events, and periodicals that had more enduring Marxist affinities. They then reduced what should have been a larger story and more complex history to one or another of three overlapping but rather uncomplicated tales of progress: ambitious and upwardly mobile poor Jews journeying from outsiders to insiders; cultural wannabes emerging from the Communist margins to successfully carve out an elite status for themselves by supposedly rescuing literature from the corruption of political partisanship; and onetime wild-eyed political utopians saved from the abyss by the wisdom of an anti-Stalinism that revealed the pitfalls of ideology, the necessity of Western civilization, and the evil essence of a twentieth-century totalitarianism that bridged communism and fascism.

At the same time, there were always liberal and radical antagonists of the entire tradition (some with illusions about the Soviet Union and China) who maintained that the group was composed of opportunists from the outset; i.e., that 1930s Trotskyism was Left in name but Right in content, containing the DNA for CIA sponsorship in the 1950s and Reagan-era neoconservative triumph in the 1970s and 1980s. To understand why the New York intellectuals matter today, one has to extricate the story from these and many other myths. One of the most pervasive is the suggestion that ethnic origins determine motivations and fate, forgetting that one’s Jewish upbringing can be definitional without being delimiting. Another is that the results of this Left-Right political journey reveal real intentions, forgetting that authentic idealists can be transformed by the very world they set out to change.

The argument I make in The New York Intellectuals is that the phenomenon is most accurately explained as a compelling, and in many ways profoundly unique, experience of radicalization and deradicalization. It occurred predominantly among individuals who were unusually gifted; whose secular Jewishness inflected their internationalism with the richness of an outsider’s perspective; whose openness to modernism gave their thinking a self-reflexivity and critical consciousness appropriate to the age; and who held a relatively clear understanding of the problem posed by the disastrous retreat of the Russian Revolution from its original aims and objectives. This combination gave the experience the fullness that has allowed—and still allows—for generation after generation of intellectuals to find a resonance.

The dynamic described above, however, went into crisis precisely as the New York intellectuals achieved their distinctiveness as a group after World War II. The critical factor was that anticommunism emphatically replaced Marxist anti-Stalinism as its new character coalesced. Commentary was founded in 1945 as liberal anticommunist; Partisan Review published a broadside against the Left in an editorial called The Liberal Fifth Column in 1946; Dwight Macdonald closed up his anarcho-pacifist Politics in 1949 and by 1952 was a staff writer for the New Yorker; Hannah Arendt published her often ill-used The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951; and the Dissent editors broke away from the Independent Socialist League in 1952 and launched their own journal in 1954. This last event circumscribed the left perimeter of the New York intellectuals at the moment of its debut, finally displacing the formation preceding it. All ties to revolutionary Marxism had ended.

Even though several of the best-known figures moved sharply left again in the mid-late 1960s, the story of the group was grounded in its deradicalization phase. The cultural power of Cold War liberalism secured a narrative foundation establishing that there simply had been no alternative to the great transformation of the Cold War. That is, since the New York intellectuals did not follow another course, they could not follow another course; the road from the 1930s had a defined end point. All that remained was for scholars to evaluate the result: had the group of onetime revolutionaries that evolved into the New York intellectuals appropriately matured, or had they sold out? The same outcome—the necessity of deradicalization—works for either version, whether one favors or rejects the new formation.

This is a form of teleology I reject as much as I have always rejected those versions of Marxism that position socialism as the ineluctable outcome of the contradictions of capitalist society. In The New York Intellectuals, I emphatically designate my research method as Marxist because the evidence I found in archives and interviews corroborated Marx’s classic statement on historical interpretation: Men make their own history but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances already existing, given and transmitted from the past.¹² Although my focus was on both the ideas and lived experience of a range of actors, I interpreted the great transformation in their outlook in the context of historical restraint and a calamitous political climate change at the national and global level. It seemed to me that, in the guise of recognizing what was purported to be an objective situation of having to choose either imperfect democracy or totalitarianism, scholars of this topic imprisoned in the Cold War liberal conventions were urging resignation to defeat. This elimination of a genuine third way functioned to promote a new kind of disillusionment in which the social framework of the Left’s memory was to be disarticulated so as to break the continuity with the tradition of independence from Washington as well as Moscow. I did not believe that, had a certain political line been followed by the intellectuals, a postwar utopia would have been possible; but I did have an interest in learning what kinds of paths were open to resistance even as they were scorned by the select grouping that created the postwar New York intellectuals.

