''Politics'', stylized as ''politics'', was a journal founded and edited by
Dwight Macdonald
Dwight Macdonald (March 24, 1906 – December 19, 1982) was an American writer, editor, film critic, social critic, literary critic, philosopher, and activist. Macdonald was a member of the New York Intellectuals and editor of their leftist maga ...
from 1944 to 1949.
Macdonald had previously been editor at ''
Partisan Review
''Partisan Review'' (''PR'') was a small-circulation quarterly "little magazine" dealing with literature, politics, and cultural commentary published in New York City. The magazine was launched in 1934 by the Communist Party USA–affiliated John ...
'' from 1937 to 1943, but after falling out with its publishers, quit to start ''politics'' as a rival publication, first on a monthly basis and then as a quarterly.
''politics'' published essays on politics and culture and included among its contributors
James Agee
James Rufus Agee ( ; November 27, 1909 – May 16, 1955) was an American novelist, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, writing for ''Time Magazine'', he was one of the most influential film critics in the United States. ...
,
John Berryman
John Allyn McAlpin Berryman (born John Allyn Smith, Jr.; October 25, 1914 – January 7, 1972) was an American poet and scholar. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and is considered a key figure in th ...
,
Bruno Bettelheim
Bruno Bettelheim (August 28, 1903 – March 13, 1990) was an Austrian-born psychologist, scholar, public intellectual and writer who spent most of his academic and clinical career in the United States. An early writer on autism, Bettelheim's wo ...
,
Paul Goodman
Paul Goodman (1911–1972) was an American writer and public intellectual best known for his 1960s works of social criticism. Goodman was prolific across numerous literary genres and non-fiction topics, including the arts, civil rights, decen ...
,
C. Wright Mills
Charles Wright Mills (August 28, 1916 – March 20, 1962) was an American Sociology, sociologist, and a professor of sociology at Columbia University from 1946 until his death in 1962. Mills published widely in both popular and intellectual journ ...
,
Mary McCarthy,
Marianne Moore
Marianne Craig Moore (November 15, 1887 – February 5, 1972) was an American modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor. Her poetry is noted for formal innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit.
Early life
Moore was born in Kirkwood, ...
,
Irving Howe
Irving Howe (; June 11, 1920 – May 5, 1993) was an American literary and social critic and a prominent figure of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Early years
Howe was born as Irving Horenstein in The Bronx, New York. He was the son o ...
,
Daniel Bell
Daniel Bell (May 10, 1919 – January 25, 2011) was an American sociologist, writer, editor, and professor at Harvard University, best known for his contributions to the study of post-industrialism. He has been described as "one of the leading Am ...
, and
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt (, , ; 14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a political philosopher, author, and Holocaust survivor. She is widely considered to be one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century.
Arendt was born ...
.
The journal reflected Macdonald's interest in
European culture
The culture of Europe is rooted in its art, architecture, film, different types of music, economics, literature, and philosophy. European culture is largely rooted in what is often referred to as its "common cultural heritage".
Definition ...
. He used ''politics'' to introduce US readers to the thinking of the French philosopher
Simone Weil
Simone Adolphine Weil ( , ; 3 February 1909 – 24 August 1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. Over 2,500 scholarly works have been published about her, including close analyses and readings of her work, since 1995.
...
, publishing several articles by her, including "A Poem of Force", her reflections on the ''
Iliad
The ''Iliad'' (; grc, Ἰλιάς, Iliás, ; "a poem about Ilium") is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest extant works of literature still widely read by modern audiences. As with the ''Odysse ...
''. He also printed work by
Albert Camus
Albert Camus ( , ; ; 7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960) was a French philosopher, author, dramatist, and journalist. He was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44, the second-youngest recipient in history. His work ...
. Another European, the Italian political and literary critic
Nicola Chiaromonte
Nicola Chiaromonte (1905 in Rapolla, Province of Potenza, Potenza – 18 June 1972 in Rome) was an Italian activist and writer. In 1934 he fled Italy for France, after opposing Benito Mussolini's Italian fascism, fascist government. In Paris he co ...
, was also given space in the journal.
''politics'' was also Macdonald's vehicle for his repeated and energetic attacks against
Henry Wallace and his Progressive Party campaign for President.
In a letter to
Philip Rahv
Philip, also Phillip, is a male given name, derived from the Greek (''Philippos'', lit. "horse-loving" or "fond of horses"), from a compound of (''philos'', "dear", "loved", "loving") and (''hippos'', "horse"). Prominent Philips who popularize ...
at the end of December 1943,
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitar ...
mentioned that Macdonald had written asking him to contribute to his forthcoming journal.
[Orwell, Sonia and Angus, Ian (eds.). ''The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 3: As I Please (1943–1945)'' (Penguin)] Orwell had replied telling him he might "do something 'cultural'" but not 'political' as he was already writing his "
London Letters
The "London Letters" were a series of fifteen articles written by George Orwell when invasion by Nazi Germany seemed imminent,http://www.bu.edu/partisanreview/books/
Boston University and published in the American left-wing literary magazine ' ...
" to ''Partisan Review''.
In his "
As I Please
"As I Please" was a series of articles written between 1943 and 1947 for the British left-wing newspaper ''Tribune'' by author and journalist George Orwell.
On resigning from his job at the BBC in November 1943, Orwell joined ''Tribune'' as lite ...
" article for the 16 June 1944 issue of ''
Tribune
Tribune () was the title of various elected officials in ancient Rome. The two most important were the tribunes of the plebs and the military tribunes. For most of Roman history, a college of ten tribunes of the plebs acted as a check on the ...
'', George Orwell recommended ''politics''.
He stated that he disagreed with its policy but admired "its combination of highbrow political analysis with intelligent literary criticism." He went on to add that there were no monthly or quarterly magazines in England "to come up to" the American ones, of which there were several.
Macdonald, in an editorial comment for the November 1944 issue of ''politics'' referred to a letter from Orwell which cast interesting light on the '
russification
Russification (russian: русификация, rusifikatsiya), or Russianization, is a form of cultural assimilation in which non-Russians, whether involuntarily or voluntarily, give up their culture and language in favor of the Russian cultur ...
' of English political thought over the last two years.
Orwell had read the May issue's review of
Harold Laski
Harold Joseph Laski (30 June 1893 – 24 March 1950) was an English political theorist and economist. He was active in politics and served as the chairman of the British Labour Party from 1945 to 1946 and was a professor at the London School of ...
's ''Faith, Reason and Civilisation'' and mentioned that the ''
Manchester Evening News
The ''Manchester Evening News'' (''MEN'') is a regional daily newspaper covering Greater Manchester in North West England, founded in 1868. It is published Monday–Saturday; a Sunday edition, the ''MEN on Sunday'', was launched in February 201 ...
'', the evening edition of the ''
Manchester Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
'', had refused to print his own review because of its anti-Stalin implications. Despite considering the book "pernicious tripe", Orwell had praised the author for being "aware that the USSR is the real dynamo of the Socialist movement in this country and everywhere else.", but criticized him for shutting his eyes to "purges, liquidations", etc. Macdonald pointed out that the fact that such a review should be considered "too hot" shows how much the feats of the Red Army had misled the English public opinion about Russia. He added that the "English liberal press had been far more honest about the
Moscow Trials
The Moscow trials were a series of show trials held by the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1938 at the instigation of Joseph Stalin. They were nominally directed against "Trotskyists" and members of "Right Opposition" of the Communist Party of th ...
than our own liberal journals" and that
Trotsky
Lev Davidovich Bronstein. ( – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky; uk, link= no, Лев Давидович Троцький; also transliterated ''Lyev'', ''Trotski'', ''Trotskij'', ''Trockij'' and ''Trotzky''. (), was a Russian M ...
had been able to write in the ''Guardian''.
Dwight Macdonald: Culture as politics – and ''politics'' as culture
As a prototypical "one-man magazine", ''politics'' bore the sensibility and characteristic preoccupations of its founding, and sole, editor, the literary and polemical journalist
Dwight Macdonald
Dwight Macdonald (March 24, 1906 – December 19, 1982) was an American writer, editor, film critic, social critic, literary critic, philosopher, and activist. Macdonald was a member of the New York Intellectuals and editor of their leftist maga ...
