Sidney Hook: Fifty Years of Anti-Communism
Miller, Stephen
There are no second acts in American lives, F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, by which he meant that American writers usually fizzle out. Unable to sustain a full career, their writing takes a...
...To call Hook a major American essayist may come as a surprise...
...From his *Viking Press, $20.00...
...Survival is not the be-all and end-all of a life worthy of man...
...There was something missing in Hook, Howe says in A Margin of Hope, "some imaginative flair or depth of sensibility that might complement his intellectual virtuosity...
...And he also said that Nabokov's "knowledge of Russia, in fact, is very special, extremely limited...
...For Hook brings to mind some of the great Victorian essayists--Mill, Bagehot, Morley, and Macaulay--who never strayed too far from the central issues of their time...
...Wilson accused the editors of Partisan Review of favoring Hook's work at his expense...
...We should totally dismiss from our minds any assumption that they ought to resemble ours or what we like to imagine ours to be, that they should imitate our own institutions...
...Finally, Hook's essays are intellectually rigorous...
...Sometimes the worst thing we can know about a man is that he has survived...
...In all totalitarian societies, Hook emphasizes, "political democracy was destroyed before the economy was socialized...
...As he said in The Hero in History, a book he wrote forty years ago: "The amount and quality of freedom and democracy in a society are determined by many things-economic organization, education, tradition, religion, to name only a few...
...Hook, moreover, admires 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 Marx, and has spoken of Marx's "own ideals of freedom and humanity...
...Such knowledgeable critics as Douglas Pike and Colonel Harry Summers think that by and large they succeeded...
...Yet how little Solzhenitsyn and Hook have in common...
...There was no rust on Wilson's beautiful machine...
...he would argue that those who do so often ignore or minimize the importance of political freedom...
...Because he kept on bringing these up, Hook was considered a killjoy...
...Nabokov's point was the same as Hook's: Lenin was not a progressive but a ruthless despot who destroyed whatever political progress Russia had made during the previous fifty years...
...The book has been praised by many writers--mainly by literary types not well versed in Russian history or political theory--but it has also been attacked not only for its portrait of Lenin but for its reductive analysis of Marx's thought...
...Whether or not Wilson knew anything about politics in 1940, when he wrote To the Finland Station, it is clear that he didn't learn much about politics in subsequent years...
...His book, Vietnam: A History,* and its companion PBS television series,"Vietnam: A Television History," of which he is chief correspondent, mark a major stage in America's recovery from our Vietnam trauma...
...But of course some of Hook's essays have not stood the test of time as well...
...As Meyer Schapiro pointed out in Partisan Review, Wilson makes too much of Marx's Jewishness--invoking it as an explanation for much of Marx's thought...
...In one respect, then, Solzhenitsyn is profoundly wrong...
...The Soviet Union, they argued, would always be a nasty place because it was, well, Russia...
...Perhaps because Hook is intent on rescuing Marx from the clutches of Lenin, Hook tends to give Marx the benefit of the doubt on the question of freedom...
...Yet it was a truth that anti-anti-Communists found difficult to state--not because they were pro-Soviet and not even because they were anti-American...
...In 1971, shortly before he died, Wilson wrote a new introduction to To the Finland Station, in which he acknowledged that his view of Lenin had been "much too amiable . . . . " Yet Wilson did not make a serious effort to redo his portrait...
...He also resented the editors' suggestion that he steer clear of political matters and submit a piece on literature...
...he never labors to be clever, never parades his learning...
...True, Hook was not interested in--or at least did not write about--literature, but what bothered Howe and others was Hook's insistence in looking at hard questions: what to do about Americans who were members of the Communist Party, how to deal with Soviet expdnsionism,_ what to make of affirmative action...
...We can be grateful that Karnow and Ellison have risen above the exorcist tone that characterized many earlier attempts to account for Vietnam...
...As a dedicated promoter of a foreign policy based on antiCommunism, Hook has no rival...
...Kennan, is to arrive at some understanding of what alien civilizations are up to...
...What is needed is a Portable Hook, a volume that preserves Hook's best work...
...Malcolm Cowley, who peddled his Stalinist views in the pages of the New Republic...
...But Hook, of course, has written innumerable essays on many of the major social and political questions of our time...
...In the 1930s Wilson had worried about American Stalinism: the disposition on the part of many American intellectuals to regard the Soviet Union as an ideal society...
...Lenin, Wilson says, "gave offense and did not show himself so benevolent as I perhaps tend to make him...
...We ourselves have not been wholly guiltless, wholly benevolent in intention, as we like to believe we have . . . . " But who were the Americans who held melodramatic ideas of absolute right and absolute wrong...