What I concluded was that historical developments limited options and altered perspectives so that a majority of the intellectuals variously adapted to the forces already committed to anticommunist liberalism, modifying as well as being modified by the new converts. Among the intellectuals, such forces included the Americans for Democratic Action, the Menshevik sympathizers of the New Leader, and the Adlai Stevenson wing of the Democratic Party. This was a realignment so distant from the earlier far Left movement that the Central Intelligence Agency had no difficulty in channeling funds into cultural projects that were seen as mutually beneficial. Nonetheless, in my distinctive version of the chronicle, there were exceptions to be noted—individuals and small organizations and journals that argued against what was happening and did not succumb. The course ultimately followed by the majority, then, is explained by neither determinism nor fatalism. The national and international political climate change made their transformation in consciousness more likely, but personal life, psychology, and political organization played a role as well.

IV. LIBERALS EXPLAIN THINGS TO ME

It is often said that the greatest crime in literary history was the 1824 burning of Lord Byron’s autobiographical memoir, and I suppose that the counterpart in my field was the 1950s erasure of the Marxist opposition to Stalinism and capitalism. Liberal scholarship was mainly to blame. The liberal metanarratives that are perpetuated—that of an admirable maturation or a fulfilling of opportunist ambitions—float above the actual messiness of the Cold War deradicalization process. Not only do they present us with an outcome foretold from either side; they also mask the diverse forms of the radical political imagination that survived on the margins, the pockets of resistance that were not wiped out but that kept alive Marxist perspectives that would come back to life in later generations. So this point is critical: there were many different futures available for the revolutionary intellectuals who coalesced in the 1930s.

All scholars acknowledge some variations: that a few intellectuals veered sharply to the right and joined National Review, and that others, such as Irving Howe, were more adamant about opposing McCarthyism than those locked into the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (the U.S. affiliate of the anticommunist Congress for Cultural Freedom). But what is rarely conceded in looking at experiences now blurred by time and distance is that there were also a smaller number of intellectuals of the same political origins who saw this new development as a decline, and who tried to seek out a different future. This includes individuals such as C. L. R. James and Sidney Lens, and others in groups such as the Socialist Union, the Independent Socialist League, and the Socialist Workers Party. What Cold War liberals were celebrating as an advance to maturity, and their rival Progressive liberals (descendants of the Popular Front tradition) were exposing as the revelation of long-term opportunism, these radicals saw as a retreat to conformity. It would have been disproportionate to give these Left heretics center stage in The New York Intellectuals, a location they did not deserve in terms of influence at the time; but they were included in the book and subject to the same critical examination as others.

My view was not that the intransigent ones had all the answers, as is made clear in my chapter called The Iron Cage of Orthodoxy. It was mainly that prevailing scholars and memoirists were sweeping the decks clean of this aspect in their haste to conflate the very different politics of Marxist anti-Stalinism and anticommunism. The upshot of this liberalsplaining— overconfident, patronizing, and often clueless—about Leninism as necessarily breeding Stalinism, and ideology as a kind of mental illness that afflicts all but those who adhere to the vital center, was successful. Most books on the topic blocked off the revolutionary past of the New York intellectuals, and those who remained variously loyal to it, as a rigorously separated, risible, and trivial effort that never had a future. My investigation continually showed that there needed to be a reconnection through a creative and scrupulous scholarly research that returned to sources and bracketed such Cold War thinking.