(1906–1982), whose cantankerous past in the face of institutional authority of all kinds furnished a fitting prologue to his six-year tenure in the editor's chair. After his undergraduate years at
Yale
Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wor ...
– during which he gained early notoriety for his critique in the student newspaper of
William Lyon Phelps
William Lyon Phelps (January 2, 1865 New Haven, Connecticut – August 21, 1943 New Haven, Connecticut) was an American author, critic and scholar. He taught the first American university course on the modern novel. He had a radio show, wrote ...
, a pillar of the university's English faculty, and a lecturer and media figure with a national following – and a brief stint in the Executive Training Squad at the
R. H. Macy
Rowland Hussey Macy Sr. (August 30, 1822 – March 29, 1877) was an American businessman who founded the department store chain Macy's.
Life and career
Macy was the fourth of six children born to a Quaker family on Nantucket Island, Massachuse ...
department-store company, Macdonald landed a position as a writer and associate editor in 1929 at
''Fortune'', the business monthly launched the year of the American stock market crash by
Henry Luce
Henry Robinson Luce (April 3, 1898 – February 28, 1967) was an American magazine magnate who founded ''Time'', ''Life'', ''Fortune'', and ''Sports Illustrated'' magazine. He has been called "the most influential private citizen in the America ...
, a Yale alumnus eight years Macdonald's senior whose stable of iconic magazines had begun in 1923 with
''Time''. Exposure to the many captains of industry whose works and ways he profiled, set against the deepening
Depression, sharpened in him a disdain for capitalism which made common cause with an elitist, aristocratic artistic sensibility that admired the classical European past as a sustaining and shaming foil to what he saw as the cultural degradations attendant upon the ascendancy of mass society. As a result, much of Macdonald's outwardly political criticism would take puckish aim at one or another of the stylistic infelicities, whether verbal or in manners, of the reigning pundits and politicians of the day, along with a critical tendency, somewhat like that of an earlier journalistic-literary "rebel in defense of tradition" (to borrow the title of Macdonald's biographer Michael Wreszin),
H. L. Mencken
Henry Louis Mencken (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956) was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English. He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians, ...
, more characteristically negative in tenor than constructive, programmatic or partisan – Mencken's claim that
one horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms might well have been Macdonald's own.
Upon leaving ''Fortune'' in 1936, after a dispute over his epic four-part profile of
U.S. Steel
United States Steel Corporation, more commonly known as U.S. Steel, is an American integrated steel producer headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with production operations primarily in the United States of America and in severa ...
one of whose crescendoes was an epigram from Lenin on imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, he immersed himself in the works of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, a schooling which, against the backdrop of the
Moscow Trials
The Moscow trials were a series of show trials held by the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1938 at the instigation of Joseph Stalin. They were nominally directed against "Trotskyists" and members of "Right Opposition" of the Communist Party of th ...
and the bitter divisions over their authenticity across the American left intelligentsia, led him to side with the
Trotskyist
Trotskyism is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Ukrainian-Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and some other members of the Left Opposition and Fourth International. Trotsky self-identified as an orthodox Marxist, a rev ...
faction against the
Stalinists
Stalinism is the means of governing and Marxist-Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union from 1927 to 1953 by Joseph Stalin. It included the creation of a one-party totalitarian police state, rapid industrialization, the theory ...
. The New York social critic
Paul Goodman
Paul Goodman (1911–1972) was an American writer and public intellectual best known for his 1960s works of social criticism. Goodman was prolific across numerous literary genres and non-fiction topics, including the arts, civil rights, decen ...
, whose early essays in ''politics'' seeded his flowering into mainstream fame twenty years later, famously asserted that Macdonald "thinks with his typewriter", a restless, perpetually self-revising (and, often enough in rueful retrospect, self-mocking) quality that saw Macdonald studding the later book versions of his magazine essays with a sort of after-the-fact Greek chorus of second thoughts, self-recriminations and liberal, as it were, doses of ''
l'esprit de l'escalier
''L'esprit de l'escalier'' or (, , ; ) is a French term used in English for the predicament of thinking of the perfect reply too late.
Origin
This name for the phenomenon comes from French encyclopedist and philosopher Denis Diderot's descri ...
'', that lent his writing a quality one critic labeled "stereophonic."
The ''Partisan Review'' prelude
Macdonald spent the years from 1937 to 1943 as an associate editor at ''
Partisan Review
''Partisan Review'' (''PR'') was a small-circulation quarterly "little magazine" dealing with literature, politics, and cultural commentary published in New York City. The magazine was launched in 1934 by the Communist Party USA–affiliated John ...
'', among the most famous of 20th-century American little magazines, founded as a Communist journal in 1933 but wrested four years later by a dissident faction led by its to-be veteran co-editors Philip Rahv and William Phillips, a journal synonymous with those "New York intellectuals" wedded equally to an independent radicalism in politics and the modernist avant-garde in literature. Macdonald's steadfast neutrality over the Second World War put him increasingly at odds with his fellow editors, and with much of left opinion following first the attack by Hitler upon Russia and then by the Japanese upon Pearl Harbor affording the Americans, along with Hitler's declaration of war upon the United States in turn, a ''
casus belli
A (; ) is an act or an event that either provokes or is used to justify a war. A ''casus belli'' involves direct offenses or threats against the nation declaring the war, whereas a ' involves offenses or threats against its ally—usually one b ...
'' unto the larger conflict, prompting him to resign from ''Partisan Review'' at the end of 1943, and to launch ''politics'' as a vehicle for his antiwar, pacifist, "third way" perspectives, arising from the belief that the developing crises would trigger soon or late an international worker's movement, socialist in form, equally bent on sweeping away both the capitalist status quo in the west and the Communist dictatorship usurping the revolutionary birthright in the Russian sphere.
Allied conduct of the Second World War
As a self-described pacifist and opponent of American entry into the Second World War, Macdonald in the early numbers of his magazine tracking the final year and a half of the war found much to criticize: the cynicism of Allied war aims, the bombing of civilian populations, the betrayal by the Russians of the Polish resistance in the wake of the crushing of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the internment of Japanese-Americans, racial segregation in the American armed forces, the sentimental belief of the "liblabs" – Macdonald's term of parodist art for the broad liberal and labor coalition across the Democratic party and the left intelligentsia – that the winning of the war would issue in the triumph of the "Common Man" and a "More Abundant Future for All" (parodic scare-capitals were among Macdonald's standard craftsman's tools), and the punitive ascription of collective guilt to civilian populations for the crimes and war policies of the governments to which they were subject.
Collective guilt
In a signature essay in the March 1945 issue of ''politics'', "The Responsibility of Peoples", also issued as a pamphlet, Macdonald took up this latter subject at great length, and extended into follow-up debates in the issues for May 1945 and July 1945.
In an editorial item in ''politics'' for April of that year, Macdonald took aim at the collective-guilt mentality as embodied in one of his favorite targets among liberal intellectuals, from which the passage below affords a prime sample of his wry, satiric style:
:"The German people have let
Max Lerner
Max Lerner (December 20, 1902 – June 5, 1992) was a Russian Empire-born American journalist and educator known for his controversial syndicated column.
Background
Maxwell Alan Lerner was born on December 20, 1902 in Minsk, in the Russian Empi ...
down. There is no other way to put it--they have failed him and damn near busted his big progressive heart. It seems that Lerner, all dressed up in his War Correspondent's Uniform (see cut), was scooting along behind the advancing Ninth Army in his jeep when he came across a large group of German civilians. 'It was a drizzly afternoon,' he writes (
''P.M.'', March 4), 'and they were clustered under a cement shed open at one end. There was a woman with a several-weeks old baby, and there was an old man of 87. Most were men and women in their middle 40's and above, with a scattering of children. They were almost all farmers.' They had been hiding in cellars for three days while American guns destroyed their village in the course of 'the war that they themselves had brought on.' (How 'they themselves had brought it on' not specified.)
