File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9801, message 31


Date: Sat, 03 Jan 1998 18:05:57 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: New film on 30's Marxists shifting  right


January 3, 1998

Left Wing to Right: The Journey of Four Marxist Intellectuals

By DAVID MARGOLICK

NEW YORK -- "I became radical because I thought I had good reason to become
radical. I became liberal because I thought I had good reason to become
liberal. And then I became conservative because I thought I had good reason
to be conservative. It seems to me perfectly natural." 

That is how Irving Kristol describes his ideological odyssey, one that took
him from the left-wing hothouse of City College of New York in the late
1930s to the center of the Reagan revolution four decades later. Three
other Jewish sons of New York's poorest neighborhoods and City College,
Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell and Irving Howe, took similar journeys at the
same time on the same ideological subway from left to right, though each
hopped off well before Kristol did. The stories of these four men, of the
extraordinary intellectual milieu they occupied and how they evolved within
it, all while looking over their shoulders at one another, are told in
Joseph Dorman's documentary, "Arguing the World." The film opens Jan. 7 at
the Film Forum, 19 stops south on the IRT Broadway local from their alma
mater. 

All four men were the products of a vanished intellectual era in New York,
a time when ideas were debated ferociously, when politics was more than a
spectator sport, when what happened in Madrid, Spain, or Moscow
reverberated around Union Square and the Upper West Side. 

Their careers encompassed and were shaped by the epochal events of their
generation: World War II, the McCarthy era, the student protests of the
1960s, Vietnam, the Reagan era. Three of them evolved from fringe leftists
to centrist or right-wing figures; through their scholarly work and in
magazines like The New Leader, Commentary, Dissent and The Public Interest,
all remained vitally interested in what governments can and cannot do,
should and should not be. 

Fellow film buffs warned Dorman that most documentaries about ideas are
deadly. Even Howe, who died in 1993, had his doubts. "How could a film
about us possibly be of any interest to anyone?" he asked during the
shooting. Watching these men at their word processors is, in fact, not very
exciting, but recalling their intellectual interactions with one another
and what was happening around them -- how their theories coincided or
collided with reality -- is. So is the novelty of their bygone world, along
with their intelligence, charm and occasional contrition. 

"There were so many ideas to cover that the film constantly threatened to
fly out of control," said Dorman, who has produced several previous
documentaries for public television. The welfare state, Marxism and
Stalinism, and the useful and destructive forms of social action were the
leitmotifs of their lives. 

"Arguing the World" opens with newsreel clips from City College circa 1936.
Against the backdrop of the school's familiar Gothic castles (fabricated,
appropriately enough, from schist dug up during the construction of the
nearby subway) are hoards of earnest-looking, dark-haired and bespectacled
young men in jackets and ties milling, laughing, talking, eating, hamming
it up, waving banners. 

"Schools, Not Battleships," states one. "Down With Imperialist War,"
proclaims another. On the soundtrack is the simulated hum of intense
conversation plus nerve-jangling modernist music signaling what Howe
described as the "atmosphere of perfervid, overly heated, overly excited
intellectuality" that then characterized the campus. 

For the most part, education at City College took place not in class but in
the cafeteria, more specifically in particular corners of the cafeteria,
where students, self-divided by ethnicity and politics, ate brown-bag
lunches and argued endlessly about politics and everything else. 

"It became a kind of heder," said Bell, referring to Jewish religious
schools built around disputation. Shaped by poverty and economic calamity,
hungering to escape their claustrophobic ghettos but retaining Jewish
notions of justice, having little sense of themselves as Americans, the
four young men were drawn to left-wing ideology. They were divided only
over whose Marxist vision held out the prospect of the most glorious future. 

Some, including the four men portrayed in the film, frequented what was
known as Alcove 1, the domain of radical leftists disillusioned with
Stalin's Soviet Union: Trotskyists, Lovestonites, socialists. 

The far more heavily populated Alcove 2 next door belonged to card-carrying
Communists and fellow travelers. 

"Someone made the wisecrack that the only place where the fight between
Stalin and Trotsky could be conducted freely was in New York City,"
recalled Howe. 

In fact, the two groups loathed each other and rarely interacted; the
divide was literary as well as political. 

"We prided ourselves on reading Joyce and Thomas Mann and Proust -- maybe
not completely, but at least dipping in -- whereas they were reading
palookas like Howard Fast," Howe said. 

World War II made such distinctions irrelevant, at least for a time. It
also helped transform all of the men into Americans, which in turn helped
transform their ideas and politics. Two of them, Howe and Kristol, became
soldiers, exposing them to the world beyond the five boroughs. 

"I was a New York Jewish kid," Kristol recalled. "I didn't know anything
about America. I didn't know anything about most ordinary people." 

They, along with Bell and Glazer, saw a new side of the United States. A
country that fought Fascism was one to which they could truly belong. 

The process of assimilation only accelerated after the war, when they began
to enjoy the fruits of American capitalism. Suddenly, miraculously (at
least to him), Kristol could afford to own a car, get married and move into
Manhattan ("The City," as it was then known) rather than live with his
in-laws. Of the four, only Howe remained an unreconstructed leftist. The
others moved right, particularly as the Soviets occupied Eastern Europe and
more about Stalin's atrocities became known. 