This argument seemed to be beneficial as well to understanding the period in which I was writing. Marxists may have been purged from the post-1940s New York intellectuals, but individuals still rooted in the founding ideas were to play the critical roles of nurturing trends of thought and activism that reemerged in full force in the 1960s, a development recently documented by Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps’s Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War (2015).¹³ Whether one of these alternative futures will reemerge in the twenty-first century remains an open question. The New York Intellectuals presented history as a force field full of uncertainties and possibilities, with no happy endings or even automatic progress guaranteed. Thirty years later, I can only reiterate the point.

The key to the demythologization of the New York intellectuals is documenting the hybridity of the group’s formation. Its unique tradition in politics and culture coalesced in the early and mid-1930s when a spectrum of revolutionary and communist intellectuals forged a critique of the official pro-Soviet movement on Marxist grounds. Many of the leading individuals were secular and internationalist Jews; the greater part of their cultural tastes could be characterized as modernism with attitude; and Leon Trotsky inspired several of the ideological positions. That said, it should be noted that there was from the outset a noticeable presence of non-Jews (James T. Farrell), nonmodernists (Max Eastman), and non-Trotskyists (V. F. Calverton).

The indispensable glue was not any single cultural or ethnic identity but a fusion at the core of uncompromising anticapitalism and anti-Stalinism. To be sure, there existed, in addition to a modicum of non-Leninists, an overlap with a variety of Trotskyist organizations. Yet the control of the publications through which writers originally found expression—the post-1937 Partisan Review, Modern Monthly, and Marxist Quarterly—was firmly in the hands of their mostly unaffiliated editors.

Though they shared a common ideology, the group that would become the New York intellectuals was a breed unto itself. It was also a movement of many voices, one interlaced with various elements, crystallizing around associations and friendships, a web of communities and political affiliations. It certainly wasn’t a membership group, and to determine who actually belongs, and in what manner, requires astute detective skills. Moreover, several of those who had organizational affiliations with communism or Trotskyism later made a wild grab for plausible deniability. Nothing about this history can be taken at face value because memories of political battles from past years can distort.

It was only following a profound crisis during World War II that the New York intellectuals came into their own as an influential force in United States culture. Although there was no official announcement, revolutionary politics were banned and anticapitalism much attenuated. What had been an admirable resistance to Stalinism through a revolutionary socialist alternative had mostly transmogrified into the new species of liberal anticommunism. The heart of their political existence was editing a half dozen journals, which after 1953 included the Anglo-American Encounter, and holding occasional public forums (some of which relied on nontransparent CIA funding). In the background were salons and social circles as well as connections to publishing houses and a growing academic presence at institutions such as Columbia, New York University, and Brandeis. Mainly due to the group’s base in Manhattan, the ethnic composition remained disproportionately secular Jewish, and the modernism championed was less edgy in the new atmosphere of the 1950s when Kafka was the Rage.¹⁴

V. THE TROTSKYIST NEXT DOOR

The weight of the view that the logical and necessary end point of the journey of the Marxist anti-Stalinists was Cold War liberalism has long suffocated the understanding of the legacy. When I approached the subject in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was as if near-unconscious mental maps had been put in place, commanding how one sees and instantly interprets this past. How could one erase the simplicity of these old associations and orderings, replacing them with new and more sophisticated ones? How could one smash the warped lenses through which people had been made to see an experience that still had some relevance to their lives? To understand the era before the 1950s, what I thought was missing was not a polemic but a fully imagined immersive amplitude. It was necessary to take readers back through the actual debates that had shaped this milieu as well as to the organizational activities in which many had participated. To be sure, I knew that there were those for whom the details of all this might not be a compelling stay-up-all-night read; that was one reason why I changed strategy in the final section of the book and simply made my case about The Bitter Fruits of Anticommunism.

Then there was the difficulty of explaining Trotskyism, which looked to be the most animus-attracting political movement of our time. Trotskyism certainly had its share of Looney Tunes idolaters of the Old Man and tin-pot dictators of cult-like groups with delusions of grandeur, but these were a relatively small blemish on his extraordinary life and brilliant body of writing—not to mention the record of some remarkable political activities by admirers around the world who had authentic credentials as working-class leaders and creative scholars. Regrettably, Trotskyism was also a magnet for scorn from people (conservatives, liberals, radicals) who had never studied its theories or understood its history, or who had been indoctrinated with prejudice based on false information. There was the need to carefully document the complicated relationships of the intellectuals under scrutiny to Trotskyist ideas and movements; but a bigger problem was my own role in the book as narrator and appraiser.

