An Intellectual's Fading Footprints
OSHINSKY, DAVTD M.
An Intellectual's Fading Footprints A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald By Michael Wreszin Basic. 590 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by David M....
...In the process, he tolerated practically all of the excesses of radical students??in part because he sympathized with their relentless assaults on authority, in part because he believed that the evils of war and racism were impervious to all but the most outrageous methods of protest...
...Dwight's repeated assertion that the capitalist system's gross injustice to some social groups gave Communism its appeal lent the party political legitimacy...
...The follies of the Establishment, in these two cases, are so extreme...
...Macdonald used his Yale connections to land a job at Time Inc...
...He truly believed that American mass culture represented the nation's selfish, boorish, materialistic values...
...He was true to his word and recruited an astonishing array of talent: George Orwell, Bruno Bettelheim, and such newcomers as Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Paul Goodman, Richard Hofstadter, C. Wright Mills, and Marshall McLuhan...
...This was hardly Wreszin's intention...
...Macdonald, what do you do...
...He had reached a political dead end...
...And he wondered aloud whether the Jews might have saved themselves from the gas chambers if only they had employed the sort of civil disobedience that he and his fellow anarcho-pacifists were practicing in the United States...
...To his credit, Macdonald became a powerful, effective and early critic of the Vietnam War...
...Macdonald claimed, among other things, that the Nazi atrocities were probably overblown, and that genocide??if it truly happened??was part of the historical legacy of industrial capitalism...
...Intellectuals were not only joining the faculties of major universities, they were also writing for major circulation magazines at 10 cents a word...
...According to historian Stephen Whitfield, Macdonald "exhibited more positions than the Kama Sutra" And most of them were wrong...
...If any of this bothered him, he never let on...
...Young Dwight was bookish, awkward and socially insecure...
...His list of mid-cult writers included Pearl Buck, Thornton Wilder, John Steinbeck, Herman Wouk, John Hersey, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Walter Lippmann, Dorothy Thompson, and Archibald MacLeish??in short, almost everyone more successful than Macdonald himself...
...civil liberties were preserved...
...His purpose, he wrote, was "to create a center of consciousness on the Left, welcoming all varieties of political thought...
...Around 1940 a new Macdonald appeared...
...In an odd way, Macdonald was describing himself as well...
...Macdonald did not join the CP, though he probably voted for Earl Browder, its Presidential candidate, in 1936...
...Though the words stopped coming, the passion did not die...
...the Allies won the War...
...A few months later, Macdonald did a long piece for Fortune on the American Communist Party...
...But the choice left him drained and demoralized...
...His own world, the old world, was largely gone...
...He liked what he saw...
...He loves his lucid prose, his brutal honesty, his wildly unpredictable ways...
...He attacked Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he truly despised, as both a front man for capitalists and an embodiment of the all-powerful state...
...After reading this long, detailed, faithful, well-intentioned biography, I can sympathize with Macdonald's lament...
...He had contempt for everything from California, describing Los Angeles as "a barbarically provincial noncity 3,000 miles from our cultural capital and 2,000 even from Chicago...
...In the process, his larger point??that the inhumanity of war knew no national boundaries??was lost in a tangle of ill-conceived (and sometimes malicious) assertions...
...Flustered by her ignorance, he began to stammer, "Well, I, I, was a writer, an editor of Partisan Review and Politics, who...wrote for the New Yorker...
...The work on Fortoe is more unsatisfying every minute," he confessed...
...His obvious talents got him better writing assignments...
...Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Professor of history, Rutgers...
...Some critics dismissed him as an upper-class snob who knew nothing about the tastes of those he so cruelly mocked...
...Not at all...
...by 1935, he was earning theprincely sum of $ 10,000 a year in the midst of a paralyzing depression...
...In the 1930s, Dwight seemed partial to Stalin and to Mussolini??the latter, oddly, for his keen "intellectual" bent...