:"Descending from his jeep, Lerner asked them: Are You Guilty? He records no reply from the baby, but the others answer that they had never trusted or liked Hitler, that they had always considered the Nazis criminals, and that they were Catholics and hence opposed for religious reasons to Hitler's policies. Why then, asks Lerner with that imploacable logic he shows when he is baiting some one who can’t hit back, Why then did you allow the Nazis to do these things? 'With one accord they answered that they had yielded to force and to force alone. But this doesn’t go down with Lerner; he points out to the shivering, bomb-dazed farmers that the people of France, Belgium, Poland, and Russia didn’t yield to German force; so why did they?* *
ccording to reliable sources, the above countries were all engaged in a war against Germany.This was a blockbuster: 'They were silent.' (Different interpretations might be put on this silence.) Even after this, some of these simple peasants apparently didn’t understand the kind of animal they were dealing with (see cut); they had been accustomed, after all, to the civilized society of hogs. So they asked Lerner to put in a good word for their local police chief, who had used his official post (probably at the risk of his neck) 'to shield them from the severity of the Nazi regime.' We will omit Lerner's reaction to that one.
:"'I came away heartsick and discouraged,' writes Lerner. The crime of these people was cowardice and moral callousness rather than active criminality.... Nowhere did I find the moral strength to face the fact of guilt. Only protests that they were not responsible for what had happened.' Even the baby apparently lacked a sense of responsibility for Hitler, which shows how deeply ingrained this moral callousness is in the German national character.
:"However, Lerner thinks there may be 'better material among workers than among the farmers and middle-class.' (You can’t keep a ''P.M.'' editor discouraged for long.)..."
Japanophobia and the military mind
Other ongoing interventions by Macdonald calling attention to the divers attributions of collective guilt to enemy civilians during wartime, if on rather a more exalted register of jingoist bloodthirstiness, included an essay, "My Favorite General", whose treatment of its iconic lead subject -
:"My favorite general is
George S. Patton Jr.
George Smith Patton Jr. (November 11, 1885 – December 21, 1945) was a General (United States), general in the United States Army who commanded the Seventh United States Army in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations, Mediterranean Theater ...
Some of our generals, like Stilwell, have developed a sly ability to simulate human beings. But Patton always behaves as a general should. ... He writes bloodcurdling poetry apostrophizing the God of Battles. He
slaps shell-shocked soldiers and curses them for cowards. When Italian mules obstruct the progress of his staff car, he has them executed on the spot ... He wears special uniforms, which, like Goering, he designs himself and which are calculated, like the ox horns worn by ancient Gothic chieftains, to strike terror into the enemy (and into any rational person, for that matter.)"
preceded a report of an off-the-record dinner speech to Washington newspapermen by Navy Admiral
William F. "Bull" Halsey, from which one characteristic passage,
:"I hate Japs! I'm telling you men, that if I met a pregnant Japanese woman, I'd kick her in the belly!"
led Macdonald to note that
:"Bull is a top-ranking naval officer, which gives him the privilege of talking in public in a way which would get civilians locked up in the violent ward of Bellevue. ... A few more such generals and admirals, and militarism will be a dead issue in this country."
In responding two months later to letters from two soldiers – one of whom signed himself "A DISGUSTED MEMBER OF OUR ARMED FORCES." – defending the motivational tactics of Patton and Halsey, Macdonald clarified his views in noting that
:. . . These apologies for Patton are based on two arguments:
:(1) The war was a just one; therefore, it had to be won; to win it, good generals are needed; Patton is a good general; therefore, Patton is justified. (2) Army life is radically different from civilian life; therefore, it is foolish to criticise its values from a civilian standpoint. Both arguments raise the problem of means and ends.
:(1)I never thought World War II was a just war. But accepting this premise for the sake of argument, I'd say that far from the justness of the war excusing Patton's barbarism, Patton's barbarism calls into question the justness of the war. There is something suspect about an end which calls for such means. As I have noted before, Patton is my favorite general because he expresses so naively the real nature of World War II.
:(2) That life in the U.S. Army is more brutal and inhumane than civilian life is true, but this fact would seem to be something to be criticised and changed rather than accepted as a law of nature. If it cannot be changed, then, if we are serious about our humane values, we must reject the war which requires such instruments to achieve its ends. Also: my correspondents would wall off military from civilian society, whereas I would do just the opposite: extend civilian values throughout the armed forces. What is actually taking place is, of course, something worse than either of these alternatives: a breaking down, indeed, of the wall between military and civil society, but in the sense that the former is reshaping the latter.
Conscientious objection
Given his pacifist sympathies during the war, it was natural for Macdonald to run many essays from and about
conscientious objector
A conscientious objector (often shortened to conchie) is an "individual who has claimed the right to refuse to perform military service" on the grounds of freedom of thought, conscience, or religion. The term has also been extended to object ...
s (C.O.s), with whose position he sympathized, but whose common preference for reassignment to civilian over military-support work he did not reflexively share – as an egalitarian with revolutionary hopes for the leavening educational function of the man of conscience upon the larger population, soldiers included, he felt that a more direct presence among the armed forces was a constructive means to the desired end, a subject debated at length within the magazine,. an above-average proportion of whose readers and contributors were drawn from both the ranks of C.O.s and, given the sheer scale of wartime mobilization, soldiers themselves.
Racial segregation, in war and in peace
Among the forms of social injustice in and out of uniform to which ''politics'' devoted extended coverage was that of racial segregation, in the regular feature "Free and Equal" and elsewhere. Moral issues aside and assumed, Macdonald in one article questioned the very effectiveness for military ends of racial segregation in the armed services, at a time when it was a common assumption that it was no business of the military, given its overriding mission, to be bothering itself with the advancement of "utopian" social goals scarcely advanced elsewhere in a civilian realm scarcely able itself to boast of a shining record of omnichrome rainbow tolerance. One article on race matters, by Wilfred H. Kerr, co-chairman of the Lynn Committee to Abolish Segregation in the Armed Forces, forecast one ironic effect in the postwar era of race strife, prophesying in its very title, "Negroism: Strange Fruit of Segregation", the eventual rise of Black Power and other forms of black separatism. The African-American writer
George S. Schuyler
George Samuel Schuyler (; February 25, 1895 – August 31, 1977) was an American writer, journalist, and social commentator known for his conservatism after he had initially supported socialism.
Early life
George Samuel Schuyler was born in ...
, sometimes called "the black Mencken" after his earlier association with the Baltimore journalist's monthly ''The American Mercury'', contributed an impassioned review of
An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, the Swedish scholar
Gunnar Myrdal
Karl Gunnar Myrdal ( ; ; 6 December 1898 – 17 May 1987) was a Swedish economist and sociologist. In 1974, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences along with Friedrich Hayek for "their pioneering work in the theory of money a ...
's pathbreaking and exhaustive survey of the current state of the American racial agony.
The dropping of the atom bomb
The dropping by the Americans of atom bombs upon the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as a means of hastening the end of the remaining Pacific front of the Second World War, afforded Macdonald a zero point of the modern condition and a rhetorical crescendo of humanist horror for ''politics'', in the form of a widely anthologized lead editorial filling the top half of the cover of the issue for August 1945:
:"At 9:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, an American plane dropped a single bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Exploding with the force of 20,000 tons of TNT, the bomb destroyed in a twinkling two-thirds of the city, including, presumably, most of the 343,000 human beings who lived there. No warning whatsoever was given. This atrocious action places 'us,' the defenders of civilization, on a moral level with 'them,' the beasts of Maidanek. And 'we,' the American people, are just as much and as little responsible for this horror as 'they,' the German people.
:"So much is obvious. But more must be said. For the atomic bomb renders anticlimactical even the ending of the greatest war in history
hich seems imminent as this goes to press
Ij ( fa, ايج, also Romanized as Īj; also known as Hich and Īch) is a village in Golabar Rural District, in the Central District of Ijrud County, Zanjan Province, Iran
Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also ...
The concepts 'WAR' and 'PROGRESS,' ARE NOW OBSOLETE. Both suggest human aspirations, emotions, aims, consciousness. 'The greatest achievement of organized science in history,' said President Truman after the Hiroshima catastrophe--which it probably was, and so much the worse for organized science. Such 'progress' fills no human needs of either the destroyed or the destroyers. And a war of atomic bombs is not a war. It is a scientific experiment.
THE FUTILITY OF MODERN WARFARE SHOULD NOW BE CLEAR. Must we not now conclude, with Simone Weil, that the technical aspect of war today is the evil, regardless of political factors? Can one imagine that the atomic bomb could ever be used 'in a good cause'? Do not such means, instantly, of themselves, corrupt ANY cause?