How was I to communicate my multilayered assessment that some aspects of Trotsky’s legacy were necessary, others dangerous, and still others above my pay grade to explain? Playing coy or being mysterious was not an option; from the outset, I had decided that I wasn’t going to collaborate in the familiar fiction of claiming that I—or anyone—could be completely unbiased in carrying out this type of project. I definitely wanted to make a contribution to the revolutionary socialist side of the scales of history, and said so, but this did not translate into writing a cheerleading book for Trotskyism.

Today, I haven’t politically strayed from the method used in this book or the convictions behind it, although I hope my understanding has advanced. When the facts change, one must respond, and in the 1960s through the 1980s I was unquestionably too caught up in a limited paradigm: the hope that traditional working-class movements, based in trade unions and guided by experienced socialist parties, had a future as the ballast for massive social movements in the last two decades of the late twentieth century. This kind of classical Marxist thinking prepared me well for the continuing growth in inequality in the United States, with special hardships for people of color, and a persistence of Western imperialist interventions under a variety of pretexts. But nothing I read or heard equipped me to anticipate the nonviolent transformation of the Soviet Union and China into such ruthless capitalist systems, the improbable election of a liberal African American president in 2008, the extraordinary success of the right to same-sex marriage and the LGBTQ movement, the popularity and impact of Occupy-type actions, and the stunning acceptance of a socialist contender for the Democratic Party nominee in 2016.

I won’t deny the residual presence of an inner Old Bolshevik that still stirs my thinking about the concrete utopia of working-class collective emancipation and the need to organize earnestly to advance that aim. But orthodox varieties of Trotskyism were something I never found attractive; I never promoted these by name in my writing, even when endorsing portions of Trotskyism’s historical critiques, or the current political strategies of some organizations regarding nationalism and self-determination, united-front coalition building, transitional demands, and so on. Nonetheless, I respected many of the older generation of Trotskyist activists from various factions as admirable, and read with approval the writings of European neo-Trotskyists such as Ernest Mandel, Michael Löwy, Catherine Samary, Tariq Ali, and Terry Eagleton (and, later, Enzo Traverso and Daniel Bensaïd). I found that I could learn a great deal from Trotskyism’s abstract doctrinal schemes, even as I was never certain as to what was truly an objective description of reality, especially in regard to big questions such as the Popular Front, the Soviet Union, and the meaning of World War II. Out of power, Trotsky seemed a giant; in power, I had many questions.¹⁵

Frankly, while it looked appropriate to indicate my conclusions about disputes among the New York intellectuals where I could, I really didn’t see myself as a vociferous fog-lifter, except in perhaps one area: the conviction that romanticized accounts of the past were contrary to Marxist principle. In my project of retrieval, I set out to discover what had been forgotten, and I was not about to flinch from whatever I found. I was forty-one years old when the book was published, and well aware that history could be a bummer. In fact, I suspected that it might well be that the uncomfortable truths would matter the most.

No one writes a book free of factual and interpretative errors, not to mention goofed-up footnotes or typos. I was probably something of an over-eager tour guide—one with too much to say and not sufficient lingering over certain features of the landscape. But in one area I badly misjudged: my assiduousness in documenting Trotskyist associations of many intellectuals who turned right ended up fueling the fairy tale that there is a momentous connection between Trotskyist ideas and the movement of neoconservatism. The relatively new neoconservative phenomenon was actually an outgrowth of the antiradical backlash among Democrats in the 1960s, but, at the very moment The New York Intellectuals was published, neoconservatism was en route to genuine national influence in Republican administrations, and scare stories about conspiratorial infiltrators were attractive among its rivals. Should I have known better and devoted more time to debunking this fable that significant political features of neoconservatism grew out of Trotskyism? It didn’t strike me as necessary inasmuch as the careful scholarship to that time, and most of it since, has been consistent in depicting the ideas of neoconservatism as an outgrowth of varieties of Cold War anticommunism—which had captured a number ex-Trotskyists (as well as ex-Communists) even as it was surely not their invention. But I was naïve about the power of journalistic memes, which became even worse as Internet culture arose and took over intellectual life.

