Among the Intellectualoids / A Refined Irving Howe
Beichman, Arnold
.I.HI_ IN'TT:L1.E[:TU•ALOIDS A REFINED IRVING You don't have to be a sadist to enjoy Irving Howe's "autobiography" but it helps.* Not being (I think) sadistic. I can't say that reading Howe, the...
...O CHECK-OUT TIME d\II.\1._1II This takes us back, conservativefeud-wise...
...Howe describes the late Dwight Macdonald's long defunct magazine, Politics, as "a stopping place for independent leftists who were bored with Marxist sects yet refused Cold War conservatism...
...it is a war of imperialist rivalry...
...After centuries of ignorant and dull compliance, hundreds of millions of people in Eastern Europe and Asia have opened the books...
...After all, it was just as totalitarian to be a Leninist Marxist, which is what Trotskyism was all about, as to be a Stalinist Marxist...
...they tapped phones and cold-shouldered the- press...
...As in 1911_ So in ]' 7 -Eb creaL Cupos11, e% Cn 1h4wxh v4x3 krww [Iha1 "a viclney fnr a tom mu rkisl ar a Cnmmprlisl-dornirIQtCd mnuCrn l [in Vietnam] illcaMs anoiIi r 1oual ilarian dicialor%hip ,u pprcsxirng 1,u, man freCdlun_- 1 Howe's lctllpr, Arfw }'or# R.-view 1)(grji.4 }, Dcccmber M. 1965.1 Tl 1• ngi- bo -Mock % YaO -mrid-' rT FWW WPW M"16 I'M= wW rF Arf L+7 gr% W&F 4. .10...
...Accommodating to what-to the essential antiCommunism and anti-Stalinism of the postwar world, the Taft-Hartley Law, the Marshall Plan, midcult...
...Macdonald eventually lapsed from this state of grace but not before serving a tour of duty as an editorial associate of Encounter magazine...
...From the men in his family, he received a conviction (the evangelical terminology seems appropriate) of the truth and justice of the GOP...
...Really...
...In March 1942, for example, Howe's paper still described the war as "a struggle for world mastery between two imperialist camps" and still claimed to be upholding "the banner of Lenin and Trotsky...
...The "right-wing Social Democrat," says Howe, is to be reprobated because "lie has lost that larger sympathy for the oppressed, that responsiveness to new modes of rebellion that a Socialist THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1983 19 ought to have...
...I 11I k'I I . HI )K% 1.4 1k,l+ 1,1 1. 4A•pIdn.L %IS 1{•U...
...he left for New York City to study law at age 21, and never looked back...
...They are beginning to know that man's welfare throughout the world is interdependent...
...For his third birthday, Mrs...
...Little of this is mentioned by Howe, who tosses off a euphemistic phrase that his faction "moved to what Marxists called a position of `critical support' of the [Second World] war, though we didn't make this explicit...
...or that by a process of self-mystification one can create out of nothing a Third Force, a Third Camp and thereby avoid having to make nasty political choices...
...The Deweys had been partisans from day one...
...But just when you think he's going to fall into the morass of anti-anti-Communism, Howe makes a quick leap into the safety net by adding, " . . . correct as that anti-Communism may be...
...Was there no Cold War liberalism...
...This John Anderson of the producing class took a world tour in 1943, and wrote a book, One World, that would have done honor to Eleanor Roosevelt: *Simon and Schuster, $22.50...
...It was "for the Third Camp of World Labor and the colonial peoples...
...Tammany's connections with the mob were fraternal and intimate...
...What "new modes of rebellion" is Howe talking about...
...And then there is the sly Lionel Trilling, a man who exhibited "subtly conservative moods" and whose "critique provided a rationale for an increasingly relaxed and conserva tiled liberalism...
...Everybody is marching to the wrong drummer except Howe...
...He provided, it is true, no bulwark in principle against the free-for-all liberalism of his successors...
...The reason for the inverted commas is that since Howe says he is no longer a Marxist, the "socialism" in which he still believes is little more than a sympathy for justice, brotherhood, peace...
...Supposing, then, that the rightwing Social Democrat hasn't found his "bureaucratic niche" and still makes "a safe politics out of antiCommunism," is he still unattractive...
...As for Richard Hofstadter, the peerless American historian, he had, for Howe, "veered too far toward a conservative brand of liberalism...