ATOMIC BOMBS ARE THE NATURAL PRODUCT OF THE KIND OF SOCIETY WE HAVE CREATED. They are as easy, normal and unforced an expression of the American Standard of Living as electric iceboxes. We do not dream of a world in which atomic fission will be 'harnessed to constructive ends.' The new energy will be at the service of the rulers; it will change their strength but not their aims. The underlying population should regard this new source of energy with lively interest--the interest of victims.
THOSE WHO WIELD SUCH DESTRUCTIVE POWER ARE OUTCASTS FROM HUMANITY. They may be gods, they may be brutes, but they are not men.
WE MUST 'GET' THE MODERN NATIONAL STATE BEFORE IT 'GETS' US. The crazy and murderous nature of the kind of society we have created is underlined by the atomic bomb. Every individual who wants to save his humanity--and indeed his skin--had better begin thinking 'dangerous thoughts' about sabotage, resistance, rebellion, and the fraternity of all men everywhere. The mental attitude known as 'negativism' is a good start."
''politics'' was one of several left-wing American publications to condemn the bombing (along with ''
The Progressive
''The Progressive'' is a left-leaning American magazine and website covering politics and culture. Founded in 1909 by U.S. senator Robert M. La Follette Sr. and co-edited with his wife Belle Case La Follette, it was originally called ''La Follett ...
'', ''
Common Sense
''Common Sense'' is a 47-page pamphlet written by Thomas Paine in 1775–1776 advocating independence from Great Britain to people in the Thirteen Colonies. Writing in clear and persuasive prose, Paine collected various moral and political argu ...
'' and ''
The Militant
''The Militant'' is an international socialist newsweekly connected to the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Pathfinder Press. It is published in the United States and distributed in other countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Aus ...
'').
European intellectuals
Given Macdonald's interest in European intellectual life, and his blended interests in both political and literary matters in an age whose own most famous political essayists were among their respective nations' leading literary figures –
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitar ...
,
Albert Camus
Albert Camus ( , ; ; 7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960) was a French philosopher, author, dramatist, and journalist. He was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44, the second-youngest recipient in history. His work ...
,
Ignazio Silone
Secondino Tranquilli (1 May 1900 – 22 August 1978), known by the pseudonym Ignazio Silone (, ), was an Italian political leader, novelist, and short-story writer, world-famous during World War II for his powerful anti-fascist novels. He was no ...
– it was natural that the onetime ''Partisan Review'' veteran Macdonald would feature such writers prominently throughout his controlling tenure atop the masthead of ''politics''. In addition to contributions from those just mentioned, Macdonald published regular essays and columns by his exiled Italian friends
Nicola Chiaromonte
Nicola Chiaromonte (1905 in Rapolla, Province of Potenza, Potenza – 18 June 1972 in Rome) was an Italian activist and writer. In 1934 he fled Italy for France, after opposing Benito Mussolini's Italian fascism, fascist government. In Paris he co ...
and
Niccolo Tucci, who were among his most prolific contributors. French intellectuals, often in reprints from native journals, took center stage in a special number from July–August 1947 given over wholly to "French Political Writing," whose stellar roster included
Georges Bataille
Georges Albert Maurice Victor Bataille (; ; 10 September 1897 – 9 July 1962) was a French philosopher and intellectual working in philosophy, literature, sociology, anthropology, and history of art. His writing, which included essays, novels, ...
, Camus,
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir (, ; ; 9 January 1908 – 14 April 1986) was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist, and feminist activist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, and even th ...
,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty. (; 14 March 1908 – 3 May 1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest an ...
,
David Rousset
David Rousset (18 January 1912 in Roanne, Loire – 13 December 1997) was a French writer and political activist, a recipient of Prix Renaudot, a French literary award. A survivor of the Neuengamme concentration camp and the Buchenwald Nazi ...
, and
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (, ; ; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology), a French playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and litera ...
.
Toward a recovered humanism
The accumulated horrors of total war – from bureaucratic regimentation of the home front to concentration and death camps, racialist nationalism and genocide, atomic weapons, firebombing of civilian populations, and, not least, the replacement as ruling power over Eastern and Central Europe of one, defeated total state, that of Hitler's Germany, with the newly powerful one, that of Stalinist Russia, that had helped defeat it – combined with the ongoing fading of hopes across the
anti-Stalinist left
The anti-Stalinist left is an umbrella term for various kinds of left-wing political movements that opposed Joseph Stalin, Stalinism and the actual system of governance Stalin implemented as leader of the Soviet Union between 1927 and 1953. Th ...
for a long-dreamed socialist dawn to put into wholesale question the sort of reflexive, confident nineteenth-century belief in an all-but-inevitable Progress that had long underwritten the political dimension of western intellectual life. As world war gave way to
Cold War
The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because the ...
, a much-noted reactive turn among intellectuals in the west to such pre- and post-Marxist registers of thought as those offered by religion (
Niebuhr,
Barth,
Tillich),
existentialism
Existentialism ( ) is a form of philosophical inquiry that explores the problem of human existence and centers on human thinking, feeling, and acting. Existentialist thinkers frequently explore issues related to the meaning, purpose, and valu ...
(
Camus
Albert Camus ( , ; ; 7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960) was a French philosopher, author, dramatist, and journalist. He was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44, the second-youngest recipient in history. His works ...
,
Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (, ; ; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology), a French playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and litera ...
,
Jaspers), or both at once (the newly modish
Kierkegaard) provided regular fare in both the highbrow little magazines of the day and the books pages of the newsweeklies.
This postwar turn from the old mechanistic secular faith of Marxism toward renewed ethical, if not always explicitly religious, commitments, took central, watershed root in ''politics'' as well, as the uneasy postwar peace agreements and zoned division of Europe,
de-Nazification
Denazification (german: link=yes, Entnazifizierung) was an Allied initiative to rid German and Austrian society, culture, press, economy, judiciary, and politics of the Nazi ideology following the Second World War. It was carried out by removi ...
of German elites and
war-crimes trials cemented the Allied victory after the summer of 1945. In the magazine's April 1946 number, Macdonald published the inaugural version of one of his signature essays, "The Root is Man", whose widely reprinted book version from seven years later would eventually find its way almost fifty years later on the lists of an American publisher specializing in anarchist and other forms of radical literature. The inauguration of a regular department in the magazine, "New Roads", heralded the quest formally, as did a regular feature devoted to "Ancestors" from across the ranks of assorted pre-20th century anarchists (
P. J. Proudhon
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (, , ; 15 January 1809, Besançon – 19 January 1865, Paris) was a French socialist,Landauer, Carl; Landauer, Hilde Stein; Valkenier, Elizabeth Kridl (1979) 959 "The Three Anticapitalistic Movements". ''European Social ...
),
:"EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first of a series of articles by and about such political thinkers of the past as
Diderot
Denis Diderot (; ; 5 October 171331 July 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the ''Encyclopédie'' along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert. He was a prominen ...
,
Condorcet
Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet (; 17 September 1743 – 29 March 1794), known as Nicolas de Condorcet, was a French philosopher and mathematician. His ideas, including support for a liberal economy, free and equal pu ...
,
Tom Paine
Thomas Paine (born Thomas Pain; – In the contemporary record as noted by Conway, Paine's birth date is given as January 29, 1736–37. Common practice was to use a dash or a slash to separate the old-style year from the new-style year. In th ...
,
Saint-Simon,
Charles Fourier
François Marie Charles Fourier (;; 7 April 1772 – 10 October 1837) was a French philosopher, an influential early socialist thinker and one of the founders of utopian socialism. Some of Fourier's social and moral views, held to be radical in ...
,
Alexander Herzen
Alexander Ivanovich Herzen (russian: Алекса́ндр Ива́нович Ге́рцен, translit=Alexándr Ivánovich Gértsen; ) was a Russian writer and thinker known as the "father of Russian socialism" and one of the main fathers of agra ...
,
Kropotkin
Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (; russian: link=no, Пётр Алексе́евич Кропо́ткин ; 9 December 1842 – 8 February 1921) was a Russian anarchist, socialist, revolutionary, historian, scientist, philosopher, and activist ...