On what basis can there be a claim that Trotskyism was a big influence on neoconservatism? Influence is a vague term if there ever was one. Nonetheless, any argument beyond noting that neoconservative leaders and ranks included several people who had passed through—and then broken with—factions of Trotskyism a quarter of a century earlier breaches multiple norms of scholarly discourse. The case that neoconservatism is in some senses a species of Trotskyism is founded on an elementary confusion between a causal factor and simply the presence of individuals in the 1970s who had repudiated certain ideas by the end of World War II. Instead of offering up a sharply reasoned and carefully documented argument about the deradicalization of a generation that might be useful, we see a triumph of branding, a surreal exercise in alternate history.

As The New York Intellectuals detailed, the handful of neoconservatives who were once diversely associated with Trotskyism decades earlier came to disagree with every one of their previous views, except perhaps the belief in their own absolute rectitude. Even in regard to Stalinism, they had reversed course by World War II or shortly after to conclude—with their new allies—that the answer was not a democratic and socialist revolutionary transformation but Western economic power and military might. It was out of elements of this revised orientation, shared by other Cold War anticommunists, that the neoconservative outlook would spring. The present-day journalists who market op-eds and articles with this assertion of a direct Trotskyist-neoconservative bridge are taking the totality of a person’s experience and passing it through a sieve to isolate a supposedly incriminating facet and connect dots inappropriately. As has been documented in studies neglected by the mainstream, the case is being made through inaccurate identifications and innuendos—pretty bad cherry-picking that takes the story out of serious intellectual history.¹⁶ It is a fool’s errand to attempt to understand neoconservatism by looking at Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution (1930) instead of the various fearmongering reactions to radicalism, such as Whitaker Chambers’s Witness (1952).

VI. REFRAMING THE CONTEXT

Since I always believed that Marxists could make better use of their time than accusing others of betrayal, why did I write this book? In reality, I was not at all concerned with refighting the political wars of fifty years ago, but with collecting and analyzing facts about the fate of a politicocultural blend that had inspired me as I encountered it in the pages of the Menorah Journal, Partisan Review, Marxist Quarterly, New International, and Politics. This research led to my recognition that I needed to reframe the context; the story had to begin candidly at the beginning, rather than be subject to the restructuring of experiences to make them line up with one of the familiar endings in the Cold War, the 1960s, or the 1980s. It now seems more significant than I realized at the time that the first Partisan Review writer I interviewed was the delightful F. W. Dupee. He had retired to Carmel, California, in the early 1970s, while I was writing a dissertation in the University of California, Berkeley, English department on James T. Farrell in the 1930s and 1940s. Dupee had reradicalized in the 1960s, when practically all the founding editors had cycled back to the left—Dwight Macdonald (whom I had met in the late 1960s when he came to teach a class at Antioch College), Mary McCarthy, and Philip Rahv. Irving Howe was judged by some of them as little more than a State Department socialist. Commentary magazine, it is now hard to believe, had also moved significantly left and joined the radical movement; and Norman Podoretz was one of the first to condemn the Vietnam War and call for immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops.¹⁷ So I originally intended to work on an upbeat project, an affirmation of a vibrant usable past. The glitch was my obsession with evidenced-based scholarship, which had been encouraged by my collaboration with a working-class Trotskyist autodidact, George Breitman. Through a synthesis of various types of material, what I ultimately found myself weaving together turned out to be far more challenging and convoluted than I had expected as the 1970s became the 1980s. Thus the book could have been better described as a meditation on what might be called The Age of Deradicalization.