...At times it is eloquent, even Churchillian: It is better to be a live jackal than a dead lion--for jackals, not men...
...Wilson had not the foggiest idea what political institutions the Soviet people desired,,yet he took it for granted they did not want to "imitate THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 19 our own institutions...
...Moreover, until the post-World War II era, their political 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 views were similar...
...Hook's Marxism and Beyond, by contrast, was accorded a few paragraphs in the back pages of the same journal--the reviewer praising Hook for his scholarly analyses of Marxist thought yet chiding him for his anti-Communism...
...Their articles on lndochina have appeared in Encounter, the New Republic, the New York Review, National Review, as well as The American Spectator...
...Reviewing George Kennan's Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin in 1961, Wilson paraphrased Kennan with obvious approval: "What is needed, says Mr...
...Though Hook's scholarship is excellent, he always has been most effective, as Irving Kristol has observed, in bringing "his extraordinary intellectual powers to bear on partitular issues of social or political controversy . . . . " t *Rowman & Littlefield, $22.95...
...An obvious truth, one would think, especially after 1956, when Soviet tanks and troops crushed the Hungarian freedom fighters...
...Pasternak, I suspect, would have been surprised and puzzled to find his novel become--in Wilson's hands-akin to Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man...
...Those who disagreed with this point of view were labeled reactionaries (especially if ~migr~s like Nabokov) or obsessive anti-Communists...
...The democratic countries of the West, Hook has pointed out, have expanded the sphere of government, but this expansion "has not resulted in the progressive diminution of freedoms in political and cultural life...
...In a letter to F.W...
...Under the Soviets, from the very start," Nabokov told Wilson, "the only protection a dissenter could hope for was dependent on governmental whims, not laws...
...But most of the anti-antiCommunists were not fools...
...Yet if Wilson's views were intellectually fashionable, it was not because he bowed to fashion...
...What are we to make of the politics of a man who fulminated against centralization yet admired Lenin, a ruthless centralizer...
...To be a Cold Warrior was to abet Stalinism--or, as innumerable observers now put it, to abet the hawks in the Kremlin...
...Wilson not only stuck to his views, he even confidently said in 1971 that because Nabokov "despises the Communist regime," he "does not even understand how it works or how it ever came to be...
...As Hook points out in a review of Cowley's autobiography (reprinted in Marxism and Beyond), Cowley was totally committed to the Stalinist faith--doing his utmost to defend the Moscow trials...
...Dupee, then one of the editors, Wilson complained that Partisan Review published Hook's "interminable articles" and yet rejected his essay...
...Hook also stresses that the expansion of government is not in itself destructive of freedom...
...Its adherents did not generally praise Lenin, but-like Wilson--regarded the Soviet "experiment" as positive on balance and Lenin, despite his excesses, as a force for the good: an enlightened despot who had brought his people out of the darkness of tsarist times...
...one had to point out the sins of the United States as well as those of the Soviet Union...
...As Hook himself has pointed out, Marx has no room in his political blueprint for faction...
...His view of the world was balanced: he was an anti-antiCommunist, someone who acknowledged the evil of the Soviet Union but dismissed anti-Communism as simplistic...
...The United States could do this only if it refrained from taking a hard-line approach to Soviet expansionism...
...Within that first-rate mind, there had formed a deposit of sterility, like rust on a beautiful machine...
...Stephen Miller is executive assistant to the Board of Radio Free Europe and author of Special Interest GroUps in American Politics, to be published this winter by Transaction Books...
...Hook has been so noted for his stands on certain questions that both his admirers and detractors tend to focus on his position, overlooking the style and argument of his essays...
...Though past eighty, Hook is still writing well, as can be seen in Marxism and Beyond,* a collection of his essays from the last ten years...
...Like Hook, he was inclined to be contentious, to relish literary and political quarrels, to speak bluntly about matters...
...Recently, however, the National Endowment for the Humanities has seen fit to honor him by asking Hook to deliver the 1984 Jefferson Lecture on the Humanities...
...Like Hook, Wilson did not buy the then popular argument that in order to build socialism the Soviet Union was right in suspending civil liberties "temporarily...
...Temperamentally, Hook and Wilson had much in common...
...But they depend just as much upon our willingness to fight for them as upon any other thing [emphasis Hook's...
...Hook has always questioned those--both on the Right and the Left--who speak of economic freedom or economic democracy and do not recognize the primacy of political freedom...
...No doubt in the 1950s there was a self-righteous strain to American foreign policy, particularly in John Foster Dulles...
...Pike, whose classic study of the Vietcong angered doves in 1966, judges it "a first rate popular contribution to understanding the war...
