2
Affirmers and Dissenters

From the outset, more than a decade before the Waldorf Conference, the New York intellectuals split into two camps. The more idealistic faction, originally led by Dwight Macdonald, conceived of themselves as perpetual dissenters, critics continually in opposition to mainstream culture. The more pragmatic camp, led at first by Sidney Hook, saw no benefit to perpetual opposition and instead hoped to reshape the world through a skeptically minded affirmation of culture.^[1]

Despite the significant fissure, members of both camps pondered the same problems, shared almost the same enemies, and employed the same style of analysis. The group's unity in opposition to the Waldorf Conference showed that the affirmers and dissenters could combine to fight a common threat, and that they viewed the Stalinists and fellow travelers as a greater danger than the differences within the group. Although the political outlooks of the two camps diverged, their practical politics were often nearly identical. For most outsiders looking in, there was little difference between Macdonald's circle and Hook's.

The Split: 1937–1943

In 1934 Philip Rahv and William Phillips launched the first Partisan Review under the auspices of the New York John Reed Club, a Communist organization for proletarian writers. The literary counterpart to the Communist New Masses , the Partisan Review supported proletarian literature and revolutionary Marxist politics, continuing the tradition of Symposium , published from 1930 to 1933 and edited by James Burnham and Philip Wheelwright. Writers in the Partisan Review circle who had written for Symposium included Macdonald, Phillips, Hook, Harold Rosen-

berg, and Paul Goodman.^[2] But almost immediately Rahv and Phillips grew weary of the drudgery of proletarian realism and cultural orders from the Party, and the magazine suspended publication in 1936.

In 1937 Partisan Review was reborn with a new cast of editors: Rahv, Phillips, Macdonald, F. W. (Fred) Dupee, George Morris, and Mary McCarthy. The new magazine supported modernist literature and an antiStalinist politics of the left, and was intent on Europeanizing what they considered an inferior American naturalist culture.^[3] The shift from communism to a more moderate cultural and political position brought it nearer the American mainstream, and enabled it to attract over the course of the next several decades an impressive sampling of American and European intellectuals as contributors and readers.

But politics and culture were not simple matters of agreement among the intelligentsia, and by 1938 there was already friction. During that year Hook was attempting to organize a League Against Totalitarianism (LAT) and sent Macdonald a manifesto that had already been endorsed by Dewey, Eugene Lyons, and himself. Macdonald thought it was not leftist enough and declined to sign it. "Unless the LAT states that its sympathies are on the left, with the masses and against their exploiters," he wrote to Hook, "its program is as empty and even politically red-baiting" as the Dies committee. By June 1939 Hook and Macdonald had founded separate organizations to oppose totalitarianism. Hook started the Committee for Cultural Freedom with John Dewey as its head, the forerunner of both the Americans for Intellectual Freedom and the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. Macdonald's League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism was a more outspokenly Trotskyist organization that opposed totalitarianism and believed that cultural freedom was impossible without socialism, an opinion that Hook rejected.^[4]

Hook did not appreciate Macdonald's splitting the antitotalitarian unity. "When the first Committee for Cultural Freedom was organized in 1939," Hook wrote to Richard Rovere in 1952, "a small group insisted that only under socialism was cultural freedom possible. Instead of trying to convince the rest of us that this was so, they split away to organize a 'Committee for Cultural Freedom and Socialism' [sic ]. We survived it."^[5] Narrow at first, the differences between the Hook and Macdonald committees soon expanded into an ideological rift that nearly sank the Partisan Review for good. The issue of the proper response to the war ignited the hostility.

Of the six original Partisan Review editors, Rahv, Phillips, and Macdonald wielded the strongest influence in the first years of the forties. Rahv and Phillips, together with Hook (a prominent contributor but not

an editor) represented one power bloc within the magazine. Macdonald and Clement Greenberg represented another.

Hook became associated with the magazine through Phillips, who had been his student at NYU. In Partisan 's first decade Hook was the review's principal political voice alongside, until 1943, Macdonald. "In the late 30's Partisan Review and everybody on it leaned on Hook politically," William Barrett, an assistant editor at the magazine, recalled. "He was the acknowledge master of Marxist theory and the spearhead in the attack on Stalinism from the Left; and therefore ideologically indispensable to the magazine."^[6] Hook, with the blessing of Rahv and Phillips, wanted the journal to acknowledge that both America and the Partisan community should support the Allies against the growing fascist totalitarianism in Europe. Although some other liberal and leftist intellectuals had reached similar conclusions, Hook was the first in the Partisan circle to press for American involvement. About this Hook was adamant, and Rahv and Phillips, unaccustomed as most of the New York group had always been to think of America as their country, were only slowly coming to support his position. Macdonald, on the other hand, regarded both America and Germany as exploitive, repressive capitalist countries to which no socialist intellectual could offer his loyalty. Macdonald, like many Trotskyists of the time, believed that principled intellectuals had to support a "third-camp" position that rejected the moral claims of both the Allies and the Axis powers with the hope that from the ashes of war would rise a viable third position of democratic socialism.

As Macdonald recalled, Rahv and Phillips initially agreed with him that it was an imperialist war, but their minds "changed the day of Pearl Harbor when the United States got into it." Irving Howe, however, located the turn of the magazine against Macdonald in the issue of November–December 1941, where Rahv attacked Macdonald and Greenberg's earlier article "Ten Propositions on the War," a formal declaration against American involvement in the imperialist war. Rahv's "Ten Propositions and Eight Errors" was the Rahv-Phillips-Hook repudiation of Macdonald's position.^[7]

Macdonald resisted the wish of Rahv and Phillips to throw the magazine's support behind the Allies, and he insisted on Partisan Review having a divided editorial voice. He felt that the journal had started in the 1930s as a vehicle of opposition rather than an affirmation of American culture, and he now thought that stance should not be compromised by the war. Throughout the 1940s, from before the war until after the Waldorf Conference, Macdonald urged on the intellectual community a third-camp ideal that was first Trotskyist, then in the late 1940s pacifist.^[8]

According to Hook, the split between the Trotskyists and him came in 1940 or 1941. Until then, he recalled, he had been the darling of the Trotskyists because he had led the fight against the acceptance of the Moscow Trials, despite his disagreements with the Trotskyists and their political line. Until 1940 everyone on the left, including the liberals, opposed involvement in the war; but around 1940 Hook publicly changed his mind, and the Trotskyists turned on him and attacked his war position.^[9]

In the early forties it looked as though the power at Partisan Review might shift toward Macdonald by default when Rahv considered giving up his editorship because his wife, Nathalie, had work that had taken them to Chicago. He told Macdonald to find an editorial replacement for him. But Rahv's identity was bound to the magazine he had helped conceived seven years earlier, so in the spring of 1941 he changed his mind and wrote to Macdonald that Nathalie's work was going quickly enough for them to return soon to New York. "Hence I think I'd better reverse my decision to take my name off the magazine. This also puts a new construction on your search for new editors. I hope you haven't committed yourself to anyone." Meyer Schapiro and Lionel Trilling had both declined offers to become editors, much to Rahv's relief.^[10] Had Rahv left, Macdonald might have been able to steer the magazine to his course, although Phillips and Hook would still have been formidable obstacles. The obvious irony is that by the 1940s, among the Partisan Review editors, the Jews of the group were supporting the U.S. against its enemies while the old Yankee on the staff was America's sharpest critic.

By the end of 1941 Rahv and Macdonald were corresponding about their differences on the war. "I think our controversy is exciting," Rahv wrote Macdonald from Chicago, "though in my opinion you begged most of the questions I addressed to you. You seem to think that a mere listing of the failures of the democracies is enough to prove the validity of the revolutionary case you have outlined." Rahv thought Macdonald unreasonable. "To make the revolution in America is a much more difficult task than to win the war against Hitler on the present basis—hence your position amounts to saying: let's do the more difficult thing first. There is no logic in such a policy."^[11]

(Five years later, in 1946, Rahv would still be making the same charge against Macdonald, but with regard to Stalin rather than Hitler What Macdonald's "position comes down to—in objective terms—is a complete surrender to Stalin," Rahv and Phillips warned. "With a truly oriental passivity Yogi Macdonald prostrates himself beneath the wheels of the advancing juggernaut."^[12] By 1950 Macdonald had come to agree entirely with Rahv's complaints and issued essentially the same warning to others about the need for more than a passive stance against the Soviet Union.)

Hook was disgusted with Macdonald and other Trotskyists who criticized the capitalist war and would not oppose fascism. He believed that for socialism to be successful in America, Hitler had to be defeated. The best plan for socialists, in Hook's opinion, was to organize their political program around a democratic socialist approach to fighting and winning the war: labor should participate in war councils, and all levels of the nation should be offered a greater stake in a victory.^[13]

Macdonald was not convinced. By 1942 his faith in his third-camp position was strong enough that he was willing to tear the magazine apart over the war issue—to fight for control of the magazine and abandon it if he lost. His friend Lewis Coser, the sociologist who a decade later would be one of the founding editors of Dissent , wrote to him that "there is no use denying that there is a change between the old and the new PR and this change is on the whole not a very beneficial one. The question is only if one should abandon it or not, and I still think that it is worth while to stick to it and to make the most one can out of it."^[14]

The other founding editor of the future Dissent , Irving Howe, was also more sympathetic to Macdonald than to the other editors at Partisan Review . Assessing Partisan 's internal struggle over the war, Howe praised Macdonald for having moved the magazine to the left for a considerable period of time before it turned against him and moved to the right. Howe mistakenly thought Macdonald acquiesced in the magazine's rightward swing, but when Macdonald later left Partisan Review and started his own magazine Howe again was sympathetic to his general outlook.^[15]

Macdonald disagreed with Coser about the value of remaining with Partisan Review . Concurrently, the magazine's prospects began to dim because of a serious lack of financing. To resolve the editorial and financial impasse, the editors decided that if Rahv and Phillips could obtain the money to keep the magazine going they would receive editorial control; but if they failed, and Partisan folded, Macdonald could revive the review under his control. Even as Rahv and Phillips worked through the spring of 1943 to find a sponsor, Macdonald was preparing an announcement to run in the magazine. It explained that the journal would fold because of financial hardship, but assured readers that "Partisan Review will not disappear, however. It will be carried on in the fall, with a different format and editorial policy, under the editorship of Dwight Macdonald. It will become a magazine of political and social comment with cultural overtones (instead of, as at present, a literary magazine with political overtones)."^[16]

Macdonald's statement was never printed; Rahv and Phillips found a sponsor in Mary Herter Norton, who pledged $2,500 a year to the magazine, although she guaranteed only the first year's funding. She was

more interested in a cultural than a political magazine, which Rahv evidently assured her it would be. "Mrs. Norton is a woman of the finest sensibility, Rahv wrote to Macdonald, explaining his success, "but politically she is an indifferentist more or less. What she liked particularly about the mag is its sustained contact with European literary art and ideas."^[17]

Macdonald wrote a letter of resignation and asked that it be printed without change. It was. In his letter he lamented that Partisan Review had abandoned whatever political position it once held, and in the future would be only a cultural forum. Rahv and Phillips strongly objected to this accusation, with Phillips complaining to Macdonald, "Your note is inaccurate, misleading, and it, in effect, knocks the magazine, somehow suggesting that you stood for a good magazine and we for a lousy one."^[18] Rahv, whose perpetual scowl made him look "like the chairman of a grievance committee," was more to the point.^[19] "It is not true," he advised Macdonald, "that PR will now be thoroughly de-politicalized; there are a thousand and one ways of slipping political discussions into the magazine—reviews, ripostes, etc.—despite our agreement with Mrs. Norton. Let's not be too literal-minded about it."^[20]

Hook later claimed that Rahv, Phillips, and Macdonald were not very influential in changing political and cultural attitudes. Partisan Review , according to Hook, ended up taking the same political and cultural line as most of the rest of the intellectual community. Further, the editors were not even "serious revolutionists" since they took no risks and were not active in revolutionary events of the period. "They called themselves socialist and occasionally Communist, but the terms had no real content in their minds, except that they were against things as they were," Hook remembered. The Partisan editors "read no economics or sociology or philosophy but mainly literary criticism," which was insufficient to educate or fuel a revolutionary. "Their chief contribution," Hook wrote, "for which they deserve commendation, is that they provided a forum for nonsectarian writing during a highly sectarian period in intellectual political life." In Hook's estimate he was the political intelligence and savvy behind the magazine: the editors invited him to associate with them "as a kind of political guide."^[21]

Yet after the war Hook's position "was already subtly on the wane" at the magazine. His influence began to dissipate, according to William Barrett, because of his anti-Stalinist "single-mindedness," his narrowing of vision. For Rahv and Phillips, Barrett wrote, Hook "had become a kind of Johnny One-note, clear and forceful but also monotonous in the one issue he was always pursuing. When the question came up one day of Hook's possibly doing an article that was then needed, Rahv rejected the sugges-

tion in his usual corrosive and reductive way: 'No. Sidney will only tell you once again that Stalin stinks.'"^[22]

Perhaps Rahv and Phillips were correct to insist on the futility of the third-camp position in the early 1940s. But that issue aside, Macdonald was accurate in noticing the effect of the war on members of the Partisan community. Partisan Review had been founded by leftist outsiders, most of whom felt little in common with American values. Many in the founding generation had middle-class aspirations, but most of them also felt alienated by a culture with which they only partly identified. Those who were least alienated from American culture—Alfred Kazin, Norman Mailer, Norman Podhoretz—were members of the group's second and third generations and were not part of the power struggle over the magazine during the war.

So, as Macdonald realized, the depoliticization of Partisan Review was a significant shift. It was a notable sign that many of its first generation editors and readers (as well as the younger crowd) were being pulled into the orbit of American cultural values by the gravity of the international tensions. The magazine had gained such high regard among the American intelligentsia that Richard Hofstadter was later prompted to call it "a kind of house organ of the American intellectual community."^[23] But in the 1940s the magazine and the group itself were slowly becoming transformed, evolving toward a more affirmative outlook and a greater respect for America. At the same time, the division between the affirmers and the dissenters was growing more pronounced.