,
Tolstoy
Count Lev Nikolayevich TolstoyTolstoy pronounced his first name as , which corresponds to the romanization ''Lyov''. () (; russian: link=no, Лев Николаевич Толстой,In Tolstoy's day, his name was written as in pre-refor ...
,
Daniel De Leon
Daniel De Leon (; December 14, 1852 – May 11, 1914), alternatively spelt Daniel de León, was a Curaçaoan-American socialist newspaper editor, politician, Marxist theoretician, and trade union organizer. He is regarded as the forefather o ...
, and
Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg (; ; pl, Róża Luksemburg or ; 5 March 1871 – 15 January 1919) was a Polish and naturalised-German revolutionary socialist, Marxist philosopher and anti-war activist. Successively, she was a member of the Proletariat party, ...
. The names, it will be noted, are mostly of non-Marxists. This is because (1) Marxism is already widely familiar to American intellectuals (perhaps disproportionately so); (2) the contemporary crisis of socialism demands that we supplement and reshape the Marxist heritage with the aid of 'Utopian' socialism; 18th century liberalism, anarchism, and pacifism." social and political philosophers (
William Godwin
William Godwin (3 March 1756 – 7 April 1836) was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism and the first modern proponent of anarchism. Godwin is most famous for ...
), reformers (
Alexander Herzen
Alexander Ivanovich Herzen (russian: Алекса́ндр Ива́нович Ге́рцен, translit=Alexándr Ivánovich Gértsen; ) was a Russian writer and thinker known as the "father of Russian socialism" and one of the main fathers of agra ...
), and the morally rebellious type among artists (
Leo Tolstoy
Count Lev Nikolayevich TolstoyTolstoy pronounced his first name as , which corresponds to the romanization ''Lyov''. () (; russian: link=no, Лев Николаевич Толстой,In Tolstoy's day, his name was written as in pre-refor ...
). And in the wake of the assassination in early 1948 of
Mohandas Gandhi
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (; ; 2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948), popularly known as Mahatma Gandhi, was an Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist Quote: "... marks Gandhi as a hybrid cosmopolitan figure who transformed ... anti- ...
, ''politics'' devoted a full-court symposium to the life, ideas, and relevance both inspirational and practical of the slain leader of Indian independence, with contributions from
James Agee
James Rufus Agee ( ; November 27, 1909 – May 16, 1955) was an American novelist, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, writing for ''Time Magazine'', he was one of the most influential film critics in the United States. ...
,
Nicola Chiaromonte
Nicola Chiaromonte (1905 in Rapolla, Province of Potenza, Potenza – 18 June 1972 in Rome) was an Italian activist and writer. In 1934 he fled Italy for France, after opposing Benito Mussolini's Italian fascism, fascist government. In Paris he co ...
,
Paul Goodman
Paul Goodman (1911–1972) was an American writer and public intellectual best known for his 1960s works of social criticism. Goodman was prolific across numerous literary genres and non-fiction topics, including the arts, civil rights, decen ...
, Macdonald,
Mary McCarthy, and
Niccolo Tucci, followed by copious extracts from Gandhi's own weekly ''
Harijan
Dalit (from sa, दलित, dalita meaning "broken/scattered"), also previously known as untouchable, is the lowest stratum of the castes in India. Dalits were excluded from the four-fold varna system of Hinduism and were seen as forming a ...
''.
The counterculture of anarchist humanism: prologue to the 1960s
Macdonald's publishing in ''politics'' of some of the earliest essays by the young Columbia-bound sociologist
C. Wright Mills
Charles Wright Mills (August 28, 1916 – March 20, 1962) was an American Sociology, sociologist, and a professor of sociology at Columbia University from 1946 until his death in 1962. Mills published widely in both popular and intellectual journ ...
and the young novelist, playwright, therapist, and New York social critic
Paul Goodman
Paul Goodman (1911–1972) was an American writer and public intellectual best known for his 1960s works of social criticism. Goodman was prolific across numerous literary genres and non-fiction topics, including the arts, civil rights, decen ...
helped seed their rise to national fame twenty years later as two of the signature theorists undergirding the New Left critique of postwar industrial society and mass culture. A debate between Mills and Goodman over the proper locus for the critique of repressive structures in America, with Mills taking a broadly Marxist frame in examining above-ground social structures, and Goodman preferring instead to excavate the post-Freudian unconscious and the repression of instinct, with the social psychology of
Karen Horney
Karen Horney (; ; 16 September 1885 – 4 December 1952) was a German psychoanalyst who practised in the United States during her later career. Her theories questioned some traditional Freudian views. This was particularly true of her theories of ...
and
Erich Fromm
Erich Seligmann Fromm (; ; March 23, 1900 – March 18, 1980) was a German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime and settled in the U ...
for supporting witness, prefigured the sorts of polemics that would soon crowd the American quality-paperback tables from Ann Arbor to Yale amid the renewal of campus activism and new modes of scholarship. Other harbingers of future cultural ferment may be discerned in a long poem by the English anarcho-pacifist physician
Alex Comfort
Alexander Comfort (10 February 1920 – 26 March 2000) was a British scientist and physician known best for his nonfiction sex manual, ''The Joy of Sex'' (1972). He was an author of both fiction and nonfiction, as well as a gerontologist, ...
(ascended for all time into the global ''non''-literary firmament since 1972 thanks to ''
The Joy of Sex
''The Joy of Sex'' is a 1972 illustrated sex manual by British author Alex Comfort. An updated edition was released in September 2008.
Overview
''The Joy of Sex'' spent eleven weeks at the top of the ''New York Times'' bestseller list and more ...
''), an essay by the young San Francisco Beat-affiliated poet Robert Duncan on the internalized repression, thence redirected outward, too often afflicting "The Homosexual in Society", and numerous essays by the Canadian-born London anarchist and conscientious objector
George Woodcock
George Woodcock (; May 8, 1912 – January 28, 1995) was a Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anarchist thinker, a philosopher, an essayist and literary critic. He was also a poet and published several volumes of travel wri ...
, editor at the time of the anarchist cultural quarterly NOW, the raiding of the offices of whose publisher, Freedom Press, during the war by the political arm of the London police he chronicled in a letter to ''politics'' in all its unavoidable irony:
:"One of the houses raided was that of a surrealist not even directly connected with the anarchist movement. The day after the raid a Special Branch detective appeared to say that he had always been interested in surrealism, and would like to join the surrealist movement!"
And twenty years before his ideas on the "global village" made him a prophetic household name worldwide, the budding Canadian media theorist
Marshall McLuhan
Herbert Marshall McLuhan (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his ...
weighed in as a contributor to ''politics'' with a discussion of the problems of women in modern bureaucratic society.
Counteracting the Soviet myth
With the grim consolidation of Stalinist rule in Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, and the ensnaring of a large part of the younger generation on the left by the
Henry Wallace movement and what he felt to be common notions within of either a moral equivalence between Russia and the west, or an outright tipping of the moral scales in favor of the Soviet side, Macdonald, while still claiming adherence to the anarchist and pacifist labels, and upon re-immersion in the vast literature on recent Communist history, devoted a large opening section of the Winter 1948 number of ''politics'' to the attempt to counteract the Soviet myth, among whose articles he included an extensive reading list of standard works chronicling
forced labor in the Soviet Union
Forced labor was used extensively in the Soviet Union as a means of controlling Soviet citizens and foreigners. Forced labor also provided manpower for government projects and for reconstruction after the war. It began before the Gulag and Kolkho ...
, the Moscow trials, the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33, dating back to the early critiques of the Bolshevik experiment in its infancy published by the anarchist Emma Goldman and the eminent English philosopher Bertrand Russell. In the sphere of foreign and military policy in the developing Cold War, though the range of perspectives Macdonald published naturally did not include pro-Soviet or
fellow-traveling writers, he did publish those advocating that the United States take the first, unilateral step toward an eventual mutual disarmament, in the belief the Soviets, assured of the good faith of their ostensibly stronger adversary, would be moved to follow suit. Within the same symposium, Macdonald included a detailed response from the Deweyite pragmatist philosopher and militantly anti-Soviet social democrat,
Sidney Hook
Sidney Hook (December 20, 1902 – July 12, 1989) was an American philosopher of pragmatism known for his contributions to the philosophy of history, the philosophy of education, political theory, and ethics. After embracing communism in his youth ...