...On Dewey's left, Wendell Willkie, the down-home Wall Street lawyer, a fatuous narcissist who barnstormed his way to the Republican nomination in 1940, and was still a contender in 1944...
...Since Howe now writes that his Trotskyite sect gave "critical support" to the war, let me remind him of just what the paper he edited wrote in its issue of December 15, 1941: The Socialist Workers Party, "as the uncompromising foe of capitalism and capitalist war, cannot and does not give any political support to the government and the war...
...Now look at what he writes about Sidney Hook...
...old Socialists' as they still like to call themselves, worthy people who have done worthy things but are now locked into a single passion: a coarse [sic], monolithic anti-Communism...
...Now the Trotskyites whether of the Cannon or the later Schachtman sect, were Leninists, just like their opponents, the official Stalinist Communists...
...In return for payoffs and assorted political favors (Dutch Schultz and his gang served as Democratic poll watchers), complaisant district attorneys gave the lampreys a free ride, and they bled the city ashen...
...Howe wants his anti-Communism to be aesthetically by Arnold Beichman uplifting...
...5o we have the silly business that in the 1950s "among once-radical intellectuals there now prevailed a coarse version of antiCommunism often ready to justify whatever the United States might do...
...The enemy is neither the White House nor democratic capitalism...
...Everything else is just so much hogwash designed to trick the unwary into surrendering their lives for these profits...
...but forgets to mention that he was instrumental in expelling Kristol from this same group because Kristol pressed for a reading list which would go beyond Marxist-Leninist propaganda tracts...
...In actual fact, Hook was criticized in a New Leader article by Arthur Lovejoy, the eminent co-founder of the American Association of University Professors for not urging a categorical ban on Communist teachers...
...As Leninists, they believed in the same ghastly ideology and tactics as the Stalinists, except that their prophet was Leon Trotsky, not Stalin...
...Or is the phrase nothing more than Howe's trying, at his tiresome worst, to show where he really stands: no conservative he...
...I have examined some of the copies of Labor Action from the period that Howe was managing editor...
...Schultz wanted to murder him...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1983...
...Social scientists, for whom acculturation (never mind how or to what) is the summum bonum, are apt to look on Tammany and similar institutions with a mild eye these days...
...Recognizing the Smith Act's dangers to civil liberties, Hook proposed amending the law to pre vent possible abuses in its application...
...Howe says that Hook, "once a leading Marxist," saw "merit" in the "infamous Smith Act...
...If Howe has any doubts about Hook's position, I recommend he read Hook's book, Heresy Yes, Conspiracy No (1952), Chapter 5. Howe also accuses Hook of taking a blanket position against the employment of professed Communists as teachers through the device of "declaring categorical bans...
...ZO THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1983 there is such a thing as benevolent Trotskyism...
...As a Communist schismatic, Howe and his Schachtmanite brigadiers had to prove to their erstwhile allies, the Cannonites, that they were Leninists as true, pure, and orthodox as those from whom they had split...
...1•, M.N.F...
...rey.c • .n 4W *F fvdY...
...When Dewey arrived in New York, millions were pouring down Tammany's maw each year...
...He has glossed over (to put it mildly) his-own political past...
...Dewey was an establishment internationalist-not the best of all possible worldviews, maybe, but what else was there in the GOP...
...But like the Stalinists, they vilified Socialists and Social Democrats alike as betrayers of the so-called revolutionary working class...
...Richard Brookhiser is editor at National Review...
...He came before the cusp...
...Are these the casual judgments of a memoirist trying to compose grand, sweeping intellectual, rather than factually exact, history...
...Fiorello LaGuardia beat Tammany at the polls...
...d .fi rr1..t...
...In his recent book, A Better World, Professor William L. O'Neill says that Howe, among .others, was "imputing views to [Hook] that he did not hold...
...Howe writes that his "main intellectual journey, difficult enough, consisted of a break from an earlier, orthodox, anti-Stalinist Marxism...
...The book reveals a New York intellectual, now in his early sixties, wriggling, twisting, ducking and dodging any possible accusation that, because he is critical of Communism, he might be mistaken for a-CONSERVATIVE: that somebody out there on the Left might accuse him of being a secret believer in democratic capitalism rather than "socialism...
...This was one major difference between Dewey's era and ours...
...41 7•L I..-dI,np W* P.yp6L_-q CRi•qm a I bopA rX r...