Politics and Commentary : 1944–1950

Unwilling to abandon the stance of cultural opposition upon which he and others had founded Partisan Review , after he left the magazine Dwight Macdonald carried on his own vision of its original critical intention and posture by starting his own publication, Politics , in 1944.^[24]Politics was a fulfillment of the editorial statement he had planned to use for Partisan Review if he had inherited it: a political magazine with cultural overtones. The magazine lasted only five years, folding on the heels of the Waldorf Conference in 1949. Within the New York group Politics became required reading, and it lived on as a legend after it died. It was a small operation—edited and orchestrated by Macdonald and his first wife Nancy, although they drew articles from members of the group such as Irving Howe, Lewis Coser, Meyer Schapiro, Paul Goodman, Harvey Swados, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and Lionel Abel.^[25]

Throughout the war years, Macdonald, like other members of the international intellectual community, felt that "new roads" in politics

should be explored. He was influenced by Nicola Chiaromonte and the young postfascist Italians, and by the new Canadian Commonwealth Federation. When Macdonald began thinking of a new magazine, others were interested as well. Zellig Harris at the University of Pennsylvania (a linguist whom Noam Chomsky and Nathan Glazer studied under) showed interest, as did Frank Marquart of the United Auto Workers. Paul Goodman was discouraged with Partisan Review because, like Macdonald, he was more of an anarchist than the others, and he too was looking for new outlets. Several planning meetings at Macdonald's apartment were attended by Goodman, Harold Orlans (representing Zellig Harris), and Daniel Bell. "It soon became clear that Dwight could not work easily with others," Bell remembered, "and as it was his money (or Nancy Macdonald, the sister of Selden Rodman, who had founded Common Sense ), and his magazine, he took up the marbles and began shooting them himself. But we all contributed articles and ideas to the early issues."^[26] Politics began speaking to the intellectual community the year before the war ended.

"I am very glad that you have definitely decided to go ahead with the new revue," Lewis Coser wrote Macdonald shortly before the first issue appeared. "Everything seems to be crying for some new and fresh radical magazine." Coser advised him to "rely to a rather large part on younger elements who are not yet very well known but could become a homogeneous group under your direction." He warned Macdonald not to allow the new magazine to "sound like an agglomeration of foreign specialists in Marxism." Among other names, Coser suggested as contributors Meyer Schapiro, James Farrell, Harold Laski, and Daniel Bell. The magazine, Coser recommended, could function for those on the left who had been tied to the Young People's Socialist League ("YPSLs" is what those young members called themselves), which he estimated at about two hundred. Though it would not be wise to write it for the YPSLs, he thought they could be a "backbone for the revue" and help spread the magazine on campuses.^[27]

Coser was born in Berlin in 1913 to a middle-class Jewish family. Although he was the son of a banker, as a young man he became a socialist. With the failure of the Weimar Republic and the increasing threat from the Nazis, he left for Paris in 1933, where he studied comparative literature and then sociology at the Sorbonne. After France fell, Coser lived in the unoccupied zone until 1941, and then found his way to America on a special visa with a few hundred emigres[émigrés] who had opposed the Nazis. Late in 1941 he arrived in New York.^[28]

There Coser decided he wanted to become "a highfalutin Walter Lippmann type of journalist." While working at the Office of War Informa-

tion, he wrote a few articles for Partisan Review , submitting the pieces under the pseudonym Louis Clair to circumvent the OWI policy that employees clear their writings with the government. When Macdonald left Partisan Review and began Politics , Coser maintained his allegiance to Macdonald and wrote under the same pseudonym for that journal. After reading Macdonald's letter of resignation printed in Partisan Review , Coser wrote him that "There is absolutely no point of disagreement between us." Sometimes Macdonald would ask him: "Why can't you say that in a simpler way? Why be so Germanic?" Coser felt that Macdonald had taught him "what an American writing style was" and found him to be "a wonderful editor."

Through parties at Macdonald's apartment in the Village, Coser met Paul Goodman, Harold Rosenberg, and Meyer Schapiro, among others. Seymour Martin Lipset, Irving Kristol, and Martin Diamond invited Coser to contribute to Enquiry magazine. At the Shachtmanite paper Labor Action Coser came to know Emanuel Geltman, Stanley Plastrik, and its editor, Irving Howe.^[29]

Irving Howe was then a precocious twenty-year-old, and Coser was twenty-seven. Labor Action was published in "a grubby loft on Fourteenth Street," and about half the "four-page sheet" was composed by Howe himself "under various pen names." Coser wrote a weekly column on European events under the pseudonym Europacus for Labor Action , but Howe considered him formal, shy, "a somewhat strange bird," and they maintained only a business relationship.^[30]

In summer 1948 Coser registered for graduate study in sociology at Columbia. Shortly after, he was called by Nathan Glazer: "Do you know David Riesman?" Coser didn't. Glazer told him that Riesman was hiring people to teach at the University of Chicago. So Coser met Riesman for a walk in Central Park and was offered a job teaching American history. Unfamiliar with American history, Coser declined. Two weeks later he was offered a job in sociology at Chicago, and this time he accepted. He had not yet started graduate work at Columbia, although he had studied at the Sorbonne. Coser wrote Macdonald about his new job, "the same job Daniel Bell used to have," and told him how pleased he was with his good fortune. "Got this mainly through Dave Riessman [sic ] who must have told them that I am a little genius." Coser signed off his letter: "Professor (former hatchecker) Lou." Riesman, a regular reader of Politics , admitted he was "very much taken with Louis Clair," and confided that "in Coser's case I alone" brought him to teach at Chicago. Riesman then hired Coser's wife, Rose, as a research associate for The Lonely Crowd .^[31]

In The Functions of Social Conflict (1956), Coser developed a view that

has been called "conflict theory," an approach drawn largely from Marx, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel that underscores the tensions, competitions, and hostilities between classes and groups. In the 1960s Coser became expressly interested in the sociology of intellectuals, which led him to write Men of Ideas (1965) and Refugee Scholars in America (1984).

Riesman knew many of the New York intellectuals individually, but he "wasn't that conscious of them as a group." When he was in Chicago in the late 1940s he learned of Glazer by reading Commentary . He thought Glazer and Commentary overestimated the impact of American communism, and wrote and chided him for thinking American communists were so important. Glazer told Riesman that his wife was disturbed that she could not walk down Riverside Drive without running into readers of the fellow-traveling New York Post . Riesman thought this story illustrated how New Yorkers, even after 1948, oddly persisted in seeing communists and fellow travelers as a threat—and he took this as an example of the entire New York group's insularity and parochialism. Not sharing their obsession with their city and with the danger of communism, Riesman "felt very remote from these people because of their provincialism."^[32]

While Riesman thought the New York circle excessively anticommunist, he had other concerns and was somewhat indifferent to their ideological battles. One could share the New York group's interest in the general cultural and political landscape without being preoccupied with the Soviet or communist threat.

His studies of the impact of mass society and affluence on character formation and political perceptions in individuals produced two influential volumes written in collaboration with Glazer and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd (1950) and Faces in the Crowd (1952). The books explored the loss of autonomous individual behavior and beliefs and their replacement by peer pressure. Many of Riesman's notable essays on individualism, popular culture, leisure, Veblen, Freud, Tocqueville, intellectuals and populists, the nuclear threat, totalitarianism, national character, affluence, and suburbanization were collected in Individualism Reconsidered (1954) and Abundance for What? (1964).

Riesman respected Macdonald. "Macdonald I knew from quite a different vantage. I was on the Crimson when he was at Yale putting out his little irreverent sheet." Trilling was the member of the group who most influenced Riesman, although Riesman felt his own interests were nearest to Glazer's and was a closer friend of his.^[33]

Macdonald had thought to call his new magazine The Radical Monthly or New Left Review . But Politics was suggested by C. Wright Mills, a sociologist who taught first at the University of Maryland and then at

Columbia during the 1950s. Sharply iconoclastic and outspoken, Mills was associated with the dissenters, influencing such members of the group as Dennis Wrong, but his commitment to radicalism put him at odds with even the dissenters by the end of the 1950s.^[34] Mills's criticisms of the American power structure appeared in White Collar (1951) and The Power Elite (1956).

Macdonald met Mills in 1943, "a few years after he had broken out of his native Texan corral, like a maverick bull, to seek greener intellectual pastures up north." The two men were drawn together in a wartime atmosphere that was not particularly radical; both were cynical, skeptical, and rebellious iconoclasts. According to Macdonald, Mills "could argue about practically anything even longer and louder than I could." While writing for Politics , Mills met Coser. Though Mills taught graduate courses in the Columbia sociology department, where Coser earned his doctorate, Coser never took classes from him. Nevertheless, the two "were very close" according to Coser, and he claimed that it was he who later brought Mills "into the Dissent fold."^[35]

Richard Hofstadter was another figure who inhabited the periphery of the New York group and shared many of their concerns but kept a separate identity. Daniel Bell, a member of the inner circle who had attended City College, said of his friend, "Dick wasn't a New York intellectual—I use 'New York intellectual' in quotes—to the extent, let's say, that Alfred Kazin was or even I might be, namely a great interest in ideas and constantly racing around to discuss ideas."

Nor was Hofstadter a cultural generalist in the letters tradition: "Dick was less interested, in the evenings, in sitting around, getting involved in a large-scale discussion of what was going on in politics, what was going on in the cultural world. . . . his orbit essentially was his own particular intellectual preoccupations." Hofstadter also did not share the group's freelance literary-cultural outlook, the approach of the New York street intellectual raised on factional politics—the sort of person who felt as comfortable in an editor's chair as in a university chair. A scholar more than a freelance intellectual, Hofstadter took to the classroom, library, and scholarly writing rather than journalism, essays, and talking. Hofstadter, Bell reported, was not as engaged in "the more general world of abstract ideas, which is, you know, the great stuff of discussion in the '50's." Bell concluded that Hofstadter "was intellectual in the range of his interest, but he wasn't in that very simple and slightly invidious distinction, a 'New York intellectual.'"^[36]

Hofstadter's fellow historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., however, had no trouble serving as the sort of involved intellectual Bell described. Schles-

inger shared little background with the group, for he was raised in Cambridge as the son of a Harvard historian and never thought of himself as anything more radical than a reformist liberal. When the politics of the Partisan circle had cooled into liberalism after World War II, Schlesinger shared their liberal anticommunism, wrote The Vital Center (1949) in defense of that outlook, contributed to some of their publications, attended an occasional conference, and joined their American Committee for Cultural Freedom.^[37]

Alfred Kazin, Bell's brother-in-law, was another who fit Bell's model of the New York intellectual better than Hofstadter. Like Macdonald, Kazin during the war described himself as "a man of the third camp." He read Politics , but after the war he was frustrated by Macdonald's emphasis on "abstention and perpetual alienation." "What I object to in McDonald's [sic ] position," Kazin wrote in his journal in 1946, "is not that it is 'impractical,' but that it is self-righteous to the point where it identifies all power with evil and its own powerlessness with good."

In Kazin's view an intellectual had to be a dissenter, but if dissension solidified into intransigence, one's power necessarily diminished. An intellectual needed to be creative and flexible. In contrast, Kazin felt that Macdonald "does not distinguish between opposition to the established culture, which is good, and the ceremony of alienation, which is a self-protective neurotic device." Further, Macdonald set unrealistic goals which led to a feeling of futility. He "errs initially and almost fatally" Kazin observed later, "by setting himself the smallest possible amount of primary alternatives, usually in terms of the external organization of the state, and then despondently, finding them equally abhorrent, writes them all off."^[38] Criticism could be both useful and moral in Kazin's view, and its utility should not be surrendered easily.

Yet Kazin found much to admire in Macdonald. In the late 1940s several of these writers belonged to a Europe-America discussion group, and Kazin sometimes felt, after the evening meetings, that "Rahv is a commissar out of a job and Macdonald [is] an utter fool." But in his journal Kazin also found himself "regretting, as I always do when I see Macdonald, that I have so often poo-pooed him superficially; in his strivings and daily attitudes, [he is] more creative than anyone else in his group." Because Kazin was more interested in art than journalism, Macdonald could bore him, but Kazin at least considered him a clever and thoughtful "utopian journalist."^[39]

Irving Howe was another of the contributors to Politics . "Only Macdonald's personal zest as editor of Politics ," Howe remembered later, "created the possibility—perhaps the illusion—of preserving some sort of

left-wing community" in this period. Howe had returned from the army in 1946 and again worked for the Shachtmanite Labor Action , but his horizons had expanded too far for him to remain in a sect. Macdonald hired him at fifteen dollars a week as a part-time assistant at Politics . There Howe again ran into Lewis Coser. Howe and Coser considered themselves unorthodox Marxists, but they thought Macdonald went too far, in "The Root Is Man," toward "a kind of anarcho-pacifist-moralist declaration stressing his new commitment to absolute values." Howe and Coser each wrote "rather turgid" criticisms of Macdonald's idealism, and, according to Howe, "Dwight was good-natured enough to print them." Later Howe admitted that those criticisms "probably helped sink that admirable magazine."^[40]

While Howe was criticizing Macdonald's political outlook, the two men existed in a friendly tension of ideas. Macdonald was paying him to write a review of articles in various periodicals, for Politics , and Howe sent him several each month. Macdonald received a letter from Howe in late summer 1946, when Macdonald was considering printing Howe's attack on him, explaining that "our political lines have diverged so widely that all we can really do is note the differences and let it go at that." Two weeks later Howe again wrote Macdonald that "the two political lines of thought we represent have diverged so radically that there is less and less common ground for polemic." They remained friends, although they did not try to hide their disagreement.^[41]

Those at Partisan Review took a different course during the 1940s than the dissenters at Politics . After Macdonald left Partisan Review in 1943, the magazine continued to support America in the war, and for the remainder of the 1940s it was increasingly sympathetic toward America in the Cold War. Along with Commentary , which was founded by the American Jewish Committee under the editorship of Elliot Cohen in 1945, Partisan Review became the home of the affirmers among the New York group. In the 1940s the division grew more pronounced between the Hook group at Partisan Review and Commentary and the Macdonald circle at Politics .

It is usually assumed that Hook's politics originated in his strong Marxism of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and that as his passion cooled it solidified into a social democratic vision close to that of Eduard Bernstein. Although this version is not wrong, it underestimates the extent to which Hook, after his initial Marxist period, settled into the political outlook of his mentor John Dewey.