As the thirtieth anniversary edition goes to press, we may be approaching a time of broader political relevance than 1987 for many of the ideas that I tried to preserve in this book. Paradoxically, the topic of the New York intellectuals is now older, well-established, venerated, and canonical, even as it feels distinctly of this moment. And 2017 is a political conjuncture when many of the lost ideas of the New York intellectuals need to be redeemed; to know this history is to give current debates a fuller historical context, and also to acknowledge an avatar of unfulfilled promise. To me, it is quite understandable that a new generation should now look to the trajectory of this earlier generation in thinking about where intellectuals stand and how they should conduct themselves. After all, following long years of condescending neglect, the mainstream press is suddenly beginning to pay a bit more attention to what non-Stalinist Marxist intellectuals have to say. This is primarily because there has been a shift toward socialism that is unprecedented since the 1960s.

Much of the material in The New York Intellectuals consists of heretical responses to the fact that, in the twentieth century, revolutionary movements primarily took the form of Communism. Although some younger radicals may search for pretexts to evade the troubling aspects of this pro-Soviet legacy, it is a past that will not pass as easily as they might hope. It is dangerous to circumvent rather than deepen our understanding of the Bolshevik catastrophe, not to mention the failures of social democracy. We can’t just shoot past these topics; vestiges can and will attack us. For instance, aspects of it may come back in the form of doubts about revolutionary transformation and the workability of a collectivized economy, or even the possibility of workers’ control and democracy. And there will be other reruns of the problems for the Left confronted by the New York intellectuals in the 1930s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1980s.

Biography, too, is a critical part of the picture. Many intellectuals were not signed-up party militants and consequently didn’t have to live out the full consequences of their arguments. What, then, do commitment and engagement mean in terms of the way one balances political and professional life, or for one’s cultural practice? How do vanguard intellectuals relate to the broader public? How does one remain in clear-eyed opposition to policies and practices of one’s own government without idealizing and romanticizing that government’s victims and opponents? These questions suggest that there is a sense that we are still in the same age as those who started out in the 1930s, despite thought-provoking changes. Yes, the Internet and Twitter culture have upended the universe of the little magazine; intellectuals have migrated from bohemias to universities and think tanks; Soviet Communism has collapsed; and religious fundamentalism is on the rise. Yet many of the older issues generate heat.

There is no single explanation for why the moment appears ripe for a critical reclamation of the independent Marxism fashioned and later lost. Maybe it has just taken time, and unraveling of other myths and narratives, for reality to break through antiutopian cynicism, along with the infusion of new energies. And then, too, there is Suddenly Saunders—Bernie striking a resonant chord among young people and racking up 13 million votes in the Democratic primary election of 2016. More than anything else, Saunders brought socialism back to public life and established a left pole in the country’s political terrain. To be sure, his affinities are with reform-oriented European social democracy, but his campaign was built on ideals of human equality and the dignity of working people. Many more young people today give the impression that they are out to reengage critical debates that have been brewing since the revolutionary Marxism of the 1968 era was largely abandoned. Possibly socialism will now have an impact missing for decades, although we also know that it is not unusual for the Left to episodically go from the margins to the mainstream and back again.

What ultimately happened to most of the New York intellectuals remains a specter haunting all recollections of radicalization and deradicalization; there are warnings for those moving left as well as right. One can never rule out the possibility that, as in the 1960s, we may be rethinking a revolutionary project—the need to rebuild the destroyed community of mass social movements inflamed with humanitarian ideals and practical solutions—in a nonrevolutionary age. Events, none more than the alarming evolution of the post–Soviet Union and the Arab Spring, are often unanticipated and their consequences hard to predict. Fresh disenchantments could be in the offing, but I am not writing this new preface as a version of the famous Soviet dissidents’ salute: a toast to the success of our hopeless cause. We must channel whatever melancholia we have for past losses into the fruitful work of reconstruction. This project is not simply about a return to origins; it is only that not every wheel may need reinventing. A new generation must break free of mythic and ideological formulations about the past so that it can fashion its own political and ethical socialist community for the twenty-first century.