...I had no premonition that the Soviet Union was to become one of the most hideous tyrannies that the world had ever known, and Stalin the most cruel and unscrupulous of the merciless Russian tsars...
...In our differences with foreign powers," Wilson wrote in his review of Kennan, "we must give up our melodramatic ideas of absolute right and absolute wrong...
...He has always been active not only as a writer of polemical essays but also as an organizer and participant in numerous organizations to defend freedom...
...at best he is indifferent to religious belief...
...When the Portable Edmund Wilson was published recently, it was lauded in a frontpage review in the New York Times Book Review...
...The Russian past, not Leninism, was the main ingredient of Stalinism...
...Wilson truckled to no one...
...We tend to think of essayists as freefloating souls who, like Wilson, deal mainly if not exclusively with literary matters...
...Wilson's unthinking patriot, however, was a straw man...
...he wrote about the Civil War, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Iroquois Indians, Russian literature, even the Hungarian language...
...Their attempt, as Karnow put it, was to be "impartial," "to show all sides in an evenhanded way...
...Author Karnow and producer Richard Ellison have fashioned the most important of quite a few recent studies of the war which employ analysis rather than demonology as their historical method of choice...
...Referring mainly to To the Finland Station, Dwight Macdonald said that Wilson "doesn't know a thing about politics . . . . It's just another subject he's read up on...
...He was one of the organizers, for example, of the Dewey Commission of Inquiry into the Moscow Trials...
...Hook, I suspect, would be suspicious of those who attempt to "get behind politics...
...he says that "the entire twentieth century is sucked into the vortex of atheism and selfdestruction...
...Like most anti-anti-Communist intellectuals, Wilson thought that by invoking the notions of bureaucratization and centralization he had exposed the real face of all advanced industrial societies...
...Hook, no doubt, was more exercised by Wilson's treatment of Lenin, for Hook has continually argued that Lenin was a tyrant who betrayed Marx's thought...
...Unable to sustain a full career, their writing takes a turn for the worse as they advance into old age...
...Writing to Alfred Kazin in 1962, Wilson said he was endeavoring "to get behind politics...
...Speaking for most of the TV critics, John Corry of the New York Times applauded the "delicate balance" of a series that "tries hard not to reach conclusions...
...Hook has been a scholar--a professor of philosophy who has spent much of his life expounding the ideas of Marx and Dewey--so how can we call him an essayist, let alone a major one...
...Hook admires pugnacity as well as luciditymadmires above all the pugnacity of Solzhenitsyn, whom he has called "one of the great moral prophets of our time" for his unremitting struggle against Soviet Communism...
...In The Cold War and the Income Tax, published in 1963, Wilson pushed this idea to the point of becoming a crank, referring to"what we call our free world" and asserting that the United States is more dangerous to world peace than the Soviet Union: "It was not without plausibility that they [the Soviet leadership] began to denounce us as 'warmongers.' " I n 1962 Wilson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presumably not for coming to regard the United States as a society that only appeared to be free and democratic...
...He had seen, moreover, that "we and Russia are now competing and becoming more and more alike...
...They did battle, for example, with Hook has been a scholar a professor of philosophy who has spent much of his life expounding the ideas of Marx and Dewey so how can we call him an essayist, let alone a major one...
...Now you send back my Lenin," Wilson said, "with the suggestion that I do a little something on the younger novelists...
...they would be seen as conformists, as celebrants of the American way...
...Whatever their common concerns in 1940, by 1960 Wilson and Hook had completely different political views...
...Solzhenitsyn regards Marx as a pernicious secular intellectual whose contempt for religious belief is at one with his contempt for freedom...
...Then there is Sidney Hook--like Wilson a major American essayist...
...And so even a friend--for Howe was his friend--could sink to purple prose to describe Hook's alleged failings...
...Or, as Wilson put it in his retouched portrait of Lenin: "We did not foresee that the new Russia must contain a good deal of the old Russia...
...As many scholars have pointed out, Wilson-not Nabokov--was the ignorant one...
...he is adept at making distinctions that clarify knotty political questions...
...The difference in treatment is appropriate, many would claim, because Wilson is a more interesting essayist...
...Hook clearly feels that it is the responsibility of citizens to defend their political freedom as actively as they can...
...he barely retouched it...
...We tried hard not to load it in any particular direction," said Ellison...
...Although rich in subtle distinctions, Hook's essays are very simple: He continually stresses that the United States differs from the Soviet Union because the citizens of the former country possess political freedom whereas the citizens of the latter do not...
...In 1938 Wilson wrote that the Soviet Union hasn't "even the beginnings of democratic institutions...