...America's real motto, he declared, was "I got mine and screw you, Jack...
...It is also true, given the competition, that this was hardly a strenuous task...
...The article, notes Wreszin, "was a remarkably sympathetic statement for the pages of a Luce publication...
...Insisting, in Wreszin's words, that the War "was not a struggle between good and evil or even democracy and totalitarianism, but a conflict between rival forms of imperialism," he placed the Allies on equal moral footing with the Nazis...
...He was assigned to a risky new venture??a glossy dollar-a-copy business magazine called Fortune??that became an overnight success...
...He now saw solutions in terms of small units, little communities in which direct, personal human relationships could be achieved...
...Mills, Bell, David Riesman, and William H. Whyte were among those who analyzed a host of new issues??the struggle between individuals and bureaucracies, the monotony of modem work, the quest for security over adventure, the emptiness of suburban living, the changing standards of success...
...He adores Macdonald, whom he calls "Dwight...
...And the more he studied the Great Depression, the more he blamed the capitalists he had been lauding in print...
...It seemed even more brutal and dehumanizing than the industrial capitalism it sought to overthrow...
...Macdonald's targets included the Book-of-the-Month Club, Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Harper's, the Atlantic, and Saturday Review...
...He came from the "shabby-genteel"??a family of declining status and precious little wealth...
...The only times I feel alive now are when I'm either drunk or God-awfully miserable...
...Of course, Macdonald never pretended otherwise...
...A young woman there, impressed by his sophistication and quick wit, asked him, "Mr...
...author, "A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy " ALMOST A DECADE AGO, in a piece about the Old Left for the New York Times Book Review, I described Dwight Macdonald as "the finest??and most annoying??intellectual journalist of his time...
...His wife's substantial inheritance allowed him to move from the oppressive halls of Fortune to the more vibrant Partisan Review...
...With few exceptions??his belated anti-Stalinism, his support for civil rights, his early opposition to the Vietnam War??Macdonald misjudged about every significant moral and political issue of his time...
...After slogging through Michael Wreszin's huge new biography of Macdonald, I would like to modify my earlier assessment: I now find Macdonald simply annoying...
...Wreszin tells us little about Macdonald's formative years...
...This certainly is true...
...an autobiography, a book about mass culture, a study of Edgar Allan Poe??but nothing got done...
...By the 1950s discussions of radical politics had virtually disappeared...
...His biographer does not entirely disagree...
...Others viewed his withering cultural criticism as an "esthetic substitute" for his deeply embedded anti-American bent...
...It seemed to disappoint Macdonald that his major predictions proved false...
...As Wreszin makes clear, Macdonald's first wife, Nancy Rodman, a Vassar graduate, prodded Dwight's conscience and widened his reading list to take in the likes of Trotsky's autobiography and The Communist Manifesto...
...Weary of writing, unable to focus upon a book-length project, he accepted a series of visiting professorships in New York, Texas, Wisconsin, even California, and traveled to Europe on Ford Foundation junkets...
...Macdonald did a little of everything there: planning issues, researching articles, and composing short puff-pieces about corporate leaders who had impressed publisher Henry Luce...
...Yet he was hardly content...
...Macdonald had almost no contact with the masses, Wreszin points out, and his writings were often deliberately anti-American in tone...
...Born in Manhattan in 1906, Macdonald attended the best private schools, including Phillips Exeter and Yale, where he wrote for the college newspaper and became chief editor of the humor magazine...
...His footprints are barely visible today, and Michael Wreszin has not really deepened them for history...
...With his worldview a shambles, Macdonald quickly reinvented himself again...
...America did not go fascist...
...In 1943 Macdonald left Partisan Review to establish a magazine of his own, Politics...
...Marxism no longer appealed to him...
...In addition, Politics gave a platform to those who had often suffered in silence: blacks, feminists and gays...
...It seemed wrong, almost obscene, for him to be doing this well in a sea of economic misery...