Dewey had always been interested in individualism, especially in the first few decades of the century. By the late 1920s, when Hook studied

with him, Dewey realized that collectivism was the new order and that America's only choice was whether that collectivism would be operated under private, corporate, and somewhat fragmented auspices or under a more coherent social control. Yet he thought that even if that increased planning and integration remained in private hands, the economic system might as well be called socialism because of its collectivism. "We are in for some kind of socialism, call it by whatever name we please, and no matter what it will be called when it is realized," Dewey announced on the eve of the stock market crash.^[42]

His vision of what planning would entail did not change perceptibly from World War I to the market crash. The planning agency would be a partnership of government, labor, business, and consumer representatives. If it sounded vaguely like the Swope Plan or the National Recovery Administration of the New Deal that is not surprising, since the visions of Dewey, Swope, and the NRA were all roughly based on the planning partnerships established in Britain and the United States during World War I. While the war was still at a peak Dewey announced his plan. "This does not involve absolute state ownership and absolute state control," he reported, "but rather a kind of conjoined supervision and regulation, with supervisors and arbiters, as it were, to look after the public interests, the interests of the consumer, the interests of the population as a whole, others to represent those who have their capital immediately invested, and others to represent those who have their lives (in the form of work) immediately invested."^[43]

Thirteen years later, just prior to the stock market crash, Dewey wrote a similar piece, although this time he mentioned the Soviet Union. His plan, he said, would need to be voluntary rather than imposed by the government. "A coordinating and directive council in which captains of industry and finance would meet with representatives of labor and public officials to plan the regulation of industrial activity," he suggested, "would signify that we had entered constructively and voluntarily upon the road which Soviet Russia is traveling with so much attendant destruction and coercion."^[44] Although in 1932 Dewey supported Norman Thomas and the Socialists, he never abandoned his fundamentally liberal outlook.

Both of Dewey's proposals, over a decade apart, envisioned a partnership between government and the major interests of society, with the government serving as the orchestra leader—much as he suggested should occur in his liberal associationist theory of society. Hook, except for the decade of his fascination with Marxism, shared this Wilsonian progressive liberalism with Dewey—and mixed it with a dash of the social democratic vision to which he paid rhetorical allegiance. Many of the osten-

sibly more radical members of the New York group followed Hook, if not always intentionally, along his political course. Even the young firebrand Irving Howe over the decades grew closer to the politics of liberalism than Marxism.

This insight did not escape Hook, who felt that Howe viewed everything Hook did after announcing his support for American involvement in the war in the early 1940s as only a sign of betrayal to the left. Yet Howe, according to Hook, followed Hook's own political journey toward the center at a lag of ten or fifteen years. Hook always felt alienated from Howe, whom he thought had never stopped judging him. But Hook softened toward Macdonald, at least after his death, in part because Macdonald was not a party person, not doctrinaire. Hook saw virtues in Macdonald that he did not detect in Howe—Macdonald was flexible, more interested in culture than politics, more freewheeling and willingly irresponsible—and Hook continued to think of Macdonald as a first-rate journalist.^[45]

As Howe remembers it, Hook was respected by the group during the 1940s as the best anti-Stalinist voice, and they were proud to have Hook deal with that controversy. But the dissenters recognized that Hook's moral outrage about oppressed peoples (other than those oppressed by totalitarian regimes) had left him. In the tension between the affirmers and the dissenters, Harold Rosenberg and Paul Goodman, both dissenters, were frozen out of writing for Partisan Review because they were considered to be too far left. Yet Howe, though he was a vocal critic of Partisan Review and the Hook group, continued to write for the magazine, and assumed it was because he was too young to be resented.^[46]

The third significant publication of the New York intellectuals in the 1940s was Commentary . It succeeded the Contemporary Jewish Record , which the American Jewish Committee had published since 1938, and for which both Rahv and Greenberg had served as managing editor in the early 1940s.

Commentary 's first editor was Elliot Cohen, who was in his mid-forties when the magazine began. Born in 1899, Cohen was only three years older than Hook and six years older than Trilling. Raised in Mobile, Alabama, he had been a brilliant and precocious youngster and at age fourteen he went to Yale. Despite being an exceptional student in English, he sensed there was an anti-Semitism in English departments, which Trilling and others would later feel, and he did not pursue graduate studies.

From 1924 to 1932 Cohen was an editor at the Menorah Journal , where he became another kind of teacher, gathering around him promis-

ing young Jewish writers like Lionel Trilling, Tess Slesinger, Herbert Solow, Clifton Fadiman, and others. Trilling wrote that "no one—certainly none of our teachers—ever paid so much attention to what we thought and how we wrote." At Cohen's death Trilling said, "I would wish to acknowledge him as the only great teacher I have ever had."^[47]

After leaving the Menorah Journal in 1932 under strained relations with its head editor, Cohen for the next decade and a half served as a fundraiser for a Jewish organization. Despondent at such an insufficient outlet for his talents, Cohen leaped at the opportunity to edit Commentary in 1945, and he established a strong presence there.^[48] Again he became a teacher. His lesson now was that Jewish writers needed to become involved in American culture, that there was a connection, in Trilling's words, "between the seemingly disparate parts of a culture, and between the commonplaces of daily life and the most highly developed works of the human mind."^[49] Baseball, stump politics, popular culture—all of it should be evaluated, addressed, and engaged by the American Jewish community and then made to correspond and interact with the higher realms of thought. More than any theme other than persistent anticommunism, Cohen's advice about interaction with American culture characterized the tradition of Commentary .

Within a few years of its birth Commentary functioned as a new voice of the New York group, and after the early 1950s it became the most prominent of their publications. Among its editorial staff were Clement Greenberg, Nathan Glazer, the young film and cultural critic Robert Warshow, and Irving Kristol. Sidney Hook was a contributing editor, and contributors included Harold Rosenberg, Mary McCarthy, Paul Goodman, Alfred Kazin, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Philip Rahv, Diana Trilling, and William Barrett.^[50]

Commentary was not limited to affirmers, although they came to predominate over time. For one, Clement Greenberg scarcely qualified as an affirmer, and Howe wrote Macdonald in 1946 that Greenberg had been helpful getting him published there. Macdonald remained unimpressed with Commentary . He answered Howe that "I don't agree that the journal is worth calling attention to."^[51]

Midge Decter, who went to work for Commentary in the early years, acknowledged that her editorial friends such as Warshow, Glazer, and Kristol had all become affirmers. "My new friends," she recalled later, "had been radicals who became pro-American because of World War II, and then afterwards they went to work at Commentary . . . . I think it could be said that they were more anti-Communist than they were merely pro-American. They had looked upon the face of totalitarianism and were finished with their early flirtation with radicalism."^[52]

This was a key issue between the dissenters and the affirmers in the 1950s: Had the affirmers at Commentary abandoned their radicalism? If so, were they justified or not? Were they merely anticommunists rather than affirmers of mainstream American culture? Did their strong anti-communism lead them into affirmation? Or were the dissenters merely defending an outmoded and irrelevant stance of critical opposition that contained more intransigence than intelligence?

As the mid-century mark approached, at least some of the affirmers and dissenters began to reach a closer agreement on the inadvisability of a third-camp outlook that tried to straddle the tensions between the Soviet Union and America. Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) was representative of the increasing hostility in the intellectual community toward any type of totalitarianism—right or left. By her analysis, the totalitarianism prevalent in the Soviet Union was not the natural product of Marxist or socialist principles, but an analogue of the situation in Nazi Germany. The influence of her book helped sink any traces of third-camp ambivalence that remained in the New York group.

Hard to classify, Arendt was probably more of a dissenter than an affirmer. She admired Macdonald, and in 1946 wrote to Houghton Mifflin, recommending him and his manuscript The Root Is Man . Arendt called him "an honest, stubborn, restless thinker" who was "struggling with the problems which perplex our age." It was the strength of Macdonald's dissenting unorthodoxy that attracted and impressed her. "What I like best about Mr. Macdonald," she told the publishers, "is his courageous willingness to go beyond the fashionable and orthodox unorthodoxies which constitute so great a danger for any person who is really trying to think today."^[53] She was close to others as well. Alfred Kazin found himself so galvanized by her that he had to remind himself in his diary that he was not in love with her. "So drawn to Hannah these days," he noted to himself, "that I resent [Heinrich, her husband]. I'm not in love with her, just adore her as a human being, with all my heart."^[54]

Arendt, like Coser, had escaped from Germany to America early in the war. In Germany she studied under Karl Jaspers and received a doctorate from Heidelberg. More than others in the New York group, she wrote deep and complex philosophical works rather than critical essays. Her work, like theirs, shared significant themes with the critical theory developed in the 1930s and 1940s by the Frankfurt School in Germany and the United States.

The Frankfurt School had been established as the Institut fur[für] Sozialforschung in Frankfurt in 1923, but was exiled to the United States in the mid-1930s. There it took up residence at Columbia University as the Institute for Social Research under the leadership of Max Horkheimer, until

it was reestablished in Frankfurt in the early 1950s. Its key figures were Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal, Franz Neumann, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin. The Frankfurt School was characterized by an anti-Bolshevik and then anti-Stalinist Marxism, a neo-Marxist criticism of the Marxist heritage, and an outlook that found neither capitalism nor Soviet socialism satisfactory.^[55] In that regard it was compatible with the independent radicalism of the New York group.

Among the topics that the Frankfurt School explored were the growth of the state and bureaucracy, the domination of the individual by the government apparatus and the cultural hegemony of the dominant class, the spread of mass culture and the growth of commodification in the culture industry and the development of authoritarian and totalitarian societies. This constellation of interests was obviously prompted by an attempt to explain the social transformations and extremism that had surfaced around the globe during the 1930s and 1940s. It was an inquiry in which the New York group was also engaged, and the Frankfurt School and the New York intellectuals influenced each other, wrote for each other, and helped establish a cross-pollination of European and American intellectual culture around these important concerns.

In the late 1940s, for example, Adorno led a study published as The Authoritarian Personality (1950), in which he postulated a personality type that under modern conditions of the growth of mass culture and the state was potentially fascist or absolutist in outlook and susceptible to racism and extreme nationalism. Parallel projects by the New York intellectuals on the dangers of mass societies and movements included Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950) and Faces in the Crowd (1952), and Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).

While Arendt's thesis reassured leftists that Marxist or socialist principles need not produce a Soviet totalitarianism, she also warned readers not to make the mistake—as third-campers did—of equating the dangers of American illiberalism with those of Soviet totalitarianism: totalitarianism was the ultimate danger.

Even the dissenters agreed with Arendt on this judgment by the time her book appeared. Macdonald became increasingly convinced by the argument that Rahv, Hook, and Phillips had made before World War II: the third-camp position was meaningless in the reality of the 1940s, and one had to choose between East and West. Macdonald's change of heart was accompanied by another shift for which he had criticized Partisan Review years earlier: becoming less political. His depoliticization was born of despair. As a political critic looking at the disturbing aftermath of the war,

he saw only futility; as a pacifist faced with the reality of having to choose sides in the Cold War, he stared blankly at a choice he did not want to make.

In addition, in Macdonald's case the personal and political were intertwined at that moment to increase his despair. His first marriage was breaking apart, and he left the bohemian life of Greenwich Village to move uptown, marry his second wife, and live after that at a more fashionable location on East 87th Street off Park Avenue.^[56] These events marked a deeper change in his life that was reflected in his move from politics to culture, and from Politics to the New Yorker . It was not an easy time for him. There was a crisis in his soul that reflected the crisis of postwar America.

As Macdonald looked about him in 1947 from his position at Politics , he told his readers that "now the clearer one's insight, the more numbed one becomes." It was remarkable for a leading member of a group committed to rational criticism and intelligence to admit that he was dazed by the world. Even as recently as a decade before, the New York group had assumed that intelligence could transform the world. Most of them still believed that, if in a slightly more modest way. Macdonald was the most discouraged of the group, perhaps because he had been the most idealistic and hopeful. "But on the world scale," he wrote in confusion and sadness, "politics is a desert without hope." Hook and the rest of the group in the aftermath of the war flinched only slightly almost imperceptibly as the reality of the new world situation swept over them; then they recommitted themselves to their course—although most of them now took paths that were a little more cultural than political, and centrist than leftist.

Politics and ideology were no longer the maps to the future. "Instead it is discouraging," Macdonald wrote blankly. "For our positive ideas have not worked out, either: the world seems farther than ever from either pacifism or socialism. As one brought up in the Progressive tradition, which assumes that if we only 'know enough' about any situation, we can master it . . . I find it disconcerting to be confronted with a problem that shakes this assumption." The path to the future, which had been so clear during his socialist days, was now uncertain. "We radicals are faced with a split between knowledge and action; we may overcome it, but we cannot any longer assume that we will."^[57] He felt all options were closed to him. Violence could not settle the Cold War tensions because of the threat of atomic weapons. Nonviolence would not work because of the Soviets' immorality and inhumanity. A pacifist, he decided, was in an inescapable "dilemma."^[58]

By spring 1948 Macdonald was increasingly willing to support the

West against the Soviet Union, rather than merely to criticize the Soviets. In Politics he wrote a long list of comparisons between the two countries that showed how on each score America was better. Again he regretted that the liberals would not admit this. In the thirties the New York group and others had discovered the evils of Stalinism, but a decade later the "younger generation in America, on the other hand, seems to be not even at the level of sophistication I had reached in 1938." He used the image of a pair of "scissors" cutting America in half: the anti-Stalinist intellectuals becoming even more anti-Soviet, while the younger generation was becoming less critical. Macdonald was worried lest the "scissors gape even wider" in the future.^[59] The scissors that Macdonald feared did cut sharply across the fabric of the American intellectual community in the 1940s and 1950s, and an example of that incision occurred a year later at the Waldorf Conference in New York.

While it lasted, from 1944 to 1949, Politics maintained the viability of the third-camp position and offered a perspective that Macdonald described as "anarchism and pacifism." Politics existed in that short span of years Macdonald aptly labeled "the gray dawn of 'peace,'" in which the reality of the Nazi death camps, the atomic bomb, and Stalinism began to settle on people—like the dust descending after a great explosion.^[60] Most of the New York intellectuals were more prepared than the rest of the country for the "gray dawn." They had few illusions left. They had watched the approaching daybreak for years. They had lived with the soured reality of their dreams in a long, protracted, polluted sunrise that began to dawn with the Moscow Trials in the mid-1930s. They had seen another shade of light added to the gray morning with the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939. They had watched the continuing brightness of the dull light with the disappointing perversion and destruction of ideologies in World War II. Now with the arrival of the atomic bomb and the beginning of the Cold War in the late 1940s most of them were witnessing without surprise or illusion, even without despair, the glaring bitter morning to the postwar period.