...As if aware that the project would be at the center of a national act of introspection, both Karnow and Ellison undertook their tasks with requisite gravity...
...Their approach is like that of two psychiatrists who want to walk the patient back through his trauma and have him see it in a clearer light, free of violent emotions and crippling blockages...
...If the editors of Partisan Review did not think much of Wilson's portrait of Lenin, neither did Vladimir Nabokov, whom Wilson befriended in 1940 by sending him a letter with a copy of To the Finland Station...
...Hook was also regarded as a brilliant man who had lost his balance--and perhaps, as Irving Howe suggested, his soul...
...In his famous essay on Doctor Zhivago, written in 1958, Wilson insisted that Pasternak's novel "is not merely a little out of line with the assumptions of the Soviet Union...
...Both flirted with Communism in the early 1930s, and both were among the first American intellectuals to point out that the Soviet Union was hardly a progressive country...
...Unlike Hook, Wilson remained friendly with Cowley yet in 1938 complained to him about his "damned old Stalinist line, which gets more and more cockeyed by the minute...
...As Hook says in "Karl Marx Versus the Communist Movement," which also appears in whom he was closely associated, to reject a long piece on Lenin that Wilson had submitted for publication...
...Wilson's reluctance to revise his estimate of Lenin stemmed from his refusal to come to grips with the unamiable nature of Lenin's thought...
...According to Hook, "political freedom is the sine qua non of every other form of desirable social freedom...
...Like Wilson, Hook is a master of the plain style...
...Over eight million people each week have watched the television series...
...Say it to his credit, Stanley Karnow is no Sy Hersh...
...Stalin was a darker version not of Lenin, but of Ivan the Terrible...
...In The Truants, a memoir of life among the New York intellectuals, William Barrett writes that Hook was regarded by the editors...
...In all good faith, we tried to do a responsible job that will enlighten, not obfuscate...
...but they [the Soviet people] are actually worse off in that respect than when they started...
...He quotes from several contemporary observers of Lenin, who said that the Bolshevik leader was cold, harsh, and rude...
...The anti-antiCommunists also argued that it was important to strengthen the hand of the Leninists in the Soviet Union--important, of course, after Stalin died...
...Doan Van Toai, a student leader at Saigon University under the Thieu regime, is currently director o f the Institute for Southeast Asian Policy Analysis...
...In the post-Stalinist 1950s and 60s, however, Wilson became nervous about American patriotism--the disposition to regard America as an ideal society...
...Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand, assigns too much explanatory power to atheism--whether Marxist-inspired or otherwise...
...the problem is not atheism, but that too many people are not sufficiently committed to political freedom...
...An intellectual in good standing was supposed to have a "balanced" view of the world...
...He is especially good in analyzing the jumble of foolish ideas held by many luminaries--John Kenneth Galbraith, Robert Heilbroner, Herbert Marcuse, Lillian Hellman...
...But Fitzgerald did not live long enough to see some of his contemporaries put on, as it were, five-act plays: Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop, for example, as well as Edmund Wilson, one of Fitzgerald's friends...
...Like other voices from the past, Kaiser blamed the war on aberrant THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 21...
...The anti-anti-Communists thought the anti-Communists not only foolish but naive--naive became they assumed democratic institutions might flourish in Russia if given the chance...
...In other words, the best the people of the Soviet Union could hope for is Lenin-style Communism...
...Hook has been called a "secular humanist...
...But a society without faction cannot be a democratic society...
...Nabokov did not deny that Stalinist terror was worse than Leninist terror, but--like Hook--he argued that they were cut from the same cloth...
...Wilson didn't like their insinuation that political analysis was not his forte...
...According to publisher's projections, the book will sell in the area of 300,000 hardcover copies its first year...
...One need not be a champion of atheism to recognize that societies in which religious belief flourished have not always been societies that honored human dignity and freedom...
...Hook did not buy the argument of convergence...
...The disposition to think well of Lenin became a basic tenet of postwar anti-anti-Communism...
...Such numbers suggest that a decade after the war there is a distinct need to look back not in anger, but in search of understanding...
...Wilson did some of his best work--Patriotic Gore--when he was past sixty...
...Indeed, the Soviet Union was a menace to freedom...
...So Wilson argued in To the Finland Station, published in 1940...
...Any changes that took p l a c e . . . [were] changes in the decor which more or less screens an unchanging black abyss of oppression and terror...
...Men who have the moral courage to fight intelligently for freedom have the best prospect of avoiding the fate of both live jackals and dead lions...
...tKfistol's essay on Hook appears in Sidney Hook: Philosopher of Democracy and Humanism, a festschrift edited by Paul Kurtz, Prometheus Books, $18.95...