...In short, it is time for Irving Howe to dissent from Dissent and to seek his fulfillment, not in rewriting history or dreaming up new strategies for old politicocultural frauds, but to free himself from a faith which, in his "intellectual autobiography," has driven him to forget his chosen vocation as scholar...
...Arnold Reichrnun is a Visiting Scholar at the Hoover Insrirurrnri...
...For shame...
...onetime Trotskyite, Marxist...
...Is it the strategy of the Great Copout...
...Attorney, special prosecutor, and District Attorney, worsted the mob in court...
...I can't say that reading Howe, the memoirist...
...In twelve years, he managed to cut taxes, balance the budget, and inaugurate a series of new projects-a thruway, a state university...
...He was born in 1902, in Owosso, Michigan, in the heart of the lands where to be on time is to be fifteen minutes late...
...and other laudable virtues...
...Such prose from a man who can write clearly and even brilliantly when he wants to is simply unacceptable...
...Or is the pattern of this autobiography, with its emphasis on "socialism" and its omnipresent mistrust of "conservatism" and "anti-Communism," a pattern which reflects a writer's desire somehow to make peace with his past and present without jeopardizing his intellectual future...
...If today's GOP has any makers, they are Clif White, William Rusher, and the late John Ashbrook, founders of the Draft Goldwater movement...
...In the process, however, they reduced politics to job seeking...
...and the old machines did indeed take,boatloads of immigrants whom nobody particularly cared about and Americanize them...
...This noble hatred of tyranny has been cunningly exploited by the imperialist statesmen of the so-called democracies for the purpose of whipping up a pro-war sentiment among the masses of the people...
...A week before Pearl Harbor, the Trotskyite weekly published its "Program Against the War...
...Perhaps he was not entirely happy there...
...nr'l~y.hlL* •111, WLh Y So .l • - - f l i $F pr...
...Tammany Hall," declared Dewey's editor-father, "represents all that is evil in govern ment...
...Thomas's grandfather attended the first Republican rally in 1854, and the Owosso Times, the newspaper he founded and passed on to the family, lectured Michiganders in passionate tones on the wickedness of Democrats and drink...
...Dewey represented, when it was still possible, a real middle of the roadmoderately paternalistic and genuinely frugal...
...In 1942, there were stories headlined "The bitter struggle for Singapore/ Involves Vast Imperialist Stakes...
...They are resolved, as we must be, that there is no more place for imperialism...
...The amendments would have made the act congruent with the "clear and present danger" criterion imposed by Supreme Court Justices Holmes and Brandeis...
...HOWE turning him into a sort of eighteenthcentury American Lord North...
...More rarely, you find those who did not like Ike...
...It is especially difficult to quit when one is editing a magazine like Dissent which seeks miracles-a new radicalism, a new humanism, a new ethic, a new socialism, a new social change, a New Everything based on a New Utopia-and when all around you are to be found ghastly Communist or socialist dictatorships, whether in Africa or Asia, the Caribbean or Eastern Europe, and nothing-but nothing-brings certainty, let alone hope, for tomorrow...
...was a particularly pleasant experience, as pleasant, say, as reading his literary celebrations...
...Hollywood made movies about him...
...an editorial sloganeered, "Make the rich pay for their war...
...I.f 1..1...
...This is "'critical support' of the war, though we didn't make this explicit...
...By E. R. Ernrm.tt LI A IYnlntd r. r..W • ...I r...
...For example, he praises the Federalist Papers because their stress "on the need for countervailing powers in a democratic society represented an important truth"-but ever fearful of the accusation of being a you-know-what, Howe quickly adds that this important truth was "not rendered any less so by Madison's conservative opinions...
...14.95...
...Everything that was bought, sold, or serviced in -New York-from artichokes to laundrywas traded by a racket...
...when they have created, in Seymour Martin Lipset's phrase, the first few nation...
...Castroism...
...just after Madison and his compatriots have won a revolution against colonialism, have invented a style and form of government without precedent in history...
...The political criminals worked in cahoots with desperadoes of a more mundane sort...
...L} ii r'.1 1 171 Such a break, however, was meaningless unless it subsumed opposition to an anti-Leninist Marxism as well...
...The other great difference between then and now concerns America's role in the world, and America's conception of its role...
...Dewey rode his fame to Albany in 1942 (after a near miss four years earlier), and brought to the governor's office the same aggressive orderliness he had shown at the prosecutor's table...