Macdonald was not exempt from the pressures that had transformed his fellow writers from antagonists to supporters of America. As late as 1944 he could still write in Politics that the only hope for "a humanly tolerable world" following the war was a succession of "popular revolutions" by the common people of Europe (America was not advanced enough, to his disappointment) which would be "socialist as to economics and democratic as to politics."^[61] By the end of the decade he was not nearly so pessimistic about the value of America's ideals and potential for good.

By 1952, three years after the Waldorf Conference had ended, Macdonald publicly admitted that he was ready to side with America against its Stalinist enemies. He later called this "a 'lesser evil' choice," and rolled his eyes, acknowledging "the pages and pages of argumentation I have written exposing the illogic and immorality of this position" against Rahv, Phillips, and others in earlier years. At Mt. Holyoke College in the winter of 1952 Macdonald debated Norman Mailer; Macdonald defended his statement "I choose the West" against Mailer's (formerly Macdonald's) "I cannot choose." The following year Macdonald again complained about the lack of alternatives to choosing either the East or West, though he remained committed to the West—if without exuberance. "This is one reason," he explained, "I am less interested in politics than I used to be."^[62]

Macdonald's slow turnabout in support of the West is testimony to how even the staunchest dissenters were reoriented by the international conflict. One need only look at how the names of the New York intellectuals' organizations changed over the decade for an example of how re-adjusted their outlook about America became. Before the war the names of their groups were the Committee for Cultural Freedom, or the League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism. After the war they identified themselves more closely with American culture, and by the late 1940s their organizations were named the Americans for Intellectual Freedom, and the American Committee for Cultural Freedom.

At mid-century, about a decade after the first of the New York group began to make their peace with America, Macdonald reluctantly joined his associates "on native grounds." For Irving Howe, Lewis Coser, and others who remained more critical, the reconciliation took a few years longer, although even the most adamant critics had become more sympathetic to their adopted culture by the late 1940s. Significant differences remained between the dissenters and the affirmers, but each side had grown closer to America.

Irving Howe

Along with Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe was among the most serious and productive literary critics in the New York group. But Howe was more political than Trilling or Kazin: he wrote more explicitly political articles and edited the political journal Dissent , and even his literary criticism had more political engagement and imagination. Trilling and Kazin were the more powerful and inspired literary critics, but Howe, as a spokesman for culture at the intersection of literature and politics, was often a much more interesting and instructive presence.

Although Howe was actively engaged in reviewing literary and political trends in Western Europe and the Soviet bloc, particularly the political literature of oppression and resistance, he was overwhelmingly interested in American subjects. This focus marked a departure from the first generation New York literary critics, such as Rahv and Trilling, who were at least as interested in foreign modernism. In mid-career, Howe developed an interest in Yiddish literature and Jewish history, but his essays continued to be primarily American in emphasis. His first book was on Walter Reuther and the United Auto Workers, but he then switched more solidly to literary criticism and wrote studies of Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, politics and the novel, literary modernism and politics, Thomas Hardy, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. Interspersed with these literary works were a study of American communism (with Lewis Coser), several collections of political essays, a book on Trotsky, a history of American Jewish immigration and cultural life, and edited collections of Yiddish stories, articles from Dissent , and Trotsky's writings.

From his earliest literary writing Howe, like the rest of the group, was opposed to formalism in cultural criticism, against the construction and application of a set of formal "scientific" principles or structures for evaluating literature apart from its social and historical context. Thus in the 1950s he rejected New Criticism, and in the 1970s and 1980s resisted deconstructionism and related forms of postmodernist continental literary radicalism. Instead Howe informed his criticism with biographical, social, and political considerations of the author, work, and environment. He judged literature by how much one could learn from the author's or characters' dissenting intelligence, individual courage against official oppression, moral propositions, or commitment to justice.^[63]

Howe was born in a poor Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx on June 11, 1920. The five-story walk-up tenements of the East Bronx, Howe remembered, formed a clutter of streets overflowing with poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants. The old brownstones were run down, with dingy staircases and overcrowded apartments. People moved in and out. Milk was still delivered in the morning by horse and wagon. In the neighborhood "Yiddish was spoken everywhere," and the Yiddish newspaper the Forward sold as well as the other dailies. Howe's parents were representative of other first-generation Jewish immigrants who fixed their hopes on their children but feared their children's journey into mainstream America "almost as much as they desired it." When his father's West Bronx grocery went bankrupt in the early 1930s the older Howe became a "customer peddler" selling door-to-door. Howe's family had to crowd in with relatives to live, "dropping from the lower middle class to

the proletarian—the most painful of all social descents." His parents then became laborers in the garment industry for low wages, his mother an operator, his father a presser.^[64]

From this background Howe's socialism was born—apparently more from the neighborhood than from his family. At the age of fourteen he joined the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) chapter on Wilkins Avenue in the Bronx, and he began to take part in leftist factional arguments. Before long he and six or seven of his friends became street orators for the socialist cause. By the time he was at City College he was one of the leaders of the lunchroom arguments between the Trotskyists (the anti-Stalinist left) in Alcove One and the Communists (the pro-Stalinist left) in Alcove Two of the school cafeteria. Alcove One in the 1930s was a training ground for nearly a generation of the New York group, fostering Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, and Melvin J. Lasky, among others.^[65]

It is hardly surprising that members of the group were radicals when they were young. Studies have shown that an overproduction of educated persons (intellectual underemployment) causes intellectual radicalism. Those who think of themselves as intellectuals tend to be the most radical in society, as do those in the "critical" disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. Further, intellectuals most likely to be radical are those born into a leftist class or group, those schooled by such a group, and those occupationally and politically tied to such a group in young adulthood. Finally discontented intellectuals remain radical only if they have the power to change their conditions—otherwise they become apathetic.^[66] The New York group met all of these criteria.

Yet, linked as most of the New York intellectuals were to Jewish immigrant labor in the garment and other industries, and tied also to the European Jewish socialist tradition, socialism for them was more than merely a theoretical stance. It was part of their cultural identity, nearly the same as their ethnic heritage and religion. "Socialism, for many immigrant Jews," Howe recalled, "was not merely politics or an idea, it was an encompassing culture, a style of perceiving and judging through which to structure their lives."^[67]

There was obviously something about growing up in the 1930s, coming into personal and political consciousness during the Depression, that made the second generation of these critics more aware of their Jewish background and their political unity. Unlike the first generation, most of whom were more affected by the 1920s, the second was more reflective about their poor Jewish childhoods and their self-conscious identification with socialism and with each other in the developing New York group.

The oldest of them—Hook, Trilling, Macdonald, Rahv, Phillips, Mary McCarthy, Harold Rosenberg, Meyer Schapiro—had discovered that the group formed around them and Partisan Review in the mid-1930s without their consciously thinking about it. The next youngest of them—Howe, Kazin, Bell, Coser, Mailer, Glazer, Kristol—were young enough to have read Partisan Review and to have aimed deliberately at an institutional and social affiliation with the Partisan circle. For intellectual Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, Partisan Review was both a political cause and the career vehicle that university teaching and some other professions could not be.

Alfred Kazin, another member of the second generation, was one of the first to look back to his beginnings to determine what it meant to be part of the New York group.^[68] Kazin remembered a socialism that was so pervasive that "though I felt it deeply, [it] did not require any conscious personal assent or decision on my part; I was a Socialist as so many Americans were 'Christians'; I had always lived in a Socialist atmosphere."^[69]

Despite his socialist background, Kazin was less political than most members of the group and in his early years placed more emphasis on literature, culture, and the letters tradition. In his youth, when his friends gravitated toward Marx and other political models, Kazin was more interested in literary figures such as Van Wyck Brooks. His literary sensibility also colored his reaction to the group's magazines. "Reading Partisan Review this morning (a magazine I admire and am indebted to)," Kazin wrote in his journal in 1941, "I cannot help but feel how strikingly a certain kind of Marxist disputation has become pure scholasticism."^[70] At the time, though, few others in the Partisan circle had yet tired of its political polemics, and few would have sympathized with Kazin's essentially literary reaction to it.

Similarly, Kazin's literary inclinations informed his appreciation of John Dewey. Like others in the group, Kazin was influenced by Dewey, although not in the same predominantly political manner. In early 1942 Kazin wrote in his journal, "my own impression of his career and significance is so curiously different from that of most people." "For me," he acknowledged, "Dewey represents not the pragmatic adaptable twentieth-century intelligence which was going to fit philosophy into a new age; rather, he seems to speak with the security and quiet serenity of a vanished world." Kazin's literary perceptiveness and understanding of American culture allowed him to identify the side of Dewey that owed so much to Emerson. In Dewey Kazin saw "The tang of the Vermont woods; the philosopher of the frontier; the good American teacher and scholar, doing

his work, teaching with real integrity and quiet—if not audible—originality."^[71]

Just before World War II Kazin wrote On Native Grounds , his widely celebrated study of American literature from 1890 to 1940. As that book and his journal reveal, Kazin was more imaginatively attached to American culture than the others in the group. "Every once in a while some token, a sentence in a book, a voice heard," Kazin wrote in his journal in 1942, "will recall for me the fresh instant delight in the sense of being a student of the American landscape and culture that I felt first two years ago, only after I had begun serious work on the book. . . . Yet what it does for me is to recall the excitement under which I lived for weeks on weeks early in 1939, when suddenly I realized, and for the first time consciously, that I had a passionate and even professional (sic) interest in American culture and literature" (the sic is Kazin's). His desire to participate in the letters tradition prompted him to write a continuous flow of essays and reviews on American and European authors, many of which were first collected in The Inmost Leaf (1955) and then Contemporaries (1962). His interest in landscape, noted first in his journal, culminated in his A Writer's America: Landscape in Literature (1988).

Kazin was also fascinated with American history texts and biographies, and experienced an "incommunicable delight" in viewing the early American portraits at the Metropolitan Museum. "I have never been able to express the pleasure I derive from the conscious study of 'Americana.' . . . I love to think about America, to look at portraits, to remember the kind of adventurousness and purity, heroism and salt , that the best Americans have always had for me."^[72] No other member of the New York group would have considered making such an intimate statement about the American cultural heritage in the early 1940s, and only a few of them were ready to do so a decade later.

Howe acknowledged how difficult it was for those raised in the Jewish immigrant culture to identify with the American pantheon. "With American literature itself, we were uneasy," he admitted. American romanticism meant little to them. What were they to make of Emerson, a frigid and denatured "spiritual godfather of Herbert Hoover" who lived, of all places, in the country? "Our own tradition," he explained, "long rutted in shtetl mud and urban smoke, made little allowance for nature as presence or refreshment." Of course, the distance they felt from American culture did not leave them bereft. They found the source of their romanticism not in nature but in the Russian romanticism directed toward social justice. "We had other stories ."

The individualism central to the American tradition also left Howe and

the others baffled, since community and family were paramount values to them. Further, Emerson and Thoreau, Howe reported, were "deficient in those historical entanglements we felt to be essential to literature because inescapable in life." But if American individualism at first drove them from the American canon, in the end it brought them back. The young Jewish intellectuals, according to Howe, finally saw that the individualistic American writers were also profoundly alienated from American culture. Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, and Whitman "had also regarded themselves as strangers" in the land.^[73]

Kazin was also attracted to the outsiders in American literature. When he was young he wondered whether his fascination with American culture was because he was an outsider, and whether "only for the first American-born son of so many thousands of mud-flat Jewish-Polish-Russian generations is this need great, this inquiry so urgent?" Like Howe, Kazin was drawn to "the terrible and graphic loneliness of the great Americans. Thinking about them composes itself, sooner or later, into a gallery of extraordinary individuals; yet at bottom they have nothing in common but the almost shattering unassailability, the life-stricken I, in each." Kazin, as the first of his group to make the journey into an appreciation for the American tradition, identified poignantly with this loneliness of the pioneering genius. "Each fought his way through life—and through his genius—as if no one had ever fought before," he wrote in his journal about the American figures. "Each one, that is, began afresh—began on his own terms—began in a universe that remained, for all practical purposes, his own."^[74]

In Kazin's journals and Howe's autobiographical texts, there is an element of psychological and sociological analysis that sets the second generation apart from the first wave of the New York group. In a retrospective passage, for example, Howe offered one of the more resonant observations about why young Jewish intellectuals were drawn to the political left. They were poor, without power and influence, alienated from their surroundings, but actively involved in trying to shape the future of the world they hoped someday to control. Howe felt that "there is a more fundamental reason for the appeal of the Movement. Marxism involves a profoundly dramatic view of human experience. With its stress upon inevitable conflicts, apocalyptic climaxes, ultimate moments, hours of doom, and shining tomorrows, it appealed deeply to our imaginations." Imagination and hope were important to immigrant youths. "We felt that we were always on the rim of heroism, that the mockery we might suffer at the moment would turn to vindication in the future, that our loyalty to principle would be rewarded by the grateful masses of tomorrow."

The rewards would be the sort that the intellectually ambitious wanted: the pleasure of seeing their version of justice enthroned, but also a taste of influence and power in the realm of politics and culture. "Often enough these disputes concerned issues of genuine importance, in which the Movement found itself groping toward problems that most political analysts had not even begun to consider. . . . But," Howe remembered, "I think the faction fights had another purpose that we could not then acknowledge: they were charades of struggle, substitute rituals for the battles we could not join, ceremonies of 'acting out.' Through them we created our own drama in our own world."^[75]

Indeed, looking at the group's history before 1950, one finds that they had an increasing need to move beyond their isolation into positions of influence, leadership, and power in setting and shaping opinion on political and cultural matters. After World War II, the nation's need for intellectuals to stock its universities and design its expanding welfare state, combined with the decline in anti-Semitism in America, provided the group with new outlets for their ambitions.