...He had come to recognize that passive resistance was a futile weapon against the Soviet Union, "the most militarist, imperialist, anti-democratic and reactionary nation in the world...
...With great reluctance, he supported the military containment of Communism??apositionmost intellectuals had held for quite some time...
...As apolitical activist, he had long been interested in the relationship of mass organization to totalitarianism...
...Always sensitive to slights, he used his strongest weapon, the written word, to ridicule the snobbery and shallowness of students and faculty alike...
...To his thinking, a good dictator might bring order and confidence to a nation mired in chaos and despair...
...It would not be long, he predicted, before FDR would be "selling black shirts to all Democrats...
...As a wasp elitist, he had long been appalled by the "deplorable" tastes of his fellow citizens...
...By the 1960s Macdonald had run dry...
...His politics were in flux too...
...In some ways, the 1960s were a vibrant time for Macdonald, because the issues he held dear??civil rights, antiwar protest and countercultural possibilities??had literally exploded upon the national scene...
...He argued that white violence against blacks in the American South was more representative of widespread racism than the actions of the Nazis in Germany...
...He never seriously believed in the revolutionary potential of socialism because he did not want to be ruled by a bunch of slovenly workers??or worse, by the leaders they would inevitably produce...
...And Macdonald, to be frank, had always harbored a Menckenesque contempt for the masses...
...His voice trailed off, Wreszin reports...
...When he won a Guggenheim fellowship, he used the stipend for a down payment on a summer cottage in the Hamptons...
...Thus he soon emerged as the nation's leading cultural critic...
...he wrote in apublic defense of SDS mayhem at Columbia University, "as to make necessary the use of extralegal pressures...
...While some writers celebrated America's abundance and its devotion to democratic ideals, others moved beyond this to study the impact of mass consumption and material success on America's values...
...He added on "a charming hexagonal study," notes Wreszin, a "little hideaway with no phone...
...He showed no hint of a social conscience at Yale, and his youthful prejudices??notably a deep belief in female inferiority and a waspish disdain for Jews??did not easily disappear...
...Did this mean that Macdonald opposed dictatorship in principle...
...The truth is that the democracies cannot defeat Hitler by force," he had written in 1941...
...He still had numerous projects in mind...
...A few years before his death in 1982, Macdonald attended a birthday party for his daughter-in-law...
...As the Cold War unfolded, Macdonald's anti-Stalinism grew more pronounced...
...He warned, in particular, about the menace of "mid-cult"??high culture watered down for the poorly educated middle class...
...When friends dropped by, he would show it off, saying, "This is where I don't write...
...But life on the New Haven campus did not suit him well...
...So Macdonald turned to "anarchopacifism" in the dark years of World War II...
...Macdonald had never before experienced the guilt of a privileged man...
...He was perplexed, but worse, hurt by the fact that the younger generation didn't know him...
...Politics closed its doors for good in 1949, the victim of one man's exhaustion and the huge wage increases won by New York's powerful printing unions...
...Writing mostly in the New Yorker, he attacked America's ever-growing avalanche of trash...
...Macdonald had been studying such matters for years...
...His politics were hopelessly confused...
...Macdonald duly noted, moreover, the mercenary nature of modern intellectual life...
...It is probably true, as Wreszin says, that Macdonald "discarded those prejudices more readily than most of his gentile associates did...
...He asserted that the roundup and extermination of Jews was not known, much less supported, by the majority of Germans...
...Above all, Wreszin observes, the magazine focused upon "the forces of modern life that were contributing to the process of dehumanization, alienation, 'thingification.' That was Dwight's dominant sensibility, and it is what drew admiring colleagues into his orbit...
...It only confirmed his fears that he had not really made his mark...
...The major consistency in the man and his life was paradox and contradiction," he writes...
...He "turned inward," Wreszin explains...
...Whatever its faults, he concluded, the CP fought hard for the interests of "the down and out...
Vol. 77 • June 1994 • No. 6