...These old Socialists, writes Howe, "keep talking about 'the Commies' and something about that phrase strikes me as marking a collapse of standards, a vulgarity of mind that will soon prompt some of them into alliances with the Far Right...
...There are those who remember the hectic days when everyone seemed to be Birching (perhaps they Birched themselves), those who still wonder who promoted Peress...
...When Dewey spoke of humane Republicanism or pragmatic liberalism, he thus meant something quite different from Nelson Rockefeller or Jacob Javits, who used such talk to steal bases for the omnicompetent state...
...And there are "Jewish trade unionists...
...1•.rI . • %. w Ih'•v :vi' , Iny;I+- .r . ..t "air ..L •., 11 :.t r.r:t...
...Still, Dewey's life is interesting, even for what it does not teach us, and Smith lays it exhaustively (and exhaustingly) before us...
...Dewey pere was not so far off...
...But the punctiliousness and workaholism of his home, particularly his mother, had been scrubbed into him as with a by Richard Brookhiser bristle brush, never to be washed out...
...Nothing was too tedious or trivial, and nothing was sacred...
...What then can we say about Howe...
...And as for Macdonald himself, anyone who saw him operating as I did as an opponent of the Stalinist " W aldorf ' peace conference in 1949 would quite properly call Macdonald a Cold War something...
...To quit a movement," says Howe, "in which one has invested one's strongest feelings can be terribly painful-at least as painful as leaving home or starting a divorce...
...But he didn't practice it, either...
...While Hook, according to Howe, was not for the passage of the law, Hook "had doubts about the wisdom of repealing it...
...W L dWiM i- 11~ F +1 - V#&W 40 hoa tirt,W...
...He has accepted, as Eliot said of Milton and Charles I, the constitution of silence...
...It is really time-and it's late in the day-for Howe to realize that the enemy is not Sidney Hook, or Irving Kristol, f and to stop pretending that #Howe writes about " . . . the conservative ideologue Irving Kristol, whom I confess to having recruited to the City College Trotskyite youth group in 1938...
...FDR simply wanted to destroy him...
...isolationist, now preaching something he calls "radical humanism," a "maybe" Socialist...
...hoped for t11r cnitr, gtntC Of a ViC' [ham e % e ' 1 h ird FcLrcc' 17ap}i11r of rallying 1l a people in a pro• g ress i ve J1 ri L [3ari by' en art i ng lm rid rc14 ms and dcfendi rig cir iI I iberiirs...
...Baader-Meinhof...
...He did, and it was...
...O,r~ rylavrr'gra* s Mr M- ~~irL(YI , ii'rI,F trmso l n l -P A"My- n Fna~ww} KNN0I0 peace would be preserved," read the front-page manifesto, "all the pledges that the United States would not enter the war have been flouted and discarded by the very statesmen who made them...
...Nothing could be further from the truth than to say that Howe's faction gave even "critical support" of the American effort in World War II, let alone made that support explicit...
...The crooks didn't stand a chance...
...Were Americans for Democratic Action being Cold War conservatives when they supported the Truman Doctrine against the USSR...
...Dewey gave him a bicycle, with the warning that if he fell off it would be taken away for a year...
...Early in his book, he writes that "there is something unattractive about a right-wing Social Democrat who has found his bureaucratic niche and makes a safe politics out of anti-Communism...
...Dewey, as U.S...
...Thomas Dewey, three times governor of New York, twice Republican presidential nominee, and execrated no more, is from another era...
...There is worse yet...
...He brought to his- task all the energies he had once focused on not falling off bicycles...
...For heaven's sakes-Madison, an ally of Thomas Jefferson against Hamilton...
...Dewey and his lawyers sifted mounds of receipts and shelves of ledgers...
...The talismanic words "waste, fraud, and abuse" actually meant something then...
...Was Arthur Schlesinger...
...It is particularly distasteful to watch Howe engaging, to use his language, in "a masquerade of innocence" and even "posturings of rectitude" about his own past while seriously maligning the record of Sidney Hook, one of the bravest of American intellectuals in our century...
...The enemy is the head of the Soviet secret police who, in changing jobs, has taken over half a world and brought George Orwell's frightening prophecies into a reality earlier than had been expected...
...I wonder whether he would have called George Orwell's pro-U.S...
...Madison, a towering intellectual force in the building of America, the product of Locke and James Harrington-and Howe feels dutybound to impose his view of conservatism, via Charles A. Beard's fictions, no doubt, on James Madison, *A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich...