Working for Macdonald's Politics in the mid-1940s showed Howe the way to combine culture and politics in an influential journal. Under the pen name Theodore Dryden, Howe wrote a monthly review of periodicals for the magazine, and he did editorial chores around the Politics office. From his early adolescence until the late 1940s, though, Howe had been a committed Trotskyist, working with Trotskyist organizations and publications. Politics , in Howe's opinion, "became a stopping place for independent leftists who were bored with Marxist sects yet refused Cold War conservatism," a magazine full of "deviations" from Trotskyism that was "increasingly unreliable in its ideology." Howe would not admit, however, that working for Macdonald was evidence of disloyalty to the Trotskyist orthodoxy, though the contradiction of a professed Trotskyist working at Politics was amusing to some observers. "Macdonald was kind enough not to tease me about this," Howe remembered gratefully; "perhaps he saw that I was already heading down the slopes of apostasy and there was no need to push."^[76]

In 1948 Howe began to write occasionally for Time magazine, and he and his wife moved to Princeton, where she had found work. He resented the conformist pressures that both Time and the proper town of Princeton exerted on him, and perhaps those pressures hastened his desertion from Trotskyism. Macdonald in 1948 playfully tweaked Howe by signing a letter to him: "Are you still a Trotskyist?" Howe took the comment seriously and responded: "As to your question about my politics: I haven't considered myself a Trotskyist in any strict sense of the word for some

time now. I've been undergoing a rather painful soul-searching and will probably arrive at a terminus soon. My ideas are changing."^[77]

Following the same arc of change as Hook before him, Howe had slowly started to develop a greater concern for democracy, although he did not abandon, as most of the group did, the role of oppositional critic and socialist. "A critical point came in my own intellectual development," Howe confessed, "when I began to see that certain elements of traditional political theory could not be reduced to categories of class analysis. The stress of The Federalist Papers on the need for countervailing powers in a democratic society represented an important truth, not rendered any less so by Madison's conservative opinions."^[78] By the eve of the Waldorf Conference, Howe's continuing socialist commitment had become infused with Hook's respect for the liberal and pluralist tradition in American democratic theory.

Yet while Hook's pragmatism influenced Howe's socialism, Howe never abandoned the socialist ideal.^[79] He followed the same journey from Marxism to liberal democracy that Hook pioneered—but stopped short of crossing out of camp and remained a democratic socialist. Never content with merely a theoretical political position, however pure, Howe became a coalition-builder between the democratic socialists and the left wing of the Democratic party, joining Michael Harrington in that effort in the 1970s and 1980s through the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and the Democratic Socialists of America. By mid-century, factional squabbles were in his past.

Yet Macdonald, not Hook, was the member of the first generation whose influence was clearest on Howe. Politics was the obvious model for Howe's Dissent , and it is Dissent as much as his literary essays that stamped Howe's identity and for which he will be remembered. Howe took from his close association with Macdonald the latter's wide-ranging concerns, the mark of the intellectual journalist.

During the late 1940s, then, the second generation of the New York group became assimilated with the first. Howe was representative of what the younger learned from the older members, although there was enough contentiousness within the group for any of them to have bristled at the thought of having been influenced by anybody about anything.

The Creation of Dissent : 1950–1955

By mid-century the affirmers in the New York group had become less distressed by the country's self-satisfaction, conformity, and postwar affluence. The dissenters, however, were alarmed at the American celebra-

tion and the dissipation of the political left. Kazin felt "the reaction in America creeping around me like the blast of a cold wind," and Rahv warned the intellectual community about abandoning their dissenting outlook. Yet, like most of their colleagues, neither Kazin nor Rahv was willing to say or do much to combat the situation. Howe, in contrast, decided to mount a campaign against the new conformity and carry it to the American intellectual community.

At the point in the mid-1940s when Partisan Review was turning toward the political center, it was joined in its position of increasing affirmation by the new Commentary magazine. This double-barrelled swing from the political left alarmed the dissenters, who began more frequently to target Commentary for their criticism. In 1951 Howe wrote Commentary to complain about "the quality of some of the anti-Marxism" in its pages, with "its indiscriminate and unscholarly zealousness" and "its air of rude certainty." He went on to criticize articles that had appeared by Robert Gorham Davis, Alfred Kazin, and William Barrett. In response, Kazin dismissed Howe as "outraged" and confused. Davis also found Howe confused, could not determine "what kind of Marxist he is," and did not understand what Howe really wanted from Commentary articles. Undeterred, Howe continued to write letters to the editors of Commentary rebuking the uncritical position the magazine represented. "It is in the pages of the influential magazine Commentary ," he warned the dwindling band of dissenters who heeded him, "that liberalism is most skillfully and systematically advanced as a strategy for adapting to the American status quo."^[80]

Then in Partisan Review in 1954, Howe printed a prominent attack on the affirmers entitled "This Age of Conformity." He complained that former critics were now too comfortable in America, and that "intellectuals, far from thinking of themselves as a desperate 'opposition' have been enjoying a return to the bosom of the nation." Despite the "tremendous pressures" to conform to the zeitgeist, there were "very real virtues in preserving the attitude of critical skepticism and distance." Partisan Review and many of its contributors, according to Howe, had abandoned the radical intellectual orientation that was its founding principle. Once, Partisan Review had combined radical politics and avant-garde culture, but that "union has since been dissolved, and there is no likelihood that it will soon be re-established. American radicalism exists only as an idea, and that barely."^[81]

A letter to Partisan Review by Commentary editor Robert Warshow accused Howe of sporting an outdated Marxism. But Howe denied being "a thorough-going or systematic Marxist" at all. "One need not be a

Marxist to accept the main theme of my article," Howe replied. "The very terms of the article are not Marxist; and deliberately so. I used the rather loose phrase 'conformity' instead of a more precise political one simply because I wished to emphasize that my complaint was not that certain intellectuals had abandoned this or that ideology but that they had abandoned the traditional idea of keeping a critical distance from state power, any state power." How could intellectuals function without some distance between themselves and the forces of political or cultural power? "Whether people call themselves socialists or not interests me less than the values and standards they try to maintain in this age of locusts," Howe told Warshow. "My complaint against Commentary , for example, was not that it ceased to be socialist: it never had been that; but rather that it has become an apologist for middle-class values, middle-class culture and the status quo , and that on the issue of civil liberties it has squirmed, evaded, and played possum."^[82]

The affirmers thought Howe and the dissenters were passe[passé], and they were prepared to defend themselves. When, David Riesman wondered, would the second-generation immigrant critics finally stop parading their alienation and settle down into a normal pattern of life and thought? For some of them, Riesman conceded, "it may still be necessary to go through a novitiate of emotional expatriation in order to establish securely a claim to the intellectual's function—as we can see in a somewhat analogous case when we ask: how soon can the descendants of immigrants again eat garlic and other savory foods after a bland, self-inhibited period of 'Americanization'?" He hoped that "As we get second- and third-generation intellectuals, these problems may for many become less intense." Although Riesman respected dissenters such as Macdonald and Coser, in Coser's case enough to hire him, he still felt a distance between his political outlook and theirs. He thought Howe and Coser "had too much left rhetoric."^[83]

The dissenters' perception that many fellow New York intellectuals had abandoned radicalism was sharpened by their conviction that Partisan Review and Commentary were insensitive to the dangers of McCarthyism. Indeed, the dissenters suspected that the magazines not only acquiesced in but also approved of some of McCarthyism's anti-leftist effects. Howe and sociologist Bernard Rosenberg considered Commentary worse than Partisan Review in this regard, since Rahv, although timid, had at least opposed McCarthyism. Commentary , according to Howe, thought the "anti-anti-communists" more dangerous than McCarthy and his followers. Because of their disapproval of Commentary 's outlook on McCarthyism, dissenters Howe, Coser, Meyer Schapiro, and others were not

invited by the affirmers to join the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, an organization the dissenters, in any event, considered too stridently and indiscriminately anticommunist. Had they been invited, Howe admitted, "we would of course have refused."^[84]

Many of those involved in the ACCF, however, agreed with Hook that charges of their being soft on McCarthy were silly and irresponsible. "Everything that one can reasonably mean by McCarthyism," Hook wrote Richard Rovere in 1952 about an ACCF publication, "is excoriated in this pamphlet." What, Hook wondered, did the dissenters want? "For myself," he told Rovere with frustration, "a general resolution against McCarthy is like a resolution against sin or a resolution against Communism or Fascism, and I can say this without misunderstanding, I hope, because I have publicly and repeatedly denounced the 'irresponsible and morally scandalous methods of McCarthy.'" A generalized opposition was not the method of a pragmatist. "But I have no objection in principle to such a resolution," Hook explained to Rovere. "A resolution to have point and effect, however, should center on specific acts, particularly as they bear on cultural issues."^[85]

With Partisan Review and particularly Commentary controlled by the affirmers, the dissenters became restless. Howe and Coser discussed the lack of publishing opportunities for those who maintained standards of critical opposition. Anti-Stalinist leftists cared to write for the book section of the Nation only until Margaret Marshall, who was sympathetic to them, was fired. Dissenters, after Politics had died, lacked a voice and a home.^[86]

"When intellectuals can do nothing else," Howe once wrote, "they start a magazine." Yet in the spring of 1949, just as Politics folded, Macdonald and Howe had a disagreement about what constituted a worthwhile radical magazine. Howe had written an article, printed in Partisan Review , about the need for good small political magazines. When Macdonald complained that Howe had omitted mention of Politics , Howe explained why the magazine did not fit the description. "What I was clearly referring to, I think," Howe wrote in reply to Macdonald, "was a nonparty Marxist magazine defending the general view of revolutionary Marxism but not supporting any kind of group. If, for instance, a magazine were started with Meyer Schapiro, Jim Cork, Louis Clair, perhaps Mills and myself as editors, it would, for good or bad, fit that description. Again for good or bad, Politics does not."^[87]

Howe's conception of a useful radical magazine anticipated Dissent , which, as he hinted about his ideal magazine, would roughly follow in the tradition of Politics but depart from it in important ways. "Politics as

now constituted," Howe continued, "does not, I think, fit into the 'mainstream' or mainpuddle of American radicalism—that may be a compliment, but I think it's a fact. And I want to puddle or muddle along in a way you don't."^[88]

Macdonald disagreed that Politics was more of a "party" or sectarian magazine than Howe's imaginary ideal. He wrote back to Howe that "with the best will in the world, I cannot see why a magazine edited by the Marxists you mention and dedicated to 'defending the general view of revolutionary Marxism but not supporting any kind of group' is any more or less a 'party magazine' than Politics , which defends the general anarcho-pacifist position and is likewise not committed to any group." Why did Howe think his ideal magazine was so different? "Your mag would slant toward Marxism," Macdonald told him, "mine does slant toward anarchism; if yours is non-party why in the world isn't mine?" Macdonald failed to see a difference. "Mabe [sic ] you think of Marxism as being less 'party'-sectarian than anarchism," he wrote Howe, "since, as you correctly say, anarchism 'does not fit into the mainstream of American radicalism'; but this is to mistake popularity for nonsectarian broadness. Anyway, as you also write, maybe it's not a stream but a puddle in both cases—and the puddle shouldn't call the smaller puddle wet!"^[89]

Soon after Politics died, Macdonald was again at the heart of discussions about a new publishing venture. Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Richard Rovere, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Macdonald were hoping to begin The Critic . McCarthy did all the fundraising and collected pledges totaling $55,000, but, according to Macdonald, "since we figured it would take twice that at the very least to carry on [the] mag for [the] first two years, we dropped the project." Kazin assumed that McCarthy had "backed out" of it for personal reasons, but Macdonald said no such reasons were known to her colleagues.^[90]

At about the same time, Howe and Coser started to plan their new magazine. Through Robert Lynd, who was teaching sociology at Columbia (where Coser was doing graduate work), and Max Lerner, who was at Brandeis, Coser was hired at Brandeis in the spring of 1951.^[91] When Howe was still living on Grover Avenue in Princeton he drove up to visit the Cosers at their home in Wellesley, Massachusetts. They talked in Coser's living room, and, as Howe recalled, at length they discussed "the glory our magazine was going to be: it would avoid every fault, every sin of previous radical journals." Coser remembered that they wanted a journal "unhampered by the cowardice and caution of what passed at the time for the left-of-center press." Later they were joined in the planning of the project by Stanley Plastrik, Emanuel Geltman, Bernard Rosenberg, Mever Schapiro, Norman Mailer, and Harold Orlans.^[92]

Plastrik and Geltman had been brought into the planning circle by Howe, as all three were chastened and somewhat disillusioned former Shachtmanites who wanted to remain involved in a nonsectarian politics of the democratic left. Bernard Rosenberg was introduced to the group through Coser; the two of them together at the time constituted the entire sociology department at Brandeis. Rosenberg, an independent sort of radical, had never belonged to political organizations. When a few members of the planning group met to decide on a name for the magazine, according to Plastrik's account, Rosenberg "destroyed the attractive notion of naming the magazine No! with the quip that it would be too 'affirmative.'" Coser suggested the title Dissent .^[93]

Howe and Coser next decided to see whether they could interest a sufficient number of their friends in the project. Howe assembled a group of about fifty people, many of them former Shachtmanites, at a conference in New York to discuss the viability of the magazine. He invited both potential writers and donors. "To our great surprise," Coser remembered, "they almost all came, and there was a good deal of enthusiasm." Howe asked those in attendance whether they would be willing to contribute articles for nothing, and whether they would be willing to contribute money. The response, according to Coser, was gratifying. Meyer Schapiro said he would write, although he never did. Yet he did lend his name and moral support which, given his stature, was significant. Schapiro also persuaded some of his wealthy art friends to contribute money.^[94]

The dissenters knew that a radical journal could not be self-supporting, so they agreed not to begin the project unless they could guarantee at least one year of four issues. They determined it could not be done for less than six thousand dollars. "Well, two, three, four issues and then of course we go bankrupt and that will be that," Howe told Coser, "but we will have made a heroic effort." Their best luck came from Joseph Buttinger, an Austrian socialist emigre[émigré] whom Rose Coser knew. The editors did not want any one contributor to be in a position to control the magazine financially however. Although Buttinger gave enough to assure the existence of Dissent , he never tried to control it. Even the editors were not exempt from having to donate money to the project. Coser said that the privilege of being a Dissent editor meant you had to contribute a few hundred dollars a year to the magazine.^[95]

In spring 1953, as the planning for the magazine was under way, Howe wrote Macdonald and asked whether he would allow Dissent to use the old Politics subscribers' list to solicit funds. Howe explained the new venture as "a socialist magazine: non-party, without a 'line,' but with a general radical outlook." He told Macdonald they planned to operate "on a shoe-string, if we can get the shoe-string." Macdonald agreed to let Howe

have the subscribers' list, and he also sent along a prospectus for The Critic . Howe thought the prospectus "interesting," and felt there was no "real conflict" between the two magazines. Dissent was "on a much more modest scale," Howe admitted. "Very likely, both projects won't pan out," he told Macdonald. "If by some miracle, they did, it would be fine; and people writing for one could write for the other, if they cared to."^[96]

The Dissent editors courted Macdonald as a writer but he was never very interested. By the early 1950s he was writing for The New Yorker , was fatigued by political arguments, and would not rise to the lure of politics again until the New Left confrontations caught his imagination in the 1960s. Coser did his best to persuade Macdonald to write for the new magazine. He joked to Macdonald in a letter that since he was "some 7 years younger than you are I still can afford to have some political passion prevail over the normal inclination to academic quiescence," and therefore he would help edit Dissent . "It will be by no means as good as Politics used to be," he wrote flatteringly, "but at least it will be an effort to provide a Forum for dissenters of various stripes and hues." It was important that there be "a place where dissenters can express their ideas. The repenters seem to have conquered almost all the other existing mags."