:
:"Messrs. Daniel and Squires are naive. The political kernel of their proposal is their hope that if the United States destroys its atomic bombs and plants, Stalin will be ashamed of himself and abandon his dictatorship ... I am not in favor of a preventive war because I am as confident as one can be in human affairs that so long as Stalin fears he will be blasted off the face of the earth once he strikes against the West, he will wait. We can see to it that he is never free of that fear. Even less than the romantic Hitler has he the demonic desire to bring the world down on him in a universal ruin."
Macdonald would travel in Hook's orbit the next decade, which saw him serve for a year as Associate Editor of the London-based monthly
''Encounter'', founded in 1953 by the
Congress for Cultural Freedom
The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was an anti-communist advocacy group founded in 1950. At its height, the CCF was active in thirty-five countries. In 1966 it was revealed that the CIA was instrumental in the establishment and funding of the ...
, whose own founding in Paris in 1950, with Hook among its leading intellectual lights, he prophesied at the end of the same essay:
:"I speak in the first person only for purposes of expository emphasis. ''Give me a hundred million dollars and a thousand dedicated people, and I will guarantee to generate such a wave of democratic unrest among the masses—yes, even among the soldiers—of Stalin's own empire, that all of his problems for a long time to come will be internal.'' I can find the people. . . ."
The Henry Wallace campaign and "Wallese"
One natural cognate of Macdonald's status as a fiercely anti-Stalinist leftist lay in his ongoing critical attention to
Henry Wallace, the final vice president (1941–1945) under Franklin Roosevelt whose tenure thus was bookended by respective terms heading up the Departments of Agriculture (1933–1940 and Commerce (1945–1946), followed by his nomination in 1948 atop the presidential ticket of the Progressive Party, who Macdonald saw as afflicted by a dangerously credulous and whitewashing attitude toward Stalinist Russia, along with a general-purpose timid banality and penchant for wooly idealist rhetoric divorced from concrete reality. Macdonald devoted the opening sections of the issue of ''politics'' for March 1947 to an extended look at Wallace, along with an "Autopsy" of the Wallace campaign after the 1948 election. From "The Wallace Myth" from March 1947:
:"Wallaceland is the mental habitat of Henry Wallace plus few hundred thousand regular readers of ''The New Republic'', ''The Nation'', and ''PM''. It is a region of perpetual fogs, caused by the warm winds of the liberal Gulf Stream coming in contact with the Soviet glacier. Its natives speak 'Wallese', a debased provincial dialect.
:"Wallese is as rigidly formalized as Mandarin Chinese. The Good people are described by ritualistic adjectives: 'forward-looking', 'freedom-loving', 'clear-thinking', and, of course, 'democratic' and 'progressive.' The Bad people are always 'reactionaries' or 'red-baiters'; there are surprisingly few of them, considering the power they wield, and they are perversely wicked, since their ''real'' interests would best be served by the Progressive and Realistic policies favored by the Good people. Wallese is always employed to Unite rather than to Divide (hence the fog), and to Further Positive, Constructive Aims rather than Merely to Engage in Irresponsible and Destructive Criticism. As George F. Babbitt of Zenith City, who had his own brand of Wallese in the twenties, used to say: It's Easy Enough to Criticise! There are other conventions in Wallese. Issues are always Clarified, Events invariably Exert Pressure, Problems are Faced (good) or Not Faced (bad), and the World is either On the March (good) or At the Crossroads (neutral) or Facing a Crisis (bad). No article may be composed in Wallese unless it includes at least one of the following terms: 'grass roots', 'integration', 'horizon', 'general welfare.' The frequent use of the 'should and will' or 'can and must' construction is also obligatory, as in the (imaginary) sentence: 'The American people can and must free the forward march of technology from the dead hand of monopoly.' The adjective 'new' is much used, as: 'new horizons', 'new frontiers', and 'the new democracy' (which means the old democracy minus all democratic elements). Like 'adventure', another important word in Wallese,* *
it suggests something Different (and God knows we're sick of what we've got now), Positive, Exciting—something to which the old critical categories, which have proved so lethal in the hands of Irresponsible and Destructive critics, cannot be applied. Thus many of us are by now somewhat leery of both democracy and ''The New Republic'', but how about the new democracy and the new ''New Republic''? Perhaps the greatest sentence ever composed in Wallese is the following, from the hand of the master himself: 'New frontiers beckon with meaningful adventure.'"
Culture, high, middlebrow and mass
As the 2011 reissue by New York Review Books Classics of his signature 1950s cultural essays,
Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain' (most originally gathered in 1962 as ''Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture''), may indicate, the phase of the career of Dwight Macdonald best known to the educated public came with his arrival in 1952 as critic on the staff of ''The New Yorker'', there to assay with dialectical scalpel at the ready such characteristic products of postwar aspirational "middlebrow" – or "Midcult" to Macdonald – culture as the Great Books of the Western World book-sets, the Revised Standard Version translation of the Bible, the latter-day age-of-science penchant for facts over interpretative general ideas, and that hardiest of evergreens in the groves of the American book market, the how-to book. It was in ''politics'', though, if not surprisingly, that Macdonald provided himself with a premonitory sounding board for such preoccupations, in and out of his regular roundup "Popular Culture", one of whose items also hints at Macdonald's dawn-to-decadence penchant for connecting the evolution of cultural forms to that of the stages of industrial development from which they issue:
:Whatever Became of Addison Sims?
:The kind of question it might be fruitful to answer is: why was self-education so much more popular several generations ago than it seems to be now? Pelmanism, Chatauqua, the Harvard Classics ('Fifteen Minutes a Day'), the International Correspondence Schools, the Roth Memory Course ('Why ''of course'' I remember you--Mr. Addison Sims of Seattle!'), Cooper Union--these have become innocent archaisms. At the turn of the century, book agents roamed the country ringing doorbells and selling sets of 'standard authors' (Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot) encyclopedias and multi-volume historical works. The book-agent has vanished; people read for amusement, not instruction, and authors are no longer 'standard' or sold in sets. Does all this perhaps show the growth of a popular instinct that education is not the golden key to progress which the Victorians thought it was? Is the myth of the
self-made man
"Self-made man" is a classic phrase coined on February 2, 1842 by Henry Clay in the United States Senate, to describe individuals whose success lay within the individuals themselves, not with outside conditions. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Foun ...
fading? Is the modern world at once so irrational and so totally organized that the mass-man simply gives up, no longer hoping to understand or 'improve' his situation?
:A study of self-education in the last fifty years might be a good way to answer such questions--as Orwell in his 'Ethics of the Detective Story' (POLITICS, November 1944) was able to trace in ''that'' field the deterioration of ethical standards during the same period. I can't help feeling that American critics might more profitably concern themselves with such rich and relatively unexplored areas than with trying to find something new to say about Henry James."
Publishing and circulation
As is proverbial among small-circulation journals of intellectual opinion, the finances of ''politics'' ran at a deficit, much of it covered by Macdonald's first wife the former Nancy Rodman (m. 1934), sister of the poet, editor and author
Selden Rodman
Cary Selden Rodman (February 19, 1909 – November 2, 2002) was a prolific American writer of poetry, plays and prose, political commentary, art criticism, Latin American and Caribbean history, biography and travel writing—publishing a book al ...
, and the beneficiary on her mother's side of an ample trust fund; also proverbially among such magazines, circulation tended toward the 5,000 (c. 60 percent subscription, 40 percent newsstand) mark. Macdonald changed its original monthly frequency to quarterly early in its fourth year of six, and acknowledged in an aside to subscribers his awareness of its chronic scheduling delays in a rueful aside in the issue for (in the best of all intended worlds) Summer 1948:
:Note
:For reasons not unconnected with the postal regulations governing second-class matter, the present issue, which appears early in November, is officially styled the Summer issue. The Editor extends his customary regrets, apologies and condolences to the readers.
Nancy's humanitarian and philanthropic background played a key role in an ongoing project of the magazine after the war, that of "Packages Abroad", by which regular appeals to readers, channeled directly or through such standard relief agencies as CARE, enabled the donation of food, clothing, shoes and coal for heating to thousands of individuals and families across war-ravaged Europe deprived of them.