...For Wilson, like Marcuse, implies that the chief evil of modern times is not Soviet Communism or Stalinism, but advanced industrial society, which breeds centralization and bureaucratization...
...Marx doesn't acknowledge, as Hook puts it, that human beings "have purposes that are often at cross purposes with each other...
...In the late 1930s both Hook and Wilson combatted the influence of Stalinism in American intellectual life...
...Stalin was evil, but Lenin basically a good man, a great leader who tried to bring Russia out of poverty and stagnation...
...Wilson covered a lot of territory...
...Marx did praise democracy, but he also dreamed of a future society in which democratic politics would be superfluous--a society of total concord...
...Wilson himself went to great lengths to show that he had such a balanced view...
...In 1948 Nabokov wrote Wilson that "you and other American intellectuals of the twenties regarded with enthusiasm and sympathy Lenin's regime which seemed to you from afar an exciting fulfillment of your progressive dreams...
...many of his essays hold up well and serve as an excellent guide to the major controversies of the postwar era...
...Although Nabokov became indebted to Wilson for his help in getting Nabokov's books into print, the Russian ~migr~ strongly objected to Wilson's view of Lenin in particular and the Soviet Union generally...
...Even as late as late 1982, while Vietnam veterans gathered around the war memorial, the Washington Post's Robert Kaiser could be found declaiming how striking it was "that no one in command has ever been held responsible.., there has never been a formal national accounting...
...Perhaps some politicians indulged in strident patriotism, but no anti-Communist intellectual ever did...
...of the Partisan Review as "a kind of Johnny One-Note, clear and forceful but also monotonous in the one issue he was always pursuing...
...In the 1940s and 1950s, Nabokov patiently lectured to Wilson about Lenin, Russian history, and Soviet Communism, yet these lectures fell on deaf ears...
...According to Wilson, Doctor Zhivago is also "directed at conditions and tendencies which have lately become pronounced in the United States...
...David Chanoff teaches at Harvard and is a free-lance writer...
...Wilson undoubtedly thought Hook's formulation simplistic...
...How could Wilson complain in 1938 about the absence of democratic institutions in the Soviet Union, yet in 1961 reproach those who made the same complaint...
...What the anti-Communist intellectuals said was that the United States, whatever its sins, was by and large a force for freedom in the world, whereas the Soviet Union was not...
...They ought to pay more attention to zoology and anthropology...
...Hook's reputation would be higher if he had confined himself to being a scholar of Marx and Dewey...
...Hook does not lack admirers, some of whom honored him at a dinner in New York one year ago in celebration of his eightieth birthday...
...Yet Wilson, who said that reading Marx in long doses made him sick, had a soft spot for Lenin...
...Rather, they felt that by stating such an obvious truth they would be betraying their intellectual calling...
...chair at the Army War College, Summers called the book "objective," "exceptionally well-researched...
...No parties except the one in power could exist...
...Or as Hook said in "Communism and the American Intellectuals," written in 1981: "Today, by and large, the mainstream of American intellectuals is either indifferent to the challenges of the Communist world or hostile to the very conception of such a challenge as a manifestation of cold war sentiment...
...But what has hurt his reputation as an essayist most is his strong anti-Communism...
...Hook has generally confined himsdf to politics, and on occasion to education...
...Hook, however, has never eschewed public life...
...Solzhenitsyn, by contrast, has continually stressed the importance of religious faith, arguing that the erosion of religious belief in the West is the chief reason for the West's inability to take a strong stand against Soviet expansionism...
...That Hook, who has defended freedom forcefully and eloquently for fifty years, has never received the Presidential Medal of Freedom is disturbing, even scandalous...
...His prose is clear, and rarely humdrum...
...They did not assume that if the Leninists triumphed in the Soviet Union, the country would become a nice place...
...it presents a radical criticism of all our supposedly democratic but more and more centralized societies [emphasis mine...
...According to Wilson, "many intellectuals think in political and economic terms too much...
...I think he is...
...they have the musty odor of old quarrels, of issues no longer of interest...
...It is troubling--indeed disturbing-that a writer whom Leon Edel has called "an old-fashioned American individualist" recited much of the antianti-Communist litany so popular with American intellectuals in the postwar era...
...By calling Stalin a merciless Russian tsar, Wilson could get Lenin off the hook...
...Yet clearly he does not possess the stature of Edmund Wilson, who has been described as the foremost American man of letters of the twentieth century...
...But we should becareful not to confuse political acumen with literary merit, and so the question remains: Is Hook, like Wilson, a major American essayist...
Vol. 17 • January 1984 • No. 1
