From Karl Marx to John Wayne

...This somewhat self-indulgent reverie reveals the strength of Diggins' book...

...A few years later this same professor found himself so assailed by New Left student radicals that he withdrew from academic life...

...Orwell's famous dissection of Burnham's "power worship" resolved much of my doubt and helped make Orwell one of my heroes, which he has remained ever since...

...Dos Passos' rejection of Commu-ism, Marxism and finally the New Deal occurred as a result of his disillusionment in Spain in the late '30s...

...Other radicals rejected Stalinism as completely as these men without becoming ideologues of the Right...

...at a particular moment of this country's history...

...At about the same time, I discovered Dos Passos' USA and, like so many others, was powerfully affected by its political vision ("they have clubbed us off the streets they are stronger") and its combined naturalistic and Joycean rhythms...

...The rationale for the book is its exploration of how passionately committed radicals could end up toasting Barry Goldwater at Waldorf banquets and mingling with the likes of Clare Boothe Luce, John Wayne and Strom Thurmond (while slowly losing contact with the greatly expanded liberal-Left intelligentsia in which they had once been central figures, and which Eastman had done much to create earlier in the century...

...Having reached the "age of reason" in the early '40s, when the backwash from the '30s was still a powerful tide, I know he has chosen well...

...As Trotsky's first American supporter, Eastman suffered considerable intellectual and political isolation as early as the 1920s...

...Herberg was expelled from the Communist Party in 1929 as a youthful Lovestoneite...

...Up From Communism is divided into three parts, covering the periods 1912-40, 1940-55 and 1955-74, with separate chapters in each part reviewing the ideas and responses to major political events of each protagonist...

...Stalinism was a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the intellectual odyssey that Diggins describes...

...Not so...

...Diggins fails to mention that 1984 was greatly influenced by Burnham's vision of a future world of "managerial" superstates...

...All four, in short, tasted a measure of isolation and exclusion before they moved to the Right, and one wonders whether a less amorphous, more intimate intellectual community, such as that of England, might not have checked their movement...

...As a high school student I read Eastman (and Sidney Hook) on Marxism in V.F...

...Up From Communism stirs personal memories...

...But that, no doubt, would require another book of at least equal length...

...Calverton's Modern Library anthology, The Making of Society—where I also learned for the first time of the existence of something called sociology...

...This is scarcely surprising, for, as Diggins notes, "about half of National Review's editorial board was, after all, Stalin's gift to the American Right...

...In pursuing his declared goal of understanding "anti-Communism as a genuine intellectual position, and not merely a politics of ambition," he has truly written an intellectual history centered primarily—indeed, almost exclusively—on ideas and developing beliefs...

...It reliably documents and critically assesses the contradictions and paradoxes in the positions of both revolutionaries and reactionaries in the U.S...

...It is less satisfactory on the larger world of American intellectuals...

...Still, I should have liked—reflecting perhaps my own biases as a sociologist—greater emphasis on the relation of Eastman, Dos Passos, Herberg, and Burnham to the larger American intellectual community...

...We need more histories of this kind, done when living witnesses are still available...

...Reviewed by Dennis H. Wrong Professor of Sociology, New York University John Diggins, a young historian at the University of California, recounts the ideological pilgrimages of four American intellectuals who started out as radical Marxists and ultimately became editors of the conservative National Review: Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, Will Herberg, and James Bumham...

...He has also examined several collections of unpublished private letters and interviewed Herberg and Burnham, as well as the widows of Eastman and Dos Passos and several former close associates...

...Especially in the United States, "free-floating" intellectuals, in Karl Mannheim's phrase, are likely to be highly volatile, prone to temporary and shifting social and political attachments...

...Burnham started out in that same decade as a Trotskyist...

...The apostate and the renegade always inspire a certain fascination, often a fascinated loathing...

...It is worth noting, too, that except for Burnham, none were academicians...

...Diggins knows that "the experience of Stalinism pressed like a tumor on the brain of a whole generation of writers who came of political age between 1917 and 1939," something many young radicals and Marxists often seem incapable of comprehending, though they lack any disposition to defend Stalinism or even the post-Stalin Soviet Union...

...I have to confess, however, that I did not know what a Lovestoneite was until there were none left...

...And I first encountered Herberg as a religious existentialist in the '50s...

...I recall a comfortable and not unintelligent academic liberal remarking to me—with reference to an ex-Communist who had by no means moved to the far Right—that he hated people who "fouled their own nests...

...In reconstructing the views of his figures, Diggins has diligently burrowed through old magazines like the Liberator and Modern Monthly —and, for that matter, the early New Leader...

...To many under 45, Diggins' choice of subjects may seem arbitrary, dictated perhaps by the sources accessible to him...

...Writing as a "man in the middle," he abjures pat charges of "sell-out" and facile psychologizing about "extremists" who jump from "one end of the political spectrum to the other...

...Diggins is refreshingly free from this spirit...

...I don't specifically remember Burnham's name from the New International, but I read The Managerial Revolution at college a year or so later and The Machiavellians when it came out in 1943...

...The individuals under discussion here were "premature anti-Communists...

...By sheer chance, in early 1940 I picked up a copy of the New International in the only Toronto bookstore carrying "little mags" on politics and literature...

...There I encountered the passionate exchanges between Trotsky and others over the Soviet invasion of Finland, and heated debates over whether the Soviet Union was a "degenerated workers' state" or a new "bureaucratic collectivist" form of tyranny...

...The iron determinism of the former both repelled and bothered me, as did Burnham's 1945 article "Lenin's Heir...

...Diggins closes with two chapters on the dilemmas and paradoxes of the "postwar intellectual Right," dilemmas and paradoxes that often parallel those of the vastly larger intellectual Left...

...Nor does he patronize his subjects as ideological curiosities...