Reception and influence
In his column in the left-wing London ''Tribune'', George Orwell wrote favorably of ''politics'', as reprinted in a subscription advertisement in the latter paper in August, 1944: "One cannot buy magazines from abroad nowadays, but I recommend anyone who has a friend in New York to try and cadge a copy of ''politics'', the new monthly magazine edited by the Marxist literary critic, Dwight Macdonald. I don’t agree with the policy of this paper, which is anti-war (not from a pacifist angle), but I admire its combination of highbrow political analysis with intelligent literary criticism... Politically, the paper in this country most nearly corresponding to ''politics'' would be, I suppose, ''The New Leader''. You have only to compare the get-up, the style of writing, the range of subjects, and the intellectual level of the two papers, to see what it means to live in a country where there are still leisure and wood-pulp." In her preface to a 1968 reissue of the full run of ''politics'', the eminent German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt asserted that
:"When I was asked to write a brief introduction to the reprint edition of ''politics'' I was tempted to yield to the rather pleasant melancholy of "once upon a time" and to indulge in the nostalgic contemplation that seems to be the appropriate mood for all recollection. Now that I have carefully reread the forty-two issues which appeared from 1944 to 1949—more carefully, I am sure, than I read them more than twenty years ago—this mood has vanished for the simple reason that so many of its articles, comments, and factual reports read as though they were written today or yesterday or yesteryear, except that the concerns and perplexities of a little magazine with a peak circulation of not much more than 5,000 have become the daily bread of newspapers and periodicals with mass circulation. For the issues, far from being outdated, let alone resolved, by the enormous changes in our everyday world, have only increased in urgency."
The Polish poet and 1980 Nobelist in Literature,
Czesław Miłosz
Czesław Miłosz (, also , ; 30 June 1911 – 14 August 2004) was a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. Regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation ...
, whose renowned 1953 essay collection ''
The Captive Mind
''The Captive Mind'' (Polish: ''Zniewolony umysł'') is a 1953 work of nonfiction by Polish writer, poet, academic and Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz. It was first published in English in a translation by Jane Zielonko in 1953.
Overview
''The ...
'', amplified a number of Macdonald's own themes regarding the effect of Stalinism on the European mind, found in Macdonald's own independent, anti-authoritarian ethical humanism much to admire, seeing in him a successor to "Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville ... a totally American phenomenon--the completely free man, capable of making decisions at all times and about all things strictly according to his personal moral judgment." Macdonald's friend the Hungarian-born American historian John Lukacs, like Macdonald a cultural traditionalist equally critical of standard-issue American politics either right-wing or ''pas d'ennemi à gauche'' progressive, in the Jesuit weekly
''America'' in 1958 christened him an "American Orwell", as John Rodden indicates:
:"Noting that Macdonald's American 'reputation is rising,' Lukacs wrote that he was already known among British intellectuals 'as one of the most interesting American critics of these times.' In particular Lukacs lauded Macdonald's 'lonely and courageous positions' in the mid-1940s -- on Yalta, the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender, the mistreatment of Japanese-Americans -- and argued that Macdonald's political stance 'coincides with the often lonely positions taken by George Orwell amidst the leftist intelligentsia in Britain.'"
[John Rodden,]
Dwight and Left
, ''The American Prospect'', March 2006.
Along with the prominence among leading social critics of the 1960s of such early contributors to ''politics'' as Paul Goodman and C. Wright Mills, and Macdonald's role among the founding circle of Europhile New York literary and political intellectuals who wrote for the influential biweekly ''
New York Review of Books
New is an adjective referring to something recently made, discovered, or created.
New or NEW may refer to:
Music
* New, singer of K-pop group The Boyz
Albums and EPs
* ''New'' (album), by Paul McCartney, 2013
* ''New'' (EP), by Regurgitator, ...
'' (1963-), a mainstay of postwar intellectual life, among which Macdonald's impassioned critiques of Lyndon Johnson and American policy in Vietnam renewed his role as Second World War gadfly, mention might be made of such long-running
little magazines
In the United States, a little magazine is a magazine genre consisting of "artistic work which for reasons of commercial expediency is not acceptable to the money-minded periodicals or presses", according to a 1942 study by Frederick J. Hoffman ...
founded in the wake of ''politics'' as
MANAS (1948–88), a one-man weekly edited by Henry Geiger, a Los Angeles Theosophist, Indophile, commercial printer and Second World War C.O. indebted to the social philosophies of
Mohandas Gandhi
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (; ; 2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948), popularly known as Mahatma Gandhi, was an Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist Quote: "... marks Gandhi as a hybrid cosmopolitan figure who transformed ... anti- ...
,
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817May 6, 1862) was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading Transcendentalism, transcendentalist, he is best known for his book ''Walden'', a reflection upon simple living in natural su ...
,
Leo Tolstoy
Count Lev Nikolayevich TolstoyTolstoy pronounced his first name as , which corresponds to the romanization ''Lyov''. () (; russian: link=no, Лев Николаевич Толстой,In Tolstoy's day, his name was written as in pre-refor ...
and Ortega y Gasset, and who published the 1953 pamphlet revision of Macdonald's ''The Root is Man''; and
''Dissent'' (1954-), the quarterly founded by early ''politics'' contributor
Irving Howe
Irving Howe (; June 11, 1920 – May 5, 1993) was an American literary and social critic and a prominent figure of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Early years
Howe was born as Irving Horenstein in The Bronx, New York. He was the son o ...
, a leading anti-Stalinist democratic socialist whose equal prominence as a critic of modern European literature found its cognate in ''Dissent'' in the prominent space devoted, much after the precedent of ''politics'', to Continental thinkers and social developments.
Chris Hedges
Christopher Lynn Hedges (born September 18, 1956) is an American journalist, Presbyterian minister, author, and commentator.
In his early career, Hedges worked as a freelance war correspondent in Central America for ''The Christian Science Mon ...
recounts the story of
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is ...
reading at least most of all volumes of politics, in Chomsky's youth.
Notable contributors
The following is a selected list of notable contributors to ''politics'', including those who wrote for it at least 3 times:
*
Lionel Abel
Lionel Abel (28 November 1910- 19 April 2001, in Manhattan, New York)Reisman, Rosemary M. Canfield. "Lionel Abel." ''Salem Press Biographical Encyclopedia'' (2013): ''Research Starters''. Web. 11 July 2014. was an eminent Jewish American playwrig ...
(1)
*
James Agee
James Rufus Agee ( ; November 27, 1909 – May 16, 1955) was an American novelist, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, writing for ''Time Magazine'', he was one of the most influential film critics in the United States. ...
(2)
*
Milton Babbitt
Milton Byron Babbitt (May 10, 1916 – January 29, 2011) was an American composer, music theorist, mathematician, and teacher. He is particularly noted for his Serialism, serial and electronic music.
Biography
Babbitt was born in Philadelphia t ...
(1)
* George Barbarow (7)
*
Georges Bataille
Georges Albert Maurice Victor Bataille (; ; 10 September 1897 – 9 July 1962) was a French philosopher and intellectual working in philosophy, literature, sociology, anthropology, and history of art. His writing, which included essays, novels, ...
(1)
*
Bruno Bettelheim
Bruno Bettelheim (August 28, 1903 – March 13, 1990) was an Austrian-born psychologist, scholar, public intellectual and writer who spent most of his academic and clinical career in the United States. An early writer on autism, Bettelheim's wo ...
(3)
* Don Calhoun (5)
*
Albert Camus
Albert Camus ( , ; ; 7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960) was a French philosopher, author, dramatist, and journalist. He was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44, the second-youngest recipient in history. His work ...
(1)
*
Nicola Chiaromonte
Nicola Chiaromonte (1905 in Rapolla, Province of Potenza, Potenza – 18 June 1972 in Rome) was an Italian activist and writer. In 1934 he fled Italy for France, after opposing Benito Mussolini's Italian fascism, fascist government. In Paris he co ...
(6)
* Louis Clair (5)
*
Alex Comfort
Alexander Comfort (10 February 1920 – 26 March 2000) was a British scientist and physician known best for his nonfiction sex manual, ''The Joy of Sex'' (1972). He was an author of both fiction and nonfiction, as well as a gerontologist, ...
