AT FIRST GLANCE
Howe, Irving
Suppose the Golem had been made, not of the clay that legend has it, but of plastic: what would have been his fate? Well, he might have been elected president and as he acquiesced in...
...Even without "all the answers," there might be some point in a little noise, a little protest...
...In 1932 he wrote in an appeal to the German workers: "Should fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank...
...He fought with equal vigor the mass culture of his day and the infatuation of so-called Progressives with Stalin...
...There was a shared feeling that the social order had simply collapsed, and if we're to believe the testimony of men like Edmund Wilson and John Dos Passos this brought about a heady feeling of freedom, an end to the pieties of the Coolidge and Hoover years, a persuasion that people could now start thinking...
...Because he smilingly remembers one-liners from the days he made speeches for General Electric, one of the most anti-union corporations in the country...
...Why are so few American intellectuals raising cain...
...In Paris, recently, the Salvation Army sent out a mobile soup kitchen to feed the hungry...
...We shall miss him...
...SDS and other New Left groups objected, rightly enough, to universities working closely with the military...
...It's painful that this should have happened, but there is consolation in the fact that the Mitterrand government quickly announced a program of help and rehabilitation, apparently not content to wait for the mysterious workings of the Free Market...
...Not much of a political speaker, he came alive when he could use his pen...
...Still, there was this difference: by 1931 or so, the American intellectuals were starting to speak out...
...In those years many nonpolitical professors, who until then had cared mostly about their publications and gardens, grew frightened of the student insurgency and discovered that, yes, they too were strongly attached to the idea of academic autonomy...
...Politics used to run a column entitled "Ancestors" where Dwight printed reconsiderations of half-forgotten radical thinkers of the left...
...To mark the 50th year since Hitler took power, the New Republic ran an excellent article by Walter Laqueur this past February in which he remarked on the common tendency both on the right and the left to dismiss Hitler as a mere passing adventurer...
...Being jobless doesn't build self-confidence...
...Among intellectuals the best responses so far have come from a handful of social and economic theorists who have disagreements among themselves but largely share the view that the present crisis is more than cyclical and that even if interest rates were to be lowered and a stimulus applied to the economy, we would continue to suffer severe unemployment...
...Isn't it shameful that we should again be living with the specter of foreclosed farms and homes...
...And besides, how can he be a nice guy—in a country where, as the received wisdom has it, nice guys finish last...
...Ronald Reagan blandly urges "every employer" to hire one more person...
...During his heyday in the 1940s and '50s he had hardly a peer as a radical iconoclast on the political and cultural scene...
...Today there is little shared understanding of what is happening...
...Look back to the New Deal program of 1934 and you'll see that it consisted of a series of job-creating and relief-providing measures that by present-day standards seem pretty radical—at least more radical than anything proposed by the leading Democratic candidates...
...He probably didn't realize that he too would become such an "ancestor...
...During and after the War he brilliantly edited the magazine Politics, an influential radical magazine that served as an organ of oppositional thought for all those who refused to fall prey to the pieties of official wartime propaganda and "progressive" obfuscation...
...We have nearly 14 million unemployed, and very little protest...
...Like Randolph Bourne and George Orwell, both of whom he greatly admired, Dwight helped keep alive the radical tradition and the politics of hope in times of cultural corruption and political befuddlement...
...But under the influence of a somewhat undigested Marxism they argued that the university had to be politicized, one way or another, and that to speak of the "autonomy" of academic life was a liberal illusion...
...Perhaps of the undignified kind...
...Perhaps for reasons not unrelated to those that cause the unemployed themselves to remain silent...
...Still, it would be foolish to wait for "all the answers" (and self-defeating to be intimidated by calls for "fresh ideas"—as if supply-side economics weren't one of the oldest of capitalist notions: trickle-down with a beard...
...There was, it should be said, one analyst on the left who foresaw at least part of the horror that Hitler would bring, and that was Trotsky...
...The New Deal wasn't even enough in the 1930s...
...Unemployment was of course much more severe then, and the intellectuals had channels of protest —some good, some not—we don't have today...
...Meanwhile, isn't it intolerable that in 1983 the United Automobile Workers' Union should have to Dwight Macdonald, who died last December at the age of seventy-six, was a radical critic and journalist very much in the American grain...