...And I suppose, in keeping with Howe's aesthetic sensitivities, we should never have referred to them as "the Nazis" but rather as National Socialists to avoid vulgarity of mind and collapse of standards...
...Howe tells us that in 1941 he became editor (actually managing editor on the masthead) of a Trotskyite journal, Labor Action, at the tender age of 21...
...Au*vs[ I8, 11474!, he 41rFc'rkdrd 1h is neUtT.3Iist patiilin n bw SaYIPi9 1ha[ -'Some of us...
...y.~1'w.h.trk +A-+t,~-h I!r 40- •Mf1 114+1 no +"LIM rrF•F +bow-kNr it il11.-v i, A.&.., LEARNING TO THINK 6s A.k X.r1k 1. , ,~yK L• MI +H KI IM 7W$ 1M skew 1., {,1.7 Ialy,a J.11u ..isr..rlrlrpl ~/I...
...anti-Communism "coarse...
...Hook opposed the Smith Act and especially its use by the Roosevelt Administration against the Trotskyites...
...Men and women all over the world are on the march, physically, intellectually and spiritually...
...During the twenties, the city's budget increased sixteen times faster than the population...
...and with each job went a letter of marque for fiscal piracy...
...Trilling the conspirator who "embarked on an oblique campaign to transform the dominant liberalism into something more quizzical and less combative than it had previously been...
...He has made serious misstatements of Sidney Hook's politicocultural positions and unjust criti cisms of Hofstadter and Trilling among others...
...a Cold War conservative when he wrote powerful articles against Soviet foreign policy...
...It's 1787...
...I-.1.io..~,vrr,...# lf~tr..p,}rdI 1...
...his hmfi 1rw Vivl nk m hi an af[ICIe_ ]Urn I Is aulhorcd with MLehjcL Walrer 1Niw k4 -1wblic...
...The underworld's exactions were estimated to have raised the cost of living twenty percent...
...Hang around the right wing for a while, and you soon meet veterans who grunt, "I was for Barry when Irving Kristol/Jerry Falwell was still a socialist/preacher, and I'll be damned if I'm going to have my agenda set by any Public Interest/ Moral Majority...
...Trilling's work "had come to serve as a high-toned justification for the increasingly accommodating moods of American intellectuals...
...I like you," he once told Rockefeller, "but I don't think I can afford you...
...Jay Lovestone, expelled secretary of the Communist Party, USA, who was supporting the war, was described caustically as "a pure and simple war mongering bourgeois liberal...
...i c..:' "ii s;..r t41'1g 11C scxl.vl v a nd com pIctrly for prof it s." M am shocking was [he lknt-Peir1 HafhcFr i. MI C' . IL1111 1ii'w-C edited_ "All the %4)IL'IlilI .3 , %i I.i 1]i'L' . 1h3...
...Under Howe's own name there appeared a story May 4, 1942 with the page-one headline "Exposing the Merchants of Death /Their Profits Born in Blood" and a paragraph that "this is the picture of the capitalist world gone mad-profits, profits above all...
...The Socialist Workers Party, it said, was "against both imperialist camps," meaning isolated Britain and Nazi Germany...
...In an ,11I;I1• s~• ~vd I1• . •'IIIiIS.I 4:411 103 % r. :1...
...This statement is palpably unfair...
...The aesthetics problem for Howe knows no end...
...rm Aer o+ ==12.11=6M.111=7 .~ *+nom I~ .rap~lr tlr +~ "it .'Y.'r vim...
...Richard Norton Smith, author of Thomas E. Dewey and His Times, * is unaware of his subject's datedness...
...this is not a war for national defense...
...t For1~ IfC3rf 12[CT, llowc wis f1ill peddling 1hc "Third Comp" idem...
...t "Not a man, not a cent for Wall Street's War," the paper trumpeted...
...Isn't it possible that Hofstadter and Trilling were right then and, in the light of contemporary history, are still right...
...And what kind of "bureaucratic niche" is Howe talking aboutsomething like that of the late David Dubinsky who certainly made a "politics" out of anti-Communism, or George Meany...
...And such language was not temporary nor were the ideas behind the rhetoric...
...Government had been so slipshod that it was possible, with strict efficiency and common honesty, to lessen the taxpayer's burden while increasing services...
...He calls his book a biography of the "maker of the modern Republican Party, " which is quite wrong...
Vol. 16 • February 1983 • No. 2