Their thoughts, bandied about in the soirees of Partisan Review, were
lofty, but they sometimes involved tough choices and tougher consequences. 

During the McCarthy era, when political demagogues and opportunists
championed a more primitive version of the anti-Communism that they now
espoused, Kristol, Bell and Glazer were forced to weigh competing
principles: their hatred and fear of Soviet Communism and their professed
civil libertarianism. More often than not, the former concerns prevailed.
They said little when fellow leftists lost their jobs, fled the country or
worse. 

Nearly 50 years later, Kristol, still convinced that these leftists merely
paid the price for their naivete, is unapologetic. "I referred to
(McCarthy) as a vulgar demagogue," he said. "I thought that was enough." 

Bell contends that when congressional investigators asked the writers,
artists and academics they had summoned before them whether they had ever
been Communists, they should have fessed up rather than fudged. 

For Glazer, it isn't so easy. Throughout "Arguing the World" he is an
ebullient spirit, laughing easily amid his memories. But asked about the
McCarthy era, he pauses, shakes his head slowly and bites his lower lip. 

"Even at the time and also in retrospect, we never managed to figure out a
good position, one that was respectable and moral and responsive to all the
complicated issues raised," he says in an affecting moment. "I still don't
think we have one." 

Former radicals are forever being faulted for selling out, for abandoning
their principles, for ceasing to remain radical enough. That is what Howe,
in the mid-1950s, accused his colleagues of doing, forsaking their
principles for an uncritical patriotism and conformity. 

"I lived in the same building with Irving Howe; talk about conformism,"
countered Kristol, whose omnipresent cigarette seems as dated as his
one-time Marxism. "What was I conforming to? To what? I could never get an
answer to that question." 

In fact, in their time and place, these men may never have been very
radical at all. Among the Jewish students at City College in the 1930s,
Republicans were rarer than passenger pigeons, and Karl Marx would have
gotten far more votes than Alf Landon or Wendell Willkie. Rarely did these
men venture beyond the world of ideas. Their notion of direct action seems
to have consisted of cutting class. When they took to the streets, it was
usually to head to a bookstore. 

Barely 20 years later, immersed in their cerebral lives, seeing
universities as sacred sanctuaries, strikingly forgetful of their own
romantic student days, they had little tolerance for the more strident
protests of the next generation. 

As moderate as the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, Calif., came to seem
(its leaders wore coats and ties to protests and did Israeli folk dancing
while occupying the school's administration building) and as legitimate as
its grievances were (until then, political protests on campus had been
banned), Glazer, then a member of the Berkeley faculty, still condemns what
he called their "enthusiastic and euphoric rejection of forms and norms." 

To Jackie Goldberg, then a student activist, now a member of the Los
Angeles City Council, Glazer and his ilk were control freaks. "The
liberalism they espoused was an armchair intellectual liberalism," she told
Dorman. To them, "protesting" was sending a letter to a congressman. 

A few years later, Bell, teaching at Columbia, tried to negotiate with the
students who had shut down the university. When that failed and the police
came in, he walked home to Riverside Drive -- and cried. 

Howe, editor of Dissent, remained spiritually closest to the new crop of
protesters. But a summit meeting off Central Park West between Dissent
editors and the leaders of Students for a Democratic Society, led by Tom
Hayden, proved disastrous. 

"They didn't appear to be doing anything," Hayden recalls. 

To Howe, meanwhile, Hayden conjured up the very figure he'd most loathed.
"We could see the commissar in him, and that put us off," he says. 

In The Public Interest and in their own academic work, Glazer, Bell and
Kristol outlined their skepticism about the Great Society and liberal
government in general. But still resolved to make a flawed philosophy work
better, Glazer and Bell speak with sadness in the film; Kristol, who was a
member of the Young People's Socialist League, speaks with glee. 

In the end, Glazer and Bell remained Democrats; Kristol enlisted with
Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan, championed the religious right,
condemned liberalism and embraced the free market. To his critics, he had
come full circle, abandoning one orthodoxy for another. 

"The fact that we were together 50 years ago doesn't stir the faintest
touch of sentiment in me," Howe said of Kristol. "I wish him well
personally -- a long life with many political failures, I hope." 

For his part, Kristol boasts of never having read Dissent. "It didn't exist
on my horizon," he said. But as Dorman spoke to him, he spotted Howe's
"World of Our Fathers" on Kristol's bookshelf. 

The intellectual and emotional crosscurrents between the four men are deep
and complex. That no two of them are ever seen together in the film is, one
suspects, not simply a matter of logistics. 

And yet for all their philosophical differences, for all their great
successes, there is a kind of wistfulness in reflecting on this lost era.
Even when he chastises Kristol, Howe has an impish, almost affectionate
grin. The very evident enjoyment with which all the men recall their lives
among "New York intellectuals," betrays how much they all shared, how much
the world they loved has largely disappeared, how sorely they miss it. And
how nothing seems poised to take its place. 

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company  




     --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005