The young Dissent , Coser knew, would profit from an affiliation with Macdonald. "Now we would like to extend to you a most cordial invitation to contribute to the magazine," Coser wrote. "We will not be able to pay a red penny we will not have a circulation much above 2000 [it was 4,000 after two years], we will not be considered as 'glamorous' as Politics was—all we are really able to offer you is a place in which you can say whatever you please." Coser renewed his offer two years later, writing that "Dissent 's pages are always open for you, we would love to have you among our contributors. If there are things you prefer not to say in Encounter—Dissent is yours for the saying them."^[97] Macdonald did not accept the invitation.

An important difference between Politics and Dissent was that the former was an "anarcho-pacifist" publication mostly written and edited by one person, while the latter was a democratic socialist magazine not individually controlled. But the similarities between the two journals included the host of Dissent contributors who had written for Politics : Coser, Howe, C. Wright Mills, Harvey Swados, and Paul Goodman, among others. As Politics was created in the mid-1940s to replace the critical function that Partisan Review had abandoned, Dissent was formed in the 1950s to replace the radical forum lost when Politics folded in 1949.

On the editorial board for the first volume of Dissent were Coser and

Howe, Travers Clement, Harold Orlans, Stanley Plastrik, and Meyer Schapiro. The contributing editors were Erich Fromm, University of Chicago economist Bert Hoselitz, Norman Mailer, labor leader Frank Marquart, peace activist A. J. Muste, and University of Washington English lecturer George Woodcock. Frequent contributors from 1954 to 1960 included Coser and Howe, Bernard Rosenberg, Stanley Plastrik, Ben B. Seligman, Norman Mailer, C. Wright Mills, Harold Rosenberg, Michael Harrington, Harvey Swados, Michael Walzer, Henry Pachter, and Paul Goodman.^[98] Most of the editorial work was done by Howe and Coser, with Howe—who was then teaching at Brandeis—performing most of the "line-by-line routine editing and rewriting." Emanuel Geltman did the technical work of makeup and general editing. Howe thought those were "pretty good years" for Coser and himself. "We were still in our thirties; we were starting to make our mark professionally he as a sociologist and I as a literary critic," and the editing at Dissent "gave us genuine pleasure." He felt there was a complementary difference between Dissent 's two head editors. Howe "tended to be more empirical, looking for opportunities on the American scene to make even a small dent, while Lew tended to make of his radicalism a stance primarily moral, yielding criticism from intransigence."^[99]

A statement of intentions published in the first issue of Dissent pledged to combat conformism, "defend democratic, humanist and radical values," fight totalitarianism "whether fascist or Stalinist," begin "a frank and friendly dialogue with liberal opinion," investigate American cultural life, and reassess "socialist doctrines." Not wanting to concede positive values to the Commentary side of the group, Dissent acknowledged that its project "would be meaningless if in dissenting it did not also affirm. We are united in the affirmation of a positive belief," the magazine declared, "—the belief in socialism." Dissent would carve out a middle position of independent radicalism between the Stalinists and the new affirming liberals at Commentary . "Our magazine will be open to a wide arc of opinion," Dissent announced, "excluding only Stalinists and totalitarian fellow-travelers on the one hand, and those former radicals who have signed their peace with society as it is, on the other." Hardly a description of "a wide arc of opinion," this narrow span offered the magazine only a self-righteous isolation. One of its own editors, Harold Orlans, in the second issue criticized this statement of exclusion, and thereafter the magazine omitted the sentence from its statement of purpose, which for a few years continued to appear inside its front cover.^[100]

The Dissent editors quickly identified the Commentary wing of the New York group as an enemy. Coser drew the battle lines in the first

issue. "Radicals of the thirties," he reported, ". . . can be classified as repenters and dissenters. The former predominate. Some magazines, such as Commentary , specialize in documents of repentance." To illustrate how Commentary promoted the ex-radical position of affirmation, Coser cited sociologist William Petersen's article in the November 1953 issue. Petersen's thesis, Coser explained, was that the strength of America's postwar economy demonstrated the country was still a land of opportunity and that arguments to the contrary were only "scholarly myths." Petersen, Coser continued in disbelief, thought that America's mixed economy was socialist. According to Coser, that kind of thinking was aimed only at helping the repenters find a defense for affirming the status quo.^[101]

Howe joined Coser's attack on Commentary . The "sophisticated liberals who read Commentary and think of Sidney Hook as their spokesman" could do much better, Howe alleged, since the Commentary liberals did not even appear to know that threats to civil liberties existed in the America of Senator McCarthy. If Commentary would not, the dissenters themselves should "try to raise the traditional banner of personal freedom that is now slipping from the hands of so many accredited spokesmen of liberalism." Hook's followers had "lost their capacity for integral response," according to Howe, and the most discouraging development was "not that the reactionaries attack but that the liberals hardly remember how to counter-attack."^[102]

If Howe and Coser were genuinely convinced that the Commentary group had lost their skill at "integral response" or their expertise at "counter-attack," they had only to wait for the following issue of Commentary to be treated to a stinging refutation of that belief. Nathan Glazer decided to write the rejoinder because he liked neither Dissent 's tone nor its positions. Howe later remembered that Glazer's attack on Dissent "delighted us, since the one thing a new magazine needs is attention."^[103]

Glazer began by noting that "in the abstract" starting Dissent had seemed like 'a fine idea," as there was always a need for good political magazines. The reality of the magazine, however, he found depressing. "The whole thing is an unmitigated disaster as far as what is left of socialist thought in this country is concerned," he told his Commentary readers. "If this is socialism no further explanations are required for its failure to catch on in America." Dissent was against conformism, but did not document the spread of conformism nor suggest specific ways to combat it. The new magazine was no better than the despised Nation in its disregard for "fact and authenticity." Similarly, the new project was against war, but did not bother to say whether some wars were necessary,

and if not how they could be avoided. If the third-campers at Dissent had their way, according to Glazer, the Soviets would be "comfortably established" throughout the world—in Rome, Paris, London, Saigon, and Hanoi.^[104]

Particularly offensive to Glazer was the new magazine's hostility toward Commentary. Dissent "carries on the unpleasant tradition of vituperative intemperance begun by Marx," and in the same heritage its "greatest violence is reserved for renegades and those politically closest to you." Why, he wanted to know, did the self-righteous editors of Dissent have to imply that "the former radicals" had "sold-out" rather than merely changed their outlook? Did Dissent need a scapegoat? "Marx had his 'nigger Jew Lassalle,' Lenin his 'Kautskys and their ilk,' and the editors of Dissent have their 'Sidney Hook and other writers for Commentary .'" Unwilling to let Dissent monopolize all the vituperation, Glazer excoriated the magazine's intention to exclude totalitarians and former radicals: "Perhaps no more remarkable spectrum has been conceived of since Mein Kampf ." Dissent did not represent anything but "the left wing of socialism," and Glazer urged other socialists to disassociate themselves from the magazine and join him in condemning it.^[105]

The third-camp position Dissent took on international issues particularly troubled Glazer, who attributed the third-campism mostly to the influence of Lewis Coser, but also to the lingering influence of Dwight Macdonald. Glazer also thought it a weakness that Dissent writers argued against specific people whom they thought took a wrong position, rather than arguing about the issue itself. For example, Coser sanctimoniously criticized Glazer's friend William Petersen and other affirmers for reconciling themselves to American culture, but, Glazer noted with irritation, Howe and Coser both had academic jobs at Brandeis at the time. Had either of them sold out less than Petersen, Commentary writers, or other ex-radical affirmers?^[106]

Glazer's question encapsulated the tension between the dissenters and the affirmers in the New York group in the first years of the 1950s. Were the affirmers reconciling with America in a way that the dissenters were not? Did the dissenters' critical and nonconformist stance have anything to do with genuine leftist or radical convictions, and, if so, what did leftism or radicalism mean? Did the dissenters' critical orientation have any more inherent intellectual validity or analytical integrity than the affirmers' approach? Did either of them have the right to claim the correct intellectual outlook?

As the disagreement between Coser and Glazer about William Petersen's article showed, the extent to which members of the New York group believed America had changed from the 1930s to the 1950s was vitally

important, since, if there had been no change, some former critics were reconciling themselves to the same culture that they had previously despised and derided. To affirm that culture, it became necessary to show that it had changed for the better. The documentation of that change became the theme of much of the writing done by the affirmers from 1945 to 1960, and their work contributed to a new respect within the intellectual community for American institutions and culture.^[107]

Nathan Glazer

Like Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer was a member of the second generation who had been involved in magazines since early in his life. Three years younger than Howe, Glazer was born the youngest of seven children to a tailor from Poland and his wife in New York on February 25, 1923. His father was a quiet man, and Glazer's parents pushed him into neither an education nor their view of politics. Although his parents could speak English, they seldom did, and they spoke only Yiddish at home. They were moderate in their opinions, and critical of the extremes of communism, religious orthodox, anarchism, and Zionism. His family's socialism was unionist rather than revolutionist. Glazer described his background as "Socialist, but not too socialist; Orthodox, but not too Orthodox; friendly to Palestine, but not Zionist; Yiddish-speaking, but not a Yiddishist."^[108]

At James Monroe High School in New York, Glazer discovered he had little aptitude for math or science, and somewhat more talent for drawing and writing. Since art was not thought to be a vocation, he decided to become a writer in some field. Within the context of his working-class family, Glazer was free to pursue what education he wanted. For him as for others in the New York group, this meant attending City College, which he entered in February 1940. He began studying history but ended as a sociology major.

Again like others in the group, he focused his education outside the classroom in his involvement in magazine work. In his case the magazine was the Zionist Avukah Student Action , the national organization's newspaper, which he edited. In retrospect Glazer felt it was a "left sectarian" organization whose anti-Stalinism fitted well with the Trotskyists at City College. In the Avukah group he learned a moderate nonrevolutionary socialism whose outlook was between that of the social democrats and the Leninists.

With his Avukah friends, Glazer read Partisan Review , the New International, Politics , and the New Leader . Through Avukah Glazer met Harold Orlans, who preceded Glazer as editor of Avukah Student Action ;

Dwight Macdonald, who addressed the Avukah summer camp; and Daniel Bell, who was then managing editor of the New Leader . Glazer "was sometimes present at the informal New Leader shmooze sessions that took place at their offices Friday afternoons, after the paper had been sent to press." He also met Seymour Martin Lipset and Philip Selznick. It was Lipset who first told Glazer about Lewis Coser and arranged for Glazer to be invited to a study group at Coser's apartment in Queens.^[109]

At City College Glazer became intrigued by community studies and ethnographic sociology, known as the "Chicago style" of sociology, which was the beginning of a continuing intellectual interest. Glazer received his bachelor's degree from City College in 1944, and a master's degree in social anthropology later the same year from the University of Pennsylvania.

On the recommendation of Daniel Bell, Glazer called on Max Horkheimer at the American Jewish Committee in 1944 for help on a study of anti-Semitism. The committee also supported the Contemporary Jewish Record , and Glazer maneuvered himself into an editorial position there. When the Contemporary Jewish Record was transformed into Commentary in 1945, Glazer found himself aboard the new ship.

In the late 1940s Glazer met David Riesman and decided to take a leave from Commentary to work with him on The Lonely Crowd . That was the first of several collaborative projects that also included Faces in the Crowd and the noted article "The Intellectuals and the Discontented Classes," a response to the McCarthyist right. While Riesman thought some of the New York intellectuals possessed a doctrinaire theoretical aridity, he felt Glazer shared some of his own love for fieldwork and curiosity about society.^[110]

During the early 1950s, back at Commentary , Glazer was slowly taking graduate courses in sociology at Columbia. Some years he took no courses; other years he spent a day a week at Columbia. He studied with Robert Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld, and worked gathering and analyzing interview data for C. Wright Mills's White Collar . Glazer finally submitted a book he had already published, The Social Basis of American Communism , to fulfill his dissertation requirement, and he received his doctorate in 1962.

He decided later that he had learned more at Commentary than in graduate school. One of his lessons as an editor was to be suspicious of generalizations, but he also learned the intellectual synthesis of fields and interests that was the style of a general intellectual magazine. One of his final acts at Commentary was his critical review of the first issue of Dissent .

Glazer was bound to be offended by the young Dissent . He had been

raised in a moderate household that avoided ideological excess, and he was trained in a sociology that had specific demographic and cultural interests and avoided generalizations and overt ideology. Further, Dissent had attacked not only Commentary and his friend William Petersen but also Sidney Hook, whom Glazer saw as a broad and beneficial influence in the 1940s and 1950s. Hook had advanced the intellectual agenda by helping to destroy the illusion of Marxism as a science; as a result, the rest of the group did not have to worry about battling it so vehemently on their own.^[111]

After leaving Commentary in 1954, Glazer went to the new Anchor Books as an editor. He produced a shortened version of The Lonely Crowd for Jason Epstein's new scholarly paperback house and stayed at Anchor for three years as an editor. But he was too interested in sociology to stay longer, and he began a series of teaching jobs: as an instructor in sociology at Berkeley in 1957–58, at Bennington College the next year, and at Smith College the year after.^[112] He taught race relations, the sociology of ethnic groups, and urban sociology.

In 1959 Glazer began writing Beyond the Melting Pot , and at Irving Kristol's suggestion he recruited Daniel Patrick Moynihan to write a chapter on the Irish. Glazer finished the book in 1962 and spent a year in Japan studying urban life. When he returned, Moynihan, then working at the Labor Department, set up an interview for him at the Housing and Home Finance Agency in Washington. Glazer was hired.^[113] While in Washington Glazer was recruited by Lewis Feuer to teach sociology at Berkeley, where he taught until 1969. He then went to Harvard with an appointment in the Graduate School of Education, and also became a member of the Sociology Department. Throughout the 1960s and after, Glazer remained a frequent contributor to Commentary and other publications, and served as an editor of The Public Interest .