...Without denying that it's hard to maintain the autonomy of the university (or any other institution), socialists argued that it was very much worth trying to...
...Reading Irwin Stark's essay in this Dissent brought back memories of the late 1960s...
...but an equivalent of the 1934 New Deal measures would certainly constitute a strong beginning...
...I'm talking about serious intellectuals who do care about the fate of other people: why the silence...
...When he attacked Henry Wallace or James Gould Cozzens his sting was deadly...
...Had Reagan been a shade less precipitous in his failures we would have had more time to work on a liberalleft program for the immediate future...
...Today even friends ask, "Surely you socialists don't suppose you have all the answers...
...This became for them a convenient shield for warding off student criticism...
...The unemployed worker, losing his job, feels at first a shock of dislocation, then a hope that something will turn up soon, then a dazed refusal to believe this could be happening to him, and then perhaps a flutter of guilt that it's really his own fault, since in America such things don't happen .. . That's how it was during the first year or two of the Great Depression...
...Many of those who have been associated with Dissent, this writer in particular, learned much from him...
...In those days the problems of illegitimate ties between American universities and the Pentagon became a big issue on the campus...
...Only later did the unemployed start making themselves heard, and even then, as unemployed, only fitfully and with insufficient force...
...True, our more intransigent left-wing analysts say that a mere repetition of the New Deal isn't going to be enough for getting us out of what is now politely called a recession (though it's not called that in Michigan or Ohio...
...LEWIS COSER 132 start collecting food parcels for its jobless members who have used up their unemployment insurance...
...Why...
...he's a rigid, hard-hearted, simplistic ideologue...
...He's not a nice guy...
...Even after Hitler became chancellor, the German Social Democrats and Communists were issuing statements that "Berlin remains red," etc., betraying a lamentable underestimation of the Nazis' power...
...The crisis, they tell us, is "structural," though precisely what that means and how deeply it goes remains a question...
...And so I find myself wondering whether some of the same professors who grew so devoted to the autonomy of the university when they were being pressed by New Left students will be as fervent in coping with the corporate intrusions Stark describes...
...yet he resigned from the American Committee for Cultural Freedom when it failed to fight against McCarthyism with the same fervor that it fought against Stalin...
...As a brave and witty warrior against cultural cant and political obscurantism Dwight was superb...
...Dwight loved nothing better than the din and noise of political or cultural argument...
...Of course not...
...Dwight was among the leading New York intellectuals who fought the good battle against Stalinists and their fellow travelers before, during, and after World War II...
...nobody has...
...His slashing style, his ready and deadly repartee in political and cultural encounters were memorable...
...Socialist governments need socialist critics, and from a distance I'd bet a nickel that there were socialists in Paris, some in and some out of the Socialist party, who made an uproar after the Salvation Army sent out its kitchen...
...Well, he might have been elected president and as he acquiesced in the engineering of a depression that has thrown millions out of work and cut off vast numbers of children from lunch programs, some people would still have said, "But he's a nice guy...
...Even though he was briefly a Stalinist, then a Trotskyist, a pacifist, and a somewhat conservative anarchist, he remained his own man always reserving his right to think otherwise...
...No doubt, there are explanations: France, a second-rank power, suffers the tremors set off by the decline of the American economy, and even in the best of societies, which the French Socialists can hardly be expected to create in two years, there are bound to be neglected victims, the strays and the derelicts...
...Now Irwin Stark offers graphic evidence that there is a trend toward annexing segments of the American university to profit-making corporations (known in genteel circles as "the private sector...
...Moral #1: It makes a difference who is in office...
...These analysts are probably right...
...Trotsky was utterly wrong about many things, but he wasn't one of those who thought the rise of nazism a mere small discomfort in the life of Europe...
...Moral #2: Even when our guys are in office, there's a need for criticism and complaint...
...One reason intellectuals in the '30s were more articulate than those of today is that by 1933 there was an accumulated body of liberal-left thought 131 that enabled a modest revival of the radical movements and contributed significantly to the New Deal improvisations...
...The French Socialists recognize an obligation to help the homeless...
Vol. 30 • April 1983 • No. 2