(1)
* Helen Constas (3)
*
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir (, ; ; 9 January 1908 – 14 April 1986) was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist, and feminist activist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, and even th ...
(1)
* Theodore Dryden (5)
*
Robert Duncan (1)
*
James T. Farrell
James Thomas Farrell (February 27, 1904 – August 22, 1979) was an American novelist, short-story writer and poet.
He is most remembered for the ''Studs Lonigan'' trilogy, which was made into a film in 1960 and a television series in 1979.
B ...
(1)
*
Nathan Glazer
Nathan Glazer (February 25, 1923 – January 19, 2019) was an American sociologist who taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and for several decades at Harvard University. He was a co-editor of the now-defunct policy journal ''The Pu ...
(2)
*
William Godwin
William Godwin (3 March 1756 – 7 April 1836) was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism and the first modern proponent of anarchism. Godwin is most famous for ...
(1)
* Ethel Goldwater (5)
*
Paul Goodman
Paul Goodman (1911–1972) was an American writer and public intellectual best known for his 1960s works of social criticism. Goodman was prolific across numerous literary genres and non-fiction topics, including the arts, civil rights, decen ...
(8)
*
Oscar Handlin
Oscar Handlin (1915–2011) was an American historian. As a professor of history at Harvard University for over 50 years, he directed 80 PhD dissertations and helped promote social and ethnic history, virtually inventing the field of immigration ...
(1)
*
Will Herberg
William Herberg (June 30, 1901 – March 26, 1977) was an American writer, intellectual and scholar. A communist political activist during his early years, Herberg gained wider public recognition as a social philosopher and sociologist of religi ...
(1)
*
Richard Hofstadter
Richard Hofstadter (August 6, 1916October 24, 1970) was an American historian and public intellectual of the mid-20th century.
Hofstadter was the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. Rejecting his earlier historic ...
(1)
*
Sidney Hook
Sidney Hook (December 20, 1902 – July 12, 1989) was an American philosopher of pragmatism known for his contributions to the philosophy of history, the philosophy of education, political theory, and ethics. After embracing communism in his youth ...
(1)
*
Irving Howe
Irving Howe (; June 11, 1920 – May 5, 1993) was an American literary and social critic and a prominent figure of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Early years
Howe was born as Irving Horenstein in The Bronx, New York. He was the son o ...
(1)
*
Abba P. Lerner
Abraham "Abba" Ptachya Lerner (also Abba Psachia Lerner; 28 October 1903 – 27 October 1982) was a Russian-born American-British economist.
Biography
Born in Novoselytsia, Bessarabia, Russian Empire, Lerner grew up in a Jewish family, which e ...
(2)
*
Dwight Macdonald
Dwight Macdonald (March 24, 1906 – December 19, 1982) was an American writer, editor, film critic, social critic, literary critic, philosopher, and activist. Macdonald was a member of the New York Intellectuals and editor of their leftist maga ...
(37)
* Nancy Macdonald (4)
* Frank Marquart (3)
*
Mary McCarthy (2)
*
Marshall McLuhan
Herbert Marshall McLuhan (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his ...
(1)
*
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty. (; 14 March 1908 – 3 May 1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest an ...
(1)
*
C. Wright Mills
Charles Wright Mills (August 28, 1916 – March 20, 1962) was an American Sociology, sociologist, and a professor of sociology at Columbia University from 1946 until his death in 1962. Mills published widely in both popular and intellectual journ ...
(2)
*
Marianne Moore
Marianne Craig Moore (November 15, 1887 – February 5, 1972) was an American modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor. Her poetry is noted for formal innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit.
Early life
Moore was born in Kirkwood, ...
(1)
*
A.J. Muste
Abraham Johannes Muste ( ; January 8, 1885 – February 11, 1967) was a Dutch-born American clergyman and political activist. He is best remembered for his work in the labor movement, pacifist movement, antiwar movement, and civil rights movemen ...
(1)
*
Nicolas Nabokov
Nicolas Nabokov (Николай Дмитриевич Набоков; – 6 April 1978) was a Russian-born composer, writer, and cultural figure. He became a U.S. citizen in 1939.
Life
Nicolas Nabokov, a first cousin of Vladimir Nabokov, and of ...
(1)
* Walter J. Oakes (3)
*
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitar ...
(2)
*
P.J. Proudhon
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (, , ; 15 January 1809, Besançon – 19 January 1865, Paris) was a French socialist,Landauer, Carl; Landauer, Hilde Stein; Valkenier, Elizabeth Kridl (1979) 959 "The Three Anticapitalistic Movements". ''European Social ...
(1)
*
David Rousset
David Rousset (18 January 1912 in Roanne, Loire – 13 December 1997) was a French writer and political activist, a recipient of Prix Renaudot, a French literary award. A survivor of the Neuengamme concentration camp and the Buchenwald Nazi ...
(1)
*
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (, ; ; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology), a French playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and litera ...
(1)
*
George S. Schuyler
George Samuel Schuyler (; February 25, 1895 – August 31, 1977) was an American writer, journalist, and social commentator known for his conservatism after he had initially supported socialism.
Early life
George Samuel Schuyler was born in ...
(1)
*
Victor Serge
Victor Serge (; 1890–1947), born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich (russian: Ви́ктор Льво́вич Киба́льчич), was a Russian revolutionary Marxist, novelist, poet and historian. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Bolsheviks fi ...
(2)
*
Kenneth M. Stampp
Kenneth Milton Stampp (12 July 191210 July 2009), Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley (1946–1983), was a celebrated historian of slavery, the American Civil War, and Reconstr ...
(1)
*
Harvey Swados
Harvey Swados (October 28, 1920 – December 11, 1972) was an American social critic and author of novels, short stories, essays and journalism.
Family and early life
Born in Buffalo, New York, Harvey Swados was the son of Aaron Meyer Swad ...
(1)
*
Leo Tolstoy
Count Lev Nikolayevich TolstoyTolstoy pronounced his first name as , which corresponds to the romanization ''Lyov''. () (; russian: link=no, Лев Николаевич Толстой,In Tolstoy's day, his name was written as in pre-refor ...
(2)
*
Niccolo Tucci (13)
*
Max Weber
Maximilian Karl Emil Weber (; ; 21 April 186414 June 1920) was a German sociologist, historian, jurist and political economist, who is regarded as among the most important theorists of the development of modern Western society. His ideas profo ...
(1)
*
Simone Weil
Simone Adolphine Weil ( , ; 3 February 1909 – 24 August 1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. Over 2,500 scholarly works have been published about her, including close analyses and readings of her work, since 1995.
...
(2)
*
Joseph Weizenbaum
Joseph Weizenbaum (8 January 1923 – 5 March 2008) was a German American computer scientist and a professor at MIT. The Weizenbaum Award is named after him. He is considered one of the fathers of modern artificial intelligence.
Life and caree ...
(1)
*
Bertram D. Wolfe
Bertram David Wolfe (January 19, 1896 – February 21, 1977) was an American scholar, leading communist, and later a leading anti-communist. He authored many works related to communism, including biographical studies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph St ...
(1)
*
George Woodcock
George Woodcock (; May 8, 1912 – January 28, 1995) was a Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anarchist thinker, a philosopher, an essayist and literary critic. He was also a poet and published several volumes of travel wri ...
(8)
See also
*
Bibliography of George Orwell
The bibliography of George Orwell includes journalism, essays, novels, and non-fiction books written by the British writer Eric Blair (1903–1950), either under his own name or, more usually, under his pen name George Orwell. Orwell was a proli ...
References
Further reading
*
Gregory D. Sumner, ''Dwight MacDonald and the Politics Circle: The Challenge of Cosmopolitan Democracy''.
Cornell University Press
The Cornell University Press is the university press of Cornell University; currently housed in Sage House, the former residence of Henry William Sage. It was first established in 1869, making it the first university publishing enterprise in th ...
(1996). .
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Politics (magazine 1944-49)
Quarterly magazines published in the United States
Defunct political magazines published in the United States
Defunct literary magazines published in the United States
Magazines established in 1944
Magazines disestablished in 1949
Magazines published in New York City