From the 1960s on, Glazer maintained a keen interest in the relations between blacks and Jews and how pressures toward social funding and affirmative action influenced society and altered the relations between various ethnic groups. In December 1964 he wrote an article for Commentary on the tensions between blacks and Jews, and in 1975 he published Affirmative Discrimination .^[114] In his writing on ethnic groups and affirmative action, Glazer combined the New York intellectuals' support of pluralism and diversity against absolutism and unity, on one side, with their commitment to meritocracy instead of stifling egalitarianism, on the other.^[115]

In Affirmative Discrimination , Glazer complained that after liberals had struggled for decades to reach a point where no distinctions were

made on the basis of race, religion, or national origin, many of the same liberals were attempting to make just those distinctions with affirmative action requirements. He lamented that the nation was moving from a goal of equal opportunity to "statistical parity." Glazer and others in the New York group opposed that trend because, as he wrote, individual equality must be a higher concern than group equality.^[116] The worth of the individual and individual rights remained a central tenet of the New York intellectuals' outlook both when they called themselves socialists and later when they did not. Their sympathy for the individual and fear of excessive egalitarianism prompted many of them to embrace the work of Tocqueville in the postwar period.

Before, during, and after college Glazer thought of himself as a socialist, if only by family inheritance, but by 1947 he no longer identified himself as one. Never among the more stridently committed of the New York group, he suggested that his beliefs "were not to be defined as socialism then, nor sociology now." Although generalization made him uneasy, like others in the New York group he was too much an intellectual generalist to classify himself—yet he did not want to be mistaken for a socialist. The empirical nature of his sociology after the war increasingly undermined the faith necessary to sustain a visionary socialism.

To acknowledge that he had abandoned socialism was not to say that he had abandoned politics, for politics was the common foundation of all the various outlooks and interests among his fellow critics. Like many of them, Glazer turned to sociology at least partly to wage the political struggles of the present. Alfred Kazin noted to himself in 1959 that Glazer's "comparative intellectual success is not accidental," and found him bright and aware of what he was doing. He had been "kidding" Glazer about sociology and mass culture, and Glazer had answered that "sociology for him is a way of writing contemporary history." Writing contemporary history, Glazer might have added, is contributing to contemporary social and cultural politics. "Exactly the phrase that haunts me," Kazin confided to his journal about Glazer's remark. "And I know why. For to write contemporary history is, by covering the present to the best of one's ability, to seek the future, to press the future for a solution."^[117] This shows that the critics in both the social sciences and the humanities were devoted to a similar enterprise: cultural criticism, that generalist intellectual project whose mission, at heart, is to seek the future in present conflicts and to derive future solutions from present polemics.

Glazer recognized the political content of his scholarly writing and reflection. "Sociology' he acknowledged in retrospect, "is still for many socialists and sociologists the pursuit of politics through academic means,

though it is today a far different politics, pursued with different means." Part of the impact of the New York group on American intellectual life is that they dignified that outlook of political pursuit. They were never embarrassed to admit the political content of their scholarly work, and in fact brought into the intellectual mainstream the idea that all strong work had ideological and political overtones. They tried to balance that axiom with the assertion that intellectuals, in order to maintain a proper function, could not become the uncritical voice of one party or position. It was a fine line between engaging the world as scholars and remaining critical and independent enough to be of use to that world. Glazer's comment that his work could be seen as pursuit of politics through other means could serve as a fitting epigraph to the careers of most of the New York intellectuals.

Dissent and Commentary : 1955–1965

The threat of the Soviet Union, felt especially keenly by intellectuals and Jews who would be prominent targets of repression in the Soviet system, had pushed many of the New York intellectuals into the arms of America by the late 1940s. The problem was how to stop Stalinism without forfeiting radicalism; however, if forced to choose, most of them were willing to sacrifice their former socialist aims.

As Diana Trilling saw it, intellectuals needed to reclaim a proper sort of chauvinism. In the justifiable attempt in the twentieth century to combat "excessive nationalism" and "imperialism," the effort had gone too far. In 1951 she complained to the American Committee for Cultural Freedom that a "decent feeling for one's own country" was thought to be chauvinistic. Idealist liberals and third-camp intellectuals, she felt, did not allow one to support America properly against the Soviet threat. Trilling hoped that without becoming overly chauvinistic, and while continuing "to criticize our own country as we must," American intellectuals would no longer "undervalue what is our own."^[118]

That the fear of the Soviet Union's postwar power was chiefly responsible for the new intellectual reconciliation with America is dramatically illustrated by the "Our Country and Our Culture" symposium in Partisan Review in 1952. Sidney Hook, in his contribution, recognized the polarization caused by the Cold War, but he asked his fellow critics for a more complex intellectual response than a Manichaean duality. The real choice, Hook suggested pragmatically, one to be made without embarrassment, was "between endorsing a system of total terror and critically supporting our own imperfect democratic culture with all its promises

and dangers." Nonconformists in the West might not be honored, but at least they survived; in the Soviet Union a nonconformist could only earn "a bullet in the neck."^[119]

However, even while the affirmers were defending American culture against the Soviet alternative and praising recent beneficial changes in the culture that had brought them into middle-class occupations and lifestyles, they resented others pointing out the signs of their affirmation. Hook wrote impatiently to Norman Thomas in 1954, defending himself against an allegation by Waldo Frank: "worst of all is the invention that I ever surrendered my belief in socialism and became a defender of capitalism or free enterprise." He told Thomas that his affiliation with Americans for Democratic Action "expresses my point of view." The ADA, of course, was not a socialist organization.^[120] Hook was also indignant at Dissent for having branded him a counterrevolutionist, a right-wing social democrat who uncritically supported American culture. Dissent , he complained, simplistically interpreted his attacks on communism as mindless pro-Americanism. Despite thinking of himself as a person of the left, Hook never wrote for Dissent and admitted that he never read it carefully.^[121]

Yet it was not only those at Dissent who were uneasy about the new mood of cultural reconciliation and intellectual anticommunism. Writers such as Philip Rahv, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Archibald MacLeish all voiced their concerns. Although, as an editor of Partisan Review , Rahv piloted a journal that was accused of having reached its own peace with America, Rahv himself rode the fence between the dissenters and the affirmers. He acknowledged the "incontestable virtue" of American democracy, but he was dismayed by the intellectuals' "recoil from radicalism," and their "complacence and spiritual torpor." The "ex-radicals and ex-Marxists" could hardly be distinguished "from the common run of philistines," and the "petrified anti-Stalinists" could not separate the real danger of the Soviet Union from the illusory danger of domestic communism.^[122]

Reinhold Niebuhr was harsher. He found it foolishly arrogant for the affirmers to attribute contemporary American power to the nation's "virtue" rather than to events and circumstances. Our economic and military power led us to the "conceit" that our status was a result of "the American way of life." Although the Soviet Union did in fact pose a real threat, the affirmers were "in greater peril from their own illusions than from their neighbors' hostile designs." Moreover, that our competition with the Soviets produced such "hysteria" was evidence we had little confidence in ourselves and our institutions.^[123]

Archibald MacLeish, unconnected to the New York group except as an

occasional antagonist, shared Niebuhr's distaste for the strident anticommunism of the period. In 1949 he predicted that later historians would describe the immediate postwar period in America as dominated entirely by the Soviets. A future historian, he imagined, might write that, in the late 1940s, "American foreign policy was a mirror image of Russian foreign policy: whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse." This historian would conclude that "American domestic politics were conducted under a kind of upside-down veto: no man could be elected to public office unless he was on record as detesting the Russians, and no proposal could be enacted, from a peace plan at one end to a military budget at the other, unless it could be demonstrated that the Russians wouldn't like it."^[124] MacLeish did not aim his criticism at the Commentary anticommunists, but he rejected the notion that the evil of Soviet society implied anything about the virtue of American society. America needed to recognize its own Jeffersonian virtue, rather than merely react to the Soviet threat.

Irving Howe, at about the time Dissent first appeared, told the Partisan Review community that it was not necessary to be pushed into the arms of middle-class America by the Soviet threat. He pointed out that "the danger of Stalinism may require temporary expedients in the area of power such as would have seemed compromising some years ago, but there is no reason, at least no good reason, why it should require compromise or conformity in the area of ideas , no reason why it should lead us to become partisans of bourgeois society."^[125] He urged intellectuals to separate foreign-policy power issues from critical considerations of ideas. For him that meant that an intellectual could remain a dissenting radical, could maintain a third-camp position of not supporting totally either the East or the West, yet still remain a certified and enthusiastic anticommunist.

Those at Dissent could have been called third-camp anticommunists. Their anticommunism was so strong that they took it for granted and did not discuss it much among themselves. Within the context of the New York intellectuals, they thought of themselves as leftist anticommunists, but they did not see the issue perfectly polarized between left and right within the group. Instead they perceived a continuum, from Hook and many affirmers with an enthusiastic anticommunism on one side, to most of the dissenters with a less strident but active anticommunism on the other. Howe felt that during the Cold War the distinction between left and right anticommunism became harder to maintain.^[126]

Third-camp anticommunism did not mean neutralism for the dissenters. In Dissent 's second issue, in 1954, Stanley Plastrik criticized the Western European desire for neutralism. The editors declared themselves

"unalterably opposed to all forms of totalitarianism" of both left and right. Throughout the 1950s Dissent hammered at the Soviet Union and Stalinism. In spring 1956 Coser vented his disgust at the lack of discussion in the Soviet Communist party, and in the following issue Howe dismissed the significance of the changes in Soviet rule between Stalin and Khrushchev. The New York group's anticommunism had been correct for a generation, Howe proclaimed. "It would be a great error," he announced, "if we did not insist upon reminding people that we were right—whatever our shade of socialist or radical opinion, we who for thirty bitter years kept up the fight against the lies of Stalinism. Modesty or immodesty is irrelevant here: there is a deep moral-political necessity for keeping the record clear."^[127] In the next issue Howe was at it again, this time taking Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman of the Monthly Review to task for their support of Stalinist Russia, and calling them "left authoritarians" who supported "the radicalism of the blackjack."^[128]

Throughout the Cold War, especially after 1950, the third-camp anticommunism of the dissenters was tilted toward America and against the Soviets. The dissenters felt they could no longer, as they had during World War II, cast "a plague on both your houses" equally, could no longer "pretend that we were spectators in a fight that was not ours."^[129] Yet they were neither as anti-Soviet nor as pro-American as the writers at Commentary . In the mid-1950s, for example, Howe's articles in Dissent were more critical of American foreign policy than anything that appeared in Commentary . His "The Politics of Moderation," published in Dissent in 1956, was written from a third-camp perspective that was hostile to both American and Soviet foreign policy. In the early 1960s the dissenters continued their third-campism. Harold Rosenberg told Partisan Review readers that the Cold War was a "delusionary struggle" in which the East and the West both limited freedom in the developing world whenever that freedom encroached upon either the profits of the West or the dictatorship of the East. To believe that such issues were worth nuclear war—perhaps an offhand reference to Hook's position—Rosenberg felt "one would have to have lost his mind." Hook later said that he felt Rosenberg's article "openly came out for what was in effect unilateral nuclear disarmament for the U.S."^[130]

For his part, Howe told Partisan readers in the "Cold War" symposium in 1962 that although Soviet Communism had to be opposed there was "no longer any possibility" of Western "intervention" or "roll back" without nuclear war—and war would be insanity. Howe rejected both excessive anticommunism and "unilateral disarmament." One had to be balanced, but one could not be "neutral or indifferent to the world

struggle." He admitted that there was an "identity of interest" between radicals and the West, "a sharing of certain limited goals" that required the dissenters as well as others to "depend on Western power."^[131]

The dissenters took the same approach to the Vietnam war. Although they were hostile to North Vietnamese communism, they also opposed the intense American military involvement in the conflict. They hoped that in the wake of the conflict a more democratic socialist force would rise in Southeast Asia. By 1967 Rosenberg was willing only "to fight Communism with economic aid but not with napalm, and to help anti-Communist peasant movements but not anti-Communist dictators. "Because the theory of containment undermined radical politics, he was willing to repudiate containment.^[132]

Dissent 's third-campism drew criticism not only from those to its right at Commentary , but also from those on its left, such as C. Wright Mills. Mills was interested in Dissent in the 1950s, and, although he declined to join its editorial board when asked in the beginning because he was opposed to such a formal ideological affiliation, he came to Dissent 's defense when its inaugural issue was attacked by Glazer. Mills contributed several articles to the magazine during its first five years, but his books and articles were skeptically received by some Dissent editors, and friction developed. In 1959 Howe criticized Mills for comparing the use of power in the Soviet Union with its use in America. There were qualitative as well as quantitative differences, which Howe thought Mills failed to recognize. Mills's analysis bordered too closely on that "neutralism" that the Dissent editors rejected. Unlike neutralism, Dissent 's third-campism would not tolerate a "moral coexistence" with the Soviet Communists.^[133]

Mills was disappointed and angered by Howe's attack, and before severing his relations with the magazine he wrote a response. "I had thought that you had abandoned the foot-dragging mood of the Cold War and were trying to make a new beginning," he told Howe. Mills expected Howe's third-campism to be more of a departure from the group's anticommunism. Instead he felt that Howe's anticommunism would fit well with the conservative and strident State Department. If Howe opposed moral coexistence with Soviets, how, Mills wondered, did his view differ from that of Dulles or Adenauer? Was that a position for an editor of a magazine that encouraged opposition? "To dissent is lovely" Mills chided him. "But Irving, as regards foreign policy, from what, tell me, do you dissent?"^[134]

It was not only on foreign policy that Dissent tried to straddle the fence. In its general political orientation it sought a middle position—similar to its third-camp stance—between socialism and liberalism. At its

inception the magazine was a somewhat Marxist socialist publication, but after five years it had all but abandoned Marxism for a democratic liberalism that its editors combined with their socialist outlook to produce a democratic socialism.

At the time Dissent began publication, Howe told Partisan Review readers that he hoped "that any revival of American radicalism will acknowledge not only its break from, but also its roots in, the liberal tradition," and he wrote with admiration of "the liberal-radical vision of the good society." For the first several years Dissent proclaimed inside its front cover that it would "reassert the libertarian values of the socialist ideal." Central to Howe's criticism of Stalinists such as Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman was their failure to advocate a multiplicity of political parties in Russia and their failure to deem democracy and pluralism essential. For years, Howe wrote in 1957, he and the Dissent editors had kept alive the idea of libertarian socialism. Seeing the liberalism of the 1950s in a crisis similar to the problem socialism faced, he tied the future of the two together in 1959 and proposed a dialogue between them.^[135]

Journeying from Marxian socialism to liberal socialism, Coser and Howe both admitted the benefits of decentralization over centralization of power in society, and they thought society should be pluralistic instead of unitary, participatory rather than imposed, and material and practical rather than ideological and visionary. Like Howe, Coser was willing to recognize common aims "with those radicals who do not consider themselves socialist."^[136]

One of the more interesting voices in the magazine to argue for the synthesis of liberalism and socialism was Ben B. Seligman, who wrote on economic theory. In a series of articles published during Dissent 's first half-decade, Seligman worked to reject the economic philosophy of both conservatives and Marxists and to carve out a place between them for the democratic socialists.

Seligman began with an admiring piece on Joseph Schumpeter, characterizing him as a conservative who, like Marx, wanted to discover the internal laws of capitalist motion. He followed with an essay on Keynesian economics that sought to fuse the best of Marx and Keynes, as Hook had earlier fused Marx and Dewey. Both Keynesian and Marxian economics, he explained, described breakdowns in capitalism that resulted "from internal insufficiencies." Keynes's shortcoming was that he focused too much on gadgetry like multipliers and liquidity and not enough on "underlying social realities"; he relied too much on price theory rather than on the human, political, and social. Overall, Seligman faulted Keynes as "essentially a conservative thinker."^[137]

Next Seligman examined Marx. Too bad, he thought, that Marxists took Marx's words as the "absolute truth," for it rendered his followers the sort of fools Marx detested. The Marxian labor theory of value could not explain price changes and it "fails as an analytical tool," yet his work still was useful in explaining "the internal drive of the capitalist economy." Marx could help one understand the "long view," the direction in which the economy was moving, so his theory could not be "blithely ignored." Marx was a useful thinker, but one who had been taken too literally by the true believers.^[138]

Having touched on both poles of economic theory—Marx and Keynes—and having found something to admire and something to dismiss in each, Seligman in 1959 advocated a move to the middle ground of market socialism, the transplantation of a normal market system into a socialist economy and society. Under this hybrid model, the economy was to run by a market price mechanism that set production levels and distribution, gauged demand, and promoted decentralization. Proponents of market socialism, in fact, believed that only in a socialist context that allowed the market to exist in its pristine neoclassical state—without the interference of the inequalities of income and the barriers to entry in some industries—could a market actually function correctly. As Seligman argued, since it is only in a market socialist system "that the textbook version of the market really comes into existence, it may be said, somewhat paradoxical1y, that perfect competition can only exist in a socialist society."^[139]

Seligman, like Howe and Coser, believed that democratic socialists had to place the values of individual autonomy, personal freedom of choice, and decentralization of economic and political power above all others in the socialist vision. For him it meant that socialism had to be combined with democratic liberalism. "Simply enough, socialism can no longer be discussed purely in economic terms," Seligman concluded. "In fact, it seems reasonable to suggest that the way in which a socialist economy works must be in consonance with the moral and political aims that socialists seek to attain. In such a framework the competitive solution of market socialism seems by far the more desirable objective."^[140] Seligman, however, was one of the few dissenters to endorse market socialism; curiously, Howe, Coser, and many others ignored it.

When the dissenters became involved in the economic issues of democratic socialism in the 1950s they were visiting a territory that some European and American political economists had already charted. Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Joseph Schumpeter, three prominent economists who had been educated at the University of Vienna, all op-

posed market socialism, but in the process had at least addressed themselves to the difficult problems of weighing the free market against economic planning and collectivism.^[141] In 1935 Hayek, then teaching at the London School of Economics, edited Collectivist Economic Planning , a volume in which some key essays on market socialism appeared, including articles by Mises and Hayek himself. Schumpeter arrived in America to teach at Harvard in 1932, and Mises in 1945 was appointed professor of economics at New York University—the same faculty as Sidney Hook.

Their opposition to market socialism as incompatible with intellectual and economic freedom was also taken up in America in the 1930s by the newly forming Chicago School of economics at the University of Chicago, under the leadership of Frank Knight and Henry Simons. Although the Chicago School was known for its endorsement of laissez-faire and its hostility to economic planning, Knight acknowledged that economic theory alone could provide no refutation for market socialism—although he felt there were clear political, moral, and historical reasons to oppose it.^[142]

In Europe a few political economists wrote sympathetically on market socialism, particularly Henry Dickinson in Britain and the Polish economist Oscar Lange. Dickinson's remarkable book Economics of Socialism proposed a libertarian economic and political socialism. Lange was recognized for his short but seminal On the Economic Theory of Socialism , in which he outlined the benefits of market socialism. But Lange soon gave up on the theory and, as a member of the Polish government, began to endorse traditional centralized planning instead.^[143]

So Poland, Britain, Vienna, the University of Chicago, and Harvard all had economic philosophers who shared with the New York intellectuals a belief in the importance of the decisions about socialism, capitalism, democracy, planning, intellectual freedom, and ideology. This was not the New York group's most important tie to European cultural criticism—not nearly so strong as its connection to the Frankfurt School, or to that collection of European writers who operated almost as an extension of the New York group: Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, Raymond Aron, Ignazio Silone, Andre[André] Malraux, and Nicola Chiaromonte. But the shared interests between the New York intellectuals and political economists on both sides of the Atlantic showed the extent to which economic issues were understood as cultural and ideological issues as well—and that the enterprises of economic criticism and cultural criticism overlapped. The conflation of those disciplines and identities was most apparent in the work of such figures in the group as Seligman, Robert Heilbroner, and Robert Lekachman, who were both economists and cultural critics.

While working out this new ideology that combined liberalism and

socialism, Dissent in its early years was at the same time trying to deemphasize ideology. It was a curious and ambivalent attitude. Most of the ideology they shed was Marxist. Throughout the 1950s, as Howe recalled, "we kept shedding more and more ideology; by about 1960 most of us no longer thought of ourselves as Marxists." Instead the dissenters tried to "work piecemeal, treating socialist thought as inherently problematic." Yet, if trying to lose ideology, they did not want to lose ideas. They felt that for dissenters it was especially a time of ideas, "that socialism in America had to be seen mostly as an intellectual problem before it could even hope to become a viable movement."^[144] One of the ways they sharpened their ideas was by grinding them against the whetstone of Communist ideology. By denouncing Communists, Stalinists, and their sympathizers, they showed that their new democratic socialism was all-American and worthy of respect. They were trying to ground intellectual leftism on an American rather than a European ethic.

Trying to save leftism (now an increasingly centrist and liberal leftism) from extinction in America in the postwar period, the Dissent group tried to bridge the distance between their Old Left background in European debates and the newer American orientation of a younger generation of radicals. Coser wanted to teach the young that they could not change the country in the current conservative period, but that it was enough for leftists merely to endure. Faith in radicalism and in history had been lost by Americans, even some, like the affirmers, who had once been members of the left. In such conditions, the remaining radicals had to be content with "fostering" each other, constructing "little oases of radical thought," and looking to the future while being interested critics of the present. Radicals in the postwar period, Coser counseled, must drop their Marxism and have "wider and deeper" orientations. They had to be concerned with individual liberty and personal autonomy, with democracy. Above all they had to survive, so they could pass their radical outlook on to others when the mood of the country changed. "It might be," Coser wrote without illusion, "that the most significant answer that radicals could give in the future to a question about their 'action' in our period would be 'I stayed alive, Sir and I remained sane.'"^[145]

Radicals realized that they were in the minority, and the affirmers' attacks only added to their fear of extinction. Bernard Rosenberg complained that "the number of dissenters or Dissenters in American intellectual life today is pitiably small; and if the ex-radicals didn't keep sourly kicking us while we're more or less down, we'd be even more obscure than we are."^[146]Dissent , however, launched its share of attacks on the affirmers and was hardly a timid victim. The magazine in the early years was a small group of social and cultural critics besieged, wagons pulled up

into a circle for protection, but emitting louder whoops than their assailants.

By the end of the 1950s Dissent began to note that the changing temper of the country offered radicals a new opportunity. Howe detected "a significant change in political mood, a shift toward liberalism." The "hostility" to radicalism so prevalent in the 1940s and 1950s "has begun to evaporate," and radicals no longer needed to feel "beleaguered." It was time for dissenters to develop programs that would take advantage of the new unrest in the country. Time, too, for Dissent to move forward: "Our first five years were devoted to cleaning up a little our own intellectual heritage," Howe told the magazine's readers; "let the next five be devoted, in part, to seeing what we can say usefully about American society as it operates today."^[147]

So during the 1940s and 1950s the group moved from leftism to liberalism. Even the dissenters evolved into liberal socialists and social democrats. For some members of the group, affirmers such as Lionel Trilling, that change occurred in the early 1940s. For others, dissenters such as Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, the transformation did not take place until the early 1950s. By the 1950s, however, both the affirmers and the dissenters, with different levels of enthusiasm, supported the welfare state. Totalitarianism and communism in foreign policy remained their predominant interest, but they were also concerned in the postwar period with the Civil Rights movement, civil liberties issues, and general problems of equality in the domestic political realm.

They now approached these matters as liberals and centrists rather than leftists. The desire for a wide-ranging political or social transformation in America had dissipated. The dissenters had moved from the left in the 1930s to the liberal left by the late 1950s. The affirmers had evolved from the left, before the war, to the liberal center by the late 1940s and early 1950s, and then to the right of center in the late 1960s and after. For the affirmers it was a gradual and relatively smooth transition from left to center-right. For the dissenters it was a shorter journey from left to center-left.

The dissenters and affirmers disagreed on many issues in the postwar period, but one commitment that bound them in a common enterprise was their view of what it meant to be an intellectual. Both dissenters and affirmers agreed that an intellectual must be a nonconformist who maintained some tension with society, yet they disagreed about what constituted nonconformism and about the proper level of tension with one's culture.

The dissenters' opinion of the proper intellectual orientation was articulated by Howe and Harold Rosenberg. Howe described the intellectual

as a "noise-maker," one who could not watch silently. He seconded Rosenberg's definition that an intellectual "is someone who turns answers into questions," the challenger of orthodoxy and accepted wisdom, the upsetter of apple carts. The intellectual was someone pledged "to freedom above all." Like Julian Benda, Howe believed that an intellectual "stands apart, as critic and observer," from the interests of a particular party or state, or else is transformed into a propagandist.^[148] He worried that the "whole idea of the intellectual vocation" was being abandoned. The postwar opportunity of affluence and power had harmed the intelligentsia, because whenever the intellectuals "become absorbed into the accredited institutions of society they not only lose their traditional rebelliousness but to one extent or another they cease to function as intellectuals ."^[149]

Harold Rosenberg, constantly satirizing the affirmers' views on various subjects, lampooned their outlook on intellectuals as well. "Who but one with a taste for priests would desire this particular caste to flourish?" he asked about intellectuals. "Except perhaps that portion of it that works quietly in the laboratory, the study, the classroom. The others, the ideological ones, those who want to remake the world, the revolutionists in everything from paint to politics, those who never stop talking save when someone puts to them a pertinent question, these people have proved themselves as a group more trouble than they are worth." Those dissenters, he continued, were "traitors both to their ideas and themselves" out of a loneliness and conceit. "This type has manifested the same disagreeable traits throughout the world, in the 'new nations' as in the old, wherever the breakdown of authority has given prominence to ideas."^[150] What good were intellectuals, Rosenberg wrote with a wink to his readers, if all they did was cause trouble? The affirmers, according to Rosenberg, thought that intellectuals only got in the way and caused an unnecessary fuss.

Yet none of the Commentary crowd proposed giving up cultural criticism; they asked only that it be employed intelligently. Granville Hicks, a literary critic who occasionally wrote for the group's magazines, pointed out that "'Blind unreasoning rejection' may be, as Irving Howe says, 'healthier' than blind unreasoning acceptance, but it is not more intelligent."^[151] One should be allowed to be independently affirmative as well as independently hostile.

Similarly, Sidney Hook, the bete[bête] noire of the dissenters, felt that the intellectual was "no more un-American when he is intelligently critical of the United States than he is chauvinistic when he is intelligently appreciative." To be intelligent and useful, critics had "to discriminate, to make relevant distinctions." Be pragmatically critical and intellectual, Hook suggested. Unthinking dissent was not intelligent criticism, it was

"fashion," and that was no better than unthinking affirmation. "It is sufficient for the majority to believe anything," Hook wrote of his radical detractors, "for them to oppose it." A habitual response, in Hook's estimation, did not qualify as an intellectual process whether one was an affirmer or a dissenter. Real intellectuals, in his view, had to "criticize what needs to be criticized in America, without forgetting for a moment the total threat which Communism poses to the life of the free mind."^[152] Yet some of Hook's critics believed that the affirmers' same automatic reaction against the danger of Communism caused a reflex reaction against all dissent.

Few of the dissenters criticized Hook's animosity toward the intellectually corrosive effects of habitual positions. Instead of his rhetoric, it was his actions and commitments that made the dissenters doubt his sincerity. Hook, it seemed to the dissenters, had put all his energy into criticizing the Communists and had forgotten to be a critic of America as well. His actions, it seemed to them, suggested that an intellectual's primary responsibility was to criticize the Communists, and his example suggested that intellectuals should not criticize the West at all.

Affirmers might have adopted the example of David Riesman, who was not excessively anticommunist, and who felt it was the intellectual's responsibility "to remain in some tension with his audience and his immediate milieu."^[153] Many of the radicals, however, doubted whether Riesman ever functioned as a dissenting critic of American culture. Moreover, most of the affirmers were more anticommunist than Riesman, and so did not fit his example.

Therefore, despite a nominal agreement between affirmers and dissenters that intellectuals should be nonconformists and questioners, in practice the agreement collapsed into arguments and accusations about what really qualified as significant nonconformism. The two sides of the group were bound by a common ethic that each side interpreted and practiced differently.

A special case of nonconformism arose in the decade following the end of World War II, as the New York group struggled to establish a role for intellectuals in what, in their view, was a postcommunist and postideological world. During that decade many former members of the Communist party published books or essays of atonement. The New York intellectuals' ambivalent response to that confessional impulse, and disagreements about the extent to which it was specifically aimed at stifling radicalism, produced a significant and revealing friction between affirmers and dissenters.