Alan Wald, August 2016

NOTES

1. Although this book follows the style of the University of North Carolina Press in not capitalizing intellectuals unless it is part of a title, I have no objection to capitalization. The point is that the phrase refers to a particular group (with some debate about affiliations), but not all intellectuals associated with New York.

2. A good overview of the return of a left-wing Marxism to U.S. intellectual life can be found in Timothy Shenk, Thomas Piketty and Millennial Marxists on the Scourge of Inequality, Nation, 14 April 2014, https://www.thenation.com/article/thomas-piketty-and-millennial-marxists-scourge-inequality/.

3. James B. Gilbert, review of Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World," Nation 135 (26 April 1986): 589.

4. Cited in Benjamin Baint, Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left into the Neoconservative Right (New York: Public Affairs, 2010), 73.

5. See the article by Batya Ungar-Sargon, Twenty-Four Arrested in Protest against Israel’s Gaza Campaign, http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/180812/24-arrested-in-protest-against-israels-gaza-campaign.

6. https://newrepublic.com/article/118788/israels-war-gaza-morally-justified.

7. See the 10 December 2014 essay in Haaretz, "Exodus from the New Republic: What Will It Mean for Jewish Thought?," http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/news/1.631038.

8. Yivo Institute, Interview with Adam Kirsch, https://yivo.org/interview-with-adam-kirsch-new-york-intellectuals-revisited.

9. Damon Linker, Leon Wieseltier: The Last of the New York Intellectuals, The Week, 8 December 2014, http://theweek.com/articles/441724/leon-wieseltier-last-new-york-intellectuals Wieseltier published an essay on Gaza supporting the invasion but expressing dismay over the lack of humanitarian concern for civilians (https://newrepublic.com/article/118986/leon-wieseltier-israel-and-gaza-just-and-unjust-war).

10. Michael Walzer, Can There Be a Decent Left?, Dissent 49, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 19–23.

11. A key document of deradicalization, the Euston Manifesto of 2006, appeared a few years later, mainly authored by former British Trotskyist Norman Geras (1943-2013) and signed by Walzer, who was himself not a supporter of the invasion. It was reproduced on the Dissent website (https://www.dissentmagazine.org/wp-content/files_mf/1390330362d5Euston.pdf).

12. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm.

13. See my review essay Reaching for Revolution in Against the Current 179 (November–December 2015): 25–29.

14. The title of a 1997 memoir of Greenwich Village in the 1950s by Anatole Broyard.

15. I recently published an assessment: Between the Power and the Dream, Against the Current 178 (September–October 2015): 41–44.

16. There have been several well-documented refutations, but among the most cited is Bill King’s 2004 Neoconservatives and Trotskyists, http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0304/0304neocontrotp1.htm.

17. See Nathan Abrams, Norman Podhoretz and Commentary Magazine: The Rise and Fall of the Neo-Cons (New York: Continuum, 2010), 31.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the following libraries for assistance and in some cases for permission to quote from letters and manuscripts: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University; Boston Public Library; Butler Library, Columbia University; Charles Patterson Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania; Frank Melville, Jr. Memorial Library, State University of New York at Stony Brook; Guy W. Bailey Library, University of Vermont; Harvard University Records Office; Haverford College Library; Hoover Institute, Stanford University; Houghton Library, Harvard University; Humanities Research Center, University of Texas; Labadie Collection, University of Michigan; Leon Trotsky Institute, Grenoble, France; Library of Congress; Library of Social History, New York City; Middlebury College Library; Mills College Library; Museum of Social Science, Paris; Northwestern University Library; Tamiment Library, New York University; Tufts University Library; University of California, Los Angeles, Research Library; University of Delaware Library; University of Illinois Library; University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Library; University of Oregon Library; University of Tennessee Library; University of Washington Library; Wisconsin State Historical Society; Yale University Library. The following individuals generously gave me access to their private collections: Daniel Aaron, Cambridge, Massachusetts; George Breitman, New York City; Robert Gorham Davis, Cambridge, Massachusetts; James T. Farrell, New York City; Albert Glotzer, New York City; Walter Lippmann, Los Angeles; and George Novack, New York City. I appreciate the